Today’s Killer AP. Delivering customer value!
“Our strategy is correct – we just seem to have a problem with how it is delivered on the front line of the business.” This is a comment we frequently hear when chatting with business leaders. Some even rate their success at the customer interface as little as 15-20%. This is especially true when these leaders have to operate through a dealer, branch or franchise network.
Its only when you realise how the entire marketing landscape is changing that you understand how important this comment might be. The power in the commercial transaction has moved steadily from the producer or seller to the user or customer.
The recently announced Orange Index results bore this out, revealing that performance expectations have increased and overall satisfaction decreased over the past year. One of the reasons has been the improvement of communication between customers. The 2007 research also showed that customers have lost faith in company systems and processes and rely instead on consistent performance from customer facing staff, not “hero” type customer service.
One of the major trends is the power of customer conversations, the telling model of marketing communications (traditional advertising) is losing effectiveness customer engagement is gaining importance as is the businesses ability to empower its staff to deliver this experience.
One of the drivers of this has been the massive growth of social networking systems such as facebook, my space and others. Consider their power, a few weeks ago the entire Gauteng shut down early on rumours of a devastating storm. Sure it was only a rumour, but it was also a very powerful demonstration of the individuals’ power to communicate within their community. This power is exercised daily by your customers – through the internet on networking site, by email AND through mobile phones. They are telling their network about good and bad experiences!
A colleague of mine – having persistent problems with the gearbox on his car, was able to negotiate a full free replacement because he came armed with information from around the world, gleaned from a simple Google search, that the problem was due to a design fault and endemic.
In this kind of market if you are only delivering 15-20% of your brand and your strategy at the customer interface you have huge untapped opportunities, even delivering 80% is not good enough, more and more we are starting to understand that its not through advertising that your brand is built – it is through a customer experience. Only a few years ago you could isolate the damage of a bad customer experience or patch it up with advertising spend or programmes. Today you can’t because your customer is connected, not only in your local area, but also around the world.
The PiKE Applause methodology is a comprehensive program of enablement and empowerment of the customer facing staff and the translation of strategy through the business. We use many innovative and some traditional approaches in the methodology and we have applied the same networking dynamic to organisations, as a method to deliver the brand at the point of customer interface.
One of the differences we have, and we believe it to be a world first is to capture and enable the social network contained within an organisation in a closed, private or in-house electronic social networking platform, your own company “facebook” in fact, but using our proprietary technology.
An electronic social network is nothing like the traditional intranet. Rather it enables a vibrant corporate community allowing the culture and values of an organisation to be truly experienced by each individual – whether they are across the country or around the corner. For the staff it creates a feeling of belonging, and of contribution. For the company it creates an access to the community, and a conduit to influence culture which works infinitely better than an email. Furthermore, it also provides the opportunity to unearth the hidden diamonds amongst the staff and creates a path for innovation.
We were very pleased to see that the futureworld newsletter this week saw this approach as a glimpse into the future, pointing out the massive benefit for the companies who adopt this. They are right but they were wrong about one thing its not in the future – We with some leading edge organisations are doing it now!
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Zan
