How new KPIs are helping companies become more customer-centric

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According to Forrester Research, organisations in industries ranging from airlines to health insurance have the potential to gain hundreds of millions in revenue when they provide a better experience for their customers. This revenue is typically driven by increased purchases, reduced churn, and improved word of mouth promotion.

To truly engage with customers and reap the full rewards of a customer-centric focus, however, companies need to build a deep understanding of their customers' journeys across all touchpoints.

Today, many organisations are exploring more sophisticated ways to build that level of understanding to provide consistent, contextual and personalised experiences - no matter which channels customers use to engage with their brand. It has become imperative for organisations to consider end-to-end approaches to collecting, analysing, and utilising customer data across all channels.

To that end, the following new key performance indicators (KPIs) are helping organisations shift the paradigm to view interactions from the customer's perspective rather than the company's, resulting in a much better understanding of customer needs and engagement:

• Customer effort score looks at making the overall customer experience as effortless as possible. Customers dislike having to contact an organisation multiple times to resolve an issue, having to repeat information, or having to be transferred from one agent to another. Organisations are analysing both structured and unstructured data mined across multiple channels - including phone and branch interactions, emails, chat sessions, and social postings - to determine how easy or difficult it is for customers to interact with them.
• First contact resolution is an important element in the customer effort score. This metric has evolved from a single-siloed measurement to an omnichannelmeasurement. This is done by trying to map the end-to-end journey customers experience across channels to achieve full resolution. For example, speech analyticscan help analyse phone interactions to identify when a customer says he/she was promised something in a previous conversation or has tried communicating via other channels. This would then be tagged as a repeat contact journey, even if it may be the customer's first phone call or a call that is beyond the time window associated with traditional first contact resolution.
• Customer health score examines how a customer might rate an organisation and allows a business to use the information to pinpoint loyal and content customers who might want to increase their purchases - and even help promote the brand. The score also helps to identify unhappy customers who need more personalised attention from agents to prevent them from churning or becoming brand detractors. The customer health score and relevant personalised suggestions should be presented to the agent every time she serves the customer. Armed with this information, agents are better equipped to handle customer interactions in a personalised and contextual way - which also helps to achieve true customer engagement.

An effective way to meet consumer demand for personalised service and a positive customer experience is to utilise these detailed metrics in tandem with customer journey mapping to create a clear view into the customer relationship lifecycle. By being able to create an illustration of this lifecycle, employees across departments gain a much deeper understanding of the customer experience. They are primed to influence and optimise customer engagement and, if need be, change existing processes and procedures.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the end-to-end service journey of a customer, including customer expectations before the first encounter. It shows the customer perspective from the beginning, middle, and end as they engage in different services and departments to achieve their goal. This helps to illustrate the range of tangible and quantitative interactions, triggers, and touch points, as well as the intangible and qualitative motivations, frustrations and meanings.

Creating a customer journey map is one of the most effective methods for understanding how customers interact with companies, whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied (including ways to address specific areas of dissatisfaction). It typically involves interviews within the organisation and customers, as well as customer-facing employees across all business areas, to get a full perspective of all the customer touchpoints.

As a way to augment customer journey mapping strategies, organisations can now employ more dynamic customer journey mapping solutions by leveraging new analytics platforms to capture, analyse and correlate customer interactions, behaviours and journeys across all channels. These new engagement analytics platforms allow for real-time information to reflect the inevitable changes in customer interactions and behaviours. Because customers use so many communication channels - often simultaneously - organisations need a single view of the customer journey, pinpointing areas of opportunity and deficiency, and developing actionable strategies to address them.

Dynamic dashboards, advanced data visualisation tools and sophisticated engagement analytics capabilities are now helping leading organisations to truly understand and affect the end-to-end customer journey. But these insights need to be applied and used by employees who interact with customers as well as back-office employees, who sometimes have a huge impact on these interactions as well. This emerging new space is called 'customer engagement optimisation', which combines advanced analytics capabilities with engagement management solutions that include unified agent desktop powered by contextual knowledge management for the front and back office, as well as optimised self-service solutions that are constantly fed by analytics insights.

Customer engagement is high on the priority list of senior executives because of the quantifiable links among customer experience, loyalty and revenue. The most successful organisations are adapting metrics and processes to reflect a more personalised customer-centric perspective. For organisations seeking to optimise customer engagement, ongoing assessment and evaluation and a willingness to update traditional metrics and business processes can provide a clearer picture of how to engage customers on their own terms, which ultimately benefits customers and company alike.

Daniel Ziv is vice president of customer analytics at Verint.

Up Next: The Greatest Era of Entrepreneurship and Small Business The World Has Ever Seen

BY THOMAS KOULOPOULOS

 

Founder, Delphi Group

Six game-changing forces are driving a new era of entrepreneurship and opportunity globally. How many of them are you tapping into?

There's a raging debate about the future of small business. On one side is a mountain of data that indicates entrepreneurship is slowing. On the other side is the rising sentiment that it's easier than ever to start a new business, whether you're a 13-year-old sneaker-head or a 65-year-old consultant.

Part of the problem is that many of the metrics we rely on to plot the future of small business are simply misleading. For example, one stat used to justify the decline of small business is that the number of startups as a percentage of total businesses has fallen from 15% in 1978 to 8% in 2012. But that's in large part because the total number of businesses has nearly doubled over the same period.

"Part of the problem is that many of the metrics we rely on to plot the future of small business are simply misleading."

A bigger part of the problem is that we are simply looking in the wrong place. Sort of like the fellow who dropped his wallet on a dark sidewalk and then walked back two blocks to look for it under the last street lamp he passed because that's where the light was!

In this same way we are looking at small business and entrepreneurship through the lens of the past, without factoring in six game-changers that are going to spur what I believe will be the greatest era of innovation and entrepreneurship the world has ever seen.

Game Changer #1--Micro-Entrepreneurs

Starting a business is not for the faint of heart. But what if you could remove the risk from the vast majority of new business ventures?

That's exactly what's happening with what are being called micro-entrepreneurshipmarketplaces. Some of the earliest and most obvious of these are Ebay, Amazon, and Etsy. While getting exact numbers on the size of these marketplaces is difficult and requires a bit of speculation, it's safe to assume that over 1,000,000 people use Ebay as their primary or secondary source of income, there are about the same number of shops on Etsy, and Amazon has over 2,000,000 marketplace sellers. Over 90% of all these sellers are sole proprietors who do not show up in any statistics about small businesses, employment, payroll, or entrepreneurship.

"...the potential represented by micro-entrepreneurism--already as high as 10% of the US workforce--is not tracked in any meaningful way."

In addition there are nearly 100 other micro-marketplaces in existence today where people earn all or part of their income. Some of the most popular are Amazon's Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, Innocentive, Elance, and oDesk, which collectively include about 10,000,000 participants.

And then you have the micro-entreprenuers who are involved in Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Instacart, TaskRabbit, Homejoy, and others; they add another 1,000,000 to the ranks of micro-entrepreneurship.

And yet the potential represented by micro-entrepreneurism (which could already be as high as 15,000,000 people or about 10% of the US workforce) is not tracked in any meaningful way. They are not employees, nor are they running a business, at least not in the traditional sense.

So, what impact will this new breed of micro-entrepreneur have on the economy? Well, consider that franchising, one of the great game changers for small business over the course of the last century, today accounts for over $1 trillion in total sales and employs approximately 15% of the US workforce. My sense is that micro-entrepreneurs will far exceed that sort of scale and economic contribution in just the next five to ten years.

Game Changer #2--The Renaissance of Manufacturing

In our book, The Gen Z Effect, my co-author Dan Keldsen and I talk about how 3D printing is creating an entirely new model for hacking the high cost of manufacturing and creating a manufacturing renaissance for entrepreneurs. With 3D printing the time and cost of prototyping, testing, and market adoption drops dramatically, as does the cost of the final product. One of my favorite examples is Easton LaChappelle, a teen who used 3D printing to not only build prosthetic arms that can be sold for a few hundred dollars, as opposed to traditional prosthetics that can cost upwards of $50,000, but also made his 3D design and engineering plans available as open source! 3D printing opens up manufacturing to just about anyone who has access to the Internet. Easton is not only creating value for himself but he is also creating a platform for value creation that ends up being an entrepreneurship multiplier.

Game Changer #3--The Hidden Billions

A staggering 500,000 new businesses are started each month in the USA alone. While only 30 percent of those businesses have more than one employee and less than 20 percent will survive their first year, that still leaves just about three million new businesses each year that are bootstrapping without any outside funding. Not all are destined to become the next Google or Facebook, but if only one percent even come close, that's still thirty thousand businesses that have a good idea and do not have access to outside capital--seven times as many as do get funding!

"within ten years the amount of money flowing through all crowdfunding platforms will at least equal that of all other funding sources."

That's an enormous amount of potential opportunity left on the table. Just to put it into perspective. Estimates from the National Venture Capital Association put the contribution of VC at about 10% of US GDP. While the math is fuzzy, we could claim that GDP would increase by as much as 70% if seven times as many businesses were able to get funding!

What will fuel these businesses is crowdfunding, through platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Bolstr, and RockThePost which to date have raised over $3 billion for businesses that would otherwise have no access to capital.

Crowdfunding may still represent under 5% of total funding from VC and angels but it's doubling year over year. I'd go so far as to project that within ten years the amount of money flowing through all crowdfunding platforms will at least equal that of all other funding sources.

Game Changer #4-- The No-Cost Failure

The entire risk profile of an entrepreneurial startup is changing radically. In the Graduate classes I teach,my students have increasingly been voicing their expectations that they need to have started at least one if not several businesses. While they would all like to hit it big they are more concerned with the stigma of not having tried than with having tried and failed. In research we did for The Gen Z Effect we found that 50% of Gen Z (born after 1995) expect to start their own business.

"...50% of Gen Z expect to start their own business."

The reality is that with the availability of micro-entrepreneur platforms, free or near-free services in the cloud, and crowdfunding options, the down side of starting a new business is approaching zero. Experimentation is all but free. All that you are investing is your time. Think about it. If I were to take you to a casino, sit you down at a roulette wheel and let you place your bet with free chips, which would pay off in real money if you won, would there be any reason not to place the bet? Yeah, now you're getting it.

Game Changer #5--The Third Act Entrepreneur

It's been said that boomers have been the most entrepreneurial generation. Yet, the vast majority have worked in a traditional organization and haven't started their own business--not yet anyway. As Boomers become Zoomers (A moniker meant to describe their continued momentum past the 65 year mark--and one I personally love since I'm smack in the midst of that cohort!) many of them are struggling with the notion of retirement.

"...retirement is a construct of the past, when attachment to a physical workplace defined the degree to which you could remain in the workforce."

By 2030 there will be more than 70 million people in the US 65 years old and over, double the size of that same demographic in 2000. In addition number of employed workers over 55 has risen by 50% over the past decade as boomers move through the workforce! The bottom line is that retirement is a construct of the past, when attachment to a physical workplace defined the degree to which you could remain in the workforce.

By the way, shunning retirement is not just an economic issue. Most of the boomers I talk to are well off. It's not about the money. There is something even more important at play. Simply put, they really are the first generation to have the choice to remain intellectually and economically engaged as much or as little as they want for the rest of their lives.

Game Changer #6-- The Other 5 billion

The final factor that we seem to consistently dismiss is the one that will amplify everything else I've already talked about, it's the Internet on-boarding of the world's population. Today we can generously estimate that about 2 billion people have regular access to the Internet. Over the course of the next 10 years we will see the affordability and the mobility of the Internet reach a point where every person on the planet has the ability to not only access the vast stores of information but more importantly educate themselves and then contribute to a global network of commerce. The easiest route to do that with the least amount of economic friction will be entrepreneurship

Opportunities Multiply

Economist Paul Romer once said to me, "we fail to appreciate the magnitude of change because opportunities do not add up, they multiply." That is definitely the case when it comes to the future of entrepreneurship and small business.

"we fail to appreciate the magnitude of change because opportunities do not add up, they multiply."

There's no doubt that ignoring these six game-changers means that you'll miss out on the opportunities that lie ahead, but take heart; standing under that streetlamp will give you the best view of each one as they pass you by.

The Skills That Make Entrepreneurs Extraordinary

An author finds what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur

April 9, 2015|by Eilene Zimmerman

Five years ago, Amy Wilkinson was attending a birthday party in New York City when she looked around at the prominent guests and saw several well-known entrepreneurs. They included the founders of Google, eBay, and Gilt Groupe.

That got Wilkinson, a fellow in the White House Trade Office at the time, thinking. She wondered what had made these entrepreneurs successful when so many others had failed. “I decided to study the most successful entrepreneurs to figure out what skills they had in common,” says Wilkinson, a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Thus began her research odyssey: 200 interviews with leading entrepreneurs, including the founders of LinkedIn, Spanx, Chipotle, and Airbnb.

After analyzing nearly 10,000 pages of interview transcripts, more than 5,000 pieces of archival and documentary evidence, and some 4,000 pages of academic research, Wilkinson teased out six skills shared by the most successful entrepreneurs and wrote a book about them. Wilkinson says extraordinary entrepreneurs are “creators” who aren’t necessarily born with an ability to build and scale companies successfully. They work hard and exploit these six skills:

Find the Gap

Steve Ellis wanted to create a Mexican fast-food restaurant that was, at the same time, the antithesis of fast food: made-to-order with high-quality ingredients. In founding Chipotle in 1993, he also created a new dining category —fast casual. This ability to see opportunities and unmet needs that others don’t and then find innovative ways to fill them is what innovative enterprises do, Wilkinson says.

Drive for Daylight

In the same way race car drivers keep their eyes fixed on the road ahead while seeking opportunities to pass a competitor, successful entrepreneurs focus on the future, unconcerned about the constraints of their “lane” or the position of their competitors. Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya, for example, took his company from zero to $1 billion in annual revenue in five years by making decisions with an eye toward the future. That included buying and rehabbing a decaying yogurt plant despite having only a few thousand dollars of available cash. Today, Chobani Greek yogurt sales are about half of all yogurt sales nationwide.

This framework for rapid decision-making was created by a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot during the Korean War, but it can help entrepreneurs too.

Fly the OODA Loop

An acronym for “observe, orient, decide, and act,” this framework for rapid decision-making in fast-changing environments was created by Col. John Boyd, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, during the Korean War. For entrepreneurs, Wilkinson says, this means continually updating their assumptions and moving quickly from one decision and iteration to the next. David Sacks, PayPal’s first COO, told Wilkinson that PayPal’s team would look at new features that competitors were building and quickly iterate. When Dotbank.com, for example, gave a $10 bonus to those who signed friends up for its service, PayPal rolled out a similar offer within a week, and added a $10 bonus for the new customer, too.

Fail Wisely

“There’s a lot of hero worship in startup circles,” Wilkinson says, “but they’ve all failed. Every single person I met with talked about failure.”

Successful entrepreneurs understand the key to avoiding more catastrophic mistakes is to make a series of smaller errors. They test ideas in low-risk environments as an inexpensive way of gathering insights to determine whether a product or idea will take off. Some concepts work and some don’t, but in either case, the results make creators smarter and more resilient, says Wilkinson.

Network Minds

Entrepreneurial success, says Wilkinson, involves solving multifaceted problems with the help of a diverse group of thinkers. They build on each other’s ideas to overcome the problems that arise in growing their businesses.

Gift Small Goods

These people are building new things and solving new problems all the time.

Amy Wilkinson

Whether it’s forwarding a résumé, writing a few lines of code, passing an opportunity on to a colleague, or critiquing a proposal, giving brings rewards. Wilkinson says entrepreneurs who build positive relationships by looking for ways to provide help gain a competitive advantage. “This was a surprise to me,” she says. “It’s the result of the rapid transmission of information, especially through social networks, so our reputations are 100% known. That forces better behavior.”

Wilkinson was also surprised to find the most successful entrepreneurs are not comfortable in their success but instead keep striving. The most successful entrepreneurs tune out naysayers. “These people are building new things and solving new problems all the time,” she says. “They have had to learn to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

Customer experience ROI building blocks

There's a natural flow to generating customer experience ROI. In laws of nature, short-circuiting the flow is self-defeating.
The building-blocks formula for sustained customer experience ROI is C5 + I2 + E2 = CX ROI.

1) Set the stage for CX ROI	C5 =	Customer voice Customer experience strategy Customer-centric culture Customer intelligence Customer lifetime value
2) Adapt your company to customers	I2 =	Improving customer experience Innovating customer experience
3) Engage employees and customers	E2 =	Engaging internally Engaging externally

C5

Customer retention and loyalty are outcomes of a system that has a distinct natural flow.

• Voice of the customer: Informs us about what “the boss” wants.
• Customer experience strategy: Sets the stage for cross-functional collaboration for CX excellence.
• Customer-centric culture: Defines the ways we think and do.

These 3 building-blocks work hand-in-hand, like a 3-legged stool. With any one of them missing, things will be lop-sided. They're the foundation that keeps your company from limping along in your quest for customer retention and loyalty business results.

Customer intelligence and customer lifetime value help you prioritize your efforts, resources, and roadmap components. Don’t fly in the dark! Connect the dots across information from your customers, and quantify the upside of keeping existing customers as well as the downside of losing them.

• Customer intelligence: Paints a picture for accurate actions.
• Customer lifetime value: Motivates & prioritizes action.

E2

Always think about the entire system. "The system" is the only "silver bullet" for CX ROI. Example:

1. While you are setting up a shared vision (CX strategy/culture) . . .
2. You may collect existing customer comments (customer voice) and
3. Connect the comments to operational data (customer intelligence) and
4. Prioritize the comments based on customer revenue or cost (CLV) and
5. Engage some teams in resolving the blaring issues (improvement) and
6. Inspire some teams in creativity around the blaring opportunities (innovation)
7. Share selected comments on your intranet site (engaging internally) and
8. Adapt your customer engagement to be sensitive to the blaring issues/opportunities (engaging externally).

Like any system, removing a component will eventually render it useless. Make sure your customer experience management journey keeps all the system components in top form, and reflects the left-to-right flow of the CX ROI building-blocks model.

 CX ROI Maturity

3 levels of ROI maturity

http://clearactioncx.com/customer-experience-maturity-assessment/

 CX ROI Mini-Assessment

7 keys to breaking through plateaus

http://clearactioncx.com/customer-experience-enablement-mini-assessment/

 Return on CX Investment

"Middleware" is essential to CX ROI

http://clearactioncx.com/return-on-customer-experience-investment/

https://clearactioncx.com/customer-experience-roi-building-blocks/

10 Sales Skills Everyone Should Master To Be Successful

BY BO NARDIN

What comes into your mind when hearing words ‘sales skills’? Some people connect these words with manipulation, chasing people on the streets and being able to talk like a machine gun. These images are just the opposite of what good sales skills are all about.

The fact is that mastering sales skills is an essential part of being successful in any area of your life: as an artist or as a computer programmer, at your office when you present a new idea to your colleagues, as a business owner or even when planning a new holiday destination with your family. If you look at sales skills from the right angle, your success is on the way!

To start with: we all have practiced some good sales skills (and not even thinking about them!) at one time in our life. Remember when you were a kid. How many ways have you invented to persuade your parents to buy you ice-cream? Or in your teens, you met a girl or a boy of your dreams. What have you done? You tried to convince her or him that your love is a true one and that you are the best choice for her or him. And (hopefully) you meant it from all your heart.

So, we are all born with some good sales skills! To help you out to be even more successful in any area of your life, here are 10 sales skills which can improve your daily life.

1. Be a good listener

Contrary to popular opinion people with good sales skills listen very carefully. They know that we have two ears and only one mouth, so that there is a good reason to listen more than talk.

When listening, be an active listener, be interested in what people have to say. When you propose an idea at your job or in your family, listen carefully what objectives people around you have. Only then, you will be able to find the right answers for them and be successful in promoting your idea.

2. Find a way to connect

Successful salespeople are masters in connecting with other people.

The next time you talk to a person observe the way he or she talks. If the person speaks slowly, you should slow down your speech, too. Why? Because similarities connect people.

Find out what the person likes, what hobbies they have. Does the person have a dog? If you have a dog, too then there is plenty to talk about and the connection just gets stronger.

3. Think of giving value first

If you want to empower your life with good sales skills don’t think of selling. Think of giving value first and the money or success will be a by-product. We all like people who bring value to our lives and dislike people who just want to sell.

Be resourceful, make suggestions for improving the workflow at your office or your business, try to find ways to improve other people’s lives and you will become successful.

4. Be passionate

Sales people or business owners who are passionate about their products or what they do don’t even think that much about their sales skills. They simply do it because they think it is right. When shareholders tried to press on Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO for greater profits, he simply replied:

”I don’t even care about ROI (Return On Investment). We, here at Apple do it in the way we do simply because we think it is right and good!”

Find your passion, find what you like to do, (think of what you would do even if you are not paid for it) and your passion will drive you through every obstacle on the way to your success.

5. Picture your end result

Successful salespeople always see their customers being fully satisfied with the service they offer. They see how grateful people are after buying their products. They see the end results even before they start selling. They always have these images in their minds.

Make a habit to picture the end result for everything you want in your life. Even when you don’t have the slightest idea how you are going to make it, visualize your end result. Picture yourself driving your new car, sipping a nice, tasty coffee on a balcony of your new apartment or signing a new contract in your office as a successful business owner. Having the image of your desired thing always in your mind will help you to find ways you can’t see right now.

6. Don’t take it personally

One of the hardest sales skills to learn is how to deal with rejections. Jean Paul DeJoria, the co-founder of Jean Mitchel Systems and founder of Patron Tequila said:

“When 100 doors are slammed in your face, go to the door number 101 and be just as enthusiastic as you were at the beginning.”

How to do that? Just don’t take a rejection personally and go on. If some people say “no” to your idea or proposal, they are maybe just not prepared for it, right now. But don’t allow this to doubt in yourself. Believe in yourself and find people who will support your ideas.

You have to remember that successful people do things unsuccessful people try to avoid in any possible way.

7. Find out what people really need

Even if you have exceptional sales skills, you would have hard times selling a bottle of water someone in the nice Alpine village. But offer this same bottle of water to a thirsty group of tourists lost in the middle of a Sahara desert, you really shouldn’t have any struggle.

Take time and find out what people need in your town or anywhere in the world (thanks to the Internet you can offer your solutions just anywhere). For example, if you are a yoga teacher, there are many people who have backache problems because they sit for long hours so try to think of how to offer your service in their offices, when they have a break. There are many people who want to learn marketing skills and you might already have these skills. So look around for the needs first and then figure out ways for solutions.

8. Keep eye contact

Keeping eye contact is one of those tiny, small but very important sales skills which show a prospect you really care about him or her. Successful people know that avoiding eye contact is a sign of insecurity or unappreciation.

The next time you speak with your boss or your customer look calmly in their eyes (just don’t stare at them like you are in trance) because with natural eye contact, even when you don’t talk you are silently telling: “I listen to you and I care for you.”

9. Do the best follow up

One of the most efficient sales skills for bringing referrals in is a great follow-up. How good would you feel if you enroll in a fitness program and the next day a fitness instructor calls you asking how you feel after your first workout day? People who do great follow-ups know they can win customers for life.

So, if you want to be successful make sure you take great care for people around you. If you helped someone at your office with a problem a week ago, ask him how he is doing now, what his progress is. If you own a business, pick up the phone today and ask your customers how they are doing with your product.

10. People buy you first

Even if you master all the selling skills in this planet if you don’t have a good, caring personality, nothing will really work. You have to remember that people buy you first and only then your products, which means that they have to trust and like you first.

Work regularly on yourself, read motivational books every day, watch videos on YouTube which motivate you. In this way, you will become a strong personality which is the great foundation for your success.

Mastering sales skills is basically the art of mastering relationships with people around you. To be successful in your life, work every day on slight improvements on every of these sales skills, and the compound effect of slight improvements will be shown in the better quality of your life very soon.