Michael Lowenstein

How can companies keep a consistent customer focus and optimize economic performance, which, after all, is the goal of customer centricity? Is it done with great products and product co-creation with customers? Will it be through customer segmentation based on detailed profiling and interpretation? Or is it through outstanding service and original, effective marketing? Few would argue that all of these are important, of course; but, at the vast majority of companies, sales, service, and marketing functions and activities tend to be discrete. And, discrete, siloed execution equals sub-optimized results.

There are many was to bring all of these individual, rarely conjoined functions and capabilities into unison, so that they are more effective on behalf of both the customer and the employee. Perhaps the simplest, and arguably the most sustainable and strategically differentiated, is to have employees directly, actively involved in making this happen. OK, this – what we...

Loyalty, or reward, programs classically have two basic intentions and objectives. One is to be an important method of generating customer profile data which can be used for targeted, even micro-segmented, marketing, promotion and communication initiatives. The other objective is to leverage loyal behavior among the customer base, in and of themselves, and reduce the use or consideration of competitive products and services. It’s fair to say that, to meet both of these objectives, the program, and its array of components and perception of personal value, need to be optimal. Are they?

The CMO Council recently conducted a study, The Leaders in Loyalty: Feeling the Love From The Loyalty Club, in which the key findings were that neither of these objectives were being met. The study concluded that companies sponsoring loyalty programs were just using them to deliver general discounts and perks to the mass of members, ignoring the customer profiles within the database which...

It has pretty much become conventional wisdom that customer experience, particularly in transactional and service situations, is critical to leveraging downstream behavior. The Peppers & Rogers Customer Experience Maturity Monitor noted that 81% of companies with strong capabilities and competencies for delivering customer experience excellence are outperforming their competition. Further, the Peppers & Rogers study has determined that 90% of North American firms view customer experience as important or critical to their plans, and 80% of the firms would like to use customer experience as a form of strategic differentiation.

So, while considered core to creating desired business outcomes, the translation of experience to actual customer behavior - the Rosetta Store of experience, if you will - is often not fully realized or understood enough to impact action. TARP, for example, has determined that customer churn is caused by customer perceptions of poor treatment 68...

Along with powerful, actionable customer experience insights and a customer-centric culture, it's almost impossible to have customer commitment and advocacy behavior without employees both understanding their role as customer experience stakeholders and living that role as value delivery agents and supplier advocates. We call them employee ambassadors.

The service-profit chain postulated that employee satisfaction drives customer satisfaction. Today's demanding and continuously changing customer environment requires tools for better understanding of both customer behavioral drivers and drivers of employee attitude and action that extend well beyond conventional-wisdom communication and satisfaction feedback approaches. Traditional best practices in these areas need to be significantly redefined. This was actively addressed in Market Probe's recent series of brand and advocacy behavior webinars.