Hello my dear readers.
First, I need to offer an apology for both the delay this week – and because this is going to be a short one (but a good one, I promise).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxm7Hu-IHJs
As the US begins to reopen, a little, and meetings in person become more of a reality – I have tried to take advantage of that and meet a few folks – formally and informally – in person to have conversations. Sure, bourbon and ice cream and – how to get rid of this horrible COVID-weight have taken predominance in those talks… but also, great chats about the future of CX and the way to better support it.
This is going to be a short one because I only have 1-2 links, but also have one great nugget that continues to come through in conversations that makes me very hopeful. I’m going to let you hang on to the success of what that is for a couple more paragraphs while I share three links with you that I thought were interesting.
A few weeks back I told you about a great discussion I had about measuring sentiment in CX. I told you how the concepts of sentiments and feelings is not measurable, but more of a binary thingie.
If the sentiment is present, you must act – not worry about how upset or happy someone is during the interaction. In the process of trying to verify my binary sentimentality concept, I came across this link – an introduction to a framework on behavioral mapping.
I will confess, did not have a lot of time to go through this in detail – but what I saw it’s quite interesting: forget understanding the journeys and the intent for the journeys, that’s easy (well, not really – but my argument is not made unless I say that), trying to figure out what the behaviors are behind those intentions and journeys is where it’s at.
If you think about it, if you read and studied behavioral sciences, our actions are guided by behaviors. If you have a question, you will instinctively seek an answer. It sounds simple, but – the method or process or… journey you chose to seek that answer is what determines the buyer journey, the customer journey, the seller journey, etc.
The more neuroscientists learn about the brain, the more social psychologists understand about consumer behavior, and the more marketers can apply these insights to branding and building customer trust.
If you can use behavioral and cognition elements (and cognition makes 100% of what we call AI, just as a reminder) to know when, where, and how the behavior will begin to seek an answer to a question – even personalized by individual customer (although I suspect that is not necessary as most behaviors are similar among different segments… but don’t want to get too far ahead), can you:
As I said, haven’t had a chance to explore this in length – but am encouraged to know there are smart people out there looking at how we can do this better that are going to the source of the interaction and engagement: the behaviors.
Second, I have tentatively secured an interesting conversation for the next couple of weeks for the next “I don’t know what I am doing – with friends” video series; he agreed, we need to set it up. Dr. Graham Hill and I go back some decades. We have been intellectual sparring partners for some time. There are few people who read and research the topic of CX as well as he does.
Follow the link I pasted above, it’s his LinkedIn profile, and look at his posts from recent. He is ending a series (that I cited here before) on customer journeys and company pathways (part of what I want to discuss with him on a video) that it was very well received, had some incredible nuggets of information, and he also wrote an article on MyCustomer.com last week about it.
I won’t give it all away – please read some of his stuff – because I don’t want to bias the video we will record – but trust me, you will want to hang around for that one. And for those who known me for some time – no, hell is not freezing over just because Graham and I agree on a few points, and we are going to have a chat…. Relax. Some people do tend to become better with age, others (me) simply find fewer things to disagree on.
Rounding up this, the summary of the conversations I promised you (I guess I had more to say than I thought — this is not going to be that short…).
I am talking about using platforms as integration points, as distributors of work, as aggregators of security, and many other things. If you ask me, as we begin to create a mainstream conscience of what platforms are – beyond marketing hype – we begin better conversations about this.
Without becoming too contentious, or boring, if I can own the processing of the transaction and the insights that arise from that – nirvana (I still believe Nevermind is one of the masterpieces of music, fight me on that).
The future of shopping is entertainment. It's not enough to have an online storefront – brands must do more. Consumers today are looking for novel, immersive, and entertaining shopping experiences.
But these discussions in the past have been marred by fiefdoms and silos. It seems, early days, that we are finally getting past the issue of who’s ball it is, and we are focusing on how we all can play better together. And that’s wonderful.
Many conversations, both internally and externally, lately about this – and the culmination (so far, but so much more work to be done) of those discussions was the understanding that platforms and ecosystems are the way to go. Sure, I’m biased to see it that way – but trust me on this: we’re going to be ruled by platforms doing the work of integrating and aggregating – and this time we are finally talking about the real technology platforms.
I will have a lot more to share and discuss on that when we resume this conversation on a timely manner after I get off the road for a while. Meanwhile, from somewhere in the heartland of the great ole US of A – signing off, late belter than never – on this CX minute.
(in case Wondrous Jenn doesn’t have the time to properly present this entry – here is the link to the collection of these minutes. Also, I am writing my second diatribe on ZDNet next week, including a more detailed explanation of how CX is progressing in the world – so stay tuned for that… my first entry talking about miserable interactions is here)
Let’s make this better…. Find me in Linked-In, via the world’s worse kept secret (my email address) but never again on Twitter (they blocked me from even accessing my DM’s, last thing I used to do there, because I did not want to compromise my privacy further – whatever) or any other place. Yes, I get the irony – trust me, I am reminded of that weekly…
See you soon.
