Lorena Harris

Consultant - Customer Experience Marketing

Lorena Harris is a top-tier MBA with 20 years of marketing and business development experience for leading B2B service providers. Her expertise is in designing customer experience Thought Leadership programs for brand building and demand generation.

One Bad Experience

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Posted on 2012-03-18

This time my husband wrote the blog entry for me. Actually he wrote the following account of a bad experience to place on a restaurant’s Facebook page. You’ve probably all written one like it – or intended to after a bad experience.

“About three months ago my wife and I discovered a new wine bistro, and immediately loved the place. Since then we’ve given the restaurant a great deal of business and many recommendations. We built a good relationship with the manager, several of the wait staff, and a couple of the Sommeliers. All-in-all, it delivered the kind of service-focused experience we look for in a restaurant.

Unfortunately, that has changed. Last night we invited four friends to join us for dinner at 7:00, and knowing that it would be busy, my wife and I showed up 45 minutes early to put our name on the list. We didn’t see any staff we recognized, and didn’t get the usual level of assistance in picking out a case of retail wine. Our friends showed...

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Today’s Mobile Bubble

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Posted on 2012-03-05

Today I attended MobileXcincy, a conference that assembled mobile experts and enterprises from around the OH, KY, IN region. Presenters flew in from around the country to address a packed house. Enthusiasm, numbers and ideas flew all day, and I typed as fast as my fingers and that little iPad on-screen keyboard would let me. I’d like to share a few of my notes, and beg your forgiveness for lacking the sources. As with many statements, let’s assume most a true and a few not so much.

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Unpermissible Hype

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Posted on 2012-02-05

Recently I learned that once a company has filed an S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that they may pursue an initial public offering of common stock, they enter into a “quiet period” during which they are not allowed any “unpermissible hype” that could be construed as an attempt to boost the company’s value pre-IPO. While this hobbles the Marketing department somewhat, sometimes “hype happens” – usually due to media over-attention.

All kinds of unpermissible hype has been circulating around the Facebook IPO, as it did around other high-profile social media site IPOs such as LinkedIn and Groupon. But if CNN’s Douglas Rushkoff’s perspective is correct, “We are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren’t the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out… The object of the game, for any one of these ultimately temporary social networks, is to create the...

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Financial Services: Too Complex For Consumers?

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Posted on 2012-01-22

For the last six months I’ve been focused on developing a thought leadership program for my new company, a payment processor. To be effective for content marketing, sales support and brand building, the thought leadership needs to be focused on meta-trends in the industry. So I’ve been drinking through the fire hose, trying to understand the financial services industry. What I’ve come to understand is … it’s complicated. There are many players enabling the transfer of money – most not directly interfacing with customers. In such a complex environment, good customer experiences aren’t’ always the priority.

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Becoming a B2B Marketing Digital Native

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Posted on 2011-11-20

Last week I participated in a B2B Marketing Summit in Colorado Springs. The VP’s of Marketing in attendance were from companies such as CA Technologies, Intel, Lenovo, Teredata and Texas Instruments. Although the travel ordeal getting home made me wonder, attending such events at least once a year is good practice. Conferences are a great place to develop or reinvigorate your marketing skills. Here are some of the marketing truths I learned or remembered while interacting with peers:

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Scary Story: Social Media Spooks Financial Services

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Posted on 2011-10-23

In honor of Halloween, I’ve written about something really scary – social media. It may not scare you, but it frightens the risk-adverse traditionalists who manage financial services companies! They know that (whether they personally tweet or not), the majority of Americans are using social media for everything from keeping in touch with friends to requesting service from the companies they shop with. But it feels so wide-open and dangerous that most financial services companies have shied away from the social part of social media, confining participation to “brochureware” postings.

Alain Sherter does a nice job describing this financial services dissonance in his recent BNET blog, “Banking on Twitter and Facebook”. He writes, “Social networks are for sharing; by contrast, many people are understandably reluctant to disclose anything about their financial situation on a public forum.” The same is...

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Customer Experience in Financial Services – Part 2: Credit Card Issuers

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Posted on 2011-10-02

Even with all the publicity surrounding last year’s Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation and the pending Durbin Amendment fee controls, the public doesn’t generally differentiate between the major card networks (Visa, MasterCard), bank-issued cards, or the processing networks behind these. But the cumulative effect of the hype has been to make card holders generally suspicious. More than customers in any other industries, financial services customers want to trust and to be loyal. Good service goes a long way towards achieving this, but bad service can quickly validate their fears. Unfortunately, the latter scenario seems to be playing out in today’s marketplace.

Today we’ll look at customer experience with credit card issuers according to the 1,900 U.S. consumers surveyed as part of the research I directed last year http://bit.ly/oDzXg8. Here’s a short list of differences between customer experience with card providers and with...

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Customer Experience in Financial Services – Part 1: Banks

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Posted on 2011-09-25

What’s different about customer experience in the banking and credit card industries? Glad you asked. The customer experience research I directed last year (http://bit.ly/oDzXg8) showed that, in general, Consumers place the greatest emphasis on “customer service” than price when thinking about financial services providers compared to other industries. Banks appear to be rising to the demand for better service, while credit card providers are failing to live up to customers’ expectations.

Today we’ll look at customer experience in banking according to the 1,900 U.S. consumers surveyed in 2010. Here’s a short list of differences between customer experiences in banking and other industries aggregated:

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Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen

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Posted on 2011-09-10

During Labor Day week , my husband and I enjoyed the Ritz Carlton’s strong service model. All guests, no matter how greasy and sandy from the beach, are treated as ladies and gentlemen. Associates, who are encouraged to think of themselves the same way, keep notes on guest preferences and transfer them to the next shift. The valet who asked if there was a special occasion for the trip relayed that information and I was wished a “happy birthday” by each associate we encountered. Likewise, my comment that it would be nice to have tuna salad for lunch one day resulted in some very tasty sandwhiches the next. Wouldn’t it be great if all service experiences were so tailored?

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Plotting Your Way To Super Loyalty

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Posted on 2011-08-15

Anyone who has ever taken a business or economics course will attest to the fondness of academics for a 2×2 matrix. Put one variable on the X axis, another on the Y, and presto – all manner of phenomenon can be explained. It’s a clarifying and therefore tempting tool – and can be applied to customer experience marketing, too. For example, Stan Phelps refers to a “Value / Maintenance Matrix” in his Marketing Lagniappe blogs (http://bit.ly/n6jN1h). The coveted second quadrant is populated by customers who are high value and low maintenance. This reminded me of the Loyalty Model I developed last year, which plots customers by their lifetime value and strength of loyalty.

According to the research I directed (http://bit.ly/oDzXg8), 89 percent of customers will say they are loyal, but only 29 percent of those customers then add that...

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