Technologies for a customer-first culture
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.
Another established technology, by Midland’s based company CRT, collects feedback at the ‘point of experience’, using touch screens, tablet pc’s and PDAs. The central ‘ViewPoint’ system enables users to easily set up surveys and deploy them to multiple touch devices. Data is then collected and uploaded on demand.
Three keys to its success are, 1) in giving feedback to a device rather than a researcher, it’s believed that people are more honest, therefore the feedback is more accurate, and 2) CRT have a data filter and quarantine system, Valid8(tm), which ensures that feedback is genuine (it filters out kids messing around etc), and 3) feedback gained at the ‘point of experience’ is 40% more accurate than that gained 24 hours later (Gartner Research quote).
Various retail stores use CRT’s technology, but also Police and NHS hospitals. More at http://www.crtviewpoint.com.
S Rowland
December 31, 2008 at 6:44 pm