Eliminating the “Graffiti” in Your Customer Experience Program

Leadership Behaviors Drive Change
Executive behavior is as much of an influence on employee behavior as graffiti is on the behavior of those who use the subway. It’s symbolic of the success of the system, and leadership needs to drive the cultural change required.  

A superb article by Nancy Porte regarding the cultural change needed to truly deliver on the customer experience and the role executives play to ensure its success. I recommend reading this article, very thoughtful writing.  

As I've been harping on for the past couple of weeks, customer experience goes well beyond creating teams and having initiatives.  Customer Experience is a culture, one that revolves around the customer and makes sure every decision the company makes is for the customer.  The rationale behind this theory is that great customer experiences will result in happy, loyal customers who will buy more and become advocates for the brand.  

5 habits of effective data-driven organizations

Size doesn’t matter, but variety does. You would think that a data-driven organization has a lot of data, petabytes of data, exabytes of data. In some cases, this is true. But in general, size matters only to a point. For example, I encountered a large technology firm with petabytes of data but only three business analysts. What really matters is the variety of the data. Are people asking questions in different business functions? Are they measuring cost and quality of service, instrumenting marketing campaigns, or observing employee retention by team? Just getting a report at month end on profits? You’re probably not data driven.

As I have articulated previously, data-driven organizations are a culture, it is not about toolsets or data scientists.  It doesn't matter how much data you have, it matters that you have enough data to make an informed business decision.

Everyone has access to some data. Almost no one has access to all of it. There are very few cultures where everyone can see nearly everything. Data breach threats and privacy requirements are top of mind for most data teams. And while these regulations certainly stunt the ability of the company to make data available, most data-driven companies reach a stage where they have developed clear business processes to address these issues.

It comes down to what data is important for each business unit.  Most business units don't need credit card information or PII information about individual customers.  Understanding what data will drive better business decisions in each unit and focusing on getting those units the needed data in a consumable format is the key.

Data is all over the place. One would think that the data is well organized and well maintained — as in a library, where every book is stored in one place. In fact, most data-driven cultures are exactly the opposite. Data is everywhere — on laptops, desktops, servers.

This can be dangerous.  Remember there is nothing worse than fighting about the validity of data.  If operating units all have their own sets of data, then it becomes a competition of who's data is right instead of what decision we should make based on the information at hand.

Companies prize insights over technology standards. Generally, the principal concern of people in data-driven businesses is the ability to get the insight quickly. This is a corollary of point #3. Generally, the need to answer a question trumps the discussion of how to best answer it. Expediency wins, and the person answering the question gets to use the tool of their choice. One top 10 bank reported using more than 100 business intelligence technologies.

I really like this, as long as you don't fall into the trap I discussed above.  To get people to adjust to a technology instead of providing insight is lost time.  Getting a huge organization on 1 platform is problematic at best, a disaster at worst.  If analysts can work in tools they have mastered, it will allow them to get insights faster.  Faster insight is a major competitive advantage.

Data flows up, down, and even side to side. In data-driven companies, data isn’t just a tool to inform decision makers. Data empowers more junior employees to make decisions, and leaders often use data to communicate the rationale behind their decisions and to motivate action. In one data-driven company, I observed a CEO present a 50-slide deck to his full team, and almost all of those slides were filled with charts and numbers. Most fundamentally, data empowers people to make decisions without having to consult managers three levels up — whether it’s showing churn rates to explain additional spend on customer services vs. marketing or showing revenues relative to competitors to explain increased spend on sales.

The old thinking was to create a business intelligence team that would provide the data for the organization.  Each operating unit should be in charge of their own data analytics.  There should be a centralized business intelligence team to provide a checks and balances, but operating units are best to answer their own questions, they know their business best.  Democratizing data throughout the organization is key to having a data-driven organization.  

DIB Digital Trends Report 2015_EMEA

I'm reading through the DIB Digital Trends Report for 2015 and there is some interesting tidbits.  For one, on Figure 5, what is the most exciting opportunity in 2015 vs last year.  Customer Experience has jumped into a huge lead, while Mobile and Social have fallen.  Why is this?  I believe organizations are starting to realize that both of those decliners are just channels.  Channels for your content to create great customer experiences.  Mobile shouldn't be your strategy any more than email.  I view content marketing and personalization as the same thing.  If your content isn't personal, then work needs to be done on your content.  However, I understand why they are separated here.  I believe multi channel campaign management needs to rate higher on these lists.  This is the engine that will run most of this,

Another interesting section is asking what companies plan on how they will differentiate themselves from their competitors within the next 5 years.  The report states they are surprised that price is only 5%.  I believe organizations will try to differentiate through customer experience, and maybe there is some bias in the respondents, because these companies are probably a little more innovative than the typical organization.  I believe companies tend to fall to price differentiation because it is the easiest way to gain sales and market share.  

Number 1 and 2 are intrinsically related.  As I wrote here, companies that focus on design will constantly look to improve on 1 and 2.  A design first mentality puts the experience and the quality ahead of all else.  Companies who are answering these questions should be looking to change their culture to a design culture before tackling these differentiators, or else the strategy may fail.

Strategy does not work without the culture to back it up.  The fact the respondents have listed strategy before culture leads me to believe these initiatives have a higher chance of failure.  If the culture of the company does not support the strategy, it will take too large of an effort to accomplish being customer first.

These are my thoughts halfway through the document.  Tomorrow I will comment on the next piece of the document.  Very interesting stuff.  Organizations are saying the right things, but with anything, it is all in the implementation.  The next 5 years will be very exciting indeed.

Digital Trends for 2015 | Digital Marketing

Simon Morris writes:

More than 6,000 mar­ket­ing, and ecom­merce pro­fes­sion­als around the world took part in this year’s Dig­i­tal Trends sur­vey, which has been by far our largest response since we launched this annual survey in 2012. Thanks to all of the con­trib­u­tors who took the time to provide their per­spec­tive. I’m pleased to say the 2015 Dig­i­tal Trends report is avail­able now to download.

I can't wait to dig into this report and green some insight on what marketers are seeing.  I suggest downloading and perusing yourself.  

Per­son­ally, what makes this report inter­est­ing to me, is not just the trends but the insight into how a com­pany needs to adapt to cap­i­talise on these new trends. Two aspects are key here: Strat­egy & Cul­ture. As seen with the emergence of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence as an over­ar­ch­ing dri­ver, we aren’t talk­ing about small shifts in your mar­ket­ing organ­i­sa­tion, but the con­scious deci­sion to develop and align your activ­i­ties with the goal of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at the heart. How­ever, strat­egy change with­out cul­ture change is inef­fec­tive, to quote Peter Ducker ‘Cul­ture eats strat­egy for break­fast’.

These are concepts I have been writing about the last few days here and here.  Adapting to the "mobile first" shift in the consumers, organizations have to change their culture and structure.  The companies that will be successful in the next 5 years will be ones that adapt to these changes in their organizations, to put the customer first and align the organization around customer experiences instead of functional duties.