Here is what do I take away from that slideshow :

1. The targeted users must already feel a strong need to collaborate and be somewhat frustrated with the existing tools like emails, central folders, intranet … well open to experimentation;
2. The wiki launch must be supported with a strong positioning strategy and integrated with other entreprise 2.0 tools like blogs;
3. The wiki acceptation process can be improved by allowing everyone to participate and even accept personal pages;
4. The results of the wiki implementation should be measurable and concrete to the users, which was obviously the case here;
5. Training users and having wiki events will increase the chances of success;
6. Do not underestimate the technology challenges, be prepared to invest significant time in this project;

So, here I am toying with the idea of introducing Entreprise 2.0 wiki and blog concepts. I feel both could be excellent for knowledge sharing, interaction, reporting, meeting planning, well a new way of getting a return of investiment on the market research, statistical analysis and competitive intelligence work my team does. I realize moving forward with this could be suicidal. I’m not sure I would be able to create adoption, participation and intense interaction. But you know what? I’m going to try anyway…slowly.

So, in the next few weeks, you’ll see a lot of posts just presenting information on entreprise 2.0 best practices. If I’m lucky, I’ll find good case studies related to customer knowledge. And if I’m even more lucky, readers of this blog will contribute with relevant comments and examples. Let’s start with this rather high level presentation found that presents the wiki concept in business and provides a good list of risks and adoption success factors.

Market conditions demanding more competitive intelligence :

• Increased costs mean companies need to keep a closer look on what their competitors are doing;
• Recession times force everybody to become more productive ans strategic;
• Emerging economies introduce new, low-cost entrants, competitors;
• New technologies and Web tools create opportunities to track competitor actions.

How will competitive intelligence evolve :

• Competitive intelligence will need to be both local and international;
• Its focus will habe to include market dynamics and trends as well as customer needs ans expectations;
• Competitive intelligence reporting needs to be more strategic to highlight the risks in a manner high management will quickly grasp … and more practical to stimulate action at the customer facing level;
• Competitive intelligence must play an integration role and connect the many parts of the organization linked to market forces;
• It can also be an important change agent in the organization, showing how things are done elsewhere;
• Competitive intelligence must be more proactive than reactive.

Succes factors :

• Introduce new techniques for information gathering, think outside the box and be open to creative strategies;
• Effective communication of the findings is key, present them in offensive/defensive perspectives or in a way your colleagues can translate in actions;
• High management absolutely must understand the strategic importance of competitive intelligence, invest in this function and pay serious attention to its findings;
• Train the competitive intelligence agents properly

Being in charge of competitive intelligenc ewhere I work, I’m obviously sold on the idea that the role must become more strategic. I can only agree that a paradigm shift is needed. But I must say we can start by closely looking at how we translate information in strategic customer knowledge. Let’s face it, our colleagues are swamped in information, they receive way too many emails. That’s why I’m always looking for new and improved ways of producing knowledge, which is different than information, and communicating in a user friendly fashion.

If you read a lot about the challenges of offering good customer experience or if you attend conferences on that subject, you will most often “learn” about the same old reasons why dealing with customer facing employees is rarely something consumers look up to. And when you think of it, that is not a realistic objective. No CEO wishes for its customers to love its call centre so much that they would call just to chat a little with the nice people that work there. Still, you want to avoid these customers to hang up in rage, which happens way too often. The funny thing with the experts writting about the reasons why so many companies fail to offer good customer service is that they almost always neglect a very important element, probably because they don’t offer consulting services in that area…

Here is what you usually get told :

1. Customers have raising expectations these days. You should stop everything and launch a major customer research that will help you prioritize their needs and set new standards to meet their increased expectations. This is not a bad thing and you’re lucky because many consultants and research firms can help you do that customer research. No efforts on your part, besides spending the money.
2. You’re dealing with isolated data silos. That’s bad and extremely common. Almost all the customer facing facing employees are working with systems that don’t gather all the relevant data on the customers … or they have five different systems from which they can get the information if they know where to search. This is an IT problem, extremely costly to resolve, but you can do it, they’re only machines and databases after all.
3. A similar challenge is not having the complete information on your clients, hurting your performance when you want to serve them properly. Maybe you can create new fields in your system interface … and allow a few more seconds to your agents so they can ask for the missing data. Again, this is nothing you can’t do if you really want to solve the problem.
4. A profound lack of resources, either monetary or in terms of body counts is also very common. Unless you can really prove that a lousy customer experience makes you lose a lot of money, you can’t solve that challenge. This is a simple case of ROI calculation. You can’t go to your boss and say we are going to spend 5 millions to integrate all the databases we have related to customer information and, by the way, we need to hire 50 additional agents.

These 4 elements are pretty straightforward and I pretty much can’t prevent myself from yawning if I’m sitting in a conference and the guy in front goes on about them. What I ear a lot less is the need to improve employee satisfaction as the most important element of customer satisfaction. Why? Because it’s a nightmare to resolve and very few consultants actually specialize in that area. I don’t and I wouldn’t want to. But I’m always scared to go in a call centre and find demotivated and bored employees profoundly sceptical about anything management has to say. It’s very difficult in these situations to think any improvement on the 4 elements listed above will make a difference.

On the filp side, it’s amazing to see what motivated employees can do with bad systems, data silos and missing customer informations. They will definetely go the extra mile and you will hang up the phone with a smile on your face…

One of the most obvious area of improvement for professionals involved in customer knowledge and all types of analysis aiming to create strategic informations for the benefit of marketing decision makers is reporting. Too often, great findings are not optimized simply because the people like us are not able to present and communicate them in a way that is interesting, clear and action oriented. Let’s face, 9 out of 10 times analysts will get lost in way too many graphs, bullet points, numbers and questions for which not answer is provided.

Too help, here are a few prosentations related to score cards that I find worth your time. Personnaly, my fear with high level score cards is that they summarize too much … and they definitely don’t do justice to all the efforts that I put in to produce them. My only satisfaction with them is to see that the people I want to take action look at them, actually understand them and, oh my god!, start discussing action plans to improve the indicators.

Depending on the type of marketing job you have, a recession will impact you in very different ways. Take for example the glamorous colleague in your department who is always dealing with the incredibly smart agency people trying to figure out who should be the next talent in the TV ad, which sporting event the company should sponsor or, even more important, what tagline should be used at the end of the jingle planned to be recorded next week. You know who I’m talking about? Well, that colleague is heading for hard times because the marketing budget for these rarely effective marketing activities will either be dramatically reduced without discussion or extremely scrutinized for proof of return on investment, the ever so famous ROI indicator we forget to calculate when marketing spend is going out of the roof.

But if you take all of the customer knowledge people, the market research specialists, the database marketers, the statisticians and even the competitive intelligence underground agents, well they suddenly become more popular than ever because now their capacity to make their colleagues smarter about what they do and how they spend is really needed. His this the revenge of the nerds? Not really, I don’t want to stereotype anybody. But it’s undeniable that if you’re one of the marketing analyst people, this is the time for you to shine.

Don’t go dreaming now, nobody is going to throw incremental research and analysis budget your way unless you’re very lucky. But at least you will find a lot more interest in many crucial facts you’ve been trying to communicate simply because so many marketers will be pressed for results, hungry for data and strategic knowledge. If you play your cards well, build your internal network, this is an opportunity for you to be nice with everybody and create new habits to position yourself as a key player.

Here are some of the obvious focus a recession imposes on a marketing operation :

• Test to improve the ROI, which might even mean start measuring if that is not already the case;
• Segment your customer base either to make sure your best customers are retained or to guide acquisition of customers similar to your best segments;
• Track what the competition is doing, they might just become more aggressive and under the radar tactics should be witnessed;
• Analyze customer behavior to identify promising trends, therefore knowing you high potential customers and treating them well;
• Avoid acquisition efforts targeting promotional hoppers;
• Plan well targeted offers to steal good customers away from your competitors, these customers just might be looking for a good deal … make sure you steal the good ones.

If you had a chance (or the displeasure) of reading the other articles of my blog, my preference for simplicity is no surprise to you and this Ruined Iphone campaign is extremely simple. Visit the site and in an instant, via the one minute video embedded below, you’ve learned the purpose of the campaign. The links to take actions are also clearly presented, no flashiness about anything. Maybe it’s the fact that Canadian cell phone consumers are so badly served that makes the campaign so effective. But the strategy ans simplecity of the Web 2.0 tools is also beneficial.

The results? Close to 55K petition signing in less than 4 days! The rate will increase and Rogers will have to react. The reaction to such Web 2.0 public relations crisis has become an art. I’m very curious to see who wins that battle… I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been working hard lately at convincing my colleagues, or should I say internal customers, to simplify our approach in customer satisfaction monitoring. They think it’s because I’m lazy, but the real reason is we are asking the customers to evaluate us on way too many things, some of which we should already have the answer and some others that are just too complex for customers to understand.

Since, I’m going through the pain, I might as well communicate some of my conclusions in no particular order :

• There should always be one metric that sums it all. The rest is nice to have and useful, but what is that one indicator that really tells you you’re doing great. For me it’s the % of customers who would recommend my company. If you’re looking in a detailed way at the work of employees, it’s the % of customers who would want to deal with that same person next time.
• Are you measuring things for which you can’t take action? That’s a waste of time. If you don’t mind wasting your time, that’s fine. But maybe the customers mind.
• Are you measuring metrics linked to real business objectives? That really helps to make those indicators meaningful.
• Can you explain what causes dissatisfaction on a specific? If not, find answers or stop asking the question.
• Did you validate what’s important to customers? Too many companies start without doing that.
• Don’t work with averages, you need to look at “completely satisfied” and “completely dissatisfied”, leave the rest for later.
• Are you boring your superiors with your complicated reports? You should really make customer satisfaction monitoring something that is easy to understand and to track for everybody, even high management!
• Open questions are hard to analyze but they provide very relevant information, you should have one overall and take the time to compile the verbatims.
• Customer satisfaction monitoring is a continuous process, too many corporations are content with a punctual measure and then they forget about it.
• Ultimately, you need to link satisfaction with behaviour, you might be surprised to find out happy customers are not always loyal. That can mean your not measuring the good satisfaction element or that competition is strong enough to lure away happy customers. Also, you want to know if your best customers are happy or not.

Voice of the customer programs can take the form of a qualitative research done in one on one sessions or everyday interactions with customers in which your aim is to find out what is really important to them and how you can improve to better meet their needs. You could also do it by organizing focus groups or by putting in place a program targeting your customer facing employees to involve them in voicing the customers’ needs. The choice to select one of these approach depends on the size of your customer base et the type of interactions you have with your customers. But you could also decide to use all three approaches.

Regardless of your choice, these best practices are always relevant :

1. The program must be sponsored by the high management team and have a global vision. Customer satisfaction is impacted not only by customer facing employees. Here it’s important to communication that the CEO is behind the program.
2. Be fore launching your program, do your homework. There is a lot of unused data and information in corporations. Analyze it and then go out and find out stuff you don’t know or confirm things you found internally.
3. A voice of the customer program should not be complicated, keep it simple. Since this should be mostly qualitative, you want to build a process to gather information, not methodological barriers.
4. Prepare yourself to help the respondents clarify their feeling, it will make the analysis much easier. If you don’t contribute to making their thoughts more structured, you will have problems categorizing what you will find.
5. Select the customers you want to talk to. The purpose here is to find improvement opportunities … to make your best customers more satisfied.
6. Support your findings with other data. You probably have quantitative surveys, industry reports, market information, complaint processes, etc…
7. Make sure you respond to expectations you will be creating with the program. You can’t go out there and ask people what they feel you should improve and then do nothing.
8. Voici of the customer is not a “one off” type of thing. It’s a continuous process that you can optimize with time.

I notice large corporations tend to make customer satisfaction measuring a very complicated thing. When you think about it, it should be easy for a customer to express feelings about products and services offered to them. But in an effort to identify too many details related to causes of dissatisfaction, the surveys presented to the customers often wind up being extremely long and sometimes ridiculous.

In customer satisfaction projects, research specialists usually have internal customers who are evaluated on high level key performance indicators (KPIs). The main objective of surveying customers should then be to provide solid quantifiable measures to track how the company is doing against those exact KPIs. But guess what, those internal managers want back up to explain why they are not doing so well (ideally coming from other department so they can point the finger somewhere) and also find the root causes fo customer dissatisfaction. These two additional objectives often generate more questions in the survey, making it too long and irrelevant for the customers.

That’s why I’m always fighting for simplicity in such surveys. You need to identify the minimum number of customer service dimensions needed to measure your performance. I find this article from Forrester interesting because to made it very simple for customer to evaluate their service/product providers: was the customer experience easy, useful and enjoyable. And, aren’t those three things what we want and what you should offer your customers?

Just three questions with a simple scale for answers and there you go. I know, this is probably too simple to look like it’s a serious approach. And that is why we see so many long and complicated surveys to produce a huge amount of data that managers spend hours looking at to realize in the end they got lost along the way of improving their customer service…