The Experience Design Scout

A customer-first culture is ’a set of shared beliefs, values, and behaviors that guide employees of an organization how to deliver superior customer experiences’.

Here is a list with ‘new’ technologies that can help management teams build and support such a culture inside their companies. I’ll try to add technologies over time through updates.

• Yammer. Basically Twitter, a microblogging platform, in house. By answering the simple question ‘what are you doing right now?’ the technology’s premise is that employees will get more productive over time as they share and discuss ideas, documents, and links. More communication means better coordination across departments which means increased accuracy and quality in customer service delivery.
•  Virtual Heroes. Virtual Heroes builds learning simulations as virtual worlds. For Hilton the company developed an interactive training game featurinig several scenarios where employees can practice interactions with guests. Built as a PSP game, hotel team members are shown how their actions impact the hotel and guest’s mood, which in turn (virtually) impacts the company’s Satisfaction and Loyalty Tracking scores.
• salesforce Ideas. Sales reps and marketers can collaborate, vote and provide feedback on key marketing material (like collateral, ads, and presentations). Users can also tag and bookmark content so the best material shines through the ‘clutter’. One of the best applications of salesforce Ideas is that it allows firms to create employee communities around new ideas. Harrah’s Entertainment is one of the users of salesforce Ideas.
• fizzback. Through text (SMS) messages, forms and other media, consumers can leave feedback to anything they have experienced inside a store — from the way front-line staff treated you as a customer to random ideas such as ‘why don’t you use energy-saving light bulbs?’ The information that Fizzback collects can be used in a various ways. It even claims to be able to drive behavioral change of employees. Managers can forward a comment to a specific team to follow up on an idea, or send a positive customer comment straight to an employee to motivate him or her. Fizzback also claims comments can help to initiate healthy competition, and for appraisal and compensation purposes.

Please leave a comment if you are working on or know about other technologies that can help build a customer-first culture.

The McKinsey Quarterly just published a new article on cxp — Maintaining  the customer experience with some interesting points (quotes) on the question “How can consumer businesses make necessary investments in service while facing the pressure on revenues and costs?”

• Our review of the companies with the best customer service records in ten industries suggests that one key is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of satisfaction.
• In short, these companies have carefully measured the “breakpoints” to find their customers’ true sensitivity to service level changes.
• Finding these savings requires rigor in customer experience analytics: the collection of customer-level data, matching survey responses to actual behavior, and statistical analysis that differentiates to the extent possible between correlation and causation. 
• It also requires a willingness to question long-held internal beliefs reinforced through repetition by upper management. Many will discover that long-held but seldom-reviewed assertions about what customers really want are wrong. The executive in charge of the customer experience needs to have the courage to raise these questions.