Friday 7 June 2013

A Social Movement Generation

Cohort and Period Trends in Protest Attendance and Petition Signing


This project explores cohort and period trends in political participation in the United States between 1973 and 2008. We examine the extent to which protest attendance and petition signing have diffused to different kinds of actors across multiple generations; we test claims central to understanding trends in social movement participation. Using aggregated, cross-sectional survey data on political involvement from 34,241 respondents, we examine changes in the probability of ever having attended a protest or signed a petition over time periods and across cohorts using cross-classified, random-effects models. We find a strong generational effect on the probability of ever having attended a protest, which explains much of the observed change in self-reports of protest behavior. More than half of this generational effect is a result of compositional change, but we find little evidence that protest attendance diffused to new types of actors. We compare these findings with a less confrontational form of protesting, petition signing, which shows more period than cohort effects. We argue that social movement activities have not become a widespread means of civic engagement.

Customer Lifecycle Management

Insights and tools to help companies increase the satisfaction—and value—of their customers.

Effective customer lifecycle management (CLM) can enable powerful customer interaction strategies that power significant business growth and profitability.
What we do
McKinsey helps clients maximize revenue and margin at every step along theconsumer decision journey, from acquisition to upsell/cross-sell to loyalty and retention to debt management.  We work with clients to analyze the behaviors and needs that characterize their most valuable customers, determine the right objectives (e.g., acquisition versus retention), and identify the best ways of reaching them (e.g., direct marketing and channel strategy). In practice, our work focuses on four primary activities:
  • Driving customer lifetime value through deep analytics
    We help clients quickly integrate massive amounts of disparate and new sources of data, providing a 360-degree view of customers. We also offer new long-term solutions to deliver sustainable impact through analytic support from McKinsey’s Consumer Marketing Analytical Center; outsourced solutions that build on McKinsey’s Solution Center (e.g., help avoid large IT investments by hosting data); the right set of data and tools leveraging new IT-enabled Marketing & Sales capabilities. 
  • Optimizing loyalty programsOur team helps clients build integrated, cross-functional programs through an in-depth understanding of affinity and traction in relation to new and existing customers. We also help clients create and monetize loyalty programs and loyalty program data.  Lastly, we help clients fine tune the program features to maximize returns going forward.
  • Implementing front-line tranformational change Based on the insights generated by customer data, we also work with clients to develop transformation programs that help those on the front lines change their behaviors.  This stage is often where companies struggle because they strive for a level of analytic sophistication that is hard for the organization to absorb and act upon. We help strike the right balance between sophisticated data analysis and the practical front-line change.
  • Improving the customer experienceOptimizing the “customer experience” (CE) can create real and quantifiable value for companies—but only with a compelling and cost effective CE strategy linked to the broader strategy of the business. McKinsey helps clients think through the full set of points at which they interact with customers—from price to product to customer service—and determine the right level of CE to provide, based on a combination of customer expectations and the relative value of each customer segment.  Good CE requires robust processes and technology, to be sure, but the most important factor is often culture—and that’s where we focus many of our efforts.
Examples of what we do
  • Worked with a multi-billion dollar online retailer build the organizational, IT, and process capabilities needed to optimize customer conversion both online and by email, resulting in sales and EBITDA growth or 20 and 30 percent, respectively.
  • Helped a hospitality company determine the customer lifetime value of more than 40 million customers while using customer insights to overhaul an outmoded loyalty program.
  • Helped build an early intervention strategy to minimize customer defaults for a retail bank, helping prevent $110 million in annual credit losses.
  • Helped a retail client build capabilities and increase revenues 18 percent at a telecommunications company, customer satisfaction nine percent year-over-year at a hospitality client, and EBITDA 15 percent in nine months.
Proprietary tools and solutions
McKinsey’s Consumer Marketing Analytic Center/Solution Center provides physical infrastructure to host, merge, and analyze large customer data sets. It is now among the world’s top 10 “CRM environments” and features the skills of more than 15 partners and 90 consultants with deep CLM experience as well as dedicated functional analysts and IT specialists.
Our innovative analytical methodologies include predictive and self-learning customer behavior models, frameworks, and tools that provide a 360-degree view of the customer and translate insights into targeted actions. Our proprietary predictive models help determine the actions and touch points that drive the greatest customer value.
Our scalable technology infrastructure offers the massive computer power needed to mine and analyze multi-terabyte sets of data, as well as the external data needed to support the analysis.
Our detailed libraries of best practices and benchmarks provide immediate insights into improvement opportunities.

Thursday 6 June 2013

Lifecycle Marketing

Lifecycle MarketingHow do you offer value to your customers over a lifetime?

Lifecycle marketing is what we do to attract, convert and keep your customers interested so that they become your best advertising tools. Lifecycle marketing is about engaging your employees to deliver the best customer experience as part of a customer retention and acquisition strategy, who then voluntarily become your brand advocates.
It seems to work as well with 75% of brands that are using it saying that it outperforms traditional batch-and-blast email programs.

Take a look at each step of our methodology to discover how we work:

What is Lifecycle Marketing?

Lifecycle marketing programmes improve campaign performance by 55%Lifecycle marketing enables you to get new customers and keep them engaged as they move through the process of researching, buying and then using your products and services.
While similar to the traditional funnel model, Lifecycle marketing goes a step further - by covering the entire customer experience, not just the initial sales process. It's about connecting your existing customers and staff with your prospects and using social media to break down barriers. Research has shown that lifecycle marketing programmes improve campaign performance by 55%.

The customer is king (or queen!)

Marketing communications used to be driven by marketing departments; but digital media means that the customer now has so many touch-points with your company that it's how you respond to each one that matters. Getting it right means you can drive the behaviours you want and turn prospects and customers into your advocates.
Lifecycle marketing means that marketing communications departments are moving from message broadcasters to facilitators of change. The right content and data strategy to guide your marketing communications will engage employees to deliver a customer experience that means they always come back for more.

Tuesday 4 June 2013

CEM Products


Customer Experience Management Products

Turn deep insight into targeted actions that improve the customer experience and drive loyalty and profitability.
Today’s mobile customers demand the highest possible standards of excellence from their operators. Many are prepared to switch operator if they do not get what they demand, with the result that operators around the world risk losing 39% of their customers in the next twelve months. Replacing lost customers is a costly task, hitting operator profitability significantly.
Consequently, it is no surprise that survey results show that nearly 60% of operators want to invest in CEM to improve customer retention, other drivers being boosting efficiency, gaining OPEX savings, and increasing revenue. To help operators achieve these goals, Nokia Siemens Networks provides a wide Customer Experience Management offering that brings together pre-integrated software and related professional services across the network, IT and the entire customer lifecycle.

What can Nokia Siemens Networks offer?

Our offering consists of products (our own and best-of-breed third party) and services (including business and process consulting, systems integration, customization and optimization) such as:
CEM on Demand
Manage your customers’ experience through an innovative user-friendly online portal that helps to bridge your organizational silos.
Service Quality Manager
Ensure the right quality, to the right customers, at the right time by moving from network centric operations to service-centric operations.
One-NDS
It unifies fragmented data into a single logical database for one or multiple applications, creating a unified view of subscriber profile information.
Serve atOnce Device Manager
Find out how to manage your customers’ devices and enable automated configuration and smooth service uptake with Serve atOnce Device Manager.
Serve atOnce Intelligence
Gather information on customer experience for each customer or customer segment to analyze, profile and segment your customers. With this information, you can drive improved customer service, develop new tariffs and track the success of your current offers and tariffs.
Serve atOnce Traffica
Analyzing subscriber behavior is the only sure way to understand how your customers are experiencing communications services. You can trust Serve atOnce Traffica to put you in the picture and help you deliver the excellent all-round experience they’re looking for.
NT HLR
Host all relevant mobile subscriber, network and mobility application information centrally to allow a completely seamless communication in GSM, UMTS and LTE networks worldwide
One-IDM
Simplify your end-users experience, monetize on subscriber data and transform your business model

Monday 3 June 2013

What's the Difference Between Customer Experience 

Management and Experiential Marketing?

Many people equate Customer Experience Management with Experiential Marketing.
However, in recent years, "experiential marketing" has become perceptually aligned with "marketing execution." This is because it largely focuses on developing highly visible, stimulating, interactive, and sensory-engaging environments in which products and services are showcased.
Accordingly, experiential marketing is an important component of CEM, but it isn't the whole enchilada.
The environments that experiential marketers focus on are diverse. You'll often find a large emphasis on shaping the walk-in experience of brick-and-mortar environments. This is done with the goal of creating more positive, intuitive, memorable, engaging, and pleasing environments which better engage, entertain, and support customers.
Some examples:
  • Museums and galleries. Because they focus on creating a sensory experience, museums and galleries like the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian, and the San Francisco MOMA have always had a high level of focus on how to create the proper experiential environment for visitors and have therefore been proactive in the application of new technology to both enhance experience and preserve works of art for future visitors.
  • Stores. Retail outlets that sell goods are placing increasing emphasis on developing more experiential environments. Visit REI and spend some time on the climbing walls available for public use. Walk in to a Build-A-Bear Workshop and create a custom toy, complete with a voice chip, for a friend or loved one.

Click Here!

Other, more obvious experiential retail environments include Apple StoresNiketown, the American Girl stores. More subtle examples include SephoraAnthropologie, Origins and Libby Loo.
  • Restaurants. It's not just about food anymore. Restaurants are getting into experiential game, as well. Almost all of us are familiar with the time-tested experience offered by Rainforest Cafe and Planet Hollywood. My five-year-old niece prefers Sushi Takahashi—a little dive sushi joint with a circular sushi bar and a train that delivers your (really yummy) food.
  • Nontraditional environments. There are more examples in less-obvious environments, like grocery stores such as Wegman's and Whole Foods. For a nontraditional example of great food shopping experience, visit Seattle's Pike Place Fish Market.

We're also seeing forays into experiential marketing within the financial services (e.g., ING Cafés), healthcare (e.g., Minute Clinic), and other industries.

Experiential Marketing carries with it as strong association with event-driven marketing. In the past, this has been primarily associated with tradeshows, technology showcases, and industry conferences.
But today, event-driven marketing tactics are becoming increasingly popular in nontraditional venues:
  • Microsoft's somewhat recent and highly successful multi-venue Tablet PC promotional event. Born out of a partnership between Microsoft and the Jack Morton agency, the event resulted in 125,000 product demonstrations in high-traffic airport terminals in major hub airports across the country.
  • Another example was featured recently in a recent CMO Magazine article on B2B experiential marketing. The article highlights IBM's Merlin Center, an experiential environment created to effectively demonstrate the future of high technology banking to bank executives. The experience starts in a living-room like environment featuring warm biscotti and coffee. It gradually transitions into an experience that has been described as a "virtual theme park for banking executives."

As marketing becomes increasingly experiential in nature, the lines of demarcation between event-driven marketing and other promotions are becoming increasingly cloudy.
For example:
  • Lexus recently drew attention for strategically placed experiential displays positioned in Times Square and a several other key US locations. The displays, placed at sidewalk level in shop windows, featured a "holographic" animation of the Lexus IS in motion—zooming, spinning, turning, and driving within the store window space. Interactive kiosks allowed visitors to control the display features, such as the color of the car. The displays drew substantial attention and shut down street corners successfully as onlookers jammed busy sidewalks.
  • Experiential marketing promotions were also featured in recent episodes of the hit TV show "The Apprentice." In several shows, the teams were assigned the task of creating innovative marketing campaigns for Dick's Sporting Goods and Tide, as well as innovative product displays for Best Buy's video release of Star Wars III.

Experiential marketing also applies heavily to the online world, where the constant drive to innovate and improve customer experience and dynamic qualities are ever present. Product searching, personal recommendations, reviews, rating tools, list sorting/filtering and wish lists become common features of top retail and/or promotional sites.
Today, companies strive to press the envelope of traditional interactivity further, to improve site and application usability.
In addition to utilizing rich media, flash, DHTML, Java, and AJAX to bring new, more engaging and effective sites to bear, an increasing number of companies are making good use of other techniques. Viral microsites, gaming, downloads, and e-cards are actively used to help encourage site interaction and visitation. Blogs and podcasting are adding a whole new dimension to site interactivity and content. Product customization, enhanced products and services are an emerging trend. Nike allows customers to create and customize their own athletic gear at NikeID.com.
Online stores such as Lands End and The Gap's "Watch Me Change" viral site allow customers to create customized avatars, based on the personal height, weight, and body-style attributes. The avatars can "try on" selected clothing for the customer and allow style and fit comparisons. In the case of The Gap, you can also get them to perform an entertaining strip tease for you, and pass it along to a friend.
In addition to hosting an online car-configuration application, Mini Cooper has an interactive site showcasing a wide number of customized roof wraps that customers can purchase for their cars. The artwork includes the British flag, sci-fi scenes, the Mona Lisa, and much more.
The Converse Gallery offers independent film makers the ability to submit 20-second short films dedicated to the Converse brand. Many of the high quality "shorts" are now serving as part of Converse's national advertising campaign.
It occurs to me that I'm preaching to the choir. As marketers, many of you are highly familiar of the tenets of experiential marketing—and I haven't even addressed how the really great experiential marketers pay incredible attention to the interaction component of CEM, working to refine person-to-person interaction within these environments (e.g., the W Hotel), or engineer product displays to boost the efficacy of merchandising, among other things. However, in the interest of brevity, let's move on to discuss how experiential marketing relates to CEM.
Unfortunately, many executives are being seduced by the flashier side of experiential marketing and can mistake it for CEM in its pure form. A cadre of agencies now purport to have expertise in experiential marketing and readily capitalize on opportunities presented by market shifts, retail expansion, and new technologies. Typically, however, such agencies execute work within a relatively narrow scope, compared with full-blown CEM project work.
Confusion between experiential marketing and CEM often forces attention away from the real value and tangible benefits of CEM initiatives. The differentiation between the two can be succinctly described as follows:
duncan4_1.jpg
In closing: I'm not a huge fan of buzzwords or hype. It's a simple truth that everything we do as marketers is experiential at some level—from the brand assets we create, to the packaging, collateral, IVR scripts we write, or the stores and Web sites we manage.
We have complete control over how "experiential," engaging, or stimulating we are, and how perfunctory the interactions we design become. At times, perfunctory is better... and at other times, engaging, stimulating, and sensory-involving is better.
Whatever the case, the companies that are faithful in the "little things" will be granted much more. Each little customer interaction is a highly valuable part of a larger set of interactions. The outcomes of customer interactions shape brand perception.
Customer interactions should be strategically designed and executed to work together to collectively lead the customer in an appropriate (and positive) direction, which compliments personal goals and business objectives. This is the core focus of CEM.
The true leaders in customer experience understand these principles. They are adamant about creating customer experiences within channels—and across channels—that are intuitive, consistent, engaging, cohesive, safe, relevant, seamless, memorable, and satisfying.
Experience leaders never get caught up in flash over substance, but instead leverage experiential marketing as an effective tool to gain exposure, attention, and customer mindshare. They focus a great deal of energy on becoming increasingly proficient in the principles of Customer Experience Management.


Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/6/duncan4.asp#ixzz2V9YCv4g8

Sunday 2 June 2013

What's the Difference Between Customer Experience Management and Experiential Marketing?

Many people equate Customer Experience Management with Experiential Marketing.
However, in recent years, "experiential marketing" has become perceptually aligned with "marketing execution." This is because it largely focuses on developing highly visible, stimulating, interactive, and sensory-engaging environments in which products and services are showcased.
Accordingly, experiential marketing is an important component of CEM, but it isn't the whole enchilada.
The environments that experiential marketers focus on are diverse. You'll often find a large emphasis on shaping the walk-in experience of brick-and-mortar environments. This is done with the goal of creating more positive, intuitive, memorable, engaging, and pleasing environments which better engage, entertain, and support customers.

In my last post, I wrote about experiential marketing and wrote about examples on how it can be used to leverage brands credentials and forge better relationships with your customer groups.  More broadly though, it is important to look at value of using customer feedback in your organisation… we’ve all done surveys

Experiential Marketing

So what is experiential marketing? In a nutshell, experiential marketing is all about creating branded experiences for your customers… for example, Google recently released their Virtual Art Gallery projectwhich is an extremely powerful form of experiential marketing due to its interactivity, emotional appeal and from an organisational perspective, it shows the power that Google have to deliver high quality and complex projects to the community.

Customer Experience Management

So what does Customer Experience Management bring to the party??  Well, after talking with Bruce Temkin, he explained that the discipline of customer experience management is all about…
“Increasing loyalty by exceeding customers’ needs and expectations”
Bruce Temkin – Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner of the Temkin Group
For an organisation, this is easier said than done but there are some pro-active steps that organisations can take to map a customer’s journey throughout an organisation to help management teams use the path of the customer to optimise the supporting processes that in turn create enjoyable experience for the customer increasing satisfaction levels.
For example, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic both operate in the same market spaces and compete for the same customers but the way they approach servicing their customers is completely different.
The main differentiator between them both is the experiential factor.  The Virgin group is renowned for creating highly effective customer experiences but to help stage these experiences requires a large amount of human resource and creativity to think “how do we create a great experience for this customer segment” and “what channels shall we use to resonate with customers” and “will this extend customer loyalty and referral sales?”

Customer Experience Mapping

Mapping your customer journey is great way to understand how your customers interact with your organisation but more to the point, if you decide to segment your customers by tier, you can gain the insight on how individual customer segments like to interact with your organisation and focus your resources on higher yielding customer touch points creating value for both the organisation and customer… a win-win situation scenario.
Professor of Marketing Leonard Berry from Mays Business School explains that there are several experiential factors to look at when analysing a customer journey.  He says that when a customer interacts with an organisation
Experiential CueDefinitionExample
Tangible CuesFunctional product/serviceTangible cues refer to the actual product or service that you buy and whether or not it meets your expectations…
Intangible Cues (Mechanics)Emotional connection to organisationThis cue is felt when you admire the aesthetic quality of a product or for services, the feeling of stepping into a spacious, well lit office.
Intangible Cues (Humanics)An organisations human touchThis cue is felt when you interact with somebody who represents the organisation… was the representative polite?
To read a previous post I wrote that goes a little deeper in the Customer Experience Mapping.. please click here.

Voice of the Customer Programs

Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs allow an organisation to truly understand what the customer values and acts as a great tool for organisations to deploy to share valuable knowledge about the customer throughout the organisation in order for departments to achieve their goals..
To go more in depth, John Hauser from MIT Sloan Management School defines VoC as ..
“a hierarchical set of “customer needs” where each need (or set of needs) has an assigned priority which indicates its importance to the customer”
By prioritising the importance of the customers’ needs in this way allows an organisation to audit its processes and programmes and focus on higher yielding processes which customers love and value.
Voc programs can be used in a wide array of settings.  They can be used in the New Product Development stage, gauging brand perceptions or develop change management programs to help address organisation issues which can sometimes be out dated or mis-aligned to market perceptions.
For Example, a VoC program allows an organisation prioritise customer needs into actionable and tactical actions that management teams and departments can help achieve by focusing the right resources to achieve them.
Taking a sports leisure club as a case study, they could identify that the customer values the gym due to
  1. A strong brand association,
  2. An enhanced sense of community,
  3. Friendly and well educated staff and
  4. Cleanly and hygienic facilities.
More importantly though, a VoC program can allow an organisation to understand why their clients leave and collect feedback across multiple touch points to understand which customer touch point are effective at communicating and satisfying the customer needs and which ones are falling short when it comes to doing well at moments of truth.
With this understanding, an organisation can optimise its people, processes and technology to extend the customer lifecycle, meet the needs of their customers better to contribute to retaining more customers in the long term.

So how can experiential marketing and customer experience management work together…

By placing the programmes I have outlined in my last two posts into a hierarchy, it is easy to see that there is a benefit of having both programs running at the same time.

The Role of Customer Experience Management

A companywide initiative that focuses around the customers opinions, behaviours and needs and loops that feedback back into the organisation via analysis of an organisations customer touch points and data collection techniques…

-          Voice of the Customer Programmes

This collects feedback from the customer and places right into the centre of the organisation… however, if the organisations culture and processes does not support a customer centric focus, then the information will lead less than satisfactory results.
An organisation has to truly break out of thinking in siloes and distribute knowledge about the customer throughout the company as inevitably; every single person is accountable and has a helping hand in delivering a service/product to the end client regardless of it is directly or indirectly.

-          Customer Experience Mapping

Mapping the customers journey allows the organisation to measure the number of touch points an organisation uses to interact with their customers and can span several communication channels and address several customer tiers…
Some touch points may yield higher satisfaction rates than others and some may be failing to meet customer expectations but by applying a Customer Experience Map, you gain the insight into your organisation as your customer sees it and measure the effectiveness of each touch point.

The Role of Experiential Marketing

Experiential Marketing focuses on creating engaging customer experiences for the customer in order to leverage a brand credentials to influence a customers buying decisions and actions in order to increase the amount of leads in the marketing pipeline and potential sales an representative can close.  More importantly though, it can act as a great retention mechanism and touch point where your organisation can take the opportunity to get to know the customer at more intimate level.
By using customer experience management as a cultural and organisational philosophy, your organisation can analyse your customer buying needs and preferences and use this insight into achieving the goals and objectives that individual departments play in servicing the customer.
From a experiential marketing perspective, the marketing department can use the insight gained from VoC departments to shape and prioritise which touch points the customer group will most likely enjoy the most and deliver an experience that is in line with how the customer likes to interact, their lifestyle and understand the underlying drivers and trends that may shift in the future.

The end result?

If your organisation has a customer centric culture and internal and external perceptions of the performance of the product/service are aligned, the organisation will in the long term, achieve higher retention rate and produce a higher level of satisfied customers…
So what does this mean for your organisation?
Satisfied customers form the foundation of any successful business as a satisfied customers leads to repeat purchase, cross-sell opportunities, higher brand loyalty and the saturation of positive word of mouth.
After conducting  20,000 customer surveys across 40 countries, Coldwell 2001 identified that a highly satisfied customer…
  • Contributes 2.6 times as much revenue to a company as a somewhat satisfied customer.
  • Contributes 17 times as much revenue as a somewhat dissatisfied customer
But..
  • A Totally Dissatisfied Customer decreases revenues at a rate equal to 1.8 times what a totally satisfied customer contributes to a business
What do you think? How does your organisation use customer experiences and experiential marketing to better serve your customers’ needs and influence positive buying behaviour?