And then one day, it happened. Customers changed. How they make decisions changed. What they value and how they want to do business changed. The funny thing is…we didn’t. Now we can and a new generation of technologies and services make it possible to not only react but lead customer experiences moving forward. To effectively compete in the digital economy, you are left with no choice; become customer-obsessed or lose! Every moment-of-truth counts when it comes to customer loyalty. For…
The Expertise Gap is Real and Employees Need Your Attention Now
The biggest challenge is not in the understanding or expertise associated with new technology. We can learn that. The biggest problem is our inability to recognize that the experience we have today is not the experience we need going forward. A notable separation exists between the expertise people have or are learning and the jobs companies need to hire for in an increasingly digital economy. This means that current employees possess expertise to perform jobs that are losing prominence in…
Working for More Than a Living
Special guest post by Tom Rath, author of Are You Fully Charged?: The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life The concept of bringing people together in groups, tribes, or organizations is based on the fundamental premise that human beings can do more collectively than they can in isolation. Hundreds of years ago, people banded together for the sake of sharing food and shelter and keeping their family safe. The basic assumption was that the association gained by joining a…
Thanks Millennials! The Digital Revolution is Only Just Beginning
Guest post by Maddie Grant (@maddiegrant) author of the new book When Millennials Take Over, exploring the digital mindset and the other three key capacities for recruiting, retaining and engaging Millennials Think about this: the Millennial generation is the first generation to NEVER know a workplace without the internet. The rest of us remember the time we got our first email address, or that time we were irritated because we weren’t part of the lucky few that were allowed…
The 7 Success Factors of Social Business Strategy [INFOGRAPHIC]
Over the years, my partner Charlene Li and I authored a series of research papers and also a short book on the evolution of social businesses, from philosophy to strategy to practice. Along the way, we also produced an effective maturity model and infographic that documented the six stages of social business transformation. This work would eventually pave the way toward my focus on digital transformation and innovation today. Now, after all this time however, I wanted to share the…
The Apple Watch Will Make Work More Delightful and Reshape Employee Engagement
Guest post by Jason Shah is the founder and CEO of Do (do.com), a collaboration platform that helps people run productive meetings and do work they love. TL;DR Summary: Apple Watch will make work easier and more impactful. Through a constrained interface, powerful one-tap actions, and intimate data it will collect, people will be better at their jobs and form new bonds with coworkers previously not possible. There is a widespread myth that a new device will only add more…
Customer Experience is Becoming More Important Than the Product Itself
Customer experience is the sum of all engagements and interactions a customer has with your business in every step of their journey and lifecycle. It’s what your customer feels, thinks, says (to you and others) and more so, what they do now and in the time to come that counts for everything. CX is measured not by NPS (Net Promoter Score) but instead by the sentiment and outcomes in every moment of truth throughout the relationship. That.is.the.experience. And, it’s yours…
To Deliver a Great Customer Experience, Stop Focusing on the Customer You Think You Know
Guest post by Rajat Paharia (@rajatrocks), founder and chief products officer, Bunchball and author of Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionize Customer and Employee Engagement with Big Data and Gamification 2015 promises to be The Year of Customer Experience. Companies around the globe are resolving to become more customer-centric because, as Brian lays out quite eloquently in his book: “Now’s the time for an investment in something more than price, performance, or value. The future of business is about creating experience,…
Brilliance is Distributed Around The World; Opportunity However is Not
The rate at which we progress is defined by the time and energy we invest in ourselves. We can’t do everything alone however. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney famously wrote, “I get by with a little help from my friends.” But not everyone has access to the same resources you and I do. Sometimes those friends aren’t so readily visible or available and thus progress inches along, stalls or sometimes regresses. One of the biggest trends I’ve seen in…
Employees are as or More Important Than Customers: Why Ignoring Employee Engagement Hurts Business
In a late 2013 study, Gallup found that only 13% of workers actually feel engaged at their jobs. What’s worse is that 63% of the workforce is not engaged at all. But wait, the news gets even more disheartening. An astounding 24%, one-quarter of the global workforce, is actively disengaged right now. Essentially we have a significant number of workers doing their best impression of corporate zombies who go through the everyday motions to collect a paycheck. So are employees…