 How Trusting Customers Drives Profit reveals how firms unwittingly broadcast that they don’t trust their customers, how that weakens profit, and how firms can take the leap. It’s a simple revolutionary idea that’s born from nine years of studying behavior while practicing experiential social media and social business.
Analysts, consultants and professors increasingly say that customer experience is the last bastion of competitiveness, and an increasing portion of total experience occurs in digital public. This presents firms with an unprecedented opportunity: interacting with people in digital public can create trust at scale and drive profit from revenue and cost levers.
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Digital Transformation’s Personal Issue reveals personal treatment to be the key to breakthrough customer experience, and it shows how digital social spaces enable Chief Digital Officers to use personal treatment to create more profit. Before they arrive, though, they need to lead their organizations through the Personal Issue. 
The Personal Issue refers to a perceived conflict between empowered customers and profit-starved companies. Digital social technologies are enabling customers to “re-personalize” business and society because their online interactions among themselves are personal, which is changing their expectations of all interactions.
However, businesses resist treating customers personally because they fear cost and inefficiency. They don’t understand the digital social economics of treating customers personally online, at scale.
Meanwhile, the missions of chief digital officers (CDOs) and chief customer officers (CCOs) are creating bold new “customer experience” and profits by using digital technologies to transform organizations, brands and businesses. They will fulfill their missions far more quickly and completely by using the key.
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 [UPDATED] The big omni-channel trap awaits digital executives who make huge technology, process and people investments to create new “experiences” for “connected customers” but neglect social technologies’ ability to engage people emotionally. Few business executives have spent enough quality time in digital social venues to appreciate how personally and deeply people collaborate online; rather, it is normal for CDOs, CMOs and CIOs to primarily think of “digital” as mechanizing technologies like Web transaction systems (ecommerce), mobile and big data. That’s the preconception baits the big omni-channel trap. The Big Omni-Channel Trap is second in CSRA’s retail & omni-channel series, and it will show you how to avoid the trap.
More and more customers and other stakeholders are collaborating online and getting accustomed to being individually treated like people, not demographics of consumers or customers. They like it. People can’t resist places in which they, and others around them, are listened to and responded to meaningfully. People respond to each other’s emotions. Organizations that don’t appreciate this development will invest heavily and receive lackluster returns, weakening themselves at […]
 Personal Individualized Experience is the DNA of digital transformation. It refers to using an optimal mix of people and digital technologies to provide personal interactions at scale, so it’s central to the mission of chief digital officers and CEOs and boards who hire them. Prior to digital and social technologies, organizations faced a trade-off between “personal” and “efficient” interactions with their stakeholders (customers, clients, employees, partners, regulators… hereafter “users”). Now this is no longer true; they can provide personal interactions at scale, once they learn how and where to interact efficiently and authentically.
Used well, digital and social technologies retain an authentic human element while digitizing key aspects of relating to people. Therefore, organizations/firms/brands (hereafter “firms”) can now provide the Personal Individualized Experience (PIE). This post explains the three components of PIE and shows how firms can use them to build and maintain authentic and profitable relationships with users.
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 [UPDATED] Social business strategy use cases represent scenarios in which most organizations find themselves, and they reflect some of the choices of which CDOs, CMOs and CEOs may use as they plan to evolve their enterprises in order to either improve returns or simply remain relevant in volatile markets.
Social business strategy is inherently transformational to large organizations whether they are in commercial, nonprofit or government sectors. All organizations are hives of people communicating and collaborating to execute business processes (“work”). Digital social technologies have reduced the cost of communication (and therefore much collaboration and work) by an order of magnitude (roughly ten times). Collaboration and innovation, before digital social technologies, were slow and expensive. Now they are very fast and inexpensive—when organizations learn how to use them. Organizations that learn how are more responsive to their constituents and customers, so the market rewards them—and will increasingly punish those that lag too far.
These use cases focus on building enterprise social business internal capability, and they are also helpful to consider when selecting social business advisors. Please […]
Customer Service Is the New Marketing shows how CMOs can leverage digital world of mouth by leading teams to serve people publicly.
 In most brand organizations, marketing investments rest on 20th century marketing principles whose results are diminishing every year. At the same time, an increasing portion of products and services are commoditizing, which puts more pressure on marketing to “create” differentiation and value. In many cases, there is no escape—except by changing the rules. Here I’ll show how marketing can reinvent itself by using social business to tap a hidden gold mine.
The Threat: Dire Straits in Marketing
Marketing as a profession emerged in leading economies during the mid 20th century, when manufactured products were novelties in many categories. Marketers came to assume that they could “create an image” or “brand” using the mass communications to which few had access. Individual customers had no leverage because word of mouth was analog. Word of mouth has always been the most trusted source of product or service information, but it had no leverage until social peer-to-peer technologies emerged. […]
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