Figure 1. Software as a Service (Saas) sales funnel illustrates the importance of three types of customer loyalty: Retention, Advocacy and Purchasing. From Stephen King at stephdokin.com
Software as a Service (Saas) companies are particularly vulnerable to customer disloyalty. SaaS companies’ success depends on satisfying their customers on a regular basis or risk the possibility of loosing customers and engendering bad will in the...
I was invited to give a talk last week at a local incubator (Eastside Incubator) on how startups can incorporate customer experience management into their companies. Thanks to Phuoc Do from 1001 Mentorsfor the invitation. The slides to my talk are at the end of this post. The content of the post below should provide good support for the content of the slides.
Successful companies understand that, to ensure long-term sustainable growth, they must focus on providing a great customer experience. Across the entire phase of the customer life cycle (e.g., marketing, sales and service), companies lay out a strategy that will, hopefully, ensure a great customer experience and increase customer loyalty. This process of understanding and managing the customer experience is formally referred to as ...
I wrote a post last week that compared two ways to make decisions/predictions: 1) opinion-driven and 2) data-driven. I am a big believer of using data to help make decisions/predictions. Many pundits/analysts made predictions about who would win the US presidential elections. Now that the elections are over, we can compare the success rate for predicting the election. Comparing the pundits with Nate Silver, Mr. Silver is clearly the winner, predicting the winner of the presidential election for each state perfectly (yes, 50 out of 50 states) and the winner of the popular vote.
Senior executives make business decisions based on different types of information. They can use their gut feelings to guide their decisions, they can use data to inform their decisions or they can use both. Executives’ decisions can be guided by their prior experiences or an examination of a whole host of business data to help form their decisions. Let us take a look at a timely topic on the predicted outcome of the US presidential election that shines a light on the use of data in making predictions/decisions.
Measuring customer loyalty, the degree to which customers engage in positive behaviors toward your company/brand, is essential for your customer experience management (CEM) program. We know that customer loyalty is key to driving business growth (e.g., increased revenue, market share). Customers can exhibit many different types of loyalty behaviors toward a company, from recommending your company and buying the same product from you in the future to buying different/additional types of products from you and staying with you for a long time. While there are several ways customers can show their loyalty, research has shown that customer loyalty essentially boils down to three different types of...
Big Data is being touted as the next big thing for businesses. The benefits of Big Data are apparent in many areas, from search results and recommendation engines to customer experience management. By analyzing massive amounts of quickly expanding, diverse data, businesses are able to gain the insights they need to beat their competitors. A major roadblock to discovering these insights, however, is the lack of people with the skills to analyze these data. For example, in a late 2010 study, researchers from MIT Sloan Management Review and IBM asked 3000 executives, managers and analysts about how they obtain value from their massive amounts of data. These respondents...
I read an article last week in Scientific American that has implications about the field of customer experience management (CEM). The article, Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into “Facts”?, discusses the phenomenon of widely held beliefs that are not true. Think about President Barack Obama’s US citizenship status still being questioned even though he has released his birth certificate and his birth in Hawaii has been corroborated by the news media. Despite these facts, 51% of voters in the 2011 Republican primary election believed Obama was born abroad...
Companies rely on customer experience management (CEM) programs to provide insight about how to manage customer relationships effectively to grow their business. CEM programs require measurement of primarily two types of variables, satisfaction with customer experience and customer loyalty. These metrics are used specifically to assess the importance of customer experience in improving customer loyalty. Determining the “importance” of different customer experience attributes needs to be precise as it plays a major role in helping companies: 1) prioritize improvement efforts, 2) estimate return on investment (ROI) of improvement efforts and 3) allocate company resources.
When we label a customer experience attribute as “important,” we typically are referring to the...
The U.S. government provides a variety of publicly available databases that include metrics on the performance of US hospitals, including patient experience (PX) database, health outcome database, process of care database and medical spending database. Applying Big Data principles on these disparate data sources, I integrated different metrics from their respective databases to better understand the quality of US hospitals and determine ways they can improve the patient experience and the overall healthcare delivery...
I was invited to present at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Payment Card Center conference, Consumer Financial Protection Regulations: How Do They Measure Up?. Held last week in Philadelphia, this excellent two-day event was tailored around different aspects consumer financial protection to help advance the discussion of targeted design and outcome measurement as central features of public policy in the area of consumer financial protection. I was part of a panel of professionals who discussed the challenges of analyzing consumer complaints from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). I focused specifically on the complaints that the CFPB are gathering from consumers regarding credit cards to shed light on the use of the CFPB credit card complaint data and the quality of these complaints.
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