Life Cycle Costumer experience How to optimize it!

How Optimizing the Customer Experience Can Help Your

Business Survive – and Even Thrive - in a Recession”

Executive Summary

The Recession Changes Everything

The bottom line is that whether in B2B or B2C the current recession changes everything because it forcibly

reorders your customers’ priorities.

For sure, price becomes more important than ever. Yesterday’s “must have” feature or service may be

today’s “nice to have.” Yesterday’s IT automation priority may now be less important to your customers

than access to live service support and advice. Being easier – and therefore more cost effective – to deal

with may now be more relevant to your customers than innovation in product features or functionality.

So what are your customers thinking - and what will they do now? Almost regardless of what industry

you’re in, your customers are going to:

Your business is almost certainly now spending money and effort in the wrong places if it’s continuing to

use a paradigm that has now been overtaken by current events.

The US is now officially in a recession along with most other developed economies. Stock prices have

plunged worldwide, unemployment is rising and the economic outlook for the next couple of years is

bleak. It’s no longer “business as usual” for any company or industry, and past performance is no

guarantee of future results.

How to “future proof” the value chain (in particular the customer facing capabilities) will require a level

of understanding what customers value together with speed and precision in execution that is currently

rare. Those that do will optimize both their top line (revenues, loyalty etc) and bottom line (costs,

efficiencies) and overall business effectiveness.

The first part of this paper (“The Recession Changes Everything”) looks at the pressures companies are

now under and how their likely responses will impact the Customer Experience. The second part

(“Measure Twice, Cut Once”) suggests some practical approaches to optimizing Customer facing

capabilities in a recession (eg: map the current experience, validate it with customers, then focus on

what really matters), the primary objective being a lower customer cost-to-serve while

improving/maintaining revenue streams.

• Need reassurance about you. Organisations and individuals face massive uncertainties and will

need to be regularly reassured for some time to come.

• Be less forgiving of service or process problems. Change reduces established loyalties and

operational deficiencies that were once tolerated may now be all the justification a customer

needs to go elsewhere.

• Fundamentally re-evaluate your value proposition. The

strategic challenge is to deal effectively with the constant

pressure to commoditize your value proposition.

• Place even more focus on price. Businesses everywhere are

deferring non-essential purchases as concern with brand equity is

replaced by cost-driven indifference and short-term focus.

• Become less loyal to established suppliers. Established

relationships are vulnerable when your customer’s job #1 is

ensuring his own survival.

• Place more emphasis on peer endorsement for new suppliers.

Customers seeking new business relationships will seek strong

peer endorsement before committing as no-one can afford to

make a mistake.

• Seek business relationships with companies that can help them regain a sense of control.

Some customers will place a higher premium on working with businesses that can help them

address the devastating loss of control which the recession has caused.

In approaching these changes in customer behaviour most companies will seek either to enhance margin

by reducing spending, or help customers regain some sense of control by addressing selected areas of their

concerns. An example of the latter could be a bank sending out comfort letters to customers explaining

how the bank intends to ride out the storm, thus alleviating emotional fears. In either case the mindset

that prevails will dramatically impact the Customer Experience offered.

These two responses need not be mutually exclusive either. Cost cutting in one area can be used to fund

investment in another - more highly leveragable - area. In any business, rational “hygiene factors” are

obviously necessary to satisfy basic customer expectations. Examples of hygiene factors for many

businesses are basic access possibilities, availability and welcome of service staff, getting resolution to

queries within a reasonable time, quality of product, etc. The opportunity for cost-cutting in these areas

varies business by business, but should be approached with caution and with a clear fact-based

understanding of the potential impact on the Customer Experience, these “basics” may well have changed

or been added to (eg: need for reassurance) by recent events .

And of course “hygiene factors” alone are not sufficient to drive retention, loyalty or word of mouth

recommendation – or to create precious reassurance for customers in tough times. That requires emotional

drivers such as trust, confidence, empathy, personalisation and sincere friendliness, promising on

commitments, time to listen, and maybe even over-delivering in these areas in the coming months. Before

either cutting costs that impact “hygiene factors” or focusing precious discretionary expenditure on

upgrading the Customer Experience, the key is to precisely understand how the recession impacts the

relative importance of individual touch points.

Yesterday’s high-leverage touch point may not be seen as such today, and equally what was seen as an

area of waste yesterday may look very different today. The key is to know what has changed and to find

out what now matters to your customers, and not simply to guess.

As an example of a company responding to

the recession by trying build up its

emotional drivers rather than cut back on

hygiene factors, one of the largest US

mutual fund and brokerage organizations

has just launched an aggressive “customer

outreach” initiative designed to help stem

the outflow of money from its funds,

targeted at a wide segment of its customer

base, including those with relatively modest

investment balances. Their efforts focus on

driving active customer engagement and

include invitations to conference calls,

webinars, free financial planning sessions,

in-person seminars, and changes to onand

off-line communications. Clearly this

organization concluded that investing in

tactics that would impact the emotional

drivers of its business was a better

approach than cutting back on the basics.

Change Creates Opportunity

This type of change is painful but it also creates opportunity in at least two dimensions:

a) As a result of the recession some companies will have the chance to

acquire new customers from competitors who struggle, go under or no

longer have the resources to compete effectively.

b) When individuals face major change in their lives (eg: moving home)

ties to all their existing loyalties and relationships are loosened.

A clear understanding of what kind of Customer Experience those

displaced customers are now looking for is therefore critical if they are

to be won over.

Some companies will acquire weaker competitors and will have to

integrate their customer facing capabilities. For the acquirer, having a

clear vision of the desired Customer Experience is critical if the

integration is to be implemented effectively, acquired customers will be

more likely to leave if they experience any service issues.

And for executives trying to drive a change agenda within their

organizations, the current economic downturn does have a silver lining.

In most businesses the status quo now looks less and less attractive to top management. There is likely to

be a consensus that change is needed, and for an executive with a plan of action, there is also personal

opportunity. To quote Rahm Emmanuel, the incoming U.S. White House Chief of Staff, “Never let a crisis

go to waste.”

Whether businesses like it or not, the recession is a catalyst for change, and effective leadership will be the

single most important characteristic of those companies that will survive and even prosper. At Mulberry

Consulting our contention is that the most powerful contribution a senior executive can bring to the table

in mapping a strategic path toward a clear and concrete vision of how to optimize the company’s

Customer facing capabilities in response to the current economic climate.

“Measure Twice, Cut Once”

The old carpenters’ maxim for getting a job done right, “measure twice, cut once,” applies well to

businesses now looking to reduce costs in a recession. Before cutting – whether it’s people, budgets,

services or product features – businesses need to first measure carefully what the net impact on Customer

Experience will be. This is not an area for guesswork as mistakes are likely to quickly invoke the law of

unintended consequences. Nor is it an area in which to deploy unproven techniques for measurement or

analysis. It requires a quantified evaluation of the end-to-end Customer Experience using proven tools and

techniques, preferably against a benchmark of peer group performance.

McKinsey recently interviewed senior executives from eleven leading service delivery companies, and all but

one agreed that improving the Customer Experience is growing in importance to their companies,

customers, and competitors. However, many of them will discover that their long-held but seldom-

The first step is an objective evidence -based assessment of the customer’s view of what has changed –

what is important now and what’s not, what can be cut and what can’t, and how to go about it.

In another example, a multi-national

insurance company with a major business

in Mexico found that by significantly

upgrading the face-to-face experience

provided in its large customer service

centres, it improved retention rates,

created substantial goodwill, and “raised

the bar” significantly for competitors. (In

Mexico middle and lower income

customers prefer to conduct their insurance

transactions in person and are prepared to

travel long distances and endure lengthy

waits to do so, primarily out of distrust of

the local postal services.) The key here

was that the insurance company had

measured and understood the emotional

power of treating its less affluent customers

with decency and respect, and chose to

invest in this key area of the Customer

Experience rather than cut back on

“hygiene factors” when the local economy

started to deteriorate.

validated assertions about what customers really want are either wrong, or have now been substantially

altered by the recession.

Against this backdrop we offer some specific examples as thought-starters to help companies manage

their customer facing capabilities to optimise their Customer Experience while maintaining or reducing

costs:

• Optimize the end-to-end customer experience. From a business perspective, why spend

resources to satisfy customers at every stage of an entire customer journey if only a fraction of it

will be remembered? In addition, why spend resources satisfying all customer segments if many

don’t care? We know that human beings only remember certain peak and particularly end

moments of an experience, so the challenge is to find out how to reduce spending on touchpoints

less critical to the customer, and of course which customer segments to apply this to.

• Consider the possibility that the mantra of all-embracing customer-centricity might be

wrong. For example, at a Northern European mobile telco the generally held view was that to

increase the “very satisfied” proportion of customers the company needed to improve the entire

end-to-end service experience, from “becoming a customer”, “receiving a welcome call”, “getting

started”, “receiving the first invoice”, “using service channels”, “discovering new usage features”,

“receiving a service call”, “contract renewal”, “offer to downgrade” right through to “being saved”.

Analysis quickly revealed that most important to the brand and to its target customers was

improving the initial experience of “becoming a customer” and “receiving the first invoice”.

Furthermore, the proportion of new customer dissatisfaction by far outweighed the rest of the

customer base, so focus was placed on customers with less than six month tenure. The remedy lay

in simple, low cost initiatives such as better information at stores and online explaining that the

customer’s existing mobile supplier may delay the number portability process, plus clear graphics

on invoices explaining how to understand the bill. Thus the telco did not try to satisfy all customer

needs, but became better at generating positive memories, and ultimately reached its satisfaction

and retention goal.

• Find the optimal service level. Mulberry Consulting is often asked what the service levels at a

given company should be. Clients ask what others are doing, and what customers are expecting.

The bad news is that there is no generic answer to the question; the good news for some

companies is that they may be maintaining unnecessarily high – and expensive - service levels. For

example, if customers of Microsoft have a high expectation that their problem will be solved when

they call the company, the chances are that they will wait several minutes, and perhaps as much as

ten minutes, without jeopardising brand equity. On the other hand, if customers are unsure

whether their problem will be resolved at all, then frustration will set in rapidly and sub-one minute

service levels start becoming important - and extremely expensive. So the trick is to monitor

abandon rates and customer satisfaction in real time to find the inflection point where service level

reaches an acceptable level.

• Improving First Call Resolution (FCR) has a dramatic impact on costs, and improves the

overall Customer Experience. Improving FCR is a classic efficiency project, potentially delivering

large cost savings and an improved Customer Experience. It is also characterised by low risk, low

investment and high returns, to the degree that one call centre we worked with actually boosted

sales by 77%, a massive impact

Our models show FCR as the independent variable which often has single highest effect on

customer loyalty. This is understandable given that customers who get their query answered

straight away do not need to call back. This in turn reduces the number of calls, and consequently

reduces frontline workload requirement and costs. However, even though improving FCR may be a

low risk/ low investment project it is by no means easy. There are three basic causes for poor levels

of FCR. First, frontline agent-related areas are the primary source of error (44-57% of root cause)

but also the quickest to fix. The majority of problems are due to agent error, for example providing

unclear or wrong information. Second, organisational and process factors (32-37% of root cause)

are the second most important source of problems but can require system changes entailing

longer resolution. This could for example impact processes for claims management. Third,

customer behaviour itself may be uncontrollable (11-17% of root cause) and difficult to fix, but

fortunately this constitutes the least common reason for low FCR.

In one business a simple remedy to address frontline agent problems was deployment of a

suggested script for the agents containing one must-say sentence in each of the call’s five phases.

By following this simple structure, such as wrapping up the “Farewell phase” with “…OK, I can

confirm I have now ordered [product] for you, at [price], which will arrive at [date/time], thanks for

your order. Is there anything else I can now help you with?” many more calls were resolved first

time, providing huge cost savings, with minimum investment and enhanced Customer Experience.

• Make it your first priority to measure and re-evaluate your end-to-end experience process.

Talk to your customers, potentially focusing on one segment at a time, and make sure you

understand what they really value in the areas that you serve them, as distinct from what they see

as nice-to-have but not essential to your core proposition. There may be cost savings in surprising

places.

• Finally, remember that a little kindness goes a long way in hard times. People from top to

bottom in service businesses should never forget that now more than ever customers are human

beings too, and that they may be more influenced by genuine kindness and consideration than by

an IT upgrade.

Life cycle CE

It is commonly known that retaining existing customers is less expensive and more profitable than acquiring new ones. The ability to effectively manage customer relationships whilst optimising customer value is more essential than ever before.

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) is a framework developed to nurture ongoing customer relationships throughout the lifecycle. It is about handling and fulfilling every customer interaction across all touch points.

Digital Alchemy’s proprietary CLM framework has been developed based on our experience in working with an extensive range of industries. We have designed CLM solutions for telecommunications, banking, insurance and others, this in-depth experience will be used as the building block to jumpstart your project.

Based on the industry you’re in, our CLM solution will be mapped into your existing marketing programs so you are able to:
  •  identify the gaps in your marketing activities  •  understand what necessary actions are missing from your current programs  •  shift your focus to improve the relationship with your customers and achieve your business objectives

CLM framework consists of 5 stages: Acquisition, Onboarding, Growth & Nurturing, Save, and Winback. Each stage, consisting of a suite of highly specific triggers and recommended campaign ideas, works in a coordinated way to:
  •  increase customer value  •  improve customer tenure, and  •  enhance customer relationship

Lifecycle Customer Experience

Extending the Customer Experience Lifecycle

Many companies have already started looking to create a consistent customer experience at all their existing touch-points, but the customer experience lifecycle starts far before and ends long after the relation covered in the classic customer lifecycle model.

The challenge and immense opportunity for companies is in extending their presence in the customer experience lifecycle by providing value beyond the standard company touch-points, and beyond the product or service. This can be done a few ways.

1. Through new touch-points within the standard customer lifecycle
   
   This means providing value to the customer to support the selection, purchase and use of a specific product or service through new touch- points.
2. Additional value not related to the specific product or service
   
   This is done by providing additional value not directly related to the product or service within the customer lifecycle.
3. On a wider scale, outside of the standard relationship
   
   This means providing value to the customer far before she is even aware of the company’s products or services, and far after the life of the product or service.

Here are a few examples that, although focused on only one touch-point, are not part of the usual customer lifecycle relationship;

• Helping customers make better decisions by providing non-biased peer reviews in store or on a Web site could be considered outside the normal scope of the customer lifecycle, but provides value to the customer’s purchase experience;
• An airline that provides airport maps with the tickets provides value at a touch-point that is normally not their concern (wayfinding in the airport) and enhances the traveler’s experience.
• A car rental company that provides customers with parking passes for key downtown locations, or public transport tickets, provides additional value to the product;
• A credit card company that provides emergency cash and passport renewal assistance in case of loss or theft overseas provides enormous value beyond the normal relationship;
• A gym chain that provides a Web site with a wealth of personalized exercise, nutrition and other health information provides value to the fitness experience beyond the gym.

Extending the customer experience lifecycle first requires being able to map out where the experience starts and ends, and to uncover areas where new and relevant value can be created.

Lifecycle CE

Extending the Customer Experience Lifecycle

26 August 2009 by David Jacques

The challenge and immense opportunity for companies is in extending their presence in the customer experience lifecycle by providing value beyond the standard company touch-points

Customer experience is similar to the concept of customer lifecycle, in the sense that it looks at creating value at multiple channels (or touch-points). But whereas the customer lifecycle is concerned mainly on selling an individual product or service, the customer experience lifecycle is a view of all possible interactions with a company, and extends beyond the product or service.

The customer lifecycle, from marketing and CRM perspectives, describes a process through which the customer discovers and evaluates the company through marketing, selects and purchases its product or service, uses it, and maybe interacts with customer support. If the experience throughout the customer lifecycle was great and relevant, the cycle may repeat itself with loyalty.

But the customer lifecycle is a linear concept. It presumes customers will follow a pre-determined path from awareness to purchase and repeat the purchase. From a customer experience perspective, touch-points with a company can be encountered independently, in any order -and for different reasons. For example a customer might buy a product without any previous awareness of a company; another one might call a company’s customer support before even buying any of their products or services.

Recently I went to a shop of mobile phone service provider "3", to which I had just switched from another provider. I wanted information on my bill. The sales staff pointed me to a telephone tucked away in a corner labeled “Customer Hotline”. The company made the assumption that if people need post-sales service, they want to do it through the phone.

Companies that understand customer experience make efforts to convey a good and consistent customer experience at all channels, and for different purposes.

And while the customer lifecycle model is mainly concerned with the touch-points that most companies share, such as marketing, point-of-sales and call center, some touch-points are unique to specific industries. For example ATMs are specific to banking, prescriptions to medical and pharmaceutical, waybill forms to shipping, and so on. As these touch-points are designed differently even between companies of the same industry, the customer experience lifecycle research and design efforts need to be adapted to each company’s specific context.

Gen Y and Customer Expectations

Move over Boomers and Gen Xers, Gen Y is about to transform the workplace inside and out.

Within 10 years Gen Y will represent the majority of our workforce and they are completely different from any other.  As the work centric rebels of the baby boom generation move into retirement and the individualistic flexible Gen X move into middle age, the tech savvy, team-work oriented Generation Y (aka Millennials) will be moving into their peak earning years in huge numbers.

Millennials are success driven, goal oriented, determined, self-confident, techno-dependent, interdependent and optimistic.  All are excellent qualities but as customers it makes them very demanding: they expect it now; they like it short and simple because they are always multi-tasking:  they are bored quickly; they are driven by convenience; and they always want feedback. 

Gen Y have high expectations because in the world they grew up in, technology has always delivered more for less, often free, and you can have access anytime, anywhere.

They expect to be able to socially interact all day, even at work.  They are used to having their say, “like right now”, and having someone listen.

So how do we serve these customers when many of the people managing or running contact center operations are not Millennials? 

• Customize and personalize: Millennials do their research, seeking out information relevant to them.  They consider it both easy and sensible so we need to make it easy to find.
• Be accessible and fast: Millennials live their lives online in a 24/7 world and expect companies to do the same.  Closed at night and on weekends won’t cut it anymore.
• Make it shareable: Millennials share what they like. They live through social media.
• Extend the experience:  Millennials have fewer dollars to spend than previous generations so they negotiate everything. They are more apt to pay a little at a time so you need to offer incentives to keep them coming back.  Their starting point for price is free.  They will pay for service, but you have to earn it.  
• Make it visual: They’ve watched YouTube turn ordinary people into stars so often it’s now expected.  You need to use video to make the connection between the Millennial consumer and your brand or product.

 Looking inward, Gen Y scares their Boomer and Gen X managers because they interact and work so differently.  But they are a powerful force if you embrace them.

Partnering with Google Apps for Business we found Millennials expect their connected life to come with them to work.   They want to work how they live.   Google Apps for Business talks about 4 new design principles which are transforming businesses and are critical to attracting both Gen Y customers and workers:

• Any-Team: teaming up with people around the world inside and outside the company to get the job done.
• Any-Time: a project works across time zones, not just 9 to 5 in the home office.
• Any-Place: work is done anywhere. 
• Any-Device:  to make it all come together,  you need to be able to work with any device you find comfortable

The inside of your business needs to match external realities of how people consume and share information. And if you’re not aligning your business around the ways Millennials operate, you’re going to lose that market. 

In our TELUS International call centers, we’ve created our own internal social network called T-Life.  This network encourages agents to work how they also live.  They share ideas and interact across the organization as part of a community.  When they feel part of a group, everyone tends to work better. 

For many companies, Generation Y is a game-changing force for better or worse.  Continuing to use the old molds to try to understand them, work with them, sell to them and serve them, will no longer do.

Apple tops customer experience, satisfaction surveys

Apple has been crowned the most admired company in terms of its customer experience, in a survey of global business leaders.

The 53 international business leaders and experts were selected and interviewed as part of the Global Customer Experience Management Survey conducted by customer-experience experts Beyond Philosophy. The survey looked at the risk that re-branding and other initiatives could have on customer experience for a company, but also at which brands the surveyed individuals most admired. The results of the full survey can be found on Beyond Philosophy’s website.

The majority of those surveyed believed that Apple has the strongest brand, followed by online retailer Amazon. Other companies in the top ten included Starbucks, Disney, Virgin Atlantic, and Vodaphone. Apple’s popularity among those surveyed was attributed to the company’s ”innovative branding” and products, as well as its status as an industry leader—perhaps best exemplified by creating category-defining products such as the iPad.

Beyond Philosophy spokesperson Scott Merritt told Macworld that “Apple is clearly an innovative brand, which is why it is so globally recognized. The stores seem to have a ‘magic touch’ to them too. It’s cool for customers to own an Apple product […] and it’s also the way Apple executes the coolness which separates them from other stores.”

Apple has also topped the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI)’s 2011 ranking of personal computer makers, based on a survey of 70,000 consumers. According to ACSI, this is largely due to the prevalence of the iPad, as demand for traditional PCs has declined in the face of tablets’ increasing popularity. This is Apple’s eighth year at the top of the ACSI’s ranking of PC manufacturers.

Life cycle

Customer Experience Lifecycle

In a previous post, I mentioned that you need to outline the customer experience lifecycle - from Need through Departure - in order to understand the interactions customers have with your brand. (Note: this is the customer experience lifecycle, i.e., from the customer's point of view.)  In this post, I'll describe the various stages in the lifecycle. The image below depicts the lifecycle, minus the start and end point, which I'll refer to as Need and Departure and define below, as well.

Before I begin talking about the stages that are shown above, I must first talk about the glimmer in the customer's eye before he/she even reaches brand awareness... that first spark is Need. It's not part of the traditional customer experience lifecycle, but Need (i.e., a solution to a problem) often begets the rest of the cycle. (I say "often" because sometimes Need happens after Awareness.)

Here's how the rest of the stages of the lifecycle are defined, from the customer's perspective:

Awareness: This is when customers first become aware of your brand, which might happen as a result of your marketing or advertising efforts or word of mouth/referrals from a friend.

Consideration: Now that they are aware of your brand, it becomes one of the brands in their consideration set. This means that they'll research and investigate your products and services, along with those of your competitors.

Selection/Purchase: Once customers have done their homework, they are ready to select and purchase your products or services.

Experience: During this stage, customers learn how to use and consume your products or services, training, support, etc. Ultimately, if they are satisfied with the experience because you've met their basic needs and expectations, it leads to the next stage.

Loyalty: During this part of the the lifecycle, customers feel comfortable with the brand experience, and, as a result, continue to use your products and services and will even broaden their purchases to other products or services that they haven't used in the past.

Advocacy: If your customers reach this point, you're starting to get into exciting territory. This is when customers become an extension of your sales force and recommend your products and services to their friends and colleagues. They've had nothing but exceptional experiences to this point.

Note that a lot of customer experience lifecycle definitions stop here. I'm going to add two more.

Engagement: While you've reached a pretty solid stage in the relationship when your customers hit Advocacy, Engagement brings in that emotional bond. Now we're talking Love and Trust. They can't live without your products or services.

Raving Fans: And finally, I believe that the ultimate customer experience yields Raving Fans. These customers have gone beyond Engagement, beyond that emotional bond. Is that possible?  Yes! Consider those brands where customers feel they are part of something bigger, where they show an outward expression of their devotion to the brand: they tattoo their bodies with the brand logo or even name their children after the brand!! You know the examples: Apple, Zappos, and Harley Davidson are just a few!

Customer Relationship Life Cycle

For your customers and prospects, your customer relationship life cycle is the basis for their experiential journey with your brand–from awareness of your company or product, to selection or purchase, satisfaction, and loyalty.

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• The better their experience, the more customers will move from one life cycle stage to the next.
• Your life cycle is a unique experiential journey from awareness of your company to, ideally, advocacy for it.
• Regardless of your customer life cycle, the early stages align closely with the traditional sales or marketing funnel.

It’s called a life cycle because it depicts the life of your relationship with your customers. And since the goal of your life cycle is to engage and deepen the relationship, it is circular in nature, with the customer appropriately located in the center.

The better their experience as they progress, the more customers will move from one stage to the next, driving increased engagement and loyalty. In each stage, you have the opportunity to understand and meet their needs, deepening the relationship along the way. Otherwise, you might unwittingly erect barriers to progress along the way, causing customers to drop out of the relationship–most never to return.

Defined by a series of predictable stages, your life cycle is a unique experiential journey from awareness of your company to, ideally, advocacy for it. Throughout the life cycle, your brand, marketing, and service delivery touchpoints–digital and otherwise–define customer experience.

Attracting and keeping customers begins with understanding how well your brand and touchpoints work, or don't, at driving movement from one stage to the next. By understanding attitudes, perceptions, and influencers at each stage, you can see where the relationships between you and your customers can be improved.

A Multistage Journey  
While every company has its own unique customer life cycle, the core framework remains the same. This five-stage model is the basic framework for all life cycles, though analysis of yours may identify four, six, or seven stages. 

Regardless of your customer life cycle, the early stages align closely with the traditional sales or marketing funnel, beginning with awareness or discovery. Once a customer has discoveredyour brand, they need to learnmore about it. Does it fit their wants and needs? What alternatives exist? Assuming your customers make it this far, the next step is to choose your brand. This stage includes selection or purchase, and is followed by use.

Looked at through the sales funnel, these steps conclude the acquisition process and–and for many companies–signal a decreased focus on customers. Realistically, this is where the hard work begins: The step following choose is use, and this is where most companies need to excel to boost retention and repurchase, and drive toward loyalty.

With the experience of using your product or service, customers get the feel of what the experience of interacting with you after the sale is really like. They’ll ask themselves questions, such as:

• Are you easy to use or work with?
• Do they enjoy interacting with you?
• Are your touch points (and the people, processes, and systems that deliver them) effectively meeting their wants and needs?

If they believe the answers to these questions are “yes,” you’ll be able to progress to the next stage of the life cycle–engagement–driving a virtuous cycle of additional discovery, choice, and use, boosting loyalty as a result.

Generation Y on Social Trends

In a matter of a few short years, social media has been infused into our daily lives. According to an Altimeter study, “In 2011, the US hit a milestone – more than half of all adults visit social networking sites at least once a month.” As social media has evolved and matured, these consumer technologies have started to make the cross-over into the enterprise. This is often referred to as the “consumerization of IT,” where consumer technologies such as mobile and social are making way into the business world for better productivity.

Not only is business changing at a rapid pace, the workforce is also undergoing a major shift. As baby boomers are reaching retirement age, 75 million millennials are expected to hit the job market at the same time. These youthful workers possess a fresh perspective and approach; qualities that are highly desirable for any company seeking to remain competitive, relevant and ahead of the curve.

This emerging workforce has grown up connecting through networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. They welcome and expect social tools in the work place, e-mail is perceived as an outdated form of communication. Companies that lead this trend and leverage social technologies will be seen as innovators by the new workforce.

Today, about half of enterprises are providing social tools to their workforce. With these tools employees have the resources to capture knowledge, overcome information gaps, collaborate, and communicate with the community in real-time. This is the groundwork for building strong relationships with co-workers, between departments, throughout companies and even globally.  Collaborating, working in a team environment, and making decisions by consensus is preferred by the new generation. The ability to create and foster relationships will be a critical component to keeping them happy.

Enterprises can no longer ignore the evolution of social media and its adoption in the workplace, especially as it relates to recruiting the younger workforce. Incorporating social technologies has enabled an increase in productivity and has provided a more efficient workplace. The Generation Y workforce is more comfortable and familiar working in real-time, adopting new technology trends and working with social tools in the workplace. To bring in this workforce, recruitment through social media is critical. Going social has become increasingly more popular within HR departments and companies that have adopted the use of social business have become more successful recruiting Generation Y. According to Socialware.com, there are four ways to use social recruiting efforts:

1)     More Social Employees = More Recruiters

2)     Your Culture Will Recruit for You

3)     Younger Generations Will Expect Access

4)     Social Media Access is still a Differentiator

Social business is the way of the future and the younger workforce is looking for companies who have adopted enterprise social collaboration for daily use. A recent survey by the National Computing Centreshowed, “employees using social business tools have an increase in connectedness by 39% and a third reported an increased level of workplace satisfaction.” The younger generation is starting to filter in and fill the shoes of the baby boomer generation.  Generation Y is armed with experience and knowledge of social tools, making complete adoption throughout companies inevitable and the way of the future.

Social software in the workplace is the collaboration tool of today’s generation. Can your company afford to ignore the adoption of enterprise social networking? Not only will lack of adoption keep your company from evolving, it could also prevent successful recruitment of the Generation Y workforce. The emerging workforce is full of new ideas, creativity, and innovation. They have their pulse on trends that will define our future. Not speaking to this group, in their language, or providing them with the tools they are comfortable working with could retract from workforce productivity, or even stifle the social evolution we see today. Incorporating a social enterprise agenda should be a priority to make your business blossom.

Apple and HP Customer experience

According to the 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings, Apple and HP are the best computer companies for customer experience. The third annual survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers pegged Apple as the number one brand, but Temkin Group Managing Partner Bruce Temkin said that HP has been closing that lead. As a whole, the computer sector posted better scores, increasing from an average of 54 percent in 2011 to 60 percent in the latest rankings. Sony and Lenovo were the lowest scorers for the industry. Acer, Compaq, Dell, eMachines, Gateway, and Toshiba were also included in the survey and fell in the middle of the pack.

The Temkin survey covered three areas in customer experience. Functional scores assessed whether consumers could do what they wanted, accessible scores rated how easy the brand was to work with, and emotional scores ranked how people felt about their interactions with the company. 

How did Apple walk away with its lead? The company earned a 64 percent rating and topped the computer companies with its accessible and emotional scores. Across all industries, Apple landed at No. 134. HP rated 62 percent and had the best functional ranking among the computer brands. Sony had the worst performance for the functional and accessible areas, while Lenovo had the bottom spot for the emotional component. You can check out the full results across all industries on the Temkin Ratings website. 

The results shouldn’t be all that surprising. Going back as far as 2005, Apple has been getting props for its strong skills in the customer service department. Beyond good service, the brand recently received top accolades from the UK’s annual CoolBrands survey and at least one of Apple’s products are in about half of America’s homes. Love them or hate them, the folks in Cupertino are doing a lot right. 

 The third age: class, cohort
or generation ?

Defining the third age
In Cultures of Ageing, we outlined our case that the structures of welfare
that helped shape later life in the 19th and 20th centuries have begun
to fragment (Gilleard and Higgs 2000). Out of this fragmentation, we
argued, a variety of cultures, or sub-cultures, is emerging within which
later life can be lived. Linked to this fragmentation are processes of
hyper-commodi®cation ± the marketing, selling and distribution of
lifestyle choices ± with which retired American and British people are
increasingly engaging. While we are critical of Laslett's position of
third-age moral individualism, and of consumerist advocates of `do it
yourself' anti-ageing lifestyles, we argue that such positions are
important re¯ections of the social and cultural realities that are ` re-
constructing' later life in the 21st century. What we did not adequately
achieve in Cultures of Ageing, however, was a more precise sociological
theorisation of ` third ageism'. What is the most fruitful way in which
this term can be understood and used ? The aim of this paper is to
consider what seem to us some of the major alternatives.
The class basis of third ageism
Focusing upon social class, the most obvious way to approach the third
age is as a coded form of `well off ageing' (Bury 1995). From this
perspective, third agers are simply those retired people (typically men)
who have greater wealth and larger incomes. There is consistenthttp://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Jul 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.148
372 Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs
evidence that in both Britain and the United States, the gap between
the top and bottom income and wealth quintiles has been increasing
over the last quarter of a century. This is as true for adults aged over
60 as it is for those under 60. Coupled with the demographic rise in the
proportion of the population aged over 60, ` third ageism' can be seen
as the more conspicuous manifestation of wealth in later life that has
arisen from this increase in numbers and the contrasting position of
those pensioners without such assets.

The cohort basis of third ageism
An alternative approach emphasises horizontal rather than vertical
social structures. Norman Ryder ®rst proposed treating `cohort ¼ as a
structural category with the same kind of analytic utility as ¼ social
class' (Ryder 1965: 851), although he speculated, from limited
information, that `in later years cohort identity was blurred'. Matilda
Riley however made cohort analysis a central element in her sociology
of age, with the general proposition that `people in different cohorts
age in different ways' (Riley 1987). From this perspective ± of cohort-
bound forms of ageing ± the emergence of a third age is the ageing of
a particularly lucky generation. Whilst the precise delineation of this
birth cohort might be a matter for dispute, it is epitomised by the baby
boomers, people born in the years following World War II, some of
whom are now taking early retirement. This cohort grew up within a
framework of welfare capitalism, experienced economic growth
through childhood and early adulthood, and played a central role in
the 1960s' cultural revolution. Throughout their lives, they have been
` the biggest cohort on the block'. The demographic, social, political
and economic signi®cance of this cohort marks them out as the true
inheritors of a new ` third age' (Owram 1996: 159).
The generational basis of third ageism
Despite being closely allied to the cohort approach, we argue that a
generational model of third ageism needs to be distinguished. The
difference between `cohort' and ` generation' has been voiced many
times, but it is one that is difficult to sustain in practice. The
signi®cance of the distinction, as well as the difficulties in maintaining
it, are evident in Karl Mannheim's seminal essay on the topic, `The
problem of generation' (Mannheim [1927] 1952). This essay, ®rst
published in English in 1952, is an important but `undervalued legacy'http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Jul 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.148
The third age : class, cohort or generation ? 373
for the social sciences (Pilcher 1994). In it, Mannheim sought to
describe three elements making up a generation: a shared temporal
location (i.e. generational site or birth cohort), shared historical
location (i.e. generation as actuality ± exposure to a common period or
era), and ®nally a shared socio-cultural location (i.e. generational
consciousness ± or `entelechy').
The point is that a cohort location is a necessary but not sufficient
condition for a generation to exist. It is the combination of being
exposed to a strati®ed set of experiences [Erlebnisschichtung] coupled
with a consciousness of occupying a distinct generational niche ± what
the German sociologist Heinz Bude has called the wir-schicht of a
generation (Bude 1997) ± that forms the distinct basis for a generational
approach to the third age. The remainder of the paper explores these
three approaches.
Class and the third age
While it would be useful to consider in detail the changing nature of
earnings and employment in Britain and the United States over the last
half-century and their impact upon retirement, income and wealth,
there is not the space to do so here. Instead, we summarise this change
by emphasizing two of its main parameters. The ®rst is the general
increase in average income that has affected those of working age
and ± with delay ± the retired population. The second is increased
intra-generational occupational mobility coupled with, in recent years,
the increased portability of pension schemes."
This change needs to be
set in a longer temporal context. When Seebohm Rowntree published
the results of his inquiry into poverty at the beginning of the 20th
century, he identi®ed low wages and the limited earning potential of
childhood and later life as the main threats to the material wellbeing
of the working population (Rowntree 1902). At the beginning of the
21st century, low wages no longer make the working classes poor nor
does the lack of employment make working class childhood and later
life the times of lack and hardship they once were. Few people ®nd
themselves locked into poorly paid manual jobs without prospect of a
pension, unable to contribute to the income and wealth they will have
in later life.#
One of the more important consequences of these changes is that
later life is no longer the principal site of poverty in the `lifecycle' that
it was for much of the 19th and the early 20th century (see Hatton andhttp://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Jul 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.148
374 Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs
Bailey 1998). Given the overwhelmingly working class character of
British society during this period (1830±1949), the impoverishment of
later life then was the direct consequence of the type of class society that
had formed over the course of the previous century. It was this
impoverishment that meant that the ` aged' were the principal
recipients of the new poor law welfare, and formed the largest group in
its workhouses and in®rmaries (Thane 2000). If the third age is simply
a matter of class, it seems difficult to explain why, despite the much
more archetypical class society of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, a third age failed to emerge as a class precipitate before the
early 1980s.
Marked differences in wealth and income within the over-60 years
population are not a unique feature of present-day society. Over the
last half-century, there has been a decline in the proportion of retired
people at or below the poverty line. Whilst not wishing to ignore the
reality of income- and wealth-related differences in patterns of
expenditure and social participation, it seems no more credible to treat
the third age as a class-based phenomenon than it would be to view the
cultural revolution of the 1960s in such a light. Rather, it re¯ects a
horizontal restructuring of society that has extended across class
divisions in a similar manner to the earlier transformation in Western
society and its culture that made up ` the sixties'.
Class, in brief, is neither an explanation for, nor the structural
equivalent of the third age. That does not mean that the manifestations
of third-age lifestyles, belief systems, and whatever collective con-
sciousness it possesses, are not systematically related to differences in
income and wealth at retirement. But it is not the transmission of class-
based values into this stage of the lifecourse that is distinctive of the
third age. The third age is a resolutely contemporary phenomenon, a
mark of our times. We cannot use class as its de®ning element. We have
to turn to historically-located cultural changes if we are more adequately
to de®ne and understand it.
Birth cohorts and the emergence of the third age
When the life experiences of the cohort of people born between 1890
and 1899 are compared with those born 50 years later, at the end of
World War II, the differences are profound. Is it the uniqueness of this
latter cohort that determines and de®nes the third age ? Let us ®rst
consider some of the differences between and distinctions of the two
cohorts. In Britain, between 1900 and 1950, average incomes doubled
(Feinstein 1976). The proportion of people employed in manufacturing

industry grew from 28 per cent to 38 per cent, while those employed in
the state sector remained constant at around eight to nine per cent
(Deane and Cole 1962: 257). The average number of hours employees
in industry worked fell from 54 to 47±5 hours per week (Gallie 2000:
306). The proportion of women in paid employment changed very
little, ¯uctuating around 33 per cent for most of that period (Gallie
2000: 292). Three-quarters of working class men born between 1890
and 1920, those retiring in the second half of the last century, continued
to share the same class position as their fathers (Heath and Payne 2000:
264).
During the same period, welfare reform replaced the poor law ± with
the early part of the century witnessing the emergence of social
insurance, old age pensions and social housing. The consequence of this
reform programme was gradually to marginalise the poverty, which, at
the start of the 20th century, had been endemic amongst both
employed and unemployed working class families.
The small increase in `leisure time' that working people gained
during this period (around six or seven hours per week) was
accompanied by an increase in the forms and availability of leisure
activities, such as the cinema, the wireless, the expansion and
professionalisation of spectator sport, developments in motor transport
and the emergence of seaside `holiday resorts' where the working
classes could spend their annual one week summer holiday. Although
for much of this period working life was long and hard, wages improved
considerably. The improvement in working people's incomes was
matched by a gradual decline in the degree of impoverishment amongst
the retired population. As Thane has pointed out:
the state pension [of 1908], low and means tested though it was, gave a regular
and secure income to a higher proportion of old people than the poor relief
system had ever done (2000: 308).
For the ®rst time, signi®cant numbers of men actually retired. Of the
cohort born at the end of the 19th century, when they reached their late
60s in the mid-20th century only 40 per cent were still working
(Johnson 1994). The improvement in working conditions of younger
adults mirrored the improvement in the conditions of older people,
most of whom were from working class backgrounds. But despite the
emerging welfare state, poverty was still very much the fate for a
signi®cant number of pensioners in 1950, just as it had been at the end
of the 19th century. Working class affluence was still some way off. Few
of the working class owned their own homes and fewer than ®ve per
cent of retired working class people received an occupational pensionhttp://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Jul 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.148
376 Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs
(Johnson 1994: 121). At the same time, working class political
in¯uence had substantially increased. By the early 1950s, the `middle
class democracy' established after the First World War had been
transformed and the working classes assimilated into the `moral
consensus' of British society (McKibbin 2000: 527±9).
This consensus extended across the generations. The lives of older
men and women in mid-20th century Britain were linked in many ways
to the working lives of younger adults: both age groups had shared the
experiences of two World Wars and the growing incorporation of
working class lives and culture into the mainstream of an increasingly
uni®ed nation. Both age groups were witness to the promise of better
times to come; of the prospect of a leisured society for all. None of these
pre-war adult cohorts however experienced the enormous cultural
transformations that spread throughout society in the second half of the
20th century. It is that post-war cultural transformation which turned
a cohort into a generation ± and which established its generational
`entelechy'.
The third age : a baby boom generation
The social and cultural transformation that took place in the second
half of the century is of crucial signi®cance in explaining the
fragmentation that has since taken place in the experience and
understanding of later life. Those whose adult lives were formed during
this period have been the ®rst to experience ageing in the context of an
adult consciousness formed within the ` youth culture' of ` the long
sixties' (Marwick 1998). This experience has no precedent ± it is a
social moment whose signi®cance social gerontologists and social
scientists generally have barely grasped.
The cohort of people born in the early decades of the 20th century,
those with direct adult experience of the Second World War and who
came to retirement in the 1960s, was not set apart socially, materially
or culturally from the earlier birth cohorts that they had grown up
with. They had much less in common, however, with the generation
born in the 1940s who reached working age at the time this earlier
generation began to retire.
Instead of the steady emergence and integration of successive birth
cohorts, each sharing in a fundamentally unchanging culture, a mid-
century generation emerged who would set a new and distinct course
through adult life; one marked by change, challenge and trans-
formation. The baby boom generation broke the mould of the modern
lifecourse.http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Jul 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.148
The third age : class, cohort or generation ? 377
Between 1950 and 2000, total domestic income in Britain virtually
tripled (Dilnot and Emmerson 2000: 326±7). The proportion of people
employed in manufacturing industry fell by more than half, from 39
per cent to 19 per cent (Gallie 2000: 283±5), while the average number
of hours worked fell from 47 to 44 hours per week.$
By the 1990s, one
in three jobs were part-time (Hewitt 1993: 23). From being little more
than one-quarter of the British labour force in 1951, by 2000, women
represented almost half the workforce (Gallie 2000: 292). Of men born
to working class fathers in Britain between 1940 and 1949, almost half
would no longer share that same class position when they in turn
became adults (Heath and Payne 2000: 264). In 1950, more than 70
per cent of the working population could be described as `working
class'; by 1998, this ®gure had dropped to below 40 per cent (Office for
National Statistics 2000a: Table 3±15).
But there has been more than a straightforward change in work and
income. Equally profound are the developments in the material and
social technologies of production and consumption. Not only have
people's work environments changed because of new technology. The
growing material and cultural resources possessed by successive post-
war cohorts ± in terms of greater education, income, social and
material security%
and free time in and out of work ± have enabled
more and more people to incorporate these new technologies into their
personal lives. Even more than in the sphere of production, the sphere
of consumption has undergone remarkably rapid change.
In 1950, most households had not one of a phone, a car or a TV. In
Britain, shops were closed mid week for a half day and on Sundays.
There were neither supermarkets or out-of-town retail outlets. The
prosaic and rather stuffy middle class department stores that appeared
during the late 19th century still dominated the high streets (Benson
1994: 62). In 1950, computer technology was unknown to the general
population. What electronic information technology did exist was
con®ned to large industrial and military complexes. Most adults had
completed no more than eight or nine years of education, and
tertiary education was the preserve of a small elite. Holidays were
con®ned to ®xed periods of the year and, for the vast majority of the
population, amounted to no more than a week or two spent in guest
houses in a limited number of local seaside resorts. In 1950, people
spent around £100 per year shopping (Benson 1994: 60).
By 2000, annual consumer spending had risen to £2,500. Holiday
entitlements had more than doubled and holidays themselves were
spent in a growing variety of countries and cultures (Gershuny and
Fisher 2000: 632). The car, the telephone, the television, the videohttp://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Jul 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.148
378 Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs
player and the personal computer have become `modal' household
possessions for successive cohorts of adults.&
These consumer goods in
turn have increased people's access to a greater variety of cultural
products. Almost every home has a phone. People spend more than
twice as much of their time going out ± to restaurants, bars and pubs,
cinema and theatres ± and rather less time at home with their family
eating, listening to the radio, watching TV or `entertaining themselves'.
More of life is lived ` out there' in a social space that is neither home nor
work (Gershuny and Fisher 2000: 644±5). This transition from a
society dominated by the juxtaposition of domestic and paid
employment to one increasingly dominated by public consumption
epitomises much of the cultural change of the latter half of the 20th
century.
These changes are beginning to emerge in the post-working lives of
those born just before the 1940s ± the ` older siblings' of the baby-boom
generation amongst whom can be counted the pioneers who established
the cultural revolution of the 1960s.'
Average pensioners' incomes in
most OECD countries now lie within 80±105 per cent of the average
incomes of their working population: more than half of the income of
Britain's new (male) pensioners comes from a combination of private
pensions, investment income and earnings (Office for National Statistics
1999a: Table 5±3). According to the Family Expenditure Survey, their
single largest source of expenditure is `leisure goods and services'
(Office for National Statistics 1999b: Table 2±2): this latter age group
also holds the largest amount of wealth ± both in Britain (Department
of Social Security (2001: Table 5±11) and in the United States (Keister
2000: Table 8±1). In Britain, there are signs of an emerging inter-
generational consensus in attitudes toward personal freedoms, with the
newly retired and those about to retire becoming more `liberal' in their
attitudes and progressively less `culturally distant' from younger `post-
boom' cohorts (Park 2000).
Increases in income, wealth, consumption and leisure, constitute
core elements of the post-war changes that have affected the working,
and latterly the post-working, population. A further element is the
marked reduction in personal security that is experienced by all age
groups. Between 1957 and 1997, recorded home burglaries in England
and Wales rose by 1,489 per cent, violent assaults by 2,189 per cent and
robberies by 5,182 per cent. In 1950, there were around 15,000 people
in England and Wales serving a prison sentence; by 1999, the ®gure
had increased by over 400 per cent to 64,000. The improvements in
material security during this period have as their obverse an equally
real deterioration in the conditions that constitute personal security.http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Jul 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.148
The third age : class, cohort or generation ? 379
No devastating wars threatened the homes and lives of the British
population during the second half of the 20th century. Instead, there
has been a constantly rising level of personal insecurity re¯ecting the
increase in crimes against the person and in crimes against personal
property. Although the absolute level of risk remains low, the relative
salience of crime in the last decades of the 20th century has made
personal security a dominant motif in the ambiguities of the post-war
post-industrial era.
This complex mix ± of rising income, increased personal freedom
and increased material wealth, of changing patterns of work, expanding
opportunities for consumption coupled with an increased sense of ` risk'
or `personal insecurity' ± marks a distinct period in western countries.
It amounts to a cultural revolution that has begun to transform the
nature of ageing in the 21st century. That it is a generational
transformation, rather than a `blip' characterising one particular
cohort who are deviating from the pattern exhibited by all other birth
cohorts in the 20th century, seems evident from a number of sources.
The shift ± in income, wealth and values ± experienced by the baby
boomers, shows no signs of being reversed in subsequent cohorts
(Inglehart 1997; Park 2000; Keister 2000: 158±62). The consciousness
of being a generation ± the `wir-schicht' of those who came to adulthood
in the 1960s ± ®rst spread across class and is spreading now across the
lifecourse. Third ageism is part of that generational consciousness ± part
of its entelechy. Subsequent cohorts will not revert to the pensionerhood
of earlier generations.
Conclusion
How does this analysis help shape our thinking about ageing and the
third age ? Generation is not the new class. It is however, a
counterpoint; a signi®cant and under-utilised structure in¯uencing
and shaping the practices and experiences that constitute contemporary
adult lifestyles. It offers a particularly useful structure through which
we can develop our ideas about the third age and what growing older
represents in the 21st century.
Economic difference and the social division of labour, though
important sources of explanation in understanding many aspects of
` third ageism', are insufficient. Birth cohorts will always be potential
` sites' for new forms of generational consciousness, but they remain no
more than possibilities. Every birth cohort group can be distinguished
in its material circumstances from every other birth cohort group. Buthttp://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Jul 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.148
380 Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs
without a sense of periodisation and the emergence of some form of
generational entelechy ± the `wir schicht' of a generation ± a phenom-
enon like the third age cannot be fully realised.
The emergence of what Inglehart (1997) has termed `post-
materialist' values, others have subsumed under post-modernist culture
and others have characterised as `lifestyle politics', re¯ects a histori-
cally-situated moment that is being played out across the lifecourse of
a particular birth cohort in complex and still largely unforeseen ways.
The third age represents one of the most signi®cant arenas where this
interplay can and should be examined. Times have changed. Ageing
too is changing. Revisiting Mannheim and the problem of ` generation'
is important in understanding how.