Greg Gianforte

I’ve done more than 100 individual customer visits so far this year.

At a recent meeting with a large Australian retail bank, the new GM of Marketing and Customer Experience said, “We were all hired to support the new CEO’s goal to differentiate based on customer experience.”  The “we” she was referring to was herself, as well as the new GM of Innovation and Strategy, the new GM of Technology, and of course the new CEO.  They were essentially a brand new management team hired specifically around the goal of differentiated customer experience and transformation.

“Customer Experience” job titles are something I’ve been seeing more and more in my travels to large consumer businesses.  In fact, according to indeed.com, the number of job postings that use the words “customer experience” has increased 450% within the last year.

Consumer businesses are starting to get the fact that customer experience is THE differentiator in the market today...

As many of you know, I do lots of 1-on-1 customer and prospect visits each year. Nothing substitutes for being at the coal face. Here are three top level takeaways from this year’s 150 or so visits:

Changing Titles
In 2008 the highest ranking title of the people I was meeting with included the words “Customer Service” or “Customer Operations”. In 2009, the most prevalent highest ranking title in each meeting was “CEO” or “COO”. Second was “CIO” and in third place was last year’s winner, “VP of Customer Service” (I also saw a number of top marketing execs starting to show up as well). Generally “Customer Service” was always in the meetings, but their boss and IT appearing are significant.

I believe this shift in attendance has to do with the increasing importance of customer experience and the growing recognition that due to...

In January, I wrote a blog about change creating opportunity, because I believe that massive change creates massive opportunity. Over the past few years I’ve met individually with hundreds of executives tasked with delivering great customer experiences in over 300 firms. One thing has become apparent: there is huge change underfoot, it is massive and it presents massive opportunity.

The change is the increasing empowerment of the consumer, driven largely by social networking. Consumers now have an unprecedented arsenal of social options to magnify their voice to either advocate or tear down companies if their high expectations don’t turn into reality. Organizations will thrive if they proactively tune into this social consumer power to deliver better customer experiences.

RightNow recently made a strategic acquisition; we purchased HiveLive, an enterprise-class social...

Ongoing thoughts about innovation

Innovation is a hot topic at RightNow and I was recently speaking with an employee about how she is thinking about innovation and applying it to her role at the company.

She said, “I’m often struck by the complexity of our business relative to our size relative to the simplicity of our mission.  I believe we have opportunities to find the simplicity beyond the complexity, and make a big impact on our business.”  She had been studying Peter Drucker who makes a valid case for simplicity as a key element of innovation.   According to Drucker:

“An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should do only one thing; otherwise, it confuses. If it is not simple, it won’t work. All effective innovations are breathtakingly simple.  Indeed, the greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say, This is obvious. Why didn...