These days, customer experience, data and brand strategy are gaining a lot of importance in marketing. Both the customer experience and data analysis play a bigger role and marketers are spending more time in focusing on the broader business strategy instead of just focusing on advertising. The infographic titled, “Let’s Talk about…

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Why do organizations seek to design effective multi-channel customer journeys? Customers demand it.…

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As you look ahead to 2016, it’s a good time to ponder: what’s the “new black” for improving customer experience? The Beyond the Arc team decided to play the role of #stylespotter and share some of our predictions.

Leaders will retool their culture to become more customer-focused

There’s an old saying that culture eats strategy for lunch. To us,…

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Have you seen the press coverage related to my book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (Wiley, February 2013)?

 

If you're already an expert practitioner, these articles can serve to help ramp up your clients and coworkers.

 

If your work doesn't connect to data munching in any way, these articles (and the book) are still totally for you. This accessible book has been…

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Banking and Financial Services, Insurance, Telecom, Retail, Aviation etc. are some of the industries that thrive on huge volume of customers. Customer interaction channels – ERP/CRM Systems, Social Media and Online Systems etc. – provide ample data to understand various facets of customer behaviour. Vast data is analysed for personalized… Continue

For Marketer’s any change in customer behaviour is a “gold mine”. Marketing to customer’s whose behaviour is changing is far more rewarding than marketing to “static” customers! But sometimes there is "too much change" and in today's market that is exactly what is happening. Marketer's need ,what we at Cequity, call a Modelling factory approach-How to build models at speed!



Gallup chief economist Dennis Jacobe concurs that "a fundamental change is taking place" in the behavior of… Continue

The interesting thing in Retail is that eventually ,competitive advantage in location,merchandize assortments & price can be replicated by competition ,but Customer experience can be a unique diffrentiator. The difficult thing about this is that Retail brands have so many touch points with customers and how do you make each of these interactions “memorable”.



Many organizations,especially in growth markets & industries are already dangerously “out of synch” from their… Continue

Customers are using your services through multiple channels. Customer’s access their bank through either the branch or Internet banking or other channels such as ATMs and mobile banking. Multi channel behavior however needs to be intelligently decoded. Mc Kinsey research shows that Multichannel customers spend on average 20 to 30% more than single channel users. More than 80 percent of a broad cross-section of U.S. retailers now report that they sell merchandise through multiple channels.… Continue

"For those organizations that have formally adopted a process-centric approach to business, the process is often formally defined, measured, monitored, and continually optimized. This level of discipline is critical to deliver a process that is high performing, predictable, efficient, effective, and error-free. In order to become more customer-centric, businesses should add the customer experience end-to-end process to their portfolio of strategically important processes. The customer… Continue

I recently read a blog post which said that ATMs would now be irrelevant! I could not disagree with it more!



For many of us, the ATM has become the true face of our bank. We hardly walk into our branch but we often use the ATM. Colin Henderson has this very interesting post which centers on the reality that with each transaction, a consumer is making a decision about their banking service.



“What has really happened is that the product experience has transferred from the… Continue

Many businesses do not have direct interactions with their customers. Service industries like Retailers, Banks & Telecom companies have millions of customer interactions which give them the customer’s pulse! How do packaged consumer goods companies achieve the same customer intimacy?

Coke has done a fantastic job of creating a strong connection with its consumers.

Coke’s marketing team first asked themselves three questions:

1) How can we connect with consumers?

2) How… Continue

Netflix has a computerized recommendation system which seeks to find the common threads in millions of people’s recommendations and throw up “what’s best for you”? A lot of Online commerce sites have this kind of recommendation engine at work and Amazon is another well known example.



Netflix had a unique challenge: they wanted to improve Cinematic, their “recommendation engine.” Cinematic is the bit of software embedded in the Netflix Web site that analyzes each customer’s… Continue

Marketers believe that creating “personalized communication” is important to drive a relevant communication strategy. But often they do not have control over the personalization process. Often very shoddy and “very personal” communication gets sent out by local sales folk which does nothing to enhance the brand perception and even less to the effectiveness of the communication. In a bank, the billing process is possibly as “personal as it can get” but rarely would you find anything but mass… Continue

Companies around the world are literally drowning in data. A typical airline or retailer, for example, is collecting data from many operational systems and storing terabytes, if not petabytes, of data. But how closely do CMO’s and CIO’s actually work or are they often at cross purposes! In India and I am sure in other furiously growing markets as well, IT is so busy building the basic infrastructure to manage the business that they often ignore the strategic priorities that Marketing is trying… Continue

Frank Capek has this very interesting take on something that we end up doing everyday - WAITING! In fact today “waiting” has become multi-channel-you wait in physical queues and you also wait on the IVR for the call centre agent.



Here is what Frank says: It’s hard to overestimate the impact of waiting on your customers’ experience. Across the research we’ve conducted, some of the most dramatic customer defections occur because of bad waiting experiences.



You can help… Continue