[Updated] Why T-Mobile Needs a Chief Customer Officer

T-Mobile Chief Customer Officer NeededWhy T-Mobile Needs a Chief Customer Officer shows how customers’ omni-channel interactions with enterprises demand profound integration of business processes, and how firms’ failure to “go all the way” in breaking down silos ultimately threatens business. Most firms don’t go far enough, including T-Mobile, and their silo-centric efforts fail to get the job done. To illustrate the point, I’ll share how T-Mobile alienates fans like me by not delivering what they promise.

This story also shows that the need for a CCO is particularly acute in mature economies like the U.S.A. and Europe because their silos were built decades ago, and their legacy processes often adversely affect customer experience.

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The Employee Engagement Fallacy and How to Fix It

The Employee Engagement Fallacy: How You Can Fix It AvatarThe Employee Engagement Fallacy reveals that most literature, papers, and methods are built on faulty Industrial Economy employment attitudes, and it provides an approach that uses experiential social media to help reframe employment and performance.

Although the idea of “employee engagement” can be a rare opportunity to increase competitiveness, its practice is compromised by well intended but flawed logic.

Here’s the fallacy: Employee “engagement” is the result of employees’ experiences while they’re working at employers. Few engagement programs focus on employees’ experiences, so they fall short.

Engagement is not achieved by a program or initiative that focuses on the outcome. Employers see much more success at achieving the result when they focus on empowering the experiences their employees want when they decide to work at the employer. Experience is the motor of engagement, so empowering experience is the first step of raising productivity and lowering employment costs, two common employee engagement goals. Here’s how it’s done.

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Chief Digital Officer Needs Analysis: Do You Need a CDO?

Chief Digital Officer Needs Analysis is an executive summary of how CSRA helps organizations assess their need for “going digital” and hiring digital executives. These engagements serve as “requirements analysis” for an enterprise, business or brand.

Improving the Selection Process for Digital Executives

Chief Digital Officer Needs Analysis: Do you need a CDO?Astute CEOs and boards of established firms and brands are awakening to an increasingly uncomfortable reality: for many, business results have been flat, and customers are behaving “unpredictably.” Since this is such a prevalent trend, there is emerging consensus that “going digital” is the way to get closer to customers(1) and revitalize business. CEOs or board members get on the phone to their executive recruiter to search for a Chief Digital Officer, a “digital CMO,” or maybe a digital-savvy CIO to lead digital transformation. As we’ll see, in so doing they are too often putting the cart before the horse. They will get better results by assessing their needs for digital expertise first, so I’ll offer a simple yet robust needs assessment process.

Although CSRA’s client work shows accelerating digital […]

How to Tap the Social Business Double Value Proposition [CDO Guide to Social Business Part2]

How to Tap the Social Business Double Value Proposition outlines an efficient and rigorous process for using social business for digital transformation in two ways: social business itself can drive reputation, preference and profit, and it’s the fastest way to develop requirements for mobile, ecommerce and big data investments.

How to Tap the Social Business Double Value Proposition [CDO Guide to Social Business Part2]

The social business double value proposition works because it discovers, engages and validates the organization’s understanding of stakeholder outcomes. Every organization’s crucial stakeholders have outcomes that they hope to attain by interacting with the organization or using its products or services. Developing deep and broad knowledge of stakeholder outcomes enables the organization to serve and quickly deepen their relationships with their stakeholders—by helping them attain their outcomes by collaborating online; moreover, since it opens fast and inexpensive communication and collaboration channels with them, it can create a continuous innovation process and sustainable advantage over rivals.

The Guide to Social Business Part2 shows how to maximize efficiency by using external and internal analyses to create and execute social business strategy, […]

The Social Business Enabler of Digital Transformation [CDO Guide to Social Business Part1]

TheSocial Business Enabler of Digital Transformation reveals how social technologies have changed the economics of interacting and collaborating, and it presents four ways that Chief Digital Officers can use social to lower risk and boost returns of digital transformation.

The Social Business Enabler of Digital Transformation [CDO Guide to Social Business Part1]Social business competency is pivotal to digital transformation because it combines four unusual characteristics. First, it makes interacting and collaborating an order of magnitude faster and less costly than current processes; second, few organizations understand how to use social business to interact with key customers to boost profit, so leaders enjoy rare advantage; third, when compared to ecommerce, mobile and big data & analytics investments, social business shows results quickly and costs less. Lastly, social business reveals what stakeholders really think when organizations aren’t in the room, so it’s effective for due diligence and “requirements analysis” for ecommerce, mobile and big data investments.

As Social Business Enabler of Digital Transformation explains, social business has a two-fold value proposition for Chief Digital Officers: they can use social directly to drive reputation, innovation and […]

Reputation and Business

conversationsIn An Offer You Can’t Refuse, Lydia Dishman interviews CEO Justin Moore, who discusses his business leadership “lessons learned” from watching The Godfather. It’s a solid post, but very thoughtful and insightful comments take it into classic territory. That said, the post didn’t hit the bullseye for our context here—B2B relationship building—so here goes with the pieces I think it missed. I invite you to add yours in comments.

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Customer Service Is the New Marketing

Customer Service Is the New Marketing shows how CMOs can leverage digital world of mouth by leading teams to serve people publicly.

Customer Service Is the New MarketingIn 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. […]

CIOs' Emerging Social Business Opportunity

cio_socbizAs a speaker at the CIO Forum & Executive IT Summit this past week, I spent two days in focused conversations with enterprise CIOs. The summit is co-sponsored by SIM, TEN and ITEEX and is a relatively intimate setting as most attendees are CIOs, and no press is allowed. We spoke about what was top of mind for CIOs and their experiences with social business. It served as an excellent “current state of the CIO,” and I have some surprising takeaways to share. I’ll also offer a surprising prediction and social business guidance to CIOs.

Having advised CEOs, CIOs, COOs and CMOs on adopting disruptive technology at various stages of my career, I have a broad perspective of the enterprise and executive roles. From the mid 1990s through 2006, I focused on enterprise software and corporate strategy. In 2006, I launched CSRA to advise enterprises on social business strategy, and I’ve been working with CMOs, which has been personally rewarding as I have also led marketing several times in my career. For context, here are a few things that most executives don’t yet […]

2010 Predictions and Recommendations for Web 2.0 and Social Networks

2010 Predictions and recommendations for enterprise social networking and Web 2.0: how executives and enterprises can leverage social business to increase competitiveness. Understand how social networks are contributing to the end of the Industrial Economy: the importance of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace and focusing on relationships. […]

Strangle Me: Apple Awarded Web 0.2 Citation for Delivering Painful Paroxysm of Yechsperience™

Apple cited with Web 0.2 award for inflicting customer pain on Mobile me “authentication” process […]