Graham Hill

DesignThinkers, Optima Value, Loyalty Factory and Nyras Capital

I work in innovation, service design, value co-creation and private equity with DesignThinkers, Optima Partners, Loyalty Factory, and Nyras Capital
If you have a question, feel free to tweet me @grahamhill
[Blog: Customer Insider]

Seven Simple Steps Towards Better Collaboration

1 comments 4,936 reads

Posted on 2011-09-30

In an earlier post on CustomerThink I described Ten Principles that Drive Effective Collaboration. And why just implementing collaboration technology would not improve collaboration. Worse, how it would make you into an ‘Expensive Old Organisation’; with all the costs of the new technology, but none of the desired benefits. If simply implementing new technology isn’t the way to increase collaboration, what is?
Fortunately getting started with collaboration is much easier than you might think. In fact, you are probably doing some of it already.

Seven Simple Steps to Better Collaboration

Building a solid foundation for collaboration is not difficult. Without it collaboration will probably not take hold and flourish. Here are seven steps that will help you get started with collaboration:

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Changing How We Manage Change

1 comments 4,160 reads

Posted on 2011-09-19

Implementing a new CRM, or other business system – even one with similar functionality to one it is replacing – is fraught with dangers. Experience suggests that without pro-actively managing change, a significant number of CRM system projects fail to deliver the expected benefits and in a significant number of cases, are abandoned within only a few months of going live.

Managing change is not the same as just implementing the new system, training staff how to use it, telling staff all about it and then expecting change to occur. That path almost invariably leads to failure. As the old change management saying goes: Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization.

Effective change management is a structured process that changes how individual staff do their work, how teams work together to do their work, how management supports the change over the longer-term and how the organization as a whole benefits from emerging changes.

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Ten Principles that Drive Effective Collaboration

1 comments 6,188 reads

Posted on 2011-09-14

Collaboration is a hot topic in business today. Companies are recognising that effective collaboration is critical to future business success. Many are hoping that if they just buy collaboration technology, a miracle will happen, and they will become collaborative companies. The bad news is: they won’t! Companies need to develop their collaborative capabilities first, BEFORE, implementing collaboration tools. Otherwise the old saying will apply… Old (Un-collaborative) Organisation + New (Collaboration) Technology = Expensive Old (Un-collaborative) Organisation!

The good news is any company can increase the effectiveness of their collaboration by building it on a foundation based on ten simple principles. Before we look at the ten principles, we had better look at what collaboration is.

What is Collaboration?

One of the best descriptions of collaboration can be found in Beyerlein & Harris book ‘Guiding the Journey to Collaborative Work...

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Customer Delight or a Brilliant PR Stunt? You Decide

2 comments 3,782 reads

Posted on 2011-08-22

There is an interesting true story doing the rounds of customer service blogs at the moment. In it, Peter Shankman a customer service writer, blogger and regular customer at Morton’s Steakhouse jokingly tweeted to Morton’s that he would like a Porterhouse waiting for him upon landing at Newark airport after a long day on the road. Much to his surprise, when he landed that is exactly what was waiting: a uniformed waiter complete with a steak dinner, some side-orders and silver cutlery. Naturally, Peter was delighted and blogged about it immediately. The twitterverse got hold of it and now everybody is talking about Morton’s, about their greatest/worst experiences at Morton’s and more importantly, putting this forward as a great example of customer service.

But is it really customer service...

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What’s Your Platform for Value Co-Creation?

1 comments 5,198 reads

Posted on 2011-07-19

A couple of years back I wrote a speculative blog post at CustomerThink entitled How Customer Co-Creation is the Future of Business. In many ways my prediction was right, Customer Co-Creation IS the future of business, but not exactly in the way I had imagined.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been with us for over 20 years. It is built around using customer analytics to improve marketing, sales and service touchpoints. And it works very well. Or at least it does for companies. But it doesn’t offer much of any value to their customers. And as a result, its effectiveness has started to fall.

Customer Experience Management (CExM) was created about 10 years ago as an antidote to the blatant one-sidedness of CRM. It still uses the same customer analytics, but it applies the insights generated to improve all the...

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Social CRM: What's Right, What's Wrong, What's Next? Inside Scoop with Graham Hill

4 comments 10,973 reads

Posted on 2011-03-29
On March 24, 2011, CustomerThink Founder/CEO Bob Thompson interviewed Graham Hill in a wide-ranging discussion about Social CRM.
Interview covers the following topics (click to jump to section in transcript):
You can also listen to the audio here:

...
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Social CRM at a Crossroads: Where to Next?

2 comments 7,246 reads

Posted on 2011-03-07

Social CRM has evolved from a novelty used by only a few organisations, to a powerful tool that practically all use. Much of this evolution has been powered by the hype cycle. Social CRM is now at a crossroads. It can go in three directions: it can become just another communications channel, it can become a technology solution, or it can become a way to co-create more value together with customers. Only by looking at Social CRM as an enabler for value co-creation can organisations use it to develop a sustainable and profitable business model.

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A Manifesto for Social Business

24 comments 35,643 reads

Posted on 2009-11-10

The nature of business is inexorably changing. The changes are being driven by a number of factors: ranging from the need to compete differently after the recession, through the availability of huge volumes of new information, to the rapidly growing influence of social customers.

I would almost go as far to say that we are fast approaching a period of ‘Business Enlightenment', based not so much on the linear thinking that drove the Enlightenment in the 18th Century, as on networked, emergent thinking which is driving so much new thinking in the 21st.

Many different themes are coming together and new business models are emerging from where they meet and mutually reinforce each other. Together, they have the potential to change many aspects of what we call business today. They have the potential to create a new kind of Social Business, driven not so much for social purposes as by social relationships. Many companies are already experimenting with these themes, some...

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How "Vision, Value & Venturing" Drives Social CRM Success

3 comments 9,349 reads

Posted on 2009-10-03

We find ourselves in times of radical change. Traditional CRM is everywhere, but is struggling, as customers demand their quid pro quo. The CEM reinforcements management has drafted in are getting bogged down too, as companies belatedly recognise that the problem with CRM has little to do with branded experiences, but everything to do with a lack of customer-centricity. Social CRM has the potential to redistribute some power to customers.

But how should we proceed when no-one can even define what SocCRM really is?
I have faced similar problems in many of my ‘edge’ projects in the past; the ones where clients are pretty sure something will work, want to take a small bet on it working, but are not sure exactly how to make it work. Not having a roadmap is absolutely no excuse for not starting out on the journey. Providing you take the journey one step at a time.

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Five Steps to Real Customer-Centricity

9 comments 14,432 reads

Posted on 2009-10-01

Many companies talk about customer-centricity. They tak about it in their annual reports, they talk about it in their analyst briefings, and their CEOs talks about it all the time when they are interviewed. But talk is all they do. A recent port on Customer Centricity: Discovering What Consumers Really Think of Customer Service by customer data specialists Dunn Humby shows the majority of companies score negatively for customer-centricity.

This lack of customer-centricity is both a problem and an opportunity. It is a problem because it fails to leverage the customer-equity available to companies that become customer-centric. But it is also an opportunity because most companies are content with just saying that they are customer-centric in their annual reports, without ever actually becoming customer-centric. Customers, of course, know better than to believe all the corporate...

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