Affichage des articles dont le libellé est customer. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est customer. Afficher tous les articles

vendredi 6 décembre 2013

What happens when T-Mobile and AT&T duke it out on Twitter over a potential customer?

TMO_CEO_uncarrierT-Mobile's John Legere scores some serious points when he gets down in the mix with a potential new customer. (Image: CNET)

It's not often you see two companies battling it out in public — let alone in front of a combined 600,000 people on Twitter. But when you do, you can expect sparks to fly.

Jay Rooney took to the microblogging site this week to question why he's still has service with AT&T, which charges through the nose for overseas data. T-Mobile doesn't, and recently pitched unlimited data and texting worldwide in efforts to stand out from the crowd while appeasing the millions of travelers on its roster.

Rooney's one, simple tweet was enough of a catalyst for AT&T and T-Mobile to engage in a virtual fist-fight for the hand of a customer, which saw T-Mobile's boss enter the mix and win over not one, but likely many more potential customers.

AT&T and T-Mobile, the second and fourth largest U.S. cellular companies respectively, used to be close friends. In 2011, the two companies proposed a merger for $39 billion that would see the combined company take on Verizon for the first-place slot. But the Justice Dept. blocked the proposal claiming it would cripple the country's cellular competition. The deal eventually collapsed — both companies taking a financial hit as a result — leaving the two firms well and truly off each other's the Christmas card list.

Since then, the two firms have taken almost every opportunity to take pot-shots at each other. At T-Mobile's Uncarrier event in March, executives mocked AT&T's "confusing" data plans and network speeds, among other things.

Here's what happened in the latest AT&T v. T-Mobile war of words.


T-Mobile immediately, without missing a beat, jumps in to help — not without throwing a right-hook at AT&T, calling it an "old-school" carrier.


Rooney seems to be upbeat about the prospect of T-Mobile's service.


But then the cellular turf war begins as AT&T catches on to the T-Mobile's subversive customer snatch and enters the fray.


At which point Rooney plays objective commentator:


He considers AT&T's pitch, but casually suggests he should get something out of it.


T-Mobile, feeling a little undercut, takes a swipe at AT&T with a scathing subtweet, and ups its offer to Rooney.


To which Rooney replies:


But AT&T wants to downplay the rivalry with its cellular frenemy.


And then things get really interesting when T-Mobile chief executive John Legere, a seasoned tweeter, throws down the corporate gauntlet with this zinger:


And that seals the deal. Rooney's convinced.


But others watching the two companies duke it out from the sidelines are starting to throw their weight behind T-Mobile.


And another enters the ring:


Legere's just scored himself at least two new customers thanks to his tactical tweeting.


T-Mobile's official Twitter account, the social face of the company, tweets out so others following the cellular company are shown what good public relations looks like.


Another disgruntled cellular customer, Gabe Guerrero, sees what's going on and throws in their two cents.


And then something incredible happens as the conversation snowballs further. Sprint gets dragged into the fray as others' look at their own personal circumstances and consider jumping ship to a rival.


Guerrero explains his situation, and showing his frustration threatens a complete walk-out. 


Sprint, looking a little desperate, throws out all the stops to prevent a customer bailing on their service.


There's a lesson to be learned from this. Customer engagement through carefully defined and considered strategy is all good and well. But when a company chief executive, like John Legere, who has a penchant for saying it how it is in a brutally honest and frank way (trust me on this one) gets right down to the customer-facing level, it certainly doesn't hurt. 

In this case, it will likely result in not just one new customer, but many. That's social engagement and marketing done right, kids. Class dismissed.

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mardi 8 octobre 2013

Marketing: Community emerges as a source of customer 'truth'

Summary: The role of community is shifting from customer support and service to being part of the brand marketing mix. Chief Marketing Officers should take note of this trend.

During a recent CxOTalk conversation with Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction (disclosure: I am an advisor), we discussed the value of online communities in brand marketing. Although support organizations have long used communities to improve customer service and reduce costs, the relationship of community to marketing is particularly interesting. You can view the entire discussion here.

In the short video excerpt embedded below, Wendy describes how communities can bring together the customer's voice with data from enterprise systems such as CRM. In addition to other benefits, engaging customers in community also drives transparency and openness, attributes that modern consumers increasingly expect:

In the world of customer experience, there is an elegant merger of this outside-in social world into these systems... I have to have everything integrated, otherwise I don't know what is going on and I can't build the culture that stays open, that we are supposed to represent to others.

It takes a lot for a company to embrace transparency; that's hard, because most companies want to control everything. The community effect, that we see happening now, can bring a new life to these very essential CRM portal-based tools that can allow the doors to fly open, the windows to fly open, so the conversations are more natural, more free-flowing, so the business results, inside and outside, are there.

Having established a link with traditional enterprise systems, Wendy explains the next steps in using community to create marketing value. This value arises by harnessing the active relationships that naturally arise when customers interact online:  

We should be able to feed the top of the funnel, helping marketers understand the value of community in the marketing mix.

We can take social interactions from our kind of community and extend their shelf life. To leverage those, you have to tag them, curate them, re-syndicate them, and extend their life. Otherwise, you just lose that opportunity.

We are not a forum, we are a living, breathing asset that connects customers to each other and then brings them into the website of a brand.

Communities provide a place for customers to interact and create content directly out of their own experience:

Content is king: it is the gasoline, social is the fire. I've got to have content to start the fire. And, then, I have got to have that interaction to put into my marketing automation system. What better content is there than that from your customers?

Establishing a link between the customer's voice and creating practical marketing programs is the primary challenge that community platforms face in making the leap from customer service to marketing. Deriving measurable structure and marketing utility from customer conversations is not an easy jump, although Wendy is totally correct in asserting the high value of this customer content.

We can hardly overstate the importance of direct customer interaction in shaping product design, marketing, selling, and driving leads into sales.

Today, we accept the idea that customers control their relationship with brands. Therefore, marketers should think about community as a gateway to customer interaction, engagement, and relationship. Although responsiveness is a touchstone of customer loyalty, the real marketing value of community lies in harnessing authentic customer interactions as a source of brand "truth."

CxOTalk is a weekly show that I co-host with Vala Afshar. We bring together the most innovative CIOs and CMOs in the world for direct, honest discussion.

Topic: CXO

Michael Krigsman

Michael Krigsman is an internationally recognized analyst, strategy advisor, and authority on enterprise software leadership, CIO innovation, and social business. Interact with Michael on Twitter at @mkrigsman.

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lundi 7 octobre 2013

At Tory Burch, a clear-eyed focus on the customer

Photo courtesy Tory Burch

CHICAGO—If you're unfamiliar with the U.S. luxury lifestyle brand Tory Burch, you won't be for much longer.


The company has seen explosive growth since its launch in 2004, and now ships its particular style—in its own words, "an attainable, luxury, lifestyle brand defined by classic American sportswear with an eclectic sensibility;" in ours, the go-to place for ballet flats for well-heeled women—to more than 30 countries, thanks to a dead-serious e-commerce strategy.


As the company prepares for its 10th anniversary, chief marketing officer Miki Berardelli and senior vice president of global stores Matt Marcotte came here, to the annual Shop.org Summit, to dish on what makes the company—a darling among retailers—tick.


The answer was surprisingly simple: serve the customer.


"We share a fundamental belief about customer centricity," said Marcotte, the former managing director of Apple's North American retail operations. "It's something we think about every single day."


Sure, plenty of businesses play lip service to this notion, but during the pair's keynote this morning, it was quite clear that Tory Burch is walking the walk and not just talking the talk. Though the company has a brand presence in the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Asia, with almost 100 physical stores in 15 countries, the real action is online, where it has native online stores for seven countries and the ability to ship to 31 more. 


"We do all of this on a global, scalable platform," Berardelli said. "Multi-currency, multilingual."


Not bad for such a young brand. Then again, that relative youth was an asset when it came to dealing with legacy technology and organizational silos.


"We started e-commerce immediately after we opened our first store, in 2004," Berardelli said. "We as a brand have never experienced a pre-e-commerce world."

Tory Burch CMO Miki Berardelli. (Photo: Andrew Nusca)

To get its digital ducks in a row, Tory Burch (the company, not the founder) started by looking at its own corporate organization. Typically, the silos between retail channels—brick-and-mortar, online and wholesale—create incentives that can work against the customer experience.


So if a customer standing in a physical store prefers to order a product from the website instead—thus depriving a salesperson of their commission and the brick-and-mortar group from a sale, which would be logged in the online column instead—they may find that the associate they're working with is less than enthusiastic about the idea.


That's not the case at Tory Burch, Marcotte said.


"We have to ask ourselves every single day: how do we tap into that passion, fuel that passion, and further it [so a customer continues with the brand?] Everyone talks about these ideas, but if we aren't talking as an organization—if everyone isn't completely passionate about the customer—then we won't make the right decisions. If we are, it frees us to make the right decisions. That makes us change the way we work, instead of limiting the way [a customer] shops.


"We don't care which channel. We are channel-agnostic. We care when the customer wins."


By keeping the silos from creating destructive internal incentives across its sales channels, Tory Burch has effectively created "three new, full-price stores, volume-wise, just by serving customer," Marcotte said.

Tory Burch SVP Global Stores Matt Marcotte. (Photo: Andrew Nusca)

If you really want to put a focus on the customer experience, you need to have the brand itself embody it. Berardelli said that she considers Tory Burch to be an "O.P.E.N." brand—on-demand, personal, engaged, networked—which "means taking the customer along on a journey."


That's no more apparent than in the company's social media outreach, a comprehensive effort that befits a lifestyle brand. Tory Burch is active on virtually every major social media platform, and each one has a different strategy, thanks to the company's internal "Social Media Matrix" that assigns each channel a team responsible and a strategy that plays into the grander one for the brand as a whole. 


On Twitter, the founder herself is actually responsible for tweeting. "We think of it as the new focus group for today's CEO," Berardelli said. Similarly, Instagram "is Tory's lens," offering photos of family and friends, Berardelli said.


In contrast, Facebook "is the voice of the brand" and the team behind it. Still, that doesn't mean its communications are stiff.


"The way we think of these platforms is different than how we think of our core marketing material," Berardelli said. "We share our favorite ice cream flavors; our customer is cheering us on and telling us what her favorite ice cream flavor is, too."


Plus, Tory Burch has an exclusive Facebook shop that puts exclusive, fan-only products up for sale.


"Our Facebook follower has an expectation that she will receive something of value for following us," Berardelli said. And it helps that the average Tory Burch Facebook fan is younger than the brand's average customer. "We see Facebook and our Facebook shop as an important customer acquisition vehicle," she said.


As for the social network Pinterest—a favorite among apparel companies, for obvious reasons—the Tory Burch approach is to constantly feed it with pieces of content so that a customer "is taking images of site and brand and spreading them around."


That brand-building mentality carries over to Weibo, the Chinese microblogging service that's much like Twitter. Because Tory Burch has four stores in Hong Hong, the company's efforts are "primarily about brand-building and supporting store openings," since a native online store doesn't yet exist for the company in that country, but four Hong Kong brick-and-mortar stores do. 


"China is a very important part of our strategy," Berardelli said.


For all of these social channels, "it's a never-ending process of watching what's happening in the landscape and figuring out what's [right] for your brand and evolving," Berardelli said. "We treat every platform differently and we create unique content for each platform. It's a lot more work, but it's a lot more fun, and we believe it's a lot more effective."


But what about return on investment? That's always the question when it comes to social media outreach efforts. Berardelli said it goes back to the goals for the brand as a whole.


"We do have a mindset that there are things we do from a marketing and social media perspective that are just the right things to do for our brand," she said. "The biggest aspect is just the people, the staffing around it. We're very focused on building a community that's truly engaged. We don't want followers for followers' sake."

The Tory Burch Clientbook application, a partnership with VeriFone's GlobalBay. (Photo: Andrew Nusca)

One of the more interesting efforts Tory Burch is undertaking is an attempt to allow data-driven personalization technology bleed into its brick-and-mortar stores.


With a tool it calls "Clientbook"—accessible through a tablet computer—the company's store associates are able to pull or augment insights from the company's customer relations management, or CRM, database in an attempt to better hone in on which products would be most appropriate for a customer. It's a similar approach to the one that luxury retailer Burberry demonstrated at SAP's Sapphire Now conference in 2012.


"It was built with the customer and employee in mind as the end user," Marcotte said. "There's nothing worse than tricky technology, because no one uses it, because no one's thought about how someone uses it."


The idea is to "enable a human connection," much in the way that Facebook prompts people to say "Happy birthday" to their friends. Even though everyone knows that Facebook's birthday reminder module "is part of a program," it still results in a human connection that people value, Marcotte said.


For Clientbook, that means that a sales associate is prompted to send a customer a birthday card days in advance, so it can arrive on time via the post.


"It helps us to build our business in a transformational way," he said.


Berardelli offered another example. She said, paraphrased:



In one case, a married man came into one of our stores, asking for assistance from a store associate. He wanted to purchase a gift for his wife. He explained that he didn't know where to turn, but saw the company's logo on his wife's shoes and assumed that she shopped at the store, so he came. The associate looked up his wife's name in Clientbook; turns out she's shopped at Tory Burch both in person and online. Anything she bought in the last two years showed up, with photographs. So the associate made suggestions and he goes off happy. The wife comes in the next day and asks to see sales associate. That's never good—usually it means that something's gone wrong. The woman says, "I don't know what you did, but it's the first time in 20 years he's ever gotten in right." So the associate shows her Clientbook. No return necessary; the husband is a rock star. She leaves. Three hours later, her friend comes in. Turns out the wife was talking about Clientbook at lunch and she just had to know what it was all about.


"Everyone's happy," Marcotte said. "This is the kind of technology that we want to enable an authentic relationship between our customer and our brand."


The big question, of course, is simple: is all this customer stuff working?


The retailer can certainly look at its sales as a very rough (albeit critical) barometer, but it has better proven its dividends with a lofty Net Promoter Score, a metric that measures customer brand loyalty. Because the rating system measures how well a customer recommends a given brand to friends, family and coworkers, it's key for a lifestyle company that needs to be as much a friend as a fashion source.


"The days of satisfaction are really kind of gone," Marcotte said, explaining that 80 percent of people who are "satisfied" defect to other brands anyway. "Satisfaction isn't enough. Being OK with an experience is not enough. We want people to be passionate."


So the company has turned to NPS for detailed data it can place in a feedback loop for its employees. 


"It's the voice of the customer," Marcotte said. "We get to hear every single day, in every single store, how we're doing from people who have shopped with us. And it goes right to the store manager," who has 24 hours to make an issue right again. "We want to bring them back to a place where they are comfortable with Tory Burch again," he said.


And because the score is balanced, the brand receives positive feedback, too. That helps boost employee morale, ensuring they're on the same page with customers. 


"It gives us that macro feedback to make sure that the customer is still sitting at the center of the table," a sort-of gut check to make sure its actions still align with the goals for the brand, Marcotte said.


Which feeds into employee training, business processes, sales and ultimately, a business that's sustainable and healthy over the long term.


"If we listen to our customer," Berardelli said, "she will actually help us be a better brand and make a difference in the world."


More from the Shop.org Summit on ZDNet:

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mardi 1 octobre 2013

Jeff Bezos has no plan for saving journalism...tells editors 'Focus on customer'

There was a momentary spark of optimism that Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos would save journalism by relaunching his Washington Post newspaper, with a fabulous tech-led business model showing the way for  a resurgent newspaper industry.

In his first TV interview since the Washington Post purchase, Mr. Bezos said that he bought the newspaper as a personal investment and to support an "important institution." Katherine Fung reported on Huffington Post:

Speaking to CNN correspondent Dan Simon, [Bezos] said that that he was hopeful about the road ahead and his ability to contribute to the organization…

"I'm hopeful that I can help from a distance in part by providing runway for them to do a series of experiments, in part through bringing some of the philosophy that we have used at Amazon to the Post." 

He added that the key to Amazon's success has been focusing on the customer.

Foremski's Take: Hopes that Mr. Bezos' tech acumen would reverse the misfortunes of the newspaper sector, were a key theme in news stories that announced his $250 million purchase of the Washington Post.

It's clear now that Mr. Bezos didn't have any bright ideas going into the deal and he still doesn't have a plan. But that's not a bad thing because he might find one or three great ideas eventually.

The customer-centric newsroom

In the meantime, the Washington Post's management has to figure out what it means to implement Mr. Bezos' credo of "focus on the customer."

Does this mean give the reader what they want to read? Should editors choose stories that will be popular?

That's a tough directive because it would mean giving up editorial control to the fickle themes of popular culture, and the loss of an editorial voice — the single most important feature that distinguishes and defines any newspaper.

Would a customer-centric newsroom result in a newspaper with an almost permanent Miley Cyrus front page, and a business/tech section that always reports on Apple and Google? 

Pageview journalism…

Editorial decisions made on the basis of giving the customer what they want to read won't sit well in the  Washington Post newsroom. But it's probably not what Mr. Bezos meant to say.

Focusing on the customer is wonderful if you are a retailer because it's easy to know what they want: low prices, speedy delivery, quick resolution of problems. The newspaper business is different.

- Customers of newspapers often don't know what they want but they know it when they see it.

- They like well written, well researched news stories; they like newspapers that are involved in social issues; they like good coverage of their neighborhoods. And they like the unexpected, newspaper readers love to be thrilled and educated. And they like to have things to talk about and share with others. 

- In every newspaper the focus has to be on the community. And a mission to help tell the stories of the individuals and groups in that community, fairly and accurately;  so that we can all get along and so we won't seem so strange to each other.

- Every newspaper should also teach its community how to produce media. How to report on stories, interviews, video shooting, editing, etc.

Media literacy is an important skill to have and by teaching high standards of media creation, along with the ethical standards, there will be larger numbers of citizen journalists working with community groups and local businesses, helping to tell each other's stories. And the newspaper can provide the publishing platform.

I've got lots more ideas for Mr. Bezos coming up…

Some Points About The Bezos Washington Post And Saving Journalism...

Good Luck With That - Pew Research Graphs Bezos' Stunning Challenge

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