Category Archives: marketing

Uncertainty Isn’t Always Bad

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Uncertainty Isn't Always Bad

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you think you understand what your customers want, you don’t.

If you’re developing a new product for new customers, you know less.

If you’re developing a new technology for a new product for new customers, you know even less.

If you think you know how much growth a new product will deliver, you don’t.

If that new product will serve new customers, you know less.

If that new product will require a new technology, you know even less.

If you have to choose between project A and B, you’ll choose the one that’s most like what you did last time.

If project A will change the game and B will grow sales by 5%, you’ll play the game you played last time.

If project A and B will serve new customers, you’ll change one of them to serve existing customers and do that one.

If you think you know how the market will respond to a new product, it won’t make much of a difference.

If you don’t know how the market will respond, you may be onto something.

If you don’t know which market the product will serve, there’s a chance to create a whole new one.

If you know how the market will respond, do something else.

When we have a choice between certainty and upside, the choice is certain.

When we choose certainty over upside, we forget that the up-starts will choose differently.

When we have a lot to lose, we chose certainty.

And once it’s lost, we start over and choose uncertainty.

Image credits: Pexels

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Creating A Connected Human Experience

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Empathy Meets Technology

Creating A Connected Human Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Because of AI, so much has changed in the way companies do business. The technology hit a tipping point when ChatGPT and other generative AI solutions moved from behind the scenes to public awareness in November 2022. Even if the public didn’t know exactly what ChatGPT-type products were, they had an idea. This created both excitement and fear. For companies and brands, it created opportunities to employ more powerful technology at a lower price. It also created confusion about which technology to choose, how to implement it quickly and whether to implement something as new as this at all.

One company that quickly adapted and transformed itself is C1, a technology solutions provider that serves nearly half of the Fortune 500 (and many others) and partners with more than 140 technology vendors that they help match to their clients’ needs. I had a chance to sit down with Jeffrey Russell, formerly a “transformation leader” and president of Accenture Canada, and now the CEO of C1, who shared how he is leading his company to grow through acquisition and meeting the company’s and its customers’ ever-changing goals.

In our interview on Amazing Business Radio, Russell shared, “In a financial restructuring, you really need to have your story right from the outset.” His formula is simple.

  1. Know what you’re really good at—your company’s superpowers.
  2. Know how you want the organization to change and how you plan to get there. Clarity is essential to getting an ownership group and other stakeholders to support your plan.
  3. Everyone on the team must tell the same story and communicate it clearly. You can’t afford miscommunication. You want to communicate the company’s vision and its long-term value and demonstrate confidence in the company’s future success.
  4. Finally, you must have patience. Over-communicate throughout the process to keep everyone aligned as you move forward.

Russell states, “In the end, leading a change like this is about taking control of your destiny so you can come out on the other end as a financially stronger organization in a better market position to innovate, deliver value to customers and sustain growth.”

While leading C1’s growth and transformation in the era of the AI technology boom, Russell never took his eye off what was most important to a company: the human experience. In addition to taking us through that overview, he also shared how to create a powerful connected human experience for both customers and employees, which is the focus of what follows. Below are his ideas (in bold) followed by my commentary:

  1. Two words that aren’t typically found in the same sentence are technology and empathy. Russell says, “Technology is stark. It’s cold, and often a barrier between the company and its customers.” The easiest way to explain this is that companies must find a balance between technology and the human-to-human (H2H) experience. While technology expands capabilities, you can’t afford to do it at the cost of the relationship. The concept of empathy means understanding what matters to customers. People must be the No. 1 consideration in a plan to acquire and implement new technology.
  2. Ensure technology serves human needs. As you seek a balance between tech and H2H, consider how the technology helps people. Does it make life easier for both customers and employees? And, to emphasize Russell’s concern about the overuse of tech, will it enable better connections?
  3. Use human experience to add new levels of business value. Without technology, what would the experience look like? Then, after implementing the technology, be sure it supports rather than disrupts the experience.
  4. Walk in the shoes of your customer! As “cool” as technology can be, pretend you’re the customer who isn’t quite as savvy with technology as you are. What’s the experience like? It must be easy, intuitive and almost human-like.

As we came to the end of the interview, Russell shared three A’s people should consider when referring to AI:

  1. Authentic Intelligence: Even if it is artificial, does the solution promote an authentic experience? Or will the technology come across to the customer as cold or stark?
  2. Augmented Intelligence: Think of augmented reality and how it enhances the virtual experience. AI augments intelligence. It may or may not work by itself, but when combined with the H2H experience, it supports and makes it easier for employees to help customers with their questions and problems.
  3. Actionable Intelligence: When you activate artificial intelligence, the implementation process should begin with what happens to the customer experience when it is applied. Just having something new or cool isn’t the reason to implement it. This concept takes us back to how the best companies seem to master the balancing act between technology and the H2H experience.

Rapid advances in AI technology bring both opportunities and challenges for businesses. As companies and brands explore, experiment and make their choices for what works best, Russell emphasizes never losing focus on creating a meaningful and connected experience. By balancing technology with empathy and understanding, businesses can not only survive but thrive in this new era.

Image Credits: Pixabay

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

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Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

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Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling during the judging round, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024:

  1. Greg Satell
    Greg SatellGreg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His first book, Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age, was selected as one of the best business books in 2017. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.
  2. Janet Sernack
    Janet SernackJanet Sernack is the Founder and CEO of ImagineNation™ which provides innovation consulting services to help organizations adapt, innovate and grow through disruption by challenging businesses to be, think and act differently to co-create a world where people matter & innovation is the norm.
  3. Mike Shipulski
    Mike ShipulskiMike Shipulski brings together people, culture, and tools to change engineering behavior. He writes daily on Twitter as @MikeShipulski and weekly on his blog Shipulski On Design.
  4. Robyn Bolton
    Robyn BoltonRobyn M. Bolton works with leaders of mid and large sized companies to use innovation to repeatably and sustainably grow their businesses.
    .
  5. Pete Foley
    A twenty-five year Procter & Gamble veteran, Pete has spent the last 8+ years applying insights from psychology and behavioral science to innovation, product design, and brand communication. He spent 17 years as a serial innovator, creating novel products, perfume delivery systems, cleaning technologies, devices and many other consumer-centric innovations, resulting in well over 100 granted or published patents. Find him at pete.mindmatters@gmail.com
  6. Geoffrey A. Moore
    Geoffrey MooreGeoffrey A. Moore is an author, speaker and business advisor to many of the leading companies in the high-tech sector, including Cisco, Cognizant, Compuware, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and Yahoo! Best known for Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win with the latest book being The Infinite Staircase. Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute
  7. Shep Hyken
    Shep HykenShep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times, bestselling business author. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs, go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken
  8. David Burkus
    David BurkusDr. David Burkus is an organizational psychologist and best-selling author. Recognized as one of the world’s leading business thinkers, his forward-thinking ideas and books are helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. David is the author of five books about business and leadership and he’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and more. A former business school professor turned sought-after international speaker, he’s worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries.
  9. John Bessant
    John BessantJohn Bessant has been active in research, teaching, and consulting in technology and innovation management for over 25 years. Today, he is Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Research Director, at Exeter University. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship with the Advanced Institute for Management Research and was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. He has acted as advisor to various national governments and international bodies including the United Nations, The World Bank, and the OECD. John has authored many books including Managing innovation and High Involvement Innovation (Wiley). Follow @johnbessant
  10. Braden Kelley
    Braden KelleyBraden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, workshop leader, and creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

  11. Howard Tiersky
    Howard TierskyHoward Tiersky is an inspiring and passionate speaker, the Founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, innovation consultant, serial entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG named him one of the “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today”, and Enterprise Management 360 named Howard “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”
  12. Stefan Lindegaard
    Stefan LindegaardStefan Lindegaard is an author, speaker and strategic advisor. His work focuses on corporate transformation based on disruption, digitalization and innovation in large corporations, government organizations and smaller companies. Stefan believes that business today requires an open and global perspective, and his work takes him to Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia.
  13. Dainora Jociute
    Dainora JociuteDainora (a.k.a. Dee) creates customer-centric content at Viima. Viima is the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world. Passionate about environmental issues, Dee writes about sustainable innovation hoping to save the world – one article at the time.
  14. Teresa Spangler
    Teresa SpanglerTeresa Spangler is the CEO of PlazaBridge Group has been a driving force behind innovation and growth for more than 30 years. Today, she wears multiple hats as a social entrepreneur, innovation expert, growth strategist, author and speaker (not to mention mother, wife, band-leader and so much more). She is especially passionate about helping CEOs understand and value the role human capital plays in innovation, and the impact that innovation has on humanity; in our ever-increasing artificial/cyber world.
  15. Soren Kaplan
    Soren KaplanSoren Kaplan is the bestselling and award-winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an affiliated professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, a former corporate executive, and a co-founder of UpBOARD. He has been recognized by the Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top keynote speakers and thought leaders in business strategy and innovation.
  16. Diana Porumboiu
    Diana PorumboiuDiana heads marketing at Viima, the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world, and has a passion for innovation, and for genuine, valuable content that creates long-lasting impact. Her combination of creativity, strategic thinking and curiosity has helped organisations grow their online presence through strategic campaigns, community management and engaging content.
  17. Steve Blank
    Steve BlankSteve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and Senior Fellow for Innovation at Columbia University. He has been described as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship, credited with launching the Lean Startup movement that changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.
  18. Jesse Nieminen
    Jesse NieminenJesse Nieminen is the Co-founder and Chairman at Viima, the best way to collect and develop ideas. Viima’s innovation management software is already loved by thousands of organizations all the way to the Global Fortune 500. He’s passionate about helping leaders drive innovation in their organizations and frequently writes on the topic, usually in Viima’s blog.
  19. Robert B Tucker
    Robert TuckerRobert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.
  20. Dennis Stauffer
    Dennis StaufferDennis Stauffer is an author, independent researcher, and expert on personal innovativeness. He is the founder of Innovator Mindset LLC which helps individuals, teams, and organizations enhance and accelerate innovation success. by shifting mindset. Follow @DennisStauffer

    21. Accelerate your change and transformation success

  21. Arlen Meyers
    Arlen MyersArlen Meyers, MD, MBA is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, an instructor at the University of Colorado-Denver Business School and cofounding President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameyers/
  22. Ayelet Baron
    Ayelet BaronAyelet Baron is a pioneering futurist reminding us we are powerful creators through award winning books, daily blog and thinking of what is possible. Former global tech executive who sees trust, relationships and community as our building blocks to a healthy world.
  23. Leo Chan
    Leo ChanLeo is the founder of Abound Innovation Inc. He’s a people and heart-first entrepreneur who believes everyone can be an innovator. An innovator himself, with 55 US patents and over 20 years of experience, Leo has come alongside organizations like Chick-fil-A and guided them to unleash the innovative potential of their employees by transforming them into confident innovators.
  24. Rachel Audige
    Rachel AudigeRachel Audige is an Innovation Architect who helps organisations embed inventive thinking as well as a certified Systematic Inventive Thinking Facilitator, based in Melbourne.
  25. Art Inteligencia
    Art InteligenciaArt Inteligencia is the lead futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. He is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Art travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. His favorite numbers are one and zero.
  26. Paul Sloane
    Paul SloanePaul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader and editor of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, both published by Kogan-Page.
  27. Phil McKinney
    Phil McKinneyPhil McKinney is the Author of “Beyond The Obvious”​, Host of the Killer Innovations Podcast and Syndicated Radio Show, a Keynote Speaker, President & CEO CableLabs and an Innovation Mentor and Coach.
  28. Ralph Christian Ohr
    Ralph OhrDr. Ralph-Christian Ohr has extensive experience in product/innovation management for international technology-based companies. His particular interest is targeted at the intersection of organizational and human innovation capabilities. You can follow him on Twitter @Ralph_Ohr.
  29. Jeffrey Phillips
    Jeffrey Phillips has over 15 years of experience leading innovation in Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies and non-profits. He is experienced in innovation strategy, defining and implementing front end processes, tools and teams and leading innovation projects. He is the author of Relentless Innovation and OutManeuver. Jeffrey writes the popular Innovate on Purpose blog. Follow him @ovoinnovation
  30. Dean and Linda Anderson
    Dean and Linda AndersonDr. Dean Anderson and Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson lead BeingFirst, a consultancy focused on educating the marketplace about what’s possible in personal, organizational and community transformation and how to achieve them. Each has been advising clients and training professionals for more than 40 years.

  31. Shilpi Kumar
    Shilpi KumarShilpi Kumar an inquisitive researcher, designer, strategist and an educator with over 15 years of experience, who truly believes that we can design a better world by understanding human behavior. I work with organizations to identify strategic opportunities and offer user-centric solutions.
  32. Scott Anthony
    Scott AnthonyScott Anthony is a strategic advisor, writer and speaker on topics of growth and innovation. He has been based in Singapore since 2010, and currently serves at the Managing Director of Innosight’s Asia-Pacific operations.
  33. Anthony Mills
    Anthony MillsAnthony Mills is the Founder & CEO of Legacy Innovation Group (www.legacyinnova.com), a world-leading strategic innovation consulting firm working with organizations all over the world. Anthony is also the Executive Director of GInI – Global Innovation Institute (www.gini.org), the world’s foremost certification, accreditation, and membership organization in the field of innovation. Anthony has advised leaders from around the world on how to successfully drive long-term growth and resilience through new innovation. Learn more at www.anthonymills.com. Anthony can be reached directly at anthony@anthonymills.com.
  34. Paul Hobcraft
    Paul HobcraftPaul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities. Follow @paul4innovating
  35. Jorge Barba
    Jorge BarbaJorge Barba is a strategist and entrepreneur, who helps companies build new puzzles using human skills. He is a global Innovation Insurgent and author of the innovation blog www.Game-Changer.net
  36. Chateau G Pato
    Chateau G PatoChateau G Pato is a senior futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. She is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Chateau travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. Her favorite numbers are one and zero.
  37. Douglas Ferguson
    Douglas FergusonDouglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based change agency that helps enterprises spark, accelerate, and sustain innovation. He specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques.
  38. Alain Thys
    Alain ThysAs an experience architect, Alain helps leaders craft customer, employee and shareholder experiences for profit, reinvention and transformation. He does this through his personal consultancy Alain Thys & Co as well as the transformative venture studio Agents of A.W.E. Together with his teams, Alain has influenced the experience of over 500 million customers and 350,000 employees. Follow his blog or connect on Linkedin.
  39. Bruce Fairley
    Bruce FairleyBruce Fairley is the CEO and Founder of The Narrative Group, a firm dedicated to helping C-Suite executives build enterprise value. Through smart, human-powered digital transformation, Bruce optimizes the business-technology relationship. His innovative profit over pitfalls approach and customized programs are part of Bruce’s mission to build sustainable ‘best-future’ outcomes for visionary leaders. Having spearheaded large scale change initiatives across four continents, he and his skilled, diverse team elevate process, culture, and the bottom line for medium to large firms worldwide.
  40. Tom Stafford
    Tom StaffordTom Stafford studies learning and decision making. His main focus is the movement system – the idea being that if we can understand the intelligence of simple actions we will have an excellent handle on intelligence more generally. His research looks at simple decision making, and simple skill learning, using measures of behaviour informed by the computational, robotics and neuroscience work done in the wider group.

If your favorite didn’t make the list, then next year try to rally more votes for them or convince them to increase the quality and quantity of their contributions.

Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2015
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2016
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2017
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2019
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023

Download PDF versions of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 lists here:


Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020 PDF . . . Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022 . . . Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023

Happy New Year everyone!

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The Innovation Danger of All-or-Nothing Thinking

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The Innovation Danger of All-or-Nothing Thinking

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

All-or-nothing thinking is exciting – we’ll launch a whole new product family all at once and take the market by storm! But it’s also dangerous – if we have one small hiccup, “all” turns into “nothing” in a heartbeat. When you take an all-or-nothing approach, it’s likely you’ll have far too little “all” and far too much “nothing”.

Instead of trying to realize the perfection of “all”, it’s far better to turn nothing into something. Here’s the math for an all-or-nothing launch of product family launch consisting of four products, where each product will create $1 million in revenue and the probability of launching each product is 0.5 (or 50%).

1 product x $1 million x 0.5 = $500K

2 products x $1 million x 0.5 x 0.5 = $500K

3 products x $1 million x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = $375K

4 products x $1 million x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = $250K

In the all-or-nothing scheme, the launch of each product is contingent on all the others. And if the probability of each launch is 0.5, the launch of the whole product family is like a chain of four links, where each link has a 50% chance of breaking. When a single link of a chain breaks, there’s no chain. And it’s the same with an all-or-nothing launch – if a single product isn’t ready for launch, there are no product launches.

But the math is worse than that. Assume there’s new technology in all the products and there are five new failure modes that must be overcome. With all-or-nothing, if a single failure mode of a single product is a problem, there are no launches.

But the math is even more deadly than that. If there are four use models (customer segments that use the product differently) and only one of those use models creates a problem with one of the twenty failure modes (five failure modes times four products) there can be no launches. In that way, if 25% of the customers have one problem with a single failure mode, there are can be no launches. Taken to an extreme, if one customer has one problem with one product, there can be no launches.

The problem with all-or-nothing is there’s no partial credit – you either launch four products or you launch none. Instead of all-or-nothing, think “secure the launch”. What must we do to secure the launch of a single product? And once that one’s launched, the money starts to flow. And once we launch the first one, what must we do to secure the launch the second? (More money flows.) And, once we launch the third one…. you get the picture. Don’t try to launch four at once, launch a single product four times in a row. Instead of all-or-nothing, think one-in-a-row, where revenue is achieved after each launch of a single launch.

And there’s another benefit to launching one at a time. The second launch is informed by learning from the first launch. And the third is informed by the first two. With one-in-a-row, the team gets smarter and each launch gets better.

Where all-or-nothing is glamorous, one-in-a-row is achievable. Where all-or-nothing is exciting, one-in-row is achievable. And where all-or-nothing is highly improbable, one-in-a-row is highly profitable.

Image credits: Unsplash

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Be Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With

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Be Ridiculously Easy To Do Business With

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

You can’t argue with the evidence. Being easy to do business with attracts new customers, keeps existing customers and gives you a competitive advantage. Consider what we learned in our customer service and Customer Experience research (sponsored by RingCentral). Each year, convenience ranks as the most important customer service experience. These findings from the study back this up:

  • 94% of customers feel convenience is important
  • 70% are willing to pay more if the experience is more convenient
  • 87% will likely recommend a brand or company if it provides a convenient service experience

David Avrin’s latest book, Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With, is filled with tip after tip on how to avoid friction that loses customers. The book’s subject is one I’ve been studying and endorsing for years. In 2018, I wrote The Convenience Revolution, which featured the five convenience principles: eliminating friction, providing self-service solutions, using technology, delivery and access (location, hours of operation, etc.). Avrin’s addition to the very few but important books on the topic goes in-depth with very specific ways any business can be easier to work with. With that in mind, here are seven of the many ideas and tactics he shares in the book. Make it ridiculously easy …

1. To cancel, return or change your mind. An easy return or exchange policy reduces the customer’s risk and increases trust in the brand. Easy and hassle-free returns are one of the top reasons customers come back.

2. To provide feedback. When your customers provide you with feedback, both good and bad, it’s a gift. They’ve taken the time to share their thoughts, so don’t make it hard for them to do so.

3. To be easy to reach. If a customer has a question, and you make it hard for them to find your contact information, what do you think happens next? They continue their search with a different company. We suggest to our clients that contact information (phone, email, etc.) is available, at least in the footer, on every page of their website. Really, it should be easy to find on anything that has your company or brand’s name on it.

4. To navigate the website. One of the reasons people love shopping with Amazon is how easy it is to do business with, and it starts with a 100% self-service solution. They make it easy to compare products, pricing and more. Most importantly, it is an intuitive experience. You know where to go. It’s easy to get to the shopping cart, and to check out. While not every company can be like Amazon, they can take lessons from how its website is designed. If nothing else, remember that a website is designed by people to be used by people.

5. To pay you. Avrin shared a great example of a vending machine that required him to use a QR code to pay for his snack. Traditional machines have the option of cash or credit card, but making a QR code the only way to pay requires extra steps. It can be an option, but taking away what’s most convenient could hurt sales.

6. To track the status of your order. Let your customers know when their order is shipped and when they can expect to receive it. And, so there’s no hassle in checking on the order, include tracking information. Once an order leaves the warehouse, one of the major carriers typically takes over, such as FedEx, UPS or the USPS. It’s much easier for your customer to click a button and enter a tracking number than to search for your phone number, call you, wait on hold and eventually ask an agent, “When will I receive my package?”

7. To resolve issues. When a customer has a problem, do you offer self-service solutions? Do they need to call? It doesn’t matter what channel the customer uses to get their problem resolved, they just want it to be easy and fast. I refer to a metric I call “Time to Happiness.” The shorter the time, with little (or no) friction, the better.

Why do we make the effort to be easy to do business with? The answer is summed up in Chapter 25. When you create an easy and frictionless experience, you make it ridiculously easy to choose you over your competition!

Image Credits: Pixabay

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

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Growing Your Conversational Commerce Capability

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How to Optimize the Latest Major Digital Touchpoint

Growing Your Conversational Commerce Capability

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Conversational commerce means interacting with your customer in an automated dialog via voice or text.

Usage of voice-based conversational interfaces such as Alexa and Siri have been exploding for years. Meanwhile, over 100,000 active bots were created on FaceBook’s messenger platform during its first year several years ago.

“Digital” began to truly scale with the web, then expanded even further via apps and social. Is conversational commerce (CC) the next major touchpoint? Conversational commerce is defined as interacting with your customer in an automated dialog via voice or text. Based on our experience consulting large brands on the implementation of their digital innovations, and given trends on consumer adoption and technology-readiness, it is fair to say that we are at the dawn of the first wave of the broad implementation of conversational commerce.

For several years, IBM has been painting a fanciful picture of its Watson technology’s ability to digest volumes of information, understand questions, and provide truly insightful answers. Meanwhile, consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with dialog-style interactions via Siri, Google voice search, and Alexa.

In fact:

  • The number of commands (“skills”) that Alexa can respond has increased past 100,000
  • 34 percent of all smartphone users say they turn to Siri and Google voice search at least weekly.

But conversational commerce does not necessarily have to involve voice recognition.

2017 represented the one-year anniversary of the launch of Facebook’s chatbots, which enable brands to engage in text-based automated interactions with their customers and audience. In 2017 its Messenger platform alone had already reached about 100,000 active bots, and a survey then found that nearly 80 percent of companies use or plan to use chatbots by 2020.

At the Shoptalk conference a few years ago, eBay President and CEO Devin Wenig announced the launch of eBay’s new chatbot called ShopBot, which advises customers on items they might like to buy via automated chat dialog.

This pattern makes sense, as we see that millennials — 38 percent of whom prefer texting as their number one form of interaction, according to a study from Think with Google — have elevated this type of communication to an art form.

Will Siri or SMS-like automated dialog with your brand become the next big consumer touchpoint? If so, what do you need to do to prepare?

The answer, as some of the stats above suggest, is that conversational commerce is poised to be a major and preferred interaction model for many future brand interactions.

The good news is that if your brand has built a reasonably flexible and integrated digital stack, it can often be quickly leveraged to enable high-value CC capabilities without requiring that you install “Deep Blue” in your data center.

Here are five key things to know about getting started with conversational commerce:

1. The Core of Conversational Commerce is Very Similar to Search.

If you already have a strong search platform that permits parametrization, you can use it to drive a key portion of your chat experience. When you tell eBay’s chatbot you are looking to buy a voice recorder; it asks you questions such as the size and memory capacity you need. These questions are simply the metadata parameters eBay has available for voice recorders. You can utilize the product metadata in your existing catalog to make your chatbot appear to ask smart questions, and even more importantly help the customer find what they need, but in reality, the results are very similar to what they would experience if they simply entered structured search queries.

Of course, not all queries involve the quest for a product. Some may be asking a question, such as about your return or cancellation policies, but this too is very similar to search. You can parse chat questions against your full-text index and return intelligent answers by, again, leveraging your search engine.

2. The Next Step of Conversational Commerce is About Enabling Transactions.

Once a customer has found what they are looking for, they may wish to buy, reserve, add to a wish list, or take some other action. Your chat flow needs to know when to pivot from searching to asking the customer to take action. In many cases, or in your initial releases, you may simply choose to branch to existing web screens to complete transactions, as eBay is doing with ShopBot. More sophisticated conversational commerce implementations allow the customer to take action via voice or text, such as Domino’s, which allows the customer to order a pizza by text.

3. In Text Conversations, You Generally Know Your Customer.

One of the advantages of most forms of conversational commerce, such as SMS or Facebook Messenger, is that your customer is identifiable. If the customer has a profile in your system, you can use this knowledge to make the conversational interaction simpler — and also smarter. Picking up again on our Domino’s example, when the customer texts them a pizza emoji, the bot matches their telephone number to its database and confirms that it will be placing the order with toppings based on their past preferences, and will deliver it to their home address on file. The customer will then have the opportunity to override any of these defaults if they are in the mood for Hawaiian pizza that day.

4. You Can Make the Language Parsing Easier by Giving Multiple-choice Options.

Many successful chatbots are more of a string of multiple-choice questions than a free-form dialog. This substantially reduces the challenge of “comprehending” the customer and furthermore reduces typing for users on mobile devices. Naturally, you will want to support customer-entered text strings, but a considerable number of interactions can be handled via a series of multiple-choice questions. In some ways, chat is similar to IVR systems at call centers, and can often use similar types of decision trees.

5. It Doesn’t Have to be Perfect.

There is still some novelty to automated interactions, so customers don’t expect them to be perfect. Furthermore, as with any digital platform, you have the opportunity to improve it over time iteratively. Siri has grown tremendously over the last few years in the range of queries it can handle.

A fantastic resource to help guide your prioritization of new capabilities are the chat logs themselves, which will give you a sense of the types of interactions that your customers are attempting that may not yet be supported by your platform. And in the meantime, as you become aware of such chat or voice requests, you can create short text responses to those categories of inquiries, letting the customer know what other touchpoints currently support that action. So if a customer, for example, uses a chatbot to check their account balance but then wants to transfer funds, and that is not yet supported via conversational commerce, you can supply the URL for the website or app and the toll-free number to call, so they know where to go next.

6. Develop a Core Conversational Engine, and Leverage it Across Many Different Touchpoints

It makes sense to invest in conversational commerce platforms and tie them to your existing catalog, customer data, business logic and transaction capabilities. In doing so, think of creating one central CC “engine” that will connect to a variety of conversational endpoints. To begin with, you may want to focus on enabling a chatbot on your website(s) and in your apps, and integrating with the Facebook chatbot API to allow customers to chat with your automated system via Messenger the same way they would chat with their friends. But in future iterations, it makes sense to support SMS, Skype, WeChat (if you do business in Asia), and possibly other similar platforms. Longer term, as Apple’s Siri, Google Voice, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa continue to open up their APIs, the same conversational engine you created for text can be leveraged with relatively small modifications to support voice interactions.

Conversational commerce is already here, and most major brands have either implemented or are in some stage of planning around an implementation. You can probably leverage existing systems and data sets to create a reasonable starting point for conversational interaction without requiring sophisticated AI or language parsing. Over time, you can learn from your customers’ queries how they want to interact with you and evolve your conversational capabilities accordingly.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Pixabay

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Top Ten Uses for a Customer Journey Map

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Top Ten Uses for a Customer Journey Map

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the evolving landscape of customer-centric business, the customer journey map has emerged as a pivotal tool. It serves not only as a means to visualize the customer experience but also as a strategic asset to drive innovation and transformation. By mapping out the customer journey, organizations can gain deep insights into customer needs, pain points, and moments of truth, ultimately leading to enhanced experiences and increased loyalty. Here are the top ten uses for a customer journey map.

1. Understand Customer Experience

The primary function of a customer journey map is to visualize the entire customer experience. By laying out the journey, businesses can empathize with customers, gaining a comprehensive understanding of their experiences and emotions at each touchpoint.

2. Identify Pain Points

Journey maps are instrumental in identifying pain points and frictions along the customer journey. By highlighting these areas, businesses can prioritize improvements and tackle the most impactful issues to enhance customer satisfaction.

3. Enhance Product Development

Innovative product development can be fostered through insights gained from customer journey maps. By understanding customer needs and pain points, development teams can create solutions that are aligned with user expectations and desires.

4. Improve Customer Support

Journey maps can highlight common issues faced by customers, allowing companies to streamline and improve their customer support processes. By addressing these areas, organizations can enhance their support services, leading to better customer experiences.

5. Drive Alignment Across Teams

Customer journey maps create a shared vision and understanding of customer segments across all teams within an organization. This alignment fosters collaboration and ensures that all departments are working towards a common goal: improving the customer experience.

6. Inform Marketing Strategies

By understanding the customer journey, marketers can design targeted strategies that align with each stage of the customer lifecycle. This ensures more effective communication and engagement, ultimately improving conversion rates and customer retention.

7. Personalize Customer Interactions

Journey maps help businesses provide personalized experiences by identifying key moments where tailored interactions can significantly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. Personalization fosters a deeper connection with customers, enhancing their overall experience.

8. Support Change Management Initiatives

During times of change, a customer journey map serves as a guiding framework to maintain focus on the customer as strategies and processes evolve. It ensures that change initiatives are designed with the customer in mind, thus reducing the risk of negative impacts.

9. Foster Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is driven by ongoing insights and feedback from customer journey maps. As businesses iterate on the customer experience, journey maps act as a feedback loop, helping organizations remain agile and responsive to changing customer needs.

10. Drive Innovation

Last but certainly not least, journey maps drive innovation by uncovering opportunities for creating breakthrough experiences and services. They challenge organizations to think creatively about how they can deliver unique value and set themselves apart in the market.

Conclusion

A customer journey map serves as an invaluable tool for organizations seeking to enhance customer experience and drive strategic growth. By visualizing the customer’s interactions with a brand, businesses can identify pain points and opportunities at every stage of the consumer lifecycle. From improving customer service and refining marketing strategies to informing product development and personalizing the purchasing process, the applications of a customer journey map are vast and impactful. Leveraging these insights allows companies to foster deeper engagement, build loyalty, and ultimately achieve a competitive edge in today’s dynamic market. As customer expectations continue to evolve, integrating journey mapping into your business strategy is not just beneficial but essential for sustained success.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Creating Long-Term Customer Loyalty

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Creating Long-Term Customer Loyalty

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Many years ago, I sold a home. My real estate agent made a value proposition for me. If I hired her to sell my home, I could walk out of the house and never come back. She would manage everything related to maintaining the home and keeping it “showroom ready.” That included lawn care, cleaning and much more. If anything broke, she would take care of. If a painter needed to touch up a wall, she would hire “her painter.” Other than showing up at the closing to sign papers, my only responsibility would be to reimburse her for any expenses she incurred.

She explained that she had a network of preferred vendors who gave her preferential pricing, and she would pass only the actual costs onto me. In addition to her stellar reputation, what she promised to do—make selling my house easy and hassle-free—was the reason I hired her.

At the time, I wondered, “Why don’t other real estate agents do this?” Another question was, “Why don’t more businesses, regardless of the industry they are in, do this?”

It turns out there are people, companies and brands that do. However, many struggle to put together a program like this and find out it’s harder than they thought. Furthermore, what if a company could profit from these recommendations and referrals? What if the referrer received a commission or finder’s fee for recommending the right vendor?

Meet Mikhail Naumov, the founder and CEO of Paylode, a company that helps his clients do exactly what my real estate agent did for me. Naumov says, “If you’re a car company, you’re selling cars. If you’re a pet adoption agency, you’re helping people adopt a new puppy. For the most part, that’s where your job begins and ends. However, the moment the customer buys a car or adopts a puppy, they suddenly have a dozen other problems or pain points they now must solve due to the purchase.”

Naumov’s version of my real estate agent story is that he moved from California to Miami, rented an apartment, and the moment he signed the lease, he thought, “I now need to find renter’s insurance, moving trucks, a storage unit, furniture, appliances, food and more.” His entrepreneurial mind kicked in and he realized there was an opportunity to help apartment rental companies (and now companies across many other industries, including travel, hospitality, and insurance) create a system to take care of their customers’ secondary and tertiary needs. His company, Paylode, was born.

Paylode helps its clients find companies and vendors that their customers need. Sometimes the clients get a referral fee. They typically negotiate discounts that get their customers better rates, and even with the referral fees, the customer still saves money.

While this offers Paylode’s clients an alternative revenue stream by monetizing the products and services they recommend, Naumov quickly realized that it was not the most important reason. The No. 1 reason is making the client’s life easier by helping them with what they need, related to but outside of what their actual business does. This ultimately creates a better customer experience, which in turn drives core business metrics (i.e., retention, engagement, LTV, repeat purchase, and more).

In a sense, the Paylode program is like offering a perk to the customer. Naumov says, “We live in an incentive economy.” Customers love to be rewarded with a perk for doing business with a company. That perk could be, as mentioned, a negotiated discount with a secondary business. But what if you took that further and offered other perks? For example, an apartment rental company could offer six months of free internet with popular streaming channels like MAX and AppleTV. A perk like that becomes an incentive behind a customer’s buying decision, which is why Naumov has named this feature of his platform “Paylode Boost,” focusing on a perk that incentivizes a customer to take a desired action, or choose one company over another.

Companies and brands spend most of their time focused on their own business. Naumov says they have tunnel vision and makes the case for companies from all industries—both B2C and B2B—to step outside of that tunnel and think about their customers’ needs beyond the core product or service they offer. It starts by asking the question, “What new problems show up in my customers’ lives as a consequence of buying from me?”

Sit down with your team and work out the answer, and consider Naumov’s suggestion to “Help customers solve those secondary and tertiary problems in a way that creates loyalty, engagement and gratitude from your customers for life.”

Image Credits: Unsplash

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

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The Magic of Starting with Yes

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The Magic of Starting with Yes

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

It’s time to revisit the idea of avoiding the word “no,” but this time, I want to approach it from a different angle. First, let me tell you about my friend Dr. Nido Qubein, a devoted husband and father, motivational speaker, entrepreneur, president of High Point University, and mentor to many, who came to this country when he was 17 with little more than $50 to his name. Almost 50 years ago, he attended High Point University, never dreaming that one day he would be president of the institution, a position he accepted in 2005.

Since that time, there has been incredible growth at HPU. In his first year, the university had about 1,400 students enrolled on the 91-acre campus. Today, there are almost 6,000 students, including 623 graduate students. The campus has grown to more than 500 acres, includes 128 buildings, and is considered an elite university.

If you Google “Nido Qubein,” you will see a list of accomplishments that give insight into this man’s extraordinary career. As mentioned, he is a mentor to many, and even as a friend, I am among those who consider him a mentor. I’ve learned much from his willingness to share the lessons he learned from his successes, and today, I want to share a simple lesson we might all want to consider, which has to do with the word no.

If you’ve been following my work, you know I’ve written several articles about avoiding the word no. Christine Trippi and Cameron Mitchell have been featured in The Shepard Letter and in my videos discussing the topic. This time, I give you Nido’s perspective, and even though he’s not talking about customer service or CX, it ties in perfectly.

Nido recognizes that when someone new steps into a leadership role in any type of organization, authenticity and listening skills are of the utmost importance. People can be skeptical. He says, “I always start with a yes. It doesn’t always end that way after we’ve done the study, but a lot of people start with no.”

I love this idea. When our customers ask us for something or they have an issue, starting on a positive note, such as finding a way to use the word yes from the start can help guide the conversation in the right direction. This is what it looks like:

  • “Yes, I understand.”
  • “Yes, that’s a great idea worth considering.”
  • “Yes, you do have a problem, so let’s see what we can do about it.”
  • “Yes, that is a possibility. Let’s look at the situation more closely.”

Nido’s simple leadership lesson is also a powerful customer service lesson. When a customer comes to you with a problem or issue, you are in a leadership position. You are empowered with authority to help the customer. Saying yes is not about giving in. It’s about using the right word at the right time to create a better customer experience.

Image Credits: Pexels

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Creating More Digital Value for Customers

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Creating more value for customers is how highly successful digital companies like Uber, Amazon, Netflix, and Apple got to where they are today.

Creating More Digital Value for Customers

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

So how do you improve your customer value? Think of customer value as an equation — how much do you give me in exchange for how much I give you? There’s the “cost” side of the equation for the customer, and there’s the “benefits” side. Great customer value engineering innovates on both sides of that equation.

Cost

An important part of the “cost” is the money the consumer spends, but it is also measured in time, convenience and level of effort. If the customer has to work harder to extract the value from your offering, this is a perceived increase in cost.

Let’s take the example of Netflix. They have always been aggressive about providing access to large volumes of content for an accessible monthly charge. Their current lowest price is $6.99 per month, less than the cost of a single movie ticket. Netflix also works hard to use personalization to lower the effort it takes to find and play content on any device.

Here are four key ways to reduce the “cost” side of your value proposition. Consider which of these might apply to your offering.

1. Charge less. This is the most obvious step. The danger is that competing on price alone can be a dangerous game and take both you and your competitors into a place where it can be difficult to make money or run a sustainable business. However, we see many of the most successful companies in the digital space not necessarily “discounting” their offer but finding ways to re-engineer their entire cost model via innovative approaches that leverage this new digital world in order to offer more for less. For example, Amazon is able to undercut the prices of many brick and mortar retailers because they don’t have the cost of retail stores and because of the large scale of their operation. Google is able to offer email for free because they have devised a way to make money via advertising rather than charging for the service.

2. Change your payment model. Blockbuster rented videos on a “per video” basis. Netflix’s first innovation was not streaming or House of Cards but rather the subscription model for video “rental.” Similarly, Amazon created a major innovation with Amazon Prime when they offered subscription 2-day shipping services. But subscription is not the only way to change the game. Disaggregation is another. Apple changed the music industry by focusing on selling individual tracks of music rather than entire albums. They then applied this same approach to episodic TV episodes which were previously only available to be purchased in “full season” DVD sets.

3. Reduce the customer’s effort. Uber takes the effort out of getting around. They extremely simplified the process of ordering a car service, paying, talking to the driver about where you are headed and managing your expense records. These may be small things, but they add up. Just like we are willing to pay more for milk at 7-11 to avoid the grocery store if your offering is less effort for the user it reduces the overall “cost.”

4. Reduce unexpected costs. Look for opportunities to save a user money that they would be paying to someone else. If a user can drive less or avoid shipping costs, you have saved them money, and they may not mind giving you a little more. An old-school example, AAA sells roadside assistance but included with this subscription are discounts to most hotels and some other travel-related services. These discounts cost AAA nothing and add value to the membership.

Benefits

Now that we’ve removed some of the “cost,” how can we augment the benefits? Here are five techniques to increase the benefits side of the equation.

1. Offer more stuff. HBO recently partnered with Sesame Workshop to add over 20 seasons of Sesame Street to their on-demand offering. Dropbox continues to increase the storage they will give you for your $9.99 monthly subscription. Consider cost-effective ways to simply give the user more of what they are coming to you for.

2. Add features. Google office massively increased the value of their “PowerPoint” competitor by enabling cloud-based real-time collaboration. Consider how to expand the features your product offers to add value.

3. Increase shareability. The more people that can utilize a single purchase, the more value it has. Apple created their family plan so that apps purchased from their App store can be used by anyone in the family. Amazon created a way to “lend” a Kindle book to a friend.

4. Increase durability or longevity. Extending the realistic lifespan of your product extends the value. For example demonstrating the “future-proofing” you have included in your solution so that it will be forward-compatible with the “next generation” of technology adds value to your offer.

5. Add flexibility. If customers can use your product in different ways, apply it to more “needs” in their life, this increases the value. You may have subscribed to Dropbox to share files with clients, but Dropbox has added and promotes features also to make it a great place to sync and store your personal photos and act as a “backup” in case of hard drive failure. Apple constantly markets the diverse ways their products can be used. iPhones are also cameras, calculators, GPS devices, musical instruments, word processors, currency converters and presentation tools. Every additional way your iPhone can be used potentially replaces another product you would have to buy and adds value.

Which of these opportunities to enhance the value equation for your customer best fit your business? For those that don’t seem to “fit,” try a thought experiment for each and consider if it did fit, how would you apply it? You might discover a breakthrough that would transform your whole value proposition.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Howard Tiersky, FROM

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