Touchpoint Insights, April 2009: Green Shoots, Touchpoints, Experience Gaps

In This Issue: Green Shoots, Touchpoint Control and Closing Customer Experience Gaps…

1.) Co-Create a Better Customer Experience… With Your Customers How leveraging social media in your customer listening toolkit can bring you closer to your customers – and tap their collective expertise to improve experience. (article)

2.) Taking a Position on Positioning As important as it is, simply knowing what your organization stands for isn’t enough. Positioning is about being different than your competition, in substantive, believable ways. (article)

3.) Measure, Understand and Improve Customer Experience How mapping the territory between you and your customers can help you see opportunities you didn’t know were there. (a slideshare favorite presentation)

4.) You’re Losing Control of Your Touchpoints But that’s OK. Here are 5 tips for controlling the touchpoints you can - and actively influencing those you cannot control. (article)

5.) The Knowing-Doing Gap You already know what you need to do. The gap that exists between “knowing” and “doing” actually resides within your organization. Yes, we’re talking about execution. (on our bookshelf)

Co-Create a Better Customer Experience
Leveraging social media as a customer listening tool can bring you closer to your customers – and tap their collective expertise to improve experience.

B2B, consumer, young or old – customers are more savvier, more demanding and better informed than ever before, looking for (and sounding off about) your brand online. What’s this mean to you? Tom Peters nailed it, nearly 25 years go, “… regular, quantitative measurement of customer satisfaction provides a much better indicator of future organizational health than does profitability or market share...” Today, Social Media is a window into quantifying customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction). All you have to do is open it; the tools are only a keystroke or two away…

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Taking a Position on Positioning
As important as it is, simply knowing what your organization stands for isn’t enough.

The importance of differentiation - and the positioning of firms and products based on these points - is often misunderstood by companies that rely on messages and strategies that don’t enable them to stand out in the marketplace. Why? Because they’re saying things that “position” themselves on top of, next to, or (worst of all) underneath, their competition. To stand out, you need to claim (or create) a space you can defend, and let the world (your customers) know that you own it.

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Presentation: Measure, Understand and Improve Customer Experience
How mapping the territory between you and your customers can help you see opportunities you didn’t know were there.

We believe that Customer Experience is the next competitive battleground of today’s economy. After all, poor customer experience is a leading driver of customer churn, with 87% of all consumers stating they “will never go back” to an organization after a negative experience. Pretty harsh. Maybe that’s why 83% of senior brand marketers stated “Customer experience is among the most critical determinants of brand strength and business growth.” Yet fully HALF of all organizations state they cannot effectively measure it! This “SlideShare Favorite” presentation shows you how…

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You’re Losing Control of Your Touchpoints
But that’s OK. Here are 5 tips for controlling the touchpoints you can - and actively influencing those you cannot control.

In the old days, touchpoints were easy to control. You had ads, direct marketing, collateral. Even the first decade of the Web was easy to control. Update your site every quarter or so, and you were good. But that’s all changed. In fact, marketers are having a hard enough time controlling the touchpoints they should be able to control – those they manage. But today, the numbers of touchpoints outside your control are increasing exponentially. Here are 5 tips that can help you begin to better control the touchpoints you can, and influence those you cannot control.

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On Our Bookshelf: The Knowing-Doing Gap.
You already know what you need to do. The gap that exists between “knowing” and “doing” actually resides within your organization.

The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action is not just another strategy book about “what to do.” By Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, they convincingly argue that management already knows what to do. They just wondered why all the (internal) talk – training, seminars, etc. – and so little action? Because the gap that exists between “knowing” and “doing” actually resides within the culture of your organization. Yes, we are talking about execution. With tips on what to do and what to avoid, the book also provides examples of how you can transform your culture.

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