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…
Customer Experience Happens To You Not Because of You…But It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way
Earlier this year, I was asked to write the foreword for a new book focused on experience marketing and CX. The opportunity appeared while I was in the throes of researching and writing my (not yet announced) book. As hard as it was to pull away from it, I must admit that it was a welcome distraction. So, I stopped what I was doing and read the manuscript for Connect: How to Use Data and Experience Marketing to Create…
Digital is Just a Means to Reach People…It’s How and Why You Use It That Matters
Splendida Notizia! #WTF is going on in Italy? The future of business is turning a new page…that’s what. I’m excited to announce that What’s the Future of Business: Changing the way businesses create experiences is now available in Italy. To celebrate the launch, I spent some time with Luca Conti, new media strategist, Italian blogger, journalist, and author of several books on social media. In our discussion, we explored the future of business and why the time is now for…
Only companies with impeccable customer service will survive the Zombie Apocalypse
Guest Post by Peter Shankman, Author of Zombie Loyalists: Using Great Service to Create Rabid Fans Imagine a world where decisions aren’t made based on anonymous reviews with no validation on sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor, but rather, through trusted sources in your own network. Imagine that world is automatic – If you want to take a vacation in Fiji, you don’t have to ask which of your friends have gone, you simply start searching for Fiji – on any…
Pivot: The Total Digital Experience
The Pivot Conference in NYC in October is unique among events in that, each year, it shifts focus to deeply reflect the needs of its community of senior business transformation executives from leading brands and organizations. To make that happen, I serve as Pivot’s Executive Producer along with Pivot CEO, Mike Edelhart. For four years in a row, we’ve put our heads together to develop a story arc that covers the hottest, emergent trends, presented by the industry’s most engaging…