Lynn Hunsaker
Marketing’s Role in Employee & Customer Experience Journeys
Is your Marketing department aligned with customer experience and employee experience? The necessity and logic of doing this was highlighted in a recent presentation by Hootsuite's Vice President of Customer, Kirsty Traill. She pointed out that Marketing Communications is unfortunately the typical focus of...
Is Your Customer Engagement Really Customer-Centric?
Customer engagement can yield short-term or long-term rewards or penalties. Are you tracking all of these? Short-term rewards: uptick once or for one period — engagement value exceeded underlying value Long-term rewards: uptick that sticks or increases organically — engagement fit the customer's expectations and...
Customer-Centric Marketing: Align for Growth
Customer-centric marketing has several layers of meaning. The most popular layer means personalization of communications, toward increasing customer lifetime value. Without the other vital layers, though, much potential customer lifetime value will be squandered. First Layer: All Customer Touch-Points. Communications is only one touch-point...
Customer-Centric Marketing: Step-Up Performance
Customer-centric marketing is necessary, yet far from sufficient — from customers' and investors' perspectives. Thankfully, many companies have been migrating away from product-centric, month/quarter-end-centric and competitor-centric marketing, toward putting the individual or most profitable customer at the center of marketing design and delivery. As...
7 Secrets of the Best Marketing Operations Teams
Value creation is the ultimate measure of success in business: value to customers, shareholders, alliances, employees, and the community at-large. In the quest to be best, follow the money, or better yet, be the one that enables value (money, capability, opportunity) to be created. Marketing...
Customer Experience Strength Depends on Being Customer-Centered
Uncentered pottery will eventually crack, just as management uncentered on customers will lead to costly cracks in customer experience. A primer on using a clay pottery wheel explains: "The pot is only as true and as strong as the centering. This is a very...
What is Customer-Centricity DNA?
What is customer-centricity DNA? Can you develop it, or must your business be "born" with it? DNA means "the fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities of someone or something, especially when regarded as unchangeable". And centricity means "being situated at the center; a position...
Actionability of Customer Experience Intelligence
Do intelligence and actionability go hand-in-hand? The basic difference between data and intelligence is this: data are facts, and intelligence is the arrangement of data to convey meaning. In other words, intelligence is a capacity for applying a combination of facts. Customer experience intelligence, then,...
What is Customer Experience Value Creation?
Customer experience value is seldom quantified from the customer's viewpoint. We explore it through customer journey mapping, customer advisory boards, surveys, user experience testing, and so forth. Even so, we still may not be sizing it up from their perspective. Customer experience value creation...
Customer Experience Professionals’ Essential Toolkit
Customer experience tools are just as important to success as a carpenter’s tools are. Despite the allure of technologies, carpenters still need their toolkit: drill, hammer, saw, wrench, level, and so forth. Likewise, customer experience professionals need to master basic customer experience tools to...
Customer Experience Treasure Trove via Chronic Issues
What more could you wish for than 288% higher lifetime value of your key accounts? That's really the goal of customer experience management, whereas recommendations, high survey scores, repeat purchases, and so forth are all means to this end. It's all about longer, more...
Customer Experience Collaboration Wins Championships
Imagine your company as a sports team, such as volleyball, soccer, hockey or football: do you truly pull together, have one another's backs, share opportunities and show your opponents and fans you're a well-oiled machine? Collaboration like this across your entire company is what's needed...
Customer Experience Motives Drive Organic Growth
Criteria for promotions, raises, hiring, bonuses, budget expansion and recognition reveal your true motives about customer experience. These criteria drive behavior even more than goals and values. These "business rituals" criteria are the truth about your culture. They're the engine behind your growth. While an...
How Customer Experience Policies Empower Growth
If you love someone, set them free. Do your policies set free your customers and your employees? Policies are designed to protect, but sometimes they disintegrate — rather than protect — customer relationships. And customers' mistrust of companies propels regulations, protests and negative word-of-mouth....
5 Radical Changes to VoC of the Future for ROI Maturity
What’s the greatest challenge Voice of the Customer (VoC) managers face? Low survey response rates, capturing feedback at all important touch-points, selecting the right scales and questions, integration of customer data across systems, connecting the dots across VoC sources, linking VoC with operational and...
Preventing Customer Experience Process Silos: 4 Prerequisites
What does a ballet (or Broadway musical number) and a business have in common? All the players have integral parts choreographed to deliver a satisfying experience. When a player misses a cue or the choreography isn't polished, all heck breaks loose. Such snafus are...
What is Customer Experience Ecosystem?
When J.C. Penney hired the wiz behind Apple retail stores' success as its CEO, there were expectations that "what worked well there will do so here". Pesky promotional discounts (600 per year) were discontinued in favor of coupon-free, discount-absent everyday-value pricing, along with a...
Value Chain Solution to VoC ROI
Voice-of-the-customer (VoC) ROI can be elusive unless you’re adamantly driving customer experience transformation. The key to VoC maturity and ROI is not sophistication or breadth of market research. It’s about viewing VoC itself and VoC actions and metrics as value chains. What is a value...
3 Ultimate Factors of Business Performance
Is customer engagement, artificial intelligence, digital marketing, predictive analytics, big data, or some other “shiny object” the key to driving business performance? Certainly all of these endeavors can make a difference in revenue growth. Yet there is a bigger picture: none of these is...
What is Walking the Customer Experience Talk?
What does it really mean to "walk the customer experience talk"? Executive sponsorship is certainly essential, yet there's so much more to it. An ironic byproduct of any customer engagement effort is that it intrinsically sets up expectations — externally and internally. Walking the...