tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61873969138809565402024-03-15T21:10:06.958-04:00Experience: The BlogExperience: The Blog: Digital, Mobile, Social and Customer Experiences that Build BrandsAugie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.comBlogger572125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-84520828929545734322023-04-29T06:02:00.001-04:002023-04-29T06:02:48.743-04:00What Does It Mean if AI Can Convey More Empathy Than Humans?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRZhNZrwGjUTLLwKFJ4XB8JAkKh780LAPOfPvRoiyjpbRXSFIzztY_8Hs5cxvwRtZwMd5MRgsD8xNw36wGkLle3XtvSb6YgRAs7TcoIwrHwFtV6CseoEFYE2jrM2_h9DiGM6e43NUn_y1r7L4GGS6bpwI309iTYrTho42ENiVzL6MotwfF80r9BCs4/s5482/gaelle-marcel-pcu5rnAl19g-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3660" data-original-width="5482" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRZhNZrwGjUTLLwKFJ4XB8JAkKh780LAPOfPvRoiyjpbRXSFIzztY_8Hs5cxvwRtZwMd5MRgsD8xNw36wGkLle3XtvSb6YgRAs7TcoIwrHwFtV6CseoEFYE2jrM2_h9DiGM6e43NUn_y1r7L4GGS6bpwI309iTYrTho42ENiVzL6MotwfF80r9BCs4/s320/gaelle-marcel-pcu5rnAl19g-unsplash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@gaellemarcel?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Gaelle Marcel</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/pcu5rnAl19g?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Deep thoughts for your weekend: I'm not sure what it means that ChatGPT can respond to patient questions with greater quality and empathy than human doctors, but it's nothing good.<br /><br /><a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2804309">A study used questions posted to Reddit’s r/AskDocs.</a> It looked at doctor responses to those questions and compared them to ChatGPT responses to the same questions. These responses were evaluated in triplicate by a team of licensed health care professionals.<br /><br />Generative AI responses were evaluated as both “significantly higher quality than physician responses” and “significantly more empathetic than physician responses.” It was no contest. The proportion of responses rated as good/very good quality was 3.5x higher for chatbot than physicians, and the proportion of responses rated empathetic/very empathetic was almost 10x higher for chatbot than for physicians.<div><br /><blockquote>"The proportion of responses rated empathetic or very empathetic (≥4) was higher for chatbot than for physicians. This amounted to 9.8 times higher prevalence of empathetic or very empathetic responses for the chatbot."</blockquote><br />No one is suggesting a chatbot can replace your doctor. If anything, this study may suggest that AI can improve patient experience while increasing physician efficiency. Still, I find it distressing that ChatGPT can already demonstrate better “bedside manner” (or, perhaps, “screenside manner”) than doctors.<br /><br />People will argue AI cannot express empathy since hardware and software are incapable of having empathy. Maybe, but if generative AI responses are perceived as more empathetic, then it is hard to argue that AI isn't incontrovertibly able to convey empathy effectively. (If a tree doesn't fall in the woods, yet everyone hears it fall, has it really fallen?) <br /><br />I'll leave it to philosophers to figure out what's true or not regarding AI and empathy, but I think studies like this should be a wake-up call. Another recent study found that <a href="https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-ai-humans-key-heart.html">AI was more effective than human reviewers at evaluating ultrasounds</a>. If AI is faster, better, and more empathetic than humans--I mean, what's left? <br /><br />And AI is really just getting started. The next five years will bring a giant pile of money into R&D to rapidly improve AI capabilities. <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/04/26/ai-pwc-microsoft-chatgpt">PwC plans to spend $1B in three years on AI</a>, and <a href="https://thestack.technology/meta-ai-investment/">Meta (which just laid off 13% of its staff) is investing $33 billion in AI this year</a>, and that's just the tip of the AI iceberg. <br /><br />Investors won't dedicate that cash out of a desire to improve customer experiences but to seek rapid return. As with all tech advances, this either creates new markets and raises revenues or it increases margins by decreasing costs, and for most companies, labor costs are the greatest cost. <br /><br />It doesn't feel as if we humans will want to lose the battle for empathy against AI. I don't mean to get all philosophical on you, but this doesn't just feel like a battle for our jobs but our souls. <br /><br />We live in a world of surging division, road rage, online bullying, air rage, and mass shootings. It feels like we need to seek a renewed sense of community with greater sensitivity, concern, and care for each other. Apocalyptic sci-fi tales like Terminator saw us battle AI robots for our lives, not us battling each other and then turning to machines for comfort and empathy. The battle against AI for empathy feels like one we desperately need to win.</div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-2187325453280937832023-03-27T06:15:00.000-04:002023-03-27T06:15:08.626-04:00The FTC's Proposed “Click to Cancel” Could Help or Hurt Your Brand. Which Will It Be? <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4WLHPRfMX1YFPB3WR0PwV1w_7t4YjbXalRQu7jhUUmg2JikKwmuAH4CAJ5wmzvBKMbpvukpBVa_O5Nl1TmfdBD6ZNkM8nqztqg7YA9QZlRG3HoAT9mOybgAVD4uGR67Os4j0fSQ5FjUZkPwrDJcFgOFd-1Hjf2FiqLgm5eX7IGIkm0cUKU5-FvKP2/s3999/markus-winkler-7EwWeNyzSwQ-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2666" data-original-width="3999" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4WLHPRfMX1YFPB3WR0PwV1w_7t4YjbXalRQu7jhUUmg2JikKwmuAH4CAJ5wmzvBKMbpvukpBVa_O5Nl1TmfdBD6ZNkM8nqztqg7YA9QZlRG3HoAT9mOybgAVD4uGR67Os4j0fSQ5FjUZkPwrDJcFgOFd-1Hjf2FiqLgm5eX7IGIkm0cUKU5-FvKP2/s320/markus-winkler-7EwWeNyzSwQ-unsplash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@markuswinkler?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Markus Winkler</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/7EwWeNyzSwQ?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></td></tr></tbody></table>My peer, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/post/edit/7046053422629826560/#">Ben Bloom</a>, raised a provocative question: Will the proposed Federal Trade Commission “click to cancel” rule help or hurt brands? Like virtually everything in business, I believe the answer depends on a brand's customer-centric culture, the customer understanding it has or collects, and its commitment to #CustomerExperience. It's clear how this proposal could hurt some brands, but smart brands can beat (and should already be beating) the FTC to the punch with a winning #CX.<br /><br />If you're not familiar with the <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/federal-trade-commission-proposes-rule-provision-making-it-easier-consumers-click-cancel-recurring">proposed “click to cancel” rule</a>, it is a simple idea that all of us will applaud as consumers: It would require businesses to make it at least as easy to cancel a subscription as it was to start it. For example, if you can sign up online, you must be able to cancel on the same website in the same number of steps.<br /><br />The fact “click to cancel” must be forced upon companies is a sign of how difficult it is to achieve customer-centric decisions in a company, particularly at the moment of customer abandonment. For a new or loyal customers, the advantages of experiences that encourage satisfaction and loyalty are evident, but what's the value of making it easy for customers to depart? The business benefit of keeping customers is immediately evident (revenue!) while the dangers of poor CX at the moment of churn are less so (damaged reputation and a reduced chance to recapture the customer). You can almost hear brand leaders thinking, “Well, if cancelers are pissed off to begin with, then what's the danger of more frustration?” <br /><br />But, let's face it--this should already be a no-brainer for brands. You and I both know this policy is a painfully obvious idea in the customer side of our brain, yet business leaders will likely fight this proposal rule tooth and nail. Any resources and effort your organization may be inclined to dedicate to lobbying against the rule really ought to go into making the rule superfluous for your brand. Brands can win with a thoughtful, customer-centric approach. <br /><br />Today, it's too easy to tell customers they have to call your company to cancel, placing the retention burden on call center employees. That not only frustrates people and risks brand damage, it is also a terrible, frustrating employee experience as well. But if customers must be able to cancel as easily as they purchased or subscribed, smart brands will: <div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Listen more and resolve drivers of dissatisfaction and churn. </b>If some brands face an impending cancelation Armageddon, the first and most obvious course should be to minimize and eliminate the reasons customers want to leave. Many companies do a lousy job of listening to customer feedback and investing to resolve causes of customer friction. Often, this is because the economic value of doing so isn't evident, but this new FTC policy tips the cost/benefit equation and makes the financial benefits more evident.<br /> </li><li><b>Identify and react to customer warning signals. </b>The prior suggestion was about understanding and fixing the top aggregate reasons for churn; this idea is more about identifying and proactively reacting to customers most at risk of churning. Some customers will abandon brands unexpectedly, but for most, there will be signals: Reduced usage or frequency, declining engagement, more customer care interactions, and dissatisfied survey responses. Brands should be monitoring and proactively responding to these abandonment signals rather than waiting for the cancelation request. An offer of a free month to someone threatening to end a subscription can seem a desperate, too-little-too-late brand ploy, while a surprise offer of a free month to an existing (albeit declining) customer can be a loyalty-building delight.<br /> </li><li><b>Consider customer personas to improve the overall experience and offer the most powerful retention offers. </b>Brands tend to rely on the negotiating skills of employees to prevent abandonment, turning each instance into a one-on-one negotiation. “Click to cancel” will force brands to automate this process, which means they need to understand each customers' persona. A budget-minded customer struggling to make ends meet will be responsive to an offer of reduced subscription fees, while a more value-oriented customer may be encouraged to stay by adding services that would otherwise require additional payments. Or, think of Netflix: Knowing which fan is into scifi versus romantic comedies can help the brand promote the most desirable upcoming content to try to keep customers.<br /> </li><li><b>Implement a constant test-and-learn approach to finding the best retention offers. </b>The solution isn't to find the one-and-only best offer; instead, constantly test what effectively retains customers. This should be a ceaseless process because today's answers may not be the same as next year's, depending on changes in the economy, competitive landscape, and your brand's offerings.<br /> </li><li><b>Finally, earn the right to keep in touch.</b> If the customer is committed to abandoning, then do what you can to improve your future ability to recapture the lost customer. Don't assume you can continue to spam lost customers; instead, ask for permission to keep people on your email list and offer options. For example, a lost customer probably won't want your daily marketing message but might be interested in a once-a-month update on improvements you've made to your product or service.</li></ul>“Click to cancel” could help or hurt a brand. Do the right things to prevent churn, earn loyalty, respond to cancelation requests, and ease the path to continued engagement and recapture, and your brand can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and minimize abandonment. </div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-26232232656829275592023-03-20T09:49:00.002-04:002023-03-20T11:11:22.368-04:00GPT-4 and AI Can Enhance or Kill Your Brand--Which Depends On What You Do Next<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKJ3EA8AeqnAW6J7YunpIw6dXwp0VrzxWK43ChYY2Z5mvT7g5SXzjSuUFxDNU-UgUDyVVGz1Vfpzzl-leKjoeNiYp8T_Xt5ZPmQqFTwOtCQmOR4pJK2z1pzZLh9qj4jSwDozfQSfFdtkmocZLOMDtIgdahHIaiI7rKN6OAc2DfpXr0gefj0-c46Klv/s5472/andy-kelly-0E_vhMVqL9g-unsplash.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3648" data-original-width="5472" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKJ3EA8AeqnAW6J7YunpIw6dXwp0VrzxWK43ChYY2Z5mvT7g5SXzjSuUFxDNU-UgUDyVVGz1Vfpzzl-leKjoeNiYp8T_Xt5ZPmQqFTwOtCQmOR4pJK2z1pzZLh9qj4jSwDozfQSfFdtkmocZLOMDtIgdahHIaiI7rKN6OAc2DfpXr0gefj0-c46Klv/s320/andy-kelly-0E_vhMVqL9g-unsplash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@askkell?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Andy Kelly</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/0E_vhMVqL9g?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></td></tr></tbody></table>A lot of digital ink has been rapidly dedicated to what ChatGPT, GPT4, and AI means to Customer Experience. Inevitably, these articles focus on how AI can increase the efficiency of or replace employees in touchpoints on the customer journey. The fact this is the first thing so many think of when it comes to AI is thoroughly disappointing. I think the real story of the future of AI and CX is more troubling, complex, and important. <div><h3>AI Is Only the Latest Evolution in the Brand-Customer Journey</h3>We must start by appreciating how the relationship between brands and customers has always been unequal in different ways. On the one hand, brands (literally) profit from these relationships. For all the humanizing talk of brand love, trust, loyalty, and other terminology marketers borrow from the language of human relationships, this remains a commercial relationship that exists only for one party to extract money from the other. The best brands get their CX so right that customers don't mind--in fact, loyal customers want their trusted, valued brands to be profitable, healthy, and sustainable. <br /><br />On the other hand, customers can often have unreasonable expectations of brands, and in particular, employees. I'm not talking here about how customers will always want their products and services to be cheaper, faster, and better--that's inevitable--but how customers treat (or mistreat) the employees with whom they interact. You can't spend any time in social media without seeing a video of a customer physically attacking or screaming invective at an unlucky retail or hospitality employee. My wife worked in customer care for years, and it infuriated me that people felt perfectly free to abuse her using slurs I cannot share.<br /><br />Brands want employees to be more empathetic to customers while increasing productivity. Customers want more, faster and better from employees. And caught in the middle of this battle of unequal expectations are human employees. Now, along comes AI with a seeming solution.<h3>AI Can Seem Like the Perfect Customer Experience Solution, But Is It?</h3>On the one hand, the tech promises to give the accurate, immediate answers that customers demand and to do it without all the mess and expense of PTO, unplanned absences, benefits, hiring, and churn. And on the other hand, customers can hurl insults at an AI to their heart's content, and the AI won't get flustered or have its feelings hurt. <br /><br />AI replacing humans feels like the inevitable conclusion of a situation where parties on both sides of the brand-customer relationship collude to treat employees less like humans and more like inanimate objects. Employers frequently speak of employees as “family” while treating them more like PCs that can be easily replaced, discarded, or updated. And customers too often pretend the target for their frustration isn't a human being but a robot or kiosk. Why not replace workers with tech, since we pretend that's all they are, anyway? <br /><br />So, I guess all of our problems are solved! AI to the rescue--blazingly fast and efficient, endlessly scalable, (probably) more accurate, and infinitely patient. Problem solved! Or, is it? How often has new tech promised to solve a problem only to create new ones? The answer is always, but that doesn't mean that adopting technology isn't the right and inevitable answer. So, what difficulties are we likely to create as AI not merely enhances but replaces employees? <h3>The Potential Problems of AI Are Both Obvious and Not</h3><p>The most obvious concern with AI replacing humans is that humans still need employment. I've focused in this post on customer care because those employed in these jobs best exemplify the workers caught in the brand-customer paradox, but AI obviously doesn't stop there. While <a href="https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/customer-service-representatives.htm">customer service accounts for 2.9 million jobs in the US</a>, digital transformation imminently <a href="https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-group.htm">threatens other categories</a>. In just the past week, GPT-4 has already:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-gpt-4-ai-video-games-b2301358.html">Coded games and websites</a> (5 million are employed in computer and mathematical occupations) </li><li><a href="https://www.laptopmag.com/news/chatgpt-will-create-an-entire-powerpoint-slide-for-you-heres-how">Created PowerPoint decks and documents</a> (20 million in office and administrative support) </li><li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGptDAN/comments/11qrsjl/interior_design_with_chatgpt_and_midjourney/">Designed eye-catching rooms complete with photorealistic images</a> (2.5 million in architecture and engineering occupations)</li></ul>I wish I had a solution to offer, but the potential economic and societal risks must be considered by brighter minds than mine. What I can focus on, however, are the other potential issues brands may have as they integrate AI into their customer journeys.<br /><br />For example, one issue that business leaders forget time after time is that new tech often starts looking like a solution for corporations but inevitably has a profound impact on customer expectations. Brands welcomed the Internet but didn't immediately foresee how it would change customer expectations of the 24/7 availability and speed they get from corporations. Brands welcomed social media as a new “free” channel to reach customers before appreciating that customers would more talk ABOUT them than WITH them. <br /><br />And so it is with AI. The same tech that makes it easy for corporations to improve productivity in their customer interactions will also make it easier for customers to negotiate lower prices and better deals. My peer, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/post/edit/7043565583342161920/#">Penny Gillespie</a>, is researching a future that isn't human customers talking to your brand's AI, but customer bots and brand bots negotiating the brand journey with brutal efficiency and speed. The outcome will be more pressure for your brand to offer competitive pricing, customize offerings, and be ready for any and all customer needs (or else their customer advobots will shift to competitors in nanoseconds.) How will brand loyalty be shaped when customer decisions are made by machines and not people? Find out by reading a new book, <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/publications/when-machines-become-customers">“When Machines Become Customers,”</a> by my Gartner peers <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/post/edit/7043565583342161920/#">Don Scheibenreif</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/post/edit/7043565583342161920/#">Mark Raskino</a>. <p></p><h3>The CX Solution Is To First Understand Where, When and How AI Will Be Valued By Customers</h3>Despite all the enthusiasm by VCs, startups and brand executives, we still don't know how much customers will be willing to replace humans with machines at every touchpoint. We have decades of experience with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley">“the Uncanny Valley”</a>, including everything from <a href="https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/polar-express-is-the-creepiest-christmas-movie-of-all-time.html/">the creepy, dead-eyed characters of the movie, </a>“Polar Express” to the rigid, frustrating interactions with corporate IVR (A/K/A “voice jail”) systems. Do we really think that an AI expressing it “understands why that would be frustrating” to customers will do more good than harm? <br /><br />Some corporate executives will be quick to foresee a future of infinite self-service (and endless cost savings) by replacing employees with AI. Smarter leaders will move quickly but cautiously to understand not just where AI brings value to business results, but where customers value AI and where they value human interactions in the customer journey. Deploying AI to the right customers in the right places at the right time will separate brands that improve their customer experience and relationships from those that do not. <br /><br />The first step in our AI future isn't to rapidly digitize every customer experience. Instead, you must start by understanding the customers you serve and their expectations, needs, and wants. What customers are more open to greater self-service and interactions with bots, and which are not? If you can't tell the difference, you aren't ready for AI-managed CX. That's just the first question of many: In which touchpoints are humans most valued?<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In which touchpoints will customers most appreciate AI experiences?</li><li>How will you proactively recognize the best digital or human journey to orchestrate?</li><li>How will you recognize what the customer wants and needs at the moment and match that to your available products, services, and experiences?</li><li>How will you change the development of your products, services, and experiences to allow for greater real-time response and customization?</li><li>How will you grant customers to control the type of experience they want?</li><li>How will you recognize when AI experiences require a human escalation?</li><li>How will you measure the impact of AI customer experiences, not just to your costs but to perception and loyalty of your customers?</li></ul><br />Before you start worrying about the state of your tech stack and data, these are the questions you must first answer. The answers will tell you where to focus your energies to strengthen customer relationships rather than simply create better margins. <br /><br />The thing to remember about AI is that it must first serve humans. Using AI with a customer-centric lens is the future to strong customer relationships and brand success. But corporations that only adopt AI with a brand-centric viewpoint will simply find very efficient, effective, and speedy ways to destroy their customer satisfaction, reputation, and relationships.<p><em>This post was written manually without any assistance from an AI, which is probably evident because of any grammatical mistakes I made. Please forgive any human foibles. </em></p></div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-70491570452230917042023-02-15T06:46:00.000-05:002023-02-15T06:46:45.954-05:00Are Your Loyalty Metrics Damaging Your Customer Loyalty?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsE1xB29lhKplu7JK7tjr2oAcwKoKDaAPse5W8jZ7mAcOmvKTdUP_NtY41ECkhBUJBVMDveEIIJkQJIb2lFQePi-xjNBqXC_C4J0BDJFnqtQNbjyP11XkDnuD5e7TohPyqGw47YBfW0Uf_oJx9CvD-ELiG6A9IzTtq_3jHHxdvxjCFC72S83xeOY9U/s5184/william-warby-WahfNoqbYnM-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3888" data-original-width="5184" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsE1xB29lhKplu7JK7tjr2oAcwKoKDaAPse5W8jZ7mAcOmvKTdUP_NtY41ECkhBUJBVMDveEIIJkQJIb2lFQePi-xjNBqXC_C4J0BDJFnqtQNbjyP11XkDnuD5e7TohPyqGw47YBfW0Uf_oJx9CvD-ELiG6A9IzTtq_3jHHxdvxjCFC72S83xeOY9U/s320/william-warby-WahfNoqbYnM-unsplash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@wwarby?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">William Warby</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/WahfNoqbYnM?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Everyone knows the adage, “You can't improve what you don't measure.” That quote, often attributed to Peter Drucker, is not entirely true, but I think it needs a vital and new corollary: “You can damage what you don't measure accurately.” After decades in Customer Experience, I've come to believe this is, in fact, the primary issue that impairs most organizations' CX efforts and undermines their customer loyalty.<br /><br />The goal of CX is to strengthen relationships and increase customers' loyalty to the brand. But what is loyalty? It isn't a business metric but an attitude. One can feel loyal to a person or product. That sense of affinity or faithfulness can then manifest in behaviors. And those behaviors are measurable.<br /><br />That chain of attitudes-behaviors-measures goes unexplored by business leaders, and it leads to bad metrics for loyalty and poor business or CX strategy. To too many executives, loyalty merely means purchases: “If we get more sales from customers, they must be loyal.” But are they?<br /><br />With bad measurement of loyalty, customer marketing can look a lot like customer experience. Both are focused on existing customers, but where customer marketing creates efforts to maximize revenue from customers, CX is about strengthening relationships. Both lead to sales, but they are critically different.<br /><br />Let's say you have a truly loyal customer. You launch a campaign for a new product line, and being loyal, that customer makes a purchase. That's a customer marketing success, but is it a CX one? Not yet. That additional sale didn't create loyalty but earned you the chance to strengthen loyalty. Whether you do or do not improve that customer's loyalty depends on the CX your product, service, and organization provides.<br /><br />If that product fails to deliver value or disappoints the customer, it can weaken your relationship and damage loyalty. If that happens, you will have raised short-term revenue, but damaged long-term loyalty, which can lead to churn, diminished sales, a decreased lifetime value, and negative WOM and reputation.<br /><br />This isn't to say there's anything wrong with customer marketing or that short-term sales to existing customers is a poor metric, but customer marketing isn't CX and short-term sales are a poor measure of CX success. Customer marketing and CX are two different disciplines with different sets of metrics. If we confuse them and measure CX badly, we may not simply undermine our CX performance but actively damage our brands' loyalty.<br /><br />In my job as an analyst and advisor, I see a lot of this. Companies expend a great deal of time and money to “improve CX,” set awful goals and metrics, and, as a result, hurt rather than enhance their customer relationships. This can take many forms--do any of these sound like your organization's CX efforts and measures?<div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>“We improved CX by implementing self-service tools on our site, leading to a decrease in call volume and reduction of call center staff.” </b>Great business results, but did those new self-service tools help customers or frustrate them? Did they gain the answers they need or leave your site to find answers elsewhere? Did it improve satisfaction for all customers, or did it annoy some customers and damage their perception of your brand? If you don't measure the experience from the perspective of the customer, it's not CX, because you can't know whether you've strengthened relationships and improved loyalty.</li><li><b>“CX is improving because we saw greater revenue and earned growth from existing customers year-over-year.” </b>Terrific news, but did you earn those new sales by discounting prices and lowering margin? Earning strong loyalty means you keep and grow customer relationships, lifting margins without affecting perceptions of price fairness. This is how, for example, <a href="https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/09/29/apple-continuing-command-of-global-smartphone-profits-and-the-lead-is-growing">Apple can command 80% of the operating profits in the smartphone industry while representing just 40% of the sales</a>. And it is why Starbucks' stock has <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/SBUX#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">outperformed the S&P 500 by 75% in the past five years</a> while charging 2.5 to 5x what it costs to make a cup of coffee at home.</li><li><b>“We improved our CX by implementing personalization tools on our website, lifting conversion rate by 20%.” </b>Congratulations, but did your customers get the value they anticipated from your product? Were they satisfied? Did they become repeat customers, or was your cost of acquisition greater than those customers' fleeting lifetime value? A higher conversion rate is a measure of sales, marketing or ecommerce success, not a way to quantify loyalty (at least in the absence of additional data points).</li></ul><br />In the CX world, we talk about the difference between behavioral loyalty and attitudinal loyalty:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Behavioral loyalty</i> is measured in ways such as frequency of purchase, organic sales growth, retention, and lifetime value. But, are those really measures of loyalty? Certainly, some share of repeat purchases are derived from customers who feel loyal to your brand, but many purchases likely come out of habit, because you're cheaper or more convenient, or because switching costs are high. But if any of those conditions change, your brand can rapidly and painfully discover how little loyalty it actually earns.</li><li><i>Attitudinal loyalty</i> measures customers' perception of and intent toward your brand--their Net Promoter Score (NPS), satisfaction scores (CSAT), or their likelihood to repurchase. But while behavioral loyalty is what is reflected on this quarter's income statement, it is attitudinal loyalty that drives next year's financial results. Behavioral loyalty is a lagging measure of what people did, but attitudinal loyalty is what they'll (probably) do in the future.</li></ul>It is that parenthetical “probably” that causes so many bad CX metrics and decisions. I hear people discount attitudinal measures, saying things like, “Many people who are promoters don't buy, and many detractors keep buying.” Funny, but I never hear a marketer suggest they shouldn't measure brand awareness, even though people who know the brand don't buy, and many newly acquired customers often didn't know the brand prior to consideration.<br /><br />More to the point, not only does decades of research tell us that attitudinal measures of loyalty are strongly associated with behavioral loyalty actions, business leaders can and should measure this themselves using their existing data. Gartner research demonstrates that firms that know the relationship between customer satisfaction and business results are a third more likely to say they exceed expectations for improving customer perception. And firms that establish the correlation between customer satisfaction and financial outcomes are 29% more likely to report CX budget increases (while being a third less likely to report decreases). Gartner clients can learn more in our report, <a href="https://www.gartner.com/document/4016874">“Prove the ROI Business Case of Customer Experience Programs While Staying Customer-Centric” (subscription required).</a><br /><br />Business leaders measure customer loyalty badly because they measure what they most value--dollars--but you can damage what you don't measure accurately. That means counting dollars while ignoring decaying attitudinal loyalty is an extraordinarily effective way to damage your brand over time. Business history is littered with examples of brands who were confident that their longstanding, profit-building, market-share-commanding behavioral loyalty was more important than customers' attitudinal loyalty. But had Kodak, Circuit City, Borders, Sears, taxi companies and dozens of other dead or sagging brands been listening, their futures were written in the attitudinal loyalty data they collected.<br /><br />Change your CX metrics, change your future. It's as simple as that. If you fail to show how leading, customer-centric measures of attitudinal loyalty create future value for stakeholders, your brand will fall into the trap of mistaking purchases for behavioral loyalty. Today's sales are today's dollars earned, but it's your customers' attitudinal loyalty that tell you whether you'll earn or lose tomorrow's customers, purchases, and dollars.<br /><br />Don't just earn dollars. Earn loyalty. Measure it properly, and your brand can soar. Do it wrong, and you'll waste a lot of efforts on “CX programs” that damage rather than enhance your customer relationships.</div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-87251375127480376542023-01-04T05:55:00.001-05:002023-01-04T06:27:52.853-05:00Seven Ways for Corporations to be Ethical<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp_ftfGeIMYwZeb7n3Ocf8E28cKuehD3mOSnrZWnnrpZW-2ybxxFJHIvbS9YFcu14_j0rISdEcp4QNhHwGk9MNB3-KCkOvjO5ZNSmZVSxzDvxod5VQUv3uyMwqgI9JvJJJnaGYJwY-pa7H0AxQwP2O_UaXOjgB1WngIBwKaw8pxI65U3hHAKVF2Z8v/s1981/riccardo-annandale-7e2pe9wjL9M-unsplash.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1588" data-original-width="1981" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp_ftfGeIMYwZeb7n3Ocf8E28cKuehD3mOSnrZWnnrpZW-2ybxxFJHIvbS9YFcu14_j0rISdEcp4QNhHwGk9MNB3-KCkOvjO5ZNSmZVSxzDvxod5VQUv3uyMwqgI9JvJJJnaGYJwY-pa7H0AxQwP2O_UaXOjgB1WngIBwKaw8pxI65U3hHAKVF2Z8v/s320/riccardo-annandale-7e2pe9wjL9M-unsplash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@pavement_special?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Riccardo Annandale</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/7e2pe9wjL9M?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></td></tr></tbody></table>I believe in a world where corporations can balance being good with being profitable. It's why I focus on Customer Experience for a living. But it's also undeniable that corporations frequently act to the detriment of customer health and safety. <br /><br />What does it take for corporations to be ethical? Entire books are written about that, and I'm not going to definitively answer that question here, but I think it's a topic worthy of exploration with some obvious top-level solutions. <br /><br />Leaders of companies often make customer-hostile decisions in countless ways, from tiny (like difficult return policies) to enormous (that harm people's wellbeing). Some of the largest ways corporations act to hurt people involve producing dangerous products, for example: <div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>The Sugar Industry: </b>In 1968, the Sugar Research Foundation funded a study to prove sugar was safe. But when initial results indicated that a high-sugar diet increased the triglyceride levels, which can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/21/565766988/what-the-industry-knew-about-sugars-health-effects-but-didnt-tell-us">the study was cancelled before it was completed.</a> It took decades for the public to recognize the adverse health impacts of excess sugar. <br /> </li><li><b>DuPont: </b>DuPont had <a href="https://www.salon.com/2016/01/04/teflons_toxic_legacy_partner/">evidence for decades that Teflon was dangerous</a>. In the 1960s, it began to learn that C8, a component in the Teflon manufacturing process, was potentially harmful. A decade later, it knew C8 was accumulating in workers' bodies. In the 1980s, the company found it was contaminating drinking water around its plant. Today, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/23/pfas-everyday-products-toxics-guide">C8 is banned or tightly regulated</a> in many nations. <br /> </li><li><b>Facebook: </b>Facebook has faced criticism for what some perceive as a habit of hiding unflattering or critical research that reveals the company's social media platforms can be harmful. Facebook has responded that the research in question is small, qualitative and taken out of context. For example, a year ago, the Wall Street Journal published internal Facebook research that found <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/28/22749357/facebook-mental-health-research-tobacco">Instagram was linked with issues like anxiety, depression, suicidal thought, and body image issues</a>. A whistleblower also revealed Facebook's research demonstrated its <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcna3581">algorithms and recommendation systems push some users to political extremes</a>.</li></ul>We could make a much lengthier list of examples; in fact, the tobacco industry was so effective at obscuring the health dangers of smoking that today, other industries are said to take a page from their “playbook,” including <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/13/business/exxon-climate-change-harvard/index.html">energy companies</a>, <a href="https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/elj/vol68/iss3/4/">the NFL</a>, <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/744837">alcohol companies</a>, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/30/senators-say-facebook-used-big-tobacco-playbook-to-exploit-kids.html">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://www.uicc.org/blog/using-big-tobacco%E2%80%99s-playbook-hook-new-generation">vaping companies</a>, and more. <br /><br />I even see evidence of this same decision-making in today's corporate #COVID19 policies regarding work in offices, conferences, and store policies. It will take months to tabulate the data, but as of Fall 2022, COVID was on track to <a href="https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-leading-cause-of-death-ranking/">the third leading cause of death in the US for the third year in a row</a>. We know COVID is mutating, that <a href="https://fortune.com/2022/12/15/omicron-subvariants-xbb-bq-1-have-alarming-ability-to-evade-both-immunity-and-medical-treatments-scientists-warn/">vaccine immunity is fading</a>, and that <a href="https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/12/21/Ten-Downplayed-COVID-Facts/">COVID can cause longer-term chronic damage</a>. There is no question that the world remains in the grip of an ongoing pandemic (with <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/30/covid-news-omicron-xbbpoint1point5-is-highly-immune-evasive-and-binds-better-to-cells.html">dangerous new variants rising at present</a>.) So, why is virtually every company willingly permitting and urging risky activities and environments? <br /><br />The argument seems to be that each employee or customer is informed and can make their own decision about COVID risks. But, if employers knowingly asked people to subject themselves to a chemical that was the third-leading cause of death, we would not consider that acceptable. And yet, corporate leaders are collaborating with employees and customers to continue exposing large numbers of people to a virus that continues to <a href="https://www.masslive.com/coronavirus/2022/12/boston-health-officials-issue-grim-covid-warning-ahead-of-new-years-eve.html">fill hospitals</a> and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-07/long-covid-is-a-threat-to-the-whole-economy">is harming the economy</a>.<br /><br />I'm not here to criticize companies; my job is to help them. While the examples above may be greater in scale, are the drivers of these corporate decisions really that different from the self-interested decisions most people make every day? <br /><br />We know that driving our car or taking a flight harms the environment. We also are aware that failing to wear a mask while in crowds lifts risks for everyone else. Yet, we do these and other things for personal finance, convenience, and social acceptance. So do companies. Upton Sinclair once said, “<a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/">It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it</a>.” We'd all like to believe we'd make better decisions, but if we were executive leaders who find our profitable product harms people, how eager would we be to sacrifice our income, security, reputation, and job to rapidly abandon that product?<br /><br />Which raises the question in the title of this post: What does it take for corporations to be ethical? There are things companies can do to be better, but in some respects, the answer starts with you (and me and everyone else.) As consumers, we need to hold brands to higher standards and realize every dollar we spend and minute we dedicate is a vote for the brand. (For example, after 13 years on Twitter, I've joined many others who made the personal decision to stop participating on the platform.) And, as voters, we should consider the role of government oversight in regulating the safety of our products (be that the mental health implications of social media, the security of our financial systems, the safety of the cars we drive, the long-term impact of or the energy we produce, or the dangers of products on store shelves.) Some believe in “laissez-faire” corporate policies, but I believe history tells us our economic, financial and public health are greater with the proper level of government oversight and corporate participation. <br /><br />Within corporations, there are many things we can do to improve ethical, employee- and customer-centric decisions: </div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Strive for greater transparency, collaboration, and employee empowerment: </b>It helps to improve the transparency of information and how decisions are made. This means allowing people both inside and outside the organization to raise concerns without fear of retaliation. It also means sharing more information, both inside and outside the organization. Reporting, for example, on your DEI initiatives is one way to bring light to your corporate actions and values. It is much harder to make dubious decisions when more people are informed and involved. </li><li><b>Commit to improved customer listening: </b>The more you listen to your customers and understand their needs and perceptions, the easier it is to make customer-centric decisions. Too many companies collect and then largely ignore the voice of their customers. Make it a priority to listen and emphasize the needs and expectations of your customers in important decisions. </li><li><b>Focus on corporate reputation and long-term success: </b>Short-term focus can kill companies. Decisions made to drive today's revenue and profit at the expense of an organization's reputation or long-term success shortens the lifespan of corporations. Boards and leaders must consider the ways in which leader performance is measured and rewarded to be sure top-level decisions are made with an eye toward the future and not just this year's stock performance. </li><li><b>Define and reinforce corporate values: </b>Many organizations have values, but fewer live by them. Make sure your values aren't something locked (and forgotten) in employee handbooks, but are ever-present and repeatedly reinforced expectations to which employees and leaders hold themselves accountable. Promote examples of times when leaders or employees rely on your values to make decisions that might have seemed wrong had only short-term financial concerns been considered. </li><li><b>Consider ethical employee recognition and rewards: </b>Too often, virtually all employee performance and rewards are based around short-term financial goals of efficiency, cost savings, and immediate success. You don't encourage ethical behaviors by demanding one thing of employees and then rewarding another. Consider ways to balance your performance appraisals, promotions, and incentive programs so that people are encouraged to make decisions aligned with your values and not just dollars. </li><li><b>Model ethical behaviors: </b>There is no substitute for top-down ethics in an organization. Everyone watches and repeats the way leaders behave because they believe that is what is expected, what's accepted, and what gets them promoted. Too many leaders think they lead with words and policies when, in fact, every leader (great and terrible) leads by the example they demonstrate in their daily interactions throughout the organization. </li><li><b>Be open about mistakes and missteps. </b>Finally, it's important for ethical organizations to learn, and there's no way to do that if people feel they must hide mistakes or deflect blame. Many leaders talk a good game about embracing failure, but many employees fear that mistakes, if acknowledged, will become a “can tied their tail.” If we allow people to think they must be perfect, or they'll sacrifice their reputations and careers, we encourage dishonesty and self-interest.</li></ul>As consumers, can demand more of the brands we buy (and don't buy). And as employees and leaders, we can implement the processes that encourage ethical actions and model the behaviors we expect of others. But will we? That's up to you. </div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-47140549933375191882022-12-28T07:51:00.006-05:002022-12-28T07:51:52.905-05:00Personal and Professional Goals: How Our Quest for ROI Destroys ROI<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY7muiTxDdkqYEJjiG9gDHdk2wdguAUnEH64CFrlixct2a5LuegCBOeIDJQe04yU6BT5ZcxLNKvTHQSjbky3e1mgeIfORO2d8RWe2i_gB-gslGKcuk_qRc8xPOG7n3q4l6sWwuxbo6JxGrmfd0D24HcL3KNhMqtxwM4tV0rJT3i19ZoGfAK2kRraOD/s4857/s-o-c-i-a-l-c-u-t-6iYb1BWWbV0-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3320" data-original-width="4857" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY7muiTxDdkqYEJjiG9gDHdk2wdguAUnEH64CFrlixct2a5LuegCBOeIDJQe04yU6BT5ZcxLNKvTHQSjbky3e1mgeIfORO2d8RWe2i_gB-gslGKcuk_qRc8xPOG7n3q4l6sWwuxbo6JxGrmfd0D24HcL3KNhMqtxwM4tV0rJT3i19ZoGfAK2kRraOD/s320/s-o-c-i-a-l-c-u-t-6iYb1BWWbV0-unsplash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@socialcut?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">S O C I A L . C U T</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/6iYb1BWWbV0?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br />I just reached a personal milestone, and the experience has caused me to think a bit about the measurement of ROI and how we use KPIS, goals, metrics, and OKRs in business.<br /><br />This past weekend, I achieved something I would've thought impossible: I've completed a high-intensity workout every single day for two straight years. It's not a long exercise regimen--it started as 7.5 minutes and has grown to 15 minutes each day--but it kicks my butt every morning. I feel great--fitter and healthier than I have in decades. I've also lost about 45 pounds (20 kg) in those two years. It's the “also” in that last sentence that is worthy of exploration in a discussion of personal and professional goals and ROI.<br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Differences Between the Personal Goals You Control and the Outcomes You Influence (and Some Advice for Your New Year's Resolutions)</h3>I didn't set out to lose weight. I hoped I would, of course. But I really started this daily regimen to be healthier. I was turning 60 soon, my doctor was voicing a few health concerns, and in the first winter of COVID, I worried isolation and diminished social behaviors would decrease my already sedentary level of activity.<br /><br />So, I set my goal to work out every day--not to look better or lose weight, just to work out. I goaled my activity, not the outcome, because I control the activity but only influence the outcome. If I failed to do my workout every day, that's on me and only me. But if I worked out every day and failed to lose weight, that is not. (Or, at least, it's a much more complex and chaotic question, dependent on activity, caloric intake, metabolism, and other factors.)<br /><br />The vital question is this: If I exercised every single day but didn't lose any weight, would that render the exercise valueless? Of course not. Had I not lost a single pound, I'd still be stronger, firmer, and healthier. Is there any doubt that working out regularly is good for us?<br /><br />Had I set my goal on weight loss, I would've given up. After four months, I had gained three pounds. That could've been a decision point, but it was not, because losing weight was an outcome, not the objective. If it gave me any pause, it was to wonder how much more I might have gained had I failed to achieve my activity goal.<br /><br />Some of you are about to embark on a New Year's resolution, and I cannot recommend strongly enough that you set your goal on the activity, not the outcome. It's okay to hope for or be confident in the impact, but your goal--the only thing you really control--must be to run five times a week, get to the gym three times a week, or exercise every day.<br /><br />(This works just as well for other New Year's resolutions: Want to learn a language? That's just the outcome; the goal is to complete an online language lesson four times a week. Which, coincidentally, is another goal of mine. <i>Aprendo español. Completo cuatro lecciones cada semana en Babbel.</i>)<br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Difference Between the Business Goals You Control and the Outcomes You Influence</h3>Which brings me to how we conduct business. I work in Customer Experience, and every single week, someone asks me to specify the ROI of CX. The discipline of CX requires organizations to listen more to customers, gather data about customer perception and experiences, and act on that information to strengthen relationships.<br /><br />Is there any doubt that doing those activities is good for our businesses? Is there any conceivable advantage to ignoring customers' wants, needs, and perceptions? And if you constantly committed to those CX activities and improved customer satisfaction but were unable to calculate the ROI, would that make that effort wasted?<br /><br />Of course, these questions pertain to more than just CX. Another question my peers and I are asked every single week is the ROI of digital transformation. What is the alternative? We live in a world with the Internet, mobile phones, and smart devices. <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107206/average-number-of-connected-devices-us-house/">The average US household owns over ten connected devices</a>, and <a href="https://www.ccsinsight.com/blog/four-highlights-from-our-2019-survey-of-employees/#:~:text=As%20the%20average%20number%20of,in%20the%20way%20they%20work.">the average number of connected devices per employee has risen to 4.9</a>. Does your organization believe there may be financial rewards to returning to typewriters, landlines, file cabinets, and interoffice envelopes?!<br /><br />I understand there's an important and valuable query hiding behind these ROI questions: It's not, “Is there ROI?” Or even, “What's the ROI?” The question is, “How will I know I'm making the right investments?” That's a reasonable question, but we must realize that the benefits won't be expressed in just dollars, just as the value of exercising isn't merely measured in pounds. We must understand the worth of the activity and not just the demonstrable, attributable return on investment we can measure.<br /><br />If I stopped working out after four months because I gained weight, we can all agree I would be less healthy and feel worse today. And, I hope, we would all concur that if an organization stopped listening and acting on customer feedback or ceased their efforts to transform for our digital world, that would be very damaging to the company. Yet, how many companies will cut budget for CX in 2023 or invest half what they should in technology because they are unable to quantify the ROI?<br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">Start With Why</h3>The secret to tackling these personal and professional challenges is to start with why we need or want them in the first place. If we do so, we'll stop treating every investment of time and money as if it's an ROI decision and start recognizing unique and necessary ways of measuring impact.<br /><br />Decisions that are short-term in nature and made to derive financial outcomes should be driven by ROI. If you can invest $500,000 to save $1,500,000 of costs over three years, that's a good investment. If an e-commerce company can invest $250,000 in a direct-response ad campaign to generate $1.5 million of sales and $500,000 of gross margin, that's a good investment.<br /><br />But the “why” behind the most complex corporate decisions is not simply to return an immediate and measurable profit. Why invest in CX? Because poor experience degrades your reputation, harms loyalty, increases churn, raises costs to serve, harms inbound traffic and conversion rate, and lowers lifetime value. Very few of those costs (or benefits) will be directly attributable, nor will be they be immediate. That means we can seek the ROI business case of CX, but we shouldn't be limited by it because we recognize much of the benefit accrues over time and is not ascribable to any single project or investment.<br /><br />Why invest in digital transformation? Because it's how business is conducted today, and the pace of change is only accelerating. Companies that fail to secure and use essential tech lower productivity, provide poor customer experiences, miss sales and service opportunities, collaborate badly, frustrate and churn employees, diminish reputation, and raise costs. Again, some of those things can be measured in dollars and cents, but trying to attach a short-term, traceable ROI to every digital investment is the road to madness.<br /><br />Every leader wants their company to be Apple and Amazon, but no leader wants to risk being Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, or Steve Jobs. Those leaders did not make every decision based on a spreadsheet. They made big bets on CX and digital transformation knowing some would fail and the ROI was neither immediate nor attributable.<br /><br />In 2013, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/jeffrey-bezos-washington-posts-next-owner-aims-for-a-new-golden-era-at-the-newspaper/2013/09/02/30c00b60-13f6-11e3-b182-1b3bb2eb474c_story.html">Jeff Bezos said</a>, “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim-cook-doesnt-care-about-the-bloody-roi/?sh=600c7e5d55f2">Tim Cook reportedly told an analyst</a>, “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o">In 1997, Steve Jobs said</a>, “As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with what incredible benefits could we give to the customer? Where could we take the customers?”<br /><br />Those are leaders who knew they needed to make investments for the future, regardless of the ROI of each decision along the journey. They knew focusing on the customer and investing in the right tech was essential, not because they could calculate the return, but because there was no other way to realize their vision.<br /><br />Must someone prove to you there is ROI to listening to customers and improving their experiences? Do you need a spreadsheet to tell you the return of using the tech you need to run your business, be responsive to customers, and keep up with competitors? What if, instead, you took the lead of the most successful leaders of the past three decades and made your goal doing right by customers? Then, much like my weight loss, you may find the financial rewards were never really the goal, but merely the expected consequence of doing the right thing.Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-31890877035482055782022-12-16T07:44:00.006-05:002022-12-16T07:44:37.595-05:00Fight FOMO: Customer Experience Non-Trends for 2023<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsOJt2PaSRgRIHVP9DRueP52iO5AY54iGzEJmWSeuQx--y62qTcxAiU077rSc06Xmn5jj-6WE2XFuurnIFnvBjzRpgZ6n22D18rId06glpScuw93LqiRrGljhxG6TVbpu1fMraDrnLr4Zl-PZwQ1ID5_6ihIbWu3AplpzRE_hsQM8ctsL5W9SePs3s/s5184/usman-yousaf-8dvyPDYa35Q-unsplash.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsOJt2PaSRgRIHVP9DRueP52iO5AY54iGzEJmWSeuQx--y62qTcxAiU077rSc06Xmn5jj-6WE2XFuurnIFnvBjzRpgZ6n22D18rId06glpScuw93LqiRrGljhxG6TVbpu1fMraDrnLr4Zl-PZwQ1ID5_6ihIbWu3AplpzRE_hsQM8ctsL5W9SePs3s/s320/usman-yousaf-8dvyPDYa35Q-unsplash.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;">Photo by Usman Yousaf on Unsplash</span></td></tr></tbody></table>'Tis the season for consultants and experts to create FOMO. “Here are the hot new trends,” they post, sharing things you're not doing. “Do this or suffer the consequences,” they'll say. And, coincidentally, those same people and their employers are more than happy to help you adopt these hot new trends--for a price.<br /><br />Do you ever go back and look at all those annual FOMO articles to see how they aged? Do you have any idea how many years people have been declaring each year the year of blockchain, NFTs, or cryptocurrency? And, has any company actually suffered for not having a blockchain, NFT, or crypto offering? (I searched Google for “the year of blockchain,” and quickly found people saying every year since 2015 was going to be the year of blockchain. Narrator: None of them were the year of blockchain.)<br /><br />As I review the stream of #CustomerExperience predictions for 2023, what I see is not constructive advice but the same, old fear-building tactics to convince leaders their brands will fail because they don't move quickly. For some reason, it's lost on many that Facebook wasn't an early social media mover, Android considerably trailed Blackberry and Palm, and the <a href="https://citymonitor.ai/transport/uber-lyft-rides-during-coronavirus-pandemic-taxi-data-5232">share of ridesharing owned by taxis continues to fall relative to Uber and Lyft</a> despite taxis having a 400-year head start (dating back to the first horse-drawn for-hire hackney carriage service in 1605.) The benefits of first-mover advantage have been wildly overstated. The winner is the brand that gets something right for the most number of customers, not the first one to sacrifice their budgets for others' education of untested platforms and technologies.<br /><br />What are the non-trends writers are pushing this year?<br /><br /><b>Non-Trend #1: The Metaverse:</b> Listen to the hypesters and you'd think everyone in the world is clamoring to live their personal and professional lives as avatars in a virtual world. (In case you haven't noticed, in science fiction and media, the idea of living our lives in a virtual world is almost always the basis for a horror, thriller, or post-apocalyptic tale and not an upbeat comedy.) So, how's the metaverse working so far? Well, <a href="https://musictech.com/news/six-people-attended-metaverse-rave-european-union/">the European Union just threw a metaverse rave at a cost of €387,000 and six people showed up</a>. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-cut-more-than-11000-jobs-one-biggest-us-layoffs-this-year-2022-11-09/">Meta has cut 13% of its staff because its metaverse bets aren't paying off.</a> And Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse's biggest cheerleader, has said <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-platforms-beats-estimates-quarterly-revenue-2022-10-26/">he expects the metaverse investments to take about a decade to bear fruit</a>. So, let me assure you that 2023 will not be a year when your brand loses out if it's not in the metaverse. Go ahead and test it, pilot ideas, and explore the metaverse; just don't call it a hot or vital #CX trend for the coming year.<br /><br /><b>Non-Trend #2: Immersive tech: </b>It amazes me to see people pushing VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) each and every year. These technologies certainly hold some longer-term promise, but honestly, do you know anyone who owns and regularly uses a VR or AR headset? A Forbes contributor said this month that “immersive AR and VR experiences will become the norm in 2023,” and let me assure you with complete confidence that is nowhere near true. <a href="https://technewsspace.com/sales-of-vr-headsets-have-fallen-this-year-but-will-increase-sharply-in-2023-thanks-to-new-products-from-sony-and-ma/">Sales of VR devices actually fell this year, although new products from Sony and Meta are expected to push sales back up in 2023</a>. And the thing almost everyone seems to miss (or obscure) is that the eventual growth of VR headsets will be driven not by consumers wishing to work and shop via VR or AR devices but by gamers. <a href="https://advanced-television.com/2022/09/07/overhalf-of-us-vr-headet/#:~:text=The%20top%20uses%20for%20VR,TV%20(25%20per%20cent).">The top use for VR headsets right now is gaming (92%)</a>, and there's a gigantic gap to the second and third-most popular uses, exploring new places (29%) and watching movies and TV (25%). (What you don't see on the list: Shopping, working, and other immersive tech use cases people claim will be hot trends.) VR games will grow in the years ahead, but don't expect the same consumers who ignore your Facebook posts or skip your ads to race to engage with your brand using their VR or AR headset.<br /><br /><b>Non-Trend #3: Personalization: </b>This one makes my list for a different reason than the others. Personalization isn't a hot new trend for 2023 because it's neither hot nor new. Personalization strategies and platforms have been with us for a decade now. My guess is that your company already has technology in place to personalize emails, websites and mobile apps. If you're like most, you struggle to gather the data necessary to make personalization meaningful. How bad are those struggles? Gartner predicts that by 2025, <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-12-02-gartner-predicts-80--of-marketers-will-abandon-person">80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both</a>. Your brand should strive to get personalization right--meaning right for customers, not just for your brand. But the reason to focus on personalization isn't that it's a hot, new thing but that it's an established and maturing capability deserving of some serious and rigorous attention.<br /><br />So, what are the hot trends in CX? From my perspective, they vary widely by category, brand, and an organization's level of maturity. For some, the hot CX trend is to simply deploy the right listening strategies to better understand evolving customer needs. For others, it's to tap the enormous value of their existing VoC feedback, customer data, and past research to create greater impact. In other organizations, this year's trend is to convert the CX program from a disconnected collection of siloed efforts into an effective and sustainable cross-functional program. And for others, 2023 will be the year to abandon generic one-size-fits-all customer journey maps and develop more powerful persona-based journeys.<br /><br />People have come to expect cutting-edge technology and sexy new business models as part of annual trend predictions. We'll certainly see chatbots improve in 2023. Predictive analytics will get better. The use of interaction analytics to understand customers will certainly grow. Without any doubt, more companies will attempt to deflect customer call volumes by offering self-service (and a couple of them may actually get it right.)<br /><br />But none of that works if you don't listen to customers, understand their needs, solve their problems, strengthen their relationships, and collaborate cross-functionally to tear down the silos that cause disconnected customer experiences. So, the hot new CX trend this year and every year won't be a new NFT or blockchain technology or the next DTC or subscription model; it'll be getting the basics of CX right to encourage a customer-centric culture that impacts the day-to-day decisions of every employee from the C-suite to your front lines.Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-91109896883477584442022-05-20T06:39:00.005-04:002022-05-20T06:39:40.246-04:00What Brands, Companies and Leaders Do That Encourage Buycotts and Boycotts: Social Justice and Marketing Part 4<br /><br /> <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2022/05/19/corporate-social-justice-has-little-to-no-net-impact-on-consumer-purchases-social-justice-and-marketing-part-3/">In the prior blog post in this series</a>, we discussed how corporate social justice stands are not significant drivers of net-positive or -negative consumer purchases (buycotts) or boycotts. In this final blog post of this series, we will explore what corporate and brand activity tended to attract consumer attention and alter purchasing behavior.<br /><br />It is interesting to note that, in many ways, all of your corporate social justice activities attract attention from consumers. We studied thirteen activities that brands, companies, leaders and employees do that cause consumers to notice and then buycott or boycott. All thirteen activities were selected by between 7% and 10% of U.S. consumers as reasons for buycott purchases, and all thirteen were chosen by between 5% and 9% of respondents as the cause of their boycotts. No one activity was conspicuously more powerful (or weaker) than the others. In short, everything you say and do matters.<br /><br />Once again, I cannot share all of our data, which is available exclusively to Gartner clients. But I can reveal what activity drove the most buycott purchases and which drove the most boycotting:<div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>An advertisement from the company or brand</b> was the top answer for what dove “buycott” purchases. One in ten consumers cited advertising as to why they purchased from a brand in support of its social justice stand. Interestingly, ads were the lowest driver of buycott purchases among Gen Zers but the highest among Gen Xers and Boomers.</li><li><b>Brand’s political contributions to candidates or parties</b> were the top driver of consumer boycotts. Overall, 9% of respondents cited this as their top reason for abandoning a brand from which they previously purchased.</li></ul><div>To learn more about the one corporate social or political activity that drove both buycott and boycott actions and what it means for brands and marketers, <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2022/05/20/what-brands-companies-and-leaders-do-that-encourage-buycotts-and-boycotts-social-justice-and-marketing-part-4/" target="_blank">please read my complete article on the Gartner blog.</a> </div></div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-39925329244733643552022-05-19T06:55:00.007-04:002022-05-19T06:55:58.054-04:00Corporate Social Justice Has Little to No Net Impact on Consumer Purchases: Social Justice and Marketing Part 3<a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2022/05/18/how-gartner-produced-groundbreaking-research-on-consumer-purchases-and-corporate-social-justice-activities-social-justice-and-marketing-part-2/"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2022/05/18/how-gartner-produced-groundbreaking-research-on-consumer-purchases-and-corporate-social-justice-activities-social-justice-and-marketing-part-2/"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD_RaMgnBXgDRQEybmmb9teVZJx8URHiMlbIHlY8JteMW0v-LcYvLMI-dZVP4f2DPfFspn2moDT67JEvjNOaocBK-18zBaBuYVR6LN9-3aN4ME7Qcbh8akvGaa_CZN4a95OO2MIcLBXbQkEAkp8LdpsrObePKOn592uVcyBdXyF_ES00nHGm9lq17y/s1491/buycott%20vs%20boycott.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="812" data-original-width="1491" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD_RaMgnBXgDRQEybmmb9teVZJx8URHiMlbIHlY8JteMW0v-LcYvLMI-dZVP4f2DPfFspn2moDT67JEvjNOaocBK-18zBaBuYVR6LN9-3aN4ME7Qcbh8akvGaa_CZN4a95OO2MIcLBXbQkEAkp8LdpsrObePKOn592uVcyBdXyF_ES00nHGm9lq17y/s320/buycott%20vs%20boycott.png" width="320" /></a></div>In the prior blog post in this series, we explored how Gartner sought to overcome flawed research on corporate social justice with its own proprietary study. We started not by asking whether people would or wouldn't purchase from brands that took a stand on social or political issues. Instead, asked consumers to name brands they had already buycotted or boycotted due to their corporate social stands. <br /><br />We found very little difference between the percentage of U.S. consumers who said they bought, or "buycotted," (18.7%) and those that said they stopped buying, or boycotted (19.2%). This data may, at first, seem surprising given the number of studies that have suggested consumers have a strong preference for brands that take action. But because we studied these divisive issues from a balanced perspective, asking about stands on both sides of the issue, it is perhaps not surprising that we’d find equal numbers of buycotters and boycotters.<br /><br />To find how corporate justice stands drive consumer purchases, we need to examine each stand individually. Our study allows us to compare the number of U.S. consumers who made buycott purchases as a result of a brand’s social or political actions versus the number who stopped buying and boycotted the brand for the same reason. I can't convey all of the data from this study since we must reserve it for Gartner clients, but I can share the two corporate social justice stands that drove the most net-positive and net-negative purchase behavior:<div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>The biggest social justice driver of net-positive purchases was an anti-racist stand that denounces discrimination against people of color. </b>Overall, 6% of US consumers in our study had purchased from brands because of this stand, while 2.3% boycotted for the same reason. Brands taking anti-racist stands enjoyed a four-point net positive impact of buycotters over boycotters.<br /> </li><li><b>The biggest driver of net-negative purchases was corporate support for former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. </b>Overall, 5.6% of US consumers boycotted a brand for supporting Trump, his administration, or the GOP; conversely, 3.5% of respondents purchased from brands due to this support. Overall, brands perceived as supporting Trump and the GOP saw a two-point net decrease in purchasers with more boycotters and buycotters.</li></ul><div>If you wish to see more, including a word cloud of the brands cited by buycotters and boycotters, <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2022/05/19/corporate-social-justice-has-little-to-no-net-impact-on-consumer-purchases-social-justice-and-marketing-part-3/" target="_blank">please continue reading on my Gartner blog. </a></div></div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-52784522639090420132022-05-18T06:58:00.004-04:002022-05-18T06:58:49.364-04:00How Gartner Produced Groundbreaking Research on Consumer Purchases and Corporate Social Justice Activities: Social Justice and Marketing Part 2<p> <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2022/05/17/whats-wrong-with-research-on-consumer-preference-on-corporate-social-justice-social-justice-and-marketing-part-1/">In part 1 of this series</a>, we explored how marketers feel increasing demands from consumers, leaders and other stakeholders to bring social justice topics into their marketing communications. We also discussed how many studies conducted on this topic are flawed and may exaggerate the need for action. So, what did Gartner do differently? </p><p>In 2021, we conducted studies of U.S. consumers that we hoped would provide our marketing and communications clients with original and distinctive insights. We conducted this research as part of Gartner’s Fellows program, which is designed to identify and sponsor high-impact thought leadership that keeps Gartner on the cutting edge of research and advisory insights.</p><p>To avoid the issues discussed in the prior post (social desirability biases and the impact of topic polarity), we conducted our research in a way unlike other research on consumer preference and corporate social justice: </p><p><strong>We first asked consumers to name brands they had purchased or had stopped purchasing from because of a stand on a social issue. </strong>Our approach required consumers to identify brands where they knowingly changed their purchase habits due to brands’ social justice activities. By focusing on past purchase decisions, we sought to minimize social desirability bias and were able to identify two nonexclusive groups of consumers: “buycotters,” who purchased brands because they took a stand on political or social issues, and boycotters, who stopped buying from a brand over their social or political stands.</p><p><strong>We then asked buycotters and boycotters what brand communications and activities drove their change in purchase habits.</strong> Rather than focus on issues, we sought to understand the stands that brands took that increased or decreased purchases. Since these issues are so polarizing, we provided a balanced series of answers that permitted consumers on either side of these contentious issues to pick a positive answer aligned with their values and choices (see below). <br /><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/files/2022/05/social-justice-topic-polarity-answers.png"><img alt="A list of answers Gartner used to study both sides of issues, such as "An anti-racist stance that denounces discrimination against people of color" and "A stance that focusing on specific racial or ethnic groups at the expense of others is unfair or harmful"" class="img-responsive aligncenter wp-image-1172 size-large" height="259" src="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/files/2022/05/social-justice-topic-polarity-answers-1024x414.png" width="640" /></a><br /><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2022/05/18/how-gartner-produced-groundbreaking-research-on-consumer-purchases-and-corporate-social-justice-activities-social-justice-and-marketing-part-2/">If you continue reading this post on my Gartner blog</a>, you'll learn what percentage of U.S. consumers reported buycotting or boycotting a brand for reasons related to corporate social or political activities. </p>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-4077440135353603162022-05-17T07:19:00.001-04:002022-05-17T07:20:14.205-04:00What’s Wrong with Research on Consumer Preference on Corporate Social Justice? Social Justice and Marketing Part 1<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBbqouMDqjV5ZDzUksb54isl03VKqCVdSgx-Ms5s0qsgSxVcwwpVhsBamx8-EnHcV1nSCDQk-zdguhMJGN8p2M5WB67Fqmmkw41UgiLrGcQLUskPsAeIVlWSwwE1PVfJTONesb2MzcG5_-Ga-yIT6U9TJ4N_Jss_RoV1DEASMuDhrMfpfguNUhNEoZ/s7952/corey-young-LB9dklK0xb0-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5304" data-original-width="7952" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBbqouMDqjV5ZDzUksb54isl03VKqCVdSgx-Ms5s0qsgSxVcwwpVhsBamx8-EnHcV1nSCDQk-zdguhMJGN8p2M5WB67Fqmmkw41UgiLrGcQLUskPsAeIVlWSwwE1PVfJTONesb2MzcG5_-Ga-yIT6U9TJ4N_Jss_RoV1DEASMuDhrMfpfguNUhNEoZ/s320/corey-young-LB9dklK0xb0-unsplash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@corey_untitled?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Corey Young</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/protest?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></span></td></tr></tbody></table>Marketers face a growing demand for their brands to have a voice on contentious social justice issues. As a result, marketers must navigate challenging questions of consumer expectations, stakeholder demands and brand health in an era of corporate social justice. There is no commonly understood definition, but corporate social justice encompasses the organizational values, attitudes and behaviors that contribute to the fair, equitable treatment of all stakeholders within and outside the organization.<br /><br />Pressure has been rising for marketers and brands to “take a stand.” Some marketers have done so with decidedly mixed results for their brands. We’ve seen <a href="https://people.com/sports/nikes-stock-reaches-all-time-high-despite-controversial-colin-kaepernick-ad-campaign/">Nike bring social justice into its advertising and succeed</a>, while <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner-echoes-black-lives-matter-sparks-anger-n742811">Pepsi faced quick and considerable backlash when it leveraged social justice topics in its advertising</a>. <br /><br />We explored US consumers’ purchase decisions, both positively and negatively, about brands taking (or not taking) stands on today’s most contentious social justice issues. Before diving into the data, it’s important to note that, regardless of if and how corporate social justice drives customer preference, there are many reasons why your organization should embrace social justice issues. <br /><br />Gartner researches the topic of social justice from many different perspectives, and we’ve found that embracing social justice issues can improve your culture and help you attract and retain talent. For example, <a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/corporate-advocacy-of-social-issues-can-drive-employee-engagement">60% of employees reported improved engagement among peers after witnessing employer involvement in societal issues</a>. And <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-03-04-gartner-hr-research-finds-sixty-eight-percent-of-employees-would-consider-leaving-their-employer-for-an-organization-that-takes-a-stronger-stance-on-societal-and-cultural-issues">68% of employees would consider quitting their current job and working with an organization with a stronger viewpoint on the social issues that matter most to them</a>. But with the growing call for marketers to bring social causes into their brand voice, we felt it was essential to study how corporate social justice affects consumer purchases. <br /><br />Why study this when so many studies of corporate social justice (and related topics like corporate social responsibility) are readily available? We evaluated studies of corporate social justice – many produced by agencies and consultants who wish to earn business helping brands become more active in these topics – and found they are flawed for two reasons. To learn these reasons, <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2022/05/17/whats-wrong-with-research-on-consumer-preference-on-corporate-social-justice-social-justice-and-marketing-part-1/">please continue reading this post on my Gartner blog.</a>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-21824272956952738542022-02-13T07:38:00.005-05:002022-02-13T07:38:44.191-05:00The Good and Bad of Going ViralI posted something last week that went viral. I thought I'd take the time to share some personal observations about what happens when something you create catches fire, albeit briefly, on social media.<br /><br />First, a bit about <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6897529164489183232/">my post</a>: It was a somewhat sarcastic (but I hope thoughtful) post poking fun at the leaders complaining about employee retention. We've heard the claim repeatedly throughout the pandemic that "no one wants to work," and it annoys me because too many employers have enacted policies and actions that diminish employee satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement. I hoped to make the point that people do, in fact, want to work. (Okay, sure, we all wish we were independently wealthy, but most people I know want to remain productive and contribute--they'd just like to do it in better, more rewarding jobs working for more appreciative bosses.) <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="400" src="https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/image/C4D12AQE06VyhrsJrcw/article-inline_image-shrink_1500_2232/0/1644753821096?e=1650499200&v=beta&t=Hi2kulcUq85YDDgt7c0icSYYh3gitk3bBWZEf5qdPy4" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="338" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br />When I posted, I expected a few likes and comments. Instead, it blew up quickly. My LinkedIn post is approaching 1 million views. People are sharing this on Reddit, and it was briefly the top item on the Reddit home page with <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/spihun/no_one_wants_to_work_our_turnover_is_terrible/">more than 120,000 upvotes</a>. The <a href="https://twitter.com/i/timeline">version I tweeted</a> has received 33,000 impressions, and people have posted LinkedIn screencaps dozens of times. And on TikTok, a labor union account posted a video acting out my post as a script.<br /><br />This isn't the first time I've had something go viral (but it is probably the most widespread.) At first, there comes some sense of pride for posting something others find worthwhile. But it's interesting to note how the context of your words changes as your content becomes others' content. For example: <br /><br />- 𝙄 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙙 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙠: I immediately grew concerned about the reaction of my leaders at work. I focus on customer experience, not labor practices (although the two are not mutually exclusive, by any means.) And I am not anti-business; in fact, I'm very pro-business. I focus on CX because I believe in win-wins--companies can have practices that enrich customers, and customers will reward them with greater loyalty and advocacy. And I feel the same about employment practices--companies win when they treat their human resources like actual resources and not interchangeable and disposable parts. Still, to have a snarky post poking fun at employers get this much attention made me uneasy. <br /><br />- 𝙄 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙙 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙬𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙠 𝙄 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙖𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙢𝙮 𝙤𝙬𝙣 𝙚𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙤𝙮𝙚𝙧: If a few hundred people had seen the post, it might not have occurred to me that many might think I was subtly subtweeting about my own employer. But, as this quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of views, that risk became apparent. If you know me, you know I'm far happier than most with my situation at Gartner. Sure, I have a few gripes like anyone, but I consider myself lucky to be doing what I do and working where I am with the peers on my team. But, some will draw the wrong conclusion when they see this one post and not other things I may post (including occasional praise for Gartner). <br /><br />- 𝙄𝙩 𝙙𝙞𝙙 𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙨 𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙠: As it turns out, my post going viral did raise some concerns at work, but they have been a bit different than I feared. My employer is in the process of communicating our merit increases for this year. I have not yet received my information, but someone asked my boss if I had gotten my info and was so unhappy it inspired the post. (This is why more conservative people don't tweet or post publicly, but I am who I am, so I will continue to share my perceptions and thoughts openly.) <br /><br />- 𝙄𝙩'𝙨 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙢𝙚 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙩: Several people have seen my post shared widely and told me, "you're famous." After almost 15 years of professional involvement in social media, I am well aware that my words are famous and I am not. More than a million people saw this--and today, if you asked them who posted it, almost none could tell you. It's healthy to separate yourself from your content and not think all of this is about you. It's not. <br /><br />- 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪: Another thing that occurs is that this one thing people see about you becomes you. What I mean by that is that many now assume I'm a labor activist--people have urged me to become a moderator on the r/antiwork subreddit (I ignored the suggestion), a labor blogger asked me for an interview (I declined), and a whole bunch of labor activists and accounts now follow me. Yes, I post about inequity, urge better customer- and employee-oriented practices, and am quite progressive in my support for fairer policies for lower-paid and middle-class citizens. But, I am not a labor activist by any stretch of the imagination. So, my future posts may disappoint some of my new followers, and if so, so be it! <br /><br />- 𝙂𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙫𝙞𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙞𝙨 𝙖 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙨𝙪𝙘𝙠: Your content going viral is a bit rewarding, but the time it requires is difficult. I've had to sift through over 500 new connection requests on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. I have received thousands of replies, comments, and criticisms, and I can't get to them all. I'm tempted to say I shouldn't even try to get to them all except 1) it's good social media practice to acknowledge some of the praise and answer the questions you receive, and 2) I do need to be aware of possible risks that could arise. For example, no one has yet replied by suggesting my employer must be one that fits my negative description, but if they do, I want to know it and respond quickly to share my belief that Gartner is a good employer. All of that means you can't simply tune out. I've spent lunch hours, evening and weekend hours, and some work time monitoring the buzz, and I'm glad it's dying down now (three days later). <br /><br />- 𝙀𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙬𝙖𝙣𝙩𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙗𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙: Finally, I am surprised how many people assume you'll want to make a mutual connection based on a single piece of content. As I noted, I've gotten hundreds of connection requests in recent days. Fifteen years ago, I might've accepted all the requests. Today, I'm declining the vast majority of them. On Facebook, I very rarely accept "friend" requests from people I don't know. On LinkedIn, I am no LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) who follows anyone and everyone. In fact, as a former social media researcher and leader, I advise people against that, urging others to keep their networks limited to people they know, can learn from (or can educate), and who will share content relevant to their professional interests. I invite people to 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 me on social media if they wish, but I will not accept 𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘴 if we don't know each other or share evident interests. <br /><br />So, that's what happens when you go viral. People think you're famous. You hear from many acquaintances with whom you've not connected in a while. You get a sense of pride--and concern. And it tosses a wrench into your time management for a few days. Some good, some bad. <br /><br />Knowing all this, I would still post what I did again. And I intend to keep doing what I do--posting about CX, business practices, and other relevant topics in which I hope to engage and learn from others and influence thought.Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-74622717544881384782022-01-20T05:41:00.002-05:002022-01-20T05:41:16.018-05:00Being Customer-Centric (Probably) Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgurK1HcTn5Yy63kugfXRoE9BR9O2xvTGImb-3XGgg1I0030H6-Ib2-yliRcVERDubt8XACPtCeYjg3INR3OnzhX4iRsm_tRXhH-F4ccNQfUH1EHATh7myraztOsp6kGbih-nZ9R9N8qaLqZRzE_EIDvhs6sIGS3e44exjc8FMnWy3i9HXIoBSHq1yZ=s745" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="201" data-original-width="745" height="86" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgurK1HcTn5Yy63kugfXRoE9BR9O2xvTGImb-3XGgg1I0030H6-Ib2-yliRcVERDubt8XACPtCeYjg3INR3OnzhX4iRsm_tRXhH-F4ccNQfUH1EHATh7myraztOsp6kGbih-nZ9R9N8qaLqZRzE_EIDvhs6sIGS3e44exjc8FMnWy3i9HXIoBSHq1yZ=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br />In my experience, there is no term less understood than "customer-centric." Real customer-centricity is challenging to achieve, demands consideration of priorities, goals, and policies, and requires leaders to model behaviors. Fake customer centricity takes many forms.<br /><br />Being customer-centric doesn't mean getting to know your customers so you can do a better job of targeting promotions, acquiring leads, improving acquisition, lowering service costs, or lifting sales. Yes, better customer insight can deliver all those things, but those are not customer-centric goals.<br /><br />The actual definition isn't that hard to decipher--it's hiding in plain view. The Cambridge Dictionary tells us "-centric" means: <br /><blockquote>"Having a particular type of person, place, or thing as your most important interest; seen from the point of view of a particular type of person, place, or thing."</blockquote><br />Organizations and leaders who wave the customer-centricity flag consistently make customer-hostile decisions because they fail to put the customer as their most important interest, nor do they measure success from the customer's point of view.<br /><br />Are you and your organization customer-centric? Do you:<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Prioritize lasting customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy equally with short-term sales and profit?</li><li>Approve projects that deliver long-term improvements to customer relationships as quickly and frequently as you do with short-term ROI?</li><li>Evaluate and measure investments against how it improves your customers' lives or business as much as your margin, costs, or marketing ROI?</li><li>Reward, praise, and promote employees who improve customer outcomes as often as those who deliver company-centric results? </li><li>Analyze your customer data to find the verifiable connection between your existing customers' satisfaction or perception and their lifetime value to your organization?</li><li>Measure loyalty as much through leading attitudinal measures of customer intent as through lagging indicators of customer purchase behavior? </li><li>Seek to constantly improve your customers' Voice of the Customer feedback and not merely beat your competitors' scores?</li><li>Make decisions and build strategies based on needs- or values-based personas and not just demographic- or value-based segments? </li><li>Listen for and resolve the barriers your employees face that prevent them from offering customer-centric products, services, and experiences? </li></ul><br />Most companies make profit their goal, and they focus obsessively on anything to maximize it as quickly as possible. Others recognize that profit is the outcome of consistent and pervasive customer-centric decisions that improve customer experience, build lasting loyalty, and yield bilateral high-value relationships. <br /><br />Being customer-centric isn't a strategy, a project, a mindset, or someone's job. Being customer-centric--really customer-centric--must be reflected in your corporate culture, values, decisions, priorities, goals, rewards, measures, and the daily activities of your employee.<br /><br />The next time someone tells you their organization is customer-centric, give some thought to whether they mean "we study customers to extract as much revenue and profit as possible" or "we understand customers so we can deliver what they want and need, improve their lives, and encourage strong and lasting bonds." Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-27208090674746401162022-01-07T04:53:00.003-05:002022-01-07T04:53:15.029-05:00Setting Targets For Your Marketing KPIs Can Destroy Them As KPIs. Here's What To Do About It...<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj_TZXYWi5wuzQqtObpFPQgmTYzYvbF1NCYoY3FsopG9PwabIqWzJMYpg7zBrnGJQ2BNMR9Z3gb3K7A6LXY5AgGhsyPnGbrt4Jnq2kA7rHPfBYX006XnPq-Z-9PBOba00jU3-d7fRgT0-svAm80RnlM175dc2XiuWASST5JAmjmBLidg-jK02LUF5xd=s4242" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2828" data-original-width="4242" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj_TZXYWi5wuzQqtObpFPQgmTYzYvbF1NCYoY3FsopG9PwabIqWzJMYpg7zBrnGJQ2BNMR9Z3gb3K7A6LXY5AgGhsyPnGbrt4Jnq2kA7rHPfBYX006XnPq-Z-9PBOba00jU3-d7fRgT0-svAm80RnlM175dc2XiuWASST5JAmjmBLidg-jK02LUF5xd=s320" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: start; white-space: nowrap;">Photo by </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/@little_klein?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #767676; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: start; text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.1s ease-in-out 0s, opacity 0.1s ease-in-out 0s; white-space: nowrap;">Vitolda Klein</a><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: start; white-space: nowrap;"> on </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/target?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #767676; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: start; text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.1s ease-in-out 0s, opacity 0.1s ease-in-out 0s; white-space: nowrap;">Unsplash</a></td></tr></tbody></table>I wish I'd been taught Goodhart's Law when I was in school. In fact, I wish everyone was taught Goodhart's law. Understanding this axiom would improve the way we lead and measure any discipline, but it's crucial for those seeking to improve marketing and customer experience. Goodhart's law is:<blockquote><div>"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"</div></blockquote><div>(Actually, that's the simplified version. Since <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law">the adage comes out of economics</a>, it is stated in a more scientific and fancy way: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." Clearly, simpler is better.)</div><div><br /></div><div>The point is that once we make one of our KPIs a goal for measuring success, we can quickly and inadvertently destroy the value of the KPI as a measure of success. If that sounds counterintuitive, let's explore three real-world examples:</div><div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Setting targets for social media likes and followers destroyed the value of social media likes and followers</h4>In the early days of social media, brands providing the best experience and earning the most significant loyalty also collected the most likes and followers. Had brands merely competed for authentic likes and followers by providing the best customer experience, then tallies of their followers and likes could've remained a valuable sign of affinity, loyalty, and interest. Instead, marketing departments set targets to increase followers and likes, each wanting more than the competition. As a result, marketers deployed strategies to deliver on the goal, such as giving away free product, Farmville items, and entries into sweepstakes in return for follows and likes. Targets were achieved, but those strategies annihilated likes and followers as a valid measure of, well, anything. And it isn't just that brands ruined the value of those social metric metrics; the brands that bought fans with freebies also found they collected less meaningful fans--not people interested in or with an affinity for the brand, but people who just wanted free stuff. Likes soared, engagement plunged, and no one benefited. Social media marketers ignored Goodhart's Law and learned the hard way that how we earned fans and likes mattered more than that we improved our fan and like measures.<br /><h4 style="text-align: left;">How you increase your email subscriber list affects if your efforts help or hurt your brand</h4>Email helps us reach our customers with lower cost and less interference than ads and social media posts, so marketers naturally want as many subscribers as possible. But, once we set targets for more extensive email lists, we inspire list-building activities that deliver on the goal while doing nothing for (or harming) our marketing objectives. Buying lists, giving rewards for subscribers, and automatically adding customers to mailing lists without consent efficiently produce larger lists, but they also encourage lower open rates, diminished deliverability, customer annoyance, and spam reports. By setting a target, we encourage strategies to hit the goal without proper consideration for whether those strategies do more to help or harm overall marketing objectives. We cannot celebrate that we added addresses to our email list without also understanding how we achieved that target.<br /><h4 style="text-align: left;">Decreasing your Cost of Acquisition is not beneficial if acquisition strategies also decrease the lifetime value of customers acquired</h4>One of the most critical metrics in the marketing world is also subject to Goodhart's Law. Of course, marketers want to reduce their cost of acquisition. But when we set this as a goal, what sorts of behaviors and tactics do we encourage? A credit card company found that many acquisition strategies were, inadvertently or not, designed to collect people who game the system, switching from one credit card to the next merely to collect as many points and perks as possible. The cost of acquiring these customers was meager compared to acquiring affluent customers more likely to remain loyal and deliver higher lifetime value. When the brand made the right offer with a competitive promise of free points, the network of blogs and communities dedicated to points gamers would spread the word and deliver clicks and conversions. Without considering who we acquire, we miss that how we lower the cost of acquisition is more important than that we lower that measure.<br /><br />This list could go on and on. Net promoter score (NPS) can be abused by altering surveys and sample rules. Ad cost per impression can be reduced by using cheaper, lower-quality ad buys. A bank that set new accounts as a target encouraged <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal">illegal activity to open accounts for customers who didn't want them</a>. An automaker targeting lower emissions <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal">manipulated its testing to show emissions 40x lower than real-world driving conditions</a>. Even bottom-line profit itself is subject to Goodhart's law--how many <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals">accounting scandals</a> have we seen where company leaders altered bookkeeping to give the appearance of a higher margin (and thus receive more generous bonuses)? There is literally no measurement for which you can set a target that cannot be controlled, abused, or sabotaged, whether purposefully or unintentionally.<br /><br />To read the complete blog post and see the five actions recommended to improve the way you set and measure targets that matter, please read the complete post on Gartner.com. <br /><br /></div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-47183431084275905152021-12-22T09:18:00.001-05:002021-12-22T09:18:23.576-05:00Mr. Big, Peloton, and the Differences, Risks, and Benefits of Influencers and Advocates<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgjcJR3jqKunqKxzR13t8HK5JYSW8DqyRFey2vwWkgXbufHp8SRFeky5qK_n6NX-ui4u2OnWe2KKr4BaciPe1K2N6HAThg1dsngmK2M7xdcKyPeBSZLxQiTAQoNioHHIcJHekCFKMZJaM6ieCshJjgQahsrO5SZwSydP77HrNycV2NOIeZTO_M43QqM=s1280" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Photo of man in "famous" hat" border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgjcJR3jqKunqKxzR13t8HK5JYSW8DqyRFey2vwWkgXbufHp8SRFeky5qK_n6NX-ui4u2OnWe2KKr4BaciPe1K2N6HAThg1dsngmK2M7xdcKyPeBSZLxQiTAQoNioHHIcJHekCFKMZJaM6ieCshJjgQahsrO5SZwSydP77HrNycV2NOIeZTO_M43QqM=w320-h180" title="Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash" width="320" /></a></div>I'm sure you already know the rapidly fluctuating story of exercise equipment company Peloton, the fictional Mr. Big, and actor Chris Noth. Mr. Big, Noth's character in the reboot of "Sex and the City," <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/dec/10/sex-and-the-city-fans-shocked-over-characters-death-by-peloton">died after using a Peloton</a>, and <a href="https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/mr-big-gives-peloton-stock-a-heart-attack-investors-flee-182640731.html">Peloton's stock took a hit</a>. Then, in just 48 hours, <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10309095/Peloton-filmed-hit-commercial-resurrected-Mr-Big-Just-Like-death-episode.html">Peloton produced a parody ad resurrecting Noth</a>, and Peloton was praised widely for its agility and marketing acumen. Then days later, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/chris-noth-accused-of-sexual-assault-1235063596/">sexual assault accusations surfaced against Noth</a>, and #JustLikeThat (which happens to be the name of the SITC reboot), <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/16/peloton-removes-viral-chris-noth-ad-after-sexual-assault-allegations.html">the ad disappeared from Peloton properties</a>.<br /><br />In a single paragraph, there lies a lesson in the benefits and dangers of influencers. After the shocking episode, Peleton sought to protect their brand and redirect the conversation by leveraging Noth's considerable popularity and influence, but in so doing, they tied their brand to Noth's, a decision that rapidly backfired. Luckily, Peloton has an army of engaged advocates at its disposal.<br /><br />Many marketers struggle to understand and act on the differences between influencers and advocates, which is understandable since influencers advocate for your brand, and advocates influence others to know and consider your brand. Still, the fact influencers and advocates are often lumped together by marketers is a problem because it obscures their distinct strategies, opportunities, and risks.<h2>Advocates are fostered with authentic experiences and produce safer, lasting brand benefit</h2>You create advocates by improving your customer experience (CX) and rousing customers to become raving fans of your brand. Advocates do a host of things that help to improve your brand's inbound marketing, reputation, and word of mouth. These include providing positive ratings for your company and product, sharing their strong product or service experiences with others, and referring prospects to your brand.<br /><br />Advocacy can come organically or through a marketing program. Organic advocacy occurs when customers, without encouragement, lift your brand because they're happy and think others will benefit from the experiences you provide. Marketing programs can also boost advocacy, such as branded communities where advocates convene, loyalty programs that reward online sharing, or referral programs that compensate the referrer for providing a newly acquired customer. The more you reward your advocates for their behaviors, the less authentic it becomes (and, at some point, ethical brands will enforce rules to ensure their advocates disclose material benefits that accrue when they help your brand.) Compared to influencers, advocates are harder to create, have a longer-term impact, and present lower risks to your brand.<br /><br />Advocates are nurtured, not created. You don't simply snap your fingers and produce advocates--it takes work to improve your CX and earn strong feelings of loyalty and advocacy from your customers. The brands we recognize with the largest body of customer advocates have dedicated years to improving their CX and building those strong relationships.<br /><br />The benefit of investing in and building that sort of advocacy is that, long after an influencer or ad campaign concludes and is forgotten, your strong CX can still generate new advocates and advocacy. And, since an advocate is not officially tied to your brand, you are protected from your advocates' embarrassing, criminal, or unethical behaviors.<br /><br />Advocates are not without their challenges beyond the fact they take time and CX commitment to foster. One is that their content and influence are less controllable by the brand. The things they say and produce come from the advocate and are generally not subject to the brand's review, guidance, or instruction. Smart brands with advocate programs can seed content and influence the things advocates share, but compared to influencer programs, encouraging advocacy requires a more gentle approach with less direct authority and leverage from the brand.<br /><br />Another challenge is that your brand needs a lot of advocates to move the needle--each advocate has a small voice, but within their tighter network, they can be very influential. Gartner's research shows that while advocates may have a smaller share of interactions than influencers, they have higher engagement within their networks (see <a href="https://www.gartner.com/document/3989827">How to Build Referral and Affiliate Marketing Programs That Consumers Want to Share</a>, subscription required).<h2>Influencers are created with marketing programs and offer riskier and more ephemeral brand benefits</h2>While advocates take time, care, and a robust customer experience to create, influencers can be engaged and unleashed in short periods of time with the right influencer strategy (see <a href="https://www.gartner.com/document/4004084">Build an Influencer Social Marketing Program That Delivers Results</a>, subscription required).<br /><br />Influencers could theoretically be customers, but what makes them influencers is your efforts to identify those with more significant influence, engage them, and encourage positive sharing about your brand. Influencers may be compensated for their posts and shares, but influencer strategies can reward participants in softer ways, such as access to company executives, exclusive content, or free products. (Once again, ethical marketers will ensure their influencers disclose any material relationships to their audience.)<br /><br />The activities of influencers can take a variety of shapes and sizes. You can reward them for posting about your brand to their networks, sponsor their content, feature them in your advertising and promotion, or make influencers official spokespeople for your brand.<br /><br />One benefit of influencers is that they can be activated more quickly and create positive engagement rapidly. You also have more control over the content and influence they produce compared to advocates. Influencer programs usually provide templates or guidelines, may cocreate content with the influencer, and frequently require prior approval before an influencer broadcasts a message about the brand.<br /><br />The downside is that, once your influencer program ends, so does your positive influence. Unlike great CX, which continuously produces a stream of new advocates, influencers typically stop influencing once your program concludes.<br /><br />Also, influencer programs create a more formal association between your brand and the influencer, which is one of the lessons of Peloton's experiences with Noth. The actor wasn't merely an advocate with an arms-length relationship to the brand. Peloton made him an explicit part of their brand, and thus as headlines revealed troubling accusations, the brand was forced to act as quickly to sever the relationship as it did to create it.<br /><br />This example is hardly isolated—many brands have struggled to distance themselves from a variety of unpalatable, off-brand behavior and content from influencers, not the least of which is an influencer formerly associated with one brand suddenly promoting another brand. Advocates loyal to your brand and its CX are not likely to abruptly switch sides, but influencers earning money to leverage their social graphs and popularity will go to the highest bidder.<h2>Advocates and Influencers are not mutually exclusive</h2>In the end, a brand need not choose between advocates and influencers. Both can happily coexist under your marketing umbrella. But it is vital to recognize that, despite their similarities, advocates and influencers are quite different.<br /><br />Advocates take work, but the benefits they accrue are long-lasting and substantial. Customer advocates don't just post or share about your brand--they also are loyal to your brand. The same efforts that create your advocates also create loyal customers with greater lifetime value (See <a href="https://www.gartner.com/document/4002820">Use Gartner's Buy/Own/Advocate Framework to Map Customer Journeys and Deliver Better Customer Experiences</a>, subscription required.) Advocates are brand gifts that keep on giving, provided your customer experience stays sound.<br /><br />Influencers can be deployed quickly, but the association with your brand increases risks. Peloton looked like a marketing genius for rapidly deploying a campaign with Noth, but within days he went from a top-tier influencer for Peloton to PR disaster. The goodwill the brand created with its agile marketing program was almost immediately diminished or lost. It turned into a costly exercise in the benefits and risks of leveraging the influence of others to benefit your brand.<br /><br />In the end, Peloton will not just survive but thrive, not because of its influencers but because of its advocates. Have you met someone with a Peloton? Because if you have, then you know they have a Peloton. Such is the experience provided by the brand that its customers become raving fans. Chances are, what you know about Peloton is due far more to friends, family, and coworkers who extoll the virtues of the Peloton experience than it is the company's advertising and marketing.<br /><br />Influencers come and go, but your customer experience and the advocates it creates are forever--provided you stay committed to listening to customers, evolving your customer experience, empowering employees to do the right thing, and deploying powerful, innovative experiences that foster strong brand relationships.Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-64500827823918328802021-09-20T10:00:00.002-04:002021-09-20T10:00:48.416-04:00Explicit and Implicit Changes Drive Customer-Centric CultureMany leaders try to change their corporate culture to be more customer-centric. In a recent poll of 57 CMOs, we asked the top five questions that are most urgent to bring success to the marketing department in 2022. Three of the top four answers require leaders to operationalize their customer experience (CX) data, values, and processes into their company's culture and employees’ daily jobs:<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>How can bring the voice of the customer to cross-functional business decisions (e.g., new product development, innovation)?</li><li>How can we ensure that brand and CX strategy are reflected in business operations?</li><li>How do we build a consistent brand experience across audiences and channels?</li></ul><br /><a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/files/2021/09/topfive.png"><img height="203" src="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/files/2021/09/topfive.png" width="640" /></a><br /><br />Changing culture is always a challenge. Efforts to create customer-centric change are undermined when leaders don’t implement both explicit and implicit expectations and rewards.<div><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">Explicit Customer-Centric Culture Change</h3><i>Explicit </i>expectations and rewards are the ones leaders communicate clearly and directly. Often, for example, leaders will share and promote the organization’s new CX values. Another explicit action many leaders use is to develop training programs to help employees understand CX processes and expectations. These efforts make clear the vision the leader has for the organization and its employees.<br /><br />These are a good start, but one of the explicit changes leaders often fail to make is to consider the way employees are recognized and rewarded. There’s an adage that employees do what they are paid to do, not what their bosses tell them to do. Simply put, setting new customer-centric expectations for employees while changing nothing of how they’re compensated or recognized undermines the effort. For example, training call-center employees to be more empathetic with customers often brings little change if those employees continue to be rewarded more for efficiency (call handle time, call volume) than customer-centric impact (the improved satisfaction, greater trust, and reduced effort that customer-centric care can deliver.)<br /><br />There has long been a debate in CX circles about the value and wisdom of compensating employees for CX outcomes. Explicitly tying bonuses or financial rewards to employee customer-centric performance requires care to mitigate challenges (such as ensuring employees cannot manipulate the results and making CX KPIs fair and accurate to each employee’s job.) But, even if your organization doesn’t tie direct financial rewards to employee CX contributions, there are still important ways to measure and reward employee performance in explicit ways. These include altering performance appraisals to consider examples of customer-centric behavior or creating recognition programs where employees can nominate each other for demonstrating customer-centric commitment.<br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">Implicit Customer-Centric Culture Change</h3>Often, leaders lean on explicit communications and rewards to create customer-centric change while being unaware of the <i>implicit </i>ways they may disincentivize customer-centric behaviors. If leaders aren’t cautious, they can send mixed signals, demanding customer-centric changes in straightforward ways while implying different values via their day-to-day decisions and actions.<br /><br />If you wish to influence a customer-centric revolution in your firm or team, you must consider:<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Have you listened to what gets in employees’ ways as they strive to achieve your explicit customer-centric goals?</b> Asking employees to be more customer-centric without considering your organization's processes, policies, systems, and rules that prevent employees from providing a great CX is one way to disincentive customer-centric change. Another is to ignore sources of unnecessary employee effort that can lead to poor customer experience. In <a href="https://www.gartner.com/document/3993037">a recent Gartner study</a>, we found that 66% of employees agree with the statement, “The easier it is for me to do my job, the easier it is to provide customers with an excellent experience.”</li><li><b>Do you make all or most of your decisions based on short-term ROI? </b>It won’t matter how much you exhort employees to deliver better experiences if your actions convey you care more about immediate financial outcomes such as increased sales or reduced costs. Consider how you evaluate, prioritize and approve ideas and projects. Do your criteria match your customer-centric goals? Or does your evaluation process penalize customer-centric ideas designed to provide what customers want, need, and expect while rewarding proposals that deliver company-centric financial gains?</li><li><b>How do you speak about your business results? </b>If you prioritize and focus only on financial outcomes and not customer impact, you implicitly convey to employees that is what you value. When I was at USAA, I once had a senior leader admonish me for providing a project update that began with the financial ROI before discussing the positive impact on the customer. “Lead with how we improved our member’s lives and relationships with USAA, then communicate how it impacted our top and bottom lines,” he told me. That statement says a lot about what he valued and, perhaps, explains a lot about what makes USAA so different, <a href="https://customergauge.com/blog/top-5-most-recommended-us-banks-based-on-net-promoter-scores">earning some of the highest NPS scores in its category.</a></li></ul><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj24N6IuwsU5EUAXkXwmgtgH60sKmrZpnLH6UUNl5R4-eO-QP9lSu80WVFmMI8-1sIYC2rihaWwCCHBJV1n2JH47iX5cZBxuqaDe5SCLx-odTcz9_0FP8K9uCjeylHyrP5DulHu7nMiZVI/s1211/Screenshot+2021-09-13+150335.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Quote: “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”" border="0" data-original-height="783" data-original-width="1211" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj24N6IuwsU5EUAXkXwmgtgH60sKmrZpnLH6UUNl5R4-eO-QP9lSu80WVFmMI8-1sIYC2rihaWwCCHBJV1n2JH47iX5cZBxuqaDe5SCLx-odTcz9_0FP8K9uCjeylHyrP5DulHu7nMiZVI/w320-h207/Screenshot+2021-09-13+150335.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-size: 13px; text-align: start; white-space: nowrap;">Photo by </span><a class="focus-visible" data-focus-visible-added="" href="https://unsplash.com/@patrickian4?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #767676; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: start; text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.1s ease-in-out 0s, opacity 0.1s ease-in-out 0s; white-space: nowrap;">Patrick Fore</a><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-size: 13px; text-align: start; white-space: nowrap;"> on </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/megaphone?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #767676; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: start; text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.1s ease-in-out 0s, opacity 0.1s ease-in-out 0s; white-space: nowrap;">Unsplash</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.” Over the years, that thought has been shortened into a pithy statement also attributed to Emerson: “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”<br /><br />The point he makes is that we don’t convey who we are and what we value with our explicit words but our implicit actions. For leaders, that means customer-centric culture change depends on what you do, not just what you say. The ways you implicitly encourage or dampen customer-centric behaviors can do more to affect your organizational culture than all the explicit expectations you communicate.<br /><br /> This blog post was originally posted on Gartner's website: <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2021/09/20/explicit-and-implicit-changes-drive-customer-centric-culture/">https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2021/09/20/explicit-and-implicit-changes-drive-customer-centric-culture/ </a><br /><br /> </div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-86925899660454368042021-06-11T13:33:00.002-04:002021-06-11T13:33:29.928-04:00The Dwindling Well of Forgiveness for Your Post-COVID Customer Experience<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFOhtOeIjBirsgFx-9nvFkVOzcvTo0bM_G-S2Hms2J15A-WCZZzZxpUutpxjyz6myT0wHUL3rXYNdNjLQyq1D-i0OTAfVAZpbUMp1LBuyjYfbPKsJzvk_Tl_DoCtDG6onPf0LSF58gasQ/s2048/marco-bianchetti-vzFTmxTl0DQ-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFOhtOeIjBirsgFx-9nvFkVOzcvTo0bM_G-S2Hms2J15A-WCZZzZxpUutpxjyz6myT0wHUL3rXYNdNjLQyq1D-i0OTAfVAZpbUMp1LBuyjYfbPKsJzvk_Tl_DoCtDG6onPf0LSF58gasQ/w200-h133/marco-bianchetti-vzFTmxTl0DQ-unsplash.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash.com</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Last March and April, as businesses struggled to implement "work from home" policies and contain service disruptions, something remarkable happened: Customer satisfaction scores rose. Clients and Voice of the Customer platforms reported that VoC scores improved quite broadly across categories and businesses.<br /><br />Why would customers report more satisfaction as service quality declined? Forgiveness. As your customers fought to adapt to the new pandemic reality and saw their employers grapple with COVID-induced difficulties, they were more inclined to forgive the sorts of experiences that would have previously generated a complaint. By summer and fall, as life settled into the "new normal," NPS, CSAT, and effort scores tended to return to normal (and, in some cases, declined as brands tried to meet customers' new expectations.)<br /><br />This spring, as the United States recovered from COVID, mask and business restrictions lifted, and people returned to normal--<a href="https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry">US restaurants have operated within 5% of their 2019 volumes on recent weekends</a>--it seemed a grateful population was ready to return with a new well of forgiveness for businesses striving to adapt to post-pandemic difficulties. But I've noticed that the well of forgiveness is rapidly dwindling, and that means organizations must consider what is necessary to either get their customer experience (CX) right or to replenish their customers' well of forgiveness.<br /><br />As I research and advise clients on CX best practices, I observe that brands fail to understand the full ROI of CX. As CX improves and customer loyalty is strengthened, brands will measure direct financial benefits such as improved sales, reduced churn, and increased lifetime value. Brands also often seek to measure softer benefits, such as enhanced engagement and greater WOM. But one benefit of CX is often overlooked, and that's forgiveness. Strong, consistent customer experiences earn more forgiveness. More forgiving customers are inclined to overlook isolated problems and are less likely to seek redress or share frustrations with others.<br /><br />If your brand is struggling with adapting to the rapidly shifting post-pandemic world, don't ignore the problems but meet them head-on. <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2021/06/11/the-dwindling-well-of-forgiveness-for-your-post-covid-customer-experience/">I offer five suggestions you might consider to earn more forgiveness and loyalty on my Gartner blog. Please click here to continue reading. </a>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-78180825282431234092021-04-09T12:57:00.000-04:002021-04-09T12:57:12.055-04:00Gartner Expands Its Definition of Customer Experience Management (CXM)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijywZ07qUhWNC2-SVe-7mt8FJsWHcrufMnaJq8acOtIDflaZvzw6SU9CwvQK1FDNCjfJWkYhIE5n_F8rtyjwWI5ytNlnlkN7FeCwb8xgbrIVQkdn-T2jiKEyLXq_Fcvki7mQyiYpkl6Yw/s2048/ross-findon-mG28olYFgHI-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="The word "Change"" border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijywZ07qUhWNC2-SVe-7mt8FJsWHcrufMnaJq8acOtIDflaZvzw6SU9CwvQK1FDNCjfJWkYhIE5n_F8rtyjwWI5ytNlnlkN7FeCwb8xgbrIVQkdn-T2jiKEyLXq_Fcvki7mQyiYpkl6Yw/w320-h180/ross-findon-mG28olYFgHI-unsplash.jpg" title="The word "Change"" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash</td></tr></tbody></table>Every now and then, there comes a time to recognize that the world has changed. My peers and I at Gartner spent several months discussing, debating, and building consensus for a change to our definition of customer experience management (CXM). Given the increase in investment in and the growing maturity of CXM programs, we felt the time had come to advance and expand our definition.<br /><br />Our existing definition was, "The practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions in order to lift satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy."<br /><br />Our new <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/customer-experience-management-cem">definition of CXM</a> isn't quite so succinct but does more to promote the scope, goals, and scale of enterprise-wide CXM efforts:<br /><blockquote>"CXM is the discipline of understanding customers and deploying strategic plans that enable cross-functional efforts and customer-centric culture to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy." </blockquote>Our existing definition of CXM, which was over a decade old, didn't capture how the practice of CXM has evolved. We have observed many changes in how our clients approach and accomplish CXM, and these include:<div><br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Customer understanding: </b>You can't design and deploy a great customer experience (CX) until you know, listen to, and understand your customers. Much of what makes CXM successful in great companies isn't about the projects they execute or the customer-facing tech they implement--it's about how they gather, analyze, and disseminate customer understanding.<br /> </li><li><b>Repeatable and ongoing discipline: </b>Gartner's former definition called CXM a "practice," which is a habit or the application of an idea. That word didn't convey how CXM has become a constant, vital commitment firms make to improve their customer experience. CXM isn't a project, mindset, tool, or process. It's a discipline--a living, evolving, repeatable and ongoing set of capabilities that demands continuous investment, requires a system of governance, and delivers measurable outcomes.<br /> </li><li><b>Enterprise-wide strategy and collaboration: </b>Our old definition did not reflect the scope that CXM requires to be successful. While one individual or team may have positive customer-centric practices that lead to CX improvement, a successful CXM program must inform, establish and scale these efforts across the entire organization.<br /> </li><li><b>Customer-Centric Culture: </b>Finally, while the former definition put the focus on a CX outcome, our new definition recognizes that CXM leaders must enable change within their organization. You cannot achieve the desired goal of constantly improving CX throughout your customers' end-to-end journey unless you affect how the organization works. A strong CXM leader doesn't merely oversee individual projects that positively impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy; they must influence everyone within the organization to change how they work in a way that results in improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.</li></ul>Our new CXM definition aligns with Gartner's CX maturity framework. By design, it is intended to reflect the nine elements of CX maturity (voice of the customer, customer research, personas and journeys, strategy, technology, roles and governance, customer-centric culture, purpose, and metrics). If you're a Gartner client, you can learn more about the revised CXM definition, how it can help bring consistency to the understanding of CXM in your organizations, and how to mature your CXM programs by reading "<a href="https://www.gartner.com/document/4000275">Use Gartner’s New Definition of Customer Experience Management to Align to CX Scope and Goals."</a></div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-30512362510749232782020-06-15T16:00:00.001-04:002020-06-15T16:02:11.307-04:00The COVID-19 Dilemma: Remaining Customer-Centric When Customers Expect Incompatible Pandemic Rules"The Customer is always right." As a customer experience (CX) professional, I've heard that maxim quite a lot. The well-worn adage has never been entirely correct. The customer can be wrong, and knowing when and how to identify and manage that situation requires brands to recognize the distinction between being customer-centric and customer-subservient. Understanding that difference is vital as you consider the right policies to lure customers back to your business while ensuring the safety of customers and employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. <br /><br />When I say the customer isn't always right, I'm not simply talking about the occasional unreasonable or abusive customer but about the fact "It's not the customer's job to know what they want" (as Steve Jobs is credited with saying). If we acted as if every customer whim is equal, we risk becoming customer-subservient, blindly chasing every consumer impulse. Being customer-centric is a little different--it means making decisions that are in the best interest of your customer. <br /><br />In normal times, the difference between customer-centric and customer-subservient can seem relatively minor or meaningless, but in times of stress, change, and challenge, the two can be quite different.
<!--/wp:paragraph-->
<!--wp:heading {"level":3}-->
<h3><font size="5">Drugstores, Cigarettes and the Difference Between Customer-Subservience and Customer-Centricity</font></h3>
<!--/wp:heading-->
<!--wp:paragraph-->
To explore the subservient/centric difference, ask yourself it is customer-subservient or customer-centric for a drugstore chain to sell cigarettes. A drugstore's customer personas include a person who wants to purchase cigarettes regularly, and when they do, they often add other items to their basket. That there is a market to be served is unquestionable, but should a drugstore committed to the health and well-being of its customers sell "cancer sticks"? <br /><br />For decades, there was no question. I worked my way through high school in a drugstore run by pharmacists, and I never gave a thought to the number of customers to whom I sold products containing a prominent health warning. But then attitudes began to shift, forcing drugstore executives to reconsider their values, brand, and customer-centricity. <br /><br />Six years ago, the trend toward tobacco-free pharmacies got a boost when <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cvscaremark-cigarettes/cvs-becomes-first-big-u-s-drugstore-chain-to-drop-tobacco-idUSBREA140RP20140205">CVS became the first national drugstore chain to drop sales of cigarettes</a>. Some of its competitors haven't yet followed suit as they struggle to balance profit versus health or, put another way, weighing customer-subservience versus customer-centricity. A customer-subservient approach suggests a drugstore brand must do what the customer wants provided there's profit to be earned, while a customer-centric mindset considers that "It's not the customer's job to know what they want." <br /><br />These are sensitive and important decisions, particularly for corporations with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. And, of course, people's strong emotions over smoking only make these decisions even more difficult. A drugstore may view the decision to carry cigarettes through the lens of profit versus customer health, but customers often line up on starkly different lines, with liberty and personal choice on one side versus the greater good of the community on the other.
<!--/wp:paragraph-->
<!--wp:heading {"level":3}-->
<h3><font size="5">COVID-19, Masks, and Social Distancing</font></h3>
<!--/wp:heading-->
<!--wp:paragraph-->
Does any of that feel a bit familiar in the COVID-19 era? It does to brands with physical locations struggling to set the right policies as they reopen. On the one side are people who expect brands to have and enforce safe policies during a global health crisis, and on the other are people who oppose wearing masks and social distancing. Whatever your brand decides will be viewed in starkly partisan ways--either as an affront to freedom and individual rights or a deadly capitulation that risks the health and lives of customers and employees. <div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/06/15/the-covid-19-dilemma-remaining-customer-centric-when-customers-expect-incompatible-pandemic-rules/" target="_blank">To read an example of a gym that tried (and failed) to be all things to all people and consider the five questions you should ask to determine the right COVID-19 policies for your brand as it reopens, please continue reading at my Gartner blog.</a><!--/wp:paragraph--></div>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-67157084428107317752020-04-18T15:59:00.000-04:002020-04-18T15:59:55.430-04:00Bias Toward Actions During the Pandemic to Avoid "COVIDwashing" Backlash<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSlFCl98mAutkloeG9yvmdcOWDw0eoH-0-qlKMiZKT0xJjHhXntcWH0mL7Upwlj7c3dYJ8PVOlWHmbPLRL_AXJXz553uYhyphenhyphen_KW6dIAQfdz84RLAz4El6REMMnHqBBczqEBFUojEh3rXB0/s1600/20200412_111055.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSlFCl98mAutkloeG9yvmdcOWDw0eoH-0-qlKMiZKT0xJjHhXntcWH0mL7Upwlj7c3dYJ8PVOlWHmbPLRL_AXJXz553uYhyphenhyphen_KW6dIAQfdz84RLAz4El6REMMnHqBBczqEBFUojEh3rXB0/s320/20200412_111055.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Cut and paste ad template: “<i><insert brand="" here=""></insert></i> has been here for <i><you business="" family="" your=""></you></i> for <i><insert number=""></insert></i> years, and we’re here for you today during these unprecedented times. Our commitment to our customers and employees has never been greater. At our core, our company has always been about people, and that fuels our belief that together, we can thrive during this difficult and challenging period. We may need to stay apart to ensure the safety of our families, but we’ve never been closer. <i><insert brand="" here=""></insert></i> thanks you for making us part of your life and allowing us to support you–yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”<br /><br />A month ago (or a year in COVID-19 time), I wrote about the dangers of “<a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/03/15/beware-virtue-signaling-outright-greed-brand-communications-covid-19/">Virtue signaling.”</a> In March, our inboxes were flooded with nearly identical messages as brands raced to express how they empathized with our concerns and deeply cared for their employees and customers. Too often, those messages said brands cared without demonstrating the necessary actions and decisions to help customers during a period of worry and challenge.<br /><br />And now, the TV airwaves feel the same. Every ad affirms how intensely each brand cares, the many years it’s been there for us, and its hopeful message that we’ll get through this together. Just as with the wave of emails in March, consumers may have welcomed and appreciated the first brands to offer empathetic 30-second spots. But, the stream of undifferentiated commercials now risks boosting the perception brands are leveraging the pandemic for marketing purposes.<br /><br />People are beginning to notice. <a href="https://youtu.be/aqOvJ_9YVa4">Frito-Lay produced an ad</a>, “It’s About People,” that gently mocks other brands; “The world doesn’t need brands to tell us how to think or feel,” it says. A video called <a href="https://youtu.be/vM3J9jDoaTA">“Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same”</a> is beginning to circulate among marketers on social networks. The video, which has earned 250,000 views in two days, strings together the indistinguishable music, copy, and imagery used in the current deluge of COVID-19 TV ads.<br /><br />And, while nascent, the term “COVIDwashing” is beginning to appear in articles and on Twitter. The New York Times used the term in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/fashion/reese-witherspoon-draper-james-coronavirus.html">an article about Draper James</a>, Reese Witherspoon’s fashion label, which stumbled into a PR crisis by making a well-intentioned but ill-conceived offer. Two weeks ago, the brand took to Instagram to say to teachers, “We see you working harder than ever to educate our children. To show our gratitude, Draper James would like to give teachers a free dress.” The post generated a lot of publicity and interest, and soon the brand had to backpedal as the application form crashed. The company realized interest was much greater than anticipated, offered a raffle for a limited number of dresses, and many consumers took to social media to accuse the company of reneging on their promise.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/04/18/bias-toward-actions-during-the-pandemic-to-avoid-covidwashing-backlash/" target="_blank">To learn more about the term COVIDwashing and learn advice about what your brand can do to protect itself from the accusation of using the pandemic for marketing purposes, please continue reading on my Gartner blog. </a>Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-48858610925902414592020-03-22T15:42:00.000-04:002020-03-22T15:42:02.103-04:00COVID-19 and the Rise Of Intermediate-Term Business and Marketing Planning in 2020<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2CN7RuJ2an6kJ0t-9hEKiWLEiYo0x_ssuUoXOXZ4TGXiuljESvev_dFxvqSGI9BxIcJV8B0Bn28vZXuBgHMNvu3cMaCWr5RVInzVteT4C9P8U9kAzGbis6gOdZdz0l-h79Nf9ULUa1kI/s1600/john-gibbons-JZyJxeCBtF4-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2CN7RuJ2an6kJ0t-9hEKiWLEiYo0x_ssuUoXOXZ4TGXiuljESvev_dFxvqSGI9BxIcJV8B0Bn28vZXuBgHMNvu3cMaCWr5RVInzVteT4C9P8U9kAzGbis6gOdZdz0l-h79Nf9ULUa1kI/s320/john-gibbons-JZyJxeCBtF4-unsplash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: , "blinkmacsystemfont" , "san francisco" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "ubuntu" , "roboto" , "noto" , "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;">Photo by </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/@johngibbons?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #767676; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: start; text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.1s ease-in-out 0s, opacity 0.1s ease-in-out 0s; white-space: nowrap;">John Gibbons</a><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: , "blinkmacsystemfont" , "san francisco" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "ubuntu" , "roboto" , "noto" , "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;"> on </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/road-sign?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #767676; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: start; text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.1s ease-in-out 0s, opacity 0.1s ease-in-out 0s; white-space: nowrap;">Unsplash</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Phrases like "medium-term" and "intermediate-term" have been lost from our business lexicon, it seems. <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22Medium-term%22,%22Intermediate-term%22">According to Google Trends</a>, searches for these keyphrases have declined 50% or more in the past 15 years. But 2020 is going to be the year intermediate-term planning becomes necessary. Now is an excellent time to consider what that may mean for preparing and managing your business for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.<br />
<br />
Back when I went to school, we spoke of timeframes such as ten years for long-term planning and five years for intermediate-term, but with the pace of change in recent decades, ten years feels a bit like planning for the next century. Who can anticipate that far ahead in a world where a new technology or competitor can swiftly arise and destabilize a marketplace? With our planning horizons collapsed, it can feel as if much of our business and marketing planning has been reduced to just two horizons: What we need to get done now (short-term) and what we must do to prepare for where we hope to be in three to five years (long-term). There's little room for the intermediate-term in a business environment that changes fast and demands agility.<br />
<h3>
COVID-19 Here and Now</h3>
But, if we thought the pace of change was hectic in recent years, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is forcing business to react at a breakneck speed. It may seem hard to believe, but the first US case of unknown origin stemming from "community spread" was announced less than a month ago (on <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0226-Covid-19-spread.html">February 26</a>). As I type this, it's been just 11 days since the <a href="https://www.si.com/nba/2020/03/12/nba-suspends-season-further-notice-coronavirus">NBA suspended its season</a>. The <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/">US passed 5,000 cases less than a week ago</a>, and by the time you read this, the tally of known COVID-19 cases in the US will likely be more than 30,000.<br />
<br />
At unprecedented speed, many brands have been quick to react with care and empathy. Banks have raced to suspend late penalties and early-withdrawal fees, many brands are offering assistance to customers, and some employers have made commitments to workers adversely impacted by furloughs and reduced hours. These immediate and short-term reactions have been admiral and have helped to minimize the blow to many anxious people.<br />
<h3>
Build COVID-19 Scenarios for Business and Marketing</h3>
But what's next? It is no exaggeration to say that no one can say. There is simply too much that is unknown (including the actual number of infections and how well the COVID-19 mitigation efforts are working in different locations). To show just how little we really know, <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/infectious-disease-experts-dont-know-how-bad-the-coronavirus-is-going-to-get-either/">a survey of infectious disease researchers conducted March 16 and 17</a> found the consensus forecast of expected cases in the US for March 29 was roughly 19,000; in fact, the US exceeded that number just days after the survey was conducted. (Of course, in a rapidly growing pandemic, reporting is quite variable; as I type this <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fcases-in-us.html">the CDC website,</a> last updated Friday, currently shows 15,219 confirmed cases in the US, while the <a href="https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6">Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard</a> shows 27,004 and <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/">Worldometer</a> is reporting 29, 214.)<br />
<br />
If the most knowledgeable infectious experts can't predict the future with accuracy, neither can you. This is why the best minds in public health, epidemiology, and disease modelers are considering a range of possible scenarios. You must, too.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To learn what Gartner is recommending to clients about scenario planning and why a three-horizon plan with short-, intermediate-, and long-term perspectives is important for your business and marketing plan, <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/03/22/covid-19-rise-intermediate-term-business-marketing-planning-2020/" target="_blank">please continue reading my post on Gartner blogs. </a></div>
Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-41704420940331428082020-03-15T12:55:00.002-04:002020-03-15T12:55:52.462-04:00Beware of Virtue Signaling or Outright Greed in Brand Communications About COVID-19<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cBKwqj_ipj4EnofkCVyd8DtRLy0Kscc_SUepRwXk8LPwIp5Ng1BpWMLdoVZkDMI-ER8DYgFI3Y51sE6QpF82myRFk1IFeIalcCSQHrZuputund-qcine44OhxFS3qZEAXQh4TGJqGzM/s1600/WeCare8001200.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cBKwqj_ipj4EnofkCVyd8DtRLy0Kscc_SUepRwXk8LPwIp5Ng1BpWMLdoVZkDMI-ER8DYgFI3Y51sE6QpF82myRFk1IFeIalcCSQHrZuputund-qcine44OhxFS3qZEAXQh4TGJqGzM/s320/WeCare8001200.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Like everyone else, marketing and communication professionals have had a challenging few weeks. As the pandemic expands, marketers and customer experience professionals have done their best to keep up with and bridge swiftly shifting consumer and brand needs.<br />
<br />
We rapidly transitioned from a period when brands debated <i>if </i>they should communicate about COVID-19 to now, with brands tripping over each other to broadcast their coronavirus email messages to customers. If your inbox is like mine, you received almost no brand emails about the virus before a week ago. But in the past week, the volume has exploded. Brands seemed to go from COVID-19 denial to COVID-19 FOMO in a matter of days.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The global pandemic may or may not be a business opportunity for your company, but trying to make it a marketing opportunity for your brand is risky. </blockquote>
On Friday, I received more than two dozen brand emails about COVID-19. The problem is that few of these messages took a customer-centric approach; instead, the race to email consumers reflects a growing sense of brand virtue signaling or outright desperation for business. Consider what customers need and want to hear from your organization to best help your brand while dodging potential risks.<br /> <br />
<h3>
Avoid Virtue Signaling</h3>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling">Virtue signaling </a>is when your brand conspicuously expresses its values without actually taking actions to live by those values. Today, it is not enough to tell consumers you are aware of and reacting to the pandemic — everyone is. We also don't need to know that your brand is keeping your employees safe — we hope that's business as usual. Finally, no one needs to hear how your brand is striving to continue its operations uninterrupted — it would be real news worth sharing if you weren't! If that is all your brand has to report to customers, then you do not need a special COVID-19-themed brand communication at this time.<br />
<br />
For example, my mortgage company, with whom I have a completely digital relationship, felt it needed to email me "An important message" simply to say, "The health and safety of our customers and team members is — as always — the most important thing to us." How does this company, which merely processes my auto-payments once a month, have any impact on my physical health? And why would it be necessary for any organization to state it cares about the health of its team members? Put that on the list of the many things I assume is true of every brand and thus need not be said, such as that it follows laws and that its CEO puts pants on one leg at a time.<br />
<br />
The problem with marketing messages that merely signal your brand's virtue without doing anything further is that they waste customers' time and do little to impact your relationship. In fact, messages like that do more to hurt brands because of what's missing — anything meaningful for customers. What one might expect of "an important message" from a mortgage processor during this global health crisis is information about what will happen if customers are unable to pay their mortgage. This email didn't address this topic, and the glaring omission of content to help or comfort customers only makes the brand-centric virtue-signaling that much more evident and damaging.<br /> <br />
<h3>
Don't Signal Your Brands Desperation</h3>
These are tough times for businesses large and small, and they are going to get tougher in the coming weeks and months. Companies can be excused for wanting to keep customers buying. But they cannot be forgiven for making their self-interest and desperation evident in marketing communications.<br />
<br />
About a quarter of the COVID-19 messages I received Friday came from businesses with physical locations that wanted me to know they are regularly cleaning, urging employees who are sick to say home, and are still open for business. Those sorts of notices, absent any offer or helpful content, do nothing to differentiate the brand from every other brand that is saying the same thing.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, if your company is considering a message to drive physical traffic to real-world locations this coming week, hit the pause button long enough to consider if that train has already left the station. Here in the US, the CDC is recommending <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/prevention.html">social distancing of six feet</a>, the media is full of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-cant-spread-if-you-stay-home-11584132164">guidance that urges people to stay home</a>, and the social pressure to take action that saves lives is growing — this morning on Twitter, "<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23StayTheFHome">#StayTheFHome</a>" is trending. Unless your business is essential (to others, not just to you), then it may be time to shift strategies away from driving physical visits.<br />
<br />
For example, a Sonoma winery sent me a message intended to seem comforting but instead sounded tone-deaf: "Our doors will remain open, the live music will carry on, and our staff would love to say hello and treat you to a cup of coffee." Nothing conveys how much your brand cares for customers like telling them to violate CDC instructions that save lives amid a global pandemic.<br />
<br />
The other three-quarters of COVID-19 messages in my inbox are from digital brands with little to tell me other than "we still want your business." A clothing brand I love disappointed me by sending a seven-paragraph, 382-word missive that said, well, absolutely nothing. This brand thanked me, told me communication is key in times like this, expressed its commitment to my health and safety, disclosed it set up a COVID-19 task force, suggested I monitor the CDC site, and reminded me it has a website. At first glance, that may seem harmless enough, but what part of the message says anything that isn't painfully self-apparent? It was a three-minute read to convey nothing unexpected or meaningful to the customer during troubling times.<br />
<br />
That sort of message may have seemed helpful and differentiated last week before customer inboxes were flooded with soundalike brand emails. But, broadcasting such a message now will only make your real intent clear — not "We care deeply for our customers," but "We're still here, need your business, and hope you'll spend money with us." This isn't to say your brand doesn't have something important and valuable to say during this crisis, but the onus is on you to make sure your message is essential and useful <i>to your customers</i> and not just to your brand. Don't forget the WIIFM.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/03/15/beware-virtue-signaling-outright-greed-brand-communications-covid-19/" target="_blank">To learn some examples of brands bridging the gap between brand and customer needs and consider the four questions you should ask before sending your COVID-19 brand messaging, please read the conclusion of the blog post on my Gartner blog. </a></div>
Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-70742015616373767782020-03-09T20:38:00.001-04:002020-03-09T20:38:42.773-04:00Examples of Proactive COVID-19 Communications That Enhance Customer ExperienceTwo weeks ago, I wrote about the <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/02/24/the-customer-experience-implications-of-the-sars-cov-2-coronavirus-and-covid-19-disease/">importance of proactive customer communications during the unsettling period of rapid change caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and COVID-19 disease</a>. Brands are already acting to intercept potential brand problems and offer support to uncertain and concerned customers.<br /><br />This health event will continue to evolve for months to come, creating unprecedented disruptions to business operations and significantly altering the needs, wants, and expectations of customers. Being proactive now is an opportunity to create a win-win, allowing your brand to simultaneously solve brand and customer problems.<br /><br />Among the difficulties your organization may face are a host of customer concerns that can deter them from conducting business with your company, such as:<br /><ul>
<li><b>Customer anxiety about visiting your location or purchasing your product. </b>Is your product safe? What steps are you taking to ensure customer health in your physical site?</li>
<li><b>Customer worries about your ability to deliver on promises: </b>If I purchase from you versus a competitor, can you deliver on time? Will your inventory or logistics issues cause delays or frustrations?</li>
<li><b>Customer hesitancy about making commitments: </b>If I purchase advance travel, can I cancel if my situation changes or I am prevented from going? If I buy a ticket to your event, what happens if I'm unable to attend or the event is canceled? What are your timeframes or conditions for refunds?</li>
</ul>
If customers wonder about these questions, then they are becoming obstacles to your business maintaining its revenue in a difficult period. Furthermore, questions like these can raise your call volume, increase expenses, and further strain your staff as people seek answers.<br /><br />Proactive action and communications during this epidemic can do more than minimize customer objections. They also represent a chance for your brand to demonstrate its customer centricity, earn trust, and build relationships. Brands that act quickly can differentiate themselves with decisions and information that decrease customer anxiety and solve customer problems before they develop.<br /><br />If you are not yet communicating to customers on issues around the COVID-19 outbreak, you're already behind organizations that have taken the lead to bring clarity and comfort in a time of growing fear and worry. I will share some examples, but if you have any worthy instances of brand communications you have seen (or launched), please share them in the comments or <a href="https://twitter.com/augieray">on Twitter</a>.<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/03/10/examples-proactive-covid-19-communications-enhance-customer-experience/" target="_blank">To learn of proactive COVID-19 actions and communications from TaskRabbit, United, Citi, Instacart, Microsoft, Trader Joe's and others, please continue reading the blog post on my Gartner blog. </a></div>
Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-38813743700607269122020-02-24T12:02:00.001-05:002020-02-24T12:02:57.909-05:00The Customer Experience Implications of the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus and COVID-19 DiseaseThe SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease are increasingly making headlines. As you are no doubt aware, the number of known and <a href="https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6">reported cases will surpass 80,000 today, and more than 2,600 have been killed by the disease</a>. While the first priority is health and safety, CX leaders must give consideration to how this growing epidemic (soon, likely, to be l<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/pandemic-coronavirus-outbreak-economic-impact/">abeled a pandemic</a>) will impact customers.<br /><br />Customer Experience (CX) is about knowing and responding to customer expectations and needs to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. In typical times, it can difficult to understand what drives satisfaction and dissatisfaction and encourages loyalty and disloyalty. But in those rare moments in time when unexpected, profound, and significant changes are thrust upon the world (so-called "<a href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.investopedia.com_terms_b_blackswan.asp&d=DwMFaQ&c=qRq7a-87GiVVW7v8KD1gdQ&r=aKKMgtkZesroQ2p1HELVZw01VrJ9l1lqGo0PzXUfh7M&m=pZ_Q3KMiN3vRR-CeTEdqlfKWt-enqHH3w1oQZU4qKN4&s=j5pIrKEMOwQhl9tO6EicaY_Y5OsaOVQvYHo8BycT51U&e=">black swan events</a>"), your customer's needs and expectations can evolve in rapid and surprising ways.<br /><br />At this point, depending on your brand's category, you might think that your primary issues are oriented to your <a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/coronavirus-how-to-secure-your-supply-chain/">supply chain</a> and not to changes in customer preferences, attitudes, or behaviors. It's sensible to plan ahead for interruptions to your production and operations, but customer-centric organizations will also prepare for how their customers' questions and needs will change rapidly in the coming months.<br /><br />On the one hand, it might be argued that all brands are on equal footing, so the impact of your words and actions will have little influence on your brand's satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy relative to its competition. After all, today's epidemic was unforeseen just two months ago, and with the news changing daily, your brand, just like all brands and people, is caught in a maelstrom of rapidly evolving knowledge and recommendations.<br /><br />That's true, but with each passing week, brands will be made unequal based on their preparedness, communications, priorities, and actions. This event, just like any that alters consumer expectations, activities, and motivations, will impact the customer perception of different brands in different ways. Keep in mind our opportunity to excel (or fail) for customers is greatest in instances when emotion and needs are running high versus in regular periods when everything is going as expected.<br /><br />Today's global health emergency may be without precedent for generations, but that doesn't mean our brands cannot find ways to prepare for different customer scenarios and maintain a customer-centric approach in the face of the unexpected. Traditional crisis response along with CX best practices provide some guidance you can use and consider:<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Consider likely and possible changes to customer needs and journeys</li>
<li>Be proactive now with information for customers</li>
<li>Listen to your customers</li>
<li>Be prepared to act</li>
<li>Plan for rapid shifts in corporate priorities and budgets</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To read suggestions on each of these categories of CX action, <a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2020/02/24/the-customer-experience-implications-of-the-sars-cov-2-coronavirus-and-covid-19-disease/" target="_blank">please continue reading on my Gartner blog. </a></div>
Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6187396913880956540.post-50504277643616363462019-12-12T16:42:00.000-05:002019-12-12T16:42:07.913-05:00Three Things To Know About 2020 Customer Experience TrendsYear-end articles and blog posts about hot trends are popular. People enjoy reading speculative predictions, and writers are happy to collect the clicks earned by lofty and alarming statements about the pace and breadth of change. Since both writers and readers love them, the annual slew of CX predictions are arriving, and you can find plenty of posts and articles about the Customer Experience trends you “must be aware of” and “must get ready for” in 2020. But must you? Really?<br /><br />I’ll share some observations on CX trends in this blog post, but at the same time, I also want to caution you from taking too much from the flood of similar articles you will see this month. Most organizations do not struggle with CX because they don’t see or execute the buzziest new trends; they struggle because the foundational basics of CX are often neglected. To a CX leader grappling with limited resources and influence, it may seem appealing to chase some talkable new tech rather than encourage customer-centric changes across the enterprise, but focusing on CX blocking and tackling will almost always have a much greater impact.<br /><br />As you read this year’s crop of articles about the CX trends you absolutely must act upon or risk immediate consequences, keep in mind these three cautions:<br /><h3>
1. There is often much less to those “hot” trends than meets the eye</h3>
One of the ways to create attention for a dubious trend is to focus on the innovative business model for a well-publicized startup with a rapidly growing private valuation. The eye-catching valuation gives the appearance of success, but we should know by now that private valuations and impressive IPO prices are not an accurate harbinger of future performance. From Theranos to WeWork to Uber to Magic Leap, it should be evident that impressive growth and inordinate financing rounds are no guarantee of sustainable, profitable success.<br /><br />Take Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) strategies, which were all the buzz earlier this year. I’m not suggesting DTC isn’t right for your brand or won’t be important in the future, but are you aware those well-known envy-inducing DTC brands aren’t actually profitable as of yet? Casper <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/27/mattress-startup-casper-said-to-be-valued-at-1-1b-with-new-funding/">hopes it will become profitable on an EBITDA basis in 2019</a>. Dollar Shave Club <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/7/19/12232698/dollar-shave-club-just-sold-for-1-billion-to-unilever">wasn’t profitable when Unilever purchased the company</a>, and <a href="https://digiday.com/retail/companies-get-addicted-notion-subscriptions-dollar-shave-club-ceo-michael-dubin/">subscriber growth has slowed since the acquisition</a>. The Honest Company made headlines in 2017 for a down-round that stripped the company of its “unicorn” status, and the CFO recently shared The Honest Company generates <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/honest-co-cfo-shares-lessons-170045661.html">half of its total revenue from stores</a> and not DTC. Lastly, SmileDirectClub was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-unicorn-ipo-flops-of-year-worst-performance-wework-peloton-2019-12">one of the five worst IPOs of 2019</a>, with its shares losing over 60% from its September IPO price.<br /><br />I am not casting aspersions on these brands or the DTC strategy, which may continue to grow more common and profitable in the coming years, but given the deafening level of hype about the DTC trend, you’d be forgiven for thinking these companies were printing money and not struggling to get into the black. By all means, research the value of DTC strategies, but don’t buy into this or any other hot trend simply because some unprofitable, VC-funded companies have gained market share by selling products or services at a loss. If that were a repeatable and scalable recipe for success, we’d all be billionaires.<br /><br /><i>Real CX Trend: Back to Basics: </i>Corporate websites have been with us for 25 years, mobile apps for 15 years, and social media for more than a decade. Yet, many brands still struggle to offer good, customer-centric experiences on these channels. Focus your efforts on learning the drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction you have on today’s widely adopted-platforms and channels rather than racing to launch a technology, platform, or strategy that may (or may not) be the next big thing in 2025. No brand will fail in 2020 because it lacks a Virtual Reality application or Alexa Skill, but many brands are already failing because they cannot deliver the experience customers want and expect in the real world, on desktops, and on mobile phones.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogs.gartner.com/augie-ray/2019/12/12/three-things-know-2020-customer-experience-trends/">To continue reading the blog post, please click through to my blog on Gartner's website. </a>There, you'll get information on two more CX cautions ("The first focus of CX is on what customers want, need and expect; not on trends, tech or competitors" and "CX trends are not as 'hot' as you probably think") and two CX tips or trends ("The tech that matters most is the tech that helps improve your customer understanding" and "Hold your existing vendors responsible for keeping you up to date on new tech trends.")Augie Rayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11717746847853655184noreply@blogger.com0