The document discusses developing customer experience management (CEM) best practices. It notes that CEM can provide competitive advantage for companies and data showing that companies with stronger CEM significantly outperformed the S&P 500 index and companies with weaker CEM over a 5-year period. It also discusses developing a CEM framework and Telstra's customer advocacy program, which aims to improve the customer view to better serve customers.
3. CEM
AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
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Bridges both consumer and B2B, pure product and pure service operations
6. TELSTRA GLOBAL
CUSTOMER ADVOCACY PROGRAM
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The 360o Customer
View will allow us to
better serve our
customers
7. GETTING THE PROCESS RIGHT
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INPUTS OUTPUTS
Requirements
and feedback
Requirements
and feedback
8. SOLUTION IS TELSTRA GLOBAL +
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Must evaluate whole
of product / service
Benchmarking Best in Class
partner program
9. WHAT DOES THIS BUY US?
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Definition of CEM, according to According to Bernd Schmitt (author of Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers): "The term 'Customer Experience Management' represents the discipline, methodology and/or process used to comprehensively manage a customer's cross-channel exposure, interaction and transaction with a company, product, brand or service." It’s ironic that in a world where product and service quality has increased to extremely high levels across price points and industries, it is still the overall brand experience with an organization that can provide sustaining differentiation and a competitive advantage. Good old fashion service and a fantastic experience appear to be a ‘back to the future’ situation, but this really should not surprise anyone Ex-Forrester analyst Harley Manning, now of Watermark Consulting, says: “ … We've entered a fourth age, which we call the age of the customer. In this age, past sources of competitive advantage have been commoditized: Now every company can tap into global factories and global supply chains. Brand, manufacturing, distribution, and IT are all table stakes. And with online reviews, social networks, and mobile web access, it's easy for your customers to know as much about your products, services, competitors, and pricing as you do.“In this age, the only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology-fueled disruption: an obsession with customer experience.”Today this applies not just to consumer experiences, also just as much as B2B.
While great customer experience seems like a sensible thing to do, it also has a bottom line impact:Consulting firm in the US Watermark looked Forrester Research’s Customer Experience Index ranking and ranked them as leaders or laggards and then performed addition analysis which found that:“For the five-year period from 2007-2011, the customer experience Leader portfolio outperformed the broader stock market, generating cumulative total returns that were 27% better than the S&P 500 Index and 128% better than the customer experience Laggard portfolio.“This pecking order of performance held true even on an annual basis. In all but one of the five years, the Leader portfolio outperformed the index, which in turn outperformed the Laggard portfolio.Leaders see higher revenues from better retention, greater wallet share, lower price sensitivity and positive word-of-mouth. They see lower expenses from reduced acquisition costs, fewer complaints, and the less intense service requirements of happy, satisfied, long-term clients.Laggards erode business value by creating experiences that are rife with friction – stoking customer frustration, increasing attrition, generating negative word-of-mouth and driving up operating expenses.
The nice thing about CEM best practice is that there are so many of them … you just need to pick one that suits your approach and strategy inclinationsFor Telstra Global, we are evolving an approach that focuses on a Customer Advocacy Program Aligning pre- and Post-sales processes and teams around common customer outcomesBenchmarking not just our performance, but that of our partners for a ‘whole of solution’ customer experienceThese three focus areas all have sub-processes and metrics but the goal is to improve the overall customer experience and therefore satisfaction
Goal is to provide a differentiated service offering that customer will find compelling and delivers significant value-add in terms of the engagementWe aim to become an extension of the customer’s own team – from pre-sales through to post-sales and ongoing project managementAs a global company we try and mitigate risk for our clients at all levels, integrating in-region experts in our teams to provide solutions for our clients that anticipate their needsTelstra has a more than 80 years’ experience operating in Asia, enabling it to be a successful bridge between the West and the East in terms of meeting customer needs from bothHow do we measure our advocacy program? Using the Net Promoter Score, which we put in place in 2010-2011
Within the Advocacy program, we have re-architected how are teams interact and engage on new and ongoing customer engagements (Three Triangles diagram?)We have significantly blurred the line between pre-sales, post-sales and ongoing program managementWe do this to avoid ‘chains of handovers’ and potential for miscommunications and errorsIt also enables the client to engage across our entire team to find the very best solution(s) to their needsCUSTOMER EXAMPLE?
Our business is often not just about our products, but those of our partners who provide solutions across the product chain, but also geographiesBenchmarking Best-in-Class partner programs to determine not just how we provide the solution, but how our partners doHave found that even language or concepts that we think are common, might not be, affecting the end customer Currently benchmarking 10 key partners in this way, an established cross-functional team to identify other partners – technology and geographic – to ultimately probably benchmark 30 or 40 so we are collectively provide best solution to customersCUSTOMER EXAMPLE OF HOW THIS HAS AFFECTED CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT IN THE PAST?
In the end, superior customer experience ensures better outcomes Helps us as a vendor garner credibility in the customer’s’ eyes and this in turn engenders trust and confidenceThat trust and confidence is maintained in ongoing engagements and delivering high quality services and products on an ongoing basisWhen there’s an emergency or other incident, the relationship is strong enough to be able weather most storms – especially if the emergency validates the customer’s trust in us
In summary, CEM involves all aspects of an organisation and its partner coming together to seek the very best solution for customersThere is no one-way to achieve great CEM outcomes, you have to adapt your systems, processes and engagement on an ongoing way, so it’s an organic process rather than a point in time.