Customer's New Voice E-Book

John S. McKean

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

Seitenzahl: 529

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Find out how to reap the benefits of motivating and engaging the new, direct customer voice The Customer's New Voice shows businesses how to motivate and transform directly volunteered consumer knowledge into profitable insights, enabling a new echelon of marketing relevancy, customer experience, and personalization. With a deep look at the inner workings of how a modern generation of business innovators are tapping into the fresh opportunities with the customer's new voice, this book describes how businesses are transforming "inference-based" predictions of purchase intent with direct consumer knowledge of their actual intentions and buying context. The result: An untouchable/unprecedented level of offer relevancy, experience, and personalized service levels. Those offers range from the most basic app model of "Give me your physical location, we'll find the best Thai restaurant near you, and give you an instant coupon" to a more complex model such as an Electric utility value proposition: "We'll give you discounts to charge your Prius during certain times to help us optimize our grid efficiency while allowing Toyota to monitor and optimize your battery to enable Toyota's R&D and customer experience enhancement." Forty case studies detail proven approaches for directly engaging the new consumer, showing companies how to take advantage of rapidly evolving personal technology--smart phones, homes, vehicles, wearable technology, and Internet of Things--and the new sharing culture to collect the higher value "intentionally/ discretionarily" shared information. Readers gain access to a robust tool set including templates, checklists, tables, flow diagrams, process maps, and technical data schematics to streamline these new capabilities and accelerate implementation of these transformational techniques. Ninety percent of the data that businesses use to determine what they sell or how to personalize a customer experience results from consumers unintentionally volunteering "indirect" data; however, this type of data has less than 10 percent accuracy. This low effectiveness also necessitates up to 70 percent of a business's cost infrastructure. Direct consumer knowledge is now available and boasts up to 20-50 percent accuracy, yet businesses remain anchored in the old "indirect" competencies. This book helps companies integrate compelling sharing motivators and controls for consumers to feel motivated and safe about directly sharing their product and experience desires, providing the ultimate market advantage. * Learn how to catch up to the new digitalized consumer * Leverage direct consumer information from current megatrends * Navigate privacy's current and future metamorphosis * Unlock the untapped value of Big Data's true enabler--Little Data Parsing "incidentally" volunteered data has been stagnant for decades due to the capabilities and expectations of a new generation of enabled consumers The timeless reality is that any level of investment in computing power, data, and analytics will never approach their full ROI potential without interfusing the direct, intentional insights from the consumer. If today's forward-thinking companies want to profitably engage the new consumers, they must learn the secrets of motivating and safeguarding this new potential of customer transparency. The risks of not engaging these new consumer voices? Irrelevancy and Silence. The Customer's New Voice shows businesses how to fulfill the promise and caveat of the new consumer: "If you make my life easier, reward me, and respect my shared information: I will tell you my secrets."

Leseprobe

Additional praise for Customer's New Voice: Extreme Relevancy and Experience through Volunteered Customer Information

“The always connected digital lifestyle means consumers are continuously sharing information about their specific wants and desires. Is your business positioned to take advantage of this shift? The Customer's New Voice points the way with actionable information as to how your organization can confidently move forward.

—Kathy Koontz, Associate Vice President, Customer Information Management, Nationwide Insurance

“In the Customer's New Voice, McKean's astute insights force us to take a hard look at chasing customer mediocrity by only building information proxies of what's inside the customer's head. He creditably demonstrates that the most effective path toward driving tomorrow's profitably is not only by businesses answering questions about customers, but increasingly how businesses inspire customers to volunteer their own answers to business's questions.”

—Marc Teerlink, Chief Business Strategist, IBM Watson Group, IBM

“The Customer's New Voice brings us the blunt reality that the most advanced technology or analytics will only reach a fraction of its full potential without integrating the insights that exist inside the heads of our customers. In the context of the new connected and “sharing” consumer, McKean clearly illustrates the steps taken by today's business innovators to inspire new levels of volunteered customer knowledge for the win/win of unprecedented levels of product relevancy and customer experience.”

—Dr. Mark Jeffery, Director of Technology Initiatives, Center for Research on Technology and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

“The consumer view of big data analytics is a critical perspective that is essential to the ultimate realization of the value potential made possible by today's information revolution. John's refreshing viewpoint on the empowerment of the individual in taking ownership and control of data assets is an indispensable read for anyone who wants to understand the future of big data analytic.”

—Stephen Brobst, Chief Technology Officer, Teradata Corporation

“Customer generated information is mind boggling and the amount of insight available is growing at a far faster pace than businesses can process. That's why I love John's new book. The history of how we got here is intriguing, but the practical guide to “what do I need to do today” in invaluable. Driving change through an organization is no small feat. Having a roadmap to start with is priceless.”

—Joni Newkirk, CEO Integrated Insight; former Senior Vice President, Business Insight & Improvement—Walt Disney Parks and Resorts

“In The Customer's New Voice John McKean has comprehensively documented the “we” economy of customers who are connected 24/7, never more than a click or a swipe away from your business. But don't even think about trying to compete if you don't have your customer's trust.”

—Don Peppers, Author, Thought Leader, Founding Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

“John McKean is a twenty-first century pioneer exploring the emerging personal data economy. The Customer's New Voice is a foray into the future of consumer interactions and reveals how your business can capitalize.”

—John Lovett, Senior Partner, Web Analytics Demystified, Former President, Digital Analytics Association and Sr. Analyst at Forrester Research

“McKean's the Customer's New Voice is a thorough handbook for the paradigm shift with the consumer now in control! This book's cases and tool sets will guide navigation in the new digital economy with benefits based on currency minted in trust and respect.”

—Cathy Burrows, Director, Strategic Initiatives & Infrastructure at RBC (Royal Bank of Canada)

“John McKean's concise and thoroughly researched the Customer's New Voice provides a detailed account of the history and current technology to which consumer's behaviour has been reactive, and less than predictable. Defining terms and new behaviours of those consumers and the models to which modern and next generation businesses will be expected to interact, in a candid and deep assessment of the next generation of consumer behaviour and business/systems requirements. Practical history, statistics, and examples are widely used, this book will become the Information Purveyors' bible of who/what/how, and should be on the desk of anyone who designs, implements, and interacts with consumer systems of any kind.”

—Michael McIntire, Distinguished Architect, TapJoy; former Chief Technology Officer—Analytics Sears Holdings, Chief Architect User Data at Yahoo!, Chief Architect Data Warehousing at eBay.

“In the Customer's New Voice, McKean makes clear our transition to a digital world doesn't change the fact that we seek and value advice from those we trust, and understand they must know us—and what matters to us—to provide it. This truth and McKean's roadmap for implementing it digitally will obsolete the naïve view that massive investments in collecting and analyzing the digital bits and pieces of our lives we inadvertently leave behind can ever substitute for chosen, trusted and engaged relationships.”

—Dr. Blake Johnson, Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University

“Supported by powerful facts and compelling statistics, the Customer's New Voice presents an insightful view of today's brave new world where consumers have sharing discretion over the most valuable dimensions of information that exists in the current business environment. McKean provides concrete examples of how businesses can transform their performance metrics by motivating this sharing while creating a safe and trusted sustainable sharing environment.”

—Klaas Wierenga, Senior Engineer, CTO (Chief Technology Officer) Office Enterprise Networking, Cisco Systems

“What happens when the big-data-driven organization meets the info-empowered consumer? The Customer's New Voice will prepare you for the next big shift in company-consumer communication where the data marketplace becomes a two-way street moderated by data aggregation services, infomediaries, and personal data agents.”

—Jim Sterne, Founder, eMetrics Summit and Digital Analytics Association

“I was inspired by reading McKean's new book−Customer's New Voice as it clearly shows us the immense impact that can occur when customers and their volunteered insights are placed at the epicenter of any business with all information, processes and systems in place to empower the customer.”

—Darren Herman,VP of Content Services, Mozilla, Named in Top 25 Marketing Innovators and Thought Leaders by iMedia and named “Media All Star” by Media Post.

“The Customer's New Voice brings much needed clarity to a topic that has long been regarded as mysterious: Understanding and acting on your customer's personal beliefs and preferences. McKean shows you how to engage your customers and act on their specific needs using straightforward analytics and communications.”

—David Sonnen, President, Integrated Spatial Solutions, Inc. Global Analyst—Geospatial Technologies—International Data Corporation, Member: Editorial Board Member—GeoWorld

Customer’s New Voice

Extreme Relevancy and Experience through Volunteered Customer Information

JOHN McKEAN

Cover image: ©iStock.com/DrAfter123 Cover design: Wiley

Copyright © 2015 by John McKean. All rights reserved.

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

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 978-1-119-00232-1 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-1-119-00420-2 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-119-00436-3 (ePub)

To my loving mother, Barbara McKean.

Contents

Foreword

Notes

Preface: New Voice, New Competencies

Acknowledgments

Part I: Dawn of the New Customer

Chapter 1: New Information Masters

Informed

Sharing

Mobile

Future Masters

Notes

Chapter 2: Power and Transparency

Absolute Power

New Transparency

Note

Chapter 3: Age of Sharing

Historical Sharing Tools

Sharing Statistics

Intentional versus Incidental

Value of Intent and Context

Science of Consumer Sharing

Notes

Part II: New Voice Innovators’ Win-Win

Chapter 4: Yesterday’s Indirect Information Model

Yesterday’s Model

Legacy of Indirect Information

Privacy Not

Notes

Chapter 5: Emerging Customer’s New Voice Business Information Model

Customer-Direct Information Model

Forces Driving New Voice Engagement

Direct Competencies Required

Unlocking Consumers’ Intent

Notes

Chapter 6: Today’s Customer’s New Voice Vertical Industry Innovators

Industry Innovators (Vertical)

Notes

Chapter 7: Horizontal Industry Innovators

Collaborative Consumption (Sharing Your Stuff)

Quantified Self

Wearable Technology

Mobile Health

Internet of Things

Triangulated Personal Information

Sensor Technology

Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality

New Customer Information Industry (Consumer as Stakeholder)

The Customer’s Voice

Notes

Chapter 8: Practical Guide: How to Leverage the Customer’s New Voice Today

Scenario 1: Jeff’s Shopping Trip

Scenario 2: Jill’s Grocery Shopping

Overview

Strategy

Marketing and Sales

Customer Service

Information Technology

Notes

Part III: Engaging Tomorrow’s New Voice

Notes

Chapter 9: How Consumers Will Buy Tomorrow

Selling Reincarnated as Buying: New Buy/Sell Process

Advertising Inversion

Notes

Chapter 10: New Privacy

Government/Advocacy Personal Data Initiatives

Pivotal Personal Data Protection Initiatives

Pivotal Business Event Time Line

Notes

Chapter 11: Future Consumer Data Ecosystem

Consumer as Information Stakeholder

Mature Consumer/Business Information Sharing Models

Walking through the Model

Three Key Components Enabling the Personal Data Ecosystem

Frameworks: The Major Ecosystem Governance Mechanism

Volunteered Customer Information Service Characteristics

Personal Information as a Sovereign/Monetized Asset

Personal Data Ecosystem

Notes

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 1

Table 1.1

Chapter 5

Table 5.1

Table 5.2

Chapter 7

Table 7.1

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 Social Media Use over Time

Figure 1.2 Cell Phone Owners Use Phones to Go Online

Figure 1.3 Facebook Friend Counts

Figure 1.4 Evolution of Channel Effectiveness for Financial Services Consumers

Figure 1.5 Internet Use over Time by Teens and Adults

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 Trend of Google Searches on the Word

Privacy

Figure 3.2 Consumer Information Sharing Equation

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1 Evolution of Business Computing Capabilities

Figure 4.2 Business’s Consumer Relevancy

Figure 4.3 Data Sovereignty and Flow

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1 Intent Continuum

Figure 5.2 Context Continuum

Figure 5.3 Inferred versus Actual

Figure 5.4 Business Can Only See the Past Whereas the Customer Knows the Future

Figure 5.5 The Intent Marketing Landscape

Figure 5.6 Nielsen Segment Explorer

Figure 5.7 How Much Do We Care about Who Accesses Our Information?

Figure 5.8 Foursquare Screen Shots

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1 New Banking Value Network

Chapter 8

Figure 8.1 Unified Data Architecture

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1 New Voice Creates Buy/Sell Process

Figure 9.2 Current Advertising Model (Business Driven)

Figure 9.3 Inverted Advertising Model (Consumer Driven)

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1 The Personal Zone

Figure 11.2 The Connection

Figure 11.3 Infomediaries Facilitate

Figure 11.4 New Breed of Data Aggregators

Figure 11.5 Personal Data Ecosystem Enablers

Figure 11.6 Personal Data Ecosystem Landscape

Figure 11.7 Personal Data Ecosystem Landscape

Figure 11.8 Personal Data Ecosystem

Figure 11.9 Personal Data Ecosystem Roles and Flows

Figure 11.10 Data Sovereignty and Flow Graphic

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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Foreword

In every apple you'll find five seeds. Plant those and the result will be five different trees, bearing five different fruits, as unlike each other as they are of their parent. This is because apple seeds are heterozygous, meaning they produce different individuals in a variety that trends toward the infinite. All the familiar varieties of apples—McIntosh, Delicious, Granny Smith, Fuji—come from trees grown from twigs of parents grafted onto saplings that are nothing more than rooted trunks.

The normalizing of apple varieties through grafting is one of civilization's oldest industrial practices, and serves as a model for the way industry today normalizes another heterozygous species: Homo sapiens. To any company doing mass marketing, you are not a distinct and different human being. You are a rootstock for a graft that produces cash. The graft is a template: a controlled and generic set of appetites the company wishes to fill. In some cases the company seeks customers like you, which they understand in terms of demographics, regions, sectors, income levels, tested preferences, and so on. In some cases the company creates appetites through advertising, promotion, and other marketing methods. But in all cases the need for scale outweighs the need to respect customers' differences as human beings.

For evidence of how one-sided this is, go to a bookstore or a library and visit the business section. See if you can find a book about what individual customers bring to the marketplace, other than cash, credit, and loyalty cards. You won't find much. While there are plenty of books that are respectful of customers, and talk about how companies can “relate” to customers, the default assumption is that companies are in charge. Even when you hear talk about “giving the customer a seat at the board table,” it's still the company doing the giving. Such flattering jive is the exception to the rule of subordinating individual customers to the imperatives of scale. This is why you still hear sales and marketing people talking about “targeting,” “capturing,” “acquiring,” “controlling,” “managing,” and “locking in” customers as if they were cattle or slaves. The mentality behind this talk not only dismisses customers' individual differences, but also their ability to contribute more to a business than cash and coerced loyalty.

This mentality took root after Industry won the Industrial Revolution. Before then, the power advantage was on the customers' side. The expression “supply and demand,” for example, was coined as “demand and supply” by James Denham-Steuart in An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, written in 1767.1 In his Inquiry, Denham-Steuart described seven natures of demand, the sixth of which was “to encourage industry.” In The Wealth of Nations, published nine years later, Adam Smith wrote, “The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.”2

Once the Industrial Age got rolling in the early 1800s, power piled up on the supply side. Mass manufacture and distribution eventually led to mass markets and marketing. Conversation between company and customer became a cost to be minimized, rather than a direct source of intelligence and discipline. While treating customers as templates was an efficiency required for scale, it also denied what is most human about us as individuals. Not only are we all different from each other, but each of us also differs in what we think, feel, know, and do, from one context and moment to the next.

When the Internet took its current form in 1995 (ISPs, browsers, e-mail, and websites galore), many expected the balance of power to shift from businesses to what Smith called their employers: the customers. That's because the Net, by design, regards everyone and everything connected to it as a peer, and places them all at a functional distance apart of zero. By this simple design, the Net also had no privacy, no control over the manners of people, businesses, governments, or anything. On the Internet, everybody could do what they pleased—for themselves, for each other, and to each other.

So, while business has become more connected than ever, it has not become more involved with customers—at least not directly. In fact, business may be less involved with customers, thanks to “big data” gathering, analytics, and programmatic marketing. These provide ways for companies to know more about customers without actually engaging them directly. We see this rationalized in a 2012 promotional piece by IBM titled Welcome to the Era of the Chief Executive Customer. One excerpt:

CMOs used to try to shape customers' desires; now they're actually learning how to predict them. Sophisticated analytics help them take a holistic view of the customer experience and create new methods of engagement, using data to create not just a snapshot of a customer, but a lifetime view that can improve with every interaction. Predictive analytics brings science to the art of customer engagement, helping create a seamless experience that can give customers what they want, when they want it.3

Note how the company is still totally in charge: it creates the methods of engagement, predicts what the customer will do, and controls the customer's experience. The customer in this fantasy is not a fully human being, but an ever-changing “snapshot.”

Little of the data feeding this system is volunteered. Instead it is either coerced or obtained by surveillance. This is both unfriendly and inefficient. Improving guesswork is no substitute for direct knowledge, voluntarily given, by customers.

What would happen if customers had full control over their sides of relationships with companies—and if those relationships were genuine rather than coerced? How much more valuable would customer information be if it was offered directly and voluntarily, for the good of both sides? And how much more useful is it for customers to express their true intentions, rather than having those intentions guessed at constantly?

These are the kinds of questions that have driven my work in the world over the past two decades. I wrote up some answers in The Cluetrain Manifesto (Basic Books: 2000, 2010) and in The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press: 2012), which begins with this prophesy:

Over the coming years, customers will be emancipated from systems built to control them. They will become free and independent actors in the marketplace, equipped to tell vendors what they want, how they want it, where, and when—even how much they'd like to pay—outside of any vendor's system of customer control.

On the matter of personal data, I wrote this:

Each customer will come to market equipped with his or her own means for collecting and storing personal data, expressing demand, making choices, setting preferences, proffering terms of engagement, offering payments, and participating in relationships—whether those relationships are shallow or deep, and whether they last for moments or years.

The question this begs is How? John McKean answers that question—and many more—in The Customer's New Voice. For companies that want to know how to engage fully empowered customers, there is no better guide than this book.

There will always be a need for scale. Companies successfully explored the limits of that need throughout the Industrial Age. Now it's the customers' turn. We have the tools to start making scale work for us, and we will get more of them. Count on it.

The best time to invest is in the past. That's where we are now. Companies that place their bets with customers today are the ones that will see the biggest payoffs in the future. In this book, John McKean tells you exactly where companies should invest their money, time and attention today and in the coming years, as customer self-empowerment blooms in the wilds of the networked world.

Read on and prosper.

—Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economyand co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto

Notes

1.

James Denham-Steuart,

An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy

(London: Printed for A. Millar, and T. Cadell, in

The Strand

, 1767).

2.

Adam Smith,

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

, Book I, Chapter X, Part I, I.10.86.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN4.html#I.10.86

. (Accessed August 1, 2014.)

3.

Welcome to the Era of the Chief Executive Customer

. International Business Machines Corporation 2012.

http://ibm.co/1o7KUpp

. (Accessed August 1, 2014.)

Preface: New Voice, New Competencies

For the first time in history, individuals are developing the ability and willingness to share any information at any scale with anyone.

Whether it is with their rapidly evolving smart phones, smart homes, smart vehicles, wearable technology, or anything connected via the Internet of Things . . .

This is their new voice . . . rapidly evolving and radically empowering.

It is transforming their lives, cultures, countries, and the very fabric of our society.

Individuals as customers and consumers are intentionally sharing this new voice with those businesses today that have created the new competencies required to inspire the sharing of this new voice while safeguarding their shared information.

The result: a new generation of win-win.

Customers/consumers get what they want . . . extreme levels of product relevancy, exceptional experiences, and ultra-personalized interactions.

Business shareholders get what they want . . . significantly higher and expanded revenue generation opportunities, ultra-product relevancy (higher campaign conversion rates), operational cost reductions and efficiencies, and incomparable customer experiences.

A new generation of business innovators has begun leveraging the customer’s new voice with initial results reaching as high as 20 percent to 50 percent for purchase relevancy with extreme levels of customer experience and personalization.

Customers/consumers are not sharing this new voice with businesses that are still caught in the legacy approaches of “chasing” them using arm’s-length, second-hand “inferences” as to what they actually really want and need. Nor are they willing to share their most valuable information with businesses without sufficient motivators and safeguards.

The traditional inference-based business model only achieves an average success rate of 2 percent to 5 percent and has remained at this level for decades. That is, only 2 percent to 5 percent of a business’s inference-based marketing offers are deemed sufficiently relevant for purchase. Equally important is that 70 percent of a business’s cost infrastructure exists to compensate for these low success rates; that is, compensating for not knowing what your customers and consumers already know.

The blunt reality is that the most advanced technology or analytics will only achieve a fraction of its full potential without integrating the insights that exist inside the heads of consumers and your customers.

So better hurry. . . . They’re waiting for you to inspire their new voice . . .

Acknowledgments

I want to express great appreciation for the intellect, creativity, and courage of my colleagues, friends, and family who have inspired my thinking around the Customer’s New Voice.

Adam Dawes

Digant Kasundra

Adam Goldberg

Doc Searls

Alan Karp

Dr. Catriona Wallacerant

Alex McKean

Dr. Hugh J. Watson

Amy McKean

Dr. Jeffrey Gersbach

Amy K Johnson

Drummond Reed

Andy Dale

Eric Sachs

Anne Robinson

Erik Brynjolfsson

Anthony Rodio

George Fletcher

Ben Gillis

Geraldine McBride

Bill Franks

Gregory Leproux

Bill Mills

Griffin McKean

Blake Johnson

Guy Kawasaki

Bob Page

Hani S. Mahmassani

Bryant Cutler

Helen Cho

Chad Meley

Iain Henderson

Chris Twogood

Jack Greenberg

Chuck Mortimore, VP                              

James Donovan

Craig Gard

James Semenak

Craig Hackett

James Sheire

Daniel Gerber, VP

Jaron Lanier

Darren Herman

Jeffrey Hayzlett

David Howell

Jeffrey Jones

David Pinter

Jessica McKean

David Rocci

Jim Sterne

David Schrader

Joe Andrieu

Dean Furness

John Lovett

DeAnna Blair

Jonathan Zittrain

Deanna Decker

Kaliya Hamlin

Kazue Sako

Prateek Mishra

Kimberly Little

Rob Tuttle

Klaas Wierenga

Ron Monzillo

Lee Rainie

Roshni Chandrashekhar

Leland Modesitt

Sarah Davies

Linda McKean

Scott Gnau

Loie Levine

Sean Bohan

Marc Stiegler

Sean Brooks

Marius Scurtescu

Seth Godin

Mark Jeffery

Shadron Ruffin

Mark Swenson

Sheck Cho

Mary Ruddy

Shon Shah

Matthew Berry

Srisupa Ruangsuk

Matthew Sutton

Stefan Magdalinski

Michael Engan

Stefanos Giampanis

Michael McIntire

Stephen Brobst

Mike Jones

Steve Greenberg

Morteza Ansari

Taylor Davidson

Nathan Dors

Tom Davenport

Naveen Agarwal

Tom Malone

Neil Harris

Tony Ohlsson

Pat Patterson

Verna Allee

Pattie Maes

Vikas Jain, Mr

Phil Hunt

Vint Cerf

Phil Windley

William Griffith

Philip Filleul

William Heath

Porter Gale

Yue Lu

PART IDawn of the New Customer

Consumers are born and subsequently brought up in a world increasingly dominated by increasingly sophisticated and friendly personal information technology (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops) interconnected by an increasingly pervasive Internet and mobile infrastructure. Each succeeding year, consumers are exposed earlier in their lives and are more deeply immersed in the competencies of how to leverage the information components of these technologies. Their motivation is the opportunity to leverage the information to better fulfill their needs and wants (e.g., connect with family and friends, make their lives easier, save money, do their jobs, find information). The key transformational piece is the direct connection to information, people, and organizations. This is analogous to the original vision for the Internet—to “directly connect to anything without an intermediary.”

This directness to information, people, and organizations has radically changed our lives forever and will continue to do so.

CHAPTER 2Power and Transparency

Complete open access to information creates new transparency. This new transparency creates absolute power. It is this access to information that has given birth to a new customer and the relative evolution of absolute customer power.

The commercial world has witnessed an inversion of the consumer/business power structure. Since the early 1900s when Henry Ford pronounced that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” customers have been subordinate to business. Today, the polar opposite is true: Consumers choose not only the color but every dimension of the who, what, where, when, and how of a product or service. If the consumer/business power structure is deconstructed, the core of the power transformation is the evolution of information. Technology has fundamentally changed the information equation. Technology enables information. Information enables power. The enabling technological chain that underpins the rapidly evolving direct consumer consists of four parts:

Technology—Internet/mobile infrastructure

Information—resulting by-product and the raison d’être of technology

Competency—and consumer’s ability and willingness to use it

Culture—emerging new consumer behavioral norms

Absolute Power

The absolute power of today’s consumer is unquestioned. The attributes of consumer power have radically evolved from a subservient, simple, mute, naive, defenseless entity to an assertive, vocal, influential, sophisticated, complex, and armed commercial force. The information-enabled power chain has involved the following set of direct consumer attributes:

Independence

Looking and listening on business’s time and terms have migrated to consumer’s time and terms.

Informed

Reliance on business’s information has evolved to direct independent information sources.

Complexity

Ten commercial interactions or transactions are now thousands.

Disconnectability

Irrepressible advertising is increasingly consumer controllable (e.g., “Do not track,” “Do not call,” “Right to be forgotten,” and inevitable future interactions of “Do not’s”).

Manageability

Customer has evolved from managed consumer (customer relationship management) to manager.

Speed

Speed standard of offline world (days) is now immediacy of online world (seconds).

Sharing

Limited breadth and depth of shared personal information and audience have evolved to pervasive sharing of personal information (doubled each year).

Learning

Confided concerted efforts are now limitless, immediate, and detailed.

Identity

Real person identity moves to device (multiple) oriented identity.

Expectations

Low expectations regarding product or service competitiveness have evolved to high expectations from completely transparent view of product, price, delivery, and experience.

Digital information competency

Techie-oriented competency has evolved to essential and unconscious digital information competency in everyday life.

New Transparency

The new transparency is a two-sided coin. The customers’ transparency is the degree to which they reveal or disclose their purchase intentions in the context of their lives to businesses and others. The businesses’ transparency is the degree to which the characteristics of their reputation, quality, and brand are exposed or disclosed to their customers. Coupled with the consumer’s new voice are new eyes and ears that have virtually unlimited access to the relative truths about almost any aspect of the business and its product offerings.

Customers choose not to be transparent to businesses unless there is a motivating factor and they feel safe being less transparent. In the new environment, businesses have no choice regarding their level of transparency. Businesses are fundamentally naked to the array of candid and direct customer feedback about their value propositions and their performance in delivering a good or bad value proposition and customer experience.

The future evolution of transparency will focus on building new business competencies to create an environment where this asynchronous transparency will evolve into a synchronous transparency.

Asynchronous Transparency

Asynchronous transparency is the world that the Internet and mobile devices have created. It is a one-way looking glass for consumers to research a business’s products and services in great detail as well as its competitors’ offerings. The consumer can research not only the attributes of products and services but also the direct experiences of others like themselves who have actually experienced the company’s products and services as well as its service levels. While consumers have this new one-way lens, businesses have far less ability to view a consumer’s purchasing intent and context with equal translucence.

Synchronous Transparency

Synchronous transparency is the world that we are evolving to where consumers not only can see businesses in great detail but also are motivated and feel safe enough to increasingly reveal themselves to businesses to achieve greater relevancy on both sides. Synchronous transparency enables extreme relevancy.

Simple truth: Relevancy is desired and desirable both by businesses and by consumers.

Death of B2C/C2B; Birth of C2W/W2C

This new transparency is not confined by limited discovery processes (e.g., single phone calls referenced from the Yellow Pages, a stroll through a shopping mall, a car ride downtown), but is now an unbounded discovery process starting with one click to the world. This has antiquated the premise of business to consumer (B2C) or consumer to business (C2B) models as if consumers were still bound to a myopic view of local markets.

The new model is consumer to world (C2W) and world to consumer (W2C). It is not only how the new consumers view their world but also the new process by which they create the perception of potential value from businesses. The competitive edict for a business is to provide products and services to consumers that have greater value than the consumer would expect from purchases from competitive businesses in similar markets. The consumer then weighs a business’s offer relative to the perceived worth of competitive offers (i.e., “What do I get for what I paid?”). The consumer’s new reference point is any business on the planet that is selling a similar product or service in a similar market. This includes unmitigated direct reviews of the product features relative to price as well as the waterfall of the experience, which could extend anywhere in the world and even across decades of product use. The consumer researches a business to determine how “somebody like me” felt about the product and the experience, ranging from product liability to responsiveness.

In the life of a consumer, the following waterfall of experiences in five areas represents typical points of determining how consumers develop their perception of relative value of a product or service. In the old B2C or C2B world, most of this learning happens after the purchase or product experience. In the new C2W world, these attributes can be discovered from virtually any location on the planet in seconds with a simple mobile device:

Product Research

Reliability—“I want it to be reliable.”

Feature/function—“I want certain product features.”

Ease of use—“It has to be easy to use.”

Performance—“It has to work well.”

Buying Process

Accessibility—“I want information easily accessible or, if not, a person to talk to.”

Responsiveness—“I want my questions answered fast.”

Knowledgeability/professionalism/automation—“I want all my questions answered completely.”

Follow-up—“I want quick follow-up with any unanswered questions or delivery issues.”

Delivery/Installation

Interval—“I want it delivered fast or faster.”

Delivery/installation when promised—“I want the stated delivery time met or exceeded.”

Progress report—“Let me know the status before the actual delivery.”

Follow-up—“Follow up with me if things are different than promised.”

No initial failure—“When I get it, I want it to work.”

Return/Exchange/Repair

Fast—“I want it to be fast and easy.”

When promised—“I want it when promised”

Progress report—“Let me know what’s going on during the process.”

Follow-up—“Check to make sure I’m satisfied.”

No repeat troubles—“Don’t let it happen again.”

Receipt/Invoice/Bill

No surprises—“Make sure there is nothing unexpected after the fact.”

Easy to understand—“Make it really easy to understand.”

Timely—“Make it fast.”

Easy to resolve problems—“Make it easy to resolve any issues I have.”

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Whether the product or service is a travel destination or some esoteric collectible, the business will thrive or struggle based on what its customer’s feedback is online for the world to see.

The other important dimension of moving from a B2C or C2B world model to a C2W/W2C world is that the added view increases the consumer’s choices. As a result, the number of competitors a business has increases. The more competitive choices a consumer has to choose from, the higher the expectations become. The higher the consumer expectations are, the less tolerant consumers are of any performance other than excellent along any one of the waterfall elements. Statistically, businesses must score in the 90th percentile or above in terms of executing in a combined excellence rating to prompt a strong “likelihood to recommend” score. Once the overall total customer experience score drops below the 80th percentile, the “likelihood to recommend” score drops off precipitously. This is referred to as the slippery slope where, after the initial purchase, execution excellence is the only performance level that creates a follow-on purchase as well as a recommendation to others to purchase.

Note

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Raymond Kordupleski, former AT&T customer satisfaction director.

CHAPTER 3Age of Sharing

It is our nature to share. It is as much a part of our survival as a species as it is a central part of our self-actualization as human beings. We share because we have the enabling tools and motivation to share. When we don’t share, either we don’t have the tools or we lack sufficient motivation or safety to share. The following points are the essence of why and how we share:

Given the right motivation (e.g., make my life easier, save me money, make me feel good as a person)

Sense of safety (if I share information with you, nothing negative/no harm will come from it)

Sharing enablers (with mobile phones, tablets, the Internet, wearable technology, and sensors, we have the propensity to share virtually any information with anyone)

Historical Sharing Tools

Sharing personal information is what people do as human beings. It has been the nature of human beings since the beginning of time. Until recent history, sharing was confined to physical one-to-one communication and its content was determined by the level of trust and intimacy. Communication tools evolved because human beings wanted to share more information beyond just words. Human beings’ need to share has driven prolific inventions and has historically shaped our behavior:

1814: First photograph

1829: Braille (system of reading for the blind)

1831: Electric telegraph

1835: Morse code

1843: First long-distance telegraph line

1843: First fax machine

1861: Pony Express established

1867: Typewriter invented

1876: Mimeograph patented

1876: Telephone invented

1876: Dewey Decimal System invented (system for classifying books in the library)

1876: Phonograph invented

1884: Fountain pen invented

1888: Roll film camera invented

1895: First radio promoted

1915: Mechanical pencil invented

1925: First television invented

1935: Ballpoint pen invented

1938: Xerography invented (process of copying paper without ink)

1956: Liquid Paper invented

1960: First cell phone invented

1963: Zip codes created

1969: First form of Internet created

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The age of sharing is driven by the ease of sharing. When contrasting the effort and competency required to use some of the predecessors of today’s communication devices (smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and laptops), we see that the ease of sharing is driving much of this new sharing age. Consider just a few years ago, when fax machines where still fairly prevalent, the time and effort required to fax a 30-page document to 200 people. Hours of time to complete this task are now measured in seconds. Other communication tools such as speech recognition are also enabling sharing to be much more natural while still being very efficient. It is not only the ease of sharing a simple item but the ability to share massive amounts of information to a broad number of entities that is transforming our world. Sharing is truly the new behavioral norm. This comes with all of the pluses and minuses of the new etiquette of sharing.

Sharing Statistics

One of the most telling sharing statistics is how often individuals are searching for words related to sharing. Over the past 10 years, the word privacy as a search word has slowly declined, and it is predicted to decline even further. This is indicative of the new digital pragmatism of today’s consumer. On the surface, this may indicate that individuals are caring less about privacy issues. Individuals continue to be aware of privacy issues but are more pragmatic about their privacy awareness.

The amount of global digital information that was created and shared (e.g., documents, pictures, tweets) grew nine times in five years in 2011.2

Demographically, global averages indicated that individuals under the age of 35 (81 percent) are most likely to share any type of content on social media sites compared with individuals aged 35 to 49 (69 percent) and 50 to 64 (55 percent). Women (74 percent) edge out men (69 percent) in having shared content in the past month. Those with a high level of education (74 percent) are more likely than those with low and medium levels of education and income to share content.3

In the beginning of 2014, there was no sign that how much individuals were sharing was going to slow down. This is not to say that they do not value privacy—they do. Events such as Edward Snowden’s global surveillance disclosures and other notable organizational data breaches will help keep their new digital pragmatism in check. Here are some of the latest sharing statistics, primarily on Facebook:

Instagram alone has 200 million users as of the beginning of 2014, with 200 billion photos shared total and 60 million photos shared daily.

The number of Facebook users grew to 1.28 billion, with monthly active users registering at 1.23 billion. This is not a youth phenomenon.

Forty-five percent of Internet users who are 65 years or older use Facebook.

Sixty-two percent of Facebook users post about what they are doing, where they are, and who they are with.

The total number of location-tagged Facebook posts is 17 billion.

The total number of uploaded Facebook photos is 250 billion.

The average number of photos uploaded per Facebook user is 217 photos.

The average number of items shared by Facebook users daily is 4.75 billion items.

The average time spent on Facebook totaled per day is 20 billion minutes.

The average number of minutes users spent on Facebook mobile is 914 minutes compared to

Facebook.com

, which is 351 minutes.

Thirty percent of Americans get their news on Facebook.

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On the surface, the declining frequency of searches on the word privacy seems to indicate a declining interest or concern with privacy. Taking this trend in the context of other privacy research, though, the exponential increase in shared personal information does not necessarily indicate that the concern for privacy is lessening. The concern for privacy is being melded into a new digital pragmatism coupled with some level of digital naïveté (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Trend of Google Searches on the Word Privacy

Source: Google Trends.

According to Intel’s “Mobile Etiquette” survey, 85 percent of U.S. adults share information online with 25 percent of U.S. adults sharing information at least once a day; 23 percent of U.S. adults experience fear of missing out (FoMo) if they are unable to share their consumer information online.

Twenty-seven percent of the respondents stated they are an “open book” both online and offline, with very little in their lives they would not share; 51 percent of U.S. adults said they would be comfortable if all of their online activity were made public tomorrow. This reflects the new digital pragmatism as well as a level of digital naïveté; that is, they do not fully understand the full life cycle of personal information.