Disrupting The Game

Tag: connected customer

Reprioritise Point of Sale and focus on Point of Value
How many of our customer realise genuine value when they engage with the people, products, services, and experiences which constitute a brand?

Too few, according to CX guru and the Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute Bruce Temkin.

Bruce has recently revisited the case he originally made back in 2010 for organisations to focus on the value customers derive. He argues for a concept called Point of Value to be recognised as the next logical step after the traditional Point of Sale or transaction stage.

According to Bruce sales without customer value are like a Ponzi scheme. They feel good in the moment, but the long-term outcome is likely to be negative.

“Too many organizations overly focus on selling their products and services, keeping a tight eye on short term metrics like sales targets,” Bruce writes, “but sales are not necessarily an indication of long-term success. What’s missing from the picture? Value!”

“If customers don’t get value from their purchases, then they are likely to return them, stop using them, not renew them, and tell others to stay away. Does that sound like a sustainable blueprint?!? Of course not. However, most organizations have a hard time breaking their addiction to sales numbers.”

Bruce challenges companies to compare and contrast their focus on sales targets versus the usually secondary effort they devote to delivering value.

“It’s time for organizations to shift their focus from sales to value! If we see an economic downturn, then the focus on value will become even more critical as companies are pushed to target their limited resources at retaining customers.

According to Bruce a POV mindset would mean the following:
- A clear measure of customer value that’s used as a critical KPI for the entire business, driving everything from sales commissions to bonuses for the product development teams.
- Support for customers to help them envision and articulate their POV and match their purchases accordingly.
- Cross-functional journey teams with responsibility for driving success during the engagement phase for key customer segments, and continuously monitoring any changes in how customers perceive the POV.
- Product organizations adopting a focus on “designing for value” by prioritizing features and enablement that streamlines the path to POV over new capabilities. Rather than considering feature adoption as a customer success function, product teams are responsible for ensuring that it is as easy as possible for customers to reach the POV.
January 29, 2023
Consumer-grade experiences are essential B2B differentiators

The imperative for B2B brands to deliver consumer-quality experiences as essential differentiators was a prominent theme at Salesforce’s Connections 2018 conference in Chicago earlier this month.

The consumerization of B2B companies is a building wave that will upset those who don’t embrace the transition. Salesforce itself is leveraging its recent B2B commerce platform CloudCraze.

Despite their traditional back-end complexity, B2B companies must attain UX simplicity. B2C consumers have long become accustomed to buying with once click and enjoying rich, engaging content. However, when they go to work they are confronted with legacy, green-screen ERP complexity, no engaging UI and no relevant communication and promotions.

Ok, B2B transactions can be complex, lengthy and involve a small army of stakeholders, influencers and decision makers, but successfully addressing this complexity must become an opportunity.

The consumerization of B2B means making the relationship as easy and as efficient as possible. It can typically mean going more direct, often by empowering the distribution channel with data.

It also means getting the so-called “middle office”, as distinct from the ERP back-end, better connected directly to the customer-facing front end so that configuring, pricing and quoting (CPQ) and contract life cycle management (CLM) flows far more smoothly and effectively than has been the norm for traditional B2B players.

I like the word flow. Are we, as a B2B organisation, flowing? Are we identifying and removing our internal, self-imposed and self-maintained legacy constraints? Are we acknowledging that the old B2B and B2C distinctions are less and less relevant as next-generation business tech mandates that we converge around H2H, Human-to-Human commerce?

June 25, 2018
What’s your platform strategy? Is it connected, collaborative and scalable?

All businesses either will be digital platform businesses or they will be out of business. As we transition from transactions to conversations, we need to urgently consider the critical role our platform strategy must play.

Rather than making and selling products and services in a series of transactions with individual customers, we must view our customers as partners who should be integrated into a flow of value within the context of a connected, collaborative and scalable platform. In this environment, value creation is not linear. It is two-way and continuous.

MIT Digital Economy fellow and Boston University professor Marshall W. Van Alstyne in a recent Harvard Business Review interview said that with platforms, the rules of strategy change.

“Strategy shifts from controlling to orchestrating resources; from optimizing internal processes to facilitating external interactions; and from increasing customer value to maximizing the value of the ecosystem,” Van Alstyne said

“The failure to transition to a new approach explains the precarious situation that traditional businesses find themselves in. For traditional firms, the writing is on the wall: learn the new rules of strategy for a platform world, or begin planning your exit.”

What do we mean by platform? MIT Professor Michael Cusumano provides this definition: “A platform or complement strategy differs from a product strategy in that it requires an external ecosystem to generate complementary product or service innovations and build positive feedback between the complements and the platform. The effect is much greater potential for innovation and growth than a single product-oriented firm can generate alone.”

The importance of platforms is linked to the concept of network effects: The more products or services it offers, the more users it will attract. Scale increases the platform’s value, helping it attract more complementary offerings which in turn brings in more users, which then makes the platform even more valuable.

Accenture’s Tech Vision 2016 report makes it a point that a platform doesn’t just support the business, the platform is the business. The report also quotes Marshall Van Alstyne: “Products have features. Platforms have communities.”

The Accenture reports cite estimates from IDC, which predicts that within the next two years, a majority of large enterprises will create or partner with industry platforms. IDC also predicts that the number of industry clouds will reach 500 or more by 2018, up from today’s 100-plus.

For marketers focused on ensuring that their customer experience is the decisive differentiator, they must start considering how best can they integrated their systems, processes and people into an integrated customer-facing marketing-and-sales front end, which must also be synchronised with the transactional front end.

For example, a website content management system, integrated with a marketing automation application and a CRM-ERP solution, plus a powerful analytics tool is a force multiplier of genuine significance. Operate those solutions individually with limited integration and their collective value to the business is inhibited and not the game changer it should be .

September 4, 2016
A differentiated, superior customer experience does pay dividends
Launched six years ago, Watermark Consulting’s annual Customer Experience ROI Study illustrates why, according to the firm’s founder Jon Picoult, “every company _ public or private, large or small _ should make differentiating their customer experience a top priority”.

The study, by the firm which describes itself as a customer experience consultancy, tracks the cumulative total stock returns for two model portfolios _ comprised of the Top 10 (“Leaders”) and the Bottom 10 (“Laggards”) publically traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Rankings.

According to the report’s latest edition, leaders outperform the broader market. They generated a total return that was 35 points higher than the S&P 500 Index. Laggards were far behind. Their total return was 45 points lower than the market.

Watermark states that “a great customer experience, and the internal ecosystem supporting it, can deliver tremendous strategic and economic value to a business, in a way that’s difficult for competitors to replicate”.

So why do the laggards “continue to subject their customers to complicated sales processes, cluttered websites, dizzying 800-line menus, long wait times, incompetent service, unintelligible correspondence, and products that are just plain difficult to use”?

Watermark says leaders embrace these basic tenets:
- They aim for more than customer satisfaction
- They nail the basics and then deliver pleasant surprises
- They understand that great experiences are intentional and emotional
- They shape customer impressions through cognitive science
- They recognize the link between the customer and employee experience
Download the report.
July 4, 2016
2015’s top 50 marketing slides
Percolate’s 50 most important marketing charts of 2015

Good summary of the state of marketing in 50 slides from marketing management software company Percolate:

Here are my takeaways:
- Adults use their smart phones more than all other devices
- Vertical viewing is replacing horizontal viewing
- Mobile searches will soon replace desktops
- Millennials love their smart phone and cannot live without them
- Mobile is driving eCommerce
- Social’s share of Internet traffic is rising
- Lead generating is B2B’s biggest priority
- Blogging is B2B’s mmost important channel.
November 30, 2015
Subscribe, don’t buy

Dollar Shave Club is back with a new video promoting their second product line, butt wipes called “One Wipe Charlies”.

Not as humorous as the first , which has had 10 million hits, but still good enough to launch the new product.

http://youtu.be/3FOae1V1-Xg

Dollar Shave Club has more than 200,000 customers receiving monthly razor shipments.

How well the wipes product flies remains to be seen, but company founder Michael Dubin is adamant that he can own a significant share of the market for bathroom products and disrupt the conventional retail-consumer connection with his subscription model.

Backed by high-profile venture funds, Dollar Shave Club endeavours to keep its customers and prospects engaged with a consistent stream of digital communiqués in form of an engaging blog, social jokes and virtual cards.

Dubin wants you to subscribe to his brand, to commit to a continuous engagement not a series of transactions.

June 16, 2013
The first person to live to 150 is alive today

Prudential’s billboard captures our attention with its simple statement. What will this fact mean for marketing?

June 8, 2013
Embracing connectedness
An excellent example of brand-building thought leadership, IBM’s 2012 Global CEO Study Leading Through Connections is the outcome of 1700 face-to-face interviews with CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders across 64 countries and 18 industries.

It is proving to be an influential document, which is being cited by numerous industry leaders, including Salesforce.com’s Chairman and CEO Mark Benioff who is referencing the report during his current “Customer Company” roadshow.

Benioff highlights this quote from the report: “for some time, businesses have been refining and optimizing their networks of suppliers and partners. But something just as revolutionary has been happening _ the sudden emergence of the cloud, social and mobile spheres _ connecting customers, employees and partners in new ways …”

IBM says the study “explores how CEOs are responding to the complexity of increasingly interconnected organizations, markets, societies and governments – what we call the connected economy”.

Three themes emerged from the interviews. Today’s CEOs must:
Empower employees through values

Engage customers as individuals

Amplify innovation with partnerships
It is the first time since IBM began conducting its global CEO studies in 2004, that the phrase “market forces” has been toppled by “technology” as the most important external force impacting organizations.

When you think about it, “Biz-Tech” enabled front-end collaboration is a logical evolution from driving efficiency in the supply chain.

Connecting employees, customers and stakeholder partners to unlock value and differentiation is the way forward.
April 28, 2013