If your customers (and prospects) are clamoring for mobile access to things like loyalty programs, special offers, feedback forms and customer support, then here’s something to think about. At first glance, it seems like a ‘feature request’ and the typical procedure is add it to ‘the list’ and prioritize it in the roadmap for your product development.  Seems likes a rational approach right?

But this one is different and it deserves special treatment.  This is about spotting the opportunity when customers are telling you something about how they want to interact with your business.

The intent you hope for is there

Your customers want to interact with you.  But when they’re around their computer or office phone they are too busy to engage (at home with family or at work overloaded).  But on their smart phone…. they’re on the train, the bus, sitting waiting for someone, having a coffee, bored at a party.  And they want to interact with your company then.

What more does your company want?  

What’s better? 10-15 minutes with them when they have nothing else distracting them or 1 minute with them when they’re being pulled somewhere else (like at home and work).

Customers want mobile access. partly because they know their time frees up when they least expect it.  Most people have 2-3 hrs of time wasted per day sitting waiting in lines, public transport, taxis, riding in a car, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Your company should want customers to have mobile access before they ask for it.  Now that they have asked for it, you have the confirmation you need — run with it.

Understanding the economics

The majority of your company’s marketing spend is for the opportunity for meaningful touches and engagement.  The big problem is outbound rarely catches customers when they’re ready and doesn’t give them a very enticing way to come back to when they are more receptive.

Mobile is powerful for giving customers the option of when they interact with your brand.   You also get unequalled access to them when they’re away from their home or office —  likely a more opportune time to engage them.

Every program you run, it’s the same challenge

Impact is always the biggest hurdle.  Whether it’s your loyalty program, a real-time feedback effort or another marketing program, your company’s investment needs to be rewarded with a strong impact on your business.

The biggest obstacle to program impact is timing — precisely when you catch the customer.  Increasingly, when customers are at their computers (sitting at home or work), they are less than ideally placed — to be engaged with messaging.

It’s at those other times, when they’re passing time, or even better shopping for your types of products or services, that they are most receptive to being engaged by your company.  And what is the only platform available at that time? you guessed it — it’s their mobile phone.

Why do companies measure CSat? Is it a mathematical exercise? Is it a status check?

We say it’s about creating actionability and driving decision making. How can your business take a CSat metric and use it to:

Set direction to improve CXEstablish competitiveness and the basis for taking a more aggressive market approachBenchmark overall progress of the businessAssess the impact of CX and engagement efforts

A Time to Be Cautious and a Time To Be.....

There are times in the life of a business when aggressive moves are called for. It may an opportunity to create a significant lead over a competitor. or a chance to grab a specific market position or advantage that requires a big investment. But often something stops decision makers from pulling the trigger. A lot of times what's missing is confidence. Speaking from experience, there have been many times in my tenures as a C-level executive, that I had to take exactly that type of call. It’s a lot like deciding to go for a big score or just making the safe play (pick your sport -- it works with all of them). The real question is: when do you go for the kill?

Where does confidence in a business come from?

Ultimately it comes from your relationship with customers. but how do you measure that? For a long time all there was CSat scores. Then along came NPS — which aimed to capture the confidence a business could have in its customers as promoters.

Have we reached the finish line on the measurement of the strength of customer relationships? CX Advisory company Beyond Philosophy says no. They’re a proponent of a measure they call a company’s “emotional signature”. They define it as “a level of emotional engagement with their customers and these emotions manifest themselves in every Customer Experience.”

So the next level of measurement is the emotional elements of a company’s customer experiences. Why is that important? Because it looks behind visible customer satisfaction and promoter behaviour to what emotional impact you've created with your customer experience.

Is it a better forecaster of future behavior?

Ultimately that’s what we’re after. We want to be able to say: we’re doing well enough with our CX and we’re taking the right approach. If we're not there yet, then we want to know it: we’re not building the foundation for loyal, active, promoter customers and we need to change / improve our CX.

If you’re looking to move your business strategy up a level by focusing on CX, then take a look at Beyond Philosophy — they are thought leaders in CX — and turning advanced thinking into practical business strategies.

The focus here really is how you approach measuring your position with customers. Being satisfied with passive measures like CSat scores just doesn’t make sense when what you’re trying to do is build a foundation of confidence to pursue the most aggressive version possible of your business model.

Synopsis

Businesses are always looking for ways to drive efficiency and generate more impact from every investment. What stands in their way is a siloed view of their programs — which prevents them from recognizing the cross over impact that possible across functions. Rewards programs are one big example. They can be a businesses best marketing tool for new offerings but it takes a bit of out of the box thinking.

Reason #1: Your most likely first buyers

No one wants to be the first to buy a new product or service and even less so when it’s with a company they’ve never dealt with. Your best shot for early buyers is your happiest and most active existing customers. They’re already sold on your brand and their trust of your delivery track record is high. For them, the risk of a new offering is the lowest, if you can just get it in front of them.

So why not make some of it a bit easier on your business?

As your sales people are getting used to selling the new features, benefits and value of new offerings, you can take the burden off them of the other key part of the sales cycle: brand building and qualifying the lead. Reason #2: ROI: Double the bang from an investment

No matter how you slice it, you’re paying something for the rewards you’re giving customersWhether is giving bonus products, pricing discounts or externally source merchandise or services, there are costs that are being borne.

You’ve probably already done a lot to manage the costs of the rewards you’re giving your best customers but what else can you do to drive ROI further. ROI is the name of the game and using your newest products as rewards is just smart business.

Double the fun: aside from getting the cost benefits of using internal products as rewards, your company also creates a second dimension of ROI from delivering rewards. By offering new product as rewards, your company takes some of the load off marketing and sales to build awareness and understanding of your latest offerings. Marketing and sales campaigns are the most costly way to build product awareness and, despite that, they only carry the ball part way. Neither puts the products in the hands of customers (or in the case of services, puts the customer in the live experience of the service). In contrast, rewards programs do just that, without the additional expense of running marketing and sales campaigns. Reason #3: A higher level of engagement Building awareness of new products or services often involves free ‘trials’. Whether it’s a product sample or a free service or visit, they compromise the value story of the new offering. Rewards by definition have a value attached to them because customers earn them by their buying behavior — and they understand that.

Studies have shown that customers are highly engaged when redeeming rewards because they put a high value on the ‘effort’ put in to earn them. It’s that very level of engagement and awareness that marketing and sales campaigns can’t achieve despite big dollar investments. The cleverness of shifting that responsibility to your rewards programs is clear.

VoC vendor Confirmit recently won an industry award for its Voice of the Customer solution and it got us thinking about how that type of solution helps clients to drive success and ROI in their VoC programs.  

We boiled it down to 5 key factors that reside on the customer or internal side of a successful VoC effort.

On The Customer Side:

#1: Superior layout and design of surveys

Providing customers with a easy, clear and enjoyable survey experience is a real key to getting them to take the survey and complete it fully.  They're already putting in the effort to thoughtful answer your questions (you hope), why make them abandon simply because of design or workflow issues?

# 2: Convince them your company is worthy of their feedback

Participation in surveys is largely driven by a belief that something will come of the effort.  Customers want to know that the company they are ‘helping’ with their insights is a worthy customer-oriented organization that is likely to make good use of the feedback.  So the communication of those brand elements is critical prior and during the survey process.

Inside Your Organization:

#3: Easy setup of cross platform VoC programs

One-off, single platform surveys don’t work.  Running multiple platform VoC programs is a powerful tool but can be cumbersome with a complexity level your team members shy away from. Remember, they have to integrate these VoC programs repeatedly into their already overcrowded work days.

You want to get them a smooth and integrated system that makes them want to undertake regular, repeated and cross platform VoC efforts The key is minimization of time wastage from tasks like data synchronization, combining results across platforms and generating reports across multiple surveys.

#4: More engaging insights from all VoC efforts

It’s not just about good data gathering — having the systems in place to consistently delivery high quality summary and analysis to internal teams encourages them to take action on VoC findings.  They need quick and ready access to actionable insights, leaving them empowered to push through changes in the way your company interacts with customers.

#5: Single customer view

Multiple customer data points can be a dream or a nightmare.  In the end, the ideal is a ‘single customer view’ that brings together what you know about each customer from disparate sources into a single place that is always available to customer facing team members.

It’s not hard to see why Confirmit won an award from Customer Magazine: they took on a fundamental set of challenges that customers face around hearing the Voice of the Customer …. and solved them with a powerful integrated solution.

Ever wonder why when you talk to a team member of a company (even a senior manager), sometimes it seems like they are totally out of alignment with key initiatives. They’re not just neutral about them, they’re actually angry and cynical about them (to the point that you wonder which side they’re on).

If they seem like they’re prisoners trapped in someone else’s script, it’s because they are. That’s the big risk with follow the leader strategies. No doubt they are a shortcut to a ‘proven’ strategy, but what price do you pay for that shortcut?

You miss the key waypoint where the strategy is aligned to your internal challenges and turned into an internal goal.

How do you know if your program is a follow-the-leader program?

Easy — just ask a key player in your team who's intimately involved in the program a question:  what internal goals or drivers are behind the effort? There are couple of different answers you might get back:

Taking the time to internalize it

Quickly implementing a duplicate program may seem like an easy shortcut, but trust us, taking the time to make the program ‘your own’ is a worthwhile investment. You may find a few acrimonious meetings come up along the way, but that’s a good sign — you’ve exposed an alignment trap that would have potentially killed the program later when some fine-tuning effort would have been needed.

Short term vs long term thinking

It’s easy to ignore the internalization step — especially when you have a short term focus in your business strategy. Initially you’ll get that easy kick from ‘appearing’ to have caught up with your competition.

But just wait, when the inevitable challenges start developing in the programs, requiring the collective commitment and coordinated effort of your most talented team members. Then the “follow-the-leader” disease will kick in, often demolishing what ever attempts to make a team push to overcome those key hurdles. The next thing you know: you've got a failed program that suffers a slow and quiet death.

United Airlines recently announced the winner of an internal contest among customer facing air and ground staff for a big bonus award. It put the eligibility decision in the hands of customers who had to single out exceptional employee effort in the pursuit of customer experience.

The program seems to be a win but it was a one time big program effort.  Whether or not it United’s goal was internal employee morale / alignment or generating PR (or a combination of both), the former is a good priority for businesses looking to create competitive strength from customer experience.

So what about gamification as an internal tool?

United used it effectively in this context and here’s what it impacted:

The truth is that in all these programs success lies in the details — fine-tuning if you will — to maximize engagement, breadth and impact. United showed that it wanted more than just to appear to be internally focused on CX — management wanted a shift in employee thinking and put in place a well thoughtout program to achieve it.

On the heels of Bruce Temkin’s 2013 Experience Ratings (of the biggest companies in the US), Direct Marketing News reporter Elyse Dupre asked a powerful question of every company: “ Do You Have What it Takes to Make My Day?

In the case of Aesop Australia the answer is yes. The way a team member in Sydney handled a special birthday request demonstrated how companies and their engaged employees can ‘get it right’.

First the success story:

Another year, another birthday of a sibling in Australia. We was elsewhere in the world, but knew that she was planning to visit the Aesop store in Chatswood (Sydney suburb) for a quick bit of shopping. So we thought, how can create a bit of different birthday surprise for my sister. A bit of phone espionage let us know that she didn’t have a specific great product that Aesop sells. So opportunity was there: we knew what to get and that she would be in the store to receive it. Now we just needed a some help from the store staff.

A call to Aesop Chatswood connected us with Minnie, a manager at the store. Now keep in mind we were doubtful of getting a positive response from a retail store, which have a reputation for being somewhat less than customer centric. Minnie boosted our low expectations by delivering a near text book perfect customer experience and a highly successful birthday surprise.

From the outset, she ‘got it’. Minnie understood what we were trying to do and beyond just buying a product, she realized we were looking to pull off a birthday surprise to be remembered. She began to ask all the right questions: what is your sister’s name? how will I recognize her when she comes in? what message do you want on the card?

On paper, everything was ‘wrong’ about our request:> we were buying ‘only’ one item> the birthday girl was reaching the store in less than 1 hr> we were overseas and had to pay over the phone

There were plenty of reasons for Minnie to say no.

Instead, Minnie grabbed the ball and ran with it. Within 1 hr, my sister was stunned to be greeted by name when she walked in the store and handed a gift wrapped present and a birthday wish. And Minnie followed it up with an email confirming successful delivery of the surprise. Her end-to-end comprehension, execution, demeanor and efficiency were amazing.

So why write an article about it? Read on for our takeaways for companies targeting better CX.

We figured the right way to look at this ‘home run’ (or six depending on where you are in the world) is to look what the real role model behavior was and the business benefits it created.

What did the team member get right:> she was smart> she ‘got it’ — our need was a ‘solution’ not a product> amazing energy / attitude / efficiency> perfect execution and followup

What did the company get right?> hiring a talented manager> keeping her engaged and well trained> empowering her to deliver something out of the ordinary

What did the employee gain?> the gratitude of a customer> we’ve written about her (hope she likes the attention!)> hopefully recognition / reward by company (hello Aesop management?)

What did the company gain?> happy customer telling their circle of friends and family> new evangelist / promoter (who happens to run a portal about customer experience)> emotional connection to brand where there was none before (just another provider of beauty products)

The key point here is that exceptional CX creates emotional connections between customers and brands. Customer facing employees are the key channel for that exceptional CX to be delivered.

So the next time you’re looking to spend big bucks on a branding effort, take a look at investing in employee training and engagement.

Synopsis:

Just because targeting is a best practice in customer facing programs doesn’t mean that it always makes sense. Targeting drives up costs and complexity and sometimes the trade-off doesn’t have a payoff.

Here we look at two key reasons why targeting does make sense in your loyalty programs — because the gains far outweigh the accompanying cost and complexity. First we look at targeting rewards to your most valuable customers and second we look at targeting different types of loyalty programs to specific customer ‘demographics’ to increase their effectiveness.

That combination represents an ideally balanced loyalty program that gives only your best customers a loyalty program that adequately rewards them with benefits that really strike home.

No Blind Follow-The-Leader

We’re not big on just doing something just because it’s a ‘best practice’.  And we’ve found that even if managers say they follow best practices, they rarely do it on blind faith. Rather they (like us) take in best practices and adopt those that connect with their priorities, perspectives and approach to business. With that in mind, how should companies weigh the benefits of targeting their loyalty programs? The answer lies in a couple of driving factors that make targeting loyalty program critical.

Factor 1: Rewarding Only Valuable Customers

Keep in mind that if you look deeply enough at your customer base, not all your customers are equally valuable to your top (revenue) or bottom (profit) lines.

There’s your biggest contributors to revenue or profit because they:

A second pool is your middle-of-the-road customers:

The bottom pool is your nightmare customers:

Every business we’ve been involved in has had all three categories of customers (even if sometimes management doesn’t take the time to analyze the mix).

It should be pretty obvious that your loyalty programs should be most heavily targeted at your top tier customers that contribute repeatedly and in high amounts to your revenues and draw on support in a more reasonable way while less price sensitive that average. It’s bad enough when businesses take the ‘any revenue is revenue’ approach and accept business that is ultimately unprofitable to the business. Even worse is when you reward unprofitable customers with loyalty benefits because you have an un-targeted program.

This level of targeting focuses on how customers qualify for loyalty program benefits. For example, a simple revenue based points system sounds simple but puts a customer who buys $1000 of low margin services in the same bucket as one that buys $1000 of high margin services. Instead, other factors like pattern of buying, transaction size, level of support all should play a role in determining levels of rewards.

There’s no question that targeted loyalty programs cost more upfront. A company has to invest in technology and program design to achieve effective targeting of only valuable customers. But comparison of the company-wide impact of good, average and poor customers will create the incentive to invest in exactly that level of targeting.

Ultimately, loyalty programs are about ‘changing behaviour’ which means encouraging good customers to become great customers and by forcing poor customers to become good customers. An untargeted, one-size-fits all program will do exactly the opposite, by inadequately rewarding strong buying behaviour and over-rewarding poor buying behaviour.

Factor 2: Ensuring Rewards Have An Impact

Sometimes, we lose track of the fact that figuring out which customers or buying behavior to reward is only half the battle. With the end goal being impact on key customers, how you reward them is equally important. That’s where the second part of your targeting strategy comes into play: targeting rewards to key customer groups.

Which rewards will be most valued by your key customers? Travel rewards, financial rewards, merchandise, add-ons, bonuses? There’s a huge range of rewards options available and, if your goal is to really impact buying behaviour, creating rewards options that are targeted to specific segments is absolutely key.

Democracy doesn’t work here either. Your rewards programs should be tightly fine-tuned to limit rewards for less than ideal buying behaviour, so the maximum amount of your ‘rewards budget’ is fully focused on your most valuable customers.

And it’s not a one off decision, but a constant cycle of select-execute-measure-fine tune. First,  listening to feedback on a customer segment-by-segment basis. Second, adjusting your rewards mix based on what key customers value is a key effort — ensuring that your loyalty program will deliver maximum ROI.

The simple facts

Giant Eagle is cutting back on its rewards programs and aligning them more closely to those of competitors. For whatever reason, their apparently popular Foodperks grocery rewards program no longer had the support of management — and they decided to cut it, along with free antibiotic and diabetes drug programs.

PR Fail

As messaging efforts go, this one looks like it ranks near the bottom as a communication effort. Cutting benefits is like raising prices: never popular, hard to hide and needs a lot of explaining. Clearly, Giant Eagle’s PR wizards decided the right approach was to try to outsmart their customers with a contrived story which made little sense from the customers viewpoint.

The biggest 'lemons' were:

None of it made sense and it looks like a weak PR campaign.

The Truth:  They were Victims of their Success

The more likely story is that, like many rewards programs, the Foodperks program was launched with a short term mindset (in this case to drive foot traffic and pull in new customers). The problem likely was that it did more than that. Based on customer reactions, the company managed to convince price sensitive customers to make the program a part of their regular efforts to save money on regular grocery expenses. The program probably was too generous and was eating into margins on an ongoing basis. So they eliminated it.

Customer reactions to the pull-back

Fans of the program, which seemed to be many, were quick to respond online and on social media. That included threats to take their business elsewhere, calculating how much more the new program spending levels were going to be, calling out the company’s weak ‘complexity claims’ and claiming offense for not being promptly informed as a loyal customer.

The Social Media Crockpot and the Smarter Customer

All this points to a shift in the dynamics of customer interactions with the advent of social media. Not only were customers ‘heating up’ over the lost benefits, they were doing it collectively online. They were helping each other to understand how much the company was ‘raising prices’ (in effect) and convincing each other that there was a PR attempt to ‘blame customers’ for the change.

The end result? A total failure on multiple fronts:> convincing customers that the company was being self serving> making the changes highly visible across the customer base> customers convincing each other to ‘boycott’ the company

The big crime? The lack of a long term plan

If you’re company is going to offer meaningful rewards, don’t put them out there if you’re going to pull them back if they’re too successful.There’s no shame in being surprised by a failed (unpopular) rewards program. But there’s no excuse for being surprised by success of rewards programs — you should be planning for it and understand the impact on the long term economics of your business

Understanding customer segments, expecting different reactions

Perhaps the biggest thing that surprises companies is the discrepancy among different customer segments when ‘pricing changes’ are introduced (these types of cuts to rewards programs are pricing changes). Voice of the Customer programs play a big role in companies understanding how different customer groups are interacting with their products, pricing and rewards programs. Had Giant Eagle listened, they would have known that for a significant portion of their customers, the Foodperks program had become more than a rewards program and instead a key tool for saving on costly grocery bills which struggling families and other customers battle every month.

The beginning of the year brough the news that cable services major Charter Communications has pulled back its social media customer support program raises an important question for businesses that are experiencing pressure to engage with customer issues on social media. In this post we explore the underlying challenge of ‘scale’ that lies at the heart of a social media strategy.

Drivers vs ROI

Companies come to the idea of providing customer support on social media from different places. Here are a few:

1. Follow-the-leader: Seeing competitors engaging customers effectively on social media can pressure companies to launch their own similar programs. It’s not unusual for these types of reactive programs to be launched too quickly and with limited ‘internalization’ of goals and targets.

2. Unanswered customer activity: The fact is buyers are increasingly turning to social media to voice their concerns about the services and products they are buying and often their outcry goes unanswered by the associated companies. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a viral social media post can single handedly unwind years of good PR efforts in a matter of days.

3. The Best Practices Approach: Increasingly, the most respected minds in customer service are pushing social media as a critical avenue for engaging customers as they interact with your products and services. Extending beyond simply good customer service, competitive advantage, brand and revenue are being impacted by good social media strategies.

What’s Missing to Reach ROI

Whether it’s Charter Communications or retailer Wegmans, there are minimum standards that have to be met on social media . Some of key ones are:

What these criteria ultimately point to is the need for complete infrastructure and team strength — there is no dabbling is social media support. It’s obvious that those companies that ‘failed’ in their attempts at social customer service were either unwilling or unable to put that in place. The question is why?

Converting Reactive Social Media Strategy to Proactive

Going back to the drivers we first talked about, one common thread exists: whether it’s follow-the-leader, unanswered customer activity or best practices, each of them lacks a fundamental ‘internalization’ to become part of core of a company’s customer focused strategy.

What does that mean? There’s two sides to the answer:

1. Identifying and ‘cementing’ internal goals.

Social media is hard work and as we mentioned before it needs a big investment in infrastructure, manpower and business process changes. Are there strong enough internal goals to drive that type of transformation.

2. Getting the effort to a big enough scale to create ROI.

Often there’s an imbalance on the customer service side: the resources needed to address the range of issues and the 24x7 timing of social media exceeds the direct ROI on the customer service side. The only way to achieve the required ROI is to extend the mandate of the social media team to areas like generating customer feedback (VOC) and contributing to lead generation and branding.

What That Means For Other Companies

Both of these requirements create a pressure on companies that decide to pursue a social media customer service effort to create stronger internal set of goals and build company wide alignment around them. In turn, that will lead to a broader investment in social media as a customer facing platform and then justify the required investment of manpower, process changes and infrastructure that is a must for any level of success.

Synopsis:

This article tackles a problem which many companies with loyalty programs have: a lack of clarity as to the impact of those programs on their overall business. Whether driven by an impending decision to renew or expand the program, or competitive pressures requiring greater investment in those programs, those decisions often expose the weakness in the initial decision to pursue a loyalty program. Here we discuss one metric that can bring clarity to the effort to drive customer loyalty via direct and indirect programs. 

Sometime stock market analysts get it right

The one thing about public companies is that analysts (both inside and outside the company) are always looking for ways to assess company strength, growth potential and competitive benchmarking. Best Buy recently released a quarterly earnings report and highlighted its rewards program and also noted that high percentage of its profits coming from rewards program members. Now why would this metric make its way into financial reports intended to guide investors about Best Buy’s stock?

Without thinking too literally, this type of metric can help companies to frame their business success in a more customer centric way. By putting a value on retained customers — their contribution to profit — it puts an internal spotlight on long term customers. That can deliver a greater internal alignment of key team members and management towards customers

Companies often operate in a fog when it comes to loyalty programs. Lacking an internal perspective on their importance — they simply do it because it’s a best practice or popular in their industry. But the truth is they need as much if not more in terms of specific goals and targeting to ensure resources are deployed effectively to maximize ROI.

Should you know this metric for your business?

There’s a lot of ‘juice’ in this one metric for businesses that have loyalty programs. While it’s not always easy to get it, think about how it would distill your assessment of loyalty programs impact to a single metric. We’re not saying you should only rely on one metric, but having an overriding metric is a powerful tool. I know from the experience of being in 100s of management meetings, sometimes an overriding metric can represent a voice that breaks a impasse in a key business vote. It can also centre your customer focused strategy around a main success parameter, which in this case would be increasing your profits from loyal customers.

Going back to the Best Buy example, why is that important? Well, if it’s a growing percentage, then it suggests that the company is being successful in increasing customer loyalty without compromising profits in the form of discounting or overly generous rewards programs. That’s an extraordinarily important achievement, because it implies a strong understanding of what drives customer buying behavior and success in using that to build a strong product, experience and rewards combination that profitably drives loyalty.

How can you act upon this data?

Suppose you knew this data every month or quarter, how would it help your business? The trend would definitely guide you in the right direction for deeper analysis of your customer data and your loyalty programs. And more importantly, it would tell you whether to invest more in the same loyalty programs or instead seek to change direction — and realign to this ultimate measure of the success of your loyalty programs.

We suggest that you should direct your analyst or financial team to provide this number for you every month or quarter.  Ultimately, this is one tool for defining the ROI of your loyalty programs. Right down to the bottom line of your business. Profits.

What’s the difference?Obviously, rewards are a part of most loyalty programs. But when does a rewards program become a loyalty program? What's the magic line you have cross? The first indicator is your company’s mindset: is the focus transactional, on closing sales in the short term? Or is the real goal long term retention (loyalty) of your most valuable customers?

That difference is real and important because it affects many of the decisions your company makes about its investment in loyalty programs. One level of investment is in the ability to offer rewards on a transaction by transaction basis. Whether it’s in your ecommerce solution or part of your merchandising, that part of the program connects purchases with rewards and encourages higher close rates and volume of purchases.

The second level of investment is in giving customers more options for redemption. It’s surprising how many companies see low redemption rates as a good thing ( because there appears to be a gain without the expense). But if the ultimate goal is loyalty, then the success measure is whether customers FEEL they’ve been rewarded for loyalty in the past and will continue to be in the future. Failing that confidence, customers will be less willing (or unwilling) to be loyal to your company.

Leading digital payment processor Square just announced (link) its integration with Apple’s Passbook, with the primary impact being the ability of customers to redeem their rewards more easily via smartphone. Its impact is precisely what this article is focused on.

Companies which have a longer time horizon and focus on customer retention and loyalty recognize that low redemption rates are a cause for concern not celebration. The financial impact of unused rewards is outweighed by the wasted effort and lost impact on the long term loyalty of key customers. The perception of cost savings is short sighted for two reasons:

1. It ignores the past investment of human capital in selecting, implementing and operating the rewards program, whose ROI will be limited to short terms sales2. It also ignores the future sales cost of reacquiring lost customers or worse shepherding new prospects through the lengthy process of becoming first leads, then opportunities and ultimately (a small %) into paying customers.

We return to our original question: does your company need a rewards program or a loyalty program? That decision requires an understanding of all the costs of associated with having high customer turnover and weighing that against the investment in the redemption infrastructure that turns rewards programs into loyalty programs.  

We came across a job posting for a new combined role in customer service and social media management.

So why are we writing an article about a job posting? Job descriptions are incredibly revealing about a company’s underlying strategy in the specific business area they are seeking to staff. Why? Hiring managers often have strong strategic focus in the hiring process because, unlike in their other efforts, managers tend to realize that getting their core capabilities and strategies aligned is critical when it comes to hiring and they hate the thought of training a person up only to find they weren’t the right fit. (We’ll leave the discussion of why they don’t have the same value for their time and effort in other strategic initiatives for a future post).

Some highlights from the requirements posted in the job listing which inspired this article:

Nothing reveals your strategic stance like your job descriptions

So what does this job description tell you about the company’s approach to building social CX? It falls into the fairly typical ‘fill the gap’ approach to catching up on social media as a customer interaction medium. So is that a good first step in building a long term social media / customer service strategy? The answer lies in the details of the job posting. Do any of the line items speak to a longer term development of a more integrated or strategic approach?  Answer: None do and that's what makes this the wrong approach.

There’s typically one big red flag in social media job description's

“ Must be able to work independently with little to no supervision”

What that usually means is:

The big missing pieces

Here are some missing things we would demand from of anyone filling a social media manager role:

It’s true that a gap might be filled (checkmark) by simply filling the position but the real ROI in driving social media customer interactions lies in integration and leveraging what is commonly known as ‘big data’. There’s a rapid transformation underway in how companies evolve their lead-prospect-customer relationships. Whereas, in the past, both ‘warming-up the lead’ and ‘building the customer profile’ stages lay firmly in the hands of the sales development team, now that responsibility also lies in the hands of marketing and social media teams. Gathering data and transforming it into decision support insights is the big hurdle, and that’s where the social media team comes in.  Companies' social media team job descriptions reveal whether they get it ..... or don't.

Big Data is a ‘big topic’ these days and Jeff Grossman, VP of Product Marketing at ClickFox, has put together a great article (link).  Building on his thinking, we’ve got our own take on the evolution of Big Data into a core business strategy. 

Big shifts in the nature of business

Thanks to social media and online in general, now everyone has big data not just big companies.Management roles are shifting as the integration of different data siloes and then interpreting and actioning the findings becomes a bigger part of management.

Companies are facing the same core business challenges but now big data and technology are shifting how we think about and seek to build processes that address them.  Where in the past it was typically a human to human connection approach (sales to prospect, support team to customer, marketing to general audience segments), now the same (and often better) data is available via technology.  Whether it's analytics on your website or social listening tools for Facebook and other social networks, mountains of data are available to the companies that seek it.

The key decision is how to make the transition from more traditional to data driven business models.

Taking on the customer challenge

Customers have always been tough to figure out for sales teams. So how did we go about it before? We did by engaging in a long sales cycles, making exploratory calls, followed by warm up calls then sales calls then closing meetings. That's where the money went.  We didn’t know their mindset, what stage of buyer’s journey they were at and which pains they were seeking address.

How does big data change that? It continues the journey that began with online lead gen and prospecting. Social media and big data changes that further by letting companies understand customers (sometimes better than the customers know themselves) before they make messaging and use that information to market and sell more effectively. The sales costs may have been eliminated but now atleast a part if not all of that investment has gone to the big data systems and team.

What driving your VOC efforts? If you're like most companies, it's changed with the growing influence of social media in the customer to company interaction.

Understanding the role of VOC before and after social media's rise

Before social: it was about data to support decisions.That was in a world where companies were in control of the interaction with customers.

After social: it's about empowering your ability to engage customers in ways that are relevant to them since they are now in control.

That's the game (since the power shifted to buyers): brands proactively using information to engage customers who are active on social media

A Double Role

Social media plays a double role as:

That's where the power of social Voice of the Customer comes in.  Its ability to deliver powerful insights into the mindset of customers is unmatched.

Deeper Insight Into Customers

You're gaining access to customers as they engage in pre-purchase activities rather than simply asking their opinions in a traditional customer survey. Social listening in its many forms can yield powerful insights such as:

These are the types of insights that Social VOC provides, with its most powerful impact being in the area of empowering your customer engagement efforts. Consider the difference between trying to engage customers with and without the kind of insights mentioned above.