Growth and the Customer Experience: 6 Principles That Are Simplifying Both
Two major business challenges are proving to be quite difficult for businesses: 1) Achieving profitable growth and 2) Transforming the customer experience (CX) in ways that improve business performance. That said, our research is showing dozens of companies having success in both areas by adopting a different mindset and approach, based on these principles: 1. […]
How to Electrify Your C-Suite
You have a high-stakes meeting with a new CXO, or a group of influential stakeholders, or perhaps your boss or boss’s boss. You’re concerned about the dreaded lack-of-real-interest creeping over their faces, that fatal glance at their smartphones. Here’s how to convert such ennui into excitement. In the last issue. I showed how to do […]
The Right Way to Hire Your Customers
Suppose I told you that you have access to a resource that is more empathetic, more interesting, and more persuasive to potential buyers of your products and services than even your best sales or marketing people. A resource that can do a significant amount of the marketing work that you’re spending lots of dollars on, […]
Winning the Elusive Marquee-Brand Customer Advocate
The marketing head of an ambitious technology firm recently shared with me a vexing problem: Apple was one of their customers. But the executive and her team could essentially tell no one. The restrictions that Apple placed on them were that airtight. It’s one of the sweetest moments a business can have: landing a marquee-brand […]
How to Focus a Customer Experience Transformation on Business Growth
In 2015, Finastra (at the time, called Misys)—a global banking software firm based in London—decided to pursue a compelling opportunity: to expand its business within its client banks. The firm seemed quite prosperous, with a client list that included 46 of the 50 largest banks in the world. But it’s penetration into many of these […]
Actively Including Your Customers
In my last article, we saw how a Total Customer Experience (TCE) approach to business operations is critical if you want to get serious about delivering a successful customer experience. Legacy business operations tend to be too siloed, and too focused on business objectives to the exclusion of customer needs. Here, we’ll look at an […]
BMC Tip Sheet: Bringing confidence and clarity to a high-pressure rebranding
The days when customer advocates primarily took reference calls from buyers and interview requests from the media are long gone. In what we call “advanced practices” (AP) firms[1], they’re using customer advocates at all stages of the customer journey—pre-sale and post-sale. Here’s an example showing how BMC used its customer advocates to bring confidence and […]
Top 7 Opportunites For Customer Advocacy Programs
Here are the top seven opportunities (challenges too!) for those working in the field of customer advocacy and related customer engagement programs. Needless to say, there’s never been a better time to be in this career-if you’re ambitious and enjoy the occasional whirlwind. 1. Master the Customer Journey. I don’t mean “learn.” I mean “play […]
Time to Get Serious About Marquee Customers
About a decade ago, former McKinsey consultant David G. Thompson conducted important research on how the fastest growth businesses are built. That is businesses that get to $1B in revenue faster than their competitors do (if they’re competitors make that number at all). One of the key drivers for the fast growth firms is their ability […]
Creating a Total Customer Experience (TCE)
In my last post, we looked at where legacy business operations go wrong. The very names—marketing, sales, product management, and even “business operations” itself—suggest an inward business orientation. The objectives that most firms pursue are clearly misaligned with customer needs throughout the customer journey. While business objectives are necessary, they shouldn’t be the primary focus. […]
