There has been so much said about Web 2.0. that most of us are confused. We related Web 2.0 with the famous Facebook or Linkedin or some of their cousins. So many different definitions, I could fill this entire blog with them. However there is a really easy one that can tell us how to use web 2.0 tools to enhance our customers experience : "Web 2.0 is all about connecting people". Yes, connecting people. Your employees, your partners, your customers. Web 1.0 was just about connecting computers. This is different. Those of us that are concerned about not being able to align technology with the business can have it easy if we know how to use Web 2.0 technologies.

Web 2.0 is not for college kids anymore. Did you all know that the average Internet gamer in the USA averages 33 years old ? Are they watching TV ? not really. Just guess where you need to get in contact with them easier.

However, in WEB 2.0 there are blogs, there are wikis, virtual worlds, social communities, meetups, mess-ups, chats, and so much more!
Where to start ? 34 percent of Americans today blog... just imagine how crowded it is and how it is going the get. Ah... Blogs... TOO many of them now on the Internet ? which ones should one read ? what is really good information and what is a waste of time ? With all these different options, where should one start?

I love traveling and I love flying. However every time I am in an airport, I think that in customer service we are definitely forgetting the basics. We are thinking so much about knowing customers, their behaviours, their expectations, trying to establish relationships and giving them the best experience, that we are forgetting the minimum any human being expects. Relating to nice people and being heard.

How many times have you told your favorite airline that you like ailes. How many times have you gone thru an inmigration line without getting an answer from a good morning or a bonjour! How many times have you talked to airline agents who do not smile? or how many times have you been told "there is nothing we can do about it". How many times have you had to wait until they hang up their mobile calls to get an answer?

The theory says that customer service has to do with people, with processes like handling complaints, and in many cases with too much technology. People with competences that include customer orientation, flexibility, patience. Processes that are customer centered and technology that allows efficiency and productivity.

For ages, we in customer management have discussed a very strong marketing tool called "word of mouth." On certain occasions, you might even call it gossiping. But whether you call it word of mouth or gossip, it has found a fast vehicle to ride on: the Internet.

Social networking is nothing more than finding new ways to distribute and share what you think about companies, their products, people and anything else using the Internet as the medium. Blogs, chats, social networking sites are replacing parties and get-togethers to create a forum where the number of people participating grows exponentially.

According to the (Brazil-based) Update or Die, as of late October 2007, the top three sites were MySpace, with 110 million users; Google's Orkut ranked second with 67 million users; and Facebook was third, with 48 million users. It is scary and exciting. Social networking has been here all along and is here to stay.

There was an airline in Colombia that had very old airplanes that had problems very often, yet the airline was the leader in customer satisfaction and loyalty. How did it do it? By applying some basic principles that created a customer-oriented culture.

"Customer culture"—which along with "customer focus" has become some of consultants' favorite buzz phrases—relates to instilling values and behaviors in a company. It is oriented toward implementing a process in which a company understands what customers need and want and develops products and services accordingly.

The emphasis on getting a customer-centric culture right is definitely a growing trend. In its 2006 study, High-Performance Workforce, Accenture asked 470 global executives to classify the greatest challenges their organizations were facing. Two issues had the biggest response: information technology (48 percent of respondents) and keeping up with industry change (47 percent). And to keep up with change, 75 percent of the organizations surveyed stated that the most important element was creating a culture that matched the company's strategy.

I came home one night from work, and my 15-year-old daughter told me, "Mommy, a robot called you to confirm our reservations to go to Peru during Easter break." I could not help laughing. I laughed so much she got upset. She said, "I am serious. It was not a person. It was really a robot." And she started imitating the voice.

It was a contact center agent reading a script. And my daughter was right. He sounded like a robot.

What are we doing with contact centers? Are they still the magical places where you can find out what your customers are thinking and doing? They definitely are. But we are changing them so radically, we are forgetting why we created them.

You know the theory. Contact centers are those places where you can receive calls, emails, electronic contacts, faxes and short messages from customers. And places where you can generate calls to your customers. But what are you calling them for? For helping them, solving their problems, listening to them, getting to know them, updating their information, serving them, selling to them and cross-selling to them. In general, relating to customers.

Has 2006 been a good year for customers? I definitely think it has been. Many companies have focused on implementing customer-oriented strategies; many others have made real efforts in understanding what customers want and value; and others have come up with creative and innovative ways of catching and sustaining the customers' attention so they won't go to the competition.

But not all has been golden. Companies have backtracked tremendously in their ways of making customers feel different, understood and special. Haven't you seen that wonderful place where you get your coffee every morning behave in a different way? Are you getting the same customer experience you had a couple of years ago?

Are you feeling closer to retail stores on the web? Or are they still sending you the same advertising emails, forgetting your size and preferences? Has your bank or insurance company stopped sending you tons of mass marketing catalogs and campaign pieces that clearly show they don't understand what you want to receive and how you want to receive it?

Even though real efforts have been made, we still have a long way to go in relating differently to customers and giving them a differentiated experience that makes them stay with us.

A good customer strategy needs to be measured.

How many times have we all heard that? Every time we read a new book on marketing or customer management, we see a different metric. Customer satisfaction, income, frequency, ARPU, churn, new customers, ROI, ROC, number of customer complaints, average number of complaints per customer. I could fill pages and pages of acronyms and metrics. On top of everything, we have all the management and marketing gurus telling us we need to measure. Peter Drucker told us many years ago, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

He is right. Part of defining a good customer strategy is defining how we measure if it is working. And to know if it is working, we need to know the objectives of the customer strategy, so we can measure against them. But most companies make it almost impossible. They measure too many things. The multitude of metrics used makes it impossible for a company to act on them.

Marketing experiences. CEM. Customer Experiences. A new term has just come out, and it is becoming quite fashionable to speak about the experience your customer has with your company. I am sure it will be just a short while before companies are speaking about PEM (partner experience management), EEM (employee experience management) and all kinds of "EM" acronyms.

It's nothing new. Thinking about customer experiences has been in the minds of marketers for a long time. It is something so logical that when you hear about it, you think "yes, it is obvious." But at the same time, you get the feeling you've just discovered hot water or air conditioning.

I have spent the last four years of my working life thinking about how to make a total end-to-end customer experience something that differentiates companies from others and can give them a competitive advantage. It all started at a CRM conference. A speaker from the United Kingdom was talking about the Virgin brand. Suddenly, I realized, "This is it! It is so obvious." But what is experience? And how can we design it and implement it so customers perceive that we, as companies, behave differently?

We all know that a customer-centric initiative involves many elements. It starts when you define your strategy, deciding to compete differently and focus not only on great products and innovation but also on relating and treating customers differently.

It continues when you recognize the need to know your customers; you segment them; and then treat different customers differently and consistently. To do that, one of the first things you need is to integrate all customer contact points. Sales, service, provisioning, billing, claims and returns, communication, marketing campaigns—these are all customer touch-points.

That is the customer-centric initiatives recipe. Sounds easy. But many companies are still not getting it. They forget that there are two things they need to do flawlessly: give customers differentiated treatment and deliver it consistently.