Outside Innovation

Evolving Your Online Strategy to Meet Customers'€™ Current Expectations

We'™re starting 2008 with a set of updated frameworks that reflect our most current understanding of best practices in supporting customers'€™ online and cross-channel activities. In the first few weeks, we'€™ve published our most up-to-date thinking around:

1) what capabilities you should have in search, navigation, and findability [See Susan E. Aldrich€'s  €œ"Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, Version 3,"€ January 3, 2008, http://psgroup.com/research_859.aspx; and "Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Matrix, Version 3,"€ January 17, 2008, http://psgroup.com/research_862.aspx],

2) what capabilities you should be able to support for online customer communities [See Matthew D. Lees'€™ "Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms, Version 2,"€ January 10, 2008, http://psgroup.com/research_863.aspx; and "Online Community Platform Evaluation Matrix,"€ January 17, 2008, http://psgroup.com/research_864.aspx], and, on January 17, 2008, we'€™re bringing you another leg of the stool:

3) what capabilities you should have in place to support customers'€™ shopping and buying (e-commerce) activities. We look in detail at the capabilities you should ideally have in place to provide state of the art customer service for customers who are trying to self-serve on line. We call this "€œAssisted-Service"€ for e-commerce. [See Mitchell Kramer's "Framework for Assisted-Service for Ecommerce: Requirements for Evaluation and Comparison of Multi-Channel Ecommerce Applications, " January 24,2008, http://www.customers.com/research_865.aspx.]

Should You Have Customer Brand Managers for Your Target Audiences?

As organizations move from product-centric to customer-centric, they often discover a missing core competency. They don’t have an executive with clout who acts as the advocate for each target customer audience (customer segment+role). Most companies have product marketing managers who represent the product line and ensure that the brand message, competitive positioning, and customer experience wrapped around that product are appropriate and consistent. But many organizations don’t realize that they also need a “brand manager for customer experience” for each key customer segment they serve.

Retail financial institutions are one exception to this rule. They often have VPs in charge of High Net Worth customers and/or for customers in different life stages and demographics (young adults, middle-class Hispanics, about-to-retire, parents with young children, etc.). Automotive brand managers are a hybrid of a product marketing manager and a customer segment/audience brand manager. Every car brand is designed to appeal to a particular audience. But these are the happy exceptions. Companies in other industries are beginning to realize they need “customer brand managers.”

One Laptop per Child XO

What’s special about the One Laptop per Child XO (http://laptop.org/en/laptop/) computer is that it is designed for children in third-world countries. The XO is a very impressive piece of consumer electronics engineering. It includes a number of breakthrough implementations: low power consumption, a display that’s easy to read in the sunlight, a built-in camera and microphone, a flash disk, child-friendly user interface and applications, and mesh networking – each laptop acts as a wireless network router as well as receiver.

I ordered my OLPC computer using the Give One/Get One program. For $399, you receive one XO laptop for yourself and sponsor one for a child somewhere in the developing world. Mine arrived before Christmas. It would have been great to know where the “sponsored” one went and when it arrived.

My goal: test the XO laptop to see whether it might be useful for the Girls’ School (http://urdt.net/girlsSchool.html) in Kagadi, Uganda – where 240 girls (8 to 17 years old) from low-income, rural households participate in a unique, successful, and proven educational program. Their co-curriculum includes the approved national curriculum plus applied courses in organic farming, appropriate technologies (solar, computers, internet, water treatment, sanitation, etc.), radio programming, journalism, drama, music, gender/sex education, and visionary leadership training. The curriculum also incorporates a two-generation approach – students empower their parents with the skills they learn and, through “back home” projects, work with their families to improve their family’s living conditions and increase their incomes. This seems to me to be an ideal application for these hardy, laptop computers that the students could use on campus and take home with them to enrich and empower their communities.

How did it do?

Amazon Kindle

I’m really enjoying my Amazon Kindle e-Book (http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA). I find the text display easy on the eyes. I find I use it just like a book. I read on planes, in bed, during solitary meals. For me, the most appealing capability of the Kindle is the ability to instantly download a book, newspaper, magazine, or article from Amazon at the drop of a hat. The result is that I’ve tripled my book purchases in the 3 weeks since I’ve been using my Kindle. This is great news for Amazon.

The Whispernet wireless connectivity is what makes this so easy. It’s virtually invisible networking. There’s no set up required. It just works. You can go to the Amazon store from the menu, navigate thru options (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.), or search for authors or titles. Then you can download a sample for free, and, if you decide you want to read more, you can buy it. The purchase is automatic. The transaction happens using your Amazon One Click settings. And it is possible to cancel the transaction if you change your mind or made a mistake. The selections available are good enough. There are a number of current and older books I would have liked to have on Kindle that aren’t available in this format.

Quick Takes on Consumer Electronics

Consumer electronics remains a vibrant and ebullient industry. This year’s 2008 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show was jam-packed as always. As an armchair participant, I won’t try to compete with all of the pundits who have already voiced their opinions about the most exciting technologies being introduced this year. What I notice are the patterns:

1. High-definition video is driving the appetite for large screens and HD downloads.

2. GPS and navigation technology has made in-car electronics a must-have for most families; not content with digital navigation devices, in-car electronics also include audio, video, radio, games, etc. You can travel the world in your electronic cocoon.

3. Smaller, thinner, cheaper, brighter, fewer moving parts, less energy consumed... the world’s designers are getting pretty good at designing and evolving nifty gadgets that take advantage of pervasive computing.

Customer Communities: High Priority for Your 2008 Game Plan

Why do online communities matter so much? One of the best ways to foster customer loyalty and to build deep relationships with customers is to host vibrant online communities. Even if 90 percent of your customers don’t actively participate in these online discussions or contribute to blogs or Wikis, they value the ability to see what others are saying. A vibrant customer community adds tangible value to your brand and your products.

Business customers and consumers tell us that they rely on their peers for information they trust. When customers research online, they often trust strangers more than they trust suppliers and brand owners when it comes to getting the “real skivvy” about something. (Caveat: Unscrupulous marketers have been known to sponsor “customer” reviews).

When customers want to find out which products will best meet their needs, they rely on customers’ ratings and reviews.

If they want to know how to solve a problem, they rely first on others who have encountered and solved the same issue.

If they want to get up to speed on a topic, understand a new discipline, or expand their knowledge, they look for knowledgeable subject matter experts, so they can eavesdrop on their conversations, get up to speed, and then feel confident asking a question.

Why Microsoft Is Acquiring FAST

On January 3, 2008, we emphasized the strategic importance of focusing on enterprise search in 2008 to improve the customer experience you provide. Microsoft seems to agree. On January 7th, Microsoft offered to buy Norwegian enterprise search provider FAST Search and Transfer for $1.2 billion. Here’s Sue Aldrich’s analysis of this latest move:

This is unquestionably good news for both FAST and for Microsoft. FAST had been a juggernaut of growth: in 2005 it was poised to overtake Autonomy, the other large search-focused ISV. But in 2006 FAST faltered, seemed to lose track of its identity, grasped at a series of strategies, and today is half the size of Autonomy. Microsoft will have no such strategic collywobbles.

Microsoft gains some strategic assets with FAST. Microsoft, until very recently, had only the most basic of search capability incorporated in its products. It’s difficult to comprehend that in so many years of investment Microsoft should have produced so little, but there you have it. In the past month, Microsoft has released its first advanced search engine, a first release that will take some years to catch up to the technology already incorporated in FAST’s Enterprise Search Platform (ESP).¹ With the addition of this technology, Microsoft could actually compete in the search market. Of course, before Microsoft will do that, Microsoft will have to integrate ESP into Microsoft’s software platforms, marketing strategy, and partner programs. This will take some time: Microsoft has leapfrogged its technical sophistication, but perhaps landed in mud to its hips, and there is a great deal of effort to extricate itself and get cleaned up.

What’s the Most Critical Core Competency to Master in 2008 to Improve Customer Experience?

Findability should be your organization’s highest priority in 2008. We’ve learned this from watching our customer-centric “Visionaries” in action. Clients like Tim Ingoldsby at the American Institute of Physics, Phil Gibson at National Semiconductor and GreatLifeStories.com, Sean Belka at Fidelity Investments, Christer Ljungdahl at National Instruments, Mark Keyworth at Agilent, Tom Kraus at ShopNBC, and Colin Hynes at Staples are consistent leaders in prioritizing search, navigation, findability. These influential and successful practitioners are consistently way ahead of the pack in:

1. Prioritizing search, navigation, and findability as a core competency.

2. Investing in people, skills, and technology to continually improve the quality and reach of search and navigation for their company’s Web presence and cross-channel customer experience.

3. Investing personal time and energy in ensuring high-quality search and navigation results on all their companies’ Web properties and e-enabled products (software, services, content).

Here’s to an Easy Upgrade from 2007 to 2008!

I love the energy the New Year brings! There must be something in the air when hundreds of thousands of people around the world crystallize their visions for the lives they’d ideally like to be leading. (My local radio announcer reminded me that January 1st 2008 was not only the first day of the New Year for many western cultures, but also the first day of the Gregorian calendar, and hence a “new beginning” for millions of people around the world.)

As I drowsed in bed this morning, grateful that the electricity had come back on during the night after a blizzard-induced power outage, I found myself comparing my feelings about the new and renewed life choices I have made and my experiences in upgrading or migrating from one software version to another of a familiar software package. In both cases, there’s a feeling of anticipation about the benefits of the new capabilities (better performance, less bloat, more efficient and effective, easier access to better resources, empowered, creative, smoother interfaces with others) combined with a feeling of dread that things won’t go as smoothly as I’d like (dead-ends, frustration, disappointment, loss of important stuff, needless rework, wasting time, giving up, feeling inadequate). The result: a desire to slide back to the comfort zone of how I’m used to doing things, instead of accepting the challenge of accommodating to the brave new life I envision for myself.