Getting ahead in differentiating your business is an ongoing quest. Benchmarking studies can be a great tool to monitor and maintain your edge -- if you know how to maximize your value from them. Here are 8 paths to gaining value from best practices studies:

1) Participate! By investing a portion of an hour to answer the study questions you'll likely pick up an idea or two for tweaking your perspective or approach for greater success. Every study has its own theme, so there's always potential for picking up something new from each one. (Even if you're on the agency side and may not qualify for a certain study, encourage your clients to participate -- they're less likely to be complacent as a result, and complacency is not a great thing for an agency.) What else only takes 15-30 minutes and gives you a possible new model, big-picture view, and/or tickler for taking your programs to the next level?

2) Accept the offer -- whether it's a donation to charity or a free copy of the report or something else, enjoy the token of appreciation. A complimentary report typically saves hundreds of dollars in your budget. Conducting your own benchmarking study can often cost thousands. Study authors specify how they will honor your confidentiality, anonymity and privacy.

This June marks ten years since the first buyer persona development methodology was pioneered and launched by the firm Goal Centric now called Buyerology.  Over the past ten years it has been quite a journey.   Much has happened and much has changed.  The adoption of research-based modeling of buyers that leads to buyer personas has been mixed.  The rise in popularity of the term has also been a mixed blessing.  It has resulted in many misguided definitions and practices that have not produced the potential results other organizations have seen when the goal-based methodology is utilized.  The organizations who have embraced the goal-based methodology for research-based buyer personas have seen tremendous success in uncovering new opportunities for revenue growth.

The State of Buyer Personas 2012

As a Chief Customer Officer (or Customer Experience Officer), success is achieved when you have the ability to evolve your company from delivering a “defaulted” experience that results from each silo doing their own planning, prioritization, projects to uniting the organization to deliver a reliable and then ultimately differentiated and desired experience.

A successful Chief Customer Officer can:

• Bring folks together who don’t normally work together
• Establish clarity out of the complexity that surrounds who does what on projects for “customers”
• Break the work into manageable chunks so that it doesn’t get abandoned
• Develop “ownership” of the work by the operating areas
• Consider their success as enabling the operating areas to focus and change

Here are the ten aptitudes and competencies of people who are the most successful with this mission – those with the ability to work across a business operation; engaging leaders and operational leaders in uniting their efforts in behalf of customer profitability.

One of the common challenges we hear from customer strategists is centered around taking action. People will say things like,

"How do I get people to pay attention?"

"When I share results from our customer survey research people are engaged, but after the meeting, nothing happens."

"Our leadership team says they are committed, but they aren't engaged."

Creating a customer-focused culture has many challenges, and taking action appears to be at the top of the list.

One of the first steps to taking action is goal setting. There are many different formats and criteria that companies use for goal setting. But, I was recently reminded of one criteria that often gets overlooked  - "Excitement."

My daughters are on a swim team and each year, they set goals that are:

• Specific
• Exciting
• Believable

While I doubt requiring goals to be exciting will singularly solve the taking action challenge, excitement (and food) never hurt to get people engaged.

And, who said customer retention strategies couldn't be fun and exciting anyway?   

Facebook’s IPO is scheduled for May 18th, 2012. I have no doubt that it will be fully subscribed. If you are a Facebook user, and if the stock is sold at the planned price of $38/share, YOU are worth $115.43 to investors. That’s what Facebook is selling: Us!

Facebook is selling the details about our lives and access to us to advertisers. Advertisers would need to agree that access to us and information about what we and all of our friends are doing is worth that much to them over our lifetimes.

So, here’s my question: Am I worth $115 to a Facebook investor? The stock price reflects the net present value of the future PROFITS Facebook expects to reap in selling ads and/or information about me and/or commissions on physical or virtual purchases I make through Facebook to companies who want me to buy their wares.

Annual planning is a missed opportunity for driving customer profitability inside the corporate machine.   Ah, the joy of the annual plan. Those last three months before the fiscal year ends are spent rushing about trying to decide what you’ll do next year. Each silo pushes its numbers around for head count, capital expenses, vendors, and programs.

The silos usually pick their projects and plan their budgets independent of one another.

Here’s what happens: Short-term tactics with outcomes easily attributable to individual departments (for purposes of “clean” compensation and metrics) comprise annual plans and financial commitments. These often come at the exclusion of messier company-wide efforts that could resolve customer issues and subsequently yield more significant long-term revenue. As a result, customer experience and customer profitability opportunities are lost in the (lack of) hand planned projects, and planned experience hand-offs between the silos.

Choice covers both the capacity to control people and events, and an underlying belief in the possibility of such control. Being able to rule your environment gives power to self-determination, even for babies. In a study, researchers attached strings to the arms of infants “as young as four months.” When they moved their arms, music played. The babies grew “sad and angry” when researchers removed the strings and they could no longer make music play, though music continued sporadically.

Wanting to choose comes naturally, though it isn’t linked to any distinct biological advantage. Without choice, as zoo animals show, even if someone else’s decisions set you up in luxury, you won’t be happy. Having influence on control makes people happiest. A nursing home let some patients decide when to watch movies and which plants they wanted. After six months, those who had more perceived choice “were happier and more alert” and, it turned out, “were less likely to have died.”

People define themselves through their choices

Listening to the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson I am left with the impression that nothing was more important to Steve Jobs then using technology to produce great products that delivered a great user experience.  Good enough was good enough, even great, for many in the computer industry.  Only insanely great was good enough for Steve Jobs.  Anything less was simply not good enough, it was not ‘art’ and not ‘worthy of artists”; great artists don’t want to put their names on good enough art.

Given that Apple, Amazon, Zappos, USAA, SouthWest Airlines, Zanes Cycles, Richer Sounds, Salesforce.com, O2, American Express.. have shown what can be done by focussing on the customer, why aren’t companies focussing on the Customer Experience?  According to Mindshare the biggest issue with companies and executives is turning VoC into changes in the business such that a powerful impact is made on the Customer Experience.  Why is it an issue?  Because of ‘Other Priorities’.  What can these other priorities be?

From products and pricing to service and social, there is no shortage of talk on what companies need to do to achieve service excellence. For the past many years, specific to ‘social’ the number of people who are more than willing to share ‘what to do’ is staggering. It is easy to say what to do, to be an advice giver. That said, telling someone how to do something is not nearly as easy.

There is not only a tremendous difference between ‘what’ and ‘how’, the ability to cross the chasm between is where companies succeed or fail. Transitioning from what to do to how to do it takes hard work, planning and execution – especially in the realm of customer service!

Customer Service Mission:
A mission is the very big, long-term end-result or achievement in your sights. A Customer Service mission is the biggest and most important thing you and your team aim to accomplish. Mission statements can be tied to financial metrics, directly or indirectly, but financial metrics can also get in the way. A mission is a ‘what’ not a ‘how’. What is your customer service mission? Do you know it by heart?

(A quick sidebar regarding a mission: The company certainly needs to have a mission, but that is not the same as the customer service mission. For example, a company mission may be to reduce the need for customer service. That is not going to fit for the customer service team, now will it.)
Service Goals and Objectives: