In Seeing the Big Picture: Business Acumen to Build Your Credibility, Career, and Company, Kevin Cope, puts People at the center of his 5 Key Drivers: “People make the decisions, supply the financial resources, buy the products, provide the labor and services, and otherwise create and contribute everything else about a business. They drive cash, … Read more
You all know my evangelism for iterative prototyping… Well, you can imagine my joy when I saw this month’s Harvard Business Review dedicated to “The Evolution of Design Thinking” and a great article by Tim Brown and Rodger Martin on “How to use design thinking to make great things actually happen.” According to the article, … Read more
“As far back as 1966 the phrase “word of mouth advertising” was coined in a Harvard Business Review article by Ernest Dichter, the father of motivational research (and the “focus group”). He exhorted the ad community to move from acting as ‘a salesman who tries to get rid of merchandise,’ to the new role of ‘a friend … Read more
Danny Peters is Customer Experience consultant at Conexperience, specializing in Customer Journey Mapping and Customer Experience Management. He posted 6 Steps to Build a Customer Journey on LinkedIn Pulse. He breaks down CJM in six steps: Step 1 – Episodes: Episodes are groups of touchpoints in the customers’ journey. An episode is like a chapter … Read more
In my younger artist hippy days, I believe that “money was the root of all evil.” As I got older, I realized that money itself was not evil and could be used to do a lot of good – the problem was capitalism and how it was “driven by greed!” Then I realized that capitalism … Read more
We are at the intersection of three maturing technologies: mobile devices, cloud services and big data analytics. Experience Makers collect, correlate and analyze data from their customer interactions across channels to learn, anticipate and simplify the experiences they create for their customers. In the Forbes.com post, Using Big Data and Machine Learning to Enrich Customer Experiences, Kurt … Read more
Sales job is to find and acquire new customers. Services job is to retain and grow the current clients. Product needs to support both theses objectives. The product needs to provide features that new customers are looking for and features that retain and grow the current client base. In most cases, features that retain and … Read more
“We know from our history that while promotions may win quarters, innovation wins decades.” – Bob McDonald, Chairman, President, and CEO, Proctor & Gamble The company spends billions annually on R&D – roughly 50% more than its closest competitor and more than most other competitors combined according to How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate. Each … Read more
Customer experiences must be contextually relevant, personalized, and synchronized across the channels that they frequent. Organizations need to go beyond demographic, psychographic and geolocation segmentation and capture, analyze and execute on behavioral data about their customers. Smart organizations deliver the right message or offer at the right time through the right channel to the right … Read more
From Wired Innovation Insight’s blog, The Marketing Tech Differentiator: True Contextualization, Dennis van der Veeke shares with us: “Organizations today often rely on multiple technologies to provide the relevant data points needed to drive customer experience. These systems, however, tend to lack seamless integration with each other, resulting in a disjointed brand experience. To meet … Read more
If there is such a thing as a Design Thinking geek – I’m it. My new favorite Design Thinking technique is Empathy Maps. Empathy Maps are a tool to help synthesize your observations to discover insights about your target audience. Empathy Maps are to Design Thinking what SWOT Analysis is to business. They are simple … Read more
Just last week I ran a customer journey map (CJM) workshop at FICO World 2014. I always enjoy the enthusiasm for customers and engagement around designing better customer experience that happens at these workshops. The secret to any good workshop is to facilitate an environment of trust where the participants can be free to share … Read more