success

Do you know the top three secrets of VoC success?

Strong Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs are a foundational element for any CX transformation. Transformations grounded in customer understanding lead to better outcomes for the business and for the customer.

And so it was on that premise that I compiled the three secrets of VoC success for a recent CMSWire.com webinar, in advance of my keynote at DX Summit in Chicago this November.

Successful businesses grow. Through better products and processes, they win the favour of customers, increasing their volume and margins. That success often translates into further advantages as they invest in new and better equipment, develop expertise and gain bargaining power with suppliers.

With 15 Academy Awards and an average worldwide gross of over $600 million per film, Pixar might just be the most successful creative enterprise ever—and one of the most profitable. Out of the 14 features the firm has produced, all but one have made the list of top 50 highest grossing animated movies.

Peter Thiel loves secrets. In his book, Zero to One, he makes a fervent case that unless you firmly believe that there are still things to discover, you will never achieve much. The most you will be able to accomplish is a small tweak on conventional wisdom and that’s no way to create value.

I wish to acknowledge members of the ‘methodology police’, whom I met recently, for being the source of this conversation. Please note that for the purposes of this conversation I will use the terms formula, recipe, method, script and template interchangeably.

1989 was a revolutionary year. From Berlin, Warsaw and Prague to Tiananmen Square and South Africa, the world order was completely overturned. Yet probably the most consequential event happened in a quiet lab in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In the 1950’s, Haloid Corporation thought it had a winning product. Through some clever engineering, it had created new technology that was leaps and bound better than anything that had come before it. The only problem was that nobody wanted to buy it.

I guess this is a general posting and not specific to the 50-plus.

You could say that all of the competitors, let alone the medal winners, are role models for marketers, and everybody else come to that. Dedicated to become the best in the world, disciplined and willing to keep learning. Not a bad set of qualities.

At the turn of the last century, AOL was the household name when it came to Internet access (not to mention a reliable source for spam CDs in everyone’s snailmail boxes). It was a portal...no, the portal to Internet experience through which people passed in order to access the content there.