Customer World

Is your business ready to pick-up intentcast from customers?

The word "intentcast" has been used by Doc Searls, one of the proponents of customera taking control of their own data vs companies take control of the data.  He has written a brilliant piece in Wall Street Journal - Customer as God basis his new book intent economy.

 He makes a very strong point by mentioning that businesses treat customers like a cattle herd and they have to get ready for personal empowerment.

I personally believe this is true and agree with Doc totally. Here's why there's a silent revolution that's happening in the customers' own world:

1. Businesses are increasingly finding a large majority of their customers really don't want them to be reached out to. The digital mediums of mobile, web make this "shut-out" very easy. I have heard customers say that You Tube Ads are annoying - be it the banners or the ads before the videos. They just are blind spots. The best customers don't want to be bugged with messages and worst customers  businesses don't care any way!  They need to find a new model to appeal to both.
2. It is sometimes extremely painful to provide information to businesses and many a times the same information is sought again and again across different parts of the same businesses  and across the internet. Information is not seamlessly transported across the pockets of businesses or across different sites they are present on the web.
3. Customer's personal information is treated with very little respect as tracking by cookies, content is widespread. Search for information is treated as " intent to buy" which may not be the real case in the offline world.  Walking in the high street or mall does not mean we are opening the wallet to buy.
4. Rather "intent to buy" must be treated as information and bussinesses must find flexible ways to build conversations with customers. Not all conversations are purchase conversations.
5. If businesses  own the platform along with customers who intend to know, understand, compare, evaluate and purchase, then at least customers will give them a chance.
6. In my opinion, Intentcast is the end of the sales funnel but bussinesses that lead  customers to the end of this funnel will be the ones that will gain trustshare and then marketshare. 

 

Personal data is the new oil!

The world economic forum and many futurists believe personal data is the new asset class that will emerge as a competitive advantage for many marketers. It is important that marketers start using this data  intelligently, judiciously and in a manner that benefits and engages the customer. Else, this is one area that can have a severe backlash from customers just like the occupy the wall street episode.

Personal data may be the new oil but refining and using it sparingly with relevance is becoming a very important issue for marketers to focus and address.

Who is the owner of our personal data?

However,  there is an emerging debate around the ownership of personal data as digital outposts & sites are gathering data about customers like never before. Google recently released a new privacy policy last week which  redefines how this data will be used across all Google properties that we as their customers have an account. The new Google privacy policy reads " We may use the name you provide for your Google Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Google Account.....We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads...."

Clearly, the challenge that is becoming a key part of the debate is who is the owner of this personal data  and what of it can be used and by whom.

My View

I personally believe customers should be given control of their data. Customers must give permission about which of this data can be used basis their interests and lifestyle needs to companies, advertisers and marketers. And thereby brands can deliver value to these customers.

Imagine personal data lockers being available which customers can own for a fee(much like the demat of company shares that have happened over years across different countries & markets). There will be several central agencies that hold this data and provide access to customers  - with a front-end which provides flexibility to give permissions to customers to release this data for commercial purposes. If the past few decades were the era of credit bureaus, the coming decades are the era of data bureaus.

Imagine a customer wanting to buy a car ticks the check-box on the need or expresses the need to be a part of a community of interest.Many marketers and companies then vie to build a dialog and a conversation with the customer - not spam her with emails, irrelevant ads and messages on mobiles. All the searches that customer does then become available for relevant ads to be shown to her online. Then, the sales & marketing teams of different marketers & products unlock a new engagement platform to woo this customer.

The customer experience is therefore refined, relevant and customized like never before using the data that is in control in the hands of the customer. 

Imagine the power of this data. Imagine its efficiency. Imagine its effectivness. If personal data has to remain as the new oil, the control & flexibility must be in the hands of the customer.

Managing data across the enterprise- How semantic web is changing the game

Most often enterprises struggle with siloed data. It's no surprise that integration of data across enterprise is a nightmare. PWC technology report provides some interesting perspective on how semantic web can make it real and ensure it can be done easier than ever before.

Here are some interesting facts contained in the report:

How is semantic web a game changer for data integration?

The disparate data feed into a mashup—a Web application with highly configurable data display capabilities—that updates each time you add a new store site or remove an old one. Other data in the mashup arerefreshed whenever the original sources are updated. By combining various data, regardless of their formator source, you have a wide range of possibilities forgreater insight and context.

The challenges with traditional data integration vs semantic web:

Generally enterprises don't make the best use of their data.

Given the disparate systems and multitude of vintage of technologies( old and new), it is always very difficult for business managers to use multiple source of data for decisions.

 

Getting internal and external to handshake with each other can help trigger power decisioning within organizations

 

.....empower your business users...

with exploration tools that they could use with existing internal data and with external data of their choosing. These tools would let them find the best business cases and make immediate use of the Linked Data technologies at a low cost to IT, since most of these tools are reasonably priced.

Read more

Customer conversations in a world without identities

I recently read a very thought provoking article by Alec - " Hankering for a world without identity or federation". Also, a lovely follow-up article on the same topic by Andriana. Also, there's a nice comment by Christopher Carfi on the same topic.

These articles raised serious questions in my mind about how marketers, in the future, will have to build conversations with customers without identity. The key issue raised in my head was - increasingly as more and more get customers get online or mobile( in developing markets like India, China and the like) they would like to control their identity & conversations with brands. I presume things like DNPC( Do Not Place Cookies), DNL( Do not link ads(without permission)), DNT(Do Not tag along - SMSs )etc. will increasingly gain importance.

At the same time , these mediums are also being used for transactions and  purchases more and more. Many of these articles talk about protecting identity but when you combine identity with transactional information, interests in various social networks,memberships in certain sites etc.- it provides a new dimension in building conversations  with customers.Marketers will need to use data from multiple sources -in real time- to understand customers, get into their inner circle by really being valuable to their lives not just providing or sending a marketing messages. Also, identities need to be confirmed from multiple sources of paths from where customers come. There is a nice diagram from Adriana that I have picked-up which brings this point alive:
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The key challenges and the winners of tomorrow will be the ones who are able to build conversations without identities. 

Lead management - Involve before you start!

A recent study from the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA)  shows that many companies are ignoring their sales lead management.

Their 2nd annual Sales Lead Management Study, conducted with 144 businesses in Southern California, revealed the following results:

• 68.8% don’t qualify leads before sending them to their sales teams
• 52.4% have no formal process for compiling sales forecast reports
• 82.8% don’t track ROI for lead generation investments
• 55% rated low satisfaction with their SFA/CRM system, at 5 or less on a 10-point scale
• 52.1% use no SFA/CRM system to track the lead process

My View:  The gap between sales & marketing departments has only grown over the years.Sales has had a siloed process in enterprises and in my experience getting sales to see & appreciate good quality leads is always big problem. On the other hand, I have always found, lack of understanding what a good lead is the problem of most lead generation programs. Often there is a mix of science, logic and an intuitive feeling in the salesperson's mind which a software or a process cannot replicate. But, my belief is that right at the inception of a lead generation program, you need to have the buy-in of the sales team. The lead generation team must be 'considered' a part of the sales team and may be that's the reason there's a term coined as 'inside sales'! Nevertheless, the lead generation team, the software and the process must be seamlessly integrated to succeed. It has to start before the program is implemented and announced. That's the key to its success.

Emerging Technology trends that will shape business and economic growth - McKinsey's perspective

Carleen Hawn has drawn-up a nice summary of McKinsey's article.

Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. … we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.

A. Managing relationships

1. Distributing cocreation

The Internet and related technologies … allow companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders—cocreation—in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.

The Caution:
Companies pursuing this trend will have less control over innovation and the intellectual property that goes with it, however. They will also have to compete for the attention and time of the best and most capable contributors.

2. Using consumers as innovators

Consumers also cocreate with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance… Companies that involve customers in design, testing, marketing (such as viral marketing), and the after-sales process get better insights into customer needs and behavior and may be able to cut the cost of acquiring customers, engender greater loyalty, and speed up development cycles.

The Caution:
But a company open to allowing customers to help it innovate must ensure that it isn’t unduly influenced by information gleaned from a vocal minority. It must also be wary of focusing on the immediate rather than longer-range needs of customers and be careful to avoid raising and then failing to meet their expectations.

3. Tapping into a world of talent

… Much as technology permits [companies] to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks…new talent-deployment models could emerge [and] changes in the nature of labor relationships could lead to new pricing models that would shift payment schemes from time and materials to compensation for results.

The Caution:
This trend should gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate, where companies can easily segment work into discrete tasks for independent contractors and then reaggregate it … Competitive advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks.

4. Extracting more value from interactions

Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, as we call them. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 percent of total US employment, up from 40 percent today.

The Caution:
Tere is still substantial room for automating transactional activities, and the payoff can typically be realized much more quickly and measured much more clearly than the payoff from investments to make tacit work more effective. Creating the business case for investing in interactions will be challenging—but critical—for managers.

B. Managing capital and assets

5. Expanding automation

Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes [like] forecasting and supply chain technologies…. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and … this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.

The Caution:
Automation is a good investment if it not only lowers costs but also helps users to get what they want more quickly and easily, though it may not be a good idea if it gives them unpleasant experiences. The trick is to strike the right balance between raising margins and making customers happy.

6. Unbundling production from delivery

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently… Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems. Amazon.com [has] expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services [and] independent software developers … buy processing power on its IT infrastructure so that they don’t have to buy their own. Mobile virtual-network operators, another example of this trend, provide wireless services without investing in a network infrastructure.

The Caution:
Companies that make their assets available for internal and external use will need to manage conflicts if demand exceeds supply. A competitive advantage through scale may be hard to maintain when many players, large and small, have equal access to resources at low marginal costs.

C. Leveraging information

7. Putting more science into management

Technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From “ideagoras” (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches… Leading players are exploiting this information explosion with a diverse set of management techniques. Google fosters innovation through an internal market: employees submit ideas, and other employees decide if an idea is worth pursuing or if they would be willing to work on it full-time.

The Caution:
Leaders should get out ahead of this trend to ensure that information makes organizations more rather than less effective. Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures. Environments that celebrate making choices on a factual basis must beware of analysis paralysis.

8. Making businesses from information

Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities… market imperfections include[ing] information asymmetries and the frequent inability of decision makers to get all the relevant data … allow middlemen and players with more and better information to extract higher [prices] by aggregating and creating businesses around it.

The Caution:
But that sword can cut both ways; today’s aggregators, for instance, may themselves be aggregated tomorrow. Companies relying on information-based market imperfections need to assess the impact of the new transparency levels that are continually opening up in today’s information economy.

Getting your blog strategy right

If you are a company having a blog where potential or current customers visit, Greg Verdino has some great advice on how to make it interesting and compelling:

"..we put together this simple graphic that presents the 7 Strands of Blog DNA - the key elements that, when combined in a unique way, make any given blog what it is.  Original, compelling and unlike anything else on the web."

Google Widgetvertising

Google today is launching a new effort to turn widgets into ads. A select group of brand advertisers are working with Google on special Google gadgets (widgets) that iGoogle users can place on their Google homepage.

What are Gadget Ads?

Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google™ content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement.

See some examples here.

Poor Customer Experience - Is it a marketing or IT issue?

I have always believed bad customer experience with a company is primarily due to lack of alignment/ synergy with various departments involved in delivering value or service to the customer. When the departments' objectives are not aligned and if they don't work together closely, superior customer experience can never become a reality. In this era of all pervasive technology across the enterprise, increasingly marketing and IT must talk and work with each other to make this happen. CIO Magazine has a nice article on this topic:

Indeed, every time you see significant dysfunction in the way a company or brand interacts with its customers, it is not the fault of one corporate function but two—both marketing and technology. The combination of people and technology deployed across multiple service channels fails to provide the basic services you sought, let alone the world class services you expected.

So when will CIOs and CMOs join forces to address these challenges, not from their well-defended functional silos but together? The answer: when both parties take time to fully understand and account for the impact their solutions will have on the consumer.

It’s Not What You Sell, It’s How You Sell It

When corporations grow to mass market proportions, their scale alone creates complexity that requires one or more presentation layers. Indeed, without integrating a corporation’s touch points into an appropriately configured presentation layer, a company’s offerings (its brands, products and services) and its operations (its people, organisation and processes) can behave in ways that make little sense to customers and present a corporate “face” that’s wildly inconsistent from one customer encounter to the next. Such conditions can also create opaque, unresponsive or simply uncaring corporate behaviors, which don’t align with the intent of most corporate brands.

It’s the art of interaction that makes the difference between great brands that transcend the fate of individual product or service offerings (Nike, Starbucks, or Lexus), and those that live and die based on the often short-term viability of what they have to sell (Reebok, Burger King, or General Motors). It’s a new frontier of competition, and winning requires integrated marketing and IT savvy.

Restructuring the CIO-CMO Relationship

The strategic dialogue between CIO and CMO must begin with consensus as to the desired customer experience and brand. Often these conversations are best guided by an outside facilitator with objective hearing and broad industry context. This probing can highlight impediments of the company’s organisational structure and governance, management incentives, and enterprise economics. Together, the CIO and CMO must know the customer perspective on these issues:-

• Have we deployed the right touch points (human and technology) in the right places in the right ways—and do we have we too many or too few?
• Have we optimised each of our touch points according to customers’ preferences and needs, by customer segment and usage occasion?
• Have we understood the processes or pathways our customers select to interact with our company in each and every purchase or re-purchase cycle?
• Have we aligned and integrated those touch points (along with the people, processes and systems that enable them) into consistent and coordinated expressions of brand and offerings to deliver coherent customer experiences?

Attn: CEO - Great marketing + Great Technology is the only way forward

George F.Colony CEO, Forrester, has written a brilliant paper on how technology has broken down the barriers that existed between companies and customers. In an era where the 30-sec TV Spot and newspaper ads are dying, over the last couple of years, I too have come to firmly believe that marketing and technology departments in companies have to come together and work closely, if companies want to build truly tangible value for their customers. 

George goes on to explain how CEOs need to pay attention to this increasingly:

• Marketing and technology in your company must work together to design and implement your Web 2.0 strategy. And you, and only you, can get the dogs and cats to interbreed. It's an unnatural act, but one that must occur before your company can become an opportunist, rather than a victim, in the world of Web 2.0.
• You may try to restrict your digital content through laws, rules, digital rights management, and/or security systems. The cold reality remains that customers, citizens, consumers want what they want, regardless of how you may try to restrict them. They see the power of digital and its inherent flexibility.
• You've got to earn the respect and allegiance of your customers every day — both of which can wither with unparalleled speed (see Dell and the flaming batteries, circa 2006).
• Get your marketers to throw out those 30-question customer surveys and focus on one question: "Would you recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?"
• After eight years of evaluating more than 1,000 large corporate Web sites, Forrester found only 3% with passing grades. The vast majority are hard to use, confusing, poorly designed, and cast an unfavorable shadow over the brand.
• It's now a two-way conversation. Listen, respond, and talk intelligently. Stop dictating to customers. It's your customers, not you, that have the power.

Lovely stuff and worth putting into action rightaway!