Customer Engagement Club podcasts with Blastland and John Lewis

The Customer Enagegement Club has launched a new series of podcasts where I meet and interview some of the keynote speakers from their Director’s Forum events. We kick off this month with two great discussions from November’s Measuring Engagement Director’s Forum event:

Simon Russell (Head of Multichannel, John Lewis) shares the John Lewis approach to multichannel customer experience and tells up why transparency is important in winning customers whether online or in store. He makes the very valid point that providing openness regarding price comparisons from competing retailers is better to do in store, where you can sell the benefits of your value added, than forcing them away to do it at home.

Michael Blastland (freelance journalist) tells us not to immediately trust the numbers and how the human mind can be frail and inaccurate in its recognition of ‘patterns’ which may not be there. He tells of how the media can be guilty of creating and fanning misinformation and why you should seriously consider hiring a good statistician at a senior level within your organisation.

More here.

John Bohannon on the Google effect and what it means for teaching

In this EDUCA2011 pre conference podcast I meet journalist and teaching expert John Bohannon, where we discuss an ‘always on’ society:

Nowadays we use the Internet as an extension of our brains. If we wish to find out the name of the actor we have just seen in a movie we google it on our computer or smartphone. We can look up the recipe of a dish or re-read a newspaper article we liked at any time online. But this way of accessing information “in the cloud” is changing the way we process and store information.

We no longer try very hard to recall facts, and students are now better able to remember how to find information than the actual information itself.
What are the implications of this for teaching and learning? John Bohannon, a Boston-based journalist for Science magazine and visiting researcher at Harvard University will examine this question in his keynote speech at OEB 2011.

 

Listen to the podcast here

Peter Nowak on how war, porn and fast food influences culture of learning

More podcast action from the EDUCA2011 pre conference series.

What stimulates technological innovation? The Canadian journalist Peter Nowak argues that most of the advances in technology that we enjoy today can be traced back to the industries that cater for our most basic instincts: military, porn, and fast food. The microwave oven, for example, is an adaptation of the radar developed for detecting bombers during World War II.

In this podcast interview with Dom Graveson, Peter Nowak shares some of the “I did not know that” moments he provides in his book “Sex, Bombs and Burgers”. And he explains how technology is driving the demand for ‘entrepreneurial learning’, the topic of his keynote speech at ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2011.

Listen to the podcast here.

An A-Z of ICT and learning with Tim Rylands

Its Online EDUCA time again soon in Berlin… and that means its podcasting season. In this latest one I met with inspirational teaching guru Tim Rylands and we created a fun and informative A to Z of e-learning and social educational resources to create something a little different this time… The idea being to develop a resource useful for teachers in class. Its rather informal, but what the heck… And here’s a bit.ly with all the links in too!

Summary:

Join primary school teacher of over 25 years and lover of creative technology Tim Rylands as he talks to podcaster Dom Graveson about his top ICT tips. Whether you’re looking for ways in which ICT can help you get creative, enhance learning or simply to facilitate your daily life, Tim’s A – Z of ICT tools provides listeners with a wide range of practical tools and techniques.

Podcast link

Link to EDUCA page here.

7 rules for measuring and delivering engagement

I am not sure if the world needs another ‘n rules of this or that’ either. However, these are ideas that have been hanging around for a while so I thought I would just put them together into a set of pointers and things to consider if you are developing a stragey for measuring and delivering customer engagement:

1 Be sure of your business objectives online. This one is so obvious, but I am still struck by how many businesses aren’t really sure what they are trying to achieve with their online presence. Awareness, sales, community, customer service, market research are all options to explore.

2 Know how you want to measure these objectives. What does success look like to you? It’s not just numbers of visits or unique visitors to your site that matters, in fact focusing on this can be a dangerous distraction. Look beyond this; what do you actually want people to do once they arrive? What would you call a successful encounter? Define your engagement goals – set the value of each transaction or interaction, and build these values into your analytics.

3 Get organized and plan what you are going to do with the data you are capturing. Buying in the infrastructure is only half the way there… that’s just a big spend of money. Plan your reporting and allow time to analyse and turn the numbers into something your board can understand and make decisions based on. As they say, ‘buying a Gibson doesn’t make you a great guitarist’. You have to understand what it means.. and act upon it… and that takes practice, transparency within the organization, and trial and error.

4 Roll your own reports and analytics. Reports are fine, but the ones you are likely to get canned as defaults within your analytics systems aren’t going to offer you much real value to your specific business. This is because until the analytics are linked to the value of your customer’s interactions, they cant tell you much. (To paraphrase someone: ‘Remember, its not the size of your audience that matters, its what they do that counts’)

… and don’t forget to cross reference the resulting reports with the experiences of your front line customer service people. They know the most about your customers anyway, and are probably trying to be heard. Ignore them at your peril

5 Supplement the numbers with qualitative – the what and the why. Involve your customers where you can. People like to be involved in discussions that contribute to creating new products and services they care about and use. Your audiences, hold them close and consider holding competitors customers closer still… Successful companies are now setting up panels of customers of their competitors and are asking them: why did you go buy elsewhere?

6 Engagement with Social Media is unavoidable outside the business and with Yammer and other internal systems becoming more prevalent, inside too. Learn about it, build it into your digital strategy and look upon it as the source of incredibly rich data and targeted audience exposure it has the potential to be.

7 Integrate online across your customer journey. If your business has shops, use them, don’t cannibalise or set them in competition with online.. Have your staff allow me to compare prices.. John Lewis are introducing free broadband so you can check whether its cheaper elsewhere… customers will always do this, where would you rather have the conversation? In your shop with your trained staff demonstrating the value of buying through you? Or while your customer is looking at a cheaper offer on a competitors web site? Think about it very carefully before setting on division of your business against another… it might seem a great way to drive cost effectiveness, but how will it affect the customer experience?

Ed said… Social media in the enterprise

More goodness from colleague and cScape creative director Ed L-W on the value of social media within the enterprise. here’s a snippet:

Many large companies are still thinking about how to embrace the social space and others have sophisticated social media strategies. For some, blogs, forums and collaboration spaces are all used as a matter of course on many intranets, but the take up of social technology on corporate internet sites is treated more cautiously. For others all things social is something to be used to spread messages.

The Chartered Institute of Personal and Development (CIPD) have embraced the social space on both their internet site with community forums, blogs, user ratings and comments and with wider social media activity. They are engaging their member base with Twitter, Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups to name a few. The CIPD realise that users are no longer passive recipients of content, they create via their social network profile or by adding comments to blogs or community forums. This allows for their consumers of content to not only be recipients but to also be heard and apart of setting an agenda.

You can find the rest of the article here

MediaPro talk online

After a great two days at Olympia, finally the conference organisers have followed up and now you can watch this video of my keynote talk on behalf of Sitecore at the MediaPro conference in London earlier this month…

I talk about the value of measuring visitor engagement as opposed to simple numbers (value vs quantity), how to develop a set of values for engagement for your business, and introduce the Digital Maturity Model.

By understanding the ‘digital footprint’ and ‘body language’ of your visitors, you can match the profile of your visitors to that of your content, in real time, delivering compelling, relevant and more persuasive experiences.

You can view the talk here

Up a bit, right a lot…

Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM) places Sitecore’s latest version well ahead of its previous incarnation and well ahead of many of its rivals – particularly along the ‘visionary’ axis… Quote from Gartner site:

The WCM software market achieved total worldwide revenue of $1 billion in 2010, despite recessions in many major economies, and Gartner forecasts that it will reach $1.2 billion in 2011 (see “Market Trends: Worldwide Web Content Management Market Is Driven by Enhancements to Online Channels, 2010″).

North America accounts for 61% of revenue, EMEA 28% and Asia/Pacific 11%. Gartner projects that the WCM software market will see a compound annual growth rate of 14% from 2009 to 2014, approximately twice that of the overall enterprise software market.

This growth has led WCM to constitute a greater proportion of the overall enterprise content management (ECM) market than ever. In 2010, WCM accounted for more than 27% of this market.

You can see more on the report here

Keynote at mediaPro 2011

Extract from article following my keynote at Media Pro 2011 (Olympia) with Sitecore.

Never mind the size, feel the quality….

If there’s one issue that seems to be burning itself into the consciousness of Customer Experience professionals throughout 2011 it’s the challenge of how to measure the value of customer engagement.

This should come as little surprise, not only is a thorough understanding the key to developing your strategies for the future, but equally importantly it’s the key to demonstrating ROI on activities which build improved relationships with customers. Now more than ever, demonstrable ROI is the basis for building sustainable online presence for your business.

In the tough uncertain times we live in, these customer relationships take a while to develop, and there is an increasing appetite across senior management to understand the iterative stages of the relationship rather than just demonstrating the results at the end of the customer journey. Not everyone who visits your site buys the first time, in fact most don’t, but that doesn’t mean you cant convert them later.

This is a good thing. Aside from the obvious drive for transparency, it also finally marks the end of the obsession with audience size and traffic which has somewhat blighted this field for the past few years. Marketers have been all too happy to simply measure numbers (more = better) without really understanding the quality of these audiences. The fixation with abundance hides the process through which a customer or prospect goes through to learn about and ‘become a friend’ with your product or service before they convert, and that process is the key to really understanding the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.

They say if you want to understand your customers, start by looking at your own buying habits… When undertaking a major purchase its rare one simply goes and buys it. More than ever before we are visiting a range of suppliers and competitors, reading reviews, engaging with communities across social media, a combination of on-site, off-site, online and offline activities go to make up buying your next TV, or laptop, or car. Research suggests 75% of customers enjoy over a dozen separate touchpoints
before buying something like this. It’s a journey alright, almost an adventure!

Lessons from offline

But was it always thus? Much has been written about the assault of online on bricks and mortar retailing, with high streets bearing the scars of a combination of changes to the way we shop over the past ten years. However, it is an art over 3 thousand years in the making and it will outlive us all if it holds on to the one thing which technology cant replace. The element of the human relationship between customer and retailer.

A good shopkeeper knows that success is built on relationships as much as sales. She remembers my last visit, answers my questions, allows me space to make up my mind, and makes suggestions based on what she knows of my context, time of day, even the weather. This is a powerful glue to bind a transaction together.

Lets return to the online shopping experience, being only perhaps 20 years in the making, is this anywhere near mirroring the face to face experience?

All too often online shopping is delivered through websites which are more like brass monkeys than local shopkeepers; they see nothing, hear nothing, and don’t say much either:

See? The view they provide of the customer is based on quantity of traffic and not value of behavior. Numbers not insight.

Hear? They might gather feedback through forms, etc, but aren’t really ‘hearing’ what your customers are saying

Speak? The conversation is based on pre defined ‘user journeys’ which are based on majority habits and are all to easy to fall outside of for many. Experience aren’t adaptive, and rarer still respond to my behavior.

Examples of this are all around us – search results tend to focus on offers which don’t reflect what we see when we visit the front page of the site they link to. When we arrive, we are presented with a generic front page trying to be everything to all and generally failing to engage with the personal context of users. I may be providing all sorts of information around where I am (location) and what I am looking for, but this is lost. Only those sites with advanced user profiling are able to adapt to my particular needs and desires and even then, this is based on an initial requirement for me to register.

You can find the whole article here…