84% Of Enterprises See Big Data Analytics Changing Their Industries’ Competitive Landscapes In The Next Year

87% of enterprises believe Big Data analytics will redefine the competitive landscape of their industries within the next three years. 89% believe that companies that do not adopt a Big Data analytics strategy in the next year risk losing market share and momentum.

These and other key findings are from a Accenture and General Electric study published this month on how the combination of Big Data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) are redefining the competitive landscape of entire industries. Accenture and GE define the Industrial Internet as the use of sensor, software, machine-to-machine learning and other technologies to gather and analyze data from physical objects or other large data streams, and then use those analyses to manage operations and in some cases to offer new, valued-added services.

Big Data Analytics Now Seen As Essential For Competitive Growth

The Industrial Internet is projected to be worth $500B in worldwide spending by 2020, taking into account hardware, software and services sales according to Wikibon and previously published research from General Electric. This finding and others can be found on the home page of the Accenture and GE study here: How the Industrial Internet is Changing the Competitive Landscape of Industries.

The study also shows that many enterprises are investing the majority of their time in analysis (36%) and just 13% are using Big Data analytics to predict outcomes, and only 16% using their analytics applications to optimize processes and strategies. Moving beyond analysis to predictive analytics and optimization is the upside potential the majority of the C-level respondents see as essential to staying competitive in their industries in the future.

A summary of results and the methodology used are downloadable in PDF form (free, no opt in) from this link: Industrial Internet Insights Report For 2015.

Key take-aways from the study include the following:

• 73% of companies are already investing more than 20% of their overall technology budget on Big Data analytics, and just over two in ten are investing more than 30%. 76% of executives expect spending levels to increase. The following graphic illustrates these results:

• Big Data analytics has quickly become the highest priority for aviation (61%), wind (45%) and manufacturing (42%) companies.  The following graphic provides insights into the relative level of importance of Big Data analytics relative to other priorities in the enterprises interviewed in the study:

• 74% of enterprises say that their main competitors are already using Big Data analytics to successfully differentiate their competitive strengths with clients, the media, and investors. 93% of enterprises are seeing new competitors in their market using Big Data analytics as a key differentiation strategy.  The single greatest risk enterprises see from not implementing a Big Data strategy is that competitors will gain market share at their expense.  Please see the following graphic for a comparison of the risks of not implementing Big Data strategy.

• 65% of enterprises are focused on monitoring assets to identify operating issues for more proactive maintenance. 58% report having capabilities such as connecting equipment to collect operating data and analyzing the data to produce insights. The following graphic provides an overview of Big Data monitoring survey results:

• Increasing profitability (60%), gaining a competitive advantage (57%) and improving environmental safety and emissions compliance (55%) are the three highest industry priorities according to the survey. The following table provides an analysis of the top business priorities by industry for the next three years with the shaded areas indicating the highest-ranked priorities by industry:

• The top three challenges enterprises face in implementing Big Data initiatives include the following: system barriers between departments prevent collection and correlation of data for maximum impact (36%); security concerns are impacting enterprises’ ability to implement a wide-scale Big Data initiative (35%); and  consolidation of disparate data and being able to use the resulting data store (29%), third. The following graphic provides an overview of the top three challenges organizations face in implementing Big Data initiatives:

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Measuring the effects of social media

It is heartening to see companies and executives finally waking up to the potential of social media and rushing to join the bandwagon. However, most of the people are still apprehensive whether social media would work for their businesses and brand needs. Measuring social media ROI (return on investment) may be difficult but it isn’t impossible because it is difficult to track many of the pieces that need to be evaluated. Here are a few pointers to help you track down those pieces and find out the ROI you’re getting on social media.

1. Traffic is one of the most palpable ways of measuring social media. Though quality often beats quantity, sadly enough, it is always true.
2. Participation and interaction is an important pointer for many brands. It tells one about the nature of traffic being drawn. Interaction may range from leaving comments to customer reviews and ratings. You need to keep an eye on this as it can happen on other websites as much as on your own.
3. Internet has changed the nature of public relations forever. What earlier used to be distinct, is now a blend of PR, customer service, and marketing. Every person has a blog these days, along with a place to shout things to their friends and followers with twitter and Google Buzz.
4. In a world full of choices and the ease with which consumers can switch from one brand to another, the most important thing is customer engagement. This engagement is relevant both offline and online, on your website, as well as on social media sites. One way of improving your business, products, and the level of your services is by interacting with customers. Ignoring customers can be hazardous as research has found that engaged customers recommend your brand, convert and purchase more often.
5. The most useful outcome of improved customer engagement is better customer retention. This one factor is extremely crucial for the success of your business in the coming years.
6. Greater and bigger profits are the natural outcome of engage customers. You generate more business from your existing customer base and these customers are more likely to recommend your business to their network of friends, family, and social media contacts. It not only reduces your budget for customer acquisition but also adds to your profits. In the long run this improved profitability translates into more efficient organisation.

Sooner businesses strike balance between acquisition and retention better it is from a resourcing point of view. A number of acquisition strategies are so ill conceived that long term retention is not planned. Old wisdom says that it is cheaper to retain existing customers than look for new ones.

Basics to using your website as a marketing tool

It’s no more a secret that a website has emerged as the single most effective marketing tool in the hands of a businessperson today. Through a website, one can effectively tell customers about themselves along with their products and services. The wise thing is to focus one’s efforts on a website to ensure increased internet traffic, which will ultimately lead to increased sales. Here are some of the basic things that will help you use your website as an effective marketing tool.

Old news is no news. This is true for a website also. It is important to update the content on a website on a regular basis. By adding a few new things at least once a week, you can be sure to attract people, who will keep coming back on a regular basis to see what's new. Attracting people is one thing but what is more important is to retain them. To keep visitor’s interest alive, provide them with interesting reading material instead of boring business details.

Care should be taken to make the website search engine optimised (SEO). The content, the images used and even the name of the website (read company) should be search engine optimised! SEO has become an indispensable tool, which ensures thousands or even millions of hits a day. It can be safely concluded that no other kind of Internet marketing can be as effective or is capable of driving as much traffic as search engine optimization is.

When using website as a marketing tool, it is important to go beyond branding. It is important to create a unique logo or image for a website that is memorable and is also able to say much more than words can.

In today’s border-less economy where customer interactions are not hindered by geography and time zones, websites should be made more personal and interactive. Using blogs and being active on various online communities will help you get in touch with customers from anywhere in the world and at any time of day. Your posts will keep you in people’s memory and will help sell your products and services even while you are not around.

For more personal touch, mentioning yourself by name and using pictures is a great way to go about it. It only makes things easy as people like to know there are human beings on the other side of the screen. It’s also a good idea to run your own ads on your site. One can use different ads that link to services and products available on your business website.

One should consciously work towards making their website an authority site on a niche topic. This will help the site getting noticed much easily than when one tries to appeal to a broad audience. By catering to a limited audience, it is easy to attract that niche market. Though its sounds small but remember on a global scene, a niche also translate into millions of people all over the world!

Interactive {Marketing} Bandwagon

The evolutionary cycle of marketing has lead marketers wondering on how to leap into the interactive bandwagon. This no more seems to be pertaining to any specific industry, company(s), or sector. It’s now a global phenomenon or rather a cross industry phenomenon. The definition of interactive marketing comes from John Deighton at Harvard, who says interactive marketing is the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us (Deighton 1996)

Well, this could explain by President Barack Obama, Shashi Tharoor, Anand Mahindra, Gul Panag and so on is all on Twitter. Of course the another example that I love talking about is Amazon.com that mainly started to use interactive marketing so effectively, as customers record their preferences and are shown book selections that match not only their preferences but recent purchases.

I have to admit that though interactive marketing has been dominant in the digital domain, however the same has started to make inroads into other means of non-digital marketing. Though whatever terms we may use however the simplest way to understand interactive marketing is to understand the behavior of your customer and predict…well what ever predictions you can make about your customer, but not merely based on your intuitions, feeling and so on; rather based on substantial data.

While we, marketers, are attempting towards interactive marketing and trying to make a mark through getting into a conversing mode with its customer. Yes, I am talking about conversation mode in business to consumer environment. But with an event of such interactive marketing, marketers need to focus on two fundamentally important ingredients of Interactive Marketing - Analysis and Profiling.

Analysis and Profiling are fundamentals to Interactive Marketing. While I used the definition by John in starting of this articulation, I equally like to emphasis to the fact that it’s important to know your customer. Knowledge of your customer is the only way or element that could enable you to move towards interactive marketing to your customer.

For developing an effective interactive or conversational marketing, we need to understand and acknowledge about what our customer or prospective customer want to converse about. What are they like and what are their dislikes, and of course, what medium they prefer to converse with or at.

With an explosion of tools and technology we can start targeting consumer or prospective consumers about what they want. But….Hey….those are just tools. We cannot let a tool decide about our strategy(s) to converse with our customers. With the plethora of tools available it has become even more important to evaluate what tool to deploy and how the same would enable us to meet our strategic goals. It becomes little concerning and/or alarming when I enter into meeting or calls where we all are discussing about social media, Google keywords, etc without any clear strategic goal that is based on what profile of customer that we plan to target. It sounds something weird to me that we are going the interactive way without any substantial effort or homework towards understanding the customer. We just love to quickly get onto the bandwagons……… without even realizing that it may not be going where you would like it to go.

Now again how to gain that profile of your customer. Of course I can give a simple answer…Analytics or analysis of your current customer base. The analysis would yield “some” insight to your customer base, that could enable you to draw conclusion or at least draw a behavioral trend(s) of your customer. The same could be act as an important ingredient or the right spice for your strategic development activity for interactive marketing.

If I can come back on the example of Amazon, they did a wonderful study of their customer base to develop new understanding of their customer, based on which they developer programs for marketing and product offerings. Equally, if I may use an example of Facebook, a glorified discussion board that led to utilized a niche requirements of the customers. Again, this idea could have not been ideated before doing a great work at analysis of what a customer would or could have wanted.

Though this post alone will not justify the subject hence lookout for more discussion on this topic. Would appreciate your thoughts or comments at shiraz@shirazdatta.com

Retailers, get ready for the magic of CRM

“International giants entering India in a big way was an impending trend only waiting to happen.  If you haven’t prepared for the tussle yet, this is your chance. Indian retailers are set to impress customers and increase their bottom-line with the aid of the right CRM”

It’s ironic that while the retail sector in India is estimated at US$350 billion, organised retail is estimated barely at US$8 billion. The upside is the expected growth rate. By 2010, organised retail is expected to grow up to US$22 billion, an estimated 40 percent compounded annual growth of return over the next few years.

Numerous international retail giants from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are entering the Indian market with enormous hope and investments. Retailers in India so far only prefer to increase the number of outlets within a city or to other regions as a part of their expansion drive. But they will now need to fight the burgeoning retail space with many new shopping centres and growing new markets like the kids’ retail revolution in apparel. To manage the tremendous volume of transactions and to beat international competition, Indian retailers have an immediate need for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

CRM will happen. It’s simply a question of how long it will take and in how many ways retailers will benefit. Customer Relationship Management is important, especially for your repeat customers and for them to feel camaraderie with the retailer. A good CRM will provide the right framework to retailers so that they can personalize merchandise purchases, services and responses across all communication channels for the customer’s satisfaction and for increased sales.

Low cost, high value

But before retailers embark on any CRM software, they need to ensure it comes at optimal cost, with minimal risk, high value, and a higher return on investment (ROI). It should install quickly, interface readily with existing systems, be easy to learn and to use, and deliver uncompromising performance.

Driven by changing lifestyles, strong income growth and favourable demographic patterns, the Indian retail market is growing at compounded annual rate of five percent and expected revenues of US$320 billion in 2007, according to a report by AT Kearney and the Confederation of Indian Industry. And big international and domestic retailers have realized this growth.

To sustain competition from the giants, Indian retailers must differentiate or brand their business. Customers expect retailers to do this is by personalizing products and services. And this is where a rightly implemented CRM comes into play.

Growing Communication Channels

India has more than 129 million mobile communication subscribers and the number is expected to go up to 300 million in 2008. This is a strong marketing channel retailers cannot afford to miss. “Truly loyal customers can’t imagine doing business with anyone else. They are your best means of advertising because they’ve become advocates for your company. They bore their friends with stories of how great you are,” write Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler, authors of Managing the Customer Experience.

To implement the right CRM, retailers need to analyze customer preferences and trends, and then merge analysis with inbound and outbound calling via CRM technology so that customers can communicate with the retail chain by fax, phone, web, SMS and the like. The CRM framework links and integrates these channels to individualize the customer’s experience and ensure satisfaction.

Similarly, competition must be kept under a check. If a retailer offers volume discounts, its competitors must likewise offer comparable value to the customers. If a retailer has tools to reach more customers with personalized purchase offers, or to process orders faster, or with fewer errors, or more efficiently, other vendors must adapt or gradually surrender market share.

But unfortunately, only 30 percent of companies worldwide have actually implemented a commercial CRM software package. And most of these are only a year old. Of this minority, 54 percent have implemented just one part of CRM. With so much room for improvement in meeting customer demands, CRM can only help.

Contact centres form an integral part of CRM because they directly impact how customers feel about the retailer’s products, services and business. With an efficient system at the contact centre, retailers can help customers buy what they want and need. For instance, retailers are yet to utilize the opportunity of selling daily needs to a population that is using the latest technology to purchase almost everything.

If you are looking at moving to customer-centric marketing, this means that all customer functions are subject to CRM’s analytical processes. This helps retailers understand both how the customer base is presently segmented and, for the future, according to what retailing values. Other analyses identify new services, evaluate their ROI, shift focus from less to more profitable customers, etc. The outcome from CRM analytics is better service, improved planning and profitability, and more appropriate pricing.

Customer Analysis

CRM analysis can help retailers make a smooth shift to a customer-focused enterprise by allowing processes like differentiating customers into segments, discovering precise needs of customers and redesigning compensation and rewards to effect behavioural changes. This process establishes the context that stimulates the customer to shop and buy. Hardcore marketers make their own analytical understandings with the help of a CRM to evaluate what their customers need.

Improved Sales

Better services imply the customer’s improved ability to make purchases. They will make informed decisions and be happy with their purchase. Such efficient shopping will only mean a patronizing customer. For the retailers, this means higher transaction rate, increased revenues, and a wider profit margin.

Smart retailers are looking up new and critical CRM tools like the unified agent desktop that allows customer service agents to respond faster and with greater accuracy and consistency every time a customer picks up the phone, accesses e-mails or chats. The unified agent desktop brings the customer into focus at the desktop and turns the agent’s screen into a hub that can access all enterprise applications and databases necessary to respond rapidly to the customer.

The result is increased quality and decreased operating costs, leading to one of the most handsome ROIs in the industry. It also eliminates data redundancy like repeating customers with the same requests or relying on agents to recall the correct systems to enter a new customer record or service request.

Questions to ask about any CRM Framework:

• Does it allow the supervisor or manager to access and process analytical data online? Preferably through a web portal?
• Does it use just one screen to manage all customer channels – e-mail, voice, chat, fax, web self service – so that agents stay productive and don’t get lost in the transaction?
• Does it offer a universal view of your retail CRM data on a single screen – contact information, history of recent activity, knowledge base, workflow interaction, resource management?
• Does it make efficient use of your and the customer’s time by minimizing clicks so that managers and agents don’t have to toggle to other screens or other applications while the customer waits impatiently?

Attention : Is Your Call Center Ready for a Disaster?

Hosted contact center solutions help to insulate small to medium-sized businesses from disruptions – and offer additional benefits as well.

Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, storms, power outages, terrorist threats … you never know when or how your business might be disrupted. But you do know that you must have a business continuity plan because customers don’t stop calling and e-mailing when you have an outage. In fact, volumes may increase. Your agents need to be available to customers. One negative experience with your company and you could lose that customer forever. Add the average number of customer contacts you have in a given time period and it is easy to see how quickly the damage to your business can multiply with any outage.

Large companies with established national or global operations typically have the resources to create redundant systems to overcome a local or even regional outage. If there is an outage or problem at one location, contacts are simply routed to the other open sites. However, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) typically don’t have the resources to build comprehensive disaster recovery plans and are left with few options other than rebuilding the system as quickly as possible.

Hosted contact centers to the rescue

Hosted contact center solutions provide SMBs with a cost-effective and reliable solution that minimizes business risks during an emergency by enabling agents to work from virtually anywhere. The latest hosted solutions require only a web browser, phone and internet access to provide the same complete contact center functionality as if the agents were actually on-site. Because all software and hardware are housed off-premise in a secure hosting facility, the “contact center” can continue to operate without disruption.

In fact, a hosted contact center can provide even greater flexibility and security than redundant physical contact centers. For instance, even if a company with multiple contact centers were able to re-route incoming contacts to one of their other centers, the remaining locations may not be able to handle the increased volumes or have the proper training to adequately handle the re-directed calls. A hosted solution enables you to automatically route communications to available agents wherever they might be. And if employees did have to be evacuated, re-establishing operations is quick and inexpensive, since agents only need a web browser, a phone, and access to the internet. This makes nearly any home or hotel a potential temporary outpost. The end result is the business continuity that your bottom line and customers require.

A virtual contact center for real-world events – and a global economy

Because the hosted solution places the hub of the contact center outside of the organization, it makes the virtual contact center a reality. By strategically locating agents in geographically diverse locations, you can dramatically reduce the impact any single event could have on the business. Far greater than even multiple contact centers, this can make the business nearly immune to local outages or disasters.

Fine Art By Hyatt is one company that can testify to the advantages of a hosted solution in an emergency. When Fine Art By Hyatt made their original decision to go with a hosted solution from Cincom Systems, Inc., a lot of factors other than emergency preparedness entered into the equation. However, when Hurricane Wilma stormed ashore less than 20 miles from the company headquarters in Naples, Florida, this ability moved to center stage. Larry Block, president of Fine Art By Hyatt, says “our agents in the Midwest and western states were able to cover the phones while we were covering our heads to protect from Wilma. We never missed a beat as far as taking customer orders was concerned!”

Under non-emergency conditions, a hosted solution can provide unmatched scheduling flexibility for agents and managers. It enables the business to employ the best agents available worldwide – creating a virtual contact center for businesses of any size.

The flexibility of hosted solutions also offers advantages during call spikes. Because no special hardware or software is required, you can quickly engage non-contact-center personnel to take customer calls. In essence, your entire organization can become a pool of backup agents for unforeseen load conditions.

The importance of multi-channel capability

A key component in the success of hosted solutions when addressing business continuity planning is the ability to integrate multiple channels. For example, if your customers’ phones are out of service due to an outage, they will try to utilize other channels of communication, such as e-mail, until they reach you. During Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attack, this situation became reality as millions of telephone lines and cell phones were inoperable; yet e-mails could be sent from many locations. The ability to substitute contact channels proved vital in this situation.

Also, if your business involves utilities, certain government agencies, and other organizations, call volumes are likely to increase during emergencies. The ability to direct customers to alternative communication channels that are operational or to agents located outside the affected area could be critical. Today's hosted solutions make all of this possible.

Hosted contact centers on the rise

The business continuity and global business advantages of today's hosted contact center solutions haven't gone unnoticed by businesses. According to Datamonitor, hosted contact centers will be the fastest-growing sector of the market, and by 2008, will account for 38 percent of the global market. Additionally, DMG Consulting reports that by 2007, 20 percent to 30 percent of all new contact center seats will be hosted. By providing an economical and viable alternative to the on-premise contact center, a hosted solution enables SMBs to establish business continuity capabilities and global customer service that was previously not feasible. The end result is a leveling of the playing field for SMBs and minimized exposure in the event of a disaster.

Key business continuity advantages of hosted contact center solutions

Some of the key benefits of the best hosted contact center solutions in a business continuity plan include:

• Agents anywhere – Agents and other knowledge workers can log in remotely and receive phone, e-mail, chat, and fax interactions.
• Minimal capital outlay with no hardware or software investments - Typically a simple monthly per-seat licensing.
• Inherent security with off-premise hosting that places your contact center infrastructure in a secure, redundant location.
• Eliminates the expense and time-consuming process of buying, installing, and maintaining a backup site.
• Quick, simple, and inexpensive relocation with only a web browser, a phone, and access to the internet required.
• Enables non-contact-center personnel to take customer calls as backup agents to accommodate unforeseen load conditions.

By Randy Saunders

What to Look for When Selecting a Hosted Contact Center Solution

According to Datamonitor, by 2008, the global market for managed and hosted contact center services will have more than doubled, reaching a value of more than $5 billion. So the odds are good that if you haven’t already implemented a hosted solution in your contact center, that you will soon.

But once you make the decision to implement a hosted solution, finding the right service provider is critical. What should you look for? Here are five areas to investigate:

1. Experience and capabilities

The vendor’s ability to provide a complete solution is as important as its ability to execute the solution.

• A service provider offering a hosted solution should deliver a full, robust suite designed for the hosting environment. It should include advanced analytics that track and measure all elements of the contact center at both an operational and business level, interaction channels with universal queue, and an agent desktop that provides a universal view of the customer.

• Companies can gain insight into the capabilities and support the company provides by checking customer and partner references.

• Most importantly, companies must understand the hosting infrastructure.

2. Functionality and security

As the demand for hosted solutions rises, traditional vendors have begun to retrofit their premise solutions to offer them as a service. The buyer should be cautious of these solutions, as they may not have the same benefits as a solution that was built to be both hosted and on-premise. Understanding the functionality of a hosted solution is key to understanding the vendor’s ability to customize, integrate, and provide security for your existing resources.

• A multi-tenant architecture can improve the operation of a hosted solution. It is an inexpensive and comprehensive method of providing a shared architecture down to the last table. With a multi-tenant architecture, multiple clients with distinct needs, tools, processes, customizations, and workflow can all reside in the same infrastructure – each with its own completely separate, completely unique set of processes.

• A Net-Native Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) solution can eliminate the need for client/server applications on user desktops. Additionally, it utilizes the internet as a global delivery system for maximum uptime and flexibility while ensuring full security.

• Integration should use a common platform based on open standards. This easy-to-program, goes-anywhere framework can summarize data from any system (transactions, interactions) and transmit it to agents using a single, web-based interface.

• Secure data transmission is also very important. Solutions should provide best-of-breed hardware, redundant firewalls, restrictive internet protocols, good authentication, and secure virtual private network (VPN) lines between the client and the service provider. With the multi-tenant architecture, core tenants of the security framework for hosting keep everything separate.

3. Scalability and flexibility

Having a hosted solution that can grow with your business is critical to long-range success and a long-term partnership with the service provider.

• The solution needs to be flexible and customizable to your business. The ability to configure and adjust communication channels, workflows, processes, knowledge and application access, desktop presentation, and configurations are all critical.

• A hosted solution should also offer a variety of deployment and financing options. Purchase a license and let the service provider manage the logistics and infrastructure for you, or start with a hosted version and confirm that it works for your business before investing in a licensed version. Or stay with the hosted model indefinitely.

4. Processing speed and availability

As hosted solutions physically reside outside the user’s network, companies should ensure that the service provider is able to meet processing-speed and availability requirements.

• The service provider should have a commitment to meet service-level agreements and the solution architecture and infrastructure to do so.

• To ensure redundancy, the service provider should have multiple data carriers.

• The internet service provider must provide adequate bandwidth, as well as meet latency and reliability requirements.

5. Feedback and measurement

Business intelligence functionality provides the insight necessary for managers to make informed business decisions. Thus, analytical functionality has transitioned from being a luxury to being a necessity for decision-makers in the enterprise.

• The hosted solution should provide real-time or near-real-time reporting that provides managers with immediate access to logical and intuitive reports based on the company’s operations.

• Flexibility in the controls of data manipulation is also important. Not only should the vendor offer standard reports, but it should also give managers the capability of creating custom reports that meet specific needs. Companies should look for online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities that allow business users to flexibly manipulate or “slice and dice” operational data, using familiar business terms, in order to provide analytical insight.

If you fully investigate these five areas, you should succeed in implementing a solid software solution for your unique customer service needs.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “The Hosted Model: Simplifying Contact Center and Agent Desktop Solutions." To download the complete white paper, go to www.cincom.com/hostedmodel

How to Be a Customer Experience Standout

It’s no coincidence that a number of the companies delivering an unmatched customer experience are among the newest. Relative newcomers such as Amazon and Prudential’s youth-leaning Egg brand in Britain have been able to start from ground zero with modern technology and no institutional legacies. These companies know very clearly who they are and who they are trying to serve, and clearly communicate that both to the marketplace and to their own employees.

“Building that brand platform means articulating a promise to customers that makes very evident what they can expect from you, and why they should come to you,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co (www.shaunsmithco.com.) But building a customer experience around safe objectives or simply doing business the way it has always been done is unlikely to score points and create lasting value. Aggressive goals and unique offerings will differentiate you and create memorable experiences. Amazon nearly went bust trying to source one million titles – but Amazon wanted to be the place where you could get any book. It was a proposition that could be communicated to the marketplace, and it became a successful one.

In the contact center, that means doing more than simply meeting last year’s service levels or attaining an industry average. It means creating a distinctive experience the customer cannot duplicate anywhere else. “If your processes adopt a cookie-cutter approach and people are forced to adhere to a system, it takes away any of the personality and personalization there could be,” Smith says. That is where so many companies shortchange the customer experience by tying it to conventional wisdom “best practices,” which place too much emphasis on sameness and assumes customers want to be treated the same no matter where they may take their business. In fact, Smith believes that “in the absence of a clearly articulated strategy, copying other companies’ best practices is bad practice.”

Rather than focusing energy on devising rigid processes and procedures, Smith advocates spending the lion’s share of research time on determining who your best customers are and identifying ways to create a captivating experience for them. “That’s not what most companies do – most organizations have a very loose understanding of their customers and what they’re after, but they have very tight control over the processes,” he says. “The very best brands – the ones who have the most enthusiastic customers – are very tight about who their customers are, what they value, and most importantly, what the brand promises. They can then afford to be looser about procedures, giving employees more freedom to deliver that promise in the best way for that particular customer. If you make it so cookie-cutter that you reduce it to a mechanistic experience for customer and employee both, it leads to turnover – you create the problem you were trying to avoid.”

Customers take notice when they receive an experience that is clearly not delivered by the book. Smith cites a service interaction between smoothie-maker Innocent Drinks and a customer whose discarded bottle fermented in a trash can and exploded all over his office cubicle. Any responsible company could have simply sent him a free coupon. A curmudgeonly company could have simply cited that its drinks are meant to be kept cold and that fermentation is an obvious side effect. Innocent not only responded with a case of free drinks, but sent the customer a personalized message chastising his “very badly behaved smoothie for re-decorating his office,” putting a smile on a regrettable situation and creating a memorable customer experience. This raises another important issue and that is tone of voice. The best brands have a tone of voice that they use to communicate to customers in a way that is also differentiated. Google has one; so do Apple, The Geek Squad, and Southwest – and they are all different. Unless the call center reflects that tone of voice, you might just as well outsource it and trust the experience to luck.

Performance metrics can be used to determine which agents are best delivering your brand message. Coordinated desktop applications also make it possible for agents to take the best possible action to resolve each customer encounter, in a way that can be tracked and executed on by the rest of the organization. Put simply, there’s no point in having aggressive agents willing to do anything to get the job done if they cannot clearly record the results of a call or ensure that it is acted upon through immediate communication with all responsible parties throughout the entire organization.

Note that creating a sublime customer experience expressly does not mean that you must execute on each and every dimension at a higher service or satisfaction rating than your competitors. “If Southwest Airlines were to do a customer service survey, they might find that to improve Southwest, they should offer food and advance seating, and transfer baggage. But if they did all of that, they would go out of business or at the very least cease to create a great customer experience for their most profitable customers!” Smith says. “For Southwest customers, what’s of value to them are the speed, frequency, and low cost of service.” It is a powerful reminder that satisfaction ratings and customer experience are not necessarily directly correlated. A superior experience need not score a perfect 10 in all avenues of performance if those attributes are of lower importance to the target customers – but you had better be scoring 10 on those that are. The proper technology helps to identify and consistently measure the key customer-centric metrics.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.

Beyond Loyalty

For those organizations wishing to increase margins by driving down sales costs whilst driving up revenues, advocacy is the answer. This requires you to know who your most profitable customers are and to consistently deliver a customer experience so as to create a high degree of trust in your brand. Only then will these loyal and highly profitable customers be prepared to recommend your organization to others. In his HBR article ‘The one number you need to grow’ Frederick Reichheld argues that the only measure of performance that really matters is the ‘Net-Promoter Index’. This is the result of subtracting those customers who are dissatisfied from those who are highly satisfied. Our term for this is the ‘Advocacy Index’ and our CEM+™ survey measures this to determine the extent to which your firm will grow organically through attracting and retaining profitable customers through positive word-of-mouth.

Sometimes, an organisation can create such advocacy that it is accepted on trust by the market at large. At a conference in Paris a couple of years ago delegates were asked to raise their hands if they considered themselves to be advocates of Virgin Atlantic. Around 50 hands went up out of the 300-plus people in the room. Those with their hands up were asked to put them down if they had flown with the airline. This left about ten hands up. "So, you are people who are advocates of Virgin Atlantic… but have never flown with them?" the presenter said to clarify. The hands stayed up.

How can an organization create advocacy without customers having a first hand experience? When Richard Branson first launched Virgin Atlantic it was at a time when most airlines were still state-run and had a reputation for being operationally driven and rather boring. What Branson did was to create a proposition, which matched the safety and procedural efficiency of competitors, but also offered a new and exciting customer experience. He put the fun back into flying. His Upper Class was soon a big hit; essentially a First Class product at a Business Class fare. The on-board bar, interactive entertainment system, in-flight massage, CD quality music channels and friendly and attractive cabin crew all created a customer experience which was new, different and exciting. The proposition was so compelling that Virgin quickly started to win market share from the competition.

There is an important distinction to be made between customer service and customer experience. If you speak to people in Australia who fly Virgin Blue for example, you will find many people who are advocates but also a few who just do not like the experience. This is a natural consequence of making a strategic choice. When you stand for something specific and are targeting a specific group of customers then this will mean that your offer is not going to appeal to everyone. Many firms however, try to satisfy everyone and end up delighting no one. This notion of targeting certain customer segments and then being single minded in differentiating your offer to meet their needs is well known in consumer markets. We think this will begin to be true in professional services too. Increasingly, what you do is expected. It is a commodity product no matter how highly priced. The real difference is in how you deliver it and the experience that the client has of your firm. Trusted advisors understand that the real key to success is not what they know but how they use this to benefit the client.

Focusing on your most profitable customers

One large firm we know has several thousand clients and yet the top 10 represent a significant proportion of the profit; the top 100 clients account for 70% of the profit and at the tail end, there are several hundred who are loss making. Yet there is very little differentiation in how these clients are served. All too often, we respond to client requests or new business opportunities on the basis of how much time people have available from their other commitments rather than the strategic importance of the client and our relationship with them. In fact some times, new prospects get more of our attention and better deals than the clients we have worked with for years. This is certainly true in financial services and telecommunications where new customers are routinely offered more attention, deeper discounts and better deals than long established customers. In loyalty terms this is madness.

In his book The Loyalty Effect, Frederick Reichheld identifies that loyal customers are more profitable because the costs of sales are amortised over a longer period, they increase their purchases and percentage of spend with you, cost less to administer, refer others and are willing to pay a premium.

By focusing on delighting highly profitable customers, companies keep them loyal and eventually turn them into advocates who attract others who value the same things and thus in turn become advocates themselves.

Courtesy – The Perfect Customer Experience , Shaun Smith

Retailers, get ready for the magic of CRM

“International giants entering India in a big way was an impending trend only waiting to happen. If you haven’t prepared for the tussle yet, this is your chance. Indian retailers are set to impress customers and increase their bottom-line with the aid of the right CRM”

By Shiraz Datta

It’s ironic that while the retail sector in India is estimated at US$350 billion, organised retail is estimated barely at US$8 billion. The upside is the expected growth rate. By 2010, organised retail is expected to grow up to US$22 billion, an estimated 40 percent compounded annual growth of return over the next few years.

Numerous international retail giants from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are entering the Indian market with enormous hope and investments. Retailers in India so far only prefer to increase the number of outlets within a city or to other regions as a part of their expansion drive. But they will now need to fight the burgeoning retail space with many new shopping centres and growing new markets like the kids’ retail revolution in apparel. To manage the tremendous volume of transactions and to beat international competition, Indian retailers have an immediate need for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

CRM will happen. It’s simply a question of how long it will take and in how many ways retailers will benefit. Customer Relationship Management is important, especially for your repeat customers and for them to feel camaraderie with the retailer. A good CRM will provide the right framework to retailers so that they can personalize merchandise purchases, services and responses across all communication channels for the customer’s satisfaction and for increased sales.

Low cost, high value

But before retailers embark on any CRM software, they need to ensure it comes at optimal cost, with minimal risk, high value, and a higher return on investment (ROI). It should install quickly, interface readily with existing systems, be easy to learn and to use, and deliver uncompromising performance.

Driven by changing lifestyles, strong income growth and favourable demographic patterns, the Indian retail market is growing at compounded annual rate of five percent and expected revenues of US$320 billion in 2007, according to a report by AT Kearney and the Confederation of Indian Industry. And big international and domestic retailers have realized this growth.

To sustain competition from the giants, Indian retailers must differentiate or brand their business. Customers expect retailers to do this is by personalizing products and services. And this is where a rightly implemented CRM comes into play.

Growing Communication Channels

India has more than 129 million mobile communication subscribers and the number is expected to go up to 300 million in 2008. This is a strong marketing channel retailers cannot afford to miss. “Truly loyal customers can’t imagine doing business with anyone else. They are your best means of advertising because they’ve become advocates for your company. They bore their friends with stories of how great you are,” write Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler, authors of Managing the Customer Experience.

To implement the right CRM, retailers need to analyze customer preferences and trends, and then merge analysis with inbound and outbound calling via CRM technology so that customers can communicate with the retail chain by fax, phone, web, SMS and the like. The CRM framework links and integrates these channels to individualize the customer’s experience and ensure satisfaction.

Similarly, competition must be kept under a check. If a retailer offers volume discounts, its competitors must likewise offer comparable value to the customers. If a retailer has tools to reach more customers with personalized purchase offers, or to process orders faster, or with fewer errors, or more efficiently, other vendors must adapt or gradually surrender market share.

But unfortunately, only 30 percent of companies worldwide have actually implemented a commercial CRM software package. And most of these are only a year old. Of this minority, 54 percent have implemented just one part of CRM. With so much room for improvement in meeting customer demands, CRM can only help.

Contact centres form an integral part of CRM because they directly impact how customers feel about the retailer’s products, services and business. With an efficient system at the contact centre, retailers can help customers buy what they want and need. For instance, retailers are yet to utilize the opportunity of selling daily needs to a population that is using the latest technology to purchase almost everything.

If you are looking at moving to customer-centric marketing, this means that all customer functions are subject to CRM’s analytical processes. This helps retailers understand both how the customer base is presently segmented and, for the future, according to what retailing values. Other analyses identify new services, evaluate their ROI, shift focus from less to more profitable customers, etc. The outcome from CRM analytics is better service, improved planning and profitability, and more appropriate pricing.

Customer Analysis

CRM analysis can help retailers make a smooth shift to a customer-focused enterprise by allowing processes like differentiating customers into segments, discovering precise needs of customers and redesigning compensation and rewards to effect behavioural changes. This process establishes the context that stimulates the customer to shop and buy. Hardcore marketers make their own analytical understandings with the help of a CRM to evaluate what their customers need.

Improved Sales

Better services imply the customer’s improved ability to make purchases. They will make informed decisions and be happy with their purchase. Such efficient shopping will only mean a patronizing customer. For the retailers, this means higher transaction rate, increased revenues, and a wider profit margin.

Smart retailers are looking up new and critical CRM tools like the unified agent desktop that allows customer service agents to respond faster and with greater accuracy and consistency every time a customer picks up the phone, accesses e-mails or chats. The unified agent desktop brings the customer into focus at the desktop and turns the agent’s screen into a hub that can access all enterprise applications and databases necessary to respond rapidly to the customer.

The result is increased quality and decreased operating costs, leading to one of the most handsome ROIs in the industry. It also eliminates data redundancy like repeating customers with the same requests or relying on agents to recall the correct systems to enter a new customer record or service request.

Questions to ask about any CRM Framework:-

• Does it allow the supervisor or manager to access and process analytical data online? Preferably through a web portal?
• Does it use just one screen to manage all customer channels – e-mail, voice, chat, fax, web self service – so that agents stay productive and don’t get lost in the transaction?
• Does it offer a universal view of your retail CRM data on a single screen – contact information, history of recent activity, knowledge base, workflow interaction, resource management?
• Does it make efficient use of your and the customer’s time by minimizing clicks so that managers and agents don’t have to toggle to other screens or other applications while the customer waits impatiently?

Four Components of the Successful Customer Experience

It’s about more than fulfilling a transaction - By Randy Saunders, Cincom Systems

Contact center leaders are canny and battle-tested enough to know that each and every customer touch is a test of the service organization as a whole. But not everyone realizes that each and every customer touch is a test of the entire brand and its promise to that customer. When a customer and your representatives make a connection, that one experience will be the culmination of all the time, money, and materials invested by both parties – and the outcome of that encounter will be the impression and the memory the customer has of your company.

When your brand goes on trial, the only way to succeed is to deliver the kind of experience that transcends the ordinary and the everyday, and reaffirms the company’s entire brand premise. In the contact center, the front line of so many businesses, revenue is made and lost every day not on price or performance, but by the quality of the customer experience.

Connections. Not collisions.

The organization and its management are on the line every time the customer joins a call. Customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co warns against looking at customer interactions as compartmentalized moments in time. “Experience is every firm’s value proposition because no company can avoid delivering a total experience. A customer cannot not have one,” he says. “The million dollar question is: ‘Was the experience the one you intended?’”

Like it or not, consciously or not, customers evaluate their business relationships every time they touch your company. Learning to manage the experience every time the phone rings or the inbox chimes is an essential skill to maintain and build business with customers who are empowered to be brand-agnostic and effortless switchers. Above all else, the function of the contact center is to positively construct connections and to not negatively cause collisions between the customer and the provider.

Four components of the successful customer experience and positive connection

Customer experiences are not created in a vacuum. They evolve from industry conventions, customer demands, executive orders, peer exchanges, and expert advice, just to name a few influences. But up until recently, what the brand wants to stand for has not directly influenced the way that service is delivered in the call center. But that is changing fast. Relying on technology or expert advice alone to craft your customer experience is a losing strategy – those tactics are too easily copied. Doing what you have always done in the contact center (or worse, what everybody else appears to be doing) will not differentiate your brand. “Managing the customer experience is a complex undertaking, which requires strategic choices to be made, new competencies to be developed, and management’s will to execute,” Smith says.

Smith cites four criteria that are the base for any solid, sustainable customer experience management effort. A positive, managed customer experience must be consistent, intentional, differentiated, and valuable. Meeting them head-on is critical if the customer experience is truly a top priority.

1. Consistent: Your customers are not interested in the many complex layers of technology and analysis required to manage each and every call they make. All they are interested in is their own experience, and it is disastrous to that experience if they believe the quality of that call is subject to a roll of the dice. Consistency at the agent level is about more than simply giving everybody access to the same screen pops, call scripts, and escalation protocols, however. It requires being able to identify and anticipate the needs and interests of a customer, and ensuring that the right steps are taken – every time – to satisfy those requirements in a timely, predictable manner, and in a way that is “on-brand.” Inconsistencies and lamentable misses will damper the experience – and returns from that customer. Consistency is a hallmark of organizations as high-tech as Amazon, whose shopping cart interface has become a web standard, and as everyday as McDonalds, where replicable taste and process is the fundamental strength of the business. In the contact center, consistency hinges on the organization’s ability to know everything relevant about the customer, regardless of the contact channel or agent handling the interaction. The integration of flexible, powerful customer information systems that are easy to use by both agents and customers alike can go a long way toward supporting consistency. But just as McDonald’s found, consistency alone is no longer enough.

2. Intentional: The contact center must be able to clearly articulate and understand the customer experience it is trying to create and preserve in order to carry it out. Furthermore, the procedures and policies of that service organization must be specifically geared toward meeting the needs of the customer and, by extension, gratifying the customer experience. That is the failure of many CRM implementations; management assumes that technology will drive the customer experience, whereas, in fact, the opposite should be true. The customer experience must be designed first and then implemented throughout the organization. Note that this should not be interpreted to mean that the best customer experiences must always be directed from on high. Individual agents or teams may have developed their own, undocumented, but still intentional methods of delivering a superior experience, but these must be developed within the framework of the brand strategy – otherwise well-intentioned anarchy will result. Be on the lookout for customer experiences that outstrip the norm, and consider whether there may be an intentional aspect to them that could be used in the larger contact organization. Calculated intention can be expressed as a way of using channels that serve a clear purpose and deliver clear value to both the customer and the company.

3. Differentiated: “Simply put, if your customers cannot discriminate between the experiences they achieve with your company and that of a competitor, they won't distinguish.” If they cannot distinguish you from your competitors, you will feel it in the form of a significant, quite possibly unconscious, lack of loyalty. The experience you deliver to your customers must produce a feeling on some level that no other organization can do quite the same thing for its customers as you can. Skeptics may believe that this factor is based entirely on issues of product and pricing, but such an assumption misses the entire impact of the customer experience. Nothing saps the joy of feeling part of a singular, irreplaceable community than a customer experience that is bland and run-of-the-mill. If Harley-Davidson treated its customers like a faceless quick-lube shop treats its clients – as an anonymous assembly line of vehicles and owners – it would not be the brand and customer experience standout it is today. No organization can afford sameness in its customer experience unless it is happy to allow price to become the determining factor.

4. Valuable: In a sense, this is the validating step after the first three directives have been considered. Once a consistent, intentional, and differentiated strategy is devised, the question must be asked – will implementing this strategy produce value for both the company and the target customer base? For example, First Direct, an online U.K. bank with 1.2 million customers, wins a new customer every six seconds. The bank spoke to their most loyal customers and asked them what they valued most about First Direct. The research identified that being able to engage with a real person was an important driver of satisfaction. As a result, First Direct’s advertising agency created an ad that featured a customer speaking of her experience of calling First Direct and getting through to a real person, any time of the day or night and getting the kind of help that most call centers can only dream of. The ad’s engaging message and apparent empathy struck a chord with target customers. Customers have become its biggest advocates because of the value they receive. And by “value” we are not talking here about relative price, but the whole experience they have of the brand. Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that 36% of First Direct’s customers come to them through referral.

Receiving value is the validating test of all brand experience.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith."

Creating A Virtual Contact Center

"Enabling agents as diverse as your customer base to respond seamlessly"

You may have experienced the following crisis situation or one similar to it.

The crisis: In the middle of your most important campaign of the year, you’re hit with the largest snowstorm in a decade. Not only are the roads impassible for most of your staff, you have lost power in your building several times today. And to your customers this simply means your contact center is unreachable. What do you do?

You can substitute your own critical program and trouble spot as you please for this scenario — as long as it requires immediate contact center service. When you’re faced with a situation like this, what happens if these communication channels are interrupted?

The rescue: An increasing number of enterprises are using Software as a Service (SaaS) to create “virtual” or “hosted” contact centers. For the uninitiated, Software as a Service is a way of using subscription-based software to allow contact center agents to be located away from a traditional service center. Through SaaS, agents may be in multiple time zones, using multiple communicational lines. They may even speak multiple languages when responding to customers.

For enterprises that utilize SaaS, the virtual contact center allows agents to work from home, accessing a common set of tools, appearing joined and available via “regular” support channels. Having this capability pays big dividends — here’s how:

• High-value transactions receive high, skill-based priority. When a high-value customer needs support, every transfer counts. By linking agents in the virtual call center based on skills, rather than location or pool-priority, the customer may receive an improved level of support. These agents can be part of the larger contact-center pool or an escalated group of experts.
• Home-based agents may be more productive. Agents who work from home often have more education and are more loyal than those in brick-and-mortar contact centers. They don’t have commuting problems to deal with and may be more flexible regarding extended or off-hour responses.
• Virtual contact centers can be easier to reach in a disaster. Because of their decentralized nature, when disaster strikes, many virtual contact centers remain open and operational. They are more reachable because the agents are not in a single location. During disasters, the contact centers can also share critical information with employees calling to find out about facilities, coworkers, even loved ones.

Good for the your company and your customer

According to industry research from IDC, the number of U.S. at-home agents will triple by 2010. This way of working is growing in popularity for many good reasons. The first is cost. For the company implementing a virtual contact center, or adding agents to an existing operation, the cost per agent can be much lower because no additional facilities are required — The company does not have to provision or maintain more power, air conditioning, furniture, communications equipment or computers for every new agent. Adding agents in an existing virtual center doesn’t require additional IT infrastructure or labor.

From the customers’ perspective, they can’t tell that the center is virtual. Customers use the same 800 number or series of numbers. They don’t know if agents are side by side or all over the country. Customers are still routed with an automatic call distribution (ACD) queue and skills-based routing to put the right agent on the right call.

The beauty of the virtual or hosted service is that the “back end” is transparent to the customer. And for the agent they only need a web browser and Internet access to participate in the virtual center.

Creating a virtual contact center

The virtual call center model allows a company to rely on a contact center service provider to set up an account, which is quite simple. Cost is often based on the number of agents and services provided. The provider maintains the infrastructure and contact center software as part of the service to your company.

Contact center software updates, patches and bug fixes are also handled by the service provider, making the contact center even easier to create and maintain. By using different hosted services, you can boost your company’s existing contact center performance and capabilities with minimal disruption and investment. And as your company and support needs expand, it’s easy to expand your virtual contact center, using the hosted services and virtual agents.

Managing your virtual team

Companies concerned about allowing agents to work from home have excellent management capabilities with the virtual or hosted center. Since on-site supervision is no longer a part of the management perspective, other tools are needed to monitor and manage virtual contact center activity. Call monitoring software reports number of calls per agent, length of call, even software access times. These reporting tools are often accessible from a contact center manager’s desk, which may also be off-site.

Flexibility and expandability are significant advantages with the hosted model. When your company expands or becomes geographically diverse, the contact center can grow or move to support it, without additional infrastructure. Adding another shift or time-zone to your company’s operation is also easier to support with virtual agents who are already awake and accustomed to working in the new time-zone. Similarly, when you move into new regions requiring multilingual support, you can depend on agents native to the region — who already speak the required languages fluently.

Customer support on a limited budget

For small companies, or those with limited budgets, adding virtual agents enables them to provide a high level of support without devoting the infrastructure investment and facility cost of an on-site contact center. Companies often start with a small, centralized installation, allowing agents to work from home as they become comfortable with the hosted applications. This method allows a centralized presence initially or migrating to a virtual center, or a combination of the two. Often the addition of a second or third shift marks the migration to a virtual center, allowing the additional business to be supported by virtual agents at significant cost savings.

Your company may also benefit from regional hub-zone telecommuting incentives, by eliminating commuters and pollution from the area.

Virtual solutions — concrete benefits

Companies that create a virtual contact center experience a plethora of benefits. When you begin to add virtual agents to your business, you improve productivity and facilitate better customer responses through:

• Minimal capital start-up costs
• Low infrastructure and information technology costs
• Flexible and easily expandable workforce
• Readily available multishift and multilanguage support
• Lower agent turnover — loyal virtual agents working from home
• Smaller resource utilization footprints — lower cost per agent
• Reduced outages due to emergencies or disasters

The keys to success include finding a provider you can work with that offers the mix of services, reporting tools and supportability you want. Start with your existing program and add virtual extensions. As you expand, you’ll have the experience and relationships in place to better support your customer base as it changes. By making your move into a virtual contact center with the support of a knowledgeable vendor, you’ll ensure success for you and your customers.

By Randy Saunders at Cincom Systems

Welcome to the Future of Customer Experience Marketing

Old marketing habits die hard

by Dale Wolf, Cincom Systems at Expert Access

Looking back from the future we can see that as the century changed, marketing went from intrusive to helpful.

We left the safe cove of mass media. Our conversations with customers became more relevant at a personal, one-to-one level. We stopped communicating with people who had no interest in our offerings.

We learned how to locate and win over prospects with more personalized and helpful service, reliability and quality.

We discovered that giving up control of the selling process and shifting to a focus on making customers happier actually improved sales results.

Both the marketer and the customer profited. Marketing became more accountable for results.

The line was drawn

Marketers will mark 1995 as the point in history when a line was drawn between traditional marketing and data-driven marketing. This was the point in time when the rise of consumer power, a convergence of technology, and the potential for longitudinal customer relationships mandated we change how we converse with customers.

Two innovations in 1995 changed the customer conversation: Amazon's personalized recommendation engine and eBay's online auction engine. Together, they launched e-commerce in new directions and began a revolution in marketing that has reached far beyond the World Wide Web.

Just three years later, two Stanford programmers sent out a third tsunami when they developed an algorithm that echoed Amazon's automated personalized recommendation engine. They founded Google with an engineering concept that treated website links as recommendations, and from that foundation came the world's most effective search engine.

When was the last time you walked into a store where the clerk greeted you at the door with an item selected just for you? In the world of online commerce, Amazon and eBay can accomplish the seemingly impossible. They have built stores for every customer, picking perfect items from a universe of millions, all in the blink of an eye, thousands of times each second. In other sectors like package shipping, pizza delivery, discount airlines, electronics and low cost retail, companies such as UPS, Dominos, Southwest, Best Buy and Wal-Mart have changed customer expectations that every other company must meet just to be in the game.

The 4 Ps yield to a new kind of conversation

Customers already are demanding that we change the way we talk with them -- more personalized, more relevant, less interruptive. It will take time at many corporations because a generation of marketers who grew up practicing the 4Ps is still at the helm. They are only begrudgingly giving up on traditional mass marketing. This change will happen faster at companies led by marketers who see clearly into the future.

Few companies show sustained growth

A 1998 study by the Corporate Strategy Board examined 172 companies that were at one time in the Top 50 of Fortune 500 companies. Only five percent achieved sustained inflation-adjusted growth of more than six percent while 95 percent stalled. Of the companies whose growth had stalled, only four percent were able to successfully reignite their growth even to a rate of one percent above Gross National Product (GNP) growth. Once growth has stalled, it is nearly impossible to restart it. [1]

[1] The Innovation Solution. Clayton Christensen. Page 5

Four recently published studies indicate that roughly only one company in 10 succeeds at sustained growth:

1. Profit from the Core (Chris Zook and James Allen) only 13 percent of 1,854 companies achieved sustained growth.

2. Creative Destruction (Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan) only 16 percent of 1,008 companies achieved sustained growth.

3. Good to Great (Jim Collins) only nine percent of 1,435 companies achieved sustained growth.

4. Stall Points (Corporate Strategy Board) only five percent of Fortune 50 companies achieved sustained growth.

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Dale Wolf began his career as a sports journalist, followed by several years as an advertising and promotion copywriter. Both account for the lively and engaging writing style found in his blogs. After several years running his own sales promotion agency serving Fortune 500 companies, Dale joined Cincom's marketing team as a brand marketing manager with responsibility for direct marketing best practices, campaign strategies and global website strategy. He is a recognized expert in customer-centric marketing, and a thought leader in customer experience management strategy.