Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Companies continue to struggle with prioritizing the Customer over their business-as-usual, ingrained product and self-focused strategies.  Upper management in many industries seem to be dragging their feet when challenged to quickly and energetically change business practices to better serve customers. These leaders seem to look at the “Customer” as if it were an abstract representation of a value on a spreadsheet -- instead of probably the single most important factor for most businesses.

Now from the customer perspective, which is what upper management should have as top priority, interactions with most companies are becoming more and more a multi-channel journey of multiple touch points that are used to communicate, gain information, compare vendor offerings, seek assistance, make purchases, register complaints, and so on. If companies meet the needs of customers, then those experience journeys will repeat over customer-preferred channels. Multi-channel strategies for customer engagement are imperative because customers are more and more the ones who choose how they will interact with companies and on which channels.

On the flip side, customers don’t see their interactions in terms of “channels” -- just like customers don’t care how or why a company’s business processes fail to provide an overall positive experience with the company. Customers see that they did or did not have a successful interaction and that they did or did not achieve what they wanted. The outcomes of these interactions influence how customers regard companies and whether they will continue doing business with them.

Once a company has made a commitment to becoming customer-focused for its business strategies and operations, there is work to be done:  integration of channels, integration of business processes, and integration of data from customer interactions all become imperative. Integration of channels leads to understanding of touch points in individual channels as well as cross-channel. Aligning business process integration with the customer leads to creating single customer experiences across the enterprise and across communication channels. Integration of interaction data with operational data provides a more complete view of the customer in real time. Individual department and program goals across the enterprise must be also integrated and related to customer experience excellence.

Business processes must become a dynamic, intelligent and highly integrated interface for company interactions internally and externally. Most internal systems in companies should incorporate factors like customer experience and engagement, rather than functioning solely from a product, service or departmental perspective. Processes play a key role in bringing these factors together to achieve customer focus and relevance. Integration internal to the organization means cross-functional / cross-department teams to envision and implement customer strategies, translated into business processes that holistically connect the enterprise.

 

Symbiosis, Integration

Like symbiotic relationships in nature, business-customer symbiosis is founded on the belief that customer goals and business goals can be aligned in ways advantageous to both parties. The relationship that a company has with its customers affects almost every area of the business and every point of interaction with the customer, internally and externally. That’s why effective business processes are so important to enable top-notch customer experiences.

For mutual benefit, the focus for all business processes shifts to customers to embrace what they want from companies, how they view companies and how they want to work with them. Agile business processes connect all parts of the enterprise to the individual points and stages of the customer experience journey. Business processes also encompass other enterprise practices and strategies. Business-customer symbiosis can ensure the integration of both perspectives to the benefit of both parties. Business process ties directly to desired business outcomes – which now must align with customer desired outcomes.

 

Data Fuels Process and the Customer Experience

Happily, companies have a lot of data sources to help them gain insights into their current and potential customers through analytics, real conversations, social media content, customer service interactions.

Data, information and intelligence are the fuel for effective business processes that support and promote successful customer experiences and interactions. By considering business processes and business information in parallel to customer-focused strategies and initiatives, business outcomes are likely to improve.

Customer interactions produce an escalating amount of data related to internal systems such as CRM and call center management, and related to external sites such as corporate websites and social venues. Significant issues impact the ability of enterprises to correlate all the data into the so-called “single view” of the customer:

• Social media data that is primarily content and crucially dependent on context for meaning
• Company-controlled data sources that do not easily reveal customer process or outcomes
• Complexity of integrations needed to bring all this disparate data together
• Pulling data together to reflect the customer perspective rather than the internal systems architecture

Data directly related to customer-focused processes is likely to get closer to providing the elusive customer “single view” where an integrated process spans multiple interactions, touch points, transactions, and systems. The right data fueling processes is an important part of designing innovative business strategies that truly focus on the customer. Deriving timely customer insights benefit the strategic and operational aspects of an enterprise. However, a good many customer interactions or touch points are increasingly shorter-lived due to the proliferation of digital channels and their use by customers. The opportunity for enterprises to meet customer desires and needs is becoming shorter for each interaction and increasingly difficult to capture, analyze and understand.

 

Business Process Management Meets Customer

 Business process management (BPM) can no longer be solely focused on achieving operational efficiency and optimizing the business. Business processes must become more responsive to a focus on the customer, and become well-integrated across multiple systems to do so. BPM is crucial to customer-oriented systems as well as operational systems, and actually provides an essential piece to integrating these systems in order to better serve customer needs. Business processes are key to an agile holistic business strategy that helps customers achieve success with the company’s products and services. An interesting development in BPM is adaptive case management (ACM) that may be leading the way to greater convergence with customer systems such as CRM and call center applications.

An important aspect of BPM is continuous improvement, something that must happen for enterprises to respond to ever-changing markets and customer desires. To bring about customer-focused continuous change, enterprises need to articulate vision for strategies and initiatives from the customer perspective; and then tie process improvement to the customer experience. Working with customer data and analyses, enterprises may benefit from analyzing the ‘reverse engineering’ of outcomes expected by different customer segments, and then use insights to define how the enterprise should operate across process, organization, and technology domains to deliver optimal customer experiences and success.

Enterprises that allow separate solution and process silos for each channel to persist will greatly impede responsiveness to customers and will add to customer frustration by failing to provide one experience across channels. These enterprises probably did not start with a customer experience strategy and likely developed and/or acquired solutions specific only to individual channels without heeding the need for seamless integration of processes.

 

Business Process and Customer Experience Management Technology

Responsive and accurate support for customer interactions through people, processes and practices is a cornerstone of the management that enterprises can apply to enabling positive customer experiences. Enterprises must recognize that ‘management’ doesn’t mean controlling and dictating to the customer what the ‘experience’ will be. It does mean managing how well the enterprise provides a single experience across channels, how well it fulfills the needs and desires of customers based on customer terms, and even how well it delivers high quality products and services.

BPM can be instrumental for designing and maintaining effective and agile processes that are a sophisticated means to respond well to customer needs, while navigating many complex variables moving from customer to customer. Well-designed and customer-oriented processes make a big difference when integrating touch points for a ‘single view’ of customer interactions.

In the 2011 Forrester Wave for Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience, Stephen Powers defines customer experience management (CXM or CEM) software solutions as:

A set of solutions which enable the management and delivery of dynamic, targeted, consistent content, offers, products, and service interactions across digitally enabled consumer touchpoints. Previously, organizations, processes, and technologies to serve the online channels were silo’d, resulting in overhead, inconsistent experiences, and inability to measure results. However, as online initiatives have evolved and matured, so have product offerings to support those initiatives.

Three categories of solutions comprise online CXM: those based on process, delivery, and measurement:

Process-based solutions enable business users to create experiences. Process-based solutions consist of tools that business users (as opposed to IT users) use to create and manage structured and unstructured content for customer experiences. This category includes WCM, digital asset management (DAM), eCommerce, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing campaign management, marketing resource management, desktop publishing tools (such as Microsoft Word), and interactive development environments (IDEs).

Delivery solutions bring interactive experiences to customers. Vendors often tightly couple both WCM and eCommerce solutions with native delivery tiers, enabling businesses to create content and design and deliver experiences in a single package. But other technologies enable experience delivery, including rules- or algorithm-based content targeting solutions like search, personalization, and recommendations engines; marketing automation solutions such as campaign management and offer management; and customer service interaction management solutions that support customer data and history, customer self-service, knowledge management, and customer feedback management.

Customer intelligence solutions enable businesses to gauge the success of experiences. A/B and multivariate testing enable marketers and business users to test out variations of experiences on certain demographics before rolling them out to a broader audience. Web analytics tools give insight into how consumers consume content and interact with experiences. Social analytics provide insight into how consumers engage with companies by monitoring social interactions. 

 

Source: BP Trends

 

 

Process Alignment: Voice of the Customer Meets Voice of the Business 

Enterprises are accustomed to setting success metrics through KPIs related only to internal business process performance and internally-defined business outcomes. Unfortunately these metrics are frequently out-of-synch with customer perceptions of how well the enterprise met their expectations. Enterprise and customer metrics can be mismatched in other aspects of the customer experience:

 For instance the business may define the process cycle time – the length of time the process takes to run – as measured from when the customer places the order to when the products are dispatched. The customer, on the other hand, may well perceive the time taken to be from when they first went on to the website to look for a product, to the point at which the product started working. Clearly there can be a substantial difference between the two measures. 

Ideally we want to ensure that our measures of process effectiveness (the Voice of the Process) are the same as the customer’s measures (the Voice of the Customer), albeit the customer’s measures are informal measures. 

 

Source: BP Trends

 

Juxtaposing customer and enterprise views of process, experience and success through customer journey diagrams will reveal the disconnects between enterprise perceptions and what customers are likely experiencing. Enterprises are still working on finding more ways to capture the actual customer experience since true direct insight is not easily attained. Insight is pieced together with data from many sources including customer surveys, content from social sites, repeat business with the same customer, customer transactions, and interactions with customer service.

 

Symbiosis at the Heart of the Enterprise

Enterprises continue to be challenged to deliver positive customer experiences that are mutually beneficial and crafted from the customer perspective. Instead of designing business processes integrated with a customer experience strategy, many companies just tack on aspects of monitoring customer interactions to existing processes. For many companies, the main focus is still on their own needs, their own problems to be solved by the business process. And frequently when enterprises say they are customer-focused, they really mean they are trying to engineer upsells and cross-sells for their own benefit, without necessarily delivering real value to the customer.

As I continue to emphasize in much that I write, technology alone is never sufficient: enterprises need integrated and agile processes that also recognize the importance of people and practices to achieve goals and positive business outcomes. To become a truly customer-focused organization that enables customer experience excellence, the entire enterprise must be part of the overall experience:

• Starting with Upper management: choose Customer as The strategic focus
• Enable and empower customer-focused people in every part of the enterprise
• Design processes that are flexible enough to change with dynamic markets and customer needs
• Draw on innovative information systems to fuel business processes and provide continuous customer insights for fostering customer experience excellence

Keeping the focus on customer outcomes will help align people, processes, practices, and technology to the continuous changes needed to facilitate optimal customer experiences over time. Neither customer experience excellence nor well-integrated business processes should be after- thoughts for business execution – they are the symbiotic heart of success.

 

 

Related Links:

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Information, Intelligence and Process:  Combining Forces to Better Answer Business Needs

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

Virtual Community: The New Home of Customer Service?

 

Companies have begun to extend customer service functions into the external online communities and forums that they sponsor. Communities offer a dynamic opportunity for collaborative support of customers to answer their questions, to give them guidelines and ideas for solving problems, to discuss new ideas and critiques for the company’s offerings.

However “Community” isn’t just one destination – it’s not limited to venues sponsored by individual organizations. Community is in every social venue that touches the customer and the company: other forums and social media sites offer support and sounding boards for customers of that company.  Companies should understand that an overall Virtual Community can come into play for providing customer service “anywhere anytime”.

Listening to these other social venues or communications channels has become very important to achieving highly responsive customer service/support. Listening may spur the company to join in on the discussion to offer answers and assistance. Or listening may be about clearly hearing what customers are saying and then acting on that feedback by making changes and improvements to offerings, support, marketing, and even strategic company direction.

 

According to Mark Studness, Director of eCommerce at Verizon, the Community Forums have been well-received since rolling out last July, generating more than 10 million page views.

"The Community Forums have spurred interaction among customers because people today expect to be able to find answers to their technical questions online," said Studness. "The feedback we've already received shows that our customers value the personalized peer-to-peer advice and feedback they receive from fellow users."

 

To achieve effective customer service in the Virtual Community, there’s plenty of work to do. It takes quite a bit of management, new processes, new culture and attitude adjustments, to communicate with and support customers, to glean feedback, and to add value to the customer experience, no matter where the conversation is taking place. Customer interactions on the Virtual Community plane must be synchronized with CRM and customer service practices and processes to ensure that all of the appropriate teams are tapped to participate. Strategy, goals and metrics also have important roles.

 

 
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/enterprise/2010/03/community_management_the_strat.php

 

 

Effective Customer Service Communities

It’s pretty obvious that traditional customer service practices are broken for a lot of companies. Companies are making investments in social connections to customers often with the intent of doing a better job of providing answers and support, and to learn from the conversations customers are having in a variety of social venues. The Virtual Community is taking shape as it encompasses social sites external to the company as well as company-sponsored communities, both for customers and for employees.

Companies wanting to set up their own communities with customer service orientations must first engender an internal community and collaboration culture for employees and partners. Part of the collaborative activities are the empowerment and enablement of most or all employees to be customer advocates, and when appropriate, provide direct customer support. Communities can be silo-busters for enterprises where cross-departmental communication and cooperation are important.

When creating company-sponsored communities with a mind to customer service, Esteban Kolsky provides these guidelines:  

“Treat communities as the most important link between you and your customers since there is nothing that can replace the direct link you can have with them – and the free flow of information both ways...So, how do you make the move? Three things to get started”:

1. Make sure your customers want it – Quite simple, there ain’t no community without people. If your customers are not going to participate, nor do they feel they can get value out of it then the community will not succeed. …Best way to start? start a community alongside the rest of your support structure...Commit time and resources to grow it. then you start shifting people over slowly, finally make it the channel of choice. Sounds simple; it is simple.

2. Make sure your company can support it – Despite claims to the contrary, the most successful examples of community service are those where the company commits time, resources, knowledge and participants to them. If your experts are involved in the community, take interest in it, answer questions and receive feedback from customers the community will grow and become useful to you. If no one from your company ever enters the community, and it builds with its own content and resources, if you seem not to care about the feedback and knowledge built in it, then it will be a failure.

3. Let it be – I know this is hard to understand, but you have to let the content be free. Monitoring content, censoring entries, and controlling what goes where and how it flows through your community is not the way to go…It is likely that you will have to do some policing to get it started, but go lightly and err on the side of freedom. Once the community is up and running, make sure you use reputation tools built into them so the people that matter the most (engineers and outside experts as an example) can be recognized. Communities center around self-elected leaders and they are the ones that will control the content and quality of the community. Feel free to court them – but try not to control them.

 

The Customer Experience

The number one imperative for working with Community venues for customer service activities is to understand that the Customer Experience with the company is the real focus. Most customer service initiatives and practices have been pointed towards increasing agent and process efficiencies, while reducing costs, which benefits the company in the short term while offering limited benefits to customers. Changing the imperative to the Customer Experience does much more to lead companies to real customer relationship management and retention, as well as nurturing customer success, in a more scalable fashion.

 

The emerging view is to create a customer experience strategy focused on the business success of the customer. By being a vehicle for the customer’s success, companies expect to:

 - Extend the life of the customer

 - Develop a proactive advocate for their products and services

- Extract usable value from the customer’s experience that can be repurposed

- Reduce transactional support costs by developing more educated users

- Increase the value of the customer through additional product and service revenue

There is considerable evidence pointing to the success of this approach. A study by Booz Allen found that customer-centric organizations outperformed their industry peers 2:1 in revenue growth and generated profit margins five to 10 percent above their competitors. However, to deliver these results, organizations have to walk their talk. If a company wants to evolve from pushing product to delivering customer advocacy-level value, a shift in thinking and attitude is required.

 

The Customer Experience is only as good as what a company offers for its customer focus: customer-centric processes, reliable quality products, partnerships with customers for customer benefit. The entire company is responsible for positive customer experiences. The entire company can only provide effective customer focus if the internal company culture maps directly to the success and satisfaction of its customers. Again, the Virtual Community that benefits customers transcends delineations internal and external to the company. A major challenge for companies is to provide a consistent customer experience throughout the Virtual Community.

 

Bi-Directional Value of the Virtual Community  

The Virtual Community of interactions with customers provides many ways to enhance and grow positive customer experiences on a continuous basis. These interactions can be quite subtle and frequently can’t be easily measured using metrics that tie to company goals. For example, through the Virtual Community, new customer advocates arise bringing influence from their individual social networks. Tracking such influence is complex and, at times, elusive. However, significant new business for the company may result.

Dion Hinchcliffe writes extensively on the “Social Business” examining both technology and human implications, as in Social Business and Next-Generation CIOs - The Business Models:

Customer engagement on a whole new level. Leading enterprises are now finding that holding customers at arm’s length out of concern for cost is no longer necessary. Better customer service, higher satisfaction levels, and better retention are possible by employing techniques and platforms such as social CRM, online communities, and social media marketing that are especially high value. For example, financial services leader Intuit has been offering co-created customer support via Live Community to millions of customers for years, driving down costs and supporting customers much better than traditional non-social methods.

 

An article on DestinationCRM details the benefits identified by Dr. Natalie Petouhoff in her Forrester study, The ROI of Customer Service Communities:

While Petouhoff says she expected cost savings, the rise in product ideation was a surprise. In the study, she writes that customer service departments are rarely responsible for product ideation, but the nature of leaving commentary in the online community lends itself well to the process -- and can lead to other benefits.

"You wouldn't think 'customer service' when we went down this path," she says. "But because the ideas are in the community, interdepartmental collaboration can take place with them. As a result, customer service has an opportunity to step up to the plate and be an extremely valuable executive player."

In the study, Petouhoff notes several benefits that positively impact company customer service operations. Customers share the “win” from these benefits:

- increase in first-contact resolution

- boost in relevant Web-site content

Two more benefits listed in the Petouhoff study stand out as very important for customers: the already-mentioned new idea co-creation, and this one: improved customer retention and customer lifetime value. If customers are sticking around, it usually means that they are finding what they need and that they are satisfied well enough to continue dealing with the company. It likely means that customer frustrations have been reduced and confidence in the company has grown. Taking improved customer relationships one step further, communities for customer service help customers become more successful with the company’s products and services.

 

Often in the Virtual Community, problems, questions and requests are resolved faster and more accurately for the customer, by fellow customers, company employees, SMEs, and other community participants. When active on the Virtual Community, companies should be attuned to what each customer needs, and then take the appropriate action, which might be proactive, responsive, or passive. Many times listening to and understanding the customer is the best “action”.  The next step is to translate that understanding into a significant component of the strategy and direction of the company to further meet customer needs and sustain competitiveness.

 

  

Related Links

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

 

Competitiveness for many companies is often translated into external activities over which they have little or no control, such as focusing on tactical methods to attack competitors, to convince a customer not to buy from a competitor. These same companies overlook many activities that are completely in their control such as greatly improving and innovating product quality and reliability. Another area that can significantly enhance company competitiveness is working towards customer service excellence. Customer service excellence can produce a blatant ROI: Happy Successful Customers. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com makes a strong case for focusing on customers, rather than competitors:

When asked what competitors he worries about, Bezos replied that Amazon decided early on that it would be "competitor alert, but not competitor obsessed," Instead, his company is customer obsessed.

"The best customer service means the customer doesn't need to call you," Bezos says... That fixation on customer service appears to have paid off, Bezos says: The company has some of the highest customer service ratings in the retail industry.

 

 Swinging in the other direction, it’s fairly easy to dig up lots of horror stories and statistics on the high cost (quantitative and qualitative) of poorly executed customer service. For example, Genesys came out with a study, The Cost of Poor Customer Service, where consumers were surveyed globally:

Nearly 70% of consumers said they had ended a relationship due to poor customer service alone. Consumers feel the most significant root causes of poor service are:

• Being trapped in automated self-service

• Being forced to wait too long for service

• Repeating themselves

• Representatives that lack the skills to answer their inquiry

On average, consumers in virtually every country walk away from a relationship due to poor service. Overall, consumers end more than 1.4 relationships each year on average due to a poor customer service experience.

                 

The approach to customer service has been changing for many companies, and it clearly needs to change. Companies are facing not only the need to ramp up positive customer experiences whenever customers interact with the company, but now must understand and construct strategies for providing a seamless customer experience over multiple channels of communication. Many new customer communication channels are not even provided by the company. ‘Anywhere-anytime’ customer interactions, frequently driven by the customer, are happening now, and are likely to grow in diversity and occurrence over time.

But companies are not helpless in this “new world” of customer engagement. Companies have full power to create a consistent and differentiated service experience for their customers, across any and all channels. Making this happen is not an easy task, but making it happen can be a solid path to sustained competitiveness, and to providing continuous real value to customers.

 

A Continuum of Customer Engagement

Industry analyst Esteban Kolsky has been writing about the transition of customer communication channels from ones under company management to a proliferation of new modes of interaction, often pushed by customers. Kolsky considers customer-driven communication channels part of a continuum that is currently evolving:

This new continuum arose from the Social Customer becoming demanding, and expecting the interactions to happen on their own terms. No longer do customers want to be transferred from department to department – they want quick resolution by whomever they happen to interact with. They expect to get access to the relevant data regarding their transactions virtually anywhere, in any format. They want to dictate the terms of the relationship as they deem relevant…

…we see organizations today ill prepared across all channels to deal with it. Their people are not prepared to deal with customers and communities accessing all relevant information, their processes are not sophisticated enough to accommodate these dynamic demands for information and data, and the technology behind them definitely is not up to par to support flexible exchanges of information as determined by the customer – not the organization.

From Customer Lifecycle Transactions to Socially-Augmented Relationship Continuums

 

Beyond a continuum of communication channels, the path to improved customer interactions must focus on people, practices, processes, and technologies, with technologies subservient to the first three components. New accomplishments for engaging experiences with customer service functions can include knowledge co-creation that will benefit many, collecting customer intelligence to underpin ever-improving service, and highly relevant personalized exchanges that speed up acquisition of answers for customer questions and needs.

 

                                   

             Source: From Customer Lifecycle Transactions to Socially-Augmented Relationship Continuums 

 

One Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels, Old and New

Guy Stephens writes in a recent post about the influence of social media on customer relationships with companies. Stephens’ wonderfully detailed post is a response to a report from the Institute of Customer Service, Return on investment in customer service: the bottom line report. A few of his observations:

The report points out:

- customer service is moving towards a fundamental shift away from a largely transaction–based cost center to a strategic driver that helps generate value for the organisation

- calculating the ROI in customer service is complex

- a profound change for the customer service world is taking place

(but) the preoccupation remains firmly on the channel, or the mechanics of the channels. The modern day contact centre has been built on the pursuit of tactical efficiencies and expediencies, but its future lies in a far more expansive, challenging and less familiar landscape.…although technology has created many new channels that affect customer behaviour, the traditional channels don’t disappear.

To succeed with all customers, creating and maintaining consistency of experience across and between channels of communication, through many interactions, is the priority. This goes beyond listening well to the customer -- this is about action, enablement and empowerment.

 

                
 
 

Developing Solutions for the Customer Experience Continuum

Recently I worked with software company Sword Ciboodle, collaborating with Mitch Lieberman (VP Marketing Americas and well-known SME for Social / CRM) and several others to co-create a thought piece on the current state and future direction of quality customer service experiences, including the evolving customer engagement continuum, – and the impacts on company success and on the value created for customers. 

Sword Ciboodle, based in Scotland, has been growing its presence in the Americas. The Ciboodle software solutions are all about helping companies provide improved customer interactions and the many ways that this can be accomplished, including traditional customer service. Ciboodle technology powers a customer engagement platform that includes capabilities for CRM, customer intelligence, dynamic process management, and a good start on tapping into multi-channel communication interfaces. Ciboodle also gets into interfaces with social apps, plus sentiment analysis, a built-in community platform, and self-service portals. Ciboodle has a view in mind for the future of customer service and is exploring the customer engagement continuum as the ‘anywhere anytime’ customer interaction venue that is likely to become more important for many companies.

  

Collaborating with a Company That Believes In People-Centric Businesses

Collaborative projects are frequently distinct from one another, so “rules of engagement” should reflect the goals and needs unique to each project. “Rules of engagement” may be explicit or just informally understood. Collaborative communication is best when open and responsive, at a frequency that moves the work along. And companies that believe in collaboration and in connecting people for mutual benefit also end up creating solutions and deliverables that work well for what people want to get done and how they want to do it. All of the above notions have been part of the collaborative experience to create the white paper with the Ciboodle team.

The content of the white paper that we co-created is much richer for having the participation of multiple strong team members. The full team includes these experts who have been with Ciboodle for several years: Clare Dorrian (VP Marketing EMEA), Ian Henderson (VP Presales / Strategic Consulting), Rachel Tait (Marketing Manager Americas), and Lisa Goodwin (Design & Marketing Americas). I greatly appreciate all of the knowledge and insight that they have shared with me, and the great enthusiasm that this team brings to the work that Ciboodle does. Towards the end of the project, newcomer John Merritt (Product Marketing Manager Americas) jumped right in to shepherd the white paper through final production and publication. Then there’s Mitch, whose vision, drive and commitment contributed so much to the content and direction of the white paper.

  

If you are interested in reading the white paper Focusing on the Total Customer Experience (and I highly recommend that you do…), send an email request to:  whitepaper@sword-ciboodle.com  And then please come back to my blog or to Mitch’s blog to let us know your thoughts, reactions, new ideas, and suggestions for improving customer interactions, achieving customer service excellence, and the evolution of the customer engagement continuum.

Mitch has been turning out posts on the white paper topics, including:

The Importance of Positive Customer Service Experiences

Coordination, Collaboration and Co-operation; An Approach to Service Excellence

Creating Graceful and Rewarding Customer Service Experiences

The Dynamic Customer Service Experience Framework

  

My Related Links

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

Disclosure:  Sword Ciboodle sponsored and compensated me for the white paper that I wrote with Mitch Lieberman.

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

 

The notions of web presence and customer engagement aren’t new -- but are gaining in interest as web presence expands beyond the corporate website and as companies must know more about effective means of connecting to customers. Many questions swirl around understanding what engagement is, what defining characteristics should be measured and why, how to align metrics to goals, and which metrics matter the most. Context – or even hierarchies of context – plays a major role for selecting metrics, analyzing the data returned by metrics, and understanding what to do with the data. 

Engagement - like influence - is at heart an abstract. For purposes of customer engagement on the web, engagement can be thought of as the measurement of attention to something, which takes us to the ‘can of worms’ of what constitutes customer attention to a company’s web presence. For each company, what comprises engagement can be fairly unique, generally derived from a matrix of attributes, in turn leading to a matrix of metrics. As web presence becomes more far-flung and sophisticated, the metrics, tools, data, and analyses become more complex.

Which are the right attributes and metrics? For each company, they are the ones that measure actions and events that relate to key business context and goals. Many different domain experts offer many different kinds of metrics from which to choose, any of which could be relevant to individual companies. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it’s likely that each organization will need to constantly assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness – and that the change of metrics selection will be continuous, hopefully to reflect: actions taken in response to analysis, new markets explored and company innovations.

Jumping into an assessment of customer engagement is not a simple undertaking and will take a lot of work. Monitoring web presence on sites other than the corporate website is still a new undertaking, with the tech tools still evolving. Also in continuing evolution is the understanding of how to interpret data collected and how to use that data to make decisions for solution offerings, customer connections and communication, and business strategy. A company will need to define both the current status and the desired status for what constitutes an ‘engaged customer’, yet another definition set that should continuously evolve.

 

Why Understanding Engagement Matters

Most organizations have moved well beyond clocking the number of hits on a web page. Not only do these organizations have a tall order to provide personalized experiences as well as high quality content on the corporate website, but visitors to the site must be sufficiently engaged to take action. What sort of action is taken depends on the company’s strategy for web presence and customer engagement, further in support of overall business strategies and goals.

Forrester analyst Stephen Powers covers web content management solutions, and to a certain extent, web engagement.  In The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem, 2010 Powers discusses engagement:

Customer Engagement Remains Top Of Mind For Companies

The uncertain economy has increased pressure on companies to engage customers more efficiently, especially via online channels that offer lower-cost ways to interact with customers, enable better lead generation, and increase customer retention rates. This is likely why investments in software to manage customer experiences has held up relatively well in the current economy. 

Our most recent data suggests this trend will continue into the next year. Consider that in 2010, 51% of organizations plan content management implementations, more than one-third will implement or upgrade customer relationship management tools, and one in four is planning marketing automation software investments. 

 

An article in Forbes brings up the tough part of measuring engagement – the highly qualitative nature of engagement, no matter the context:

For the past year or so, the conversation around how to "engage" consumers online has spiked among publishers, media companies, advertisers and agencies. As Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard said, "Marketers monitor the front end and the back end so they see click-streams and commerce. ... The difficult part is the qualitative part in between, which is the level of engagement."

The qualitative aspect of web engagement takes us into the messier world of sentiment analysis, which is still a work-in-process, and that of semantic/content analysis. Demarcations are likely to start blurring between what matters for customer engagement on the corporate website and what matters on social sites, also along qualitative lines.

Web analytics domain expert Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog post in 2007 entitled “Engagement" Is Not A Metric, It's An Excuse providing this view on qualitative versus quantitative aspects of engagement:

At the heart of it, engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative.
Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative (translate that as: "we have clickstream, let's take our interpretations of what could possibly be happening, now find clicks that can carry the burden of our personal impositions, voila! here's engagement").

The reason engagement has not caught on like wild fire (except in white papers and analyst reports and pundit posts) is that it is a "heart" metric we are trying to measure with "head" data, and engagement is such a utterly unique feeling for each website that it will almost always have a unique definition for each and every website.

 

Since 2007, quite a bit more progress has been made in the how and why of web engagement metrics, but some of the problems remain. Distributed web presence outside the corporate website has added another dimension to the qualitative elusiveness of web/customer engagement. User-generated content in forums, blogs, microblogs, communities must be found, assessed for sentiment and key content. Processes for engaging the author of the UGC must be designed to try to open more communication channels for customers. And then we have to figure out how to measure all of this in meaningful ways.

 

 Choosing Effective Metrics

Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.

-- Albert Einstein

 

So…there are an overwhelming number of individual metrics that relate to customer / web engagement, the customer experience on a particular website, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. Web engagement not only pertains to company-owned web assets but to the many social sites that continue to proliferate on the Internet. Companies must decide where and how they wish to monitor engagement, using metrics and the tools to do so. Before choosing metrics, a clear understanding of the company’s hierarchy of strategies, programs and objectives must be in place.

Not only do high level business strategies impact the selection of attributes to monitor and measure, but other levels of strategies and objectives matter too. Individual initiatives designed by product marketing, marketing and sales groups have specific achievable components and objectives. Web engagement metrics will align to levels of program objectives as well as to the company’s ‘big picture’, essentially a hierarchy of metrics building toward overall business strategies, and toward building future direction. Metrics only have meaning if proper analysis is conducted, results examined against objectives, and if processes for taking action are in place, with decisions and next steps activated. (And then repeat….)

I’m not going to provide an overview of the vast array of tech tools available to assist in monitoring and measuring web/customer engagement. The solution space is in early stages, so there is much still to do to ‘master’ the world of engagement metrics. Suffice it to say, that there is a lot of work going on to develop and refine tech offerings.

In the category of ‘not everything that counts can be measured”: Listening, understanding, acting on  what engaged customers/buyers have to say are among the most important corporate ‘to-dos’ regarding real engagement. Companies must also heed the contextual relevance of any customer-generated content, for real understanding; content cannot be yanked from its context and analyzed in a vacuum.

  

Different Strokes for Different Folks – The Many Faces of Engagement Metrics

I’m going to run through a number of metric matrices proposed by several sources to illustrate different approaches and ways of organizing engagement measurement.

  

>> Web Properties Owned by Organizations

In the Forrester report Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007, four main components are identified as attributes for customer engagement:

Involvement – Measurable aspects of an individual connection to an organization or brand

Interaction – Depth/breadth of an individual connection

Intimacy – Sentiment of an individual towards organization / brand

Influence – Indicators that an individual will encourage someone else to visit, consider, buy

 

 
 
Forrester: Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007

 

Eric Peterson, of Web Analytics Demystified and well-known in this field, published a multi-part blog series in 2006 on engagement (I recommend reading the entire series). Here are a couple of his notions regarding the selection of metrics:

Engagement goals:

(Example) - Based on my knowledge of my site visitors and their long-term usage patterns, my engagement goals are as follows:

• I would like that visitors would view and interact with certain content on my site;
• I would like visitors to subscribe to this weblog to stay connected;
• I would like visitors to maintain a low recency with my content, regardless of whether they’re reading blog posts or viewing pages on my site;
• When visitors are on my web site, I would like them to spend a reasonable amount of time interacting with my content;
• When visitors return to my site, I prefer they remember my domain name and return to my site directly, either via a bookmark or by directly entering my URL into their browser.

Key areas for metrics:

…we had been talking about how to measure engagement on their web site. We’d gone round-and-round on ideas about what constitutes an “engaged” visitor and narrowed it down to a few key areas:

• The visitor views “critical” content on the web site
• The visitor has returned to the web site recently
• The visitor returns directly to the web site some of the time
• Some high percentage of the visitor’s sessions are “long” sessions
• If available, the visitor is subscribed to at least one available site feed

  

More recently, Chris Meares, senior data analyst at philly.com, home of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, applied his understanding of Eric Peterson’s work in engagement by adapting a white paper called “Measuring the Unmeasurable: Visitor Engagement” by Peterson and Joseph Carrabis.  Meares collaborated with Ryan Davis, the president of Philly.com, and Wendy Warren, the vice president for content, on their formula for measuring visitor engagement. The result so far is:

 

C_i — Click Index: visits must have at least 6 pageviews, not counting photo galleries

D_i — Duration Index: visits must have spend a minimum of 5 minutes on the site

R_i — Recency Index: visits that return daily

L_i — Loyalty Index: visits that either are registered at the site or visit it at least three times a week

B_i — Brand Index: visits that come directly to the site by either bookmark or directly typing www.philly.com or come through search engines with keywords like “philly.com” or “inquirer”

I_i — Interaction Index: visits that interact with the site via commenting, forums, etc.

P_i — Participation Index: visits that participate on the site via sharing, uploading pics, stories, videos, etc.

 

Tracking site visits with this level of specificity is time-consuming - Meares says he devotes about a third of his full-time job to analysis of the engagement equation — but it has produced some interesting information. For instance: “We’re definitely seeing the impact of social media and how it provides engaged visitors.” While Google and Yahoo provide a lot of traffic, the visits that they send to Philly.com don’t tend to be engaged. Only 20.34 percent of visits that come through Google are engaged visits. In comparison, 33.64 percent of visits that come via Facebook are engaged.

 

  

>> Customer Engagement on Other Sites

Over in that other world of web presence and engagement, social media sites, many domain experts and proponents have been working through definitions and metrics for customer/visitor engagement as well. The discussion of attributes and metrics for engagement on social sites has great relevance to those monitoring engagement on corporate websites, since many companies have set up their own social sites for forums, communities, blogging and so on. And of course, these companies pursue monitoring the many sites that do not belong to them.

 

Jeremiah Owyang has written numerous posts in his blog on the topic of what constitutes engagement and what metrics are useful for participants in social media sites. Here’s one version from 2007:

My working definition:

“Engagement indicates the level of authentic involvement, intensity, contribution, and ownership”

 

It’s possible for me to shorten it to:

“Apparent Interest” (and later whittled down to “Interest”)

 

Engagement Formula: 

“Attention + Interaction + Velocity + Authority + Relevant Attributes (variable)”

 

 

  


http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/category/social-media-measurement/

 

 

Social / Customer Engagement – another view

 

 
 
http://emediavitals.com/article/37/emerging-web-metrics-focus-engagement-audience-quality

 

 

 

Related Links

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions & markets

Time Travel Required: Finding #WEM in the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the ‘New’ White Paper

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services