Experiencing customer service ...

"Everyone has a quality product and everyone has good service.  But customers will not walk into a competitor's showroom and have an experience like ours."

United Airlines, a public relations that went very wrong.

Shares in United Airlines' parent company have dropped after footage of a screaming passenger being dragged off an overbooked plane went viral.

Stock in United Continental Holdings dropped by more than 4% at one point on Tuesday, and at one point nearly $1bn (£800m) was wiped off its value.

Its CEO defended employees' conduct and said the passenger had been "disruptive and belligerent".

But the company has come under intense criticism online.

Outraged customers have threatened in droves to stop flying with United and the CEO's response to the incident has been pilloried.

Share prices recovered slightly later in the day, but were still below opening prices.

[For rest of article, read HERE]

The heartbeat of modern marketing : Data activation and personalisation

We’ve come a long way from “People who bought this, also bought that.”

Consider the experience of a representative customer we’ll call Jane. An affluent, married mom and homeowner, Jane shops at a national clothing retailer online, in the store, and occasionally via the app. When visiting the retailer’s website in search of yoga pants, she finds style choices based on previous purchases, the purchases of customers with profiles similar to hers, and the styles of yoga pants most frequently purchased on weekends. She adds one of the offered yoga pants to her shopping cart and checks out

With the exception of a follow-up email, most interactions with the customer stop there. But here’s what this example looks like when we activate Jane’s data: Three days after her online purchase, the retailer sends Jane a health-themed email. Intrigued, she clicks the link and watches a video about raising healthy kids. One week later, she receives an iPhone message nudging her to use the store’s mobile app to unlock a 15 percent one-day discount on workout equipment. Though she has never bought such items at this retailer, Jane takes advantage of the offer and purchases a new sports bag. What began as a simple task of buying yoga pants ended up being a much more engaged experience.

Such data-activated marketing based on a person’s real-time needs, interests, and behaviors represents an important part of the new horizon of growth. It can boost total sales by 15 to 20 percent, and digital sales even more while significantly improving the ROI on marketing spend across marketing channels: from websites and mobile apps to—in the not-too-distant future—VR headsets and connected cars.

[For rest of article, read HERE]

The four pillars of distinctive customer journeys

New research reveals that focus, simplicity, “digital first,” and perceptions matter most.

In recent years, customer experience (CX) has emerged as a major differentiator for large companies, including financial-services providers. In a McKinsey survey of senior executives, 90 percent of respondents confirmed that CX is one of the CEO’s top three priorities.

It’s a priority because the stakes are so high. For financial institutions, for example, rising customer expectations are pressing organizations to come up with more functional improvements even as alternatives to traditional financial services are emerging. In this dynamic environment, financial institutions face a stiff challenge to differentiate their offerings while reducing cost and complexity for customers—and to do it at a profit.

Overcoming these challenges is critical not just to meet rising customer expectations and to compete with new digital attackers but also to generate significant business impact. Our research indicates that for every 10-percentage-point uptick in customer satisfaction, a company can increase revenues 2 percent to 3 percent.

At a time when the customer-satisfaction scores of top-quartile institutions can exceed those of bottom-quartile players by as much as 30 to 40 percentage points, the financial payoff from best-in-class CX can be significant indeed. These gains come from a variety of sources, including additional product purchases generated by cross-selling and upselling, such as when a borrower increases the value of a loan.

[For rest of article, read HERE ...]

New insights for new growth: What it takes to understand your customers today

Companies that know how and when to use the wide array of research tools available today have a big competitive advantage in generating insights that lead to new organic growth.

What do Unilever, Philips, Amazon, and Netflix have in common? At first sight, nothing much. They compete in very different industries, and while Unilever and Philips are firmly rooted in the 19th century, Amazon and Netflix are unthinkable without the Internet.

What they have in common, though, is that they drive growth by meeting consumer needs better than their competitors do. Core to this consumer focus is a strong belief in insights, and in the active use of a diverse mix of insight tools—new and old, qualitative and quantitative, digital and analog—to get better answers.

Unilever, for example, has successfully engaged in consumer cocreation to launch TRESemmé, a fast-growing dry-shampoo brand that is now one of the best-selling mass hair-care products in the US. Philips has achieved major market-share gains in highly contested home-appliance categories through city-level growth analysis. Thanks to its data-driven recommendation engine, Amazon attributes more than one third of its revenue to cross-selling, and Netflix saw its subscribers triple between 2011 and 2015, largely because of its ability to develop hit shows such as House of Cards, based on advanced analysis of subscribers’ past viewing behavior.

Developing a better understanding of customers is increasingly a strategic necessity, because fast-moving markets, new technologies, and new business models are changing what customers want and how they shop. Yet many companies still spend the bulk of their research budget on traditional techniques (e.g., focus groups, interviews, and surveys), or treat insights as an afterthought, which leaves them with a limited and often incorrect view of what customers want. That is a recipe for obsolescence in today’s economy.

While there is a vast array of marketing analytics and insights capabilities, this article focuses on those tools, techniques, and approaches that specifically lead to new commercial growth, i.e., new products, services, or markets. (An insight is defined as the discovery of a fundamental consumer need that companies can use to create value for the customer and the business.)

[For rest of article, read HERE]

Winning the expectations game in customer care

Call centers aren’t what they used to be. Here’s how to capture the loyalty of increasingly demanding customers.

The customer, so the saying goes, is always right—and these days it’s increasingly evident that customers don’t hesitate to flaunt their power. Assisted by technology, they wield unprecedented influence over the purchase of goods and services, as well as the ongoing care from the companies that offer them. Customers want service now: experiences marked by immediacy, personalization, and convenience. When they don’t receive it, substantial numbers defect, often after just one bad customer experience.1

This rising bar of customer expectations has significant implications for customer-care organizations in all regions and sectors. As channels—in-person visits, telephone calls, web contacts, and mobile platforms—proliferate, customers are demanding seamless and consistent service in all of them, not to mention human interaction and security for personal information.

In short, this added power is posing novel challenges for managers as a new era unfolds. We believe that customer care will change dramatically in coming years around two key dimensions: first, understanding the evolving value and complexity of transactions and, second, choosing the right level of human interaction and automation for superior service.

[For rest of article, read HERE]

This is the CEO guide to customer service.

Companies that create exceptional customer experiences can set themselves apart from their competitors.

What do my customers want? The savviest executives are asking this question more frequently than ever, and rightly so. Leading companies understand that they are in the customer-experience business, and they understand that how an organization delivers for customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers.

This CEO guide taps the expertise of McKinsey and other experts to explore the fundamentals of customer interaction, as well as the steps necessary to redesign the business in a more customer-centric fashion and to organize it for optimal business outcomes. For a quick look at how to improve the customer experience, see the summary infographic.

[For rest of article, read HERE ...]

Jack Ma speaks about the value of customers ...

 

Jack Ma once said, 'When Selling to close friends and family, no matter how much you're selling to them, they will always feel you're earning their money, no matter how cheap you sell to them, they still wouldn't appreciate it.'

There will always be people who do not care about your Costs, Time, Effort, they rather let other people cheat them, allowing others to earn, then supporting someone they know. Cause in their heart, they will always be thinking, 'How much did he earn from me?' instead of "How much did he SAVE/MAKE for me?"

This is a classic example of a poor person's mentality!

How did the rich people become rich? One of the main reason is because they are willing to SUPPORT their associates business, taking care of one another's interests thus naturally they get back more.

Your Friends will in turn support you, thus the circle of wealth continues to grow and grow!

Simple Logic, you will start to get rich once you understand it.

Jack Ma on Sales: 'When doing Sales, the first people who will trust you will be Strangers, Friends will be shielding against you, fair-weather friends will distance from you. Family will look down upon you.'

The day you finally succeed, paying the bill for every get-together dinner, entertainment, you will realised: Everyone else is present except the Strangers.

Do you get the meaning of this?

We need to treat our dear Strangers better! And even more so to Friends who know what you are doing and yet still SUPPORT you!

Let us treat STRANGERS who buys from us better from today. They are your BEST customers!

Developing a customer-experience vision

To provide a distinctive experience for customers, an organization must unite around the goal of meeting their true needs. Done well, the effort can power a vast amount of innovation. 

Almost every successful company recognizes that it is in the customer-experience business. Organizations committed to this principle are as diverse as the online retail giant Amazon; The Walt Disney Company, from its earliest days operating in a small California studio; and the US Air Force, which uses an exotic B2B-like interface to provide close air support for ground troops under fire. Conversely, companies that are not attuned to a customer-driven marketplace are remarkably easy to spot. Consider the traditional US taxi industry, which is facing significant new competition from the likes of Lyft and Uber. Customer-service standouts clearly understand that this is central to their success as businesses.

Read rest of article here.

From touchpoints to journeys: seeing the world as customers do

To maximize customer satisfaction, companies have long emphasized touchpoints. But doing so can divert attention from the more important issue: the customer’s end-to-end journey. 

When most companies focus on customer experience they think about touchpoints—the individual transactions through which customers interact with parts of the business and its offerings. This is logical. It reflects organization and accountability, and is relatively easy to build into operations. Companies try to ensure that customers will be happy with the interaction when they connect with their product, customer service, sales staff, or marketing materials. But this siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes—along the entire journey taken—can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve performance.

Read rest of article here.

Would your customer service sounds something like this.

Me: “Microsoft Office computer assistance; may I help you?”

Customer:“Yes, well, I’m having trouble with Word.”

Me:“What sort of trouble?”

Customer:“Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went away.”

Me:“Went away?”

Customer:“They disappeared.”

Me:“Hmm. So what does your screen look like now?”

Customer:“Nothing.”

Me:“Nothing?”

Customer:“It’s blank; it won’t accept anything when I type.”

Me:“Are you still in Word, or did you get out?”

Customer:“How do I tell?”

Me: [Uh-oh. Well, let’s give it a try anyway.] “Can you see the C:\ prompt on the screen?”

Customer:“What’s a sea-prompt?”

Me: [Uh-huh, thought so. Let’s try a different tack.] “Never mind. Can you move the cursor around on the screen?”

Customer:“There isn’t any cursor: I told you, it won’t accept anything I type.”

Me:[Ah–at least s/he knows what a cursor is. Sounds like a hardware problem. I wonder if s/he’s kicked out his/her monitor’s power plug.] “Does your monitor have a power indicator?”

Customer:“What’s a monitor?”

Me:“It’s the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it have a little light that tells you when it’s on?”

Customer:“I don’t know.”

Me:“Well, then look on the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it. Can you see that?”

Customer:[sound of rustling and jostling] [muffled] “Yes, I think so.”

Me:“Great! Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it’s plugged into the wall.”

Customer:[pause] “Yes, it is.”

Me:[Hmm. Well, that’s interesting. I doubt s/he would have accidentally turned it off, and I don’t want to send him/her hunting for the power switch because I don’t know what kind of monitor s/he has and it’s bound to have more than one switch on it. Maybe the video cable is loose or something.]When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back of it, not just one?”

Customer:“No.”

Me:“Well, there are. I need you to look back there again and find the other cable.”

Customer:[muffled] “Okay, here it is.”

Me:“Follow it for me, and tell me if it’s plugged securely into the back of your computer.”

Customer:[still muffled] “I can’t reach.”

Me:“Uh huh. Well, can you see if it is?”

Customer: “No.”

Me:“Even if you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?”

Customer:“Oh, it’s not because I don’t have the right angle –it’s because it’s dark.”

Me:“Dark?”

Customer:“Yes–the office light is off, and the only light I have is coming in from the window.”

Me:“Well, turn on the office light then.”

Customer:“I can’t.”

Me:“No? Why not?”

Customer:“Because there’s a power outage.”

Me:“A power–!?! …[AAAAAAARGH!] A power outage? Aha! Okay, we’ve got it licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?”

Customer:“Well, yes, I keep them in the closet.”

Me:“Good! Go get them, and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it. Then take it back to the store you bought it from.”

Customer:“Really? Is it that bad?”

Me:“Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

Customer:“Well, all right then, I suppose. What do I tell them?”

Me:“Tell them you’re TOO STUPID TO OWN A COMPUTER!” [slam]

Is this what you called 'customer service'?

In any restaurant that serves chicken especially as its specialty, it is expected that every customer has the right to choose his/her favourite part of the dish. Not being fussy, we all have our preferences and when service is paid for, customers do expect their meals to be worth every single cent spent, right?

But in a Nando’s chain at IOI City Mall, as made viral on social media yesterday, one customer was labelled ‘Cibai (Pussy)’ for being picky requesting her preferred part of her poultry meal.

It was allegedly reported by various blog sites that the customer had requested for the chicken drumstick when placing an order, but was declined by the waiter.

According to a post by Oh! Media, a friend of the victim came forth and said, “A waiter named Shaqir had said due to crowd that day, he feared that they would run out of drumsticks for other customers too.

“My friend asked if she could speak to his manager, as she insisted that she did not eat chicken breast, only then the waiter gave in to serve her a drumstick,” the source added.

“After paying for their meal, her husband noticed the receipt with ‘Cibai Customer’ printed,” said the source.

Who knows what the conversations were between the customer and the waiter in this situation, but it is clear that the staff at the Nando's restaurant did not really display a ‘smart’ move with the presented black and white proof.

Customer service : East and West

Just came across this article and wish to share with you ...

After living here in Australia for more than a decade, I have kind of accepted, albeit reluctantly, the customer service culture in Australia - for the sake of keeping my sanity, that is. Recently, I returned to Malaysia for a couple of days and have been able to see and feel the vast difference in the customer service culture in the East-West divide.

In Australia today, I feel that there is a serious lack of personal touch and human connection. If you have a phone problem, try walk in to a random mobile phone shop and see if the staff there would help you. Even if he or she has nothing to do, the most likely response you will get is, "Sorry, you have to go to the shop where you bought this phone."

What if you have a problem with a service provider say, Optus, Vodafone or Telstra and you walk into one of their shops in a shopping mall? Chances are they will tell you to pick up the phone at some corner in their outlet and talk to the operator from some call center outsourced by Optus, Vodafone or Telstra to answer your questions. Can you imagine that? Walk into a store with live human beings and they tell you to go pick up the phone and talk to some one who could be physically two continents away!

In Malaysia, if I had a phone problem, all I need to do is to walk into a phone shop and the staff there will hear me out and solve that problem for me right there and then without reciting whatever BS policies their companies or my phone manufacturer has. And best of all, they will never expect me to pay for it. To them, it is their business to serve customers in need whether we are their customers or not unless of course there is a high cost involved in resolving the problem.

Once, in Melbourne, I walked into a shop browsing around looking to buy the right gift for a close friend. The attendant walked over leisurely with a sweet smile asking if there was anything she could help me with. I smiled back and said no and thanked her. Leisurely, she walked back to the counter. Minutes later, I found what I wanted and handed it to her for scanning. While she was doing the scanning, I requested that the item be wiped as there was visibly some dust on it.

Instead of obliging, her smiley face changed almost immediately as if she wanted to let it be known by me that she was not pleased with my request. Reluctantly, she took out a piece of scrap paper from the drawer, crunched it into a ball and attempted to wipe the dust off the purchased item! I just could not believe it! Even a two-and-a-half year old would know that kind of paper is not for wiping or polishing for it will scratch the surface! And yet this is a shop meant for selling gifts and collectibles!

In the end I had to stop her and asked if she has something softer. Without missing a beat she said no! No tissue paper, serviette or cloth in the entire shop??? I ended up using my own tissue paper from my pocket. I just had to give up before she start opening her mouth again not because I was afraid of upsetting her. I was just fed up with such behavior.
.
On another occasion, I had to collect my previously faulty lawn mover from a mower shop after it was being repaired. The owner served me, pushed out my repaired machine and asked where I had parked my car. He continued pushing that mower to my car and had some small talk with me. I could not help myself and spoke my mind there and then. I said what he was doing was extra-ordinary in Australia. In my long years of living in Australia, this is one of the rare moments where I was experiencing good old-fashioned honest and quality customer service. I told him most shops do not treat customers the way he and his staff have treated us. He corrected me by saying, "Not most, mate, ALL of Australia is this way! That's why we are falling behind in this global market place!" The shop is Burwood Mowers located in the southeastern part of Melbourne. They have been around for more than 30 years - a friendly family business with excellent service.

In Malaysia, I see people fairly obliged and willing to help even if you are not their customers. Not saying Malaysians are kinder or more generous people. It is the larger culture that determines how people behave in general. Australians are generally very helpful people, have good manners and kind hearts. But when it comes to doing business and servicing customers, they just have this Jack-is-as-good-as-his-master mentality. Why do they have to always see things in master-and-servant terms? Today you might be Jack's customer buying food from his shop. Tomorrow Jack could well be your customer getting his hair trimmed in your shop, right?

In Malaysia, even though customers are not always right, BUT service providers let them feel right nevertheless because business is about creating goodwill, building relationship and win-win situations NOT winning arguments or debates. Not so in the West. Maybe this has to do with the adversarial approach adopted in the Western courts of law.

The power of service

Marketing Managers, Sales Managers, please take note

The customer is the boss, period.

How to respond to a rude email

It’s known that reading abusive comments actually has more effect than hearing them. This is very relevant to email, which is the leading form of office communication. It’s interesting to note that for all its speed and effectiveness as a messaging tool, this sophisticated form of messaging has a flaw or two.

For example, without the emotional and facial cues a person uses when speaking, emails can come across as lifeless, blunt and curt. And when the rudeness is on purpose the effect is even worse. How many of us have experienced nasty emails? Not only do they tend to linger, but often cast a cloud over your day. What’s important is to evaluate the email calmly, and decide if the rudeness was intentional.

Should you feel so, there are ways to deal with it.

Let’s see how.

Don’t answer right away
      
Being offended by a rude email is natural; and perhaps lashing back too. But often it’s best to wait a while before you answer. Get some perspective, let your anger cool, and try not to dwell on it.

This should help you come up with a civil response. Chances are the sender was also a bit hasty and will return with an apology even before you mention it. It will also help you to get your ducks in a row should blame be directed at you, and you need to check your facts first in case you might be in the wrong.

Of course, there’s never a right time for rudeness, but being sure of your case will prevent it from getting worse.

Create a standard answer template

Getting into the details of why an email offended you can sap your energy. Save yourself time and aggravation by replying with a pre-prepared template that informs the sender of his rudeness, and that you will only consider more nicely phrased letters. Here’s an example:

I'm open to hearing what people have to say, unless they take a malicious approach to conversation. I felt your previous email applies to this, and if you'd like to try again with a nicer approach, I'd be happy to have a conversation with you.


This should give the person pause, and perhaps even draw out on an apology. At the very least, this avoids getting into an unproductive slugging match of trading insults.
Should it draw out no response, let the dust settle for a while. Then perhaps follow up with another message, kindly reminding them that you are still open for discussion.

What is important to note is that a template such as this might not always be appropriate given the situation, culture or person it is aimed at – and might be seen as a rude email in its own right! Use prudence before deciding to send it, and remember that the key is to distance yourself with an impersonal – if polite – writing tone. Which leads us to the next point…

Kill them with kindness

Sometimes, simple politeness can deflate the abuse coming your way, even if you don’t feel like being nice. First, make an effort to understand their grievance and acknowledge it. Better yet, try to solve it, and if you can’t, explain why you can’t. The voice of reason goes a long way in making the sender of a rude mail aware how they’re stepping over the line.

If the abuse continues, you might have a real problem on your hands. But before escalating it, take a step back, or step out completely. The next point explains how.

Get a cool-headed friend to respond

The problem with directed, written communication is that it’s difficult not to take personally. Distance yourself by getting an outside opinion, as well as a response.

Of course, the trick is to be fair and even-handed – as you will have to outline the situation to a third party, who is not involved in the situation. Ask them to write a response that’s impartial, then tweak it if needed and send it off. This could also help you gain perspective on the situation and set you on the road to resolving it.

When words fail

Make peace with the fact that there will always be rude people. And that we all have bad days. Based on the instance you’re facing, decide if wasting energy on an abusive person is worth it. Make sure you’ve done your best to solve the situation, but should there be no developments, move on and get on to other things. If you feel stressed by the mail, take a breather, or set your mind somewhere else. Best is then just to forget it.

After all, nicer people deserve your attention too.

Customer service by the bank

This is a letter written by an 86-year old lady to a bank.

Dear Sir:

I am  writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I  endeavoured to pay my plumber last month.

By my  calculations, three nanoseconds must have elapsed  between his presenting the cheque and the arrival in my  account of the funds needed to honor it.

I  refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my  entire pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been  in place for only eight years.

You are to be  commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity,  and also for debiting my account $30 by way of penalty  for the inconvenience caused to your bank.

My  thankfulness springs from the manner in which this  incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial  ways. I noticed that whereas I personally answer your  telephone calls and letters, --- when I try to contact  you, I am confronted by the impersonal, overcharging,  pre-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has  become.

From now on, I, like you, choose only to  deal with a flesh-and-blood person.

My mortgage  and loan repayments will therefore and hereafter no  longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank, by  cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an  employee at your bank whom you must nominate.

Be  aware that it is an OFFENSE under the Postal Act for any  other person to open such an envelope.

Please  find attached an Application Contact which I require  your chosen employee to complete.

I am sorry it  runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much  about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is  no alternative.

Please note that all copies of  his or her medical history must be countersigned by a  Notary Public figure, and the mandatory details of  his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and  liabilities) must be accompanied by documented  proof.

In due course, at MY convenience, I will  issue your employee with a PIN number which he/she must  quote in dealings with me.

I regret that it  cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have  modelled it on the number of button presses required of  me to access my account balance on your phone bank  service.

As they say, imitation is the sincerest  form of flattery.

Let me level the playing field  even further.

When you call me, press buttons as  follows:

IMMEDIATELY AFTER DIALING, PRESS THE  STAR (*) BUTTON FOR ENGLISH

#1. To make an  appointment to see me

#2. To query a missing  payment.

#3. To transfer the call to my living  room in case I am there.

#4 To transfer the call  to my bedroom in case I am sleeping.

#5. To  transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to  nature.

#6. To transfer the call to my mobile  phone if I am not at home.

#7. To leave a message  on my computer, a password to access my computer is  required.

Password will be communicated to you at  a later date to that Authorized Contact mentioned  earlier.

#8. To return to the main menu and to  listen to options 1 to 9

#9. To make a  general complaint or inquiry.

The contact will  then be put on hold, pending the attention of my  automated answering service.

While this may, on  occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will  play for the duration of the call.

Regrettably,  but again following your example, I must also levy an  establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new  arrangement.

May I wish you a happy, if ever so  slightly less prosperous New Year?

Your Humble  Client

How Can an Amiable Style Person Better Serve Customers?

Each Style of person interacts with customers in unique ways, and sometimes people’s Style behaviors don’t match the needs of customers or clients. Because they are naturally friendly, Amiable Style people can be very good at maintaining effective relationships with clients and customers. They are generally not too pushy and allow others time to make decisions. However, they tend to focus on the present without considering longer-term implications, and they do not like to impose their opinions on others. This can result in lost opportunities simply because these individuals will not share their ideas with customers and may not consider future opportunities. These individuals should make efforts to consider long-term relationships and how they can meet customers' needs beyond the immediate time frame. They may also increase their effectiveness by sharing their opinions more openly.

Five ‘no regrets’ moves for superior customer engagement

No organization can avoid coming to grips with the rapidly evolving behavior of consumers and business customers. They check prices at a keystroke and are increasingly selective about which brands share their lives. They form impressions from every encounter and post withering online reviews. As we noted in a McKinsey Quarterly article last year, these changes present significant organizational challenges, as well as opportunities. The biggest is that all of us have become marketers: the critical moments of interaction, or touch points, between companies and customers are increasingly spread across different parts of the organization, so customer engagement is now everyone’s responsibility.¹

In many companies, the marketing function is best placed to orchestrate customer engagement for the entire organization. To do so, the function must be pervasive—able to influence touch points it doesn’t directly control. Over the past year, we’ve seen a wide range of companies try to address customer engagement in more integrated ways, but many executives have told us they simply don’t know where to begin. The spectrum of organizational choices is broader than ever, and companies are struggling to determine the appropriate role of marketing for their business. What’s more, senior executives often view any internal effort by the marketing function as a “land grab.” Given the absence of solid return-on-investment data (see “Measuring marketing’s worth”), they may express skepticism about marketing’s place in the new environment.

Although these challenges are difficult to overcome, companies need not be frozen in place while they wait for a complete picture of the answer to emerge. The five “no regrets” moves described below help senior executives to move beyond their function-by-function view of customer engagement and to improve the coordination of activities across the broad range of touch points they must care about. By widening the lens companies use to view customer-engagement needs, enabling more rapid responses, and building internal lines of communication, these steps create nimbler organizations with more pervasive marketing.

1. Hold a customer-engagement summit

Almost all companies have annual or semi-annual business-planning processes that bring senior managers together from units and functions to discuss strategies and objectives. Yet few undertake a similar process to discuss how to engage with the lifeblood of all companies: customers. We recommend holding such a summit, with a participant list that starts right at the top and cuts across units and functions. At one US health insurer, for example, the CEO’s direct involvement sparked a company-wide dialogue about how dramatically customer behavior had changed and the breadth and speed of the tactics required to keep up.

The focus of such a summit is customer engagement, which should not be confused with the customer experience; engagement goes beyond managing the experience at touch points to include all the ways companies motivate customers to invest in an ongoing relationship with a product or brand. The summit must address three things. First, line and staff managers have to align on the vision for engagement: what relationship do you want with your customers? Examining their decision journey helps you to compare your level of engagement with what you believe it should be. After Starbucks investigated customer engagement in France and Italy, for example, it concluded that consumers in those countries preferred traditional local café formats. As a result, it invested in distinctive store layouts and furnishings and adjusted its beverages and service techniques.²

Second, the summit’s participants should coordinate the activities required to reach and engage customers across the full range of touch points. When one multichannel retailer held its summit, the company, like many others, discovered that recent trends had left it with an anachronism: a set of touch points that should be coordinated but were instead managed independently within functional silos. A customer-engagement summit allows the senior-management team to create a coordinated plan spanning them—so that, for example, the customer experience in a call center can be coordinated with the behavior of frontline employees, or the online-registration experience with product development.

Finally, a company ought to agree on the elements of the customer-engagement ecosystem that should be undertaken in-house and those that will involve outside partners. Internal resources probably won’t be able to deliver all of the requirements imposed by a world with many touch points: for instance, content and communications; data analytics and insights; product and service innovation; customer experience design and delivery; and managing brand, reputation, and corporate citizenship. Senior leaders need to decide how to carry out these activities and design the mix of in-house capabilities and external partners that will deliver them. These customer-engagement planning sessions, in addition to informing and motivating the organization as a whole around customer engagement, can help avoid spreading scarce resources too thinly.

2. Create a customer-engagement council

One of the first outcomes of a customer-engagement summit will probably be the realization that an ongoing forum for focusing management’s attention on engagement is needed. This doesn’t have to be yet another marketing committee. In fact, your customer-engagement council may already exist under another name, such as the strategic-planning or brand council. The purpose is to bring together all primary forms of engagement— marketing, communications, service, sales, product management, and so on—to coordinate tactics across touch points in a more timely manner.

This council, which should be an operational and decision-making body, must translate the findings of the customer-engagement summit into specific actions at individual touch points. To accomplish this goal, the council’s membership needs to be large enough to ensure that all key players are represented but small enough to make decisions efficiently. One high-technology company, for example, included 17 people on the engagement council. Because it is difficult to make it function efficiently with more than a dozen or so members, decision making in practice rested with a core group comprising the chief marketing officer and the heads of the company’s three primary divisions; subteams of the council coordinated its decisions with the company’s other entities when necessary. These councils are most effective when chaired by the same person who leads the customer-engagement summit, such as the CMO or the head of communications, strategy, sales, or service.

The second consideration is how regularly the council should meet. The customer-engagement council of one retail bank meets weekly, for example; a similar council at a social-services organization, monthly. The frequency of such meetings generally is based on what key engagement activities the group is driving and their cycle time. The third consideration involves inputs and support: the council must make fact-based decisions, so it needs information on everything from priority touch points to customer behavior and the moves of competitors.

Finally, such a council must have a customer-engagement charter. To reduce the risk of gaps, rework, and turf wars, everyone in the organization needs clarity about decision rights over touch points and the key processes that affect them. As we explained last year, it’s useful to allocate the design, build, operate, and renew rights for specific touch points explicitly to functional “owners.” Marketing, for example, might design and renew scripts for a call center, which sales or operations would build and operate. In addition, the process of developing a charter is useful to force a dialogue about who owns and does what. More specifically, what does marketing do in customer engagement? What does it not do?

When conceived, constructed, and operated correctly, these customer-engagement councils play a critical role in breaking the “silo” mind-set that diminishes the effectiveness of customer engagement in many organizations. Such a council often serves as a mediator and decision maker in conflicts between functions and business units and as a filter for what must be elevated to the level of the CEO or other senior leaders.

3. Appoint a ‘chief content officer’

A decade ago, when the extent of the digital revolution—the massive proliferation of media and devices and the empowerment of consumers via social networks and other channels—became clear, many companies quickly appointed “digital officers” to oversee these emerging touch points. It’s now evident that the challenge is not just understanding digital channels but also coping with the volume, nature, and velocity of the content needed to use them effectively. Companies need to create a supply chain of increasingly sophisticated and interactive content to feed consumer demand for information and engagement, not to mention a mechanism for managing the content consumers themselves generate. The emergence of companies-as-publishers demands the appointment of a chief content officer (CCO).

Companies across industries—from luxury goods to retailing, financial services, automotive, and even professional sports—are creating versions of this role. All are adopting a journalistic approach to recognize hot issues and shaping emerging sentiment by delivering compelling content that forges stronger emotional bonds with consumers. The CCO role is designed to provide the on-brand, topical, and provocative content needed to engage customers. The CCO must develop and manage all aspects of the supply chain for content, ranging from deciding where and how it’s sourced to overseeing the external agencies and in-house creative talent generating it.

Companies shouldn’t forget that even with a CCO in place, designing and executing a content strategy still requires coordination with several key business areas. The group responsible for gathering and analyzing customer insights, for example, may need a new mandate to support the CCO by providing research on what customers and segments require, as well as where, when, and how that content can most effectively be delivered. The CCO may need help from human resources to find, attract, manage, motivate, and develop the in-house creative talent often required to fulfill a content vision. The CCO will have to work closely with the team responsible for shaping brand perceptions to understand the company’s character deeply—its heritage, purpose, and values—and with areas such as corporate social responsibility, investor relations, and government affairs to gain a full perspective on how the company interacts with external stakeholders.

4. Create a ‘listening center’

Engagement is a conversation, yet companies are increasingly excluded from many of the most important discussions. More social and other media are available to mobilize your fans and opponents than ever before, and any interaction between a customer and your company could be the match that starts a viral fire. In this environment, companies should establish listening centers that monitor what is being said about their organizations, products, and services on social media, blogs, and other online forums.³

Such monitoring should be hardwired into the business to shorten response times during real and potential crises, complement internal metrics and traditional tracking research on brand performance, feed consumer feedback into the product-development process, and serve as a platform for testing customer reactions. We’re already seeing listening centers established across a broad swath of sectors from financial services to hospitality to consumer goods. A French telecommunications company not only monitors online activity but also has a tool kit of prepared responses. “I can’t predict what crisis will hit,” a senior executive at the company said. “But depending on the magnitude of it, I know the people I need to get in the room and what to discuss.”

5. Challenge your total customer-engagement budget

Many companies struggle to figure out how they can afford all the new tactics, vehicles, and content types required to engage with customers effectively. We propose a different mind-set: recognizing that there’s plenty of money, but in the wrong places. Companies can now communicate with customers much more productively: digital and social channels, for example, are radically cheaper (and sometimes more effective) than traditional media communications or face-to-face sales visits. When you make trade-offs across functions, you can free large amounts of money to invest elsewhere; if the experience of customers is so positive that they voluntarily serve as advocates for your brand, for example, can you reduce advertising expenditures? The moves your customer service center makes to resolve a crisis—say, a lost credit card on a honeymoon or a major machine failure on a critical production run—may build more lifetime loyalty than years of traditional loyalty campaigns.

What prevents many companies from realizing these productivity gains and cross-function trade-offs is a failure to look at total spending on customer engagement. They don’t see the opportunities to make trade-offs across functions and optimize the impact of investments across the entire set of touch points. Most budget on a function-by-function basis, and measure impact the same way. When you look at these expenditures and investments that way, there is almost never enough money, because each function seeks increased funding to improve the customer interactions for which it is accountable. That’s a losing game.

Instead, add up what you spend on customer engagement—in areas such as sales, service, operations, and product management, as well as in marketing. Then identify all the radically cheaper approaches you could take and ask, for example, how you would take them if your budget was 15 percent of its current size or how a competitor in an emerging market would approach this problem. Such exercises help to break the ingrained assumptions and conventional wisdom that creep into organizations and to highlight overlooked opportunities.

Finally, look at trade-offs across functions—for example, among investments in store renovations, revamped e-commerce sites, higher ad spending, changes in your model of sales force coverage, or improved operations in customer service centers. Which of these should be prioritized and in what order? Such decisions should be made not just on the projected financial returns but also on a strategic assessment of how customer expectations are evolving, how competitors are changing their methods of customer engagement, and where your company may have distinctive capabilities that could help it win through superior customer engagement.

One major Asian retailer did exactly this. Faced with ever-rising costs, it looked at its entire customer-engagement budget and identified where it was underperforming or missing out on new approaches to engagement. With that baseline, it cut 25 percent off its traditional marketing budget, invested in customer service, and reallocated other marketing expenditures to focus on digital, social, and mobile channels. By reducing in-store operations costs, the retailer financed new investments in a major loyalty program to improve its engagement with customers. As a result, 70 percent of the company’s sales now are to members of its loyalty program—about three times the rate of its competitors. Total costs are lower and margins higher, despite a challenging retail environment.

More customer interactions across more touch points are shaping the degree of engagement a customer feels with your company. The critical barrier to harnessing the potential value in this shift is organizational—companies that learn to design and execute effective customer-engagement strategies will have the advantage; the others will lose ground. We have no doubt that companies will one day evolve the full set of processes and structures needed to manage customer engagement across the whole organization. Until then, these five steps can get you moving in the right direction.