Turning customer pain into customer gain

The CMO Council just released a report on how companies are losing opportunities to turn customer pain areas into new business opportunities. The report highlights the following facts:

There are critical deficiencies in the way companies measure, optimize and leverage customer experience to drive loyalty, improve brand value and increase business performance and growth, including:

• Insufficient availability and aggregation of real-time customer experience data across touch points that should be shared across the organization
• Poor use of customer interactions to collect insights and intelligence or maximize up-sell and advocacy opportunities
• Lack of Internet processes and systems to track online word of mouth and drive customer advocacy
• Intermittent or deficient monitoring of customer experience that fails to provide true and timely insights into problems and opportunities
• Too few compensation programs tied to customer experience, loyalty and satisfaction gains

CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May says "CMOs must assume ownership for the customer experience and establish enterprise-wide measures and disciplines to ensure continuous improvement. We are missing a major opportunity to turn customer pain into competitive gain at every touch point through better use of web and contact center technologies and processes."

My view: This has been an area of intense focus amongst the marketing community for the last couple of years. I am always surprised to see that there is always insufficient customer experience data across enterprises. This is one piece of data that does not seem to have changed for quite some time now. For example, the report highlights that only 38% of companies gather insight from customer engagement situations! It always makes me wonder where is the gap between intent and execution. I believe the best way to do this is to start small. Don't start with a big bang approach. Pick-up areas for quick win, show to key stakeholders that it works and there is business impact. Expand as you get a lot of stakeholders buy-in, as this is very critical in making customer-centric programs successful in enterprises.

Comments

[Keith Gerr]

I couldn't agree more that companies are foolish in not organizing themselves around the study of customer interactions. The same CMO Council report went on to discuss that learning from social media has yet to be institutionalized: “only 16% of respondents said their companies have any routine system in place for monitoring what people are saying about them or their brands online.”

I've expanded on these thoughts here: http://blog.opuscreative.com/2009/02/03/the-other-side-of-social-media/

Regards,
- Keith

[Jabberwock]

Dear Swami,

I do follow your blog regularly and must say it is a treat to connect with your ideas. I am in the loyalty domain myself and it pains me so often to see companies structuring a loyalty programme around rigid rules and regulations and forget that the program, in the end, is meant to serve the higher goal of +ve WOM for the brand.

Listen to this case I recently faced - Company A provides complimentary membership benefits only for customers generated through a specific sales channel. Details of this programme and its benefits are available on the company's website for all to read. So naturally a few interested customers, who happened to buy the company's product in the not-preferred channel, come to know of the benefits and write in to the company asking to be included in the club.

Now wouldn't it be prudent to include these members into the fold even if it is at the cost of 'bending' the rules? It is a simple decision in fact - here is a customer who is screaming to give me his information and be a part of my club; thus here is a customer who will be quicker to appreciate my efforts; this customer could bring in new ones; talk positive about the brand and the club; would actively participate in activities and in short be every loyalty programme's dream!

But then this member is not in the club today becuase he din't shop through the preferred channel to begin with.

Tell me now, why are companies running loyalty programmes? And how does one break this line of thinking amongst organisations?

Would love to hear your argument - for or against!