Patricia Seybold Group Research

What Roles You'll Need to Implement Your Customers.com Strategy - A Handbook for Your Customers.com® Initiatives—Part 3

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In Customers.com Classic, we described the successful e-business strategies of sixteen different best practices organizations. We have followed the people who led these initiatives for 20 years to learn what works and what doesn’t work in a variety of organizations. As a result, we are recommending a new set of roles and responsibilities you should consider for your organization if you want to follow in the footsteps of these best practitioners in designing customer-friendly companies.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Use Your Words - Although Pictorial Instructions Avoid Localization Issues, Some of Us Don’t Respond Well to Diagrams

Ronni Marshak — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

People comprehend information in different ways, be it verbal, visual, or a combo of both. When you prepare information to communicate to customers, make sure you take into account how different people want to assimilate the information and that it is easy for all to understand.

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About Ronni Marshak.

B2B Marketers Prepare to Get the Most Out of Today's Technology Tools - Seven Steps to Adapting to Changes in Buyer Behavior and Capitalizing on Opportunities

Susan McKittrick — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

As B2B marketers adapt to changes in buyer behavior and learn how to take advantage of opportunities presented by technology, their jobs are being transformed. What’s different and how can marketing leaders prepare? This seven-step framework provides focus for assessing your situation and prioritizing steps in the transformation. Subsequent reports will address best practices in each of the five areas.

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How to Plan and Implement Your Customers.com Strategy - A Handbook for Your Customers.com® Initiatives—Part 2

Patricia Seybold and Ronni Marshak — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In Customers.com Classic, we described the successful e-business strategies of sixteen different best practices organizations. There are a lot of commonalities to the approaches that these early e-business leaders took as they crafted their original e-business strategies. Their goal: make it easy for customers to do their jobs and make it easy for customers to get things done. We've summarized the eight steps you'll need to take in order to "walk the talk" in providing a competitive e-business environment for your customers and partners.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Making It Easy for Customers to Do Business with You - A Handbook for Your Customers.com® Initiatives—Part 1

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In Customers.com Classic, we described the successful Internet Strategies of sixteen different best practices organizations. Those firms are still ahead of the pack in executing customer-centric strategies that keep customers loyal and empowered. There are eight core competencies that these early leaders adopted. Now, 12 years later, those same core competencies still stand the test of time.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Build-a-Bear Workshop's Challenge - Can an Early Innovator in Personalized Retail Experience Recapture Its Momentum?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Kids love the experience of creating, stuffing, dressing and naming their own stuffed animals at Build-A-Bear Workshop stores. This experiential retailer’s emotion-rich brand experience once yielded higher than average sales per square foot. Over the past 5 years, BBW’s sales per square foot have declined by 50 percent. Are stuffed animals hopelessly out of style? Do kids and their parents no longer frequent shopping malls? Is Buildabear-ville.com a compelling enough online experience to keep the brand fresh and to lure kids into buying more toys and accessories? BBW appears to be at a turning point. What strategy do you think would work to revitalize this evocative brand?

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About Patricia Seybold.

Implementation Challenges Limit B2B Marketers' Success with Automation - The Technology Is Increasingly Essential, Yet Few Are Ready to Transform Their Operations

Susan McKittrick — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

For today’s B2B marketer, marketing technology enables sophisticated lead nurturing that delivers results. Gain insight into how changes in buyer behavior have changed the B2B marketers’ job. Learn why use of technology tools is now essential to the marketers’ expanded role. See the elements of the business justification for marketing automation, and explore why such a successful technology has so many underperforming implementations. This article is the first in a series on B2B best practices using marketing technology.

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Sending Clear and Appropriate Messages - Do’s and Don’t for Communicating with Customers via Email

Ronni Marshak — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Email messaging is a great and cheap way to keep in touch with customers. But be sure to avoid misusing the communication channel by over- or under-communicating, misleading customers, or providing too little context on what the message is about and what to do next. Here are some basic do’s and don’ts when communicating with customers via email.

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About Ronni Marshak.

What Can Damage Apple's Amazing Customer Experience and Brand? - Network Congestion Will Be a Challenge Even to Steve Jobs

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Apple always offers a great customer experience. Yet it has chosen partners who fall down on the job. And, as you can do more with Apple products, network congestion can make the experience less than ideal. Here’s a look at where the Apple experience is falling down.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Customer Service Evaluation Framework - How to Evaluate Customer Service Products and Services

Mitchell Kramer — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In this report, we present the latest version of our framework for evaluating customer service products and services, the offerings that help your customers answer questions and solve problems. The framework has four top-level evaluation criteria: showstoppers, key technologies, analytic functionality, and viability. New in the framework are its application to all customer service products and services, support for social media, and support for knowledge management, search, and UI content management as the key customer service technologies. Use the framework to reduce the time, cost, and risk for evaluating and selecting the customer service product or service that is best for your organization.

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About Mitchell Kramer.

It Takes a Child to Raise a Village - How We Became Change Agents Improving Our Families' Incomes and Lives, and Role Models in Our Communities

URDT Girls School Students — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

See how 240 African girls, from 11 to 18 years old, are raising their families and their communities out of rural poverty. They tell their stories and show their visions in words and pictures. These girls come from poor, families in rural Uganda, where their families live on $1 day in mud huts without clean water, electricity, toilets, or enough food to eat. The girls attend the Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme’s URDT Girls School. They teach their families everything they learn about how to improve their households and generate income. Their families carry out Back Home projects to improve their sanitation, nutrition, health, income, and domestic harmony. Because the girls are teaching and leading their families and their communities, their homes soon become role model homes and farms, generating increased income, and other people in their communities learn from these families and imitate them. Soon everyone has more to eat, better health, and send their children (girls as well as boys) to the local schools.

If you're experiencing slow download on this site, you may also download it from Pando (installation of free software may be required).

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About Patricia Seybold.

The Adobe—Apple War - Jon Seybold, Father of Desktop Publishing, Comments on the Apple/Adobe Feud

Jonathan W. Seybold — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The father of desktop publishing, Jonathan Seybold, offers his personal perspective on the early relationship between Adobe and Apple, starting in the late 1970’s. Jonathan also offers his current take on the very public feud between the two companies that occurred in April 2010 over the development tools used to develop apps for the iPhone and iPad.

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Educating Kids to Be Change Agents - How the URDT Girls School Turns Girls and Their Families into Change Agents

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Why not educate children to become masterful in envisioning and creating a better life for themselves and their families? That’s the innovative approach to education that URDT has been practicing for almost a decade. The result: students’ families’ incomes increase by 20% while the kids are still in school! We offer a description of the four key educational innovations being practiced by the Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Moving along the Time-(Team) Space Continuum - Collaboration Is Both Real-Time and Persistent, and Often Unanticipated

Ronni Marshak — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A PSG Classic: collaboration isn’t about real-time vs. persistence, nor is it about the software tools you use. It is about getting your work done in the context of the overall project. It’s about achieving the outcomes of scenarios.

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About Ronni Marshak.

Will Amazon Lose Marketshare to Apple in Digital Content? - How Amazon.com Could Sell More Digital Content in the Post iPad Era

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The Kindle eBook reader pales in comparison to Apple’s sexy iPad. What will keep Apple from eroding Amazon’s marketshare and profits in e-books, magazines, newspapers, and other digital goods? Among the ideas our clients came up with: 1) Amazon should sell content that is portable across platforms, 2) Amazon should make it easy to buy digital goods for all platforms from all platforms, 3) Amazon should sponsor an Open Source e-reader platform, 4) Amazon should embrace ePub and other popular e-book formats.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Building a Customer-Centric Company…. Lessons Learned - Advice to Customer Experience Executives from Aisling Hassell

Aisling Hassell — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Aisling Hassell served as the VP of Customer Experience for five years at Symantec, a multibillion software company. She offers advice and tips on how to be a successful customer experience executive. Key take-aways: Combine your customer experience duties with an important operational role, so that you’re walking the talk and delivering value. Instill a trusted set of customer experience metrics. Solve the customer data problem early!

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Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 1 - Evaluating Recommendation Engines, Platforms or Services

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A decade ago, merchants and publishers saw the recommendations on Amazon’s site and wanted it. A decade ago, they had to spend a fortune to get it. Today, recommendation engines can be had for some hundreds of dollars a month and can be implemented in a few days. My guess is that recommendations will be ubiquitous within the next three to four years. I’m always optimistic on these guesses, but since recommendations are widely available as a service, rollout can be very swift. SaaS offerings greatly simplify the technology aspect of implementation and virtually eliminate up-front costs, making it relatively easy for customers to sign up with a vendor. Nevertheless, choosing a vendor wisely is always better than choosing often. To aid in that choice, I offer a set of requirements and evaluation criteria set forth in this evaluation framework. And I will be evaluating a number of the leading products using the framework during 2010, leading to a detailed comparison.

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About Susan Aldrich.

Hidden Quotation Word Search - A Puzzle Within a Puzzle

Matthew Lees — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Everyone knows how standard word search puzzles work. Hidden quotation word searches include an additional puzzle (they’re a puzzle within a puzzle). Here’s what to do: after all the words from the word list have been found, reading the unused letters from left to right and from top to bottom reveal a relevant quote. Here we present four hidden quotation word search puzzles, each of which is on a topic of interest to us at the Patricia Seybold Group: Search and Findability, Customer Experience, Online Communities, and Customer-Led Innovation. Happy hunting!

Hidden Quotation Word Search - Solutions - A Puzzle Within a Puzzle

Matthew Lees — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Here we present the solution to the Hidden Quotation Word Search puzzle. We hope you enjoyed solving it.
About Matthew Lees.

Innovation in Education: School Children Improve Their Families' Livelihoods - At URDT, It Takes a Child to Raise a Village

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

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National Semiconductor's New WEBENCH® Visualizer Raises the Bar - A Sophisticated, Yet Simple to Use, Web Dashboard

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How to you make it really easy for customers to select and buy your products? By understanding how they use your products—particularly if they use your products to design and deliver their products. National Semiconductor has continuously improved its Web-based tools that allow customers to design their own products using National’s components. This latest release excels in providing an interactive dashboard on top of an optimization engine that helps engineers make great design decisions in minutes, not days!

About Patricia Seybold.

An Unexpected Customer Experience with the Registry of Motor Vehicles - A Great Customer Experience Story

Ronni Marshak — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles provides an excellent customer experience when renewing your driver's license online. Obviously, whoever designed the site thought through the customer’s point of view!

Google Android vs. Apple iPhone - Whose Application Ecosystem Will Win?

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Google Android vs. Apple iPhone: Which mobile phone platform and ecosystem will attract more customers and applications? What should your company’s strategy be?

Search Marketing and Findability Trends - A Pocket Guide to Tools for Acquisition and Conversion

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

During the past decade, solutions targeted at ecommerce search have become rich marketing platforms at the same time that marketing suites and recommendation engines have also emerged to own the online marketing The result: marketers have more confusing options from which to choose. We offer a pocket guide to choosing the right solutions as well as five principles for marketers who are gazing at the current industry landscape of offerings and considering a purchase to improve customer acquisition and/or conversion.

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About Susan Aldrich.

Local Motors - Reinventing the Car Industry from the Outside In

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Local Motors is a new American car company with an innovative approach: get customers to design cars, manufacture them locally, and let customers help assemble their own cars Build-A-Bear style!

Enticed by Discounts; Impressed by Customer Experience - Providing a Great and Personal Experience Brings Customers Back for More

Ronni Marshak — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A restaurant used discounts to bring the customers in. But the excellent service makes sure that customers will come back.

Let Your Customers Be Part of the Solution - Work Together to Solve Problems, and Bond in the Process

Ronni Marshak — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Don’t try to hide problems from customers—that never works. And don’t just tell them there is a problem without seeking their help in finding a work-around or an outright solution.

Want Customer-Contributed Content? - Make It Easy for Your Customers to Multi-Post

Patricia Seybold — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Do you want customers to contribute content to your Web site? Customers are more likely to post or curate content in an environment that will "automagically" syndicate that comment or posting out to several other sites. We offer several examples of Web sites that do a good job of supporting multi-posting.

About Patricia Seybold.

The Customers.com Evaluation Framework for Campaign Management Applications - Speed and Simplify Your Selection of This Critical Customer Experience Component

Mitchell Kramer — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Campaigns are a critical customer experience component. Marketing campaigns help make customers aware of your policies, products, and promotions. Customer service campaigns notify customers of expirations and product fixes. Campaign management applications are software products and services that help you plan, design and develop, deliver, and measure campaigns. There are dozens of them available on market today. Use the Customers.com Evaluation Framework for Campaign Management Applications to speed, simplify, and reduce the risk your selection of the campaign management offering best for your organization.

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About Mitchell Kramer.

Wikipedia Evolves Its Policies - Updates Now Need to be Approved: Reduces Vandalism!

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Wikipedia’s success has been due, in large part to the fact that anyone can post and anyone can edit. In mid-2009, a series of serious libel charges triggered a change in posting policy. Has Wikipedia gone far enough to protect peoples’ reputations?

Self-Service CX Performance - Response Time and Availability for Key Customer Self-Service Activities

Mitchell Kramer — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How do you measure the customer experience (CX) performance of your self-service channels? From the customers’ standpoint, the most critical performance metrics are response time and availability at the customer user interface (UI). Response time is the period, measured in seconds, between the customer’s hitting the enter key to make a request for a component of your Self-Service CX to perform an activity until the system (and the Web) delivers a response back to the customer’s UI. Availability is the percentage of time the capabilities of your Self-Service CX are accessible to your customers at the customer UI within response times that are acceptable to your customers. If you can’t respond within their timeframes, then they’re going to abandon you for the competition.

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About Mitch Kramer.

How to Think About Search, Revisited - Four Traps to Avoid for Positive Search Performance

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Why is a good search experience still so hard to deliver? I think search experiences are, in fact, better than in 2004, when I last analyzed this question. Rising expectations lead us all to demand more. But the real issue, I think, lies with the intractability of the findability problem and how technology and practices stack up to solving it. The cost of delivering great search, given today’s tools, is still too great for most organizations too much of the time. But there are actions you can take to make search work better for your users than it does today.

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About Susan Aldrich.

Online Community Platform RFP Template - Patricia Seybold Group’s Template for Preparing an RFP for an Online Community Platform

Matthew Lees — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Creating a Request for a Proposal may not be anyone’s favorite thing to do, but RFPs play a crucial role as they lay the groundwork for an eventual business relationship. Because the RFP process can be a complicated one, this template has been developed to limit both time and frustration. It’s based on our Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms, which has been used successfully by many companies in evaluating and comparing vendor offerings. While you still have some work to do, the template will guide you in compiling the information that the vendor needs to create a great bid.

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About Matthew Lees.

Do Rewards Programs Foster Loyalty? - Only If You Address Customer Scenarios

Ronni Marshak — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Loyalty programs have to do more than just offer discounts, or else customers will simply play “find the bargain.” This report looks at the differences between Rewards Programs and Preferred Customer Programs and how each impacts customer loyalty.

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About Ronni Marshak.

Who "Owns" Your Medical Records - Whose Data Is It?

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

An organization called Health Data Rights has published five principles for the basic human right to access and to understand your own healthcare data and information. This is an important set of guiding principles that empowers customers/patients and the caregivers who serve them.

About Patricia Seybold.

Online Community Platform Evaluation Matrix, Version 2, July 2, 2009 - A Blank Matrix to Facilitate Your Evaluation and Planning

Matthew Lees — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Our Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms presents the criteria we believe to be important when evaluating technology systems to support and enable your customer community. Because each organization is different, you should focus on evaluating those features that are most important to your situation. To assist you in this, we present our evaluation criteria in matrix form with blank columns for the platforms under consideration. You can use this matrix to notate the capabilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating and/or to evaluate the capabilities of your current purchased or home-grown solution.

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About Matthew Lees.

How Visionary Customer-Centric Execs Keep Innovation Alive - Take-Aways from Patty’s Visionaries' Spring 2009 Meeting

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Patty’s Visionaries are the people that Patricia Seybold profiles in her books and whose work she admires. They are influential change agents in their respective organizations. Many of them develop Internet-based strategies to empower customers and to drive change throughout their organizations. You’ll learn how these customer-centric executives are designing and evolving new solutions and business models in the midst of a worldwide recession.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Google Wave - It’s “My” Design, but Will I Use It?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Did Google design Google Wave by watching customer behavior? If so, did they get it right? The behavior modeled in Google Wave is my behavior. But that doesn’t mean that what I’m doing is what I WANT to be doing!

How Customer-Centric Visionaries Make Information Valuable - Make Information Actionable and Connect People to People

Patricia Seybold — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

What's the state of the art in the design of customer-centric Web sites? Patty’s Visionaries—ebusiness leaders—take content very seriously. They don't just post it; they make it multi-dimensional and actionable. People are important, too. Visionaries make it easy for customers and other site stakeholders and visitors to find each other and to learn from one another.

About Patricia Seybold.

Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms, Version 3 - How to Evaluate Solutions that Enable Online Customer Communities

Matthew Lees — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online communities can empower customers and strengthen the relationships between them and your company. This happens through careful planning, assigning sufficient resources, and selecting the right tools. While the human element is a crucial factor, the underlying technology platform plays an essential role in your community’s success. We’ve developed this framework to help you evaluate such platforms and identify the one that’s best for you. This third version reflects the technological advances and increased expectations for what community platforms can and should be able do, including an emphasis on collaboration, viral marketing, search engine optimization, and mobile access.

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About Matthew Lees.

Business Week's Business Exchange - A Good Example of Crowd Sourcing and Social Networking

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Business Week's Business Exchange is a crowdsourcing adjunct to Business Week. Readers post links to interesting articles and blog posts they’ve found on other publishers' sites or written themselves. Business Exchange uses three best practices in social media. It saves customers time. It amplifies their posts and comments by publishing them on multiple social media sites. It avoids cannibalizing competitors' content by generating traffic to their sites, rather than away from their sites.

About Patricia Seybold.

Why Twitter Rules and What to Do About It - The Six Best Uses of Twitter for Your Organization

Patricia Seybold — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Why should your company "tweet"? How and why should your team be monitoring twitter? Here are the six most powerful ways that companies can use Twitter to connect with customers and would be customers, along with plenty of real-life examples.

About Patricia Seybold.

Developing Change Agents to Spawn Grass Roots Innovation and Transformation in Africa - Lessons Learned from Rural Africa Could Apply to Your Organization!

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How do you design and structure a customer-led innovation practice and core competency? We can learn from an organization that has been excelling in outside in customer co-design for 22 years. The Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT) has created innovative farming practices, micro-finance, HIV/AIDS prevention programs, and innovative educational programs. We chronicle their innovations and their structured approach to fostering innovation. Once you’ve mastered customer-led innovation, how do you grow your capacity and replicate that innovative capability in other regions? URDT trains young women in a three-year program to be transformation specialists, change agents and facilitators of innovation.

The ingredients for success include: promoting a creative orientation within and outside of the organization, mastering systems thinking, creating cross-disciplinary teams, and engaging with customers and stakeholders of all ages and genders to co-design solutions, starting from the customers’ context and environment to achieve the customers’ end goals and vision.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Green Infrastructure - If We Build It, Will They Use It?

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Where is urban transportation going? Mobility on demand using green approaches is the next wave. Think in terms of 1-way car- and bike-sharing systems combined with mass public transportation. Mobility on demand solutions adapt to customers’ changing behaviors. Done right, they’re good examples of customer-centric ecosystems.

Smart Transportation: Mobility-on-Demand - A Vision for CityCars and Smart Cities from MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities' Group

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Most of the world's car-sharing programs are currently two-way programs. You pick up a car, like a Zipcar, at a convenient location, and then return the car to the same place you picked it up. Most bike-sharing programs, like Paris' popular Velib, are one-way. You pick up a bike at any location, ride it to your destination, and drop it off there. And, when you need another one, you pick it up at a different location. These mobility-on-demand systems are complex ecosystems comprised of many partners. The good news is that it IS possible to design and continuously improve customer-centric ecosystems. Customers love to participate in co-designing and in streamlining these kinds of systems to meet their common needs and to address common issues. As we start investing in our next generation of environmentally-sustainable mobility systems, let's make sure that we're building solutions that customers will actually use!

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Tips for Interviewing Customers, Partners, and Stakeholders - How to Most Effectively Find Out what Customers Want and Need

Ronni Marshak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In over 25 years of interviewing customers, we have some insights to share about what makes an interview valuable. This report provides tips and techniques on identifying who to interview, what questions to ask, how to analyze and communicate the results, and how to engage with customers you are interviewing.

How Adidas Moved to Smart Customization & Personalized Coaching - If We Build It, Will They Use It?