SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Many customer experience initiatives struggle to create business impacts, such as improving customer retention, innovation, cost efficiencies, sales, and the like (see here, here and here). To address this when business objectives are urgent,  a slimmed-down approach to improving the customer experience is emerging organically—often spurred by resourceful managers who run customer communities, advocacy programs, advisory boards and the like.

"These 'customer experience agile' initiatives are improving CX where improvement is needed most, while achieving significant business impacts relatively quickly," says Bill Lee, author of several Harvard Business Review publications on the subject.

Lee will announce the "CX Agile" approach and provide supporting case studies in his opening keynote on March 3 at the 2020 Summit on Customer Engagement (March 2-4, in Burlingame, CA). He will also lead a deeper dive discussion on the emerging CX Agile at the invitation-only Advanced Practices Pre-Summit Workshop on March 2. "We'll have some of the top practitioners in the world for that one," says Lee.

"When addressing a major business objective for which the firm isn't getting traction," says Lee, "one of the best things you can do is ask, 'Can our customers help with this?' That question is opening up a lot of creativity."

Major C-Suite Issues Addressed By Engaged Customers

Customer Retention
After considering an expensive marketing campaign to reverse a serious decline in customer retention, SAS Canada's customer advocacy manager persuaded leadership that defecting customers were more likely to listen to other (successful) SAS customers. The manager's team recruited more than 300 SAS "Customer Champions" to form 13 executive committees that established and ran regular, live events in more than 20 major cities. The events drew 2,000 customers and prospects per year, and the Champions stayed in touch with attendees afterward via online forums and a newsletter that grew to 5,000 subscribers. Business Impact: Retention rates were fully restored.

"Companies are similarly engaging their customers to address a wide variety of C-Suite objectives—and are often surprised at the enthusiasm of their co-creating customers," says Lee.

Innovation
3M engaged "lead user" customers to try and improve on disappointing innovation results in its Medical-Surgical Division. The lead user innovations created 8x the projected 5 yr. revenue (average of $146M vs. $18M) and 2x the market share (68% vs. 33%) as the innovations from the internal team.

Market Awareness
When its rebranding initiative began to falter over disagreements on critical customer issues, BMC's rebranding team (including the CMO) engaged the firm's top customer advocates, who brought confidence, clarity, and acceptance of the new brand both by customers and the market.

Cost Reduction
Facing a serious threat from free, crowdsourced software Linux, Microsoft successfully engaged its customer community to take support requests, diverting them from its expensive support center. The community would eventually achieve savings of $100s of millions in support costs as well as a net increase in customer satisfaction.

C-Suite Objective: SALES WINS
Salesforce discovered, quite by surprise, that 80% of the prospects who attended its early live events would become customers. The driving factor was the ability of prospects to have transparent conversations with existing customers. These early events laid the foundation for the firm's sales generator par excellence: Dreamforce—with its heavy emphasis on creating conversations between customers and prospects.

"At this point we have some three dozen CX Agile examples and case studies," says Lee. "These are filling a major need for C-Suites who understand quite well the importance of competing on the customer experience but have urgent business objectives that need solutions quickly. We're going to provide specific, evidence-based guidance to enlist customers for such needs."

About Bill Lee
Bill Lee is the Founder of the Center for Customer Engagement. Many of the top B2B firms in the world such as ADP, Adobe, Amazon, CA Technologies, HubSpot, Finastra, LinkedIn, Oracle, Rackspace, Red Hat, SAS and dozens of others participate in its educational offerings, consume its research and/or use its advisory services.

Bill's passion is helping firms to build high-mutual-value, long-term relationships with today's connected customers. He's the author of 20 publications with Harvard Business Review including his book, The Hidden Wealth of Customers."

His Summit on Customer Engagement, now in its 16th year, is the longest-running, most respected educational conference in the world for customer engagement professionals.

"Bill has built one of the most interesting communities of customer-focused pros I've seen. His annual Summit on Customer Engagement is fantastic."
Don Peppers, Founder of the CRM movement

"It's probably the most educational and inspirational conference among those that I attend on a yearly basis," Martin Haering, CMO, Finastra

MEDIA CONTACT:
Bill Lee
214.907.5600
[email protected] 

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SOURCE 2020 Summit on Customer Engagement