Customer Experience and the Cloud

Are you using the Cloud to deliver a superior customer experience? This is the year to add it to your todo list.

When I talk about customer experience, inevitably people start rolling their eyes in their heads and hoping I don't plan on talking too long. Usually it's because, like me, they are tired of hearing about the one recent lousy customer experience in their organization which created the fire drill where management and unlimited resources were deployed to get the customer happy again. Like most organizations faced with this situation, they provided hundreds of good customer interactions before this poor, highly visible customer experience sabotaged all of the excellent work.

While the fire drills are mostly avoidable with good business practices, it's not my primary focus when I talk about customer experience. With most organizations we focus on the changes required to close the gap between the customer's current experience and their expectations. For organizations which consistently meet customer expectations across customer touch points, the next goal is exceeding customer expectations. My work usually requires that we evaluate each of our primary customer touch points and re-design the customer interaction.

Before any work can be done in developing new customer-facing processes, I believe an organization must adopt some critical design principles in creating an optimized customer experience:

• Consistent - we need to say the same things, make the same promises, and deliver the same capabilities across all of our communications, websites, customer-facing organizations and front-line staff. Certainly our solution performance has to back our claims.
• Customized - every communication, buying and service interaction needs to respect the unique wants and needs of the specific customer. All customers have preferences with respect to the level of detail they require, expediency, needs discovery, and psychographic tendencies. We may also need to tailor the discussion to match the individual's authority within their organization.
• Socially aware - we need to acknowledge the communities where customers discuss our brands, service levels, solutions, and integrate these discussions into our customer experience strategy. Savvy customers always discover disconnects between the community and any claims you make - you will pay heavily for it.
• Content rich - customers require valuable information in their interactions with you, whether it is detailed business discovery in the buying process, comprehensive use cases and customer testimonials, or extensive online training. This information must be available in different media formats to match the consumption preferences of the customer. YouTube has proven that while the information must be of acceptable quality and professionally delivered, in general audiences will not penalize you for less than perfect production values. In other words, get the information to customers versus waiting to make it perfect. Customers will also accept, in fact encourage, beta tests of new information offerings.
• Permission based - OK. I could have included this in the customized design principle, but so many organizations are screwing this up I have included it as its own design principle.

I don't include design principles such as "visually engaging", "interesting" and other such principles. It goes without saying we need to engage the user. Assuming you can offer an experience which addresses these critical design principles, you will be well on the way to improving the customer experience you offer. Sure, you need to design the processes and conduct change management / training, but in general I see too many organizations start with process design before getting the design principles right.

At some point you might be asking yourself - "Why is Kalvin emphasizing the Cloud in this blog post (and actually almost every other post)?" "Is Kalvin trying to optimize his blog for search terms?" Well, actually not. There is one primary reason why I include the Cloud (and even with a capital "C") when I talk about customer experience...

It's because that's where your customers hang out. (sorry...you knew that was coming)

The majority of solutions we use to enable improved customer experience will either reside in the Cloud or use Cloud technologies to enable communication, whether on a PC, Netbook, Tablet, or mobile phone. And what do we believe will be the emphasis of these Cloud-based solutions over the next couple of years?

• A new online experience - our websites need to move from online brochures to mass customized engines to allow user-driven discovery. Websites will adapt to the needs of the customer. Our direct communications will also become customized to the needs of our customers based on critical customer segmentation information volunteered to us through permission-based marketing approaches.
• CRM becomes CEM - CRM has evolved from contact management, to pipeline management, and perhaps in its latest form, to some form of adversarial sales process where we evaluate and document our strengths and weaknesses in an account plan with a view to closing a particular piece of business. When CRM finally evolves into a collaborative, problem discovery and solution building process directly with the customer, it will become a true Customer Experience Management solution. This will  not likely be achieved by the traditional CRM vendors, but more likely through the addition of bolt-ons which bring the customer into CRM through a collaborative, online front-end. The bolt-ons will live in the Cloud.
• New measures are needed - we need to revisit our measures for customer experience. Of course sales are the ultimate measurable result, but not a reasonable proxy for measuring customer experience. Results are created through day-to-day activities which need to be measured for quantity and quality. What activities will we measure in our new socially enabled world? What is actionable social traffic versus noise? How will we achieve the necessary transparency we require to measure new KPI's? Expect to see an explosion in new analytics  and measurement tools which seek to create transparency in the Cloud.
• Customer 360 on steroids - it will be an exciting time for anybody tasked with implementing the design principle of consistency and attempting to measure it. Regrettably, it is going to be difficult. Pulling together information from Cloud-based solutions is still difficult to achieve unless the service provider has already built an interface you require. Integration of information and processes in the Cloud will require investment.
• Product management in real time - I don't want to appear to be too "far out there", but social media and crowd sourcing present opportunities for real time customer feedback which may be harnessed to gain a deep understanding of high value problems we currently solve, or could solve, by brokering our strengths.

In the coming weeks I plan on discussing these topics in more detail, both to look at the business-ready Cloud computing technologies in play (always with a view to business impact), and the business functions and processes impacted in your organization. The overall focus will always be Customer Experience Mastery - mastering the art of exceeding customer expectations.

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