Customer Engagement

Outside In: Forrester Customer Experience Forum 2012

Last week a steamy New York City hosted the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum, Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business. The forum content was carefully designed to support and provide real world examples connected to the upcoming book Outside In by Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning. I was stunned at the number of people in attendance. Certainly holding the event in New York contributed, but I think firms are beginning to understand the gravity of the situation. Speed, paradigm shift (sorry), mobile, social and big data are the beacons of change today. As with all Forrester Forums there was a a ton of information, case studies and technology solutions. No one could possibly attend every session, so I boiled down some nuggets that caught my attention.

Customer Experience Needs to be Unified

Consumers are literally all over the map these days. Brands orchestrate platforms on devices and interfaces, but consumers ignore all that hyperbole. They just want to get things done. In his talk, The Unified Customer Experience Imperative, Ron Rogowski (@ronrogowski) spoke about complex customer journeys and the even greater complex challenge it presents for brands to understand and deliver across this new landscape. Things used to be much simpler. He showed this chart that illustrates what brands need to consider.

Consistency has always been a critical path for success. Forrester has tweaked that term and now calls it unified. Unified but not uniform. This is a very important nuance to understand. We wrestle with this notion all the time, having spent a decade plus working the ever-expanding big canvas of a full site, we now must make tough decisions on what to do on handsets and tablets.

This means make it similar, not the same. In order to get better at this, the entire brand will need to begin to understand and inflect their work to meet this new challenge. It will be important to get everyone on board, or we will face a series of never-ending discussions across the organization each and every time we want to add content, features and functionality to interfaces that are not full site.

We will need to continue to listen, collect and categorize the voice of the customer in each channel, but find ways to do an experience mash-up VOC to help inform and guide how we design and deliver experiences in the future. Relevance and real time data should be our mantra.

There has been a lot of discussion about responsive design recently and this forum was no different. It is promising, but there are lots of challenges and some big decisions that must be made. I can’t imagine converting a massive web site to be all responsive, but it does make sense to begin to experiment and learn. Bottom line. Get moving and bring everyone along.

The World is Mobile

We hear it all the time, mobile first. Julie Ask (@JulieAsk) said it right at the outset of her talk on The Future of Mobile. It’s tricky, because if you are an established brand with millions of customers, your full site traffic and usage likely dwarfs your customers coming to you via mobile. Julie explains that designing mobile first doesn’t mean abandon full site or prioritize mobile above all else. It means your designers and CX people for mobile will need to be fully aligned with your full site team. I suggest you make them the same team, otherwise you risk an unhealthy diversion of experiences. Julie has a sharp eye and she trains it on the future. Phones will continue to get more powerful and bandwidth will improve. This will lead to a host of new technologies that will be mobile. She is careful to not restrict these new technology advances to handsets or tablets. They might extend to contact lenses or cardio stents.

No one can say with certainty exactly the order of advancement, but it’s clear that mobile will diverge even further from the PC experience and become the dominant device for service brand and shopping. The landscape will be a convergence of context, intelligence, contextual dimensions and completely new ways to navigate.

Design Still Matters

Understanding how consumers use interfaces is even more critical than ever. This used to be much easier than it is now and so expertise must be developed in house or contracted. It’s time to re-double our usability tools use to uncover struggles within interfaces as well as ensure that users can connect with your brand across devices no matter where they are. Bill Albert of Bentley University, provided one of the most concise summaries of UX tools and when to use them. Loved this chart.

Four years ago I wrote a post on neuromarketing. This is a set of emerging techniques allowing us to get at the physiology of consumers. By measuring heart rate, galvanic skin response, even body movement, we will get better data from consumers to help guide us through design. The equipment is getting better and the costs to field these studies is coming down. Add this to your big data chart.

Big Data is Really Big

Tim Suther of Acxiom laid out a nice summary of how they think about big data. Big data does not mean lots more data. There is already more data than we can mine. We all know what we need is more insights, but that is getting much harder to come by. Big data means new data sources at the most granular level that can be accessed through existing CRM systems and will be largely digital and behavioral in nature going forward. Segments are a thing of the past. People is where we need to go. How people use and interact with today’s social networking experiences must also be included.

No one signal consistently describes or predicts consumer behavior. Activate and evaluate these signals at scale with speed. – Tim Suther

Along with Tim, Richard Char of Citibank talked about their efforts to harness big data and deliver relevant offers. He spoke about Lifestyle Enabled Marketing (LEM) which he uses to push his company to gain a more compete view of the customer. He had a lot of interesting slides, but I think this sums up the shift we are trying to manage through. Somewhere where the arrows meet is where big data will be the most help.

It’s the Customer, Stupid

Amazing as it sounds, we are still learning how to deliver great customer experiences. It’s not that no one is trying, it’s that the customer won’t hold still, keeps getting smarter, more fickle and less loyal. Hard to blame them as they are constantly being tempted by the next shiny object and brands continue to stumble.

Forrester’s forthcoming book Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business offers lots of great information and practical approaches to better understand the evolving consumer. But perhaps more important, how to work inside your own company to shift the culture to be more customer focused, and therefore more successful.

They lay out six disciplines of customer experience; Strategy, Customer Understanding, Design, Measurement, Governance and Culture. They posit that getting customer experience right can add billions to the bottom line of businesses. This is challenging to measure and we all know how difficult attribution can be. But having finished this book in galleys this weekend, I’d have to say they have broken some new ground and provided us with a way to think differently, plan and act.

They speak of the rise of the Chief Customer Officer, and indeed this position is beginning to pop-up. I personally believe it will be some time before it’s a common job description and routine hire across corporate America. I do believe it will evolve, forced actually, as consumers become more independent, technology advances and competition changes battlefields from marketing to experiences.

Photo: Steve A Furman

The Role of the Persona is Shifting

I have been a proponent of using Personas to assist in the design of digital interfaces since 2003. I still believe in them, but I think their role has shifted and has perhaps become a bit diminished. Personas are user archetypes, models of groups of users that help define features, requirements and messaging choices. They are invaluable. If you develop digital interfaces and you don’t use Personas, you are seriously behind most everyone.

The Persona’s rival has taken the stage and it’s the real customer. Voice of the customer tools have improved over the last few years and companies pay more attention to what customers say thanks to the rise of social media. Everyday I sit at the breakfast table and read yesterday’s voice of the customer stream that was written by customers directly on our web site. It’s sent to me via email unfiltered, except for blocking out any characters that appear to be account numbers or personal information. Then I navigate to our Facebook brand page and read that, then over to our Twitter stream and read that.

We have done a lot to shape and enrich our Personas over the years, by enhancing their stories and adding other attributes in an attempt to bring them to life and therefore more approachable for business partners. But still they are cardboard cutouts. It’s much more powerful to read words from your customer or see someone’s Avatar adjacent to their feedback.

Reading customer comments evokes a roller coaster of emotions. One comment is glowing with praise that brings a smile to my face and a sense of pride. The next one calls out something that is just, well, stupid of us. We take all these comments seriously, logging them, and then trying to evaluate where in the priority fix queue they should fall. It’s a real time customer focus group and it’s beginning to influence how I design and shape project work almost as much as Personas have done in the past.

Curious if others are having the same experience or have other opinions.

Images from Avizor and Meetin’Bytes

A Good Customer Experience is a Positive Company Outcome

Customer experience can have numerous meanings, mostly likely driven by where you work in a company. I have been polling people for a while now about what Good Customer Experience means, the other kind doesn’t much matter, and have distilled those replies into the following definition.

Good Customer Experience: An engaging, differentiating, experience with the best possible outcome for the customer and the company that leads to repeat use and loyalty.

It’s not perfect, nothing ever is, but I think it gets at something that’s often missing when the discussion turns to customer experience. That’s the juxtaposition of customer and company in the same sentence, and the inclusion of best possible outcome. Let me stress that it’s not a balance between experience and profit. You can have both in the long run. Some transactions / interactions favor the customer, some favor the business. If you always leave out the customer you will not have as many of them as you want, and will lose them much faster. If you never include the company you won’t have enough profits to reinvest in your business. It’s lose / lose or as we called it in the ’90’s, zero-sum game. The trick is to always include both the customer and the company every time. If you begin using this lens, you will open up new ways of thinking and unlock approaches on how you might design products, services and interactions in the future.

I constructed this simple chart which took a life of it’s own and reminded me of what a daunting task it is to provide a good customer experience consistently.

It goes without saying that there are very few firms able to deliver in bristol fashion across the board. My experience is most do very well in some areas and very poorly in others with the balance being extremely unremarkable. If you tried to tackle all this at once you would probably be very frustrated. “Don’t boil the ocean” as the saying goes, but I highly recommend you be a steeping pot on the verge of boiling over, complete with a rattling top and an annoying whistle.

You will need to be a change agent. Find the places where your company is not as strong in the customer experience and be the catalyst for change.

It’s not what you do, it’s what you change that makes you successful.

It’s important to remember that you can’t change everything, but you don’t need to. Work with what you have. Change what’s changeable. Find like-minded people in your company and form a strong alliance. Above all, track and measure your results. The only way senior managers will buy in is if it will move the business. It will.

Say Goodbye to the Call Center

Earlier this week I attended the Customer Response Summit in Hollywood, Florida. It’s an In The Know event, a company that stays on the forefront of how corporations are dealing with customer care and customer experience in this rapidly evolving digital landscape. We used to call it Web 2.0, but that doesn’t capture what’s happening today. Now it’s mobile, social, video and audio. Consumers adopt new technologies quickly. Certainly not everyone is on the cutting edge, but the numbers of people grow with each new cycle. They are the ones that demand firms adopt these new channels and they can no longer be ignored.

I was a speaker at the event and my topic was How to Turn Social Chaos into Valuable Brand Engagement. I shared my experiences, successes, and challenges of using Social Media to reach, engage and service customers. We operate using a very simple framework for social. Don’t over complicate it. Align it to your current business objectives, translate the tribal language into something more familiar, and prove it’s value.

I was impressed with the speaker lineup that included executives from FedEx, Time Warner Cable, General Motors, Disney, GoDaddy, ConAgra and others. I gleaned a number of takeaways:

Corporations are all working hard on how to improve the customer experience
Social Media and Mobile are moving much faster than corporate America
New customer care technologies will need to be considered and installed if firms wish to keep up with customers
There is no silver bullet; time to focus on weapons not ammunition
Everything you know is transferrable, but it will need to be re-interpreted
Data is still overwhelming insights
New silos have emerged (Great, more silos)
People are beginning to get it, proving value and taking steps
The call center of tomorrow will look very, very different (Think internal targeting, fewer phones, more direct contact with consumers on the web)
Consumers are gaining more and more power (That’s fine, just be gentle guys)
Embrace change, or risk being irrelevant some time soon
Call center managers are starting to shift their thinking from controlling cost to creating value
It’s very, very difficult to move away from “average handle time” (AHT) for hard core call center types
One of the most frequently asked questions for Disney is, “When time does the 3:00 parade start?”

What i’m seeing is the way we service customers is rapidly changing. Consumers operate in real time while firms operate in batch. There is a serious need for a centralized customer database that’s agile and can be easily shared by any of the marketing and service channels/departments that exist inside as well as outside a company.

Partnering is becoming even more important. If your company has an “It’s built better here” mentality, you are already falling dangerously behind. No one firm can keep up with what’s going on out there. Truth be told, they never could, but the pace of change was slow enough in the past to not be too damaging. Today that pace can cause fatalities.

The call center will evolve into a contact command center. More consumers will self-service through progressively easier to use interfaces and devices. Agents that answer the phone today will be transformed into agents that use their web browser to connect with consumers. Information will be pushed to their desktops by sophisticated listening devices constantly spidering the ether for immediate response. Proactive not reactive. Pre-service, like pre-crime from Minority Report. The agents of tomorrow will be more aligned with the business and more empowered than ever. This in turn will empower consumers and leave us all more time to focus on what’s really important.

The networking was the most valuable aspect of the event for me. I met some outstanding professionals and had some great conversations that I hope will continue. View some of the event videos here.

Facebook is a Tough Place for Brands to Call Home

There’s no denying that Facebook is becoming a major channel for brands on the planet. I spend quite a bit of time there and likely you do as well. Brands are investing significant amounts of thought, human capital and money in hopes of garnering customer engagement and eventually revenue. But Facebook doesn’t make it easy.

We create content around the Facebook page design and try to understand how their technology works. We sift through the countless companies who claim to know how things work on Facebook, and just when you think things are getting there, Facebook makes a major change to the design, or code, or interface and suddenly much of what you have made is now broken, or will no longer be useful to you. It’s frustrating, and should cause all brands to take a step back and re-evaluate the role external social networks should play in their company strategy.

Facebook is great at helping us understand their ad platforms and targeting, but don’t seem to be as focused on trying to understand where pain points are for brands who place their intellectual property on Faceboook. Or, in providing ample notice when major changes are about to occur. It would be wonderful to have a technology roadmap, or at the very least an outline of what might be coming. This would help brands plan their investments. It’s hard to argue that with Facebook’s size and large head start that they need to keep everything close to the vest.

Research done by Forrester, indicates that consumers trust the information they find at a company web site (30%) at higher rates than email, TV ads and direct mail. Company blogs (12%), online banner ads (9%) and mobile ads (6%) are at the bottom of the trust list. This means that your earned media, in particular your web site, is where most of your resources should be placed. Brands control the content, design and the technology of their own internet properties, making planning and tracking much easier than in the paid and earned media spaces.

Facebook offers significant access to consumers as well as a platform that is truly social, and this means you can’t leave them out of your social framework. How much you include them and in what way depends somewhat on your brand and how valuable consumers find your web site. The more your customers visit your site, the lighter your integration efforts in the social networks should be. If you have trouble getting people to your site, then Facebook might be a richer platform for you.

Other considerations are who owns the data and how much can you track or attribute back to the networks you work in. By all means I think Facebook is valuable for brands, but like anything, the value will evolve over time. The majority of your investment should be on your own web site.

Can Customer Experience Drive Business Decisions?

Companies are getting more serious about delivering a better customer experience. Thanks to research firms, passionate consultants and champions inside company walls, senior executives are more aware of CX and willing to support staff and programs to improve it. So how far will they go? Right now it’s about making business decisions and then trying to wrap a better customer experience around how that decision plays out. This is a good start, but probably won’t be enough long term. More on this later.

Why the hesitation? Pretty simple. Senior execs are comfortable with the notion that a good customer experience will mean a positive brand experience in most cases, and they will even extend that thought to believing that this will cause a customer to be more loyal. But the data to support that is slippery. Not necessarily because it’s not there, but because it’s more difficult to track and prove. All of us need help here.

I respect and closely follow Bruce Temkin. He is a real customer experience transformist (his word) having spent time at Forrester Research and is now out on his own. He seems to have devoted his entire life to defining and championing great customer experience. In 2008 he set forth a collection of fundamental truths (according to him) about how customer experience operates. Here are his 6 Laws of CXP:

I would encourage you to read his blog, Customer Experience Matters on a regular basis to get first hand observations, research reports and opinions from a true professional in the CX space. There is no doubt that he has a guaranteed spot in CX Heaven, if there is such a place.

Back to the corporate world. Yes we must.

Some big companies are beginning to appoint a customer experience leader, give her authority, a budget and the ear of a very senior exec so there is bite to the bark. This is great, but it cannot be the “flavor of the month” or a “one year program.” Employees see right through this. They will play along, but will not seriously internalize it into their daily routine. You either make it part of what you do and how you do it, or not, long term. It’s that basic.

A great customer experience can be difficult to define, but everyone recognizes it when they see it. This is the core of CX and why data is so hard to come by. It’s at the whim of human interpretation. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not magic and not always emotional. It’s what’s right and people know when it’s right. I’m frequently tempted to say Human Experience, not Customer Experience. You heard it here first. People design the systems, functionality, rules, policies, and basic standards that a company creates on a daily basis. Empower your people to create what’s right and you will be well on your way.

How will you know when you are making progress? When you CEO or President or CMO comes to you and says something like, “I want to make business decisions based on how we can deliver a great customer experience.” The best strategy could be faxed to your arch rival and it would be useless to them because they either wouldn’t know what it meant or couldn’t possibly execute it themselves. Right now, today, if you had a real customer experience strategy you could fax it to your competitor. That is if you could fax it.

Graphic courtesy of sylvainpaillard.com.

The Soul of a Brand

What’s your soul worth? Bart Simpson sold his to Milhouse for $5.00. I would say he may have left some money on the table. Not to worry, this post is not about any particular spiritual compass, but it is the longest post I’ve ever written, 1,486 words.

Let’s say that a soul, for the sake of argument, is the core of one’s being. It’s how you act and what you say when you’re alone. It’s how you react when you face a crucial moment in your life, in public. It’s not planned behavior. It’s a spontaneous response to your environment. It’s the real you. Your brand.

Indulge me for a moment. Think about the brand you work for or a brand you enjoy. Each one likely has carefully crafted mission and vision statements that in turn spawn carefully crafted marketing and advertising messages. This is not a bad thing. It is in fact necessary to help employees of a company understand the brand, stay focused and perhaps work better together as an integrated team. Now if brands would just go the next step and let their employees inhabit the soul of the brand, things would get interesting.

Prior to Social Media tools, this was almost impossible and never seriously contemplated. Customer Service people were the first ones to take the keys to the brand’s soul. They had to answer the phones and talk in real time to customers. Their first priority was to solve problems. Eventually service was co-mingled with selling. Running a service department is a very tough job. Once upon a time customer service reps spoke from their hearts. Now they need to wrap their personality around canned scripts generated by CRM systems that display pop-ups on screens. Nevertheless, these people are on the front lines of a brand’s soul.

Public relations departments also help embody the brand’s soul. But they are often reigned in by the law department and that nagging “worst case scenario” syndrome. Their role is essentially the same as when they were formed, but their constituents go beyond customers. They speak with/to investors, journalists, career seekers and politicians. The biggest change they face now is the growing number of personal zealots who have a blog, the tool sets they need to learn and the speed at which they must react.

If you’re a pure play brand it’s much harder to be soulful because people interact with your site and not your people. Banks with branches have a distinct advantage over online only banks. Branches are full of people who can easily embody the soul of the brand in a familiar form factor; live humans in person. Apple and Microsoft were fierce rivals, even though Microsoft led market share from day one. But when Apple opened retail stores around the country they immediately gained a distinct advantage. Apple has a face and a body and a voice in the local mall. The Genius bar was Genius.

Not all brands can or should have physical locations. But they darn well better start manning public real estate on the web. By that I mean social networks on and off their own web properties. Some brands have come a long way in figuring out how to use these outposts well, others are learning; still others, the laggards, and are being lapped on the information superhighway. This is NOT a case of ,”I’ll sit by the side of the river and watch the bodies of my enemies float by.” News flash: no one’s floating by.

The British IT services and technology firm, Morse, released a study earlier this year that claim UK companies lose £ 1.3 Billion each year in worker productivity because employees shift their time to Social Media during business hours. They estimate about one week per year per employee. Taken at face value and absent of other thinking this may seem high. CEO’s around the world can now be heard screaming, “Shut down Facebook. Block Twitter.” Not so fast there college. There’s a good reason workers drift off into the social realm during the day. The old school ways of engaging are no longer as effective as they once were. Oh, one more thing. Have you explored the thought process of a Gen X or Y? I love the Brits, but why so negative?

The Meeting is Dead

Corporations have created a meeting-centric culture. From 8 to 5 it’s meetings, meetings, meetings. There’s a reason the meeting has become a staple; it encourages collaboration, it’s often face-to face-which means you can have a rich, quality communication experience, and it can help push for decisions. All this is good and it’s definitely social, but it falls short. Only those in the meeting get to participate and many of the words spoken are quickly forgotten. Whole paragraphs are never even heard because of the side conversations. By the way, if you do publish meeting notes, no one will read them.

The corporate meeting paradigm needs to be completely retooled. Administrative assistants schedule and reschedule meetings all day everyday. They select a physical space where the meeting will be held. That space is reserved exclusively for meetings and needs to be lighted, cleaned, heated/cooled, stocked with white boards, tables, chairs and a phone, at the very least. The meeting space can only be used between Monday and Friday during normal business hours. If you actually attend the meeting in person, sometimes you can call in, you physically have to find your way to the meeting place, taking you away from doing anything else. Someone always leaves an important document behind or forgets to bring enough copies for everyone, but it’s alright because, “We can share.”

Does this sound like something you would design from scratch? Unlikely. But how do we get off this meeting hampster wheel? There have been many attempts to stop the meeting madness. No meeting Fridays, no meeting mornings or afternoons, or no meetings over 30 minutes. Some meeting rooms actually have guidelines on the wall. There they are, the meeting rules in 90 point font neatly framed; create an agenda, arrive on time, be prepared, anyone can contribute, no idea is bad, etc. I’ve even heard of firms removing the chairs from meeting rooms, leaving workers to stand around the table in hopes it would speed things up.

Employee 2.0

People (employees) change faster than companies. Great companies figure out how to keep people passionate about their work, and understand the importance of retaining their most passionate people. In today’s economic environment, firms need as many people as possible engaged, because:

The number of people willing to start something is smaller, much smaller than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone starts something. — Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody

Increasing employee engagement is critical to creating differentiation. Many firms conduct employee opinion surveys to measure the engagement of their employees. The Gallup Survey does just that and they have years of data that shows engaged employees drive company success. According to the The Wharton School, a highly engaged culture:

Has respect for individuals – Employees participate in decision making
Practices transparency – Employees have access to the same information as everyone else (within reason and the law), and exposure to senor executives
Empowers employees – Team members feel a sense of purpose, authority and responsibility
Promotes team building – A sense of identity, culture and values, feeling of equality emerges

First and perhaps most important, it allows people to glean knowledge and solutions from the largest team available; the entire company. This is important for large firms. There are smart people all over the place in big companies, but anyone of us probably only engages with not more than 25 of them at any one time. In a firm with 10,000 employees that’s .0025% of the workforce!

Kill the Physical Meeting

Give birth to the Social Meeting. Use social technologies and the social graph to give and get information, and exchange ideas that solve problems. It’s not a replacement for face-to-face meetings, we will still need those. But let’s not spontaneously call a meeting when we can use simple web tools to accomplish that and more.

Setting up an internal social network is a great way to train employees on how to be social in a corporate setting. Don’t worry that someone may say something that’s rude or boring. They already do that using e-mail today. Turn it on and turn them loose; behind the firewall of course. You will see who your social stars are in very short order. Recruit those people, point them to the public social properties and you are well on your way to giving your brand a soul.

Brands that will survive and thrive in this brave new social world will be viewed by consumers as having a soul and not selling it. Don’t end up like Bart Simpson.

Artwork from the Simpsons – Matt Groening & Fox

Dilbert Cartoon – Scott Adams

A Social Org Chart – Steve Furman

Adaptive Marketing: Coping with Real Time Customers

The theme of the recent Forrester Marketing Forum held in Los Angeles this past April was Adaptive Marketing: How to Design a Flexible Organization to Thrive on Change. As usual there were Forrester speakers and presentations by big brands who have been working to either adapt their own marketing efforts to the fast-changing consumer, or providing solutions for marketers to better adapt. This post summarizes the ideas, notes and quotes that struck a meaningful chord with me and epitomized in my mind the concept of adaptive marketing.

What is adaptive marketing? Forrester defines it this way.

A flexible approach in which marketers respond quickly to their environment to align customer and brand goals and maximize return on brand equity.

Ok, fine. But what does that mean and where do we begin? Well, it begins with data, and lots of it. More data than we as marketers have dealt with in the past. And we need it faster than we have received it before and must be willing to improve our agility and act on the data much closer to real time than ever before. It’s tricky because we have all been handcuffed in the past by analysis paralysis. By not knowing when we have enough data to make the decision. Being an adaptive marketer means giving up a little on the temptation to ask for one more cut of the data to make a perfect decision, and act now on making a good decision, then, well, adapt.

Why is adaptive marketing something we should be talking about today? I believe that it has a lot to do with the fact that consumers are enjoying their new found power of being at the helm, and becoming more comfortable with bypassing traditional channels to research and learn from others who have had real experiences with brands, products and services. It’s a new world for consumers and brands, and the consumers are moving ahead. But then again it’s much easier to be agile as a single person than it is an inertia-laden bureaucratic corporate dinosaur (oh, that felt good). The traditional marketing funnel is breaking down as consumers bounce out and check blogs, forums, networks and friends before making a buying decision. This activity is accelerating an an alarming pace. Power is shifting. Thus, marketers need to adapt or risk becoming irrelevant.

Let me be clear. I am not sounding an alarm or posting my version of the Mayan calendar. Today’s marketing machine is pretty darn good. But change happens faster with each passing year, and the consumer is like Benjamin Button, he’s getting younger all the time. Good firms tend to devote a lot of thought to the future. And a funny thing happens when you raise your head up and peer over the walled garden. You see what’s out there. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll see.

Adaptive Marketing: Rethinking Marketing Methods in the Digital Age

Among a number of interesting things presented by David Cooperstein, VP of Forrester, was a brief history of media. He took us through radio, TV, and early as well as modern digital media. It was a clever parallel of media and marketing, and in fact he states Media = Marketing

Viewers – customers
Distribution = media fragmentation
Journalists = marketers

The history lesson was backed up by data that shows new media has mass appeal and is being adopted very quickly. People consume different kinds of media simultaneously, but the content they consume is oftentimes different.

This has significant implications on marketing messages, especially advertising. The user’s attention is fragmented. Wireless networks combined with the powerful capabilities of smartphones means consumers multitask to the hilt. Not good news if you want to breakthrough with your new product release. This is an important point. If a marketer can stack their message cross various media and reach the consumer during this multi-tasking moment, it will improve consideration and conversion. An article in today’s New York Times states:

For the first time the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls.

Mr. Cooperstein lists three tenets of adaptability one should consider to deal with this new reality.

Think and move differently
Listen more, react intelligently
Target people, not statistics

Probably to no one’s surprise, social plays a large part in adaptive marketing. And of course no Forrester forum would be complete without some new illustrative framework. The Social Intelligence Life Cycle was posited several times during the day and a half. It warns marketers that they must begin to manage the analysis of customer data from social sources, and use this data to activate and recalibrate marketing programs.

Now you may not be sold on the value and importance of social just yet. That’s fine. I would be the first to admit that it’s not mature and can’t compete head-to-head with traditional marketing practices. But there’s one fact no one can deny. It’s a treasure trove of data that marketers don’t usually work with. That’s a critical aspect of adaptive marketing. And yes, it’s 1,000 miles wide and one inch deep. Here are some guiding principles from Forrester.

Adapt your process
Plan iteratively and frequently
Partner for creativity, not durability
Use predictive metrics in addition to descriptive ones

Integrated Customer Marketing™: Technology And Services That Enable Adaptive Marketing

The Merkle Chairman and CEO, David Williams spouted some great ideas from the big stage. Merkle helps companies collect, manage and interpret all types of customer data. Here are some of his wise quotes.

Adaption is how marketers can create competitive advantage.
The digital revolution is enabling and accelerating the customer revolution.
Competitive advantage in the future will live in how effectively an organization can understand, track, engage, measure and influence consumer behavior at the individual level

He showed a graphic depicting how one might leverage data to attain a competitive advantage. As marketers move from mass to conversation the data gets more granular. The more one can collect, understand and act on granular data, the greater the advantage they will have in the marketplace. Makes sense.

He offered the following advice to marketers:

Push more money/spend into trigger marketing
The next decade is about media, not channels.
Real time data needs real time interactions
Create strategies that optimize the value of consumers over time
Move from a campaign mentality to a customer mentality

Mr. Williams had his twist on adaptive marketing termed Integrated Customer Marketing™. Defined as an optimization framework that maximizes customer portfolio value through targeted management of customer interactions across marketing sales and service throughout the customer lifecycle (there’s that word again). He spoke about managing a campaign inside a conversation (social). Interesting. If we could do that we would unlock tremendous value.

Know Me And Be Relevant: How Disney Creates Guest Relationships

I think we would all agree that Disney is a great marketing company. If you have ever been to their parks it gets hammered even further home. Tom Boyles, Senior Vice President Global Customer Managed Relationships for the Disney parks and resorts spoke about how they leverage customer data in a real time world. Here are some of his thoughts.

What is relevance and marketing? Knowing your customer well enough at any point in time or place that you would know exactly what to do next.

He shared real examples of how they are constantly adapting their data collection and marketing practices to improve the customer experience and impact business results.

It’s not so much about did we get someone to the park. It’s more about did we get them back to the park.
A customer never met a channel they didn’t like, so closely manage them all.
Connect with your customers across all the channels and media on their terms.
No one owns the customer, but everyone owns the moment.
Our view is that it’s not just customer relationship management, but CCRM, continuous customer relationship management.

Transforming to a Real-Time Marketing Organization

Steve Sickel, Senior Vice President, Distribution and Relationship Marketing for Intercontinental Hotel Groups (IHG) took the stage. He was an outstanding speaker and had lots of information to share. As the largest hotel group in the world they have lots of experience with customers and data. For Mr. Sickel, it was all about moving his marketing team quickly into the digital world. He echoed what we constantly hear. That customers are more informed, they control the purchase process and demand greater relevance. Traditional media is the wrong tool for the job today because it’s too slow and generic. Customers behave in real time and IHG was behaving in batch. His formula for success: investment, technology and organization.

Investment – Move traditional media to digital media. IHG has now shifted 85% of their media spend to non-traditional channels. This includes search marketing, online advertising, web retargeting, mobile and social.
Technology – Automate marketing systems and transform them from slow, reactive and limited to “Right-Time” marketing where they can do thousands of personalized campaigns at a time.
Organization – Break the silos of customer data and experience trapped in each individual channel and make accessible across the enterprise, as depicted below.

Old IHG Organization

New IHG Organization

Very clear, focused strategy to ensure IHG is poised to market to their future guests. Of all the presentations, this one laid out the best framework for how a company might go about adapting their marketing practices, systems and personnel.

Know Thy Customer: How Customer Intelligence Becomes a Strategic Weapon

The last keynote I’m going to mention came from Dave Frankland, Principal Analyst at Forrester. It was a perfect place for his talk. Much of what was said up until this moment was about data; specifically collecting, managing and acting on it. Mr. Frankland took it up a notch by challenging us to translate that data into customer intelligence for better decision making. He defines customer intelligence this way

The management and analysis of customer data from all sources, used to drive marketing performance and business strategy.

He parses the concept into three buckets.

Functional intelligence
Marketing intelligence
Strategic intelligence

The way to do this, according to Dave, is to begin to look at your customers as assets and liabilities. Not all customers are alike. Overlay your business balance sheet on your existing customer segments and you will see who makes you money and who causes you to lose money. Here’s a great focusing fact from Larry Selden, Professor emeritus at Columbia University.

The bottom 20% of customers can drain profits by at least 80%… while the top 20% can generate 150% of a company’s profit.

He cited some case studies from Fresh Direct, Farmers Insurance, Best Buy and ESPN. All great examples of how going through this exercise transforms data into intelligence.

What I Didn’t Hear Enough About

Which brings me to something I didn’t hear enough about at the forum, but alluded to earlier in this post. Mr. Frankland’s presentation got at it extremely well. That is marketers must refine the art of knowing when enough data is enough. We don’t need reams of it. We need the right data fast and then we must be able to recognize that we’ve got enough, then act. It also goes beyond enough, into, is it the right data? Marketers need to also look for new sources of data, vs. looking at the same old reports. It’s implied in many of the keynotes and track sessions, but knowing when to stop asking for data and having an eye for knowing what data to collect (it’s not all data) is something we probably could all learn more about. Forrester people, I know you’re out there. Perhaps you can assist here.

In Summary

I’m a veteran of Forrester Forums, and no matter how many I attend, I’m always rewarded with some great nuggets and outstanding networking opportunities. They excel at monitoring the vital signs of the marketplace and at delivering content right when it’s most useful. Keynotes here were very strong and consistent. Track sessions as always are more uneven.

Here’s my vote for best quote from the forum. I apologize that I am unable to attribute it.

Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.

Endnotes

All slides are property of the firms that presented them. Content in this post originates from my notes taken during the forum combined with my personal perspective. All photos are mine.

Create a Social Network Inside your Company to Succeed

Large corporations are beginning to give Social Media more face time, but it’s still well down the food chain for resources and attention in most C-Suites. There are good reasons for this; no reliable ROI, potential risk, medium not fully understood, don’t see how it can scale. It’s popular to say, “They just don’t get it.” I’ve heard that a dozen times. But these people wouldn’t be in the C-Suite if they didn’t get what business was about. Playing the “don’t get it” card puts the burden on the senior managers. It doesn’t belong there. It belongs with the the Social Media advocates inside the firm. Senior executives ask the same questions of all new ideas or concepts, “Where’s the value? How much can I get? How fast can I get it?” If you are championing Social Media in your firm then it’s you that has to “get it.” Whew, that’s out of the way. A single champion or interested parties sprinkled around the company may not be enough. So get organized.

To succeed in executing an Enterprise Social Media strategy outside the organization you must have a strong Social Network inside the company.

People who excel at E-Business truly love the digital world. It changes constantly and requires one to work hard at keeping up on what’s going on. It’s not a 9 to 5 job. Social Media is the same way. Finding the social media enthusiasts in your firm and inviting them to join a Social Network inside your company will pay dividends later.

Uncover the Value

No doubt your company has a pre-approved set of drivers and metrics that lead straight to the money. That’s where you should start. It’s somewhat easier for retailers and manufacturers to show results with Social Media in familiar ways; leads, response rates, conversions. Other verticals like health care and financial services measure things over longer sales and engagement cycles making it harder to show the value.

Just because there isn’t an obvious ROI today doesn’t mean you shouldn’t nurture this medium. I was recently in a meeting with some pretty senior folks who were debating whether or not to invest in an internal social community platform. I heard these comments. “What happens if somebody says something bad? Won’t it just be a waste of time?” No doubt those same things were uttered 20 years ago as people discussed enabling e-mail across the enterprise. I am continually shocked by how previously covered ground is so quickly forgotten.

One should never tire of tagging, tracking and cracking the attribution code of Social Media efforts to determine value. Without demonstrating value, resources will not flow into the Social Media cost center. But a fresh angle can jump start passive executives into becoming willing accomplices. That’s where this post comes in.

Resources devoted to more established channels like direct mail, phone and broad media, are not going to be drastically reduced any time soon because executives can get a predictable return on investment. So you either have to get incremental money or carve out a slice from other channels to fund Social Media. Here’s potentially a new way to get senior managers to lean in.

Companies want strategic advantage and a way to differentiate themselves that can’t be easily replicated by competitors. Brand battles are at a peak. AT&T and Verizon, Wal-Mart and Amazon. “Our product is better than the other product. It keeps you drier than… Whitens your teeth better than…” The soundtrack for today’s marketing strategy should be “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits. How effective is this? Brands complain to the advertising governing bodies and then claims need to be either changed or watered down. Marketing teams then spend time looking for ways to push the envelope on copy points. Frequently without consulting the customer. Not sure this is good use of resources. Certainly it’s not sustainable and does not advance the brand in meaningful ways as these tactics have a short shelf life.

Brands are trying to win on consumer perceptions. The thinking is if people perceive your brand is better they will buy it over another one. This only works until the competition comes out with a more compelling message. Believe me, they are working on it right now.

Go Big or Go Home

Social Media is a once in a lifetime opportunity for businesses to create value by energizing and mobilizing their customer base. It’s cheaper, faster, far-reaching and most importantly, more trusted by consumers. Social Media is an Interactive Customer Engagement Marketing Tool. It works to influence consumer perceptions about a brand, as told by other consumers, not by marketing departments.

Create Leverage For Less – CPSM (Cost Per Social Message)

Direct mail tactics are one-to-one. The thinking is when you sharpen targeting and refine champion creative your response and conversion rates will rise. But the company is still operating on a per piece and per customer paradigm. Social Media can scale very quickly once a large enough social graph is created; followers, fans, readers, etc. This is a new level of scalability. It’s transformative. CPM (cost per thousand- variable) can become CPSM (cost per social message – fixed). CPSM is significantly more powerful than CPM because the message finds the consumer where they hang out (personal social networking spaces) and then pass it along within their network and across other networks.

Be a Perception Influencer

Hyundai is not perceived to be a premium auto brand in the US car market. But the company has worked very hard on their products and the Genesis was named North American Car of the Year in 2009. What would executives at Hyundai give to be able to align consumer perceptions with product reality? You can bet lots of time is spent on trying to crack that nut. All businesses have key profit drivers that have associated consumer perceptions. When a firm executes well on these drivers they experience higher business outcomes and therefore better brand outcomes (consideration and recommend to a friend). Marketing wars and dot points are fleeting. Consumer advocates are worth their weight in gold.

The Social Media Molecule – SM²

The graphic below is an attempt to demonstrate how a well executed Social Media strategy is linked to activities and outcomes within the organization, Direct mail is a tactical campaign, and such has a defined set of metrics. But the form factor is static and it’s pushed. Social Media is an Interactive Customer Experience Marketing Tool. It greets brand advocates and invites and empowers them to take the ball and run with it. Contrived marketing dot points are expected and frequently fall flat. Social Media conversations can surge with momentum and are re-energized along the way by consumers who are trusted more than brands.

I have defined the Social Media Molecule SM² as follows.

People within a company who have organized themselves in a self-selected arrangement, held tightly together by strong, common bonds to impact business results.

I specifically chose the word molecule to set it apart from other marketing channels and evoke the unbreakable connectivity of molecular chemistry. This idea seems highly transportable to the social world of human relationships both within and beyond company walls. It’s a framework to build on.

Here’s how I can see it unfolding. Social bonds are formed by members in three areas of the company; Marketing, Customers Service and Public Relations. Each one contributes unique skills to defining and growing the social network inside the company. They use best practices and customize them to meet their own needs. Each team establishes their own metrics but all work to achieve the higher level business results of the company. Once these things are established they unleash it into the wild world of Social Media. The Social Media Molecule’s objective is to influence consumer perceptions and increase customer engagement.

Consumer perceptions – What people gleam from other consumers is more trusted than from companies themselves. Getting validation from other consumers influences what consumers buy and use. The Social Media team can listen to what consumers are saying and reinforce it or correct inaccuracies. What consumers say is then fed back to the Marketing team.
Customer engagement – Customers who have an opportunity to interact with a brand vs. being acted upon will be more engaged and become repeat buyers and loyal customers

Frameworks are always easier on paper (or pixels) than in real life. I realize that getting it off the ground is more complex. Frameworks are also just that. A model that can be followed and adjusted to better snap into a companies’ culture. Would love to hear thoughts on this.

In the works: The Evolution of Corporate Communications.