Customer Obsessed E-Book

Eric Berridge

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 345

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Optimize the customer experience via the cloud to gain a powerful competitive advantage Customer Obsessed looks at customer experience through the lens of the cloud to bring you a cutting-edge handbook for customer experience. Cloud technology has been hailed as a game-changer, but a recent IDC report shows that it accounts for less than three percent of total IT spending; why are so many companies neglecting such an enormous asset? This book provides a high-level overview of how the cloud can give you a competitive advantage. You'll learn how to integrate cloud technology into sound customer experience strategy to achieve unprecedented levels of success. More than just a state-of-the-field assessment, this book offers a set of concrete actions you can take today to leverage cloud computing into technical innovation and better business outcomes at all levels of your organization. You'll examine the many factors that influence the customer experience, and emerge with the insight to fine-tune your approach using the power of the cloud. What kind of advantage is your company leaving on the table? This book guides you through the key drivers of customer success to help you optimize your approach and leverage the future of global technology. * Learn the keys to competitive advantage in the digital era * Gain insight into each element that affects customer experience * Harness the power of the cloud to achieve customer success * Follow a prescriptive framework for optimizing customer experience We are in the golden age of IT innovation, but the majority of companies haven't even adopted cloud technology, much less begun to utilize its full business capabilities. Jump into the gap now, and reap the benefits as other struggle to catch up. Customer Obsessed gives you the guidance you need to achieve sustainable success in today's digital world.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Data

Design

Culture

Chapter 1: Disruption and Business Success

Chapter 2: People Drive Change, Technology Enables

Technology Game Changers

Build People Relationships, Not Technology Products

Rules for Engaged, Customer-Focused Businesses

How to be a Good Listener

Communal Enterprise—Rise of Reed's Law

Chapter 3: Why Social Matters to Every Business

Why Social?

“Social Media: Creator or Destroyer?”

Social Can Change Everything

Using Social

Social Payback

Social for Customer Service

Bluewolf's Social Payback

Building a Social Culture in Your Organization

Make It Easy

Light the Way

Iterate and Refine

Building an External Social Presence

Benefits of Building a Social Culture

Social Media ROI

Chapter 4: Rethinking Employee Engagement

Unifying a Diverse Team

Workers Matter to Success

Employee Engagement (or Lack Thereof) and Productivity

Creating a High-Energy, Customer-Aware, Employee-Driven Workplace

Strategies to Improve the Employee Experience

Chapter 5: Customer Engagement Defined

Customer Engagement

Customer Experience 101

How Customers Buy

Changing the Historical Mind-Set

Feeding Data into UX Design

Get Personal

Art of the Possible

Chapter 6: How to Win the Talent War

Attrition: Curse or Blessing

Ascend

Management Academy

Dashboards

Agile and Elastic

Work-Life Balance

Technical Skills

Conclusion: Drastically Competitive Job Market

Chapter 7: Gender Diversity Isn't a Plus, It's a Business Imperative

State of Diversity Today

Economic Case for Gender Diversity

Organizational Benefits of Gender Diversity

Chapter 8: Right Time, Right Moment, Right Channel

Bridging Customer Service and Social

Communities

Call Centers Still Matter

Customer Service Excellence, Not Case Management

Chapter 9: Turning Data into Action

The Challenge of Data

Data Integration/Migration/Quality—A Salesforce Recap

Data Silos/Democratization

What You Can Do Now

Mobile and IOT

Executive Action

Chapter 10: How Good Design Creates Seamless Experiences

Design

Simplicity

Convergence of Data, Design, and culture

Power of Storytelling

Mobile

Chapter 11: Digital Marketing: Standing Out in the Sea of Sameness

Marketing: Crash Course

Importance of Brand

The Customer Journey

Marketing Campaigns (or, How You Structure and Measure Your Marketing Initiatives)

Leveraging Technology

Multichannel, Omnichannel, Universal

Content Marketing

Final Thoughts

Acknowledgments

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2

Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2

Figure 3.3

Figure 3.4

Figure 3.5

Figure 3.6

Figure 3.7

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Figure 8.2

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Figure 8.5

Figure 9.1

Figure 9.2

Figure 10.1

Figure 10.2

Figure 10.3

Figure 10.4

Figure 10.5

Figure 10.6

Figure 10.7

Figure 11.1

Figure 11.2

Figure 11.3

Figure 11.4

Figure 11.5

Figure 11.6

Figure I.1

Figure I.2

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Chapter 1

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Customer Obsessed

Awhole Company Approach to Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences

Eric Berridge

Cover design: Bluewolf

Copyright © 2016 by Eric Berridge. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with the respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom.

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Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

ISBN 978-1-119-32603-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-119-32604-5 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-32606-9 (ePub)

Foreword

Fifteen years ago, Eric Berridge and I sat in a coffee shop and discussed how Salesforce would be a game changer for businesses. Salesforce had a vision to revolutionize enterprise software—with a new technology model based in the cloud, a new pay-as-you-go business model, and a new integrated corporate philanthropy model. Today, Salesforce has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a Fortune 500 company, the largest customer relationship management (CRM) company, and one of the most innovative companies in the world.

Companies of every size and industry now expect to do business with the speed, agility, and economics delivered by cloud, social, mobile, data science, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Like Salesforce, Bluewolf has always prioritized the needs of customers and brought to life not just the technology but also the strategies that help customers accelerate their growth.

In his book, Customer Obsessed: A Whole Company Approach to Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences, Eric shares what he has learned over the last decade and a half of helping companies create the next generation of digital experiences on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. He looks at data, design, and culture through a customer-first lens. Utilizing data, including real-time analytics, and designing intelligent customer journeys are key to knowing customers and engaging with them across sales, service, and marketing at every touch point.

But more important than the technology is building a company culture that focuses on the well-being of all stakeholders—not just shareholders, but also employees, customers, our communities, and even the environment—to achieve the highest levels of success.

As business leaders, we have a responsibility to improve the state of the world. Contrary to what the famous economist Milton Friedman said or what many of today's business leaders think, the business of business is not just business. The business of business is to improve the state of the world, and I've found that making the world a better place and climbing the Fortune 500 rankings are not mutually exclusive.

Eric offers incisive advice for establishing a stakeholder culture and connecting at an emotional, rather than transactional, level. As he points out in the book, millennials—who make up at least 50 percent of the workforce—are teaching us that the future of work lies in creating workplaces where employees feel a higher sense of purpose. That means fully integrating values like equality, diversity, transparency, and giving back to the community into the fabric of a company.

This is what we have done at Salesforce with our equal pay initiative and our 1–1–1 integrated philanthropy model, which leverages company resources for public good by donating 1 percent of product, 1 percent of equity, and 1 percent of employee time to help nonprofits achieve their missions. Bluewolf has committed itself to diversity and giving back via the Pledge 1% movement, donating 1 percent of its equity, time, and product to nonprofits.

This book reaffirms why Bluewolf is a leader in the cloud consulting industry and a Salesforce Global Strategic Partner. Customer Obsessed offers insightful, practical strategies for any CEO, entrepreneur, or business desiring to understand what it takes to be a customer-first company, establish a thriving culture, and drive success through all levels of their business.

—Marc Benioff

Preface

It's no secret that cloud computing is our global technology future, and while there are many cloud solutions available, Salesforce and its ecosystem are the dominant players in today's customer relationship management (CRM) market. They have 18.6 percent market share, their closest competitor has 6 percent, and International Data Corporation's (IDC) 2015 report highlights the tremendous growth of the Salesforce ecosystem—$272 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) impact worldwide by 2018.1

For over 15 years, Bluewolf has been customizing Salesforce and delivering transformative results for clients, and we're just scratching the surface of this immense opportunity. Why is that? While public cloud spending surpassed $50 billion worldwide last year, it still represents less than 3 percent of total spending on IT.2 We are still at the inception of IT innovation, but more than ever, we're seeing companies recognize the value of Salesforce and other cloud solutions to transform their business. We are also in the midst of the evolution of design and design thinking, two business elements that are beginning to appear more and more in forward-thinking conversations. As these markets grow together, we'll start seeing some powerful results and partnerships between Salesforce and companies like IBM iX.

As Salesforce's longest running partner, Bluewolf has a deep understanding of how and why Salesforce's technology helps deliver an exceptional customer experience. While we consider ourselves technology agnostic, Salesforce plays a large role in our work and features prominently in many of the stories and examples you'll read in this book.

While Bluewolf uses Salesforce, the purpose of this book isn't to sell you on their particular cloud solution; it's to take you on a journey through the current digital landscape and provide insight into how to sustain competitive advantage in a diverse, rapidly evolving global economy. Whether or not you use Salesforce, this book will provide you with a strategic framework to drive business transformation for your organization and your customers, and give an understanding of how cloud technology influences, and is influenced by, current trends and developments in design, analytics, and customer and employee culture.

If your company has already embraced Salesforce, this book should help to uncover ways that you can use it to gain a better competitive advantage; if your company is thinking of using Salesforce, this book can show you how to avoid early pitfalls and become a best-in-class user of it; and, lastly, if your company uses a different solution, this book will give you the secrets to replicating the success of Salesforce in your own environment, to the extent that is possible.

Notes

1.

John F. Gantz, Darren Bibby, Chris Ingle, Philip Carnelley, Maria Gabriella Cattaneo, and Bo Lykkegaard, “The Salesforce Economy: How Salesforce, Its Ecosystem of Partners, and Its Customers Will Create More Than 1 Million Jobs and Add $272 Billion to Local Economies in the Next Four Years,” IDC White Paper, August 2015,

http://www.sfdcstatic.com/assets/pdf/misc/The-Salesforce-Economy-White-Paper.pdf

, November 2, 2015.

2.

Gantz, et al., “The Salesforce Economy.”

Introduction

Good ideas fail all the time. At the end of every year, the technology literati draw up lists of failed inventions and enterprises, pointing out the pitfalls and mistakes made. This practice has its roots in more than schadenfreude. Their desire, and that of their readers, is to understand failure and to learn from others' stumbling blocks. They want to learn how to succeed (that is, make a profit) for themselves and their customers, and studying past failures is an excellent exercise in what not to do.

Great products and services are the sum of many failures, each carefully combed through to pick out the good and discard the ineffective or detrimental. Take, for example, the iPhone. When it was first released, it was—and still is—a massive success, a true game changer in mobile technology. But Apple didn't start with the iPhone; it started with the Apple Newton.

The Newton was a play for the Palm Pilot market and was released with huge fanfare—handheld, mobile, new user interface, celebrity CEO, great expectations—and yet Apple pulled the plug less than a year after its release. Wired magazine called it a “prophetic failure” and they were right.1 The Newton, based on a cultural hypothetical and vision of the future, heralded a new age of technical innovation. It didn't fail because it was a terrible idea—it failed because it missed the mark in three key areas: data, design, and culture.

Data

Data was not the Newton's strong suit. It allowed the user to input data, but it was static and didn't connect to anything—zero interaction with a larger network.

Design

While the Newton looked cool, there was nothing in the design that trumped what consumers were already using. It was cheaper, faster, and easier to use a $3 notebook.

Culture

We weren't ready for the Newton—we didn't need it. We were barely using cell phones 22 years ago. And when a culture doesn't need something or can't see the value of it, failure is imminent.

Contrast the Newton with a product like Uber. Uber has achieved success because it delivers in ways the Newton could not—live data; simple, intuitive design; and a culture ready to embrace a ride share service that saves time and delivers a better experience.

If we were to map out Uber's success, their path to profitability would look a little something like the framework in Figure I.1.

Figure I.1 Bluewolf's Business Outcomes Framework

Uber's strategy lies in delivering on those four business outcomes: acquisition, expansion, cost reduction, and retention. Not every play supports all four, but every single action involves at least one (see Figure I.2).

Figure I.2 Uber Initiatives Mapped to Business Outcomes Framework

This book is about business survival for the rest of this century. It starts and ends with an obsessive focus on the customer and the ways in which customer experience is affected by other critical issues: the war for talent, employee engagement, leveraging data analytics, collaboration, creating the right culture, hiring and retaining good employees, even technology, although that last point will play the smallest part.

In today's intensely competitive digital world, there is an extremely high threshold for success, which filters out the “good enough” from the best. The purpose of this book is to provide you with a strategic framework to elevate your organization to the upper echelon of customer experience and drive profitability at all levels of your business. Here you'll find real examples of global enterprise success that Bluewolf helped guide to fruition, as well as essays by and interviews with industry leaders. Whether you have concerns about analytics, governance, or gender diversity, this book will provide the answers to the question of how to compete successfully on all fronts in the current digital landscape and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Note

1.

Mat Honan, “Remembering the Apple Newton's Prophetic Failure and Lasting Impact,”

Wired,

August 5, 2013,

http://www.wired.com/2013/08/remembering-the-apple-newtons-prophetic-failure-and-lasting-ideals

, October 17, 2015.

1Disruption and Business Success

Remember Kodak, the little yellow box factory out in Rochester, New York? They seemed like they had been part of our lives since…forever. But everything changes, and some organizations manage those changes better than others. When was the last time you bought a box of Kodak film, or any film for that matter?

Kodak, the photography giant, failed to navigate the shift from being a chemical company selling film and processing to the era of social media. Kodak thought it was competing with digital photography. Wrong. It clearly didn't understand its customers. Its customers were not buying digital photos. They were buying memories and creating and recreating their identities. As soon as a better alternative emerged, Kodak was toast; simply not agile enough to recognize and make the change.

So, what was that better alternative for creating identities? Facebook started it all, followed by other social media giants like Instagram and Twitter. And you can count on the memory-making business changing again. Maybe it will come in the form of the Apple watch or another type of wearable, or maybe in the form of something altogether different.

But just imagine if Kodak had built a bridge from film to digital photography to digital identity and then conceived social networking. It might be singing a completely different song today, a much happier one.

Growing up, I remember watching sweet, sappy Kodak TV ads around the holidays. They were filled with creating and sharing images of families and friends, loved ones, aging parents and grandparents, babies, new boyfriends and girlfriends. It was about capturing and replaying the customer's memories and using them to build their identities. Kodak approached the social revolution threshold, but never took those last few steps.

Not only do companies like Kodak change, but customers change, too. Today's customers are like water—they will seek the lowest point, driven by gravity to save time, to lessen the friction of buying, to align with products and services that provide transparency and objectivity and help them preserve memories and form and reform their identities again and again.

That's how I started this book—by focusing on customer identities and customer service. Customer focus is not about the heroic moments—it's not The Ritz-Carlton finding and returning the stuffed animal left behind by a guest's child. Yes, the Ritz excels at customer service, but that has little to do with finding lost stuffed animals. Great customer service is really about knowing what a guest needs even before the guest knows; it's realizing the photos are not just about memories, but also about identity. It's about noticing that a guest will be delayed due to weather or a flight disruption and won't arrive until 2 AM. Knowing that, you send the room key code to the customer's mobile device so they can go straight to their room upon arrival without even stopping at the check-in desk.

Better yet, heroic customer service is Berkshire Hathaway Travel rebooking your connecting flight because they know you're still sitting on the tarmac. They immediately text you updated travel details, relieving you of the worry and aggravation of further delays. Or it's your cloud software vendor serving you tangible data about your usage, which actually helps you to drive more return out of your investment.

Customer service and customer engagement used to rely on the heroic moment—the rare action that becomes a legendary tale of customer engagement which was heroic mainly because it was rare and unexpected. In that dark, murky, vendor-driven world of the past 50 years, customers often had little choice but to simply take what came. When exceptional service truly happened, it occurred because someone went out of the way to actually recognize a customer need and align with it without being asked.

Today, customer engagement has shifted. Customers don't just take what they get; they arrive with an expectation that the brand—the vendor—knows what the customer wants before they do. Paul Papas, head of IBM iX, put it perfectly when he said, “The last best experience anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere.” Companies need to master customer engagement in order to become that last best experience. Customer engagement is defined by making every customer moment count, regardless of who is delivering it. And to make every moment count, we have to know who our customers are, where they are, what they are experiencing, and what they like and need. On top of all of that, we then have to act on that information and be correct most of the time.

This isn't as hard as it might seem. One of the biggest changes we have seen in the past five years is a customer's willingness to reveal personal information in an effort to receive better service. In 2011, I gave a presentation to a group of about 100 students at MIT. I asked them point blank: raise your hand if it disturbs you that Facebook is selling your data. Not a single hand went up. Now couple this willingness to share personal information with the availability of social tools to broadcast these likes and dislikes, and suddenly the vendor of yesteryear is presented with a new challenge and an astonishing opportunity to serve the individual tastes and desires of all of its customers. Yet, most still don't get it, and that's the reason for this book.

The challenge comes from the fact that the consumer and the customer are moving faster than legacy vendors can react. That's why start-ups often succeed against established brands. Start-ups have the ability to quickly leverage the network effect of our connected world to leapfrog basic services and expose almost every established business to one threat or another. That's always been the case, of course, only now it seems to be happening faster and more often.

So what do customers actually want? There are many answers, as many as the 7.4 billion people on the planet, but after a six-year global polling effort encompassing 150 countries, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup and author of The Coming Jobs War, was able to reduce it to one: what the world wants is a good job.1 This seems ridiculously trivial until you parse the sentence. The key word is good.

To succeed at customer obsession and engagement, companies need to find, hire, and retain people who will be engaged in the organization and, most important, with the customer regardless of whether the customer or the interaction falls specifically under their job description. Engaged, customer-focused employees at all levels are required if a company is to become customer obsessed and experience the success that invariably follows.

Clifton wasn't referring to jobs bagging groceries in a supermarket or ripping admission tickets at the neighborhood cinema complex (another industry desperately remaking itself in the face of streaming media options that dramatically change how customers view movies; essentially anywhere, at any time, from any device, at a range of prices). He was referring to the kind of jobs you need to offer to build an effective customer-obsessed organization. To Clifton, a good job means a job that gives the worker sufficient, steady work that will sustain them over time. He goes on to write: “A good job defines your relationship with your city, your country, and the whole world around you.”2 That also includes the vendors of products and services whose customers will be spending some of the proceeds of that good job with them. Those are the people a customer-obsessed organization needs if it is to know and anticipate what its customers and prospective customers need, even before they know it.

True customer engagement and customer obsession happens when a brand is aligned with a need, and until now, too many brands have survived focused on their own needs, not the customers' needs. Does the legacy brand attitude in Figure 1.1 sound familiar?

Figure 1.1

Businesses across the world are being disrupted and upended because the rise of digital has enabled some organizations to identify the true needs and desires of customers and fulfill them. And alignment with those needs requires organizations to completely rethink their go-to-market approach and, perhaps even most important, to rethink their employee culture, which lives at the heart of customer engagement.

Maybe your business is one of those being disrupted and upended, or you suspect it is vulnerable to that. Congratulations; reading this book is a good first move. Or maybe you are one of the disrupters who fear you could also be upended someday. This book will help you, too, by showing what you need to keep the momentum going.

Let's start with the assumption that your business already has customers or you expect to have some. Let's also assume that you have, or intend to have, employees and partners (suppliers, providers—whatever you want to call them). I present these assumptions because the days of the lone wolf are over. No business (and certainly no individual) can do it all alone. Collaboration is the new byword for success. That means you are going to have to collaborate to succeed. The era of the vertically integrated enterprise that did everything it needed to create and deliver the product to the customer ended in the first half of the twentieth century. Like it or not, it is a new era. The landscape has changed dramatically and continues to shift. Think Netflix. Think Amazon. Think Apple.

Our world is fast becoming customer-centric. Just listen to the chatter around big data. That might lead you to believe that technology will provide all of the answers. Sorry to disappoint, but technology alone cannot save you in this new customer-centric, collaborative world. This really is not about technology. Is it important? Yes. But no technology gadget will be a savior. The power of the network and social, however, can be a game changer when done right. The instinct of the upstarts to leverage the power of social networks is one reason they are able to leapfrog established enterprise players. Technology that can make frictionless, unnoticed connections with the customer is valuable. But even then, technology alone isn't enough.

To remain relevant, companies must continuously innovate to deliver an exceptional customer experience. The way to do that is to not only be customer-centric but customer-obsessed. To do this, company leaders must be focused on driving customer obsession throughout the entire company. That means you need to enable your employees to understand your customers as people with individual stories. You also need to tie that focus to the delivery of specific, measurable outcomes. Customer focus without an understanding of how it impacts your bottom line may help in the beginning, but it won't be enough to drive and maintain profitable, positive change.

Think about it: customers don't care about being served by the so-called right department. Instead, empower your employees to own any customer interaction they touch—however and whenever it may occur. Customers don't care if they are working with someone in accounting, production, or sales. They want their needs met and even anticipated, whenever and wherever you can do it. This kind of customer-centric service requires the free flow of information and collaborative knowledge, which means tight integration between back-end accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, front-end customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and anything else that can help satisfy the customer's need. Internal silos must become invisible or nonexistent. Information should flow freely among departments and employees, between everyone and anyone who might encounter the customer in the effort to solve their problems or questions.

Granted, such innovation and engagement across the enterprise has the potential to be chaotic. Companies must be willing to embrace some chaos for the sake of succeeding in the emerging customer engagement economy, which dictates companies continuously respond to—and preferably get ahead of—the needs of their customers. To that end, every employee and customer touch point must be mobilized to better understand customer needs and improve customer engagement. At the beginning of this chapter, I referenced Berkshire Hathaway's response to travel difficulties. Their story offers a compelling example of how to understand and engage with customers.

Berkshire Hathaway Story

Background

Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection (BHTP) is a division of Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, which provides commercial property, casualty, healthcare liability, and professional insurance for customers across the United States. BHTP has reinvented travel insurance for today's mobile consumer and the evolving airline industry with AirCare™, travel insurance designed specifically for airline flights that proactively monitors and pays claims when travel mishaps arise.

The Problem

While the insurance industry handles highly personal information, it has been slow to adopt personalized, customer-focused technology solutions. BHTP wanted to design a new, disruptive consumer travel-insurance product, but needed partners to build out a system that leveraged flight data, processed claims, and provided the customer-engagement platform. What BHTP was looking for was a one-stop-shop travel-insurance app that would facilitate communication between the service agent and the customer across all channels. To accomplish this BHTP engaged Bluewolf to help build the platform needed to launch AirCare.

The Solution

Bluewolf helped BHTP develop the back-end systems to build out their one-of-a-kind AirCare insurance. The result was an end-to-end policy administration system on the Salesforce1 platform. We integrated BHTP's policy data into Salesforce, which was then integrated with a quoting tool for generating policy quotes, Drawloop for document creation and automation, Amazon S3 for document storage, and a payment processor that connected to BHTP's backend general ledger. The app became a real-time system of record, allowing information to flow continuously from policy conception through claim administration.

Bluewolf focused on building an insurance app that also acted as a cloud-based personal concierge service, with SMS and social media integrated into more traditional channels, like e-mail and phone. This allows BHTP to provide travelers with mobile updates and communications through various social channels. The integration paired AirCare with Salesforce Marketing Cloud as well as the Salesforce Service Console, and implemented a robust agent interface that allowed agents to interact with customers through their channel of choice.

The Results

Bluewolf helped BHTP build and launch AirCare in just six weeks. BHTP assists AirCare customers with travel itinerary repairs, helps locate lost luggage quickly, monitors flight status in real-time, and can even help travelers get access to airport club lounges—all via text, e-mail, web chat, and even Twitter. The platform serves a new generation of travelers and gives them simpler, smarter coverage that can be managed end-to-end on a mobile device. Its proactive claim processing pays claims in seconds using a myriad of electronic payment platforms, with funds transferred directly to the traveler's bank account.

By providing the right information at the right time, BHTP can manage and report on the entire customer journey. Today, BHTP uses this system to process all its claims across multiple product lines, giving the company the power to personalize the customer experience and develop new ways to service travelers.

I consider this kind of customer obsession and engagement the essential organizing principle of twenty-first-century enterprise success. It is the only viable response to the emergence of a customer-centric world that calls for implementing strategies that fall somewhere between a wrecking ball that demolishes all you have been doing and lip service where you say the right things but make no changes that reflect what you just said. Although the wrecking ball produces heroic customer-focused actions here and there, it is not enough. A better strategy is to embark on a steady process to change the corporate mind-set by incorporating a modest customer focus in almost everything you do, at every stage of customer interaction. Over time, this approach can embed a customer focus throughout the organization gradually and nondisruptively. Surprisingly, it is these subtle changes that become the real game changers as they are replicated throughout the DNA of the organization. Approached in this way, becoming customer focused and even customer obsessed is not difficult. Any organization could do it. Notice I said they could do it. Most won't. Again, since you're reading this book, you actually might.

So, what are the real and lasting game changers? Here's a short list that will come up in more detail in subsequent chapters:

Social media—how well you know your customers and how fast you act on that insight can be a big game changer, and keeping that information updated in real time is essential. That means keep updating what you know every hour of every day.

Collaboration among staff, partners and associates, and customers is now essential; the closer and deeper the collaboration the better.

Culture takes on increasingly greater importance; you have to cultivate a customer-obsessed environment involving everyone, all the time.

Finding, nurturing, motivating, and keeping good talent is key to winning. Look for people with an aptitude for customer service.

Data is everything when it comes to engaging and satisfying customers. It's the best way to learn about the customer and keep learning throughout the (hopefully very long) relationship.

Insightful, integrated data analytics in absolute real time; without real-time analytics, data quickly becomes worthless.

Ultimately, you want to establish a strategic framework and foundation that is obsessed with the customer and can withstand the pressures of a business world constantly in flux. This isn't easy. It requires you to shift your focus from the intangible goals that sound so good in sound bites, to measuring your success against business outcomes. You have to speak differently with the customer, hire different people and manage them differently, work with providers and partners in new ways, leverage your resources, and evaluate and deploy technology unlike how you have before. That's what this book will show you. Get ready for an exciting ride.

Notes

1.

Jim Clifton,

The Coming Jobs War

(New York, NY: The Gallup Press, 2011), 10–11.

2.

Clifton,

The Coming Jobs War

, 10–11.

2People Drive Change, Technology Enables

I am a firm believer that people, not technology, are the driving force behind a company's success. Don't believe me? Let's take a look at one of the most people-focused organizations operating today: Change.org. Their entire purpose is to enable collective action to drive positive change; people connecting with other people, aided by technology. Completely user driven, their online petition platform enables people all over the world to create campaigns to accomplish incredible things: overturning the ban on gay Boy Scouts, defeating Thailand's blanket amnesty bill, saving Meriam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag in Sudan from execution on apostasy charges, and the list goes on. Over 100 million people have used Change.org since it launched in 2007, and it isn't because of the technology supporting it.1 The company tapped into an incredibly powerful force to help make a difference in the world: people.

Now, I know that not every company can operate like Change.org, but there are a ton of other examples where companies put people, and their experiences first. Take a look at companies like USAA and Trader Joe's, two radically different businesses, but with the same goal in mind: serving the customer. While they use technology to improve the customer experience, they never allow new technology to dictate or alter that focus. That's what I mean when I say companies need to prioritize people over technology. Every company's success is dependent upon people, whether they're customers, partners, or employees. Getting in that mind-set is essential to providing a better experience across every aspect of your business.

Technology Game Changers

Not every advance in technology, no matter how innovative, is a game changer. Similarly, technology itself is often not the answer. Sometimes even the seemingly best technology doesn't deliver. Remember Google Glass, the wearable computer and video recorder? The early adopters who shelled out big bucks were the stars of the party among the digital cognoscenti. However, the press attention eventually died down, and today Google Glass is an anachronism before its time. Google's product development team is already working on a new and improved form, but it wasn't a game changer then and it may never be.

Maybe the exception that proves the rule is the Apple Watch. It continues to attract customers despite its large price tag and limited functionality. The Apple Watch helped propel iOS 8 adoption to 81 percent by the end of April 2015.2 Still, popularity does not necessarily mean a technology is a game changer. Neither does a mob of imitators at different price points. The Apple Watch, and wearables as a general category, may eventually produce a revolutionary product or two, but that's far from a given.

It takes more than just cool technology and a flood of adoring press coverage to produce a product that becomes pervasive. Technology adoption is driven by unique moments where users experience a huge upgrade. Picture the first time you used an iPod versus a CD player or Uber instead of a yellow cab—these moments blended simplicity with a massive improvement in experience.

So how do we identify true habit-forming products or, more important, build them ourselves? Either business culture is advancing faster than technical innovation or innovation is advancing faster than the business. Neither situation is conducive to game changers, and cool alone is not enough. The world is full of problem solvers, but few problem finders. Do the research and discover the problems for which people lack a simple solution and build it. Take social media. People have always loved talking about themselves and sharing memories. Social media gave them an easy way to do it. Again, Kodak was so close, but never quite got social media. To a certain extent, social media allows you to continually reinvent yourself with each social interaction as Kodak customers did with the photos they took, showed, and saved. But better than paper-based photos, social media brings with it a dynamic network with a built-in audience: friends and followers and friends of friends and followers. What's not to like?

Nir Eyal addresses the quandary of creating addictive products that become pervasive in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Portfolio, 2014). Habit-forming products are not necessarily synonymous with game-changing technology. Still, if we want addictive products that we can't put down, how do we create them and do so consistently? Simple: you manufacture them following Eyal's formula.

As Eyal explains in the book: “Today, small startup teams can profoundly change behavior by guiding users through a series of experiences I call hooks. The more often users run through these hooks, the more likely they are to form habits.”3