Customer Experience

Conclusion: A high dependence on a small range of technologies can reveal and extend weaknesses in marketing strategies. Coupled with the development of mobile applications to enhance their brands, marketers have moved to one-to-one communications which entails relatively increasing marginal costs because the efficiencies of scale are discounted. The focus on metrics and CRM in order to gain a comprehensive view of customers should aim to improve marketing activity efficiency, which also includes investments.

Conclusion: consumers are de facto demanding Omni-channel customer service in digital commerce for its single consistent positive experience but Omni-channel service is only an aspiration for most businesses today.

• Viable Omni-channel technology and IT architectures exist and are rapidly emerging but insensitive, unknowing business management is the main inhibitor to adoption of Omni-channel as the universal approach and practice.
• Omni-channel creates a bigger scaling problem in marketing and IT than most enterprises currently envisage.
• Leading adopters are evaluating Omni-channel service as a goal, but only investing in deployments that are immediately affordable because an Omni-channel ecosystem can be endless.

Conclusion: Some organisations succeed at innovation better than others. To do so requires insight and an ability to understand how an organisation can function differently.

Innovation requires fresh thinking and different approaches. It demands attention on the value chain and business process in order to develop alternatives that will solve old issues.

Conclusion: In an effort to reduce transaction costs governments have moved face-to-face payment-based transactions to online services. However, it is not always clear if savings are maximised and customers are totally satisfied.

If governments look to redesign services, some payment-based transactions no longer need to exist and many can be automated to the point they require no intervention from government or customer.

Most jurisdictions have failed to reduce payment-based transactions because their service delivery bodies are KPIed on the number of transactions they process.

Conclusion: Organisations globally and across Australia increasingly understand the importance of providing products and services with a great user experience. Global companies and brands such as Google, the iPhone, the iPad, and the Kindle from Amazon have proven that user experience is an important differentiator even when something is not first to market. User experience (UX) is often confused with User Interface (UI) and organisations wanting to improve the customer experience of the products and services need to understand the difference. Organisations may increase their capabilities or engage an experienced partner to assist them to improve their user experience (UX) and it is important to understand the UX and UI roles and then apply them both in the appropriate manner so that they are not producing the wrong thing in a beautiful wrapper.

Conclusion: Organisations across Australia are talking about innovation. Having a structured approach for idea management within organisations is critical as is receiving executive support and appropriate funding for new ideas. However, thinking differently about problems and opportunities will be a key competency in the drive for innovation. One approach such as design thinking is being utilised to great effect in other countries. There are some local occurrences but Australia is lagging and needs to take action to catch up.

Conclusion: Failure to understand the nuances present in clinical environments can lead to experienced ICT professionals making fundamental errors. These errors can impact patient safety.

Conclusion: Over the years, many ICT professionals have moved from roles in commerce to roles in Health without recognising the unique challenges presented by clinical environments. The result is an underperforming, expensive and misaligned ICT service that soaks up hundreds of millions of dollars annually for minimal patient benefit.

Conclusion: Organisations that fail to recognise the difference between information and knowledge are at risk of haemorrhaging knowledge at a rate that at the very least has a measurable impact on the quality of service delivered by the organisation. In the worst case, a loss of knowledge poses an existential threat to a product line or to the entire organisation. Whilst tools can play an important role in facilitating knowledge preservation, it is information sharing between individuals and teams that fuels the creation of knowledge.

Conclusion: Consumer-oriented software and online services are raising user expectations. To determine the aspects of user experience design, and the trade-offs that are appropriate in a particular business context, requires extensive collaboration across multiple disciplines. The cross-disciplinary nature of the work must be considered when evaluating external providers of user experience design services. References and case studies should be consulted to confirm cross disciplinary capabilities and the level of expertise in all relevant disciplines.

Some standards are undeniably useful, and the benefits of these standards can typically be quantified in terms of improvements in quality and productivity due to increases in the level of automation and interoperability. In contrast, other standards mainly fuel a certification industry that has developed around a standards body, without leading to any measurable benefits, whilst clearly adding to the operating costs of those organisations that choose to adopt such standards.

Much anguish has been expressed over the Apple-Samsung patent court battle. It’s not that this run of patents wars is new – they’ve been a feature of the technology business for over a century

One of the nastiest feuds was between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Apart from being a brilliant inventor Edison was a consummate litigator. One of the reasons the movie business took root in California was to evade Edison’s patent police. He owned the major patents on movie cameras and pursued anyone who reverse engineered his product. The East coast film producers were obliged to pay large fees to Edison; but on the west coast that was evadable. It is a suitable irony that copyright violation is one of the foundations of American film industry. Edison’s struggle with Westinghouse over alternating current versus direct current power was typically bitter. By 1900 Edison’s legal costs were $2M, equivalent to $52M in today’s money.

Conclusion: When conceiving and designing new services, the primary focus of product managers and technologists is often on functionality, and adequate quality of service is largely assumed as a given. Similarly, from the perspective of a potential user of a new service – the user is mainly concerned about the functional fit of the service, and is prone to making implicit assumptions about quality of service based on brief experimental use of a service. The best service level agreements not only quantify quality of service, they also provide strong incentives for services provider and service users to cooperate and collaborate on continuous improvement.

Conclusion: The intense focus on social media and related technologies and how it will influence organisations has increased in the last year. Nor will it dim. The catalyst for the change has emanated from four companies and their products which have significantly altered behaviour and interaction with technology – in particular with devices.

Business and IT executives wishing to understand the forces of consumerisation and social media (Social IT) and its impact within organisations need to look at the compound effect brought about by network connections between those four companies and how people connect with them.

Conclusion: The challenge of servicing customers well through various channels and over many devices has added considerable complexity to operations. The blindness of monitoring how well the IT operation is working has been removed and now data flows in huge amounts. The principal goal is to provide high quality customer experience and not simply rely on dashboards to churn out machine data reports.

The skills of analysis and insight should be more keenly applied to the data in order to reveal and clarify the value of the data. How the reams of data can be used for an organisation to deliver a high customer experience remains the main task. Organisations that believe that solely monitoring data to support transactions will likely miss the significance of what the data can yield and strengthen their customer contacts.

Unbelievably, Steve Jobs' passing made front page news in virtually every nation on earth. This is probably unprecedented for an 'IT guy' let alone one who dropped out of college before going on to establish Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. As most know, after the Jonathan Sculley / Steve Jobs power struggle of late 1985 Steve Jobs resigned from Apple, founding NeXT Computer. Subsequently in 1996, Apple acquired NeXT as sales of the Mac languished, leading ultimately to Jobs assuming the CEO role at Apple after a successful boardroom coup. During Jobs’ sabbatical from Apple he was also the driving force behind Pixar. In August 2011 Apple’s market capitalisation briefly surpassed market leader Exxon Mobil, remaining comfortably ahead of IBM and Microsoft.

As a consequence of the Internet, and with it, the development of several technologies, and e-commerce (and piracy, too) and now, all things ‘social’ there is an expectation that disruptive innovation is critical to success. More than that: disruptive is the key to success, and without it businesses will die. Survive or die; it’s either/or. The choice is clear.

In the US, as each new social media IPO is a success, the disruptive power of social is proven and now figuratively slapping the faces of tired old enterprise IT. Look at the P/E ratios of Cisco and Microsoft and Google – too low and unexciting because they are not disruptive. They are like remnants of the US steel industry, slowly rusting.

Conclusion: It would be unusual to find a C-level executive who doesn’t have at least a glancing admiration for companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Intel¹. All are highly successful and all are known for their innovative cultures.

Conclusion: Many CIOs seek to be seen as visionaries in their organisations. Usually bestowed with higher than average intellect and with unique insight into the workings of their organisation and its role within its ecosystem and society, they are well-placed to make a significant contribution toward organisational growth and innovation. Yet curiously, this rarely happens.

Conclusion: Many technical, and systems related, documents are hard to read and authors run the risk only a fraction of their target audience read them. Those that do read them have difficulty reading them with understanding. The problems with hard to read technical documents are likely to exacerbate as an older age group remain in the workforce and they represent a challenge for workers whose primary language is not English.If we are to have an efficient and productive workforce, we must ensure that those who need to can both read our documentation and understand it.

Conclusion: The number of documents (reports, email, TXTs, other written material) managers read every day amounts to a huge amount of textual information. All of us are now 2.0-conditioned and are more used to absorbing sound or word-bites and less sympathetic to struggling through long documents. So you can be certain that, no matter how important the substance of your reports, your audience will not read them with as much care and attention to detail as you spent writing them. Even the management summary may get the 10 second treatment: a once-over-lightly scan to determine the document’s usefulness before giving it a proper read – or not if it doesn’t grab attention.

Bloggers know all about the 10 second treatment and the good ones construct their blogs to capture and hold their target readers. (If they don’t they lose the revenue from selling their products or the advertisements on their blog sites). Competent bloggers use successful attention grabbing and holding techniques to help ensure that their communications get the attention they deserve and convey their intended messages.

Observations: Thanks to the 2.0 world most people have learned to skim-read really quickly. This is a problem for those writing reports for management. It means that if they haven’t made the important parts easily findable and accessible then the whole report becomes invisible. Write reports, and especially, management summaries, expecting their readers initially to only scan them. Once the report has captured their attention, they will return and read more closely what they initially scanned.

The medium is the message. Marshall McCluhan¹ meant by this that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role, not only by the content delivered via medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. The widespread acceptance of PowerPoint last century (!) resulted in many documents and reports being produced in a PowerPoint-like format. Now, the ubiquitous influence of the Internet and Web 2.0 means that reports and documents are being delivered and presented in web-influenced styles.

It’s a 2.0 world, so cater for speed readers. Managers have to wade through scads of written material and become proficient speed readers, scanning at about 900 words per minute, rather than reading at about 240 words a minute. (It is likely that you will spend about 10 seconds scanning this entire note to determine its usefulness and, if it has captured your interest, will return and spend four or so minutes giving it a proper read.) Therefore, if your writing is initially going to be speed-read it is wise to write it on this assumption.

Learn from bloggers. Expert bloggers capture their readers by making it easy for them to scan the blog and find the key elements in the approximately 10 seconds they’ll initially allocate to the blog’s content. They attract the reader’s eye with:

1. a catchy blog title,

2. subtitles or subheadings within the blog

3. bold, underlined, quoted, or otherwise highlighted text and hyperlinks

4. pictures, graphs, charts, or images

5. a summary of key findings/points/recommendations

If their scan suggests the blog is likely to meet the readers’ interests they will then go back and read the article in more depth.

Copy the bloggers. By including these keys in your document, your target audience can rapidly appreciate its value and assess the relevance of the content. After that, those who are interested will re-read it, this time in more depth, understand the message and act accordingly.

Content is king is a web catchcry, generally focused on ensuring that the web sites are easily indexed by search engines. The same meme² applies to blog writers, wanting to ensure that blog readers see the value of the blog’s contents and return for more rather than ensuring search engine optimisation. The whole point of a blog (and your report) is the message. The person reading the blog (your report) wants to learn something or have something they ”know” confirmed – they are reading it for the content. That is why bloggers use the approach described above.

Rule number 1: Remember, busy people never read beyond the first page or maybe (the diligent ones) the second. You may still have to provide all the expected back-up bulk, but the serious content must appear early. Help the diligent ones find all the detail by using hyperlinks to the relevant components.

Rule number 2: Follow the Three Rules of Targeted Traffic to ensure those you want to read your material do so:

1. Determine the audience you are writing for – write for them.

2. Stay on-topic – don’t introduce irrelevant distractions.

3. Write the document – and its title – so that your targeted reader finds it as interesting as their favourite web page.

Rule number 3: review your final document – and edit if it needs be – to make sure your target audience will read it. Check that:

1. You’re making a unique and new point and not just regurgitating information,

2. You’ve clearly summarised the point of your article in 2 – 3 sentences,

3. the point you’re trying to make is apparent.

And: Move all those boring front pages containing the revision history and sign off details to an appendix with a hyperlink to them. Put the most important part of your document right up front!

Next Steps:

1. Determine your target readers’ views of the readability, clarity and value of the documents/reports you provide them, and how they think they could be improved.

2. Determine if a “blog-like” approach would improve their perceptions.

3. If “Yes” set up a pilot program to “blog” a particular set of documents and monitor the response of the target audience.

4. If it is successful, expand the program, possibly placing your non-sensitive “blogs” on your intranet.

What about – Start now – explore the option of blogging your approach as you develop your 2009/10 IT budget³.

Conclusion: Even with software to automate research functions and aggregate data, many organisations do not have a clear understanding about their customers. This condition of near blindness is made more difficult in large and diverse organisations, where it is obvious that a whole customer perspective would be commercially advantageous, but is challenging to obtain.

By a mixture of technology and astute strategic planning, it is possible to gain customer insights but to do so requires precise planning, setting objectives and indicators, in conjunction with methodologies to gain feedback.

Conclusion: Some of the lessons from corporate management literature can be applied to the successful running of an IT shop. This article contains insights gained from studies of some of the world’s most admired companies and provides new ways to think about planning for the future through the application of the ‘three horizons’ technique.

Conclusion: Manywho have outsourced their Service Desk complain that in doing so they lost touch with the pulse of their organisation. Bringing the Service Desk back in-house allows customer and IT intimacy to be re-established.

Conclusion: According to Roy Morgan Research, nearly six million people use a search engine each month and the competition to serve them is becoming more intense. With the July launch of its search engine, Sensis, the advertising arm of Telstra, is marketing its services more aggressively. Over the last few years it has defined a niche for itself in the SME sector of Australian business and aims to capitalise on that relationship for the future.

Despite Google's apparent pre-eminence and Overture's strong ties with major online publishers, Sensis purports to offer a range of products that the two do not have. Competition will be greater now as Overture is directly pitching at the SME sector but with its variety of online properties, Sensis claims to have a suite of services that are appropriate to any type of organisation.

Organisations will benefit from the additional competition in the search and services market and ought to examine the product portfolios of each company to see how they can deliver results through their channels more efficiently.

If you are a lover of ‘Fawlty Towers', you might remember Mrs Richards - arguably Basil's most difficult guest.  No matter what Basil offered to do for her, it was never enough.  Finally, he offered (among other things) to ‘Move Mt Everest six inches to the left'.  I am sure if he had achieved this, she would have complained that it should have been moved seven inches.  Basil's problem was that neither he nor Mrs Richards could agree on a reasonable outcome that would satisfy both of them.

Many IT managers face this very same problem.  They work with business stakeholders on initiatives without agreement on what a successful outcome might be.  Now at this stage most readers are saying, ‘that's not me - we have everything specified'.  Well, specifications are one thing.  The expectations people have deep in their hearts are something else again.

Conclusion: One of the best means of gaining greater leverage in business marketing is with the sales force. The sales team is the most valuable unit to promote the business, as it already knows the key elements of selling the business, namely:

• a brand value understanding;

• the customer value;

• an ability to communicate customer value;

• and follow through with implementation and management.

In the current business environment operations are being reviewed to gain greater returns and consequently the sales force needs to be retrained in operational management and undergo a revision of sales tactics to achieve targets. Those tactics may include ancillary and competitive affiliations to network the company’s product to the market.

Conclusion: In the past, age and income were reliable predictors of behaviour but now, and in the future, the old definitions do not depict consumers well. Regardless of the industry, businesses in the future must gain quality consumer psychographic research either, syndicated or customised, if they are to operate confidently in evolving consumer markets. The other ingredient to the emerging customer strategy is segmenting and categorising the market by what consumers think, hope and wish for rather than any other fixed metric like age or even income. This involves slicing consumer markets into separate dimensions to gain a better view on how they operate and what will drive them in the future.

Marketing management has always wanted to get inside customers’ heads and it will be essential to do so to understand what they want, dream of, and ultimately buy.

Conclusion: Over the next 5 to 10 years marketing to the mature, that is, over 50 consumers will become an essential element in the business of all types of enterprises as the entire population ages. The largest portion of consumers will be in this age group. Grasping the demographic difference will set a marker between those companies that can prosper and those that are living in the past.

Conclusion: As organisations strive to enhance customer experience, complemented by marketing and sales activities, success will be contingent on IT and business professionals using data literacy skills and being able to implement systems that make it easy to do business with them and understand their buying patterns.

Unless IT and business professionals acquire the data literacy skills needed, and make the right data available, efforts to better engage with customers and prospects will fail to achieve expectations and opportunities will be wasted.