Ā Humans are emotional creatures and they want experiences that engage them as humans. They’re not eyeballs, impressions, views, likes, shares, clickthroughs, or conversions. A few weeks ago, I visited New York on a beautiful summer day to participate in an event that I would love to repeat everywhere around the world. Prophet, a global brand strategy firm that recently acquired Altimeter Group, hosted an intimate event to explore the new horizons of digital customer experience (DCX). I was invited…
When You Share Experiences You Help Strangers Make Decisions
Whether you realize it or not, when you share an experience you have, whether it’s through a post, review, video, image, rant, praise, etc., it helps a stranger make a decision about what to do next. Customers aren’t following the customer journey you designed because they’re too busy hacking it. No matter how much journey work you do, no matter how creative your marketing, no matter how responsive your website is, no matter how much technology you invest in, customers…
Digital Transformation Starts with Reimagining the Customer Experience
All customers are not created equal. This is also true for relationships. No business has the same relationship with their customers as you intend to have with yours. The thing is though, you must first define what a relationship with your customer looks and feels like and in turn, how they would describe it to their friends and colleagues. This is where the future of customer experience begins. At a time when technology is affecting how people go through life,…
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…
Mobile CX (Re)design: A Catalyst for Digital Transformation
Guest post by Jaimy Szymanski (@jaimy_marie), Analyst, Speaker, Advisor In order to inspire great digital transformation within an organization, strategists must provide proof of concept on a smaller scale. Often times, change agents focus first on transforming their approach to mobile customer experience (CX) design, in order to make the case for overhauling the companyās entire approach to digital CX strategy. Over the past two years, my colleague Brian Solis and I have researched the evolution of digital transformation through…
The 80s Called, They Want Their Contact Center Back
Customer experience is meant to be evocative not reactive… We are entering an era of customer-centricity, mostly because we have to. But also, because employing a customer focus is the right thing to do. I guess businesses lost their way at some point. Blame quarterly earnings. Blame technology. Blame politics. But over the years, we overlooked the importance of the āCā and āRā and instead scaled the āMā in CRM. It didnāt hurt that we found ways to save time…
Companies Profit When Customers Suffer
Youāve heard it a million times, a happy customer tells a couple of people and an unhappy customer tells everyone. Yet to this day, executives tend to run business strategy with an emphasis on transactions over experiences. More so, business value is expressed in short-term performance metrics and reports to an audience of shareholders and stakeholders over the very people who keep them in businessā¦your customers. Itās all a bit absurd when you think about it. I know, I knowā¦itās…
Report: Some Brands Go All In on Mobile; Others Suffer from Mobile Mediocrity
Consumers arenāt just going digital, theyāre also becoming increasingly mobile. To them, mobile isnāt the second screen, itās the first screen. Brands however, struggle to keep up with them and as a result, mobile strategies are off target or underwhelming. This finding among many others is the result of new research conducted by my colleague Jaimy Szymanski and me. Iām proud to announce that the report, The Inevitability of a Mobile-Only Customer Experience, is available today for immediate download. Mobile…
The Future of Business Starts with Us
I often share a quote by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” And that’s where are in business. We all talk of change but very few of us start with changing the very things that will help us more effectively compete for the future. The evolving state of technology, customer behavior and expectations and our role within each is changing or it should change… What we see (perspective and…
The 2014 State of Digital Transformation
Today, I’m proud to announce the release of Altimeter Group’s second report on Digital Transformation. This new report is aimed at executives and digital strategists to help them (you) further understand the state of digital transformation as you plan your next steps and investments. In our initial report, “Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies are Investing in New Business Models to Lead Digital Customer Experiences (DCX),ā we learned that digital transformation was as much about technology as it was about…
