NACCM 2005 - OK, we got it.

I just returned from the 2005 North American Conference on Customer Management (NACCM) in Orlando, FL. Well, it's official. Everyone now knows:

• satisfied customers are not equal to loyal customers
• you need to connect to customers on an emotional basis to create loyalty
• you need to know your customers to create lasting relationships
• creating loyal employees will yield loyal customers
• the senior most leadership in your company need to lead the effort to create a customer centric organization

How long ago did Fred Riecheld, Shawn Smith & Joe Wheeler, James Sasser, Patricia Seybold, Lou Carbone, Len Berry, Colin Shaw, and others write about this stuff??? Does anyone read Fast Company, Mark Hurst's Good Experience Newsletter, HBR case studies, white papers, reviews or any books by some of these illustrious folks???? I'll admit, some people put some nice presentations together and did a very good job summarizing the topics but, how many times are you going to cite Starbucks and Harrah's?

The real trick is doing it. It's about getting commitment in your organization to learn about what your customers really want, investing in the tools and technology that will support delivery of products and services that meet, exceed and anticipate customer desires, and aligning business units around serving one master => your customer.

It's tough to pull together all the information that's out there and for a large to medium organization, just figuring out where to start can be daunting but the key is,... to start. You can't learn anything until you start somewhere (and as Tom Peters reminds us you might fail and when you do you'll learn something from it. No great failures, no great successes.) . I have to highly recommend Shawn Smith and Joe Wheeler's book, Managing the Customer Experience , Lou Carbone's book, Clued In and Gerald Zaltman's How Customers Think. In Smith and Wheeler's book there are a set of assessment tools you can use to help understand where you are now in relative to developing consistent, intentional, differentiated and valuable customer experiences. It also includes many tools that you can apply to CEM.

Lou's book will help you understand that an experience is made up of hundreds of clues. These clues make an impression on us that in most cases are only acknowledged by our subconscious and affect the impressions and recollection of all our experiences (see Zaltman's book below). These clues can be identified, designed and managed to illicit the emotions in customers that result in loyalty and profitable behaviors.

Zaltman's book really helps you understand well,... how customers (and marketing managers) think and why traditional market research methods have been missing the boat.

Colin Shaw has done some impressive work but I have to admit, I've only just begun reading his two books. I'll post my thought when I'm finished.

There are many other great books on the topic, but the value you gain or your impressions of them will depend on where you are on the journey to improving your company's customer (and associate) experiences. Please post your reading recommendations, experiences in your CE efforts, and any lessons you've learned along the way and I'll do the same.

Shoot, post anything you want about CE!

Cheers!
- Chris

Welcome!

Well, I've gone and done it. I've created a blog. My intentions for this blog are to discuss and share information on the practice of Customer Experience Design and Management as well as help facilitate connections among professionals exploring this new business movement. I don't have anything pressing at the moment to post, but figured getting this set up would be a start. If not now, when? If not me, who?


Enjoy!

Chris