What should you do to start the journey of constituent experience?

The effect of everyone jumping on the constituent experience bandwagon is a slowdown in the maturation of this new business discipline. Confusion abounds as does disbelief. No one wants to risk exposing their constituents (and their job security) to new engagement practices that might increase instead of decrease frustration and churn.

However, the growing confusion opens unique opportunities. Here are a couple of strategies to start action plans around.

• Creating a disruptive mindset by reimagining your business and constituent relationships in a digital world.
• Making trusted content the center of your business strategy and constituent experience.
• Infusing social constituent experience across all business functional and digital touch points.
• Repeatedly measuring and proving the financial results.

If you haven’t begun the journey, now would be the time to start.

“Lithium’s blueprint is in direct response to customer requests for advisory and insight services to help them make their social customer experience strategy a reality.” He defines social customer experience as “unlocking the passions of your customers in the digital world in a way you can capture those insights, measure them and empower your organization to bring your customers along.” ~~Rob Tarkoff, Lithium Technologies President and CEO

Interested in a Voice of the Customer Program? First build executive support

Interested in a Voice of the Customer Program? First build executive support. Those who have gone through the process all say it is critical.  It is also consistent with research showing that executive support builds a foundation for VoC success.

Executive support helps Customer Experience pros put key building blocks in place, such as adequate tools to collect and analyze data and processes to systematically act on it.

How do you build support? Prove the value of the program by demonstrating tangible business value. Track the results of service recovery efforts to save unhappy customers and aggregate the results of improvement projects initiated by VoC-collected data.

So, get started fast but make sure the C-suite is on board.

5 questions to ask about your customer focus

Whether you are a business leader of a department or the CEO, these questions make sense to ask and get answers about.

Asking the right questions is most of the job some days. Thanks to Peppers and Rogers for their insight into these questions. They have been at the customer focus for a long time now.

1. How many new customers are you attracting and what is their value?

2. How many customers are you losing; why and what is their value?

3. Why are your continuing customers loyal to you?

4. What is the profitability of each customer group?

5. Are your customers vouching for you?

Read more: Customer Strategy | Making Customers an Asset of Your Business

What is the single most important business technology trend?

What is the single most important business technology trend? I think it is fair to say we have entered the age of the customer. Customers have amazing choices (and technology) at their fingertips. From a competitive point of view it can be disruptive. It can mean the difference between thriving economically or failing.

In an age where customers are so empowered by easy access to information, they are taking control of processes companies are used to controlling. Hard wired strategic plans are going out the window as we are forced to become more flexible and nimble. So some things to think about:

• Are we customer obsessed?
• Can we master the customer data flow when existing data integration projects have failed?
• Will we provide new services quickly based on emerging customer needs?
• Are we on the “technology side” ready to partner with business teams to remove complexity and create lean, nimble solutions?

Hard questions but our customers expect no less since they have so many choices.

Related articles

• Zincubate “Tech For Business” has arrived (techi.com)
• What kind of business technology scorecard do you use? (businesstechnologypartner.wordpress.com)
• Mobile Technology and Its Future Interaction With Customer Loyalty Programs! (mygolli.wordpress.com)
• Leverage Technology for Business Transformation (blogs.hbr.org)