April 2008 Newsletter

Dear Clients

In researching this month’s edition I came across these wise words at the ConversationAgency:

“Good marketers were always storytellers. Stories help build emotional connections with people, make the brand appear human, draw us in. These stories have to be supported by experiences. Compare a good brand experience with dating: The guy you meet might have the greatest story ever told but nothing is founded in reality. Result: You’ll run for the hills. When your brand overpromises through storytelling and underdelivers in the experience department, you have nowhere to go. And your customers will go somewhere else.

In the new marketing reality, experience specialists and storytellers have to work together. The goal: To create a scarce story that’s supported by a ubiquitous consumer experience. And that goes much deeper than advertising and marketing. That goes to the heart and soul of an organization. Because people want to connect with brands not on an intellectual level. They want to engage from heart to heart. And, dare I say, from soul to soul.” (Seth Godin)

Collaboration between people and departments is essential for delivering a consistently good customer experience!! It is essential to for marketers to tell a story that can be delivered. Marketers thus need to know what and how things are delivered and they need to have the confidence and commitment from other parts of the business that promises can and will be fulfilled. Brand Experience and Customer Experience Management go hand in hand. What you promise and what you say you will do must happen… not only in glossy pages, TV, Billboards and fancy media clips but in reality. How well do your teams understand your brand, the promises made and what they need to deliver on it? Consider asking the question… you may be surprised at the answers you get.

This month's edition of Customer Focus Times includes:

• To Build an Emotion-Packed High-Performance Brand, You Have To Go All the Way - Colin Shaw, Beyond Philosophy
• NPS: The next Six Sigma? The "net promoter score" for measuring customer loyalty is emerging as a favorite metric for managers seeking organic growth - Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey
• Customer engagement: A long engagement – Stuart Lauchlan

As always, if you would like to know more about how we can help you improve in the area of Customer Experience Management, Customer Relationship Management or if you have Research requirements that you think we could help with just give us a call or drop us an email, we would be very happy to talk.

Kind regards

Neil Stewart

Managing Director

 

---

 

To Build an Emotion-Packed High-Performance Brand, You Have To Go All the Way - Colin Shaw, Beyond Philosophy

“Too many organizations project one image in brand-building ads on TV but deliver an entirely different customer experience.”

Read the full article here...

---

NPS: The next Six Sigma? The "net promoter score" for measuring customer loyalty is emerging as a favorite metric for managers seeking organic growth - Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey

"I have little doubt that this will be as big and long-lasting for GE as Six Sigma was," a senior General Electric (GE) executive told BusinessWeek in January [see BusinessWeek.com, 1/30/06, "Would You Recommend Us?"]. The executive, Peter McCabe, chief quality officer for GE Healthcare, was talking about the "net promoter score" [NPS], a method of measuring customer loyalty.

Read the full article here...

SRD Group has used NPS with customers for the last few years and to make measurement of individual variables/questions easier has also introduced what we term NPR - Net Promoter Result.

---

Customer engagement: A long engagement – Stuart Lauchlan

In tighter economic conditions, customer engagement is more important than ever. And leading-edge firms such as Starbucks and Chrysler are embracing social networking technologies to ignite emotional connections with their customers.

Read the full article here...

---

The Last Word

“It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow