Maz Iqbal

What is it to be a customer-centric enterprise?

Digital technologies can be used to improve Customer Experience. For example, by:

• Enabling the customer to do more more for him/herself e.g. check/update account information, find relevant information, set-up alerts, set-up event triggered transactions, make purchases online, get chat based help with queries or problems….
• Provision of data/information based services e.g. alerts that notify the customer that price of the ticket has fallen.

My Good-ish Experience

I rented some movies so that I could watch them over the Christmas break. This didn’t work out with two movies. In the midst of watching these issues cropped up. And the screen advised me to contact Amazon Customer Support. So I did.

This is the fourth and last ‘conversation’ in this series of conversations dealing with implementation. You can find the first three conversations here, here, and here.

This is the third of a series of ‘conversations’ centered on avoiding failure when it comes to Digital Customer Experience and/or CRM.  The first ‘conversation’ dealt with articulation-understanding-ownership of requirements.  The second ‘conversation’ dealt with the challenge of integration.  This third conversation deals with the matter of thinking/collaboration that necessarily

In the first part of this series, I pointed out that IT centered programmes that involve the term “transformation” tend to be complex and tend towards failure – failure to deliver the desired outcomes to time, to budget, to end-user expectations.  And, I dealt with that which I consider as one of the most important sources of failure – inserting business analysts between those who will be using the technology and those configuring/building that technology.

Information technology centered programmes are prone to failure. This particularly true for the large/complex programmes – in the business world these kinds of programmes have the word “transformation” in them like business transformation, enterprise transformation, or digital customer experience transformation.

There are many factors that contribute to failure. Today, I wish to focus on the business requirements that represent the demand that the technology must deliver.

It isn’t just Donald Trump that mixes tidbits of fact with much fiction to appeal to those eager to believe. This is also the case when it comes to the business world. Especially so when we get to customer-centricity, customer experience, customer loyalty….. Whilst some folks can tell that Trump is talking nonsense, in the Customer arena it is that much harder to separate fact from fiction, and useful advice from nonsense. So, today, let’s take a fresh look at customer retention and loyalty.

I enjoyed reading Richard Shapiro’s first book: The Welcomer’s Edge. In this book Richard, set out a 3 step model (the greet, the assist, the leave-behind) for making a human connection with customers through every customer interaction.