In Connected!, one of the 5 strategies I outlined towards being a connected company was about creating 3-tier loyalty models. It means that we start thinking about extending our loyalty programs. Every industry can do it – banking, retail, CPG, travel etc. All we need to do is to think of what our customers want beyond the products we are selling. […]
Products can be physical like shoes, apparel or computers, or they can be software platforms. As you move from year to year, a physical product line needs significant investments in manufacturing to refresh. And the process of determining what bets should be made to maximize that investment is critical. Software products need refreshes too, and although they seem pretty malleable, […]
It was a privilege to speak at the BAI Beacon conference in Orlando a few weeks ago. The topic of the day was digital (of course) and what banks should be doing to improve customer experience and make operations more efficient. My session was on “creating connected customer journeys of the future” – based on my book Connected! I felt that even as we […]
A buyer journey is how your buyers will move towards a purchase – have a problem, evaluate solutions, make a decision. It’s not just for marketing, but also applicable to sales – new client acquisition as well as account growth (or account farming). A buyer’s journey is different from your B2B sales pipeline which is an internal process for sales […]
An interesting study by Retail Leader(1) points out that consumers are buying more fresh grocery. The top reasons are more locations and choices. For the market overall, and for our health too, this is great! That got me thinking. More often than not (overwhelmingly), our offers and promotions are refused! So in an era of more choice, as a retailer, how […]
Cross-industry collaboration must be interpreted in a dramatically different way today. That’s because the most noteworthy competitors in any industry today have among them several non-traditional players. These include upstarts who have started with simple, logical, online models and are now slowly expanding to gobble up adjacent sectors – Amazon, Airbnb, Alibaba, Uber, PayPal, WeChat to name a few. And then […]
As AI takes centerstage, data silos are the biggest hurdle that every enterprise architect, CIO, CTO, or business leader wants to solve today. We need access to quality & timely data, which in turn will lead to better analytics and straight through processing of transactions. So far, a solution to solve the problems of data silos has been elusive. In […]
We are making great strides in connecting with customers and consumers in an Omni Channel fashion. A major part of that evolution is about bringing together a seamless experience over mobile, social media, in-store, online etc.. We are already seeing solutions that help the different channels be aware of each other. Some examples are: 1. For a contact center representative to be […]
As part of my research for Connected!, I came across an interesting research study titled Effects of Customer-Centric Structure on Firm Performance (1). The study shows that being customer centric can actually decrease financial performance by almost 23%. Wow! This research definitely got my attention. Especially in an age where everyone is singing how wonderful customer centricity is. As I dug deeper, I found that the study brought […]
If you are looking to influence revenue from your content marketing, then this blog will be helpful for you. Traditional content audits focus on SEO metrics, traffic, and technical issues. A good guide for this type of audit is here by ahrefs and another good one by SEMRush. For enterprise B2B clients where the sales is complex and transactions are […]
Customer relationship management software is popular as it helps meets important goals for businesses. Reduction of manual processes, centralized information about customers, reduction of departmental silos, easy access to analytics and the like. Customer experience is dramatically enhanced. In addition, consultants to banks are calling this phenomenon relationship banking as opposed to traditional banking, which I personally think is pretty funny, but that’s the […]
Depending on who you are as a person – even after trying to fully align this post with your professional interests – you may not give this post a read beyond this first sentence. And that’s exactly the point of this post. The content marketing world is heating up. Customers are saturated with an overload of information being thrown at them. […]
The idea of creating a composable business enterprise stems from a need for better resiliency to change. It also leads to better customer experiences and business agility. Gartner lays out a framework for organizations to follow the four principles: modularity, autonomy, orchestration, and discovery. At its core, this means a decoupled, more agile organization so that business processes can pivot […]
Businesses have generated innovative products for decades. The evidence is seen everyday in so many blockbuster products whose sales have shot through the roof, and many brands who have acquired legend status. A lot of this is attributable to ingenuity, creativity, primary research and focus groups, lots of analysis of past trends and consumer behavior among many other practices. However there […]
The impact of API economy is across all industries. Because APIs by their very definition are supposed to promote interaction and dialog across multiple companies, often in different industries. In my article on American Banker Don’t Give Away The Store When Enabling APIs, I brought out the focus on ensuring that banks maintain their customer experience front end, while allowing additional channels […]