A good case for not hiring a CDO (Chief Digital Officer)

Martin Gill at Forrester Research says don't hire a Chief Digital Officer. Chief Digital Officer (or CDO) is the latest in a long line of snazzy C-level titles to emerge over the last few years. At Forrester they’ve been watching this trend for a while now and have made a few comments, but Martin thinks it’s time to put a firm stake in the ground.

Now, why might he say this when a number of high profile firms are in fact hiring CDOs? Well, to put things in perspective he looks at a tale of three brands, all of which you'll recognize easily. 

Read more here: Why you shouldn’t rush out and hire a CDO | Forrester Research (Martin Gill)

Why should I invest in improving the Customer experience at my company?

It is reasonable to ask, if my company invests in the customer experience, will it work?

This question drove Watermark Consulting to evaluate the macro impact of customer experience excellence. They’ve accomplished this over the years by studying the total returns for two model stock portfolios comprised of the Top 10 (“Leaders”) and Bottom 10 (“Laggards”) publicly traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Index ranking. The results are stunning.

For the 6-year period from 2007 to 2012, the Customer Experience Leaders in their study outperformed the broader market, generating a total return that was three times higher on average than the S&P 500 Index. Furthermore, while the Customer Experience Leaders handily beat the S&P 500, the Laggards trailed it by a wide margin.

Keep in mind, this analysis reflects more than half a decade of performance results.  It spans an entire economic cycle, from the pre-recession market peak in 2007 to the post-recession recovery that continues today. The Customer Experience Leaders in this study are clearly enjoying the many benefits that happy, loyal customers deliver:  better retention, greater wallet share, lower acquisition costs and more cost-efficient service.

And the Laggards?  They are being crushed under the weight of high customer turnover, escalating acquisition costs and an uncompetitive cost structure that is inflated by each customer complaint and avoidable inquiry.

As a digital executive, do you want to be a leader or a laggard? You can be a hero and lead the way to an amazing ROI. Your customers will love you for it.

What is business technology? A slow but relentless revolution that is important to the digital executive.

We live in a world where simply trying to align technology with business units is becoming difficult or even impossible to achieve. Savvy business staff (via the Cloud and other means) can select, fund and enable technology without the traditional IT function.

Developing effective business strategy today requires us all to blend technology strategy and business strategy in the development stage of planning, not after the fact. Technology should be fundamental to all we do as we develop business strategy.

A slow but relentless revolution in which traditional technology management, historically delivered only by an IT organization, is changing to be pervasive technology use managed increasingly outside of IT's direct control and measured by boosting business results. --Forrester Research

I think characterizing this as a "revolution" is right!! The digital executive drives a partnership with all parties, technology, marketing, sales, communication, customer service, etc. The digital executive isn't independent but is open and interdependent.

Growing Constituents And Revenues Are Top Priorities For 2013

As more signs point to strengthening economic activity in the US and selected regions of other parts of the world, corporate austerity is fading and growth is back in the spotlight. Acquiring customers, improving the customer experience, and growing revenues have returned to center stage. Forrester Research recently asked more than 2,000 global business decision-makers at large organizations what their “critical” and “high” priorities are for the next 12 months. We found that:

• Their top priority is acquiring and retaining customers (73%).
• Tied for the top spot is growing overall company revenue (73%).
• The third most important priority is addressing the rising expectations of customers and improving customer satisfaction (68%).
• Lowering operating costs now only takes sixth place on the priority list (63%).

It is evident from these data that effectively managing customer relationships has become the top priority for business success.

Better customer experiences drive improvement for three types of loyalty: willingness to consider another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague. Forrester's models estimate that the revenue impact from a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s performance, as measured by Forrester's Customer Experience Index (CXi) score, could exceed $1 billion.

More here: Carpe Diem With The CRM Playbook: Growing Customers And Revenues Are Top Priorities For 2013 | Forrester Blogs.

What is the Customer Experience Index? Why should you care?

Is it ok to your investors to ignore money on the table by providing a mediocre customer experience?

Kerry Bodine, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, discusses what Forrester's Customer Experience Index is and what it means for you at Customer Experience Forum 2012 in Los Angeles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTlpizEuuHM

Related articles

• How to Build a Connected Brand through a Better Customer Experience (greatfinds.icrossing.com)


• Why some companies succeed without focusing on customers (customerthink.com)


• Who are the UK's 2012 Customer Experience Leaders and What Can We Learn From Them? (customerthink.com)


• Customer Experience and Outside In thinking (and our book about it) (forrester.typepad.com)

What is digital disruption?

What if someone with 1/10th your cost structure launched a full scale attack on your business tomorrow? Will you be a disruptor or be disrupted?

James McQuivey, VP at Forrester Research and author of Digital Disruption, discusses what Digital Disruption is all about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qGKoOkr-VU&list=TLTmiloly3zlI

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Why Customer Experience? Why now?

Kerry Bodine at Forrester, in a great blog post, writes that “For decades, companies have been promising to delight customers, while simultaneously disappointing them in nearly every channel. That tactic won’t cut it anymore. Why not? We’ve entered a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer — a time when focus on the customer matters more than any other strategic imperative.”

Here are 3 reasons why now:

• Commoditization has stripped away existing sources of differentiation. Competitive barriers of the past like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can’t save you today – one by one, each of these corporate investments has been commoditized.


• Traditional industry boundaries have dissolved. Companies in every industry find themselves competing with new types of competitors – automakers with services like Zipcar, newspapers with Google News, travel agents with Expedia, and the entire retail industry with Ebay.


• Customers have more power than ever. With online reviews, social networks, and mobile web access, it’s easy for your customers to know more about your products, services, competitors, and pricing than you – and to share their opinions of your company with their friends.

Related articles

• Excerpt from Forrester's Outside in (Manning, Bodine, Bernoff) (serve4impact.com)


• For Customer Experience, "Just OK" Is Not OK (fastcompany.com)

Tablets are the fastest adopted device in history

The use and adoption of tablets is exploding. Some just use it to access email on the run, others are using to easily show presentations to clients and customers and some are just having fun.

Tablets are the fastest-adopted devices in history. If we mark the modern tablet era by Apple's 2010 iPad launch, then an astounding 84 million iPads and as many as 120 million tablets in total have flown off the shelves in just two years. Forrester's global workforce and decision-maker surveys and client conversations show just how fast tablets are being adopted. What is your take on all this? As an iWorker, how are you using tablets?

• Three-quarters of a billion tablets will be in use by 2016. It took more than 20 years for the PC to reach an installed base of 750 million people. But tablets will surpass that mark in less than half the time. Global tablet sales will top 375 million in 2016 with about one-third of tablets acquired by businesses for employees. Back in 2007, we wrote that to reach the second billion users, the computer market would be driven by lower-cost hardware, useful applications, and easy access to the Internet from anywhere.Tablets fit that bill perfectly.


• Some 81% of firms expect to support tablets for employees. IT decision-makers are getting tablet fever as 81% of firms report interest in using tablets. According to these IT decision-makers, tablets will come into the enterprise via several doors, including employees bringing their own: Our latest survey of global information workers shows that 12% use tablets, and 8% paid for it themselves. And more than half of the 1,004 firms we surveyed plan to increase their spending on mobile devices and apps by at least 10% next year.
  


• Tablets will accelerate the rise of the anytime, anywhere information worker. Today, 15% of information workers use at least three connected devices for work, work from at least three different locations, and use at least seven apps for work. And 30% of information workers satisfy at least two of those three criteria. The rise of tablets will drive the number of anytime, anywhere information workers up. Tablets enable access from more locations and bring relevant and useful apps to make employees more productive.

via Forrester Research : Research : Mastering The Business Tablet Landscape.

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Are you thinking customer experience?

Passion for our customers is what it is all about. Here are some recent articles focused on the customer experience.

Protecting Our Data-Driven Efforts In a world that's ever-more reliable on data, some proposed policies in front of Congress threaten to hamper companies' customer-experience efforts. If Congress passes some of the proposed data privacy bills, personalization in marketing and one-to-one communications will deteriorate.

Data, Data Everywhere The new reality of marketing is one in which consumers expect a sophisticated level of personalization in their communications, offers, and interactions with companies. At DMA2012 in Las Vegas, thought leaders from all aspects of the direct marketing industry will converge to discuss and share best practices about how to help organizations move forward on the path toward integrated, one-to-one communications.

Why Some Companies Succeed--For Now--Despite Their Poor Customer Experiences Recently there was a question via email from one of Forrester's clients, who asked: "How do you explain the success of companies that consistently provide a poor experience but perform well financially?"

Delivering Customer Service That Makes an Emotional Connection Many companies strive to provide great customer service. However, few companies deliver the kind of customer service that makes an emotional connection with customers - the kind of connection that fosters loyalty and willingness if not an eagerness among customers to recommend a company to a friend.

Related articles

• Moving from Customer Service to Customer Experience (customerthink.com)


• Customer Service Drives Sales (customerthink.com)


• Reverse Customer Service Strategy (smallbiztrends.com)

Is hope a good strategy?

Is hope a good strategy? For many of us in business, it seems to be on some days. We can break out of that vicious cycle though. With business technology, we can bring clarity to the business goal and help with a workforce computing strategy that enables the business goal.When thinking of the workforce computing strategy, some questions to answer are:

• What is the measurable business goal?


• What capabilities are needed to reach the goal?


• What strategies is the business focused on?


• What culture is our business creating?


• What people, processes and information is needed?


• What are the current gaps that exist with our employee computing environment?

David Johnson at Forrester Research has just published Forrester's Workforce Computing Strategic Plan research. He  has some great insights.

How strange it seems then, that thousands of IT projects begin every day, but more than one third of them crash enroute. Why? I would argue that it's because there is seldom a clear destination in mind, a rational plan to get there, nor a viable system approach in place to execute the plan. Most of the time, the destination and the means to get there are only vague estimates, and the elements of the strategy are rooted in hope.

via What Is A Workforce Computing Strategic Plan...And Why Do You Need One? | Forrester Blogs.

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Are you tracking prospects from social media contacts?

This is interesting. It also seems fundamental. I am sure way to many of us are guilty of "believing the buzz about social media and aren't paying attention to a basic premise. It is about establishing relations and then generating sales.

I would be interested in your experience. Any thoughts? Are you converting social media contacts into prospects? Prospects into customers?

The University of Massachusetts released its annual survey of social media usage at Fortune 500 companies. The report revealed that in the past year, these business giants have increased their adoption of blogging by 5%, their use of Twitter for corporate communications by 11% and their use of Facebook pages by 8%. Sixty-two percent of the 2012 F500 have corporate YouTube accounts and 2% (11 companies) are posting on Pinterest. Sixty-six % of the F500 are now on Facebook. 73% of the F500 have active corporate Twitter accounts.

However, what caught my attention was another recent survey that the University was also promoting on the same web page. This survey examined how universities use social media to attract students to their MBA programs. The study showed the same sort of increases that the F500 survey revealed. However, the headliner take-away from this research was “The Missing Link in Social Media Use Among Top MBA Programs: Tracking Prospects” The report concluded that “the missing link appears to be tracking those who first become interested in the program through one of the program’s social media sites. Being able to measure whether these prospects actually apply to the program is something schools may be looking to do, but have not yet mastered. Without this piece of information it is difficult to really assess the effectiveness of the social media plan and to know where future investments should be made.”

via The Missing Link in Social Media Use: Tracking Prospects | Forrester Blogs.

 

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• Why is @rupertmurdoch on Twitter? The C-Suite Mystery (futureofbiz.org)

What kind of business technology scorecard do you use?

I have been working with Nigel Fenwick at Forrester Research to transform my Business Technology focus. He suggest to me that I use a new framework for our balanced scorecard. It made sense so I have transformed our senior management performance standards for this fiscal year.

I highly recommend the approach Nigel is advocating for in his blog. He has some great visuals in it as well.

It's time to re-think the report card used by CIOs to report on BT performance – tomorrow’s BT CIOs must look beyond the traditional IT Balanced Scorecard (BSC).

I realize this is sacred ground for many people in IT (and some of my colleagues here at Forrester), so let me explain myself before I receive a barrage of complaints. The philosophy behind Business Technology (BT) recognizes technology as integral to every facet of every organization – as such, IT is very much an integral part of the business; we can no longer talk about “business” and “IT” as if referring to two distinct things. I’m suggesting that in the age of BT, we need a new scorecard that better reflects the impact of BT on the business.

via Does BT Need A New Report Card? | Forrester Blogs.

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