Author Archives: Neil Clemmons
This morning I was walking at 5th and 52rd Street in New York on my way to a meeting. Traffic was at a standstill, people frustrated, horns blowing, due to President Bush being in town with his motorcade. As I’m walking up 5th Avenue, I encounter a blind man also walking with his cane. He looked a little flustered. With New York at a standstill, and no sense of movement, he had lost his “signal” for deciphering what was going on. Traffic was gridlocked. Congestion was outrageous. We struck up a chat and he asked what was happening and I filled him in. We chatted for maybe 3 minutes over two blocks. As the cross town motorcade passed at 55th and traffic started to move, I was amazed at his instinctive ability to regain his navigational sense – he once again found the signal within the noise as we walked. Not only could he carry on a conversation, he navigated by sound at the same time. He didn’t need an iPhone with Google maps. He didn’t need eyes, because he had internal vision. An intuitive sense based on deciphering the signal. And an amazing sense of processing that signal in real time.
It’s yet another example of separating the signal from the noise. Its easy to be distracted with the technology and tools, the emerging trends, the mountains of data, the noise around us. Our customer experience “traffic sense” can sometimes seem at a standstill. Often it’s about listening, internalizing, and understanding intuitively what’s going on. Close your eyes, regain the signal and you’ll be on your way.
A recent study by retail consultancy J.C. Williams Group highlights some core insights and strategies for cross-channel success. The study was done under sponsorship by shop.org, the online retail group. The research was presented at NRF. Our friends at J.C. Williams were gracious enough to give us a bit of background on the study.
The study was based on interviews with nearly 30 multi-channel retailers. The research explored organizational structure, compensation, measurement, and degree of integration in strategy, execution and measurement across channels. While the study was focused on retailers, it has relevance across financial services, travel, and other industries where multi-channel success is becoming so integral to the customer experience.
Not surprisingly for those practitioners of Customer Experience Management, the key success factors for multi-channel retailing success include:
- A retail strategy that encompasses all channels
- A culture focused on customer loyalty
- Hard evidence from standardized cross-channel measurements
- Aligning a technology roadmap with the enterprise’s cross-channel goals and priorities
Shop.org’s Annual Strategy and Innovation Forum is going on this week. The key theme of the conference is about Web 2.0 and it’s implications for retailing. Naturally social networking, community, Ajax, and rich experiences were all open game for discussion. But a simple question by one of the speakers got me to thinking…
One of the keynotes was Andy Sernovoitz. He’s one of the founders of WOMMA, a professor at Northwestern University, and the author of the book “Word of Mouth Marketing.” Andy took us through a number of great examples of Word-of-Mouth in action. But his most interesting slide was a post-it note with the question “Would Anybody Tell a Friend?” It’s a simple question. But one that could have profound impact on better products, and better marketing if we all heeded that question.
“One word. Just one word. Plastics.” That was the line from the 1967 movie “The Graduate.” But in 2008, that one word is “Wireless.”
The shift to wireless is upon us and will only accelerate. It will take many forms, but you can bet that consumers will be thinking about it front and center. Their interest is about reducing complexity, increasing convenience, and having the information they want where they want it. I observed an interesting phenomenon in ‘07. And I think it’s a harbinger for ‘08 and beyond.
We’re ten days from another year-end. Another 365 days have passed since this time last year. That’s 8760 hours. We’re talking 525,600 minutes of procrastination. But I’m not talking about your typical New Year’s Resolutions. Not to-do’s like losing weight. Or exercising. Or reaching out to old friends. Or reading a new book.
No, I’m thinking about resolutions around improving customer experiences. How do we work differently? Think differently? Act differently? How do we lead clients differently? And how much of a difference can we have in the customer experience?
These days there is a lot of discussion about “Content is King.”The digitization of content is well underway – from huge databases to books, from brand information to commerce catalogs, blogs, video and all forms of research content. Publishers, brands, agencies and even Hollywood are waxing philosophical about story telling. They’re developing engaging content. Shooting web videos. And they’re inviting more and more user generated content into the equation. But what’s still missing is content with deeper context.If in fact content is king, then context is the kingdom. (more…)
