Total CX

Discovering the Value of Customer Success Metrics

By Patty Seybold and Ronni Marshak

For years, people (including consultants) have been struggling to come up with good ROI arguments for "soft stuff" like CX.

Years ago, we were teaching one of our first Customer Scenario^® Mapping Facilitation courses to a mixed group of our clients. (Before we developed our online training course, we taught facilitation in a face-to-face two and a half day workshop.) One of the sample maps we worked on was for a FIT (that’s “Facilitator in Training” in CSM speak) from Merck Medco. The map was rather complicated—multiple layers deep, with layers for the end-patient, the employer’s HR folks, the RX benefits management company (that’s Medco), the pharmacist, and the health insurance provider.

As always, we spent a bit of time figuring out the customer’s Moments of Truth (MOTs)—the showstoppers that could derail the entire scenario. That’s when the FIT had a brilliant insight. He realized that each customer MOT was actually measurable!

Don’t Leave Your Colleagues Unprepared for Customer-Facing Events

For years, we’ve been drilling into you the importance of customers first—making sure they have all the information they need to do business with you, buy and use (and repair) your products, and to co-design your future products, processes, and strategies. We often take internal stakeholders—your colleagues—for granted, assuming they will know what is expected of them when meeting with customer groups. So this time, I want to reinforce how important it is to prepare your co-workers (and bosses) for any customer co-design or Customer Advisory Board session.

In the co-design and CAB sessions that we run for our clients, we have a specific set of rules for how employees (whether they are your top execs or your down-in-the-trenches workers) are to participate. For example, we specifically ask that no one from the hosting organization interrupt the customers during the group interview that we call the issues and vision discussion. Now, we can just tell them not to butt in, but that creates hard feelings (towards us) and, even worse, a lack of engagement during the session. When we fully prepare these internal stakeholders, we explain why we want them to remain silent (to let the customers determine the direction of the discussion and to let them build on each others’ comments and ideas), we offer them the opportunity to take notes while they are actively listening to the conversation, and we assure them that they will be given the opportunity to ask their top questions at the end of the customer discussion.

Can a Customer Ecosystem Approach Bring Families Together?

When I read Patty Seybold’s fascinating take on how Local Motors is transforming the automobile industry, I was taken with her mention that father-and-son teams have become a target audience for designing and building new, cool cars. I started imagining the dad-son teams working together in their garage, figuring out how the dashboard should look, whether the car needed a spoiler, and other car-like things that I, honestly, don’t know anything about. I pictured the excitement when they got feedback and support from a community of other car enthusiasts. I even saw the arguments and disappointments when something didn’t work well (and then envisioned the almost sitcom show moment when the son runs down the stairs yelling, “Dad, Dad, I figured it out!” and they hugged and rushed out to the garage to work together in family harmony).

And I envied that (okay, fictitious) moment—although they probably do occur in some less made-for-TV moments. But the model to have open source design for different kinds of “built” products—the design of goods that can be manufactured and, eventually, sold, is intriguing. So I started extrapolating on how this model can continue to bring families together—and get the females involved. I thought smaller—appliance design, fashion design, new concepts in telescopes, exercise equipment, board games. Not that any of these are as complex (or perhaps as sexy) as designing and building a great new vehicle. But they are things that a family (or friends, or community group) can work on together from conception, to design, to fabrication, to manufacturing.

What differentiates these from other DIY kit projects is the addition of the ecosystem—the providers of tools to do the design, materials to do the fabrication, and the community of like minded enthusiasts to advise, help with problems, give suggestions, and cheerlead the project to completion. And, who knows, maybe help the family market a new breakthrough product that the whole world can enjoy. In my vision, the ecosystem becomes the extended family. Wouldn’t that be terrific!

7 E-Business Basics

By Patricia Seybold

"All Business is E-Business," Christer Ljungdahl (one of "Patty's Visionaries"), reminds me almost every time we talk. Christer has been responsible for years for leading and evolving National Instruments' Internet strategy—for customers as well as employees and partners. NI's Internet strategy and evolving infrastructure have fostered tons of customer-led innovation, as hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers from thousands of disciplines share their epiphanies and their struggles, as kids and their mentors play with LEGO Mindstorms robots to spawn the next generation of sensor-savvy engineers, and as NI releases new intelligent plug and play products to help us make sense of and interact with the physical world. Christer's Internet strategy goes way beyond the basics that I described 12 years ago in Customers.com Classic. Yet he has clearly mastered all of the 7 basics that those early Internet Visionaries put in place.

Here's the second chapter of the revised Customers.com Handbook—designed to complement Customers.com Classic with a set of How To's and basic building blocks for anyone who wants to refresh their e-business strategy or is working on their mobile strategy. As we move on to (or back to) the future in social media and community, it's a good idea to make sure that you haven't neglected the basic customer-centric building blocks in crafting your outside-in, customer-centric (e-)business strategy.

How to Plan and Implement Your Customers.com® Strategy
A Handbook for Your Customers.com® Initiatives—Part 2
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, July 29, 2010