A long-term patient goes to a doctor for an annual physical, completes the required paperwork and checks out. Months later, the patient receives a bill indicating the health insurance company denied part of the service. The doctor's office can't explain why— they use a third party billing service and don't know anything about the bill. The billing service won't help—they just do the paperwork.
After numerous calls to the doctor's office and insurance company, the patient gives up and pays the bill. But, but when asked by a new neighbor for a doctor in the area, the patient recommends they look elsewhere.
By measuring each touch point independently you can determine its contribution to the overall effectiveness as well as more effectively measure the total customer experience.
Customer experience and engagement have evolved from table stakes to points of differentiation, as indicated by the flurry of customer experience/relationship scores now being published. More and more evidence strongly suggests that there is a link between customer experience/engagement and the financial success of the company.
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Peter Drucker once said that marketing is knowing "the customer well enough to develop products that sell themselves." Long-term success is linked to innovation. New product development depends on synthesizing customer insights and market intelligence—and the knowledge behind creating a product to meet these needs.
Sadly, many companies are too out of touch with their customers to do that, and many as a result do not deliver such products. More than half of the 309 executives who responded to Strativity Group's 2006 Customer Experience Management Global Survey indicated that their company does not deliver a unique and beneficial product to the customer. The authors of the study believed that "the heart of the issue is the lack of differentiation."
The ability to develop products and services that offer fresh ideas and are relevant to customers is no easy task, especially in a world where products are quickly commoditized. Few businesses get it right, and new products suffer a high mortality rate.
‘The microcontroller division went from a hemorrhaging operation to an industry leader in seven years.’
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The year of the customer. That is what the authors of the third annual New York Stock Exchange CEO Report have dubbed 2008, based on research with 240 of the world's top business leaders representing more than 20 industries in 24 countries. Those executives indicated that in the coming year they intend to have more focus on customers. This renewed effort comes on the heels of a Conference Board survey of CEOs, which found customer retention to be the No. 1 challenge facing companies.
It seems we've come full circle since Peter Drucker, the father of contemporary management, said that "the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer." A third of the CEOs in the Conference Board study reported that they now spend and plan to allot more time to customer relations than they did three years ago.
‘ROI means nothing less than accountability, and accountability signals the growing pressure for marketing to quantify its financial value.’
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Measuring Only Marketing Activities Won't Reveal the Return on Marketing Investment
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Posted on Oct 22, 2007
Today's marketers are being asked to be more accountable for the money they invest on behalf of the company and to demonstrate the contribution and value they are making. At the same time, they are struggling to secure a more strategic place at the table and to have a role beyond sales support. This was the case for one of our clients, a leading global provider of rugged and reliable specialty printing solutions.
At this company, management was asking the marketing team to focus its resources on high-value and high-ROI strategies. While senior executives had allocated what they felt was a considerable budget for marketing, the marketing team struggled to satisfy all the requirements within the budget parameters. The myriad and frequent tactical requests regularly stretched the limit of the team's internal resources. In addition, the marketing organization was being asked to quantify how it was supporting key business objectives, particularly in terms of revenue generation and channel support.
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How Effective Is Your PR? Media Impressions Can't Give You the Whole Picture
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Posted on Oct 15, 2007
For many companies, public relations is a key part of marketing efforts. Unfortunately, I have found that when it comes to metrics for PR, many companies typically rely on media impressions as a way to evaluate the value of their PR initiatives. While media impressions can serve as one good data point, alone they do not help the organization tie public relations to key business outcomes or help assess the overall impact of PR efforts.
Recently, I had the opportunity to work with the world's largest producer of air-cooled gasoline engines for outdoor power equipment and assist the company in more accurately assessing the value of its PR programs.
‘Companies can hone in on measures other than impressions so that they can more effectively measure their PR efforts.’
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Know Your Customers' Wallet Share to Retain the Best Customers
1 comments | 6183 reads
Posted on Sep 24, 2007
When I began my career in marketing and sales more than 25 years ago, my first job was helping a financial services firm retain customers and grow its share of the customers' wallet. This was long before customer relationship management was popular and before the advent of CRM and SFA systems. Today we definitely have more sophisticated ways to understand who our best customers are and what we need to do to keep them satisfied. While my work has covered all aspects of marketing, I eventually return to keeping customers and growing customer value.
That holds even today, where companies tend to focus more on customer acquisition. If you have customers, it pays to invest in retention and growing your share of the customers' wallet. Consider one company I worked with, which was already the worldwide leader in its particular industry with 60 percent of the market share. For all practical purposes, the business had only one primary competitor. Everyone already knew and bought from both of the companies. The rub was that my customer was in a market that had only about a 2 percent compound annual growth rate, and the challenge was to grow at least four times faster than the market. So how and where does a market leader who is already doing business with everyone achieve this kind of growth?
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