BYOD – Freedom and Responsibility

Mobility is a multi-faceted asset, but some of the value it adds may actually be a cause for concern, especially in terms of the fine balance between rights and freedom.

This would hold especially true when it is about mobility at the workplace. So one of the biggest challenges technology teams in any enterprise face, is how far to go and where to draw the line.

To ensure a good work-life balance, enterprises today are definitely allowing personal spaces to encroach onto the office time, and in many cases that is unavoidable- just as office work almost always takes up personal space as well. The flexibility to carry personal mobile devices at work will to some extent send out a message that the organisation does appreciate the concept of work-life balance. But while we do believe in allowing mobile devices at work, there are a number of issues that need to be resolved at the end of the day. Common knowledge is that security is a big issue with the Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) policy. But we believe the solution is not getting rid of it altogether, but actually setting processes and policies in place that will control the usage and definitely the malpractices or security risks.

The big concern that global companies face is that employees are averse that their personal devices are being monitored and controlled.

While security policies may be effective enough for the present, the proliferation of mobile applications in every sphere of activity leaves constantly evolving gaps in security. What then is our solution? Obviously, as a team that supports the IT and IT security policies of the organisation, we need to ensure complete awareness of the risks involved, and the procedures that will keep enterprise data safe, even in personal devices. They may go beyond the mobile phone or the laptop. The issue of all around holistic security is always a challenge. Enterprise control on corporate data residing in the mobile device will always be the requirement with a BYOD policy in place. But while enterprises have the potential to access personal data; they may not enforce scrutiny,  as a mark of trust.  It is time that employees also have a deeper insight about the balance of BYOD with their corporate responsibility, and a commitment to keeping enterprise data uncompromised. Every employee also needs to feel responsible for the security of corporate assets and information. We bank on this sensitivity, but keep policies in place.

That is the only way to truly have equilibrium between work-life balance, and the responsibility of enterprise security.

Ultimately, the balance has to be about responsible ownership, both by enterprises as well as employees. And in this, enterprises may be more inclined to have some clear policies in place…and also not be shy of enforcing them.

Preparing for the new customer!

Today we are living in the world of engagement. CMOs need to throw away their MBA text books and concepts and adopt new marketing techniques to suit the “new age customer”. The other up CMOs sleeve is – they required to establish a brand that’s resilient to the changing times and create customer experience that gets better with every interaction in today’s digital economy.

This new customer has greater expectations, requires higher control and engages more actively with brands. These customers have new social channels to express their opinions and can easily do so through their smart phones. Peer, review/validation and communication is high on the agenda and they expect more ways to communicate and shop anytime, anywhere.

So what does this mean to the marketing mix? Over 60% of the marketing spend is going to be spent on the non-traditional digital content like social networks, blogs, mobile, etc. This signals the demise of the traditional CMO. What this means, it requires CMOs to educate themselves on the latest emerging tools and techniques of measuring the customer’s voice, satisfaction and also to understand in detail the disruptive influence of online platforms and channels on a customer’s purchase behaviour. That is by no means the be-all and end-all of the CMO’s role. This requires a radical shift in mindset. The CMO’s responsibility is to initiate and implement that change.

With this rise in customer-centric organizations, CMO and their teams are now the key enabler for organizations to work cohesively and to have an accurate read of customer behaviour. Customer support becomes an integral element in customer engagement and creating great customer satisfaction.

So successful enterprises who have crossed this chasm and become truly customer-oriented, have aligned customer experience and support to the CMOs. These are organizations of the future catering to the new age of the customer.

Customer Experience: The Science of the Art

Many centuries ago in Southern India, a classical art form was taking root that would be characterized by its dramatic makeup, vibrant costume and extremely mathematical percussion beat and tempo. That art form as we know it now is called Kathakali. What could this art form possibly have to do with modern day customer experience one may ask?

At the very base level customer experience is all about cultural alignment – Am I living the ethos that is relevant to my customer? Am I being able to communicate and connect to my customer at the deepest level? Am I able to leave an indelible mark on someone who I may have never met?

Customer experiences is no longer a long sequence of consistent interactions but is changing to instant gratification around how his /her last experience was. Ted Rubin makes a very interesting hypothesis around “Return on Relationships” in his latest book which is also testimony to how great brands are truly built with great relationships as its core mission. However marketers must realize that to manage experiences effectively and enhance the relationship quotient with every interaction calls for changes to be made to address silo driven cultures across R&D, Logistics, Supply Chain, Sales & Retail functions etc.

Improving and revamping customer experience can’t be accomplished through a one-off effort. Like marketing, effective customer experience strategies evolve constantly. So the management process needs steady and ongoing re-assessment and refinement to deliver against changing expectations and technological advancements.

One of the key drivers for these evolving expectations is digital. It not only creates new channels and touch points, it also helps us manage the customer experience better. Embrace digital tools to work across internal silos to manage key performance indicators, and use dashboards to quickly uncover and address shortcomings that need attention along the customer journey.

A shared vision of what your business or brand should stand for can guarantee a consistent experience.

Creating a culture of experience innovation should be priority. I can think of many organizations who have truly changed the way they respond to customers and do so continuously – Cisco, Walmart, Unilever, and they continue to do so by anticipating experiences, creating the right channels of communication and consistently communicating the right message. You could almost call it an artistic science.

The artiste also changes according the vibes from the audience, constantly looks for messages from the audience to fine tune the performance, experiments with pieces to gauge audience reaction and use the reactions to perfect the art better. Customer Experience in the corporate world is pretty much the same thing. The science of technology and data come together with the art of the personality, attitude and professionalism of the person delivering the customer experience.

While science is all about tools, processes, policies, data etc. Art is humane and touches the heart.

It is the coming together of the two forms that completes the experience. After all every experience is personal. It is the experience that sustains long after to create the experience brandization. Something which I should like to talk about next time.

Building successful brands through ‘Customer-centricity’

Probably the most talked about topic in the world of business today is ‘Customer-centricity’. While many organizations build their vision and mission statements around this subject, it’s more often merely lip-service, not to sound cynical. So, what is ‘Customer-centricity’ or what does it mean for brands to be ‘Customer-centric’?

The fundamentals of marketing was always built around the idea of providing a product or a service that fulfilled the needs of a customer. Today, most companies, be it a brick and mortar business or an online commerce portal is in a hurry to acquire customers. Growing a customer base through loyalty programs and points has become the order of the day. With the belief that these are the triggers that create stickiness. But do these mechanisms really work?

Let’s play out a real life scenario. You walk into a multi-brand electronic store to buy a microwave, of a specific brand or model, and it’s not available. The spirited salesperson instead shows you a range of other brands and models that they have in stock without even wanting to know why you wanted to purchase that specific brand or model in the first place. You thank him and excuse yourself to leave. Meanwhile he pulls out a form and suggests you join the loyalty program for a host of benefits including a lucky draw. Interesting, isn’t it? Sell everything else besides what the customer wants!! Can this be categorized as a ‘Customer-centric’ response?

Well here are a few positive actions that can be put to use and be seen as a customer friendly brand.

Understanding the needs of your customer – Organizations and brands need to painstakingly understand the needs of the customer. In this case, the salesperson could have spent some time to know what the customer was looking for.

Creating and offering the best solution – Going the extra mile to offer the best or optimal solution to the needs of your customer will go a long way in creating a positive impression of your brand. Remember, customers will always remember you for both the right and wrong reasons. Always better if it is for the right one.

Honoring your commitments – Going back to the scenario in the multi-brand outlet, if the salesperson had offered to help you by sourcing the same product and delivering it in a few days, you probably would have taken up on that offer. And signed up for the loyalty program. It is always reassuring to work with a brand that is willing to serve and honor their commitments.

Building relationships with your customers – By getting to know your customers better, there are plenty of opportunities to do more business with them. When brands are seen as trusted partners, customers are likely to stay with them for long.

It’s all about giving the customer what he wants and not what you want to sell. Until and unless businesses and brands are driven by these fundamentals, their survival will continue to hinge on these two words.

Long live ‘Customer-centricity’!!

How technology powers brand equity…

Today we hear a lot of terms like customer quotient, customer experience, brand recall etc. What does this really mean? After all, at one point in our lives we are also consumers at one stage. How can we relate to this?

A decade ago, there was not much thrust or focus on context sensitive marketing as it is today. Humans are wired for experiences. Experiences shape our thoughts and memories and give us the route to what we call brand stickiness or brand recollect. It’s our experiences with a brand -the good and the bad that creates that final impact. The industry as such didn’t have the necessary insight or roadmap to getting more out of customer interactions till a decade ago, as support systems were still in the making and most experiences were reactive. If someone wanted a product or a service, they would be the first to go out and look for it, so these kind of experiences were outside the confines of a home or a personal space.

Today all that has changed. The tables turned. It’s the customer who calls the shots. With the Internet, ecommerce and Social Media platforms booming today, with so many new tools and technologies to gauge customer preferences and trends; we have analytical tools that precisely tell us where our customer base is going and heading. Not only that, this technological leap has also empowered customers to go where he or she has not gone before. The power of knowledge comes as a great enabler, it’s a great liberator. Today’s customer is 200% sure of what he wants, how he wants, why he wants and how he wants. Where did this knowledge and confidence come from? New technologies, analytics, powerful algorithms all have created a new and improved customer 2.0 where the customer creates the demand and zeros in on products or services that match the requirements.

All these technological marvels have only strengthened the bond between the customer and his brand. New age consumers are brand conscious more than anyone around, thanks to the plethora of social channels, feedback forms, surveys, reviews, context based marketing that’s commonplace today. This only increases the brand stickiness of the customer to his loyal brand, and we all know that your customer didn’t become your customer overnight. He/she would have read countless forums, seen product demos, read literature, spoken to fellow customers who have bought and used the product, went for a demo before finally turning in. Across all these stages, the customer is having a first-hand account of brand loyalty. That’s brand equity. And, when devices are able to proactively, intelligently guide you to solutions, your relationship with the brand strengthens even more and you begin to vouch for that brand wherever you are. No wonder that the very mention of certain powerful brands change us completely. It’s not so much with the product or the service that matters, but the overall experience that leaves a mark.

It’s all because each of those brands attacked one pain point consumers had and created a unique solution that alleviated them of that problem forever. Long live brand equity!

All hail the connected customer!

Technology has altered the way we communicate, interact and do business. Large scale adoption of main stream technology has given rise to a number of vendors who make digital devices that fill up our homes and which connect up with the other devices at our homes and offices. The end result is an elevated experience and an always-on connection. Though this has had a positive effect on lifestyles, a growing concern among all vendors is providing pain free support, as this is one major piece that customers look for in any deal. The consumer electronic market is crowded with millions of devices and it will only increase as technological changes rule the day.

The consumer’s journey with a brand starts much before the product is bought. It all starts with the experience of that product or brand and that has to captivate him. The invisible, intangible component here is the support experience that the product or brand wields – and that translates to whether he becomes a prospect, lead, customer or a statistic! It is imperative for all support providers to ‘wow’ customers with every interaction. This is possible only when support providers know all about their customers well, interact with them, understand their trends and pain points etc. Customers are also very learned today as they don’t need to go out looking for information, information is available at their fingertips. This is what gives them the power to make instantaneous decisions. It all lies in the first very experience of a customer with a brand. That interaction forever alters his approach (whether positive or negative) to the brand. This is where support providers need to innovate and innovate constantly.

The Internet has boomed and changed the way we work and function. Social media has turned out to be the biggest and most cost effective platform for connections, opinions, reviews. Where are the vendors homing in? If they are still looking at traditional models, then they’ve lost focus. There needs to be a concerted effort to tie in all the communication channels, listen and pick out from the digital trail consumers are leaving to understand where their brand presence is going. There needs to be a singular view of the customer to find out where he started from, trace his journey with the brand, run the data gathered through an analytical engines and plot trends to further gauge what customers are thinking about your brand, what are they tweeting, what experiences their products are creating and most importantly whether your customers are still sticking to your brand or, are they running away.

An able support vendor with a rich analytical experience should be the ideal go-to partner to bring out hidden meanings in customer conversations that would propel customer stickiness and loyalty.

Voice of the Customer(VoC), our path to Active Insight

In our quest to providing an effective tech support environment to provide a superlative customer experience, it is vital to understand the opinions that our actual and potential customers express in new channels that are much more spontaneous and less structured than the traditional surveys. The reach, the immediacy and the “emotional” aspect (Yeah, it’s all about emotional intelligence, right?) of these channels make them an impressive source of raw materials for obtaining valuable insights that can then be correlated with the traditional data collected at the tech support centre.

For this very reason, businesses are expanding their VoC initiatives towards that new territory, with active analytics on unsolicited and unstructured comments that is derived out of contact centre interactions (voice, email and chat), Social Media conversations, Blogs and News, Comments from forums and third party sites. Gartner defines customer experience (CX) as the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, channels, systems or products¹. Customer experience is increasingly the single most important factor determining competitive advantage and differentiation for many organizations². According to Gartner, while 95% of such companies surveyed collect customer feedback, only 5% close the loop by letting participants know what was done based on their feedback³.

By incorporating analytics around VoC program to provide active insights, businesses can not only improve their customer experience but their bottom line as well. A sound analytics framework around tech support (capable to handle big data & analytics) can ensure businesses benefit from the massive and quick treatment of unstructured information provided by text mining and sentiment analysis technologies. The end goal is to extract the meaning from all the customer interactions correlating to their products/services/markets.

With VoC, our core focus should be on aggregating such data collected on three main dimensions:

• Customer – eg: Detect support request patterns, identify the stage of “customer journey”, detect churn and other potential risks, identify influencers, promoters and detractors, engage customers and proactively manage conversation
• Product/Service – eg: Generate insights around problem/customer, solution/product or service dimensions. Generate ideas for new offerings, identify existing issues and missing features in their product/service offerings, assess customer satisfaction and compare against competition
• Business – eg: Aggregate public opinion and media coverage around predefined variables that have an impact on business reputation (one eg: CSS Corp Analytics during one such exercise for one of our clients, identified negative sentiments around product usability correlating to customer attrition around the same timeline). This help business to act upon such leading indicators and rebuild its brand with its existing customers and general public.

A trusted tech support partner can play a big role in bringing about this awareness and then, using analytics to provide active insights on the goldmine of data you are sitting on. Such a tech support partner will help businesses build a defensible advantage in delivering superlative customer experience. These encounters lead your business to top line growth, profitability and improved customer loyalty.

¹ Lessons From 10 Consumer Brands Cited for Outstanding’ Customer Experience in U.S., Gartner, 2014

² Alcatel-Lucent customer experience survey, 2012

³ Customer Experience Management: Raising Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty and Advocacy – Gartner