Customers running away from the competition, literally…

The video is over a year old, but I had never heard about it. Meat Pack, a sneaker store in a shopping mall, uses a GPS enabled app to track when you enter a competitor’s store and then offers you a discount at their store. Only catch is, the discount starts at 100% and decreases by 1% every second, so apparently you had about 600 people in a week while the campaign ran, sprinting out of those stores, straight to the Meat Pack store.

Just brilliant…

Time to get customer-obsessed

Successful companies get close to their customers
Customer Engagement Management (CEM) is still a relatively new term in the field of marketing, let alone in IT. Where Gartner estimated CEM related IT spending in 2010 to a mere $770 million, IDC has this year forecasted revenue from CEM related IT spending to grow to over $3,5 billion by 2016.

Good news for IT companies, but even better news for companies looking to adopt and improve customer engagement tools to enhance their competitive advantage, as it seems that chances are very high that compared to your competitors  you’ll be a leader instead of a follower by doing so.

Studies in 2010 and 2011 by IBM and Forrester respectively show that in order to be successful, companies still need to get closer to their customers. At first sight the current trends in social networking seem to be an immense boon to achieve this, as it’s never been easier to engage your customers online. Or so it seems. Because trying to manage these interactions isn’t the most obvious task, let alone using these interactions to measurably improve your revenue. Most of the time it means that marketing departments just get stuck with even more data to try and make sense of, plus several more channels to manage such as Twitter, Facebook or Pintrest. The combination of the immobility which big data can sometimes cause (call it a sort of analysis-paralysis) and the further splintering of marketing and communications effort across multiple (often independently managed) communications channels actually make that communication with your customer is in danger of becoming increasingly more impersonal and thereby less meaningful and unproductive for the bottom line. As long as you keep marketing to generic 25-40 year old men instead of to me personally, there’s still a lot that can be optimized…

Listen to customers to optimize how you engage them
This inability to consistently identify your customers across the multitude of channels and the failure to compound the information gained from those channels, leads to customers not having the unified customer experience they are increasingly demanding and expecting. Good marketing money is still not being used as efficiently as possible, and that’s putting it mildly.

Customer Engagement Management is a discipline combining Customer Journey design with the necessary tools to improve and integrate the customer touchpoints along that journey. Needless to say, this isn’t limited to merely IT tools and solutions, but I guess we can agree that IT has become a major element in current marketing budgets. In a day and age where the consumerization of IT has led to customers being the most tech-using ever, with high expectations about service and a very low tolerance for (digital) failure, it’s simply a fact that many of your touchpoints are of an IT nature, be they your mobile apps, website, Facebook page, direct emailings, down to the QR-codes on your printed media activating a YouTube video …

The ability to harness these touchpoints, in order to better listen to and understand your customers, by building up an enterprise-wide knowledge store about  their individual behavior and preferences would surely deliver a powerful support to your business. Such an “institutional” memory would allow more meaningful engagement, which will again help getting even more insight into behavior and preferences, and so on.

Learn more about CEM
If your business is mainly acquiring and servicing customers via online channels, or you are considering moving into these online channels, then you very much need to gain insight into the key elements of CEM, such as Social CRM, Marketing Automation, Big Data and Online Channel  Optimization.

P.S. I originally wrote this blog post for the RealDolmen Corporate blog

How to assess impact when the assessment takes longer than the lifetime of the thing to be assessed?

Today an article in De Standaard (link leads to article in Dutch) voices the worry of scientists that public wifi networks in cities will expose millions of people to radiation of which the long-term consequences for the human body have not yet been studied adequately.

The same has been said already many times about the cellular phone networks, but as long as it can’t be proven to be harmful, there is no real way to stop or delay the introduction.

Even if they start serious studies now, the time needed to accumulate enough evidence just doesn’t make sense compared to the lifetime of these technologies. For instance, it took many decades to accumulate enough data to show the relation between smoking and lung cancer in such a way that the facts basically couldn’t be disputed. Most studies nowadays are done so hastily that they at best show a minuscule bias one way or the other, with a near identical study often showing a comparable tiny bias the other way. And in the end nothing gets proven conclusively.

Do we really believe that say in 10 years from now we will still be using anything comparable to the current wifi networks to connect to the internet? I’m sure none of us could even speculate how the Internet will look like in 10 years…

Now, I’m not advocating the, “just go ahead and damned the consequences” approach, but what do you do in the cases where assessing the consequences would either mean seriously restricting progress, maybe even reducing it to a crawl, or where the assessment itself will be more or less meaningless due to the simple fact that the thing to be assessed will be many, many changes and iterations down the line making the assessment irrelevant?

I don’t have the answer…

Keep up or drop out…

Keeping up. Apparently you stop doing that as you grow older. Or at least that’s what some people would like us to believe. Each time I hear or read someone saying, “I don’t know about that, you seem to be forgetting I’m already 76 years old” it seriously gets on my nerves. Since when did age become an excuse for ignorance?

Of course the elderly are not the only ones reveling in their “ignorance is bliss” state. This week Seth Godin posted a rant about this very subject on his blog. I agree wholeheartedly. How can people justify not reading a single book in a year’s time, but at the same time they’re able to quote verbatim all the events, petty squabbles and other fait divers about drivel such as American (or other) Idol, XYZ-Factor or So you think you can dance/sing/juggle/talk in full length sentences…?

I admit that my interests wax and wane throughout the years. But just stopping your interest in what’s going on in society and with technology will prove to be disastrous. For the past 2 decades, technology could be leisurely observed by the curious, but as technology advancements accelerate at an exponential rate, it will become a conscious effort to keep up, no longer just a matter of mere curiosity.

Just compare, something like 30 years ago my parents bought their first color TV. That thing probably broke down about 12 or 15 years later. Going to the shop and buying that new one was not that different from buying the previous one. Now, I bought a state of the art TV less than 5 years ago. If that thing holds for another 5 years before needing replacement, and I haven’t kept up with technology, I will no longer recognize the TV’s available at that moment. I will probably need to be explained 50 new abbreviations, told about the new standards, realize that I need to hook up that TV to the internet and operate it with a remote that might look like or actually be a smart phone.

So, as technological advancement keeps accelerating, keeping up is no longer a luxury, but a necessity or you’ll be left behind…