Highly Competitive - software industry insights

B2B Software Strategies: Startups, Starting from Scratch, Re-Inventing

 

I write a lot about different B2B software solutions and try to provide lots to "chew on" about the good and not-so-good aspects of software offerings in different solution spaces. I constantly look at new thinking and work out my own thoughts and recommendations. Beyond the solutions themselves, I also explore other aspects of providing software solutions: new directions, challenges, internal and external factors, and especially a strong focus on the Customer. Making software that benefits the Customer means creating solutions that work the way customers / users work, adopting more effective customer-focused approaches for marketing and selling, and changing from being tech-centric to solving real customer problems. I suppose I want to help software vendors go into "hype rehab", to be able to do things for real, particularly from the customer perspective.

What I write comes from my direct experience working with software vendors, customers and end users. How I gain that experience comes from what I do for a living: consulting with and advising all kinds of B2B software vendors on product strategy, better sales and go-to-market strategies, the right target markets and customer segments. I want to help vendors create software that really benefits customers and end users, and performs well (you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one…).

Over the years I've worked with many different kinds of customers, both for software solutions that I've developed and for packaged solutions from vendors. I respect customers and end users – I also know that customers aren't always right, and don't always have clear motives when it comes to acquiring software. As a solo consultant, I work mostly with startups, and small and mid-sized vendors. I like the mindset of these not-so-large companies and the energy most of them bring to creating software -- but not all of these companies fully understand how to function well as a software vendor that meets customer needs. Just like large software vendors, these companies can get lost in the technology and lose sight of what really matters – if you're in the business of selling software.

    

                                                                                                                         Source: watirmelon.com  

 

 

Software Vendor Strategy

Software technology vendors are challenged more than ever to evolve if they are to survive – this may be even more the case for smaller vendors. Larger traditional software vendors are being challenged by SaaS and cloud offerings, and by customer dissatisfaction with bloated, overpriced monolithic software stacks. Evolutionary pressures are also hitting the software startup world, although many regional start-up communities aren't prepared to recognize such pressures. New ways are emerging for creating new companies that don't adhere to the "old school" startup way of thinking.

Another segment of the software industry that is on the rise relates to companies that re-invent themselves. As companies re-invent themselves, especially smaller vendors, benefits can come from thinking somewhat like a startup, especially when creating a new vision for the company. But these re-inventing companies can also think too much from the startup perspective and forget that they are in a different category with different advantages and challenges.

There are a lot of small software companies that are starting from scratch. But these companies may not exactly fit the "classic" definition of a startup either. Certain "old school" VCs and entrepreneurs only consider a startup to be a company intended for rapid growth through highly disruptive services or solutions intended for a large market, and frequently, to be sold as soon as possible. With today's economic volatility this approach has less effectiveness. The approach is also riddled with subjectivity and ambiguity, and gives rise to endless - and usually pointless - debates about whether certain companies are truly startups.

Whether reinventing or starting from scratch, this question needs to be asked: are your efforts meant to result in flipping the basic company as soon as possible, or do you want to grow into something more? If there are investors, they may push for a quick sale so they can reap their rewards sooner rather than later. So the company should decide early on if the core strategy includes evolution into a mature company. That decision impacts: who should be selected as backers, how to handle employees, who the real target markets and customers are, and many other critical aspects of running a software company.

Focus on Customer for Real Competitive Differentiation

It still eludes many companies (startups, starting from scratch, re-inventing, or well-established) that the "competitive" factors that matter most when it comes to winning and keeping customers center on: solving customer problems; providing ease-of-use for the tasks to be done; creating software that works the way customers work; and ending up with a product that is cost-effective to buy and maintain. A significant competitive edge can come from delivering on the promise: our software will help you and your business in real ways (and won't be a pain to use).

I worked recently with two smaller software vendors: one in the process of re-inventing itself, and one that has been "starting from scratch"…for three years. For this article, it doesn't matter what kind of software solutions they offer, although both are working on SaaS offerings. What matters is how they are going about building their businesses, and whether what they are doing will be effective or not. The two vendors are taking very different approaches to how they are going to market and how they consider the Customer in the equation. It's not a question of which approach is "better" – it's a question of figuring out strategies that will work, and why a lack of strategy usually goes badly.

 

Re-Inventing A Software Company – Lots of Hard Work

My client, the re-inventing vendor, is making a big and very deliberate transition from providing on-premises software to building a fresh SaaS version that truly takes advantage of the SaaS solution delivery model and the notion that software should work the way customers work. A lot of the work that we have done together centers on the fact that going SaaS will transform almost every aspect of the business, from business model to pricing to marketing and sales – and particularly how customers interact with the software and the company.

These following points are at the heart of how my client is going forward:

Necessity: The Mother of Reinvention

A majority of respondents (53 percent) say they have reinvented their business "to stay afloat or competitive." This strategy is reinforced in the current competitive climate that 38 percent of respondents describe as "extremely intense."

"Small-business owners are especially adept at reinvention – whether because of obstacles or new visions for growth," Veltre said. "Change is never easy, but neither is starting and running a business. We see our small-business clients embracing change and reinventing themselves to secure a rewarding future."

As part of the reinvention process, small-business owners say they focused on overhauling the products or services they offered (47 percent).

If small-business owners aren't reinventing their business, they stay sharp and evolve to keep up with the competition. The following steps were cited as ways they kept business thriving:  

88 percent kept updated and knowledgeable about their field

70 percent increased face time with customers

 

It has been exciting to see a company that really understands its original software business now embrace the SaaS platform and build an offering that takes advantage of what works best for customer-focused SaaS, particularly around clean design and usability from the end user perspective. It's also real work to alter management mindsets and help the company realize that it is leaping into a whole new world. The change to SaaS will likely lead this company to increased innovation in what it does for customers.

There seem to be a lot of articles about how traditional vendors often fail at creating SaaS offerings but these articles are generally talking about large companies who obviously come with a lot baggage. Smaller vendors are usually more agile and open to new thinking. They are much more in touch with their customers, and have the real-world experience to avoid certain pitfalls and to hard-earned credibility to a new SaaS solutions platform

To a certain extent, having a startup mindset is useful, especially when taking on a new solution delivery model. The mindset is necessary to be strongly open to change and some very new concepts of doing business. But the re-inventing company must keep in mind that it is not starting over. The company needs to see that many years of experience, lessons learned and a diverse customer base are invaluable, and catapults the re-inventing well beyond a "startup".

This re-inventing company is hungry for real intelligence and insight to be able to formulate good strategies, to understand the new SaaS paradigm, to know how to market to customers, and who those new customers may be. Getting a good feel for the vendor landscape is also essential. For SaaS, web presence and pull marketing escalate in importance; well-informed and well-crafted strategies and tactical implementations for marketing and sales must be based on the right intelligence.

Brand identity is a focus for the re-inventing company, not for competing against larger vendors, but to make clear to customers what the company does, that it does it well and can be counted on as a partner. This company is crafting core concepts around the customer and end user. As to lessons learned that are being applied to the SaaS offering: which current solutions have done well; what customers have indicated they liked and didn't like; unexpected use cases from customer implementations that open doors to niche solutions.

This company has a real commitment to customers and solving problems. This company is learning how to see from the customer perspective. As a step in that direction, they are revamping the current website not only to accommodate a SaaS offering, but to make sure that the website responds to the way customers want to navigate it.

 

"Starting From Scratch" Gets Off on the Wrong Foot – and Stays There

Unfortunately the client that started from scratch is not an inspirational story, but more a cautionary tale. Both from my brief advisory tenure and what I continue to know about the company, this is a company with no focus and no strategy, and apparently no concern that these two essential ingredients are missing from the plan (if there is a plan). "Starting from scratch" is entering its fourth year of existence.

What's the problem? "Starting from scratch" seems to be a vanity creation of the founder, with decisions running on his ego. The founder had previous experience with starting and growing a couple of other small software companies, and has elevated himself to "I can do no wrong". Generally rude and self-involved whether dealing with employees or outside consultants, this founder is a control freak. The final fatal flaws: changing direction constantly, no cohesive vision, and no ability to stick with a solution direction long enough to develop it. These are not pivots – there's simply not enough structure in place to pivot from. More like meanderings.

On face value there is a good idea for the SaaS offering. But it has never been given enough time for definitive development and execution. In fact, very little has been built. A rather large list of vaporware inhabits the corporate website, with a hidden "we will build it if they come" agenda. The company basically waits for a single customer request something that will then be developed as the next app. The flaw of this approach - creating an app for a market of one - should be obvious. Beyond that, the "model" doesn't scale. All the company has is a series of one-off custom apps, just like a developer for hire would do. Brief flights responding to "whim" do not add up to a long term strategy.

Remember, this is a SaaS offering. But there is very little available for subscription. Kind of defeats the purpose. There is no process of testing apps with potential customers for feedback, since there are no apps to test. There is little research on target markets, customer roles and problems to be solved – simply because the founder already "knows" what should be done. Yep.

Marketing efforts are of course scattershot, following the lead of the founder. For example, efforts related to social media are not part of an overall marketing strategy, but are random self-promoting blasts that totally miss the opportunity for interaction on social media. There's no on-going plan, no engagement with potential customers, little creation of useful or high quality content. Just a lot of disjointed activity with no overriding purpose.

With no brand identity or real goals for the development of the offering, this company is playing at business. The founder has failed to define a real solution space, target markets/customers, go-to-market strategy, a business model – and then stick to them long enough to get anything done. For "starting from scratch", a real customer focus is non-existent as far as defining target markets and problems to solve, and then providing a well-developed SaaS offering to do it. Surprisingly this company has VC backers. These backers are in the game because of the founder's previous companies.

There wasn't much that I could do for this company simply because they don't understand what a mess they are in. They had no interest in comprehensive market and customer intelligence, so I simply completed the requested tactical project for them – the end.

 

Devil's Advocate and Tough Love

While my consulting practice officially involves terms like market intelligence, future trends and customer strategy, I frequently think the better phrase is "Devil's Advocate". Most companies, whether re-invented, starting from scratch or a "classic" startup, need a devil's advocate. Partly to counteract all that kool aid drinking so many software companies tend to do. The devil's advocate is needed to dish out a certain amount of 'tough love' to help companies find and navigate a good path for growth and success.

Unfortunately many new companies, or re-inventing ones, rarely budget for in-depth assessments for determining the right strategies for products, go-to-market, customers, and vendor landscapes. These companies need outside perspectives to determine if the company is truly solving customer problems, providing a product that customers want to use, or even for understanding whether the software has value for any customers.

A devil's advocate asks all of the "so what" questions: does the solution matter, is the offering really a solution, who would buy it and why. The devil's advocate helps companies keep an eye on the future, understand the present, and keep looking in the rear view mirror to catch a glimpse of which unexpected vendor may be their next main competitor. B2B software vendors have specialized risks and competitive factors. All too often these vendors are too rooted in the day-to-day to look in any other direction, no matter what stage of development the company is in. Keeping pace with change is critical; change will be constant and sometimes brutal.

Those companies who ignore the coaching of the Devil's Advocate, or don't think they need one, many times achieve these negative distinctions:

• Lack of real innovation – more "me too" masquerading as "new tech"
• Short-sighted approach for employees – now and for future direction
• Too enamored of the tech itself – no sense of why a customer would use it
• No real markets or customers
• Failure to continuously monitor solution space, markets, customers, other vendors
• Failure to constantly test strategies for change, good and bad, and then figure out what actions to take

To prevent bad outcomes, software vendors of any size need real intelligence, real analysis and realistic strategies.

 

 

Related Links

Three Journeys: Lifecycles of Enterprise Software Buyers & End Users

The Irrelevance of Porter's Five Forces for the B2B Software Industry

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

Customer-focused Marketing Automation: ‘Automation’ is the Easy Part

                    Cross-posted on CMSWire

 

Marketing automation (MA) is a hot topic right now – it's also in the early stages of potentially becoming an integral component of engendering positive customer interactions. Quite a bit has been written about what comprises current marketing automation capabilities. Most use cases center on email drip marketing and lead management / nurturing – done well, they can make a big difference for many companies. Enterprises are beginning to understand how to use MA for more on-target 'shepherding' of prospects during the buying cycle. And for enterprises with sophisticated buyer needs, marketing automation tools can provide a good means for building sustainable processes for continuous high quality leads and revenue growth.

There are stumbling blocks for marketing automation:

• Multi-channel customer experiences are fragmented and don't always map well into MA
• Marketing automation is doomed if it retracts into a robotic email-blasting machine
• A customer focus aligned with marketing automation requires several interconnected strategies for customer, marketing, content, lead gen - plus sales and marketing collaboration

A further complication is this advice from Forrester: frequently the customer has completed 75% of the buyer journey before engaging with sales. Of course, not all buyer journeys are the same -- often marketing automation is the most useful for complex journeys. But there's still a lot to do to be successful with marketing automation.

 

The Customer Perspective Always Matters

From the company perspective, enabling excellent (or even good) customer experiences can seem complicated, even ephemeral. Some marketing programs are trying to make the "customer experience" quite intricate, perhaps overly convoluted. Software solutions are being developed around marketing processes for "customer experience management", where too much emphasis may be on the "management" part, and too little on what constitute positive or desirable experiences from the customer perspective.

The customer perspective should also drive the use of marketing automation. There's a lot of activity for the development and adoption of MA technologies – there's also a lot of room for improvement regarding processes, practices and objectives. All of this should swirl around what the customer needs and wants from the enterprise's products and services. And that will take deep intelligence, constant measurement and improvement, and continuous analysis to achieve tangible results that benefit the customer and the enterprise.

 

A Forrester report from 2011 conveys some of what it takes for success with marketing automation:

 

 

        

 

'Customer' and the Buyer Journey

To achieve more valuable use of marketing automation, you have to start with thoroughly understanding customers, buyer journeys, trigger events and key touchpoints. This means a lot of research, analysis and segmentation at sophisticated levels – all of which will have to be constantly refreshed. Behavioral and predictive analytics can provide useful insights, but these types of analytical modeling are not simple tasks. Collaboration with domain experts must be included to validate research, analysis and recommended steps to take.

Buyer journey mapping is a significant undertaking for engendering better customer buying experiences and for adding intelligence to marketing automation plans. Customer segmentation may yield multiple buyer journeys and maps, and possibly different customer experiences – this will serve to take marketing automation further away from an undesirable one-size-fits-all. Buyer journey mapping helps better decision-making for aligning the interconnected strategies and processes needed to constantly refresh relevance for customers, particularly when marketing automation is in play.

    
 

Source: Forrester

 

 

Buyer journeys are not always linear progressions. Instead steps or phases in the journey can circle back on themselves. Different phases may be revisited until the buyer is ready to move to subsequent phases. Circle-back cycles can occur multiple times. All of which adds complexity to constructing effective marketing automation processes.

 

 

Forrester's customer experience touchpoints flow captures the iterative nature of many buyer journeys:

 
                                          Forrester: Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions

 

 

 

Customer Intelligence: Data, Integration, Analytics

For almost all aspects of Marketing, data really matters for achieving sustained effectiveness. Data is needed from many different internal systems and also must be collected from external venues such as social sites. Data sources and business processes must be integrated to manage the constant need for up-to-date information on customers. Useful customer segmentation can only be achieved through such integration efforts.

Constant interaction between marketing automation and CRM systems is another must-have. Beyond these two systems, the understanding of customer needs and desires also requires data from customer experience systems, social media owned by the enterprise, and campaign management. For marketing automation to support engaging and personalized customer interactions, detailed analysis of communications over time can reveal what buyers are likely interested in now and for the near future.

Marketing automation processes don't have to end with converted leads. Significant opportunities remain for targeted customer communications to nurture a more developed long term customer relationship, to open the door for new interactions, and eventually grow new purchases and customer brand advocacy. Effective personalized interactions that evolve with the customer relationship can derive from the use of analytics. Customers can change very quickly – marketing automation has to keep up.

The data and intelligence attained in support of MA objectives must be shared with many other systems to enrich the continuous improvement of enterprise-wide customer focus and service. Not only are integrated systems and processes needed to accomplish this, but healthy cross-team collaboration, as well as the right strategies from top to bottom.

 

Marketing Automation + Customer Intelligence = Lots of Quality Content

A key aspect of marketing automation is matching the right content or message to the right customer at the right phase of the buying journey. In some ways, this is easier said than done, keeping in mind what it takes to really understand the customer. A great deal of very creative content will need to be developed along with savvy rules and decision processes. This is Personalization on Steroids.

Web content / experience management platforms and practices have a complementary relationship with marketing automation, and a critical need for interoperability to benefit each of them. Marketing automation is first focused on prospects who are purposefully interacting with enterprise web assets. WEM and content marketing are often attuned to engaging prospects who are less familiar with the brand and what it has to offer. Integration of MA and WEM for comprehensive interactions with prospects and customers has great potential:

HubSpot conducted a study last year on website redesign. What we found was that marketers redesign their websites with a surprising frequency. 68% of marketers underwent a website redesign in the last 12 months….Most marketers who redesigned their website did so for branding reasons or because "the previous website was old," and the company "just needed to modernize." When you think about it, none of these reasons are particularly focused on the customer.

After hearing from marketers, the survey also asked website visitors what they thought. The results were significant. 76% of respondents said the most important factor in the design of a website is that it "makes it easy for me to find what I want." So why are so many homepages driven by company-needs rather than those of prospective-customers?

The short answer is data. Emails sent through marketing automation are triggered by lead intelligence data. But most marketing automation systems are set up separately from a website's content tools so the same data can't trigger website content in a similar way.

 

For marketing automation content to provide superior customer engagement it must follow the same 'rules' that exist for effective content marketing: it's no longer about the vendor and product features, it's about content that helps prospects and customers solve their problems and improve the performance of their enterprises. Content marketing strategies map content to buyer journeys – since the same applies to marketing automation, integration opportunities should be explored.

 

  

Silos or Ecosystem?

The more strategic aspects of marketing automation are in their infancy and are going to take time and a lot of hard work to deliver useful results. Customer-responsive email marketing and better management of lead generation are important steps in the right direction. But marketing automation has to go beyond email programs and lead nurturing to bring more value to improved customer interactions not only for buyer journey phases, but for ongoing relationships with customers.

Marketing automation can take on greater significance particularly when integrated with WEM and content marketing processes for intelligent content delivery that reflects real understanding of each customer segment. Anytime we are talking about content, we're talking Customer – so the needs and desires of customers must be at the strategic heart of integrated processes for MA, WEM and the other components of an integrated digital marketing ecosystem.

Marketing automation has the potential to evolve into a key piece for building dynamic intelligence that feeds many digital marketing processes. But marketing automation will not meet that potential if it focuses only on responses to the actions taken by buyers in one-off interactions.

 

 

Related Links

The New Data-Savvy Adaptive Marketing

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

Three Journeys: Lifecycles of Enterprise Software Buyers & End Users

 

There have been increased efforts to improve the usability and the user experience for enterprise software solutions. The user experience is much more than utilizing software – it's all the interactions that occur during the life cycle of the software for a particular set of end users and customers. This is why the term user journey may be the best for describing the ongoing "relationship" between users and vendors and the software they provide. To engender better post-sale end user experiences, software vendors must integrate that journey with two other journeys: the software design phase user journey and the buyer journey for purchasing software. Although different roles may inhabit these three journeys, this is an opportunity for convergence in terms of how to go about creating software that people want to buy, use, keep and recommend.

Enterprise software often provides a less satisfying experience for the end user journey. Enterprise software vendors really need to do a better job of focusing on the end user perspective, particularly to improve software structure and usability as much as possible. Perhaps larger vendors should take a lesson from smaller vendors: adopt a core focus with the end user at top of mind, and simply break down what is essential to achieve what users really need and want – no more, no less.

There are opinions that choosing SaaS / Cloud offerings is the no-brainer solution to poorly designed enterprise software -- but it's not that simple. In particular, larger enterprises have complex problems that usually require sophisticated software solutions that provide a lot of capabilities. Vendors should pay attention to the key word sophisticated: create clean, smooth-performing software through thoughtful design to enable great user experiences. Many enterprise customers / users' would like easy-to-consume little packages of software to handle needs but not all problems can be solved that way.

 

The Chicken and the Egg

The three journeys. Logically the order would be: 'software design phase' user journey; 'purchase of software' buyer journey; and post-sale end user journey. But I don't think that things really work that way when creating and selling software. Let's forget about the first release of a software offering and instead concentrate on the journeys that kick in thereafter. After all, when software is first designed it isn't about the user or customer as much as it is about the "vision" of the founders, or worst case, "cool technology".

The sequence I see: buyer journey, design phase user journey, and post-sale end user journey.

Each of these three journeys is distinct, and each journey serves up roles that comprise the Customer. Nice and confusing – and I believe that the lack of integration for how these journeys are handled by traditional software vendors has contributed greatly to the existence of far too many software offerings that do not achieve the work that "customers" need to be successful in their own enterprises.

In the sales process for traditional enterprise software, the customer-as-buyer often is a composite of roles: mid-level managers who choose the software, VPs who approve purchases, CEOs and CFOs who influence or dictate purchase decisions, and even staff in accounts payable who enact purchase transactions. Defining and engendering excellent experiences for a customer or buyer journey comprised of all of these roles will require a lot of work. But this is work that should be done for vendors to understand their "customers".

Things get messier when the "customer experience" extends to the two end user journeys – the composite "customer" has become more complex, requiring even more work to reconcile what it takes to deliver software that enterprises will want to buy, that users get value from for their work, and that will earn customer loyalty. And since, like so many aspects of enterprises, the three journeys usually persist in silos with little movement towards convergence, improving the customer experience will require vendors to understand a lot more about how these journeys should integrate and interoperate.

 

Why So Much Bloatware?

Bloatware has become the not-so-great hallmark of enterprise software. Many software companies fail to assess whether they have achieved a good core competency before branching off into other areas. If the knee-jerk reaction is to start adding bloatware, then it's time to re-examine the direction of the company, how it views the solution space, and the current business model. What gets lost in the arms race to add more features is the user experience. A degraded user experience leads to lack of adoption, continuous dissatisfaction with the software offering, and potential defection to another vendor. The inability of software vendors to see the three journeys in an integrated "big picture" may be one of the chief culprits for enterprise software bloat.

But there are other culprits. Buyers frequently focus on business goals and more strategic outlooks, so their requirements often do not always match what end users need. But business goals are also enacted by the day-to-day work of the end users who depend on software to get the job done well. The creators of software should keep both of these camps in mind.

End users are also guilty in the bloatware escalation. The users of software can make requests for features and functions that may only matter for current work needs. If the "customer" (composite of all the different roles) insists that these changes must be made to keep the account, vendors often cave and add more and more features over time. Many of these features may not even matter to the bulk of current and future end users.

 

 

                                                                                        Source: Creating Passionate Users

 

        

First Journey: The Buyer Journey for Purchasing

For enterprise software, it is the buyers of the software that many vendors see as the "customer". On the buyer journey, customers go through various stages to reach a decision about purchase. The buying process for enterprise software can be complex and involve multiple steps. Adding to complexity, the buyer is that schizophrenic composite of multiple roles in the enterprise. Since the buyer frequently is not the end user, the buyer's organization already has a serious disconnect between the decision makers and the employees who have to make use of the software in support of work to be done.

Most enterprise vendors want their sales teams to close deals quickly as possible. So vendors don't want sales teams veering off into extensive discussions of end user needs and requirements. These sales people are dealing with the composite buyer of the software and are more focused on the process to gain approval from all buyer roles.

The harmful disconnect between the enterprise software buyer journey and the end user experience is articulated by Michael Krigsman:

Economics and strategy lie at the heart of why traditional enterprise software is so unloved. For the most part, vendors sell these products to budget holders, who are primarily managers and executives, making end-user satisfaction a secondary consideration. When large companies buy software, selection committees focus on many factors, starting with the product's ability to address "organizational needs." This common approach incentivizes vendors to prioritize management goals over creating delight for end users.

Fellow member, Basab Pradhan, who is Senior Vice President and Head of Global Sales and Marketing at huge Indian consulting company Infosys, offers a pointed view:  

Enterprise software still doesn't care about users. Its focus continues to be serving executives, rather than employees, because executives make buying decisions. Therefore, we see all the song and dance about BI and in-memory computing, while employees continue to suffer with terrible UIs and no options.

 

                                                                      Source: AgileProductDesign.com

 

We are at a point where not only software vendors must better understand end users, but the buyers of software need the same education. If a company is buying software technology to improve performance and competitiveness, then the company had better focus on key contributors to success: empowered end users - their own employees - who deserve to have highly usable and reliable tools to carry out the work of the company without wasting a lot of time each day on software that is difficult to use and doesn't meet requirements.

 

Second Journey: Software Design and the User Experience

In software design and development phases, the user experience and user journey should be important aspects. The software companies that are improving the usability of their offerings realize that they have to understand how the software is used in the 'real world'. There can be multiple user roles that have different routines and reasons for interacting with the offering. It's likely that the growth of SaaS and mobile apps has been a significant factor in pushing more traditional enterprise vendors to take usability seriously, as expectations for what technology should deliver evolve.

Doing a good job with usability and the user experience is much more difficult for traditional enterprise software, which is often complex, with a lot of steps to complete tasks. Consumer apps and SaaS offerings have an easier time with usability due to much smaller scope for what the technology accomplishes. For designers and developers of enterprise software, a constant awareness of the various end users throughout all phases of software design and development is essential.

 

Principles of inclusive concept generation  

• Repeat to refine. Successive cycles of exploration, creation and evaluation should generate a clearer understanding of the needs, better solutions to meet these needs, and stronger evidence that the needs are met.
• Test early and test often. Perform quick tests with rough prototypes, early enough in the process that meaningful change is still possible.
• Strive for simplicity. Simplicity is powerful but elusive, it requires a clear and succinct vision of what the product is about. Ask "can you do it with less?".
• It's normal to be different. In addition, it's normal to want different things and do things in different ways. Understand diversity amongst your customers. Understanding disability is only one part of understanding diversity.
• Consider the whole user journey. Satisfying user goals involves designing for end-to-end journeys that takes place in real-world contexts.
• Detail matters. Dig deeper to uncover and address the things that people really do, really want, and really need.
• More than just users. Consider the needs of stakeholders such as regulators, shareholders, manufacturers, retailers, purchasers, installers, supporters, and maintainers.
• Challenge assumptions. It's easy to get stuck in thinking that the way things have been done is the only way they could be done. List your assumptions and ask "why?".
• Let ideas breathe. Give wacky ideas the chance to become great ideas.
• Prove it. Complement opinions with evidence.
• Wear different hats. Be creative, be critical and know when to switch.

 

In the article Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed, Helge Freheim discusses Hassenzahl's "Model of User Experience":  

Several models of UX have been suggested, some of which are based on Hassenzahl's model. This model assumes that each user assigns some attributes to a product or service when using it. As we will see, these attributes are different for each individual user. UX is the consequences of these attributes plus the situation in which the product is used.  

The attributes can all be grouped into four main categories: manipulation, identification, stimulation and evocation. These categories can, on a higher level, be grouped into pragmatic and hedonic attributes. Whereas the pragmatic attributes relate to the practical usage and functions of the product, the hedonic attributes relate to the user's psychological well-being. Understanding the divide can help us to understand how to design products with respect to UX, and the split also clarifies why UX itself cannot be designed.

 

Hassenzahl's "Model of User Experience"

 
  

Source: smashingmagazine.com

 

 

Often software vendors push their teams to complete new development as quickly as possible, imposing impossible schedules on work-constrained teams. With this approach, design and development teams are not given adequate time or even resources to properly pursue user experience improvements. Some teams may not even be interacting directly with product management or architecture teams – instead they are handed tasks to complete without benefit of the big picture or concern for the end user journey.

Design and development teams can be in silos cut off from other teams, and cut off from the 'customer enterprise' and its end users. Software design often calls out the importance of "stakeholders" -- often the reality is a rocky course through a poorly coordinated "ecosystem" of disparate non-unified groups with conflicting agendas. Often the stakeholder with the least power is the end user of the software.

 

Third Journey: The User Experience After The Sale

Often we think of the post-sale experience as the traditional customer lifecycle that focuses on all interactions between software vendor and the customer after the sale. However, the customer life cycle is usually concerned with the business aspects between the customer and the software company and not on how the customer continues to use and interact with the software itself. The "customer" in the customer life cycle may not even be any of the end users.

End users do have ongoing relationships with the software and the vendor as each user role utilizes the software solution in support of work to be done. Each end user experience is colored by the sum total over time of usability, performance, meeting needs, reliability, training, customer support, and so on.

End user adoption and success with the software should not be the responsibility of the buying company – it is the responsibility of the software vendor, if that vendor wants renewals, customer referrals, fewer unhappy customers, protection against competitors. Many software companies have developed genuine interest in helping end users achieve successful experiences and strive to create software offerings with the end user in mind. Vendors of complex software solutions often implement user enablement programs as guidance for accomplishing different projects and tasks, to help users get up and running more quickly.

Another approach to aiding and improving software user experiences is through monitoring technology. Monitoring technology measures, and at times manages, how end users work with enterprise software. The purpose is to help improve user experiences, to improve the adoption rates of software by enhancing the successful use of the software. Interactions can be analyzed on a user by user basis. However, most of these offerings are "application performance management" solutions where most of the focus is on the performance of the application in a given IT infrastructure, and not really on the people and their experiences.

One of the most empowering ways end users let vendors know about their experiences with software is through independent well-organized user groups, such as Americas' SAP User Group (ASUG). As with any community, end user groups provide a stronger voice for expressing the good, the bad and the ugly about the software in different ways: directly to the vendor, in discussion forums and other social media, in publications, at user group events.

One of the barriers for software vendors understanding end users comes from the customer enterprise itself, which is usually comprised of silos with poor cross-team collaboration and communication. There may be no concerted effort by the customer enterprise to find out what software end users want and need, and what they don't want. Successful user-focused software design requires constant and deep communication with end users. Vibrant interactions lead to better designs and better usability. Often thedesign team is not allowed direct access to end users – by the customer enterprise.

 

                                                         Source: Creating Passionate Users

 

 

Where Do These Journeys Lead?

It can be confusing when considering these three essential journeys that greatly impact the success of software offerings, both for vendors and customers. Terminology is confusing at times, with references to customers, buyers and users. All the more reason to understand what these journeys are about. Software vendors could greatly improve the usability and desirability of software offerings if they would understand and support interoperability between these customer/user journeys and experiences.

Many traditional software vendors lag in adopting an outside-in approach to creating, selling and supporting applications. Often the focus is not on the buyer or user, but on internal goals that can conflict with the needs of customers. Vendors follow paths to success that frequently are disconnected from customer success and end user experience excellence.

For many software vendors and their customer enterprises, the three journeys exist in silos, with disconnects between the teams that are involved in supporting and enhancing each journey. Integration and interoperability between the journeys must take place on both the vendor and the customer sides. And the vendor should see every aspect of the three journeys as an opportunity to demonstrate brand quality and reliability.

The software user experience, just like the customer experience, only belongs to the user. You can design software in support of the user experience, design for enhancing and improving the experience the user can potentially have, but you can never design the experience itself.

 

  

Related Links:

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

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

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

 

  

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

The Irrelevance of Porter’s Five Forces for the B2B Software Industry

 

For the software industry the use of strategic market and competitive intelligence has not been particularly well executed by many vendors. MI and CI for software vendors differs greatly from the more established practices for CPG, Pharma or manufacturing – often what works well for these other industries has little relevance for software vendors. The main difference: the intensely fast pace of constant change for most of the software industry. "Time" is measured in nanoseconds. As such the software industry requires a greater focus on MI and CI, but often actual practice does not include the most beneficial aspects.

Market Intelligence is essential for creating strong product strategy and for fine-tuning that strategy as industries, markets, customers, the product space, and competitors evolve over time – again usually very small windows of time. Core decisions for businesses must be based on reasonable understanding of significant and likely future events – what the potential impact could be, good and bad. Market intelligence is the dynamic means for uncovering the right future-pointing intelligence as early as possible, averting "nasty surprises" and discovering new opportunities.

Strategic market Intelligence differs from business research (and traditional business intelligence) through context -- a certain mindset held while the research and analysis phases are done. The market intelligence professional always has in mind the organization, its business and product space, the industry, customers and target markets, and the drivers behind the need for intelligence. It's an ongoing sense of the impact of what could be uncovered -- the ramifications of what seemingly unconnected items of intelligence could mean for the company. It ensures that business decisions and product direction are customer-focused, market-driven, and reality-based.

Where software companies go wrong with MI and CI efforts is limiting activities to directly supporting sales in tactical ways, focusing only on pointless programs for "killing the competition", and endless feature/function battles that are meaningless in today's commoditized markets for software solutions. Another wrong turn has been the adherence to Porter's Five Forces as a model for product strategy and for market and competitive intelligence, undoubtedly influenced by MBA school curricula in the eighties and nineties, much of which has now proven useless to many enterprises.

 

 

                                                PORTER'S FIVE FORCES 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Porter's Five Forces: The Magic Model that Doesn't Work

I recently read Steve Denning's article on the demise of Michael Porter's Monitor Group consulting firm. Porter invented a model for corporate "strategy" based on 'Five Forces' that has been treated almost as a reverential artifact for many years. Denning's article brought me back to my own thinking years ago on why Porter doesn't work for software companies. I never have really used Porter for strategic market intelligence for the software industry – instead I developed a matrix that holds more relevance to the needs of software companies.

I refer to Porter's model as an "artifact" because it is no longer relevant to today's markets, if it ever really was. It's linked to a business context set in the Eighties, when corporate strategy focused on inside-out objectives such as beating competitors and sustaining profitability with no connection to value delivered to customers – chest-thumping instead of serving customers. There was a great deal more market predictability and regularity. Today's markets obviously have become volatile and not so predictable; businesses are now challenged to create new business models multiple times during the life of the enterprise to survive and thrive.

 

Five Forces Model Fails the Software Industry

Because Porter's Five Forces model is based on non-changing market conditions, it is limited or even harmful for dealing with dynamic, ever-changing industries and markets. Well, the software industry never sits still, and this has intensified in recent years. And the customers of software vendors are also facing uncertain and fluctuating markets, which adds further complexity when seeking insight for future trends regarding customer needs and wants.

Professionally, Porter was not experienced in any industry, in any hands on sense, when he created the Five Forces model, so he didn't have practical experience to fully explore or prove out his model. If you don't understand the software industry, how people interact with software and rely on software to improve their own enterprises, then any indirect models will likely have little relevance.

Under Porter, competitive intelligence is not about going to market competitively to meet customer needs and desires - it's about "beating" everyone including the customer. The customer is not a partner but a conquered spoil of war. Not exactly the best path to engendering customer experience excellence – perhaps Porter's model is one of the reasons that many enterprises have done such a bad job of focusing on the customer. MI and CI better serve a software company when its purpose is to understand the competitive landscape well enough to seek out paths that diverge from the "herd" so that the company carves out underserved markets and better understands customer needs. Porter's aggressive modeling around "competition" has misguided organizations into becoming obsessed with destroying the competition.

Other areas where Porter's model comes up short:

• The value of partner ecosystems including supply chain
• Predicting future trends
• Identifying new customer segments
• Understanding that software solution spaces are commoditized
• When it's time to sunset solutions and markets

These are all essential to growth and evolution for sustaining success.

 

Defining and Sizing Markets – Another Porter Failure

For software offerings, market sizing used to be a fairly straightforward task, when technology problems and solutions were seemingly distinct and silo'd from other technology areas. Market sizing is important but many software vendors don't consider all of the parameters that actually define the markets and the customers that are the best fit for software offerings.

An example of market sizing that has become more complex – and that certainly would be poorly served by using Porter's model – is the software market for what used to be called Web Content Management and is now frequently called Web Experience Management. The use of websites and web presence by organizations to promote and sell their products has evolved to sophisticated levels where multi-channel customer experiences have greater importance and often involve Internet venues that are not controlled by the organization.

WEM is actually a composite of a solution ecosystem – understanding this leads to a better calculation of the overall market size. Although some market forecasts from analyst firms are stretching to include more of this ecosystem, often multiple market forecasts must be considered and added into the final market potential for WEM solutions. The overall solution ecosystem becomes compellingly relevant when taking the customer's point-of-view for the desired end-to-end solution.

Porter's model is ill-equipped to handle such converging markets or ecosystems. Often Porter's model is used in business school in simplistic calculations of market size where the 'profit potential' is the real goal, unfortunately without considering the many variables that go into real market potential. And of course such simplistic calculations also lead to the allocation of 'market share' – once again focusing on competitors rather than customers.

The complex variables for real market potential primarily center on the customer: meeting customer needs and desires, improving customer experiences with the organization, understanding who the customer is through useful segmentations mapped to solution scenarios, addressing usability and problem-solving effectiveness for the software offering, from the customer perspective. But these are harder variables to try to quantify and often are left out of the 'equation'.

Another aspect of WEM markets is the fact that there are two sets of customers to be considered: the customer who buys the WEM software, and the target customer for the web properties that will be built with the WEM software. Since WEM solutions impact two levels of buyers, the technology exists as a means to an end – it is the "end" that really matters and must be foremost in the minds of vendors and solution buyers. Porter's model has little to account for the complexities of 'customer' in this scenario.

 

So Why Am I Concerned about Porter

As many have pointed out, Porter's Five Forces seemingly didn't save Michael Porter's own high-dollar consultancy, so how can it have relevance to the needs of other organizations. Even Porter's consultancy wasn't part of the simple market construct that is the best fit for gaining benefit from the Five Forces model.

Steve Denning asks in his article:  

Had Monitor tried to implement Porter’s strategy and executed it poorly? Or had Monitor implemented Porter’s strategy well but the strategy didn’t work? If not, why not?

Denning further explains what was greatly lacking from Porter's model:   

There was just one snag. What was the intellectual basis of this now vast enterprise of locating sustainable competitive advantage? As Stewart notes, it was “lacking any foundation in fact or logic.” Except where generated by government regulation, sustainable competitive advantage simply doesn’t exist.

What’s gone wrong here was Porter’s initial thought. The purpose of strategy—or business or business education—is not about coping with competition–i.e. a contest in which a winner is selected from among rivals. The purpose of business is to add value for customers and ultimately society. There is a straight line from this conceptual error at the outset of Porter’s writing to the debacle of Monitor’s bankruptcy. Monitor failed to add value to customers.

 

For strategic purposes alone, a lot of time has been wasted on trying to align an organization's management with Porter's model when it just plain wasn't useful for most software companies. Many industries have spent way too much time and resources on building complicated and non-scaling frameworks that never really help the organization with strategic decision-making and don't provide real-time responsiveness to market changes. And if the model is applied only to particular segments of a complex corporation, important aspects will be missed by working without the context of interrelations across product groups and segments, as well as across organizational functions.

 

                                                                                                        Source: Julie Hunt Consulting

 

 

Customer-Focused Strategic Market & Competitive Intelligence

Many software companies continue to think of market and competitive intelligence as tactical methods to attack competitors, to convince a customer not to buy from a competitor, instead of: developing their own strategic solution offerings, building strategic relationships with customers, and understanding how to help customers really solve their problems and support their business initiatives with reliable solutions.

Focusing on Customers should be the starting point for MI and CI initiatives for software vendors. It is essential for software vendors to attract customers, and eventually sales, through true ROI and through differentiation other than feature/function minutiae. Market Intelligence programs, in collaboration with product marketing, are important sources of comprehensive research, analysis and recommendations for providing the elements of a software solution that can set it apart, from the customer perspective.

Strategic MI makes a significant difference for the competitiveness of software companies:  

• New opportunities – identify new trends that will matter to target markets and customers; how to get there before the competition (whenever possible)
• Enhanced customer interaction – understand customer POV, goals, needs, strategic direction
• Stronger target market selection & positioning – research, validate go-to-market and positioning; locate under-served markets for target customers and solution space; guide how to articulate positioning well for customers, analysts, industry
• Strategic view of competitive landscape – figure out true differentiation, figure out where competitors are not operating; understand the issues that matter to customers and the solutions they seek from competitors
• Early warning of industry and/or competitor changes – take advantage of opportunities and leverage/deal with threats and risk

 

Related links:

Software companies still fail to tap into top benefits from market and competitive intelligence programs

Market Intelligence – Making Better Business Decisions at the Core of the Company

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

Provocation-based Market Intelligence in a Market-Driven world

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

The New Data-Savvy Adaptive Marketing

Originally published on CMSWire, September 20, 2012

 

Marketers for many organizations are facing evolutionary pressures to transform marketing practices and processes to the always-on state of Adaptive Marketing, a new iteration of direct marketing that wants to engender a unique brand experience for individual customers. At the heart of Adaptive Marketing is a customer-focused organization that is committed to constantly re-craft product offerings, sales initiatives and marketing tactics to match individual customer needs and wants. Adaptive Marketing is fueled by a matrix of customer intelligence analytics and maps into enabling continuously improved customer experiences.

For Adaptive Marketing to work, organizations have to transform the marketing infrastructure to accommodate the fluid requirements of being always-on. Changes are made to how media is set up and managed, agency relationships take on new purpose. Digital asset management goes to the next level to constantly dish up customer-responsive images, marketing calls-to-action, and other personalized and time-sensitive content. Agile practices have entered the marketing realm – and creativity and science are now partners.

To derive right-time customer intelligence, multiple kinds of data analytics are needed to tackle the many different kinds of customer data, as well as the variety of sources for that data. Right-time analytics are now being tapped for everyday marketing decisions, and to reflect the true nature of social and customer interactions: synchronizing the organization with customers, their interactions and their communications related to the organization and its products. Data analytics and customer intelligence are becoming invaluable to point the way to marketing solutions in real time, constantly reflecting changes in customer behavior and market trends.

  

                    
     

 

Personalized Customer Experiences

It may be through Adaptive Marketing that organizations have a powerful approach to nurturing positive customer experiences. Adaptive Marketing provides personalization at the experience level, based on customer data analysis to understand ever-changing customer needs and interests. Adaptive Marketing may be a more valuable approach for B2C companies, but there are lessons to be learned for B2B enterprises too.

Instead of seeing customers "in bulk", Adaptive Marketing pulls each customer into more individualized 'segmentation' as part of the data analytics behind personalized brand experiences. Product and experience personalization obviously can work well to increase customer satisfaction and the desire to come back again for more. Analytics technology, along with marketing management tools, can help provide quick responses to customer needs.

Marketing performance-related analytics and marketing management platforms are also part of the story for Adaptive Marketing, particularly using analytics to tie outcomes of marketing efforts to enterprise strategic goals and desired business results.

  

 

 

The Challenges of Customer Intelligence

Marketers and enterprises are now challenged to gather customer data from disparate and frequently fragmented sources. Data analysts must resolve customer identity across these diverse sources to aggregate the right data in a usable fashion to feed into analytics processes. Often, marketers are faced with tackling large volumes of data as well as multi-structured content, two forms of Big Data. Then data must be analyzed, insights derived, and decisions made as to actions to take – all of which comprise an iterative, always-on process.

Tibco Spotfire recently shared the results of a study done by the Columbia School of Business, emphasizing the value of sharing customer data across the enterprise, eliminating information silos:

A majority of senior corporate marketing executives (91%) believe that successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions, according to a study from the Columbia School of Business. Yet, 39% say their own companies' data is collected too infrequently or too slowly for them to turn that data into actionable information. The report notes that one of the biggest obstacles to turning data into actionable insight may be a lack of effective data sharing across departments and divisions of the company.  

In order to leverage the opportunities of big data, the report suggests marketers need to better:

• Collect meaningful customer data – including real-time data – from a variety of sources
• Link that data to metrics developed for measuring marketing ROI
• Share data across the organization, linking datasets together at the customer level
• Utilize this shared data to effectively target and personalize marketing efforts to customers

 

Marketers are also faced with deciding how to proceed with utilizing analytics. With so much data to process, at times it may be appropriate to formulate questions to be answered or problems to be solved. Other times, the right path may be to let the data point to previously unknown patterns, as is often done with Big Data analytics.

Marketers now must be dynamically responsive to change and must more quickly decide what to do. So Predictive Analytics are becoming more important to many organizations that want to derive future views that will guide their decisions, particularly those regarding potential customer behaviors and desires. Behavioral models are built based on certain objectives, such as projecting the propensity to buy particular offerings, using different customer attributes (predictors). The results are put to use to do a better a job of finding the right customers and specifically providing what they need.

 

New Work and New Roles To Do It

Adaptive Marketing holds great promise for improving understanding of customers and for enabling high quality and individualized customer experiences. But the 'guts' of Adaptive Marketing, including highly sophisticated and complex analytics processes, are placing serious demands on marketing functions. Just by itself, the work to be done to constantly collect, aggregate and reconcile customer data from so many disparate sources can be quite overwhelming and fraught with problems.

Adding in new processes, practices and management for the complete Adaptive Marketing function, quite a bit of new expertise has to be put in place. Not only are sources of customer data distributed and varied, the media landscape itself is fragmented. Tremendous efforts to orchestrate all of these aspects of Adaptive Marketing are required to make all the pieces work together and to be able to monitor and manage effectively, as well as continuously open the way for unique customer experiences.

For the analytics area, data and business analysts who are also experienced marketers are important to success with Adaptive Marketing. These roles must be adept at interpreting analytics results for things like customer behavior, and equally adept at communicating the implications to marketing and management teams. New Marketing and IT partnerships are essential to ensure that business and technology work well together.

Alignment with enterprise strategies need to take place at the C-Level for Adaptive Marketing to be successful and effective. Scott Brinker introduced the new role of the Chief Marketing Technologist in 2008; marketing organizations are slowly embracing this role as a partner to both the CMO and the CIO for creating and enacting the right marketing strategies with the right marketing technologies. Brinker sees the Chief Marketing Technologist as "an equal blend of a marketing-savvy technologist and a technology-savvy marketer".

Brinker also details some of the attributes of the 'rank-and-file' marketing technologist role:  

They cover a wide swath of technical skills, from wrangling data and analytics, authoring lightweight web features, synchronizing disparate marketing software platforms, SEO, web APIs. They're a cross between an entrepreneurial marketer and an enterprise IT manager — and with pretty good web coding chops. Think of a great technical Web 2.0 entrepreneur, and you've got a pretty good estimate of a marketing technologist.

 

From Insight to Action

The increasing importance and use of data analytics for Adaptive Marketing and customer experience improvement does not reduce marketing functions to quantitative endeavors. Data and analytics are stepping stones to more precise intelligence so that better decisions and actions can be determined more quickly and accurately, in ways that benefit both the customer and the enterprise. Improved customer 'intimacy' is likely to result. Getting closer to customers is somewhat the 'holy grail' of most marketing endeavors.

In the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, 88 percent of CEOs said "getting closer to customers" was the top priority for their businesses over the next five years. Many company leaders see opportunities through the right analytics to understand customer needs, desires and behaviors, to improve customer attraction and retention, and to ultimately drive revenue and growth. The analytics performed by marketing from program start to post-mortem also provide the means to tie marketing activities to tangible outcomes like successful products and revenue growth.

Marketers now have to understand the interrelationships between many kinds of data, evaluate the aggregated meaning, and then determine how to take insight to action. Marketers have to be self-optimized to derive continuous insight, rapidly make effective decisions and take actions that will improve the customer experience on a daily basis. There's a lot of work to do to enact Adaptive Marketing and all the pieces that make it work, but it's time to move beyond traditional marketing approaches and basing digital marketing plans on 'gut' notions.

   

The Evolution of Digital Intelligence

                                              Source: Forrester Research, Welcome to the Era of Digital Intelligence

 

 

Related Links:

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

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

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

     Originally published in CMSWire July 2, 2012

 

The customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints, which are the interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, and for the customer journey.

The buying process or customer decision journey – where customers go through various stages to reach a decision about purchase – is a significant piece of the B2B customer journey. Content marketing can bring value to all aspects of the customer journey – all customer engagement opportunities. But particular attention to the buying process is an essential aspect of successful content marketing strategies.

  

Content and the Customer Journey

The buying process for B2B software can be complex and involve multiple steps for the customer, both for arriving at a decision and for making the purchase itself. The "customer" frequently consists of multiple roles: techies (IT), line-of-business decision-makers, financial and budget managers, executives, and sometimes the actual users of the technology. (One of the flaws on the buyer side of the equation is too often the "end" user of the software solution is left out of the decision-making process.) Content marketing has a fantastic opportunity to help potential buyer roles with the decision steps and foster positive experiences as part of the customer journey.

  

"What do Suspects want? What you Know, not what you Sell"

 

                                 Source: Eloqua

 

 Eloqua's Joe Chernov has produced a lot of solid work advising B2B companies on how best to implement content marketing. Chernov and Elle Woulfe recently released a slide deck on Mapping Content to the Buyer's Journey:

 Key takeaways:

• Content has minimal value in absolute, but tremendous value when mapped to the right stage in the funnel
• When it comes to distribution, think of suspect-stage content as "many to many," prospect-stage as "one to many," lead-stage as "one to few," and opportunity-stage as "one to one"
• When it comes to prospects, content that assuages professional fears tends to be most effective
• Mismatching content to stage can backfire … mitigate by asking yourself, "Is this piece of content, delivered at this time, advancing the buyer's journey?"

  

Customer Segmentation for the Journey

Work done for target customer segmentation and for mapping the customer journey is very useful for organizing types of content, and how and when content is made available to various customer roles and needs. Some content will be tagged to certain steps in the buying process: key customer roles for each step, what topics matter to them, what kind of content, where do they prefer to consume it. Some content will help existing customers use technology solutions for greater benefit and find out more that the vendor can do to help with business success. Some content is meant to pique interest for anyone unfamiliar with the vendor.

  

                             Source: Inflexion Point

  

The key milestones in the B2B buying decision process happen when:

• Something changes, and your prospect recognises they have a potential need
• They conclude that solutions are available, and that there is an economic case for change
• They define their requirements and decision criteria
• They identify and shortlist technically and financially feasible options
• They identify a single preferred solution
• That solution successfully navigates the investment approval process

 

Many resources are available for understanding how to match content to steps or phases in the customer journey, including Spark Inbound Marketing's B2B Buying Cycle and Eloqua's Content Grid:

 

  Eloqua's Content Grid v2 (excerpt)  

 

  

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

è Content Value is Strictly from the Customer Point-of-View

Just as the customer alone owns the customer experience, the perceived value of content solely rests with the customer. Learning customer desires for content is where a lot of time should be spent. Just like software solutions must be right-fit for customers needs, the same goes for content. Just as vendors should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles for being able to connect their solutions to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content.

è Insights, Critical Thinking and Expert Knowledge-sharing

Software vendors need to provide content about current problems and future directions for topics that matter to customers. With so much content available on the internet, writing about yesterday's issues is not engaging to most customers, unless yesterday's issues address problems still plaguing customers. Then the content should look at what might be done to solve those problems. Customers realize that technology is in constant flux, in good and bad ways. Helping customers to see into future trends that could benefit their businesses, and the potential gotchas of new technology, is likely to provide valuable content from the customer POV.

è Diversity of Content

Content can be expressed in many forms, multiplied by many channels – which means companies really must understand for each target customer role what are the preferred content types and preferred channel for each content type. Mobile platforms present good but difficult channels that must be understood and handled well. Opportunities are increasing for more interactive components related to content. Creative, sophisticated approaches to most content should be considered – simplicity and clarity are other constructs to consider. Developing several related pieces of content for a particular topic can enrich how content marketing aligns with the customer journey. People come back for the next installments, and the vendor can develop more in-depth coverage via different media and different channels.

   

 Source: InboundWriter

   

è Quality over Quantity – and reliable continuity of quality content is vital

Customers and prospects don't want to waste their time on junk content or thinly disguised brochure-ware. Imperatives for effective content marketing artifacts are quality, creativity, hot topics, deep insights – essentially respecting the target audience by producing excellent work. Constant and reliable content creation is important, but what this means will vary by content type and channel.

 

There are a lot of reasons why content marketing doesn't work for some companies…But the biggest culprit (and it's not even close) is a lack of consistency, and, in some cases, a content stoppage. Research from IBM in 2010 stated that about 80 percent of corporate blogs never post more than five entries (hat tip to Rebecca Lieb). That is a truly unbelievable stat…

 

è People, Money, Time

Content marketing is sustained only by realistic allocations of resources: people, money and time in particular. B2B software companies should be tapping internal subject matter experts (SMEs), as well as external ones, to deliver the kind of content that customers want. Internal tech experts are also needed as reviewers and editors to ensure that content is accurate. Strategic-thinking enterprises cannot expect their employees to participate in content marketing on their own time or to work it into already busy work schedules, as a "sideline". Upper management has to make sure that content marketing participation for an employee is a recognized part of regular compensated responsibilities.

The responsibilities of creating relevant content must come from company staff:

Content marketing is brand marketing, cubed, and as such requires the full attention and supervision of your team. Prospects and customers now expect to engage with you— and by engage with you we mean get to know your brand—through your content. Creating content assets to support content marketing is a centralized strategy that relies on a consistent brand voice and vision to work. It's a bad habit left over from legacy thinking to allow your marketing organization to create content as one-off campaign or program assets without thinking of the broader implications.

 

Strategies to Deliver What Customers Need

The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that B2B software vendors should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need. The work being done to identify optimal target markets and customer roles for products should be extended to segmentation for content marketing purposes. In all of these cases the ultimate "product" for the customer should be high quality, reliable, useful, easy to put to work.

There are a lot of great ideas for the tactics of content marketing, but it's not likely that sustained success will result without multiple strategy levels in a given enterprise. Even if Marketing and other teams develop a good content marketing strategy, it cannot be effective if Marketing does not have a strategic position in the overall enterprise, backed by upper management. And before we can make the journey to a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to be an inter-operative enterprise that is customer-focused, market-driven, and process and data savvy. Enterprises must ensure the creation of integrated systems and processes for internal and external customer interactions. Content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it is a strategic commitment that impacts most of the enterprise – for the entire customer lifecycle.

 

  

Related Links

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors  

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

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

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

 

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 strategy, competitive selling and go-to-market strategies. 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

 

 

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

 

I last wrote about content marketing for B2B software vendors in 2010 – since then some enterprises have made good progress with strategic use of content marketing. Unfortunately, many enterprises still don't understand why content marketing has value, and haven't figured out what to do.

The story still is this:

• B2B software Customers are becoming more proactive Buyers and have taken the driver's seat in buying decisions
• These customers want relevant, quality content to learn more about problems that matter to their companies and potential solutions to those problems, which may include the offerings of a particular B2B software company
• And they'd like to learn about vendor solutions through honest, well-written content – instead of brochure-ware filled with "marketing" hype  
• But many B2B software companies are not providing the content that customers want

 A lot of data points show that for all types of companies there is tremendous content marketing activity going on now, as well as strong future growth potential:

• A recent report notes that U.S. content marketing now comprises a $40 billion industry
• About a quarter of worldwide marketing budgets are committed to content marketing efforts
• 60% of companies forecast increases for content marketing budgets by mid-2012
• According to Outsell, companies spend $67 billion annually on their websites, where a lot of B2B content marketing takes place right now
• A HiveFire study found that 82% of B2B companies were using content marketing – and the longer the sales cycle, the more use of content marketing

So why do so many B2B software companies struggle with execution and achieving beneficial results?

 

Symptoms, Root Causes and Steps in the Right Direction

There are many marketing-oriented posts about how B2B vendors are going wrong when it comes to content marketing. Most of what's called out is not surprising: failure to write properly on topics that customers prefer - added to failure to even find out what customers want to read; poor writing quality; non-engaging material; promoting brochure-ware instead of useful, thought-provoking material. There is also failure to understand how to match the right content to the right channel, and lack of knowledge regarding the channels that customer segments prefer for various kinds of content.

But these are mostly symptoms -- not root causes for the disconnect between B2B companies and the execution of a content marketing strategy for successful outcomes. One root cause: many companies have no cohesive long-term strategy for content marketing.

First, let's take a couple of steps back: if there's no strategy for content marketing, then it's likely that marketing is not positioned strategically in the enterprise with upper management backing. So it's not just content marketing that may be lacking executive buy-in at the top, but the overall marketing function. Unfortunately many technology companies continue to treat Marketing as an add-on silo'd function, or worse, as voodoo magic that can miraculously fix whatever is lacking from company offerings or hoodwink potential customers into buying the product, whether it's any good or not. In this ridiculous second situation (it happens more than we'd like to think), Marketing is of course the culprit to be punished if the "voodoo magic" fails to save the day.

Marketers were asked to explain what particular challenges they face within their own organizations. We noticed a number of themes running throughout their comments:

 Getting buy-in: "Management patience - mgt needs to understand that in today's B2B environment it takes time to engage prospects. The prospect has a lot more power than they did in the 90's and 2000's."

Now, a couple more steps back and we're looking at: enterprises that are also lacking in integrated systems and processes for internal and external customer interactions; employees who have not been empowered/enabled to interact with customers; poor understanding of target markets and target customer roles; silo'd business functions; poor use of data assets. So before we can make the journey to a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to the integrated enterprise that is customer-focused, market-driven, and process and data savvy. Overall strategies must reflect these tenets. Marketing must be included as part of overall strategy, and the value of content marketing to reach the customer-as-buyer must be given credence, support and enablement. Now we can set about creating an excellent content marketing strategy.

Bottom line: content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it is a strategic commitment that impacts most of the enterprise.

 

 Content Marketing: What It Takes to Execute Well

Why does it matter that technology companies implement content marketing? Software vendors should be neck-deep in content marketing if they are willing to take the right steps forward with the right strategic decisions in place. Content marketing (if done well) keeps the company focused on understanding and meeting the needs of customers – something these companies should be doing anyway, in every aspect of business. Align the business with Customer, align content with Customer. Content marketing is a natural progression from the recognition that the customer-as-buyer is more and more driving how and if sales happen; content marketing provides a dynamic way to connect to those customers. At a higher level, strategic content marketing is an affect of the enterprise becoming integrated and agile – hopefully of the enterprise becoming a "social business".

It strikes me that a strategic commitment to content marketing parallels the kind of strategy required to successfully implement and sustain good community management: dedicated team and participation of other enterprise teams, strategic backing from the top down, long-term commitment to the success of the community, allocation of healthy resources to ensure community success, strong integration with multi-channel customer service, and dynamic business processes. A vibrant community can also be seen as a stellar artifact of healthy content marketing.

An integrated content marketing strategy provides a single home base for all content so that real sense is made of how an enterprise is connecting with prospects and customers. The strategy for content marketing pulls together individual marketing programs and initiatives so there is potentially seamless transition for the customer from channel to channel. Connecting the tactics of marketing to a content strategy also makes it more possible to construct metrics that track the effectiveness of insightful content that can be tied to functions such as lead gen and sales funnel.

Customers know that B2B software vendors are in the business to sell products – customers want resources to figure out if a vendor's offering will answer their needs. And customers want to know if vendors understand their business problems, if vendors are thinking into the future. But the bottom line still is: the software vendor better have products worth buying and using.

 All marketers have the opportunity to increase effectiveness, and they all can learn from the "best in class." Just as was the case last year, effective marketers spend more and are more strategic in their approach:

• They allocate 31% of their budget to content marketing, compared to less effective marketers who invest 18%
• They are 50% more likely to consider the "stage in the buying cycle" when developing content, whereas less effective marketers are less likely to tailor content in any way.
• They benefit from substantially more buy-in from senior members of the organization. Only 8% of effective marketers complain about lack of buy-in from higher-ups, versus 17% of those who rate themselves as less effective (though, on a positive note, this number has declined, dropping down from last year's rate of 24% for less effective marketers).

 

 

                                          Source: Greg De Tisi (with my "strategic" addition)  

 

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

 è Content Value is strictly from the Customer POV

Just as the customer alone owns the customer experience, the perceived value of content solely rests with the customer. Learning customer desires for content is where a lot of time should be spent. Just like software solutions must be right-fit for customers needs, the same goes for content. Just as vendors should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles for being able to connect their solutions to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content. Decisions are then made: who are the key customer roles that are most interested in content at different stages of the buying cycle, what topics matter to them, what kind of content, where do they prefer to consume it.

 è Insights, critical thinking and expert knowledge-sharing

Software vendors need to provide content about current problems and future directions for topics that matter to customers. With so much content available on the internet, writing about yesterday's issues is not engaging to most customers, unless yesterday's issues address problems still plaguing customers. Then the content should look at what might be done to solve those problems. Customers realize that technology is in constant flux, in good and bad ways. Helping customers to see into future trends that could benefit their businesses, and the potential gotchas of new technology, is likely to provide valuable content from the customer POV.

 è Diversity of content

Content can be expressed in many forms, multiplied by many channels – which means companies really must understand for each target customer role what are the preferred content types and preferred channel for each content type. A matrix is now coming together for understanding and managing optimal communication with different customer roles. Mobile platforms present good but difficult channels that must be understood and handled well. Opportunities are increasing for more interactive components related to content. Creative, sophisticated approaches to most content should be considered – simplicity and clarity are other constructs to consider.

 è Quality over quantity – and reliable continuity of quality content is vital

Customers and prospects don't want to waste their time on junk content or thinly disguised brochure-ware. Imperatives for effective content marketing artifacts are quality, creativity, hot topics, deep insights – essentially respecting the target audience by producing excellent work. Constant and reliable content creation is important, but what this means will vary by content type and channel.

There are a lot of reasons why content marketing doesn't work for some companies…But the biggest culprit (and it's not even close) is a lack of consistency, and, in some cases, a content stoppage. Research from IBM in 2010 stated that about 80 percent of corporate blogs never post more than five entries (hat tip to Rebecca Lieb). That is a truly unbelievable stat…

è People, money, time

Content marketing is sustained only by realistic allocations of resources: people, money and time in particular. B2B software companies should be tapping internal subject matter experts (SMEs), as well as external ones, to deliver the kind of content that customers want. Internal tech experts are also needed as reviewers and editors to ensure that content is accurate. Strategic-thinking enterprises cannot expect their employees to participate in content marketing on their own time or to work it into already busy work schedules, as a "sideline". Upper management has to make sure that content marketing participation for an employee is a recognized part of regular compensated responsibilities.

 Strategy and planning to execute, and the responsibilities of creating relevant content must come from company staff:

 Content marketing is brand marketing, cubed, and as such requires the full attention and supervision of your team. Prospects and customers now expect to engage with you— and by engage with you we mean get to know your brand—through your content. Creating content assets to support content marketing is a centralized strategy that relies on a consistent brand voice and vision to work. It's a bad habit left over from legacy thinking to allow your marketing organization to create content as one-off campaign or program assets without thinking of the broader implications.

 

Content for the Customer Journey

The customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints, which are all interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, including content marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, during the customer journey.

The hard work is taking what frequently is a collective of separate touchpoints and harmonizing the collective to enable excellent customer experiences. Orchestration and integration are key aspects of approaching a seamless experience across touchpoints – again this only works if the customer truly perceives such a unified experience.

The buying process for B2B software can be complex and involves multiple steps for the customer, both for arriving at a decision and for making the purchase itself. The "customer" frequently consists of multiple roles: techies (IT), line-of-business decision-makers, financial and budget managers, executives, and sometimes the actual users of the technology. (One of the flaws on the buyer side of the equation is too often the "end" user is left out of the decision-making process.) Content marketing has a fantastic opportunity to help potential buyer roles with the decision steps and foster positive experiences as part of the customer journey.

Work done for target customer segmentation and for mapping the customer journey is very useful for organizing types of content, and how and when content is made available to various customer roles and needs. Some content will be tagged to certain steps in the buying process. Some content will help existing customers use technology solutions for greater benefit and find out more that the vendor can do to help with business success. Some content is meant to pique interest for anyone unfamiliar with the vendor.

Developing several related pieces of content for a particular topic can enrich how content marketing aligns with the customer journey. People come back for the next installments, and the vendor can develop more in-depth coverage via different media and different channels.

 

  

 

 Source: Content Marketing Institute

 

  

Delivering What Customers Need

The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that B2B software vendors should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need. The work being done to identify optimal target markets and customer roles for products should be extended to segmentation for content marketing purposes. In all of these cases the ultimate "product" for the customer should be high quality, reliable, useful, easy to put to work.

Content marketing cannot survive as a strategy in a vacuum. Nor can it have any impact if it is treated as a short-term project or campaign. Strategic content marketing is long-term, with continual development and evolution that parallels the changes that occur for the company, its target markets and customers, and other factors that impact software vendors. Orchestration and implementation of content marketing impact many groups in the enterprise, not just Marketing. The strategies for content marketing should be part of overall corporate and marketing strategies. Similarly metrics for content marketing should fold back into hierarchies of metrics for marketing and overall corporate measurements for achieving goals.

  

Related Links:

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

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid -- Hybrid Roles for Business Technology

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

 

The customer life cycle consists of every experience with an organization – taking place as interactions with staff, systems and sites, inside and outside the firewall. It would make a big difference if enterprises would understand that each customer experience is actually a customer service opportunity. The customer experience should always be about customer service, no matter what it is or where it takes place in the customer journey. High quality customer experiences, like high quality and reliable customer service, are competitive differentiators – and they are becoming competitive imperatives. And yet, many companies still fail to provide top-notch customer experiences and excellent customer service.

 

From the company perspective enabling excellent (or even good) customer experiences can seem complicated, even ephemeral. Some marketing programs are trying to make the “customer experience” quite intricate, perhaps overly convoluted. Software solutions are being developed around marketing processes for “customer experience management”, where too much emphasis may be on the “management” part, and too little on what are positive or desirable experiences from the customer perspective.

 

Further complications can come from the hard work of orchestrating all customer touchpoints. Customer experiences are occurring as events, related to cross-functional and cross-channel processes that need to be merged into a “single experience” for the customer, as well as integrated in terms of data, process, people, and practices within the enterprise. And this is tricky and complicated, even when the best of intentions are in play.

 

But from the customer’s perspective, it’s simple: did I get what I wanted or needed -- or not? Guess which perspective matters more to company success.

 

Source: Customer Experience Marketing for Real People 

 

Wrong Turns?

If you google customer experience management (CEM), a flood of marketing plans, tips, guidelines, and technology solutions comes pouring out. Many have overtones of manipulation and control, reminiscent of the “command and control” executive management in many companies. To sell the idea of “customer experience management” to enterprises, some consultants and vendors resort to inside-out thinking, where it’s all about what the company gains, instead of what value accrues to the customer:

 …it’s the grand design to find customers, gain their business, and bring them back...it will help to own the customer and the rewards are building loyalty and increasing profits…

 

There are also many consultants and vendors who are offering on-target assistance and useful software tools. But it’s essential always to keep in mind that the customer experience is outside-in: focus on the customer perception of the experiences and on the value that should be gained by the customer. I sometimes wonder if companies are taking the notion of “customer experience management” to mean literally managing customers into outcomes that the companies want, without really understanding or caring about the experience part. The key phrase is customer experience: the customer’s experience.

 

The reality of customer experiences and customer service at many companies is still not-so-great – but improving customer experiences overall holds great potential for the company side of the story:

 

Satisfaction at all stages across the customer life cycle is low. While conventional wisdom focuses on customer service as the pivot point for customer satisfaction, only 32% of consumers and a paltry 11% of business buyers feel satisfied with the online research process. Similarly, fewer than half of consumers and just 17% of business buyers feel satisfied with the online purchase process. This unhappiness negatively impacts customers’ likelihood to purchase again or recommend the company to friends or colleagues.

 

Fixing the research and purchase process represents a big opportunity for vendors. A basic model for looking at the financial implications of improving online customer experience shows that a company could increase revenues by over $12 million annually in the research and sales process, while the cost savings for improving service could reach $2 million.

 Adobe-Forrester study, 2010 

 

The value that customers would receive from improving customer service and all other interactions with an enterprise is obvious.

 

Perceptions Are Reality

In most cases, companies cannot truly manipulate what customers actually experience, but companies have ownership of providing consistent high quality interactions in many channels, and making sure that the same positive interaction carries over from one channel to another. Companies can engender an internal “culture” where customer service is high priority and employees are enabled and empowered to provide it. Customer is the focus, the starting point, the point-of-view – actually the whole point, so again outside-in should be the over-arching mindset.

 

But it looks like too many organizations and enterprise teams are tripping over themselves with inside-out strategies that define their staffing roles, technology, marketing, and enterprise business processes. This approach will fall short, even fail.

 

 

 Source: IBM

 

The customer perception of interactions with a company is often the guts of the customer experience. For a company to “manage” customer experience at all, it should turn most of the management on itself: well-integrated processes plus excellent products, pricing, engagement – all oriented to serving customers well and meeting their real needs and desires. Companies have the power to very thoroughly own that sort of management and should exploit it to its fullest. Then it’s likely that the customer will have a good experience with the company, which generally leads to companies meeting their goals.

 

Not only do customers have no interest in being “managed” by a company, it’s really not possible. But solutions and practices for customer-focused touchpoints that occur through websites, social media, CRM, CEM, and product fulfillment can and should make it easier for customers to acquire products and services in ways that can also meet company goals. If dropping the notion of customer “command and control” in favor of recognizing that considerable power belongs to the customer proves to be more effective for gaining and retaining customers, then solutions for the above systems should facilitate customer-enabling functions. Customer experience management in particular should be about the ‘power of pull’ – a concept well-known from the work of John Hagel and John Seely Brown.

 

 

The Customer Journey - Orchestrating Touchpoints

In a way, what is being called customer experience management might be designated as “customer interaction touchpoints and business process orchestration” – but it’s highly doubtful that such a name would catch on. Orchestration is about multiple components working together in harmony. Touchpoints are all interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey, some more important than others at times. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, during the customer journey. 

The hard work is taking what frequently is a collective of separate touchpoints and harmonizing the collective to enable the potential of excellent customer experiences. Orchestration and integration are key aspects of approaching a seamless experience across touchpoints – again this only works if the customer truly perceives the unified experience.

Forrester: Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions

 

Certain significant touchpoints can be overlooked when considering how to engender positive customer experiences:

 

Think the only impressions your company makes are through branding, sales calls, and customer service? Think again. Mishandling interactions like reference management and billing can cause customer defection as quickly as a poor contact center experience

 

In fact, organizations of all sizes and levels of CRM sophistication often overlook six primary customer touch points: Reference management, Field service intelligence, Workflow management, Sales quoting, Customer segmentation, and Billing

 

More Wrong Turns

Bruce Temkin has a thorough series on mistakes companies make in their customer experience management efforts including Mapping Your Internal Touchpoints where “Companies often confuse internally-focused touchpoint mapping with externally-focused customer journey mapping”. Some of the mistakes made include:

 

Rely on internal analysis… examining internal processes (without) the context of how customers view their interactions with the organization.

 Lack emotional design components Touchpoint mapping efforts often lead to redesigning of internal processes. But these changes are based on efficiency goals, not customers’ emotional needs.

 Temkin shares this advice to change the company perspective to the customer POV:

 Assume that customers view their journey differently than you do. This will force you to do the research to understand how customers perceive their entire relationship…reframe the objective in customer terms. For instance, find out how “customers want to buy” not “how we can sell.”

 Uncover differences across customer segments. It’s unusual for all customers to share the identical journeys.

Answer three questions. Push hard to answer these three questions: 1) What are the most important touchpoints; 2) How are we doing in those key touchpoints; 3) What can we do to improve the customers’ perception of those touchpoints.

Source: Global Crossing

 

Effectiveness

One of the biggest opportunities and challenges for enterprises who want to nurture excellent customer interactions is to implement high quality, in-depth customer analytics. In the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, 88 percent of CEOs said “getting closer to customers” was the top priority for their business over the next five years. Many company leaders see opportunities through the right analytics to understand customer needs, desires and behaviors, to improve customer attraction and retention, and to ultimately drive revenue and growth.

 

Company goals will evolve with customer experience and engagement initiatives, both at tactical and strategic levels. As a result, metrics for successful customer interactions will also evolve. It’s likely that a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative metrics will become more pronounced, to reflect increased focus on high quality customer experiences, communications and outcomes when interacting with the company. Companies also want to measure the effectiveness of different engagement channels, cross-channel activities, touchpoints for the customer journey -- but measurement is now more complex due to the qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of customer engagement.

 

Bruce Temkin discusses the traps of applying metrics to company efforts when building out culture, initiatives and opportunities for positive customer experiences:

 

Companies often get enamored with a metric like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and lose sight of what’s really important: making improvement...the true power comes when (a metric) provides insight into where and how to make improvements.

Can’t answer “why.” Reporting on a metric can highlight strengths and weaknesses of a company’s overall customer experience…But if the company does not understand “why” customers are either happy or unhappy, then they can’t systematically improve customer experience and positively affect the metric.

Overuse a metric. Understanding if a customer is happy overall with an organization is quite different than understanding if her needs were met during a specific service call. But some companies blindly use the same metrics for each of those areas. A metric like NPS, for example, may be appropriate for examining relationship strength, but it’s not necessarily good for evaluating interactions.

 

Here is some of Temkin’s advice for deriving the right value from metrics:

 

Treat relationships and interactions differently. The questions you ask a customer about how they view your company can (and often should) be quite different than those that you ask about an interaction. Think about different questions and methods for five different types of insights: Relationship tracking, interaction monitoring, continuous listening, project infusion, and periodic immersion.

Measure relevant attitudes and behaviors. Businesses aren’t in the business of getting random people to recommend them. They hope to get that type of loyalty from successfully executing their mission. Develop measurements that test the attitudes and behaviors of target customer segments, making sure they line up with your specific business and brand strategy.

Build a robust voice of the customer (VoC) program. Creating isolated metrics will not drive change in an organization; especially when people don’t understand what drives the metric. Companies need to develop a voice of the customer (VoC) program that continuously shares actionable customer insights across the organization.

 

Final Destination

The Customer’s Experience and Customer Experience Management may not always be about the same thing, depending on how an enterprise goes after a customer-focused strategy that is not only tied to corporate goals, but to providing excellent customer service for every interaction on the customer journey.

 My concern is not about turning a cultural construct into a technology solution, with the notion that this is the way to provide and control Customer Experiences. My concern is for the mindset that ‘customer experience’ can be owned and manipulated by companies through an ever-growing proliferation of digital marketing and technology platforms that give companies the illusion that they can “solve the problem of the customer experience”. First, customer experience is not a problem. Second, The customer experience is owned by the customer where the experience with a company is totally dependent on the customer’s perception regarding company interactions, both individually and as a harmonized collective.

 People, processes, and practices, supported by the right technologies and a customer-focused strategy, all have a part in orchestrating the channels, the touchpoints, the interactions that comprise the customer journey. Excellent customer experiences really come from enterprise commitment, from top to bottom, to make sure customers are successful in every interaction and every experience with company products and services. 

 

 

Related Links

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

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

  

 

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

 

 

 

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