Deploying a Mobile Application Isn’t Enough – Mobile Experience Analytics completes the puzzle

Deploying a Mobile Application Isn’t Enough – Mobile Experience Analytics completes the puzzle

POSTED ON 25 JAN 15

COMMENTS 0

BY ALEX MASSIE

OUR THOUGHTS

Mobile Apps have become an integral part of everyday activities and a necessary part of how we all “do business”.  They are all the rage, and are only going to increase in popularity.  Gartner recommends that business leaders prioritize deploying mobile applications among their top initiatives for 2015.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently identified mobile banking as one of the four exciting breakthroughs in their annual letter to shareholders.  With so much emphasis on building and deploying new mobile applications, there is potential for missing a key part of successful mobile experience strategies – Evaluating what works, and what doesn’t – through analytics and reporting.  ClickFox has analyzed hundreds of mobile applications as an important part of customers’ journeys, and our key learnings are highlighted below.

We’ve learned that Mobile is an incredible channel for so many different reasons.  When done well, it can be incredibly popular and “sticky” for customers.  For one of our clients, 75% of their customers who use mobile – use mainly mobile – with little reliance on other channels.  On another front, because it’s instant gratification and self-service (interpret, no human), it’s a great indicator of true customer needs.  The sensitivity of having to justify to another human being why you’re calling for the 6th time in 2 days to check on the status of your payment  is gone.  Since the mobile application a) doesn’t judge and b) is RIGHT THERE and begging for your attention, customers just do it.  While not the primary benefit, in this way mobile can also provide an invaluable tool for prioritizing proactive strategies to meet customers’ insatiable appetite for information.

It’s unlikely that you’ll get everything right the first time you deploy your mobile application.  Visibility into usage patterns, most popular sections, journeys to abandonment, and least popular functions can drive critical identification and prioritization of the next steps to take.  For instance, what if you learn through analytics that for every 100 customers who begin utilizing the mobile application, 50 of them don’t return after their first 1 to 2 visits?  Or, what if you learn that the mobile application is incredibly functional for those that use it, but only a very small fraction of your customer base actually does so?  Those 2 very different insights would lead to executing dramatically different strategies for improving your mobile application.  In the first example, identifying the journeys taken that lead to abandonment, segmented by customer profile, would go a long way towards identifying the root cause of the problem.  In the second, it would be paramount to identify the types of customers who are “finding” the app on their own vs. not, and crafting marketing strategies to approach those who need prodding.

Mobile is an important piece of the puzzle, but not THE only piece of the puzzle.  Remember when 15 years ago prognosticators predicted the death of contact centers, as the web would take over everything?  We certainly have seen a substantial increase in the percentage of customer activity that migrates from live employees to the web, but it also has created a new phenomenon – more educated and empowered customers – who ask increasingly complex questions of your live representatives.  Mobile will be important, but, just like the web, it won’t be the end-all be-all.  Understanding not only how your mobile application is being used, but also identifying how it “fits” with all of the other touchpoints customers use during their journey is especially important.   Our research indicates that journeys are over 30% more predictive than individual events or moments of time for key business drivers such as customer satisfaction, complaints analysis and reducing churn.

Creating adequate logging must be one of your “pillars” during the deployment and modification of your mobile application.  Without a “cookie-crumb” trail of customer activity, time stamps, and customer identity when possible, understanding mobile behaviors and linking them to the broader journey will be impossible.  With tight IT resources and short deadlines, it can be tempting to sacrifice ample logging during the development phase, but this deploys an application on a shaky foundation to begin with and leads to long term viability concerns right out of the gate.

In conclusion, mobile applications are of increasing importance everywhere in the enterprise space, not only in serving customers.  It’s essential that leaders do three things as part of these projects to ensure they have a great mobile experience for their customers and employees.

1) Create a mobile application that offers customers and employees the options they’re looking to complete.

2) Create adequate logging and tracking so a record is made of the experience that can be analyzed later.

3) Analyze mobile experiences independently and in combination with other channels so that the full journey is understood and mobile enhancements are more grounded and strategic with understanding of the full customer or employee journey in mind.

Following these strategies can lead to a great mobile experience for your customers and employees.  To learn more about how ClickFox helps our customers with mobile and other channels as a part of the customer journey, visit www.clickfox.com.

The Pre-Mortem As Antidote To Murphy’s Law

FEBRUARY 11, 2015 BY ANTHONY GARCIA 8 COMMENTS

• inShare12

Things go wrong.  Murphy of Murphy’s law fame says so. In fact Murphy goes further by stating that whatever can go wrong will. It’s my experience that Murphy is usually right. So I am not taking a faith leap to tell you that right now things are going wrong with your customer experience.

And some of those things are costing you, costing you dearly.

Some of those things are obvious, and you are likely trying to fix them. Other things, not so much. And that is where your biggest opportunities for improvement exist. As well as opportunities to plan against them in the future.

Let me introduce you to the pre-mortem, the antidote to Murphy’s Law.

Gary Klein of the Harvard Business Review writes

A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure.

In our book, Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide, we describe the pre-mortem process as it relates to the Buyer Legends process.

• Begin by having your Team imagine that the customer has completed her (or his) buying journey and either didn’t buy at all, didn’t buy what you sell (in favor of an alternative solution), or bought from a competitor. Now ask yourselves:

  • What went wrong that led to these outcomes?Your intuitions about the most likely bad outcomes and most likely causes will be more insightful than you may think.
  • This process will give your team permission to voice doubts or fears about your brand’s interaction with customers that they might not otherwise feel safe in doing.

• For every wrong turn, missed opportunity, or bump that could derail the customer’s successful journey, take time to imagine how that process would most likely play out. For instance, how would this detail-oriented customer react if a major detail about your product is left out of their journey or if that detail was hard to find? What would that look and feel like, and at what point would that frustration or anxiety actually derail the sale?

• Now think up fixes, resolutions, and workarounds for each failure point. The point to the pre-mortem exercise is to give you insight into problems that exist in your current buying paths, so that you can then use it to immunize your conversion funnel from common (and not so common) mistakes that will keep your customer from closing the deal. Understanding these will help you write a more realistic and helpful Buyer Legend when you move onto the next step of Reverse Chronology.

The reality is that most companies lose more sales every day than they make, and we have stated in the past that if you are converting less than 15% you need to evaluate what is broken in your customer experience, get to the bottom of what is going wrong, and plan to get it right.  That is why, hands down, the pre-mortem step is the most impactful step of the entire Buyer Legends process.  In fact, rarely does this exercise fail to produce at least one a-ha moment for our clients.  When you imagine the sale is already dead it frees up all the mental energy that you used to try and get the sale and points it at all the potential pitfalls and problems in your experience.  A pre-mortem is powerful optimization technique but also imagine how powerful it is when you are designing a new customer experience from scratch.

After you perform your pre-mortem you will likely end up with a long list of potential proof of Murphy’s law, but not everything on your list is equal.  Some thing are worth your effort some are not.  In my work with clients we often use Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Optimization to separate the more pressing issues from the tinier ones.  First sort the list of problems into the follow categories.

Functional. Does this product/service do what the prospect needs? How easy is it for a prospect to determine this?

Accessible. Can she access it? What are the barriers to her ability to realize the need? Is it affordable, reasonable, and findable?

Usable. Is it user-friendly? Are there obstacles?

Intuitive. Does the sales process/Web site feel intuitive and natural based on her buying preferences? Is she forced to endure unnatural buying modalities to realize her need?

Persuasive. Does she want it? Does she truly understand if it fills her need or solves her problem? Is her expectation reasonable? Will she be delighted?

Once they are sorted simply work your way up the pyramid.  Again, remember not every problem is in search of a solution, and you should focus on the problems that are likely to impact the most customers, and problems that you can actually fix. Analytics can also confirm some of the problems you identified exist and give you an indication of which ones are causing you the most grief.

Performing a simple pre-mortem should be a common business practice, but the Buyer Legends process turns it up a notch.  A pre-mortem when used in conjunction with personas (I’ll cover these in more detail soon) will uncover more specific problems and allow you to address the unique problems that exist in more than one customer segment.

Be warned, the pre-mortem is not for those that like to play peek-a-boo. If you like to pretend that the only problems that exist are the ones that you can see then skip over the pre-mortem.  This is not an exercise for anyone that wants to hear the that their not so attractive baby is a supermodel.

We encourage you to try this for yourself, but if you need help , please let us know.

=====

P.S. This is the first in a series of Buyer Legends Recipe Posts, please sign up to our newsletter for updates.

Anthony Garcia (19 Posts)

Anthony Garcia heads up Client Services for Buyer Legends.  Anthony
began his career by way of radio broadcasting at the young age of 14.
After a 15 years in broadcast radio management Anthony became an ad writer and client
consultant for Roy H. Williams “The Wizard of Ads” and managed a portfolio of high profile
clients including Leo Schachter Diamonds and Robbins Brothers.  He went on to become
the lead consultant for Future Now Inc. working with Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg to help
clients like HP, Webex, and NBC Universal. Anthony has teamed up with the Eisenbergs
to work with such clients as Runa.com, OneSpot, Adorama, and Google.

Recipes For Practical Customer Experience Design & Optimization – Buyer Legends This is an important post that Anthony Garcia wrote on the Buyer Legends blog If I gave you a recipe some of you would be thrilled and others not so much. You can cook a gourmet meal that will have your taste buds fox trotting. I know that to be true. When it comes to food there are alternative ways to acquire a great meal. However, when cooking up great customer experiences there are no alternatives. If you want customers to to tell the only story that matters, why they love your company, you’ll have to learn how. Have you ever followed a recipe only to find that you aren’t ready for the third step? I have. The results? Frustration and a poor meal. A few years ago it was takeout or starve, but now, I love to cook. I credit mise en place, that’s French for having having everything in its place as you cook, for my conversion from takeout king to aspiring chef. Mise en place is a small amount of effort expended up front that actually saves me tons of time and guarantees tasty dishes. The Buyer Legend process is like a recipe for designing great customer experiences. You can use Buyer Legends to define and improve your content marketing, social marketing, search marketing, conversion rate optimization and thereby improve your communications, execution and revenues. You just need to follow the recipe. We’ve published a basic Buyer Legend recipe  but I’ll be adding more detail in this series. I’ve been training clients and staff in the Eisenbergs’ processes’ for over a decade, Let me show you how to prepare mise en place for the Buyer Legends process.  This is the first in a series of articles that will address each major step of the Buyer Legends process. Pre-mortem because it is the antidote to Murphy’s Law  First we’ll explore the most impactful step of the process, the pre-mortem. Some of our largest conversion wins over the last two decades ever were the result of our clients going through the pre-mortem exercise.  Murphy’s law states that everything that can go wrong usually will and a pre-mortem will help you spot previously invisible problems in your current customer experience as well as plan against future problems. But the pre-mortem step is not for the faint hearted as it may show you things about your precious baby that are not as attractive as you wanted to believe.  The only thing that makes a pre-mortem more powerful is by doing a pre-mortem on a persona by persona and then scenario/ campaign by scenario basis. Read the first Buyer Legend Recipe Post here... Reverse chronology because it explains conversions Assuming you have a product or service worth buying then you and your customers have the same goal.  You want to sell and they want to buy. That’s why when you are planning a customer experience it is always best to start at the end point and work your way backwards to the beginning.  This step requires you to get very specific about how and why every decision and action needs to be taken in the buying journey.  It’s specificity also makes this step important to measuring and optimizing your customer experience when you finally implement it. Your Buyer Legend isn’t fiction so every detail must be accounted for, not only that but you must create persuasive momentum at every step. Persuasive momentum because there’s no such thing as a sales funnel Your customer isn’t truly in a funnel. There’s no gravity compelling them through your experience like there is in a real funnel. There is only the customer’s motivation and your understanding of that motivation to create persuasive momentum. Persuasive momentum is the progressive decision making process that aligns the customer’s goals with our own business goals. I’ll show you the three step test that will insure your customers’ experiences are always relevant, valuable and compelling. Personas because their motivations become your action plan Personas are a common marketing tool, but their value is often misunderstood. Simply put, personas should inform you about exactly what you need to be doing. Personas can be elaborate constructs based on reams of research and data, or they can be constructed quickly with data and information at hand, but as long as they are directionally accurate reflections of a segment of your customer they can be powerful tools that will guide your Buyer Legends processes. I will be discussing how to construct ad-hoc personas as well as help you evaluate and if needed fix your current personas if you have them. Write a Buyer Legend because the only story that matters is your customers’ story This is the step when you actually pull out your pots, grab a spatula and fire up your burners.  I will tell you all the ingredients to include so you can have them at the ready. This is the step where all your previous work begins to pay off and when you’re done you will have an action plan that can be distributed, implemented, tested, and optimized.  A Buyer Legend is where the rubber meets the road. Measurement because if analysts cannot tell the stories and business people cannot measure the stories then the strategy isn’t truly aligned with customers’ needs. Your Buyer Legend isn’t fiction, it’s not for fun or for entertainment, or even for creative fulfillment.  This is business, and anything important to a businesses success should be measurable and accountable.  Buyer Legends are both and I will give you a primer on measuring, optimizing, rinsing, and repeating. The Buyer Legend process orchestrates your best efforts and reconciles them to the needs of your customers so you can create profitable customer experiences.  If you want to become even more legendary at using this process I challenge you to follow this recipe series. I look forward to your feedback, questions, and hearing your success stories. As always, we encourage you to try Buyer Legends for yourself, but if you need help, please let us know. The post Recipes For Practical Customer Experience Design & Optimization – Buyer Legends appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.     Read this post online...

SDL Customer Experience across all channels, devices, languages and cultures.

MediaBUZZ

SDL Customer Experience Cloud for seamless global customer experiences across all channels, devices, languages and cultures

Today’s businesses have to meet their customers’ expectations of getting consistently integrated experiences across all channels, devices and languages. But can they master the challenges? A recent CMO Council study, for instance, reveals that only 12% of CMOs have a real-time, well-integrated view of customer interactions across their enterprises and a Harris Interactive Customer Experience Impact Report study reports that 60% of customers would pay more for a better customer experience.
To address this gap, SDL just launched the SDL Customer Experience Cloud, a unified suite of offerings, to help marketers create and deliver seamless global customer experiences across all channels, devices and languages. By integrating web content management, campaign management, social intelligence and analytics, SDL Customer Experience Cloud gives companies the power to optimize multi-channel customer experiences from any device, understand brand health and product perception in real-time, and adjust campaign strategies to increase marketing effectiveness and impact revenue—from a single interface.
“The Customer Experience Cloud packs all the critical elements of customer experience management into one accessible suite and delivers on our vision that every marketer can meet the expectations of their global customer base and remain connected and responsive throughout the entire buyer journey” states Mark Lancaster, CEO, SDL.
“With thousands of customers all over the world, it’s especially important to have technology that allows us to engage with our user base in real time, in any language and context, from anywhere,” said Mark Terauchi, general manager, Corporate Brand Office, at Fujitsu. “We believe SDL can provide us with the ability to deliver a comprehensive customer experience, and the new releases from SDL will help us to advance our customer strategy more effectively.”
Based on customer demand, SDL has spent the last several years integrating its Customer Experience Management products to work together and to deliver the entire solution in the cloud.
Highlights of this new release include:

• A single intuitive user interface across all SDL’s CXM products that has been significantly enhanced to provide a seamless marketing user experience that is modern, easy to use and easy to deploy.
• SaaS delivery model for all SDL products, available now, with continuous enhancements quarterly throughout 2014.
• Industry-first, integrated CXM Suite which enable marketers to create engaging, personalized and contextual customer experiences leveraging real-time data to drive better marketing decisions.
• SDL Social is the only social intelligence solution with real-time analysis of social data and conversations across all social channels to effectively predict buying and brand advocacy across the entire customer journey.
• The introduction of SDL Language Cloud, the industry’s first cloud translation solution offering both machine and human translation for radically simplified global translation – enabling marketers to engage customers in their preferred language across all interactions quickly and cost-effectively.
• SDL Web Content Management is the first to enable marketers to easily target and drive consistent, contextually relevant digital customer experiences across all channels and devices from a single, intuitive interface.
• SDL Marketing Campaign enables campaign testing, simulation, optimization and advanced segmentations – enabling customers to drive large-scale campaigns faster and more cost-effectively.
• SDL E-Commerce provides advanced digital merchandizing features, which give retailers precise control over campaign context and prioritization over the placement of product and offers across search, navigation and promotional activities.
• SDL Analytics provides real-time customer intelligence to understand, target and convert customers across the entire buyer journey.
• SDL Documentation enables seamless post sales customer support by providing easy access to online materials including manuals, support information and other important documentation.

“By 2017, 70% of customer communications will be digital, contextualized and consumed on demand with multiple channels, including Web, mobile devices and social media. Enterprises are taking steps to provide a more personalized and engaging customer experience for traditional communications such as transaction documents, marketing collateral and point-of- purchase displays. Today, only 22% of those customer communications are digital — the majority are still paper-based,” SDL’s CEO says.
With more than 1,500 global enterprise customers — including 72 of the top 100 global brands — and 400 partners, SDL is one of the only vendors with a truly integrated, comprehensive customer experience management offering. And SDL Customer Experience Cloud empowers the entire organization from marketing through to customer support to understand, create, manage and deliver contextually relevant customer experiences that drive better marketing decisions, e-commerce success and long-term customer engagement.
By MediaBUZZ