On June 6, 2009, Sprint proudly launched their latest flagship product the Palm Pre. While numerous reports have lauded the success of the launch and the phone itself, a more important storyline is the strides that Sprint has made in their overall customer experience. Sprint's customer experience problems have been well documented. Their ability to effectively address those problems may be the one thing that will make or break the company. Although Sprint's recent performance with the Palm Pre had its pro's and con's, Sprint appears to have done this one right.

Sprint obviously has a lot riding on the Palm Pre. Over the past few years, Sprint's customer satisfaction woes have been well documented and new CEO Dan Hesse has made it clear that improving customer satisfaction is priority number one. While Sprint has been making strides on fixing their problems, no one seemed to notice. Sprint needed to grab the stage - even if for just a short period - to demonstrate that things had changed. The Palm Pre has provided that stage and Sprint's performance is sure to be closely scrutinized. Dan Hesse went so far as to refer to last weekend's launch as a "coming out party" for Sprint.

THE TOTAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Most businesses understand the tremendous value associated with highly loyal customers. That is why businesses of every size and shape have implemented loyalty programs to keep their best customers coming back again and again. Unfortunately, this traditional loyalty model has grown tired and provides little differentiation in the market today. As a result, it’s time to rethink customer loyalty.

The Loyalty Flood

Unfortunately for many businesses, any advantage that was originally gained through loyal programs has quickly eroded. While airline, hotel, and car rental agencies were the pioneers of mainstream loyalty programs, other businesses were quick to jump on the loyalty program bandwagon. The result is a business environment where every restaurant, gas station and pet store has some form of loyalty card or program.

Attempting to measure the customer experience with a single metric such as customer satisfaction or customer advocacy is overly simplistic and risky. Instead, companies should dig deeper and establish a portfolio of measures that can determine how each touch point contributes to the overall experience.

The Total Customer Experience is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

The customer experience is a complex process that can consist of multiple touch points; a process that can be broad, long-running, span multiple channels, and can be influenced by any combination of internal and external factors. Effectively measuring the total customer experience requires a more acute understanding of its individual parts.

The customer experience process does not begin and end at a store, sales representatives, web site or call center. It extends from the moment the customer becomes aware of your company and is comprised of multiple independent interactions, transactions, and contacts along the way.

Each customer experience is made up of any number of touch points and customer encounters, each of which should be measured independently to determine their contribution to the overall experience. An issue encountered at any one of these points can dramatically influence the overall experience.

A critical - and yet often overlooked - component of customer relationship management (CRM) is the cultivation of existing customers. We’ve seen it all too often; companies spend nearly all of their time and scarce resources trying to attract new customers - while existing customers are largely ignored. This practice can be costly in terms of lower profitability and higher customer turnover rates. Companies seeking to improve their CRM practices should look no further than cultivating existing customer relationships.

The Importance of Cultivation

All too often, businesses large and small become focused on one simple thing: attracting new customers. While this is an important dynamic for real business growth, it can become toxic if it is overemphasized and becomes the ONLY focal point for the business.

Customer acquisition is often the most costly and least profitable component of the overall customer experience. Companies throw promotions, price discounts, or free products and services at potential new customers - all of which can quickly hike up acquisition costs and squeeze profitability.

Don’t Make a Loss Leader be a Total Loss

A business tale of what it takes to turn around troubled projects.

The year is 2005 and times are good. The business environment is vibrant and the economy is strong. Large businesses are committing large amounts of capital and resources to implement new strategies, establish new capabilities, and open new markets. It was no different at PintCo, where Jack works as a Director of Customer Relationship Management.

Jack walked into work on Monday morning like any other. He dropped his briefcase in his office, grabbed a cup of coffee and headed down the hall to meet with his boss, Brandon, about one of the company’s troubled projects. Although Jack had substantial experience, he had only recently joined PintCo after being hired away from a chief competitor. He was still learning about some of the nuances of his current employer.

After the typical morning banter, Brandon and Jack got to the topic at hand. “Jack, I’ll get straight to the point. I need to you to take over the Customer Master File project from Paul.” Brandon said. He continued, “We hired you because of your significant project management expertise. I know that you’ve turned around a lot more difficult situations than this.” Over an hour later, Jack emerged from Brandon’s office and set out to learn more about the challenge that Brandon had posed to him.

Companies seeking to become more customer-centric should define the customer experience as a formal end-to-end process in their organization.

Business leaders that subscribe to the process-centric approach to business improvement understand the importance of having well-defined end-to-end processes. Typical end-to-end processes that are well-defined and optimized in businesses today include:

• Plan to Profits (Budgeting & Finance)
• Order to Cash (Operations/Order Fulfillment)
• Procure to Pay (Procurement)
• Recruit to Retain (Human Resources)
• Idea to Market (New Product Innovation)
• Forecast to Delivery (Manufacturing & Distribution)
• Market to Sale (Sales & Marketing)

For those organizations that have formally adopted a process-centric approach to business, the process is often formally defined, measured, monitored, and continually optimized. This level of discipline is critical to deliver a process that is high performing, predictable, efficient, effective, and error-free.

In order to become more customer-centric, businesses should add the customer experience end-to-end process to their portfolio of strategically important processes.

Inside Jobs: Scary Political Season

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When projects need a strong dose of strategy & direction, leaning solely on requirements just won’t cut it anymore.

If you’ve been a part of any business project during your professional career, you’ve seen the basic formula before: Project teams analyze the current state, identify requirements, and then implement a solution that best meets the requirements. Once the solution is implemented, management turns its attention elsewhere – never to think about that specific area of the business again. This ‘check the box’ thinking can be risky business in an environment where new competitive threats can appear anywhere and anytime.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, businesses need a performance framework that can grow over time, be benchmarked against the competition, and stretch the imagination of employees and stakeholders. Although requirements development will always be a mainstay for any project management discipline, the incorporation of capabilities and maturity models can better position your business for future competition and unforeseen threats and opportunities.

Loyalty cards have invaded and have taken over our lives! It all started innocently enough. It seemed like no big deal when airlines and hotels embraced the ‘frequent’ traveler rewards programs. We consumers embraced the idea of earning rewards for our travel.

Little did we know that loyalty cards would band together and plot to overtake our lives! The momentum built slowly so that we wouldn’t notice. First we had one airline and one hotel loyalty card stowed safely in our wallets. Soon, we added other cards to make sure that we took advantage of our travel activities on all airlines and hotels that we might visit. Then, as if we wouldn’t notice, rental car reward cards snuck into our wallets. As we added airlines, hotels, and rental car cards, the number of loyalty cards that we held crept into the double digits.

Other businesses eager to cash in on the loyalty card phenomenon were quick to respond. One by one we added loyalty cards from restaurants, grocery stores, department stores, gasoline stations, coffee shops, video stores, and pet stores. Colorful plastic cards that beckoned us to use them more and more soon overwhelmed our wallets.

Inside Jobs - Where Customer Data Goes to Die

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