Many marketers fail to meaningfully differentiate their customer experience strategy from that of their competitors. So how can you blame customers that who don’t perceive much of a difference between you and your competitors, and instead make their decisions on price? MLC’s study, “Delivering a Preferred Customer Experience”, outlined just how customer experience investments pay off for B2B suppliers – namely, a great customer experience scrambles the competitive set, and makes it very difficult for buyers to compare suppliers on price alone.

So, given that the customer experience is probably the best non-price investment B2B suppliers can make, what’s stopping them? Well, it’s a difficult thing to do, involving a lot of soul-searching, walks on the beach alone at dawn, that kind of thing. But seriously, here are three things you have to take care of before you can offer a world-class customer experience: Read More »

(this is a guest post from Anastasia Milgramm of the Customer Contact Council, MLC’s sister program for customer care organizations. We thought our audience of marketers would like it, too.)

By now, we have all heard about Netflix’s infamous 2011 blunder. When the company announced a 60% price hike last July, customers were furious. Many voiced their frustrations on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter; others called customer service to complain and flooded the corporate website with comments. The company faced a huge cost spike (increased call volume) and an even greater hit to revenue. In fact, more than 800,000 subscribers left completely in just three months.

The message of the Netflix example is clear: in today’s world, companies are more vulnerable than ever. Netflix probably didn’t do itself any favors by announcing the price increase abruptly – with little forewarning or customer outreach to cushion the blow.

So how can companies stay head of the game to mitigate customer frustrations in risky situations? And specifically for service teams – how can companies proactively address customer concerns to avoid call volume spikes that often accompany these situations? Read More »

Many B2C marketers these days are turning to data and analytics to drive customer-centric outcomes. But the higher you go up in organizations, the more difficult it is to get a true picture of what your customer is like – competing priorities and the abstraction needed to run a very large enterprise run counter to focus on details of the customer experience.

Payless, an American shoe retailer, faced this problem a few years back. Facing competitive threats from big-box discounters, a deteriorating customer experience, and a management team far-removed from the average customer, the company’s CMO tried to drive improvements in the customer experience but predictably failed due to lack of senior management buy-in.

Realizing that the company needed to make the lack of customer focus “real” to senior executives, Marketing arranges a series of executive-immersion sessions. They listen in on focus groups to learn the characteristics of core segments, then “act out” those segments in a series of visits to Payless and competitor stores – a constraint that forces them to remove their functional hats and view stores from the perspective of a consumer, rather than an operations or a finance executive.

A key part of the visits to Payless stores is that they are unannounced and incognito. Executives, assuming their roles as a particular customer persona, shop in the store as any other customer would, avoiding the problem of stores “preparing” for pre-announced visits.

The end result? Executives quickly figured out where the customer experience was lacking and identified a few key elements to fix, leading to higher same-store sales and increased foot traffic and customer satisfaction.

MLC members, check out the full case, or listen to this webinar replay on how companies – including Payless – have pioneered consistent, differenteated, and delightful customer experience.

Ah, New Year’s – the time when we step back, reassess, and resolve to do better in the coming 365 days. Most New Year’s resolutions are pretty predictable – stop smoking, lose 20 pounds, finally set up that household budget – but what should marketers, specifically, be thinking about their marketing startegy for the coming year? Based on our conversations, we came up with a few resolutions we’re hearing: Read More »

Click it, type it or just ask Siri – today information is available as never before. Given their information choices today, the ability to process it is becoming a limiting factor for consumers. The result – a lot of marketing messaging is wasteful, as consumers pay no attention to it – not because they don’t want to, but because they cannot. So should marketers shout louder to grab attention? Absolutely not.

Focused on expanding the share of voice, marketers may be guilty of paying very little attention to streamlining the information path for their consumers. In a noisy marketplace, consumers today are faced with analysis-paralysis, and increasing marketing messaging has done nothing, but confused them. This has resulted in delayed or reduced responsiveness to marketing messages. So what should marketers do? Read More »

Customer Experience - United Services Storyboard

Managing the cross-channel experience is the second third biggest priority for B2C marketers next year, according to our recent member polling. It’s no surprise, given the growing number of channels to coordinate as well as consumers’ high expectations.

The problem?  Customer-facing employees lack visibility into how their work fits together with other teams’ efforts to impact the whole customer experience.  As the channel mix grows in complexity, even managers can struggle to keep to visualize the entire experience.

Enter Marketing at United Services (a pseudonymed North American financial services company).  They illustrate every interaction customers have with the brand – at each stage of the purchase (and repurchase) cycle – on huge poster boards.  To bring it to life, they even display actual examples of marcomm materials, such as direct mail or screenshots of TV ads.  Depicting the entire experience in one place helps employees see the big picture.  MLC members, see a sample storyboard here.

United Services highlight three key elements of the consumer experience: Read More »

Earlier this year Wells Fargo announced its new presence in Manhattan through a ‘flash mob’, recorded for posterity on YouTube:

Read More »

With social media an increasing part of budgets and mindshare in most marketing organizations, we thought we’d do a quick run-down of some of the biggest ways corporate social media efforts fail. What do you think? Let us know in comments below: Read More »

Improved technology, policy intervention, and the recession have led to broad structural changes in a number of industries we write about on Wide Angle, but probably none so much as healthcare. In the past few years, we’ve seen a major health reform effort in the US that will bring millions of new patients into the system, growing consensus around a reformation of the patent system abroad, and technological shifts that may soon allow for a very rapid scaling in diagnosis and other medical services.

So, how should marketers expect their jobs to change? We came up with a few ways; let us know more in comments! Read More »

Walt Disney World is a vacation destination beloved by many (including me).  Its themed rides, immaculately dressed characters, and song-and-dance-filled shows are hard for most brands to emulate, but there are several non-princess-based strategies marketers can use to boost their own brands: Read More »