March 2014, Volume7 - Issue1

Tuesday 18 March 2014

Your Prospects Are Attending Customer Contact Europe 2014

The momentum is building, the attendee list is growing and sponsorships are going fast for our 8th Annual Customer Contact 2014, Europe: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, 9 -11 June 2014 in Lisbon Portugal. Discover the only event in the industry that has proven to cut sales cycles in half. Contact us about a sponsorship today.

If these confirmed participants fit your prospect profile, contact Frost & Sullivan today:
 
BSkyB Body Shop International Blizzard Entertainment
DOW Europe Direct Line Group DHL Express Portugal
Euronet EnterCard Eaton Industries Manufacturing
Farfetch.com HTC Iberia S.L. Metlife Iberia
Moo.com Netflix Nagracard SA /Open TV
Plantronics Nokia Philips Consumer Lifestyle
Serif Europe Ltd Sibelga Sika Portugal
Swift Thorton's The Trainline.com
Vodafone Italy Vorwerk International Wargaming.net


Don’t delay!   

Contact us to guarantee your company's spot. 

Thanks!

Thursday 13 March 2014

STRATEGY SESSION

Frost & Sullivan, Customer Contact eBulletin, Vol. 7 Issue 1
6 Ways to Turn Customers into Brand Advocates


By Cynthia Clark
Senior Writer
1to1 Media


Customers are more than the value of what they spend. Instead, especially in this age of social media, customers can become an extension of the brand's voice through their comments and reviews. More importantly, customers are more likely to believe their peers rather than brand messages.

Therefore, organizations need to stop seeing their customers simply as cash cows and instead make every attempt to turn them into brand advocates who will share positive information about the brand, both with their friends and family, but also in a wider fashion over social channels.

As Don Peppers, founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, notes, a lot depends on customer satisfaction. "The ability of organizations to turn existing customers into brand advocates first and foremost depends on the quality of the service or product they're offering," he stresses. Ann Ruckstuhl, LiveOps Inc.'s chief marketing officer, agrees. "Brand advocacy is not something you wish for but that you earn through delivering an exceptional customer experience," she says. It is therefore essential for brands to ensure that they're really delivering on their promises and even exceeding them in order to turn their customers into advocates.

So is there a magic bullet way to turn customers into advocates for a brand? Unfortunately there is no secret recipe, but there are certainly steps that organizations should take to create brand evangelists who will happily share their enthusiasm for the organization with their contacts. Experts share these six tips to leverage the most loyal customers and turn them into advocates for the brand:

1. Invest in your existing customers

Many companies spend a lot of time focusing on acquiring new customers but don't put as much energy into retention strategies, making sure their current customers are happy and would therefore not consider switching brands. As Peppers notes in this blog, some customers are prone to defect, which means that the remaining ones are more likely to be loyal to the brand. Their loyalty, together with the information they have about the brand since they've been doing business with it for a while are two ingredients that can help turn customers into advocates. Ian McCaig, Qubit's CMO and co-founder, highlights the importance of knowing your customers. "Be able to detect, understand, communicate with, and serve your customers at every point in the purchase lifecycle," he says. Understanding customers and using this insight to improve their experience will help turn them into brand advocates.

2. Wow customers with unusual experiences

Customers expect great products and services from the companies they do business with. Unless organizations deliver on the basics, they will lose customers let alone fail to create brand advocates. The most forward-thinking organizations are finding ways to surpass expectations. "When you go above and beyond expectations, you create a positive feeling," notes Rhonda Basler, director of customer engagement at Hallmark Business Connections. Basler uses the example of Crayola, which decided to create a video to celebrate the company's one millionth Facebook fan. Apart from reaching more than 70,000 Facebook users, the video led to engagement through comments, likes, and shares and even triggered some people to talk about the video.

3. Arm customers with information

The most valuable customers are not the biggest spenders but those who have the expertise to share with their peers, notes Peppers. In this blog Peppers refers to a study published in the Harvard Business Review which found that customers who spend the most aren't the ones who generate the greatest value through referrals. Peppers explains that the "value you generate for a company by referring others to it will be based not on your spending value, but on your own reputation and "authority" among your friends." He highlights the need to give customers information about the brand. This will not only help to encourage customers to do business with the company, but they may share that knowledge with other customers. "The less knowledgeable the customer is, the less likely it is that the customer—even if he or she is very highly satisfied—will ever generate much "word of mouth" value for your brand," Peppers explains.

4. Invite vocal customers to become advocates

Not every happy customer has the appropriate traits to become a brand advocate. Basler notes that organizations should identify customers who are vocal about the brand, for example ones who take time to fill in surveys, since they are the ones most likely to be able to talk about the company. Surveys, she explains, are a good place to recruit advocates. "Look deeper than NPS but read every single open-ended comment," she stresses. Further, the way a customer talks about a brand can give important information as to how that person feels about the company, and whether he should be nurtured and given the tools to become an advocate for the brand. "You have to know who you're asking to be an advocate," Basler stresses.

5. Transform negative experiences into positive ones

Not every negative experience is doomed to lead to the loss of a customer. In fact, if organizations are able to address a negative experience and ensure a positive conclusion, they could leave a strong positive impression on the affected customers. "Turning a negative experience into a positive one can be extremely impactful," notes Peppers. This is mostly due to the low expectations that customers going through a negative experience are likely to have. "It's not all that hard to surpass their expectations and create an experience that's easier to remember," he explains. While this doesn't mean organizations should strive to create negative experiences, they shouldn't disregard someone who complained when searching for customers who could become brand advocates.

6. Don't forget any channels

Customers are interacting with brands across multiple channels and touchpoints and expect the same service experience across the board. Thus, organizations need to make sure they understand their customers' history across these different channels and create a true omnichannel experience. "You need to know who your customers are across the different channels," LiveOps' Ruckstuhl says. One important step, she notes, is creating a single customer profile.

Finally, organizations shouldn't forget the power that their employees have on potential customers, and they must ensure that they too are advocates for the brand. "Agents should also be brand advocates," Ruckstuhl stresses. Striving to turn customers into brand evangelists will only have limited success if employees are not speaking highly of the brand.

This article originally appeared in 1to1 Media.

About the Author

Cynthia Clark is Senior Writer with 1to1 Media, where she writes for 1to1 Magazine, “Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog” and Customer Strategist journal. Prior to joining 1to1 Media, Cynthia worked as a journalist with The Times, a daily national newspaper in Malta, and wrote regularly for The Sunday Times. She has also contributed articles to several magazines.


Other Upcoming Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange Events:

10th Anniversary
Customer Contact 2014, West

October 19-22, 2014
Coronado, CA

›› Wowing the Customer: Uncomplicated Performance Management to Improve the Customer Journey
Mar 27 2014, at 2pm EDT

›› Using the Cloud to Enhance the Customer Experience
Now On Demand

›› Using Cloud Communications for a Competitive Advantage
Now On Demand

›› Putting the Self into IVR Self-Service: Perfecting the Self-Service Model to Improve the Customer Experience
Now On Demand

›› A Case Study in Customer Contact Transformation
Now On Demand

›› The Rising Cost of Customer Service: Delivering Higher Reliability and a Competitive Edge
Now On Demand

›› Journey to the Center of Omni-channel Excellence
Now On Demand

›› Optimizing Your Unique Multi-touch Customer Support Strategy
Now On Demand


 

Additional Industry eBulletins
Competitive Intelligence
 
ConNEXTions
 
Customer Contact
 
Medical Technologies
 
Sales & Marketing
 
Click to subscribe to additional eBulletins
 
 

FROM THE TRENCHES

Frost & Sullivan, Customer Contact eBulletin, Vol. 7 Issue 1
Drive Value to Other Teams and Make the Contact Center an Integral Part of the Enterprise


By Greg Brass
Director of Client Consulting
CareerBuilder


Do you know the biggest issues your company’s Sales teams are trying to solve? What does the executive team see as the biggest opportunities for your enterprise? Can you name the top five customer complaints about each of your products?

If you are unable to answer all of these questions then your contact center is not positioned best to empower the enterprise. The contact center needs to be the team that educates and enlightens the entire enterprise on the wants and needs of all your customers.

The drive to provide world-class customer service caused us at CareerBuilder to put all emphasis on supporting customers and ignored the need to power other departments within the company. We lost perspective and the realization that to truly make customers happy, we needed to effect change throughout the enterprise. The contact center was only addressing the symptoms. Without the contact center, these other departments had to seek out their own forms of customer feedback and would only get a small sampling of what the customer was actually experiencing.

The turning point for the CareerBuilder contact center was when the company transitioned to a software as a service (SaaS) provider. Sales were no longer transaction focused. Relationships and renewals were now reliant on knowing what was happening with all customers post-sale. The legacy systems that supported the contact center were no longer adequate. There was a need for a single customer relationship management (CRM) system and the need to bring in subject matter experts from sales and product development to connect the contact center knowledge with the needs of these departments.

Replacing all legacy systems was not required, but having a CRM that would talk with these legacy systems was critical. If the data was not surfaced in the CRM, it was not driving value. Providing transparency into these legacy systems not only saved time it allowed the new subject matter experts to proactively reach out to their old teams and show them that they would reap significant value at a much reduced cost and with a faster turnaround.

The new direction of the contact center became evident in supporting a new fast growing product. This product was enjoying good sales but 12 months later the renewal rate was below 50%. There were no answers to what was happening. Was the product broken? All efforts were initially focused on fixing the product.

The new contact center, with a single system of record and a 360-degree view of all customer interaction, was able to identify the true issue. The product functionality was misaligned with customer expectations. Changing the product at great cost was not needed but rather educating the sales team and shifting the product positioning would solve the problem and not just address the symptoms.

With a win in solving this problem, it created an environment at CareerBuilder where executives started seeking out the contact center for other answers. The leaders of contact center were now being invited to enterprise strategic discussions. Product development started to use the contact center to gather customer feedback as well as monitor for new developments with product adoption and use.

You do not have to become a software as a service provider to benefit in the ways CareerBuilder has. What you need to do is ensure is that the knowledge and insight that your contact center gathers is available and usable by the entire enterprise. Your biggest challenge will not be collecting customer feedback but will be to champion this insight.

Any type of enterprise can and will benefit from a contact center that goes beyond supporting the customer and start empowering the entire business. You will also be able to answer the three questions that I initially asked and improve your seat at the executive table.

About the Author:

As a thought leader of over 20 years in the staffing and recruitment industry, Greg has worked in Product development, marketing, technology, and human resources. At CareerBuilder Greg has driven major change and innovation throughout the organization while improving the experience and profitability of some of CareerBuilder's biggest products. Now working with customers and our global operations team, Greg is working to drive a single voice of the customer that empowers the entire organization from customer care to sales, marketing, and product development.

With a bachelor’s in business administration and a master’s in computer information systems, Greg brings a unique combination of both business and technical acumen which has brought many accolades and awards and most importantly better solutions and experiences to CareerBuilder's many customers.


Other Upcoming Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange Events:

10th Anniversary
Customer Contact 2014, West

October 19-22, 2014
Coronado, CA

›› Wowing the Customer: Uncomplicated Performance Management to Improve the Customer Journey
Mar 27 2014, at 2pm EDT

›› Using the Cloud to Enhance the Customer Experience
Now On Demand

›› Using Cloud Communications for a Competitive Advantage
Now On Demand

›› Putting the Self into IVR Self-Service: Perfecting the Self-Service Model to Improve the Customer Experience
Now On Demand

›› A Case Study in Customer Contact Transformation
Now On Demand

›› The Rising Cost of Customer Service: Delivering Higher Reliability and a Competitive Edge
Now On Demand

›› Journey to the Center of Omni-channel Excellence
Now On Demand

›› Optimizing Your Unique Multi-touch Customer Support Strategy
Now On Demand


 

Additional Industry eBulletins
Competitive Intelligence
 
ConNEXTions
 
Customer Contact
 
Medical Technologies
 
Sales & Marketing
 
Click to subscribe to additional eBulletins