Patty Seybold's Research

How Visionary Customer-Centric Execs Keep Innovation Alive

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.

Green Engineering: Cutting Energy Consumption in the Tropics

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

What are the current best practices in green engineering? Travel with us to Malaysia to learn how to cut energy costs by 60% when cooling buildings in the tropics. Today’s green engineers use low-cost, distributed sensors to provide real-time data feeds about real-world events. They use this data to build and refresh models of complex systems. They trigger actions based on events and thresholds. They provide visualization tools to see what’s going on in complex systems. They monitor the patterns of behavior in each system and across systems to detect changes over time. Their systems adapt to new conditions and behaviors. These same approaches serve us well as we design customer-adaptive solutions. as no underline

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About Patricia Seybold

Developing Change Agents to Spawn Grass Roots Innovation and Transformation in Africa

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.

Smart Transportation: Mobility-on-Demand

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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Frameworks for Smart Customization

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Smart customization is an opportunity you can’t afford to ignore. But how do you go about it? At the MIT Smart Customization Seminar, November 10-11th, 2008, two of the leading thinkers in mass customization and “smart customization,” Joe Pine and Frank Piller presented introductions to their conceptual frameworks for succeeding in smart customization. This report summarizes their frameworks and offers insights on the steps you should take to get your company ready to capitalize on this manufacturing model.

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How Keds Uses Zazzle's Customization

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Zazzle is an online customization platform that lets end-users create one-of-a-kind products, ranging from apparel to posters to skateboards and shoes. Essentially, anything you can print, you can “Zazzle.” Most of the products that you find at Zazzle are pre-manufactured (mugs, shirts, shoes) and then custom-printed and assembled at the firm’s San Jose production facility, and shipped within 24 hours. If you create a design you like, you can easily resell it through Zazzle, receiving a commission on each sale, and making your designs available to millions of consumers. Keds is using the Zazzle platform as its customization engine, to offer consumers the ability to put their own designs on their sneakers.

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Smart Customization Comes of Age

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Smart Customization, an implementation of mass customization that is both profitable and sustainable, is gaining traction. The MIT Smart Customization Seminar, held November 10-11th, 2008, was a business best practices event, with practitioners from the U.S., Europe, and Asia providing glimpses of what they have done and what they’ve learned along the way. This report looks at these best practices as well as the drivers for gaining competitive advantage by offering smart customization: 1) increased customer demand for customer products and experiences; 2) interactive toolkits have come of age; 3) mass-customized manufacturing costs and turnaround times are dropping; and 4) organizations are redesigning themselves around mass-customization.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Mars Direct: Customized Candy Combats Commoditization

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Learn how personalized M&M’s have led to a profitable new business model. Discover how Mars Direct became an innovative “personalized expressions” company within Mars, the makers of Mars bars and other well-known candies. Mars Direct’s R&D Director, Dan Michael describes the journey to-date.

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About Patricia Seybold.

How American Power Conversion Streamlines Its Product Line and Offers More Customization

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How do you reduce the complexity of your product line, yet deliver more customized solutions to your customers? American Power Conversion (APC) —providers of complex power-management solutions for data centers—has the answer. APC has dramatically reduced the number of products it develops and manufactures. At the same time, the company has made it easy for customers to custom-configure solutions that are exactly right for their needs. This approach lets you reduce variability yet increase product variety to better meet customers’ needs.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Spreadshirt: Customers Want to Create Their Own Brands and Amplify Your Brand

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Why do customers love to create their own T-Shirts? “If it’s not on a shirt, it didn’t happen,” says Jana Eggers, Spreadshirt’s CEO. Customers value the ability to create their own brands. They also love to personalize well-known brands. Big brands, like CNN and Coca-Cola partner with Spreadshirt so they can give customers the ability to “roll their own” personal versions of the name brands. By offering this personalization service, you can protect the integrity of your brand, yet empower your fans to make it their own!

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About Patricia Seybold.

Tikatok: Kids Create and Publish Books

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Tikatok is a great example of the power of “smart customization” and customer co-creation. It’s a business that empowers young children to create, publish, and print their own picture books. The company was designed around the principles of smart customization: Provide customers with toolkits to create their own custom products; standardize the production processes to enable cost-effective production of one-off products.

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Are We Entering a Golden Age of IT?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

How do you leap ahead even in harsh economic times? Smart technology architects model their businesses to reduce complexity. They view exceptions as the norm. They design robust, dynamic distributed systems using commodity computing infrastructures.

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Customer (and Partner) Segment Advocates

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Whose job is it to understand and to lobby for the needs and requirements of the customers in your most strategic customer segments? One key to success in becoming a customer-centric organization is to have strong customer and partner advocates with clout. Here are some role models and suggested responsibilities that may help you build or refine these roles within your company. We recommend that you combine customer segment advocates and partner segment advocates in a single organization. These advocates should drive and monitor your firm’s customer experience priorities. They should be measured on the Quality of the Customer Experience delivered and on the profitability and growth of the segment(s) they represent.

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Rethinking CRM: Provide Customers the Information They Care about in a Seamless Fashion

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

What's the secret to a successful CRM strategy? Provide a seamless cross-touchpoint, cross-channel and cross-lifecycle experience. Let your customers manage their relationships with you, not the other way around. We recommend that you focus first on customer service, not on sales or marketing. Why? Customers (or prospective customers) will provide you the most information when they need help from you in selecting, evaluating, purchasing, learning, using or optimizing a product or service. They're much more likely to provide rich information about their situation and context when they're looking for help. Today, the scope of a CRM strategy extends well beyond marketing, sales and service. Successful CRM initiatives give customers visibility into all the back-end processes that may impact their experience. We've identified five customer-critical requirements that should be part of your CRM game plan.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Using Lakes to Monitor the Health of the Planet

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This case study of the PASEO project follows the story of a group of 24 biologists, engineers, and computer scientists as they teamed across two continents to model and monitor an unusually salty chain of lakes in Argentina. The PASEO team's rapid sampling and modeling approach may serve as a useful template for others who want to wrap their minds around what's going on with complex real-world systems really quickly.

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What Are Visionary Customer-Centric Execs Thinking About?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

How do you transform your organization from the outside in, to be more customer-centric? This is the daily challenge faced by senior executives in a variety of industries. Twice a year, we host a meeting for some of the most visionary executives in a variety of industries. They are the heads of e-business, sales, marketing, business strategy, customer experience, and product management. These are the people who are leading the customer charge in their industries—financial services, high tech, manufacturing, retail, publishing, pharmaceutical, telecoms, health and fitness, education, and not-for-profits. In the spring of 2008, they discussed over a dozen topics—many of them centered around their use of the Web to engage customers in helping them transform their organizations to be customer-outcome focused.

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Making Team Innovation Work

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

At FIRST’s annual world robotics championship, Patty and her Visionaries witnessed first hand how kids can work together while competing, coming up with innovative solutions to difficult challenges. The process by which these challenges are set up and executed provides important lessons on how to inspire innovation.
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CohesiveFT Makes It Easy to “Roll Your Own” Virtual Servers

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Cohesive Flexible Technologies is a software start-up whose story to-date provides six best practices in customer-led innovation.

They ran in front of the parade to commercialize what lead users (advanced IT architects) were already doing.
They added value by tackling the hardest problems – ones these lead customers were struggling with.
They provide structure and scaffolding to enable customer creativity.
They convert customers’ free prototypes into robust commercial solutions those customers can test and use.
They make it easy for lead users to share their creations and learnings with one another.
They look for patterns in the way the customers use your tools to build their tools—that’s your competitive advantage and your future direction!

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B2B Firms Are Adopting Web 2.0

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Web 2.0 concepts are more than just conceptual at this point. Savvy B2B companies are taking advantage of new technologies to offer tools that promote customer innovation. Our B2B use of Web 2.0 chalk talk provides “slideware” with commentary so that you can re-use the graphics, concepts, and overall presentation to educate others.

How Should You Manage Customer and Partner Portals?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

This PSG Classic report presents the do’s and don’t’s of managing customer and partner portals, including important concepts, such as designing both customer and partner portals side by side, so that they act consistently in the efforts to address customer issues; and understanding that portals are business considerations, not IT issues. Although written several years ago, the rules of thumb presented still hold true and are perhaps even more applicable to today’s portal environments.

Managing Customer Advisory Board Programs

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Do you have a Customer Advisory Board program? If so, how well is it managed and run? Is your CAB program considered a necessary evil—as a perq for loyal customers and a duty for top executives? Or, do you harness the wisdom and advice of your most loyal customers to keep you on the right track and to help bathe your organization in customer issues and customers’ priorities? This report is a summary of current practices in managing B2B Customer Advisory Boards. It’s the synthesis of my learnings from a two-day CAB Exchange that was held in October 2007. The participants included 60 practitioners—the people who run the CAB programs for dozens of businesses. The role of CABs is changing from relationship-building to strategy-building. CABs used to exist primarily to brief the executives of your most strategic accounts on your firm’s road map and product strategy. In today’s CABs, insightful customers give you their road maps and roll up their sleeves to help you craft your strategy.

Partner Portals Should Be Combined with Customer Portals

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The first goal of a partner portal is to support customers throughout their lifecycles. So a partner portal has, at its core, many of the capabilities that are required in a customer self-service portal. Why not combine your customer portal team and your partner portal team? You’ll save time and money and you’ll deliver a much more seamless experience to customers and partners.

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About Patricia Seybold.

Creating Customer Advisory Boards that Your Customers Will Love!

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Why would your customers want to spend one or two days helping your executives craft or refine their business strategies? What’s in it for them? Customers care more about gaining insights from their peers than they do about listening to your executives. If you design your customer councils to help customers gain insights from one another, you can harness their collective vision to drive your company’s vision and direction. Insightful, visionary customers can be catalysts in helping to drive change. Here are some tips about how to craft an “outside in” Customer Advisory Board program.

Customer Innovation Guide: Core Competency 4

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

How far along are you in the Open Development Continuum? Do you empower, encourage, and reward customers for extending your products, coming up with new products, and sharing their solutions with others? See how you’re doing in this self-assessment guide.

Customer Innovation Guide: Core Competency 3

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Co-designing your company’s future with your customers is imperative to ensuring continuing innovation. Make your lead customers part of your design team and take advantage of their inventions and insights as you work on your next-generation of products, services, process, and business models. In this self-assessment guide, you can see how far along your company is in taking advantage of customer co-design.

Why CRM Is the Wrong Answer to the Wrong Question

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

CRM applications do a lousy job of addressing the most strategic customer issues that every organization faces. If your organization is in the process of yet another round of CRM improvements, perhaps it’s time to take a fresh look at what your technology strategy really should be.

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About Patricia Seybold.

IBM.com’s New Look: More Than a Face Lift

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

How do you deliver a unified online experience with your brand across multiple product lines, geogra-phies, Web properties, and portals? In June 2007, IBM launched its next-generation Web site and the framework IBM will use to provide a unified online experience across all IBM’s Web properties. This new site architecture and approach embodies a num-ber of best practices, including user-controlled pro-files, dynamic contextual personalization, distributed creation of cross-enterprise merchandising, and a seamless experience for customers across both pub-lic and private (account-specific) Web sites.

What Customer-Centric Visionary Execs Are Doing in 2007

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Want to know what’s on customer-centric execs’ minds? Here’s an overview of some of the topics discussed at Patty Seybold’s Spring 2007 Visionaries’ Meeting: Customer communities, disappearing home pages, gadgets and widgets, customers’ outcomes, and customer metrics were all top of mind.

Outside In

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Tim O’Reilly got the world thinking in new ways about the Internet with his principles of Web 2.0. Expanding from these principles, we can define the next generation of business. In this perspective, Patty Seybold lays out her principles of Biz 3.0.

Customer Innovation Guide: Effective Community Building

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Customer communities are a bountiful source of innovative ideas and an excellent opportunity to create lasting relationships with your most loyal customers. But you have to do more than just set up a community and say “go.” You have to employ best practices in facilitating and managing the information flowing to and from your community members. This self-assessment guide will tell you how far along your company is on the road to leveraging the value of your customer communities.

Publishing 2.0/Libraries 2.0: Students are Shaping the Future of Academic Publishing

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Are you developing an “Enterprise 2.0” strategy for your firm? Are you engaged in providing information resources to employees, business customers, students or academics? Learn what the current trends are in information access and collective knowledge gathering from three “lead customers.” Three insightful graduate students engaged with publishers and librarians at a “Publishing 2.0” conference in early 2007. How do professionals and students consume information in the Web 2.0 era? These graduate students provide great insights into how digital information should be presented, organized, consumed and shared among professionals.

Customer Innovation Guide: Mastering the First Core Competencies: Incorporating Story-Telling into Your Organization’s DNA

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Innovation spreads by word of mouth. It’s the stories that everyone remembers. We recommend formalizing a managed process for capturing and sharing customer-related stories. The learning that results from listening and sharing your own customer stories will help lead to new insights and innovations. This self-assessment guide will tell you how far along your company is on the road to making customer story-telling part of your corporate culture

Digital Natives in the Classroom Are Propelling Us to School 2.0

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

You’ve heard of “Web 2.0.” Now we have “School 2.0.” Learn how today’s kids’ will reshape their classrooms and the educational resources they rely upon. What can we learn about the future of education and educational publishing from long-time tech-educator, David Warlick? David provides the context for Web 2.0 in education, and contrasts School 1.0 behaviors with School 2.0 behaviors. It’s not about technology. It’s about conversations.

Customer Co-Design in Rural Uganda

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Through the eyes of a western business professional, the task of rural development looks daunting. Where do you start? What trade-offs do you make? The Uganda Rural Development and Training Pro-gramme, working with students from the African Rural University, held a community development workshop with villagers in Kabamba to tackle these issues. The approach they took is one that can be applicable for your organization as it works with customers to create innovative solutions.

How to Get From Product 2.0 to BIZ 3.0

Patricia Seybold — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Every business explicitly or implicitly designs their customer experience around a product-centric lifecycle. There are phases the customer goes through from awareness to purchase to use/consumption to repeat business. Web 2.0 offers the ability to support each customer lifecycle phase with Internet-enabled services. We call this approach: Product 2.0. However, customers don’t live their lives around your products and services. They have things to do and jobs to get done. Your next generation business--which we call BIZ 3.0--should be designed to help customers achieve their outcomes. Customers will want to interact with multiple parties and suppliers, not just your firm. The good news is that you can leverage your Product 2.0 services to help customers reach their goals anywhere, anytime.

Turn Customer Co-Design Insights into Action

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Use customer co-design to gain deep insights into customers’ motivation, behavior and needs. You’ll gain the best results if you engage high-level execs from multiple lines of business and functions as well subject matter experts to work side by side with customers. Your executives gain insights and stories from working with groups of customers to brainstorm better ways to help those customers reach their goals. These insights spawn strategic conversations around customer-impacting issues and business opportunities. Turning those insights into quick strategic actions is often much harder. Our organizational silos get in the way. This report describes in detail an approach that certified Customer Scenario® Mapping consultants can use to lead a highly productive operational debrief immediately following each customer co-design session. This debrief yields a Quality of Experience(SM) Scorecard with customer metrics, operational metrics, critical enablers or offers and ROI hypotheses. By providing a line of sight between customer-critical issues, ways to measure and improve our performance on them, and the business value of doing so, you can gain momentum for taking action.

Web 2.0 ROI? Is That the Right Question?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

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Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the Fifth Step

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

A key to innovation is to assume that customers will want to roll up their sleeves and customize your products and services to meet their needs. Make it easy for them to do so. Provide customization and configuration tools. Capture customers’ customized solutions and leverage customers’ customizations in your next generation product designs. And give customers control of their innovations—reward them for their efforts and understand that you don’t own the customer-created designs; they do.

A Coordinated Game Plan for Business and IT Execs to Spur Outside Innovation

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

To make rapid progress in enabling and empowering your customers to lead you toward new innovations, you need to coordinate your business strategy and your IT efforts. In this report, we offer the how-to’s to start you on your way.

Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the Fourth Step

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It’s human nature to show off our accomplishments. Encouraging your customers to contribute their ideas, and rewarding them with recognition, lets you use the collective brainpower of your customers to help you innovate. And, while you are eliciting new ideas from customers, you should also be encouraging them to review each others’ contributions. Positive feedback from peers means as much to customer contributors/consultants/guides as do rewards from your company. This guide provides a self assessment to see how far along your company is in empowering your customers to strut their stuff.

Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the Third Step

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

In our research for Outside Innovation, we identified a key insight—all the companies who were leading in customer innovation had thriving customer communities. This guide provides a self-assessment to help you determine what your next steps in nurturing your customer communities should be. This guide is a part of a series that will explore the five customer roles, five core competencies, and five steps needed to harness customer-led innovation.

Building Interactive Feedback into Your Products and Surrounding Services

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

What information should you provide on a performance dashboard? That’s just one of the take-aways from this best practice report on how Koko Fitness provides interactive feedback to end users and stakeholders of its strength training equipment. No matter what industry you’re in, the chances are that there are end users interacting with your products and services. Do your products provide feedback to users? Should they? Learn how you can accelerate the growth of a vibrant ecosystem around your products and services by tracking and leveraging utilization data.

Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the Second Step

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Your customers are happy to enhance and expand your products. But you need to help them with this innovation by providing the right co-design tools. This guide provides a self-assessment to see how far along your company is in making these tools available to your lead customers. This guide is a part of a series that will explore the five customer roles, five core competencies, and five steps needed to harness customer-led innovation.

Outside Innovation (hardcover)

Patricia Seybold — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The ability to innovate is what keeps your organization at the top of its field. The faster and better you innovate, the more likely you are to remain in the lead and to set the new rules that others will have to follow. But the innovation game is changing dramatically. You no longer win by hiring the smartest engineers and scientists—you win by engaging the smartest customers.

In Outside Innovation, Patricia Seybold, author of the best-selling Customers.com and The Customer Revolution, argues that the only way organizations can break out of the pack is to open up their entire business to passionate customers and welcome them into every aspect of product and service design. In fact, those companies that bring customers into the innovation process—the ones that innovate from the outside in—will create products that better meet the needs of prospective customers, revolutionize business models and practices, and build fanatically loyal customers.

From millions of consumers who collaborate to create and evolve next-generation multiplayer games—games that would normally cost $100 million to develop—to competing research scientists who work together to create breakthrough medical treatments and heartier crops, customers all over the world are already changing how companies innovate. Drawing from dozens of fascinating stories of outside innovation pioneers such as LEGO, Staples, Hallmark, Kraft, and others, Seybold shows how to win the innovation wars by:

Finding lead users in your industry and commercializing their inventions.
Engaging with your most visionary customers to co-design new products and new processes.
Enabling customers to troubleshoot each others' problems, hack your solutions, and modify and extend your products to meet their needs.
Providing toolkits for your customers to design very specific solutions for themselves—customized solutions that leverage your firm's deep domain expertise.
Lively and practical, Outside Innovation provides businesses large and small with the strategies they need to let customers co-design their futures and lead them to success.

Move Over Portals; Prepare for Scenario Nets!

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Make way for Scenario Nets! We predict that this will be the next e-business model. Think workflows. Think business processes. Think about complex tasks you’d like to be able to execute easily on the Web. Add in portable personal profiles and shared customer information, and you have the makings of the next generation of e-business.

Customer Innovation Guide: Identify and Study Lead Customers

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The fastest path to true innovation is to harness the creativity and inventiveness of your smartest customers. By identifying, interviewing, and engaging with your lead customers, you learn what they care about and can leverage their innovations to your offerings. This guide provides a self-assessment to see how far along your company is in this important first step towards outside innovation. This guide is a part of a series that will explore the five customer roles, five core competencies, and five steps needed to harness customer-led innovation.

Customer Innovation Guide: Five Roles Your Customers Should Be Playing

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

This guide explores the five different roles that customers can play and companies can leverage to become an outside innovation organization. This is part one of a series that will explore the five customer roles, five core competencies, and five steps needed to harness customer-led innovation.

Outside Innovation at the BBC

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

As the BBC attempts to reinvent itself as a digital media company, the company developed an externally-facing, open innovation strategy. Experiments with four types of stakeholders—lead users, digital independents, academia, and corporate peers—have yielded impressive programs and results.

Landscape Forms’ Use of GE ColorXpress® Services Customer Innovation Center for a New Product Launch

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

For its 35th anniversary of business, Landscape Forms, an industry leader for the design and manufacturing of outdoor site furniture, worked hand-in-hand with GE ColorXpress® Services Customer Innovation Center experts to help create a bold new product line to commemorate Landscape Forms’ past, present, and future.

GE ColorXpress® Services

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

By making it easy—and exciting—for customers to become part of the color design team, GE Plastics has created an innovative business that brings customers back time and time again. GE ColorXpress Services offers online self-service color selection and color matching as well as a physical innovation laboratory environment, where customers can work in collaborative teams with GE color experts.

Online Customer Communities Are Strategic

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Vibrant customer communities are a hallmark of businesses that lead in product and service innovation. You want to build and nurture communities for different types of customers as well as for the different roles your customers play in your company’s innovation strategy. Here are a few tips to nurturing and spawning online customer communities.

Asterisk and Digium

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The Digium/Asterisk story provides a good example of one way to build a viable for-profit business leveraging the open-source model while fostering customer-led innovation. By involving customers/developers and partners in the co-creation and evolution of the Asterisk PBX software platform, Digium is able to gain traction and credibility well beyond what could be normally expected for a small technology firm.

Enabling Customer Co-Design

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Here’s an overview of the different kinds of customer co-design tools that you may find of value in working with lead users (advanced users who aren’t yet customers) and lead customers. The purpose of offering co-design tools is to make it easy for customers to design their own ideal solutions, leveraging your domain knowledge, learning what’s possible as they do so. By giving customers design tools, you shortcut the laborious and time-consuming hand-offs between the customer and the producer. Customers who design their own customized solutions become more profitable and more loyal customers.

Customized, Built-to-Order Products

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

When you enable mass customization, you’re designing all of your product development and manufacturing processes from the customers’ point of view—from the outside in. In order to be able to deliver customized or personalized products cost effectively, you must first ensure that you have a manufacturing or production facility that can build custom products to order. And you’ll need to design your products to be easy to configure and assemble. The “make products easy to configure” part of the equation will usually require major changes in the way you think about and design your solutions. All of a sudden, you begin to think about products in the ways your customers view them. You only need to enable customization for those attributes that matter most to customers. In this overview, you’ll get a picture of where mass customization is today, drawing from examples in industries as diverse as apparel, toys, beverages, shoes, and automobiles.

If yours is the first company in your industry to respond to customers’ desire for mass-customized products, and you make it possible for your customers to customize or configure a product or service that has previously not been customer-configurable, you are engaging in process innovation. When you give customers control over the selection of the attributes that matter most to them, you are opening up your company’s internal, heretofore closed, (and often proprietary) product and solution development activities. This makes you a leader in innovation. But don’t stop there. If you are successful in meeting customers’ needs for custom-designed products, you can expect your competitors to be fast followers.

Chief Customer Officer

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

This is a book about what it takes to shift your organizational culture to be more customer-centric. It’s a must read for any customer-centric executive; not just for Chief Customer Officers or for those who aspire to that position. The hardest aspect of customer experience work—making it easy for customers to do business with you and designing and delivering a differentiated end-to-end customer experience that will grow your base of profitable, loyal customers—is shifting your organizational culture. Every business unit and department has its own focus and its own metrics. These goals and metrics often conflict with one another when you try to design and deliver a wonderful experience across silos. This book, Chief Customer Officer, is an accurate and useful guide that will help anyone—whether you sit at the top or the bottom of your company—understand how to move your organization through the steps required to shift your company’s culture to deliver a great customer experience.

Give Customers Important Roles to Play in Shaping Your Business

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Our research in customer innovation revealed that there are five distinct roles that passionate customers naturally adopt with respect to an organization whose products and services they care about. They play the roles of lead customers, consultants, contributors, guides and promoters. Many customers fall into two or more of these roles. You can harness customers’ natural behaviors to drive innovations in business models, in new product and service development, in contributing their own intellectual property, in solving customers’ problems, in marketing approaches, in creating the knowledge that surrounds your products and services, and in promoting and distributing your products.

Our recommendation, based on the best practices we’ve observed, is that you recruit and nurture explicit customer communities for each of these roles. Marry each of these customer communities with the appropriate executives and employees in your organization so that these customer groups will become your partners in innovation.

What Business Models Work in an Open Source World?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT

How does open source work as part of a business model? A start-up company explains how to think through the different dimensions of open source. The approach that CohesiveFT is taking is to identify the open source modules that lead customers in the financial trading industry are currently using and to bundle them into a “stack” that CohesiveFT will support, while adding additional industry-specific software and software services.

It is possible to charge for open source software but if you plan to do so, you need to maintain authority and final say over what code is included in each build. You should also control the brand identity, ideally using two different brand names for the commercial code and the version to which people contribute.

Bathing Your Organization in Real-Time Customer Context

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT

How a number of consumer companies—Hallmark, Unilever, Kraft, RC2 and Charles Schwab—are using vibrant online customer communities to help them design and market their products. Many of these “closed customer communities” have been in existence for more than 4 years. The companies that are using them are getting faster time-to-market and better success rates with new products.

Muji

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Muji—a well-known retail brand in Japan—has integrated customer input and suggestions into its core business operations. Customers know the company listens, so they flood the company with suggestions. As Muji's online business grew, so did the engagement of its customer community. Muji encourages customers to submit product design ideas and to comment and vote on each others' ideas. Muji also recruits product testers and co-designers from its vibrant customer community.

Staples

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Staples, the office supplies retailer, has outpaced its competition by deeply understanding what its target customers—small business office supplies buyers—really care about. Staples has used a variety of approaches to study customers, to engage with customers, to co-design with customers, and to co-design with suppliers to streamline customer-impacting processes.

1) How to redesign processes and policies to make it easy for customers to buy office supplies—the Easy Rebates program.

2) How to align your corporate culture around your customers’ issues and your brand promise.

3) How to use ethnographic research to identify key customer concerns.

4) How to instill a brand promise by starting with your own staff first.

What's on the Minds of Lead Customer-Centric Executives?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 25 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Twice a year, we gather our leading customer-centric executives to share their pain and their visions. This year, we found that many of our “Visionaries” are engaging with customers in new ways to co-design better offerings and experiences. Visionaries are also developing and syndicating branded online tools and services so that customers will encounter these syndicated services on many different parts of the Web and/or on kiosks or phones.

Making Outside Innovation the “Path of Least Resistance” in Your Organization

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 11 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

What are the patterns we’ve found in researching customer-led innovation? The organizations that are doing a great job of harnessing their customers’ creativity to fuel innovation have five practices in common. You can leapfrog your competition by taking these five steps. We’ve also found five core competencies you’ll need to master and five pitfalls you’ll want to avoid.

Mozilla Firefox

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The story of how the Netscape browser transitioned into open source and was reborn as Mozilla Firefox is a good “anatomy of an open source project.” For anyone who isn’t familiar with the ins and outs of how open source projects are structured, this provides a good overview of how this process actually works. For anyone interested in understanding how to engage customers in co-designing a new product of any kind, the Mozilla Firefox story provides some great best practices.

Koko Fitness

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Koko Fitness is a new start-up company that was designed from the outside in—starting with customers’ desired outcomes. Customers’ issues drove the design of the product. Customers’ consulted on the user interface before it was built, customers beta tested the product and customers have been the new products’ biggest promoters.

National Instruments

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

National Instruments, a supplier of test and measurement instruments and software, was led into an entirely new market (K-12 education) by a lead customer—Chris Rogers, an engineering professor at Tufts University. Chris combined NI’s LABVIEW software with LEGO’s MINDSTORMS robotics kits to develop a product that could be used by teachers and kids. Eight years later, NI became the software provider for Mindstorms NXT—for consumer retail and educational markets. NI fosters customer innovation in many ways—by providing software that non-programmers can use to develop their own niche applications, by encouraging users to extend LabView and share their applications and interfaces, by fostering a vibrant online community, and by creating a formal program to recruit and solicit input from “lead users.”

Introduction to Outside Innovation

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Customers are challenging your business models and demanding access to your intellectual property. This is what we refer to as the outside innovation imperative. You now have no choice but to redesign your business from the outside in. The good news is that you can profit from engaging with customers to drive your business innovation.

The outside innovation process involves engaging with lead users and lead customers in a variety of roles to create new products, processes, and business models. There are seven ways in which outside innovation differs from traditional innovation processes.

Customer Scenario® Design: An Approach for Outside Innovation

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve spent 20 years working with companies and their customers to co-design business processes from the outside in using our Customer Scenario Mapping (CSM) Methodology. Here is a brief introduction to the fundamentals of CSM.

The History of Customer Scenario® Design

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Our Customer Scenario® Mapping methodology was a long-term result of our first outside-in design session with customers, almost 20 years ago. Here is a brief history of how this methodology evolved from that customer co-design event.

Lego Mindstorms NXT

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

LEGO® MINDSTORMS(TM) has been Lego’s highest revenue producing product. It was developed (and enhanced) by Lego’s customers.

Lego Mindstorms is a classic example of outside innovation. Lego’s Mindstorms’ robotics kit was based on inventions developed by “lead users” at MIT and Tufts University, who in turn worked with teachers and kids in their classrooms. As soon as the product hit the market, adult customers began hacking and extending the product—a behavior which Lego monitored and encouraged.

When LEGO was ready to develop its next generation product, they invited these lead customers to co-design the next-generation product with them.

Zopa Case Study: How Zopa Is Creating a New Financial Services Exchange

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Zopa is a lending and borrowing exchange designed for freeformers—people who want to control their own lifestyles. These are people who do not value 9-to-5 jobs and who do not expect to retire on company retirement plans. Zopa is a new business designed specifically to meet their needs: a peer-to-peer exchange for borrowing and lending money. Here’s a description of what the Zopa team did to meet their target audiences’ key scenarios and to design their business once they clearly understood those scenarios.

Provide a 360-Degree View of the Customer Relationship

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The fourth critical success factor originally introduced in Customers.com is “Provide a 360-degree view of the customer relationship.” Make sure you capture every interaction with your customers and make that information available to both the customer, and appropriate employees and stakeholders.

Streamline Business Processes that Impact the Customer

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The third critical success factor originally introduced in Customers.com^® is “Streamline the Business Processes that Impact the Customer.” It is vital that the end customer be the design center for customer-facing processes.

Own the Customer’s Total Experience

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The second critical success factor originally introduced in Customers.com is “Own the Customer’s Total Experience.” Customers like to have a well-orchestrated, well-designed, predictable experience of doing business with you.

Current Concerns of Customer Visionaries

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

They’ve made great strides in optimizing interactive marketing and in improving product information to streamline decision making. Most are planning major e-business overhauls in 2006. And they face similar challenges and issues: how to optimize the IT vs. e-business responsibilities, how to allocate funding for customer-impacting information, and how to corral customer information.

How to Approach Customer Experience Management

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

What’s the best approach to use for customer experience management? Patricia Seybold defines customer experience management as the practice of designing, delivering and continuously improving the manner and ease with which your chosen customers interact with your brand(s) in order to achieve their desired outcomes. In this report, you’ll learn how the Patricia Seybold Group approaches customer experience management. What dimensions of customer experience should you be managing? What experiences should you be monitoring and improving? How should you measure results?

Google vs. Microsoft

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Time Warner is looking to sell off its stake in AOL. Fierce competitors Microsoft and Google are both looking to buy and take advantage of AOL's built-in assets. What do these companies have to gain from such an aquisition, and can AOL even remain viable enough to make such a purchase worthwhile?

Meeting the Customer Experience Challenge

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

How well does your company currently walk the talk in making it easy for your customers to do business with you? What’s your current reality? Here’s a description of how many executives feel they’re doing in meeting their customers’ needs. How does a company that delivers a great customer experience look, feel and behave? Here’s the vision that our clients have of what they’re attempting to achieve as they strive to improve the Quality of the Customer Experience^SM they deliver. How do you get from your current reality to your vision of the ideal “outside-in” company? This is the first in a series of reports that tells you how to redesign your organization from the outside in.

Branded Customer Service

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

To excel in any market, your company can’t just offer great customer service, it needs to offer branded customer service—an experience that is unique to your brand. This book educates you about the differences between on-brand and off-brand customer service delivery. Branded Customer Service also addresses the corporate culture change issues that are required to help all employees learn how to be on-brand in their dealings with one another, as well as with customers. This is not a “how to” book. We wish it were! It’s a general awareness-creation book.

Leading an “Issues and Vision” Discussion with Customers (and Partners)

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

What’s the most effective way to capture customers’ current and ideal requirements about your business, about current or potential products and services, about your processes, about the brand experience you offer? Lead an “Issues and Vision” discussion with a group of like-minded customers. Include your distribution partners. Use this technique on its own, and/or use it to kick off your Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions.

You’ll gain these benefits:

1. Your customers and partners will feel very well heard and happy about the dialog. They’ll be impressed by how well and carefully you listened to their issues. They’ll enjoy hearing from others and gaining new insights. They’ll feel it was time well spent. They’ll feel a much stronger bond with your firm.

2. You’ll gain a validated set of prioritized customer requirements even before you begin your customer co-design activities. Customers will build consensus around the issues they care most about and the experience they’d value the most.

3. You’ll have captured a context-rich set of customer requirements, issues, and vision in formats that are easy to share with employees and executives. You can edit the video clips, turn the flipcharts into action plans, and present your findings to a broad group of stakeholders. These findings are very convincing!

Why the Buzz About Google Talk?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Google’s introduction of Google Talk instant messaging and chat in August 2005 unleashed a huge buzz of speculation. Our take: Google is about to shake up the telecommunications industry. Google will become a major player in telecommunications by offering free VOIP from a brand that matters. Google will expand its networking infrastructure to support multimedia traffic. Google Talk has the potential to become the preferred communications medium for people all over the world. The Trojan horse behind Google Talk is Gmail. Google wants to become the world’s preferred email provider. But, these new offerings are going to trigger even more privacy and “big brother” concerns. Yet, Google is likely to win the hearts and contact lists of consumers who are willing to trade off convenience and access for privacy. What else? Google may offer Web conferencing services that could rival those from existing players.

Democratizing Innovation

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

In his book, Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel makes a compelling case that lead users are, in fact, the most predictable source of breakthrough innovation. Instead of treating oddball customer requests as, well, oddball, you should be cherishing them as forerunners of profitable new product categories. You should foster a creative environment in which end users are encouraged to strut their stuff. You should tap communities of users—people who are problem solving and innovating as they go. Then, you’ll be able to quickly spot and commercialize more successful products than you would by sitting back in the lab and inventing solutions in response to real or perceived market needs. Let your customers do the innovation. Commercialize your customers’ solutions. That’s the democratization of innovation to which Eric refers—put the power to create new products and processes in the hands of your users.

Identifying Operational Customer Experience Metrics

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Do you know what your customers really care about the most? Can you monitor and improve the things that matter most to your customers?

Many organizations are now refining the ways in which they identify and monitor the customer-critical issues that will dissatisfy and/or delight customers. These companies are establishing and/or refining operational customer experience metrics.

This report provides an overview of operational customer experience metrics: What are they? Why do they matter? How do other companies identify and monitor them? How might you discover your customers’ metrics?

We also provide a “how to.” We describe how your customers can help you identify the moments of truth and customer metrics they care about. We’ll show you how to turn customers’ metrics into operational performance goals you can use to monitor and improve your ability to meet customers’ moments of truth.

Are You Handling Content Management as a Customer-Critical Issue?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Here are some quick tips for making content management a higher priority. Content management issues are costing your company big bucks when measured in terms of customer lifetime value. What should you do about it?

Return on Customer(SM)

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Looking for a way to convince your executives to put their money (and priorities) where their mouths are? First, come up with your current and planned strategy for measuring and reporting your firm’s Return on Customer. Then, educate your execs by handing out this book. Attach your ROC plan to it!

In Google We Trust?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Google has become much more than a search engine. Google’s strategy and services will impact your company’s future, whether you pay attention or not! Here’s a look at Google’s current set of functions and features, some thoughts about how they’re likely to impact your business, and some predictions about new functionality from Google that could dramatically change your own business strategy.

Current Concerns of Customer Visionaries

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Customer-centric visionary leaders are committed to making it easy for their customers to do business with them. Our hand-picked group of visionaries lead the pack in delivering a great Quality of Customer Experience, in enabling their businesses, and in reaping significant rewards in both customer loyalty and profitability. Yet, like all business and IT executives, they face challenges in putting their visions into operation. Here are the top-of-mind issues facing customer visionaries in the first half of 2005.

Selecting and Recruiting Customers for Customer Scenario® Mapping Sessions

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

So you’re thinking about running a customer co-design session? You’ll need trained and certified Customer Scenario(R) Mapping consultants, customers, and employees. You may also want to include your channel partners. What’s the best way to recruit customers (and partners) for Customer Scenario Mapping sessions? Here are suggestions for ways to build customer co-design into your normal activities. We also describe what kinds of customers to recruit, and how many.

A Call for Accounting Transparency: The Value of Customers and Brands

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is readying rules that will require US companies to report the value of intangible assets, such as customer lists and brands. This is part of an inexorable trend towards more accounting transparency. The good news is that the value of your customer list will now be considered an asset on your balance sheet. The bad news is that you may not be ready to report this crucial information with the accuracy that we believe will be required. Here are five steps you should be taking today to get ready.

Let Customers Co-Design Your Customer-Critical Initiatives

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 26 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

What’s the best way to gather customer requirements? Invite customers to co-design their ideal processes with your cross-functional team. Design your requirements to meet your customers’ future requirements. Learn why and when to apply Customer Scenario® Mapping to your own company’s initiatives and projects. Shave months off your projects while making your organization more customer adaptive. Gain benefits from immediate quick hits.

Nurturing Customer Loyalty in the B2B World

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 26 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

We spend a lot of our time these days working with the customer advocacy and customer experience teams at large software and systems companies, as well as at companies with other technical or complex products—manufacturers, financial services firms, B2B publishers, and so on.

SOA—All Over Again

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 12 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Service-oriented architecture is back, and now it's in the mainstream. We've revised our SOA survey from 2002, and we look forward to reading about how your thoughts about SOA have changed over the past three years.

Establishing and Nurturing a Customer-Centric Culture

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 05 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The Quality of the Customer ExperienceSM your company delivers is the biggest competitive barrier you can erect. It takes a long time for competitors to emulate a great customer experience. Why? Because having a customer-centric culture is a prerequisite for delivering a great customer experience. It takes years to build a corporate culture. Here are three different approaches.

In this report, we look more deeply at one of the best practices that truly differentiates the leaders from the laggards in customer experience delivery. We describe the ways in which three companies—Caterpillar Financial Services, Harrah’s Entertainment, and Lands’ End—have established and nurtured their own customercentric cultures.

How to Think About Content Management

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 05 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Don’t make the mistake of selecting a Web-only content management solution. Online content vs. print content is an arbitrary distinction. Focus first on the audience(s), then the information collections they need. For each information collection, think about your requirements for five key activities: findability, manageability, update-ability, reuse and measurement.

What Are Customer Experience Best Practices?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The advantage of being a “subject matter expert” in a benchmarking study is that you gain first-hand access to detailed questionnaires and site visits to best practices companies. After pouring over all the data collected during the 5 month Benchmarking Collaborative in Managing the Total Customer Experience conducted by the American Productivity and Quality Council (APQC) between October 2004 and April 2005, Patricia Seybold distilled a set of “findings” from the data. Here are the practices that seem to differentiate the “best practitioners” from the rest of the pack when it comes to delivering, and reaping the benefits from delivering a good total customer experience across touchpoints, channels, and throughout the customer lifecycle. We include a Customer Experience Report Card you can use to rate yourselves.

Building Buy-In for Customer-Centric Initiatives

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT

If your goal is to get everyone in your company fanatically aligned around a common goal (delivering a great customer experience), here’s a proven approach. Based on over twenty years of in-the-field experience, we offer our group interview technique. Projects and programs in which this technique have been used have taken root deeper, resonated longer, and built much more traction than projects that rely on standard one-on-one or departmental interviews for requirements gathering and priority setting.

Open Letter to Mark Hurd

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT

HP’s new CEO and President, Mark Hurd, has a great opportunity to help HP marry customer intelligence with customer experience. In this Open Letter to Mark Hurd, Patricia Seybold offers a prescription to Mark: focus on execution in the areas that matter most to customers. Do a better job of collecting, mining and analyzing customer information, using the techniques Mark mastered at NCR’s Teradata division. Use that customer intelligence to determine what areas of customer experience to improve. Take action on customers’ moments of truth in near-real time. Correlate the resulting increases in customer revenues and loyalty with the lower-costs-to-serve that result from proactively anticipating customers’ needs. Educate employees and investors alike about the correlation between customer insights and customer experience improvements and the correlation between customer experience and growth in customer lifetime value.

Design Your Quality of Customer Experience (QCE) Scorecard

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

What are the best practices in the design of customer experience scorecards? Best-practices leaders don’t content themselves with customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys—(How would you rate this experience? Would you recommend X to a friend or colleague?) They also identify a small set of operational customer metrics to monitor and continuously improve. These customer-centric metrics form the basis for the customer experience Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are used to motivate and focus employees. By measuring the right stuff—what matters most to customers—these companies continually improve the Quality of the Customer Experience(SM) they deliver, reaping rewards in higher customer satisfaction, greater customer loyalty, a larger number of customers and more profits per customer. Learn the 8 Steps to create your own QCE Scorecard.

Good-Bye Carly

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

On February 8, 2005 HP’s board fired CEO Carly Fiorina. What will HP’s strategy be going forward? Will HP, under a new regime be able to execute in three very different markets: consumer, small business and enterprise? Will HP be able to stay in the PC business, or will it give up and sell it off, as IBM has already done? Can HP compete with IBM in enterprise services and with Dell in the home and small business market? Worst case, a year from now, the company may be divided into two—one selling to the home; the other selling to large businesses.

Customer Portals: Central to Your Customer Experience Strategy

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

There are three reasons why customer portals are hot: 1) you save money by enabling customers to serve themselves and to up-sell and cross-sell themselves; 2) you increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability by providing everything the customer needs in one convenient, custom-tailored environment; and 3) you gain visibility into customers’ account information, their needs, and their preferences. By using customer portals to enable customers to manage their own relationships, you “solve” the problem of having a 360-degree view of your customers’ information—long the holy grail of CRM.

Apple’s Lessons for the Rest of Us

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Apple’s iPod strategy is paying off brilliantly. The popular iPod, with its iTunes legal music library, has created a halo effect for the rest of Apple’s computer business. Note that Steve Jobs came up with the iPod by watching what consumers were doing—downloading music by the track, creating their own mixes and carrying them around to listen to them on the go. Can you think of an iPod-equivalent strategy for your business?

QCE Resolutions for 2005

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Are you interested in providing or improving your customer experience in 2005? Then start by focusing on these five areas: improving serach results, giving customers access to their information, improving your cross-channel interactions, measuring what matters, and building an adaptive service-oriented architecture.

How the Blogging Community Accelerated Tsunami Relief

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

How can the Internet assist in coping with major disasters? Disaster relief in the wake of the earthquake and tsu-nami disaster that hit the shores of Southeast Asia and Africa has been accelerated by the rapid response of the blogging community. Blogs evolved to Wikis, providing the world’s fastest communally-created comprehensive and authoritative information resource for relief workers and families.

Cross-Channel Shopping Shines in the 2004 Holiday Season

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Online shopping in the United States accounted for more than 10 percent of all holiday retail shopping during the 2004 winter holiday shopping season. However, even more buyers used cross-channel shopping in 2004—searching online and buying in the store, or browsing in the store and buying online. Search and product findability were keys to success. Cross-channel shopping is becoming a much more common and seamless experience for customers. Most retailers are aggressively pursuing a multichannel shopping strategy in order to build strong relationships with shoppers and to increase the profitability per customer.

IBM/Lenovo: The China Strategy

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Will the IBM ThinkPad brand be tarnished by being Chinese-produced Lenovo PC's? The answer is no. In fact, IBM and Leveno may help to fuel innovation in the PC market.

What Will It Take for Oracle to Win the Hearts and Minds of PeopleSoft’s Customers?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Oracle's $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft essentially values PeopleSoft's customer accounts at over $800,000 each. That's a lot of profit to expect from the maintenance revenue, upsells and cross-sells of software licenses and professional services from those accounts. PeopleSoft's shareholders clearly won. But its customers did too. The Customer Assurance Program that PeopleSoft put in place guarantees customers that Oracle will support them well in the future. It's a model for a customer-focused company. If Oracle really wants a solid ROI, the company will have to become a much better customer partner.

Looking for Business Architects?

Patricia Seybold — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Ebusiness visionaries are the true business architects of the 21st century. They invest now in the core services that will be required to both deliver immediate value to customers and partners and support the way the business will operate in the future.

Why It's Hard to Prioritize IT Initiatives around End-Customer Impacting Issues

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Business and IT have always had challenges staying in synch. Today, many of those challenges are heightened as customer-centric business executives try to push through customer-impacting IT projects only to be met with resistance. Much customer-direct technology--the tools that customers use to interact directly with your business--is now moving from separate Internet groups into corporate IT organizations. This seems to exacerbate the problem. We offer a view of the issues from both the business and IT perspectives as well as a few suggestions.

VP of Customer Intelligence

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Who should be managing your customer information? What roles and responsibilities should you ideally have in order to do a great job with your customer information? We’re not talking about technical roles, but business roles--these are the job responsibilities that you’ll want to be sure are covered if you really want to have a customer-centric organization. We recommend that you combine oversight of operational customer information with oversight of customer analytics. By bringing these two teams into a single organization, you can take better advantage of real-time analytics--using what you learn from customers to take appropriate actions in near real time. There’s a major twist in our view of your customer intelligence organization: The first priority of your VP of customer intelligence should be to act as the custodian for the information that your customers care about. Start by ensuring that your customers have access to all the information they want about their profiles, their accounts, their transactions, and their interactions. Then worry about what your marketing and sales organizations want to know about customers. And make sure that customer privacy, customer research, and campaign management coordination are covered!

Sr. IT Architect for Cross-Channel Customer Experience

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

In order to deliver a great cross-channel experience to customers and partners, you’ll need to have a seasoned IT architect who is responsible for designing and evolving your application Architecture, services, and middleware to be customer adaptive. We call this role a senior IT architect for cross-channel customer experience. He or she should be “tied at the hip” to your SVP of customer experience and should lead a small team of senior architects. This Architecture team should be leading the transformation of all of your customer-impacting applications, databases, platforms, and middleware to ensure that customers’ current and future needs are met. This is the Architecture team that will redesign much of your IT application infrastructure from the outside in.

Banks Measure What Matters to Customers—and Improve Service

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Banks and other financial services firms already excel in sophisticated customer segmentation and in using customer segments and customer life events to target marketing campaigns and products. Now these same institutions are also focusing on the Quality of Customer Experience for critical customer scenarios. Here are a couple of examples of how banks are measuring and improving what matters to their prospects and customers.

Key Role: SVP of Cross-Channel Customer Experience (or Equivalent)

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT

What’s the one role that makes the most difference in a company’s ability to “make it easy for your customers to do business with you”? An SVP of customer experience (or equivalent). You need a highly placed and highly respected pragmatic visionary with clout who can improve customers’ end-to-end experience in dealing across channels, touchpoints, and functional silos. Where do you find such a person? Look inside your organization. And look for someone who has a deep understanding of your customers, someone who is a well-respected “old-timer” with your company, and someone who is recognized as a successful “go to” person—someone who gets things done and executes flawlessly.

Where Does Support Fit in Your Customers’ Lifecycles? Everywhere!

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Customers need to be supported throughout their entire lifecycle, not just during the post-sales stage. Customer support should be the engine that drives your business process improvements. If you monitor and continuously improve the issues that cause customer support problems, you’ll wind up redesigning your business processes and your products. In fact, you’ll redesign your business from the customer back.

HP Provides Cross-Channel Inventory Visibility

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT

One of customers’ “moments of truth” in deciding which product to buy is knowing where the product is in stock and how soon they can receive it. Hewlett-Packard’s Internet marketing group has partnered with Channel Intelligence to provide near-real-time in-stock status information for its printing and imaging products both at e-tailers’ sites and in bricks and mortar locations in North America. Now consumers will know with certainty that a particular model of printer and/or ink cartridge is in stock in the store before they drive over and without the need to make a phone call. Channel Intelligence provides this product in-stock status information to a number of manufacturers and retailers. Neither the manufacturers nor the retailers need to have their product data conform to any pre-agreed metadata definitions. The more players participate, the more complete the ecosystem becomes.

Customer Scenario Patterns: Are You Making It Easy for B2B Customers to Select and Buy Your Products? (Part 2)

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT

In many customer scenarios, there are common moments of truth that emerge despite differences in the customers' businesses. This report looks at those moments of truth that surface consistently in B2B select & buy scenarios, 'unpacking' the underlying wants and expectations of each.

Customer Scenario Patterns: Are You Making It Easy for B2B Customers to Select and Buy Your Products?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Before you begin a Customer Scenario® Mapping exercise, you should capture the context of the scenario. This report explains the five key elements to capture: customer, scenario, desired outcome, conditions of satisfaction, and customer context.

Payment Strategies

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 27 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Bank of America has developed a good governance model to tackle a difficult strategic problem that crosses organizational boundaries and product line boundaries. Here's a brief look at how BofA has organized to develop an integrated payments strategy. Managing customer experience is a strategic issue that also needs to be handled across organizational boundaries. If we take a page from BofA's book, we would appoint a high-level Customer Experience leadership council and arm it with a fact base that would enable the executives on the council to make the tough choices about how to profitably evolve a holistic customer experience strategy.

Project Avalanche

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

The Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative, also known as "Project: Avalanche" is a brand new corporate customer-led initiative to enable corporate IT executives to extract more value out of their IT investments. Avalanche Cooperative members can now donate quality software to a shared library and let other members re-use and evolve that software. Every company writes lots of software in order to run its business. Much of that software is more utilitarian than strategic in nature. And much of it is repetitive. Why not use the Open Source model of collaborative development and shared source code to gain access to the useful adapters, utilities, and software services that other IT shops have written? And, while we're at it, why don't we vet commercial quality open source software to insure that it is in fact "open" and safe to use without being sued? Those are two of the charters of the newly formed, and member-owned Avalanche Cooperative.

Sun and Microsoft Deal: Good News for Linux & Java

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We believe that the April 2 agreement between Microsoft and Sun heralds a new era of peaceful coexistence in IT shops around the world. .Net developers will partner with J2EE developers; Linux open source groupies will look more kindly at Java. Sun will compete with Microsoft’s real monopoly—office applications—and go down market to compete in the commodity hardware and software business. At the same time, Sun will ready itself for the next round of enterprise software—its N1 Grid optimized network computing Architecture.

Rethinking CRM

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

How should you be thinking about CRM? Don’t limit your thinking to the traditional triumvirate of inward-facing marketing, sales, and service. Instead, expand your thinking to encompass customer experience management. Today’s customer-centric executives have expanded the purview of their CRM initiatives to encompass end-to-end customer experience management. Their mandate now includes merchandising and product information, as well as all customer-impacting operational systems and processes, including inventory management, provisioning, fulfillment, billing, and many other related areas. Where will you find the best payoff from CRM? Start with cross-channel customer service. You’ll convert prospects to customers faster and you’ll improve customer loyalty and profitability. Then leverage the customer insights you glean from serving customers in your marketing, merchandising, and sales initiatives.
About Patricia Seybold.

Why Skype’s Peer-to-Peer Voice over IP Is Revolutionary

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Skype offers a compelling combination of voice over IP telephone service and presence awareness, leveraging peer-to-peer networking. The result is a killer app--an application that makes it advantageous for households and businesses around the world to upgrade to broadband. Skype’s impact on telecommunications companies will be profound. It challenges the notion that users should pay for phone calls by the minute.

Best Practices in Dealing with Consumers’ Cross-Channel Retail Behavior

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 29 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Many of today’s consumers prefer to shop across channels—for example, researching online, buying in the store, and getting support by phone. Cross-channel retail poses significant challenges for retailers and for suppliers of consumer products. We offer some tips for retailers and suppliers based on consumers’ “moments of truth” across a variety of shopping scenarios.

Designing a Customer-In CMR Environment

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

No description currently available

Eliyon’s Person Search and Profile Service

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Privately-held Eliyon offers an interesting “person search” and automated professional profile generation capability. What intrigues us most about this dedicated search facility are three things: the possibility that it could become a de facto standard, the fact that its functionality can be integrated into lots of different Web sites and applications, and the issues surrounding privacy and the use of aggregated publicly-available information. Eliyon uses Artificial Intelligence algorithms to infer relationships among people, companies, and other institutions, as well as to pull that information together into professional profiles. The company hopes that businesspeople will want to vet and update their own professional profiles.

Capturing Customer Requirements for Content Management

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Enterprise content management initiatives are notoriously difficult to scope and to pull off well. That’s because unmanaged content is everywhere, organizational boundaries and fiefdoms abound, and information and content is housed in a plethora of information silos. Here’s the best way to launch any ECM initiative: start with the audience for the information; identify that audience’s critical scenarios; then identify the information and content required to support those scenarios, the content attributes and metadata, and the roles and responsibilities. Here’s how.

Emerging Governance Structures for Tackling Information Management

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Today’s organizations, workers, and customers are mired in information overload. Information management is looming as a necessary strategic core competence for organizations in the 21st century. In order to retool your organization, you’ll need information management governance, policies, standards, processes, and guidelines. In this report, we outline some emerging practices in information management governance.

Is Outlook Becoming the Center of Our Universe?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Most of us “live” in email, and more than half of us use Microsoft Outlook. We therefore predict that Outlook will become the front-end to most business applications. IBM/Lotus and the Linux crowd better act quickly before most companies acquiesce to making Outlook the center of their workers’ universe.

MessageOne’s Emergency Messaging System (EMS)

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Your business can’t afford an email outage of hours or days. The risk to your revenues, productivity, and reputation is too great. There’s a new set of players coming onto the market, providing affordable email continuity solutions for emergencies. MessageOne’s EMS is one such solution. This report describes how it works.

Making Progress in Cross-Channel Retail

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Sears and Lands’ End are just over a year into their merger. Here’s a progress report on merger progress to-date. We’re particularly impressed with the strides the merged company has made in sharing best practices for cross-channel retailing across the two strong brands.

The Killer App: Email

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Email has become the one application without which most modern businesses would cease to function. It is the true “killer” application. But Email can kill your business, too. New viruses and worms continue to infiltrate our email inboxes. Spam continues to overwhelm the filters we put in place to stop it. Bad email etiquette lowers productivity. And peoples’ idiosyncratic work habits often make it difficult to locate vital email business correspondence. Here are seven steps should your firm be taking to ensure that your company’s killer app doesn’t kill your business.

Gaining Adoption & ROI for Your Software Projects

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Software suppliers need to focus on their customers’ speed of adoption and roll-out, end-user critical scenarios, and achieving ROI.

Granularity Rocks!

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 17 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

How do you address thorny business and technical issues? Break them into the right-size chunks. When you select the right granularity to address any business or technical issue, the way forward becomes clear.

Netflix.com Wins Patent on Business Methods

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Netflix, the online DVD rental company, has demonstrated that it understands its customers’ critical “moments of truth,” and has designed a business model to address them. This business model was so innovative that it earned a U.S. patent. Netflix turned customers’ pain points into its competitive advantage and, by innovating and claiming a patent on its innovation, now has a sustainable competitive advantage. Could your company do the same thing?

Gathering Customers' Real Requirements

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 03 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Gathering customer requirements can be tough. Particularly if customers can't envision the possibilities of how they might reach their outcomes in a dramatically different way. We've found that focusing customers on identifying the moments of truth in their ideal scenarios helps get their creative juices flowing. Here are two real-world examples of how companies used Moments of Truth to help customers and stakeholders think out-of-the-box.

Wanted: Information Architects!

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 26 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Every company today is drowning in a sea of disorganized and dysfunctional information. We are in desperate need of information architects and other information professionals who can make sense of the mess of information we've created and is now exposed to our customers, our partners, and the world!

Will Microsoft Co-Opt Linux, Too?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

What’s Microsoft’s Linux strategy? Befuddle the industry, stall Linux, and co-opt Unix on Windows. Who stands to lose? The Linux community and IBM. Who stands to gain? Customers will win if Unix and Windows coexist on Intel platforms.

Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft (and Linux)

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

PeopleSoft plans to acquire J.D. Edwards. Oracle plans a takeover bid for PeopleSoft. What are we to make of this IT industry consolidation? Will consolidation help major players—such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP—as they turn their attention from the stagnant large enterprise market to the more vibrant small- to medium-sized business arena? And Microsoft isn’t going to take this intrusion into its territory lying down. What can Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP do to compete with the Microsoft Juggernaut?

Beware of Business Process Management

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 May 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Business processes are internally-focused, difficult to design, hard to adapt, and have very short shelf-lives. Instead of wasting time designing business processes, we recommend that you identify the services required to support key Customer Scenarios® and let these services improvise to form new patterns in response to customers’ changing contexts. Notice the re-occurring patterns these services-interactions take. Optimize those. Services should be owned by business executives who should be responsible for the policies governing the services which fall under their purview.

Support for Business Processes (Theirs and Ours)

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

What’s the relationship between customers’ business processes and your company’s business processes? They’re orthogonal. Your business processes need to support your customers’, (and your partners’, and your suppliers’) constantly-changing scenarios. We use our understanding of the relationship between the two to help us in evaluating products and platforms.

Engine of Global Growth: China

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

A visit to China sparks predictions on the Chinese business market. Don’t be surprised if the country helps jumpstart the flagging worldwide economy.

The Future of Marketing and Branding

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Here’s a compelling synopsis of some of the findings in our new book, BRANDchild. We offer some interesting market research statistics and observations about the make-up of today’s global tween market—a group that purchases and/or influences $600 billion worth of sales each year.

Understanding Your Next Generation Customers

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 20 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Today’s tweens (ages 8-14) are tomorrow’s customers and employees. It’s important to understand how they react to branding. Branding is a very personal experience that reflects the individuality of these young consumers.

Supporting the Partner Channel

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

A well-educated and well-supported partner will help you make more sales. Be creative and generous in how you make it easier for partners—as well, of course, as customers—to do business with you.

How to Think about Portals

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Portals are more than a thin veneer on top of a set of disparate applications. You can use the portal veneer to let you discover how to re-design from the outside in.

The Network Effect

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

No matter what business you're in, you should be aware of emerging standards in cross-referencing digital assets. As we've seen in past Reports, the technical journal publishing industry again takes the lead.

Who Is Accessing Your Information?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The COUNTER Project is attempting to provide a standardized method of tracking reader access to online published information. Leading scholarly publishers and library groups have endorsed the project.

Protecting Your Digital Assets

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 13 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The DOI standard for uniquely tagging digitized content is in widespread use by journal publishers. What implications does it have for your business and your intellectual assets?

Understanding Digitization: Trends in Business Models

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Technical journal publishers have come up with new business models to for generating revenues from digital assets. Other businesses can take note!

How Should You Manage Content within Your Enterprise?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve identified seven critical issues that seem to be plaguing today’s content management project teams: organizational structure, scope, interdependencies, distributed and centralized control, workflow design and implementation, categorizing content, and cross-media “publishing.” Here are our suggestions to help you deal with each of these issues.

Needed: Ad Hoc Collaborative Services

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Microsoft becomes more aggressive in addressing collaboration. But what ad hoc collaborative tools do customers need? This Report presents our wish list for ad hoc collaboration functionality along with feedback from Microsoft’s Anoop Gupta, PlaceWare’s Gary O’Neall, and Groove’s Ray Ozzie.

Services on Our Mind

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 16 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

IT buyers have discovered the value of service-oriented Architectures. They are learning how to prioritize the application and infrastructure services they need based on customers’ (and other stakeholders’) scenarios. But today’s application software vendors are still trying to force-fit packaged solutions into these enlightened enterprises. Application software vendors who figure out how to offer bundles of robust services to deliver application functionality will win customers’ business.

What Are the Top IT-Related Initiatives in Q1 2003?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 09 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

What are the top issues that CIOs and business executives are dealing with this quarter? After talk-ing to lots of our customers, I’ve compiled a list of the key issues and projects they’re all working on in FY03.

Amazon.com: Retailers’ Friend or Foe?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 19 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Amazon.com moves from online retailer to offering merchandising and marketing partnerships with other retailers. In this report, we look at how well the online e-tailing leader is doing in the partnership arena.

Lands’ End Brings the Softer Side to Sears

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 13 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Today’s retailers have come to realize that modern consumers have become quite demanding about the quality of the customer experience they receive as they cross channel and touchpoint boundaries. Customers increasingly expect to be able to research and shop by catalog and phone and/or online, to get questions answered by phone, to examine goods at the retailer or dealer location, and to either purchase at retail or go back to purchase online. We've identified eight critical competencies that modern multi-channel retailers need to master. In this report, we analyze how well the new Sears/Lands' End combination stacks up on all eight counts.

A Better Way to Measure ROI

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

In the Customer Economy, the only way to gain budget approval is to measure the time and costs you save your customers and justify your IT expenditures based on the increased revenues and customer retention you’ll gain. A number of companies have done just this and are reaping the rewards.

Customer Issues: Single Sign-On

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

If you are implementing portals as a shortcut to solving the single sign-on problem for groups of employees, customers, and partners, beware of false promises of simple single sign-on from portal suppliers. Authenticating users across organizational boundaries and application services will remain a thorny problem in 2003.

How to Prioritize Your Roadmap Using Customer Experience & Value

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

You want to incorporate a customer perspective into your IT planning process, but your analyses devolve into anecdote and gut feel. We’re offering a methodology for establishing the Customer Experience Value of your plan items.

Sam’s Vision Will Rejuvenate the High Tech Sector

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano forecasts increased IBM spending on IT. This is good news for the high-tech industry as a whole.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid in CRM

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 24 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

What are the most common problems besetting today's CRM executives? And what can be done about them? We've found eight problems that recur over and over again. Too often, CRM initiatives are implemented with the wrong set of goals--internally-focused goals and metrics. If you rethink your CRM strategy as a Customer-Managed Relationship (CMR) strategy, and avoid these common mistakes, you'll be on the right track.

The Next Big Thing: Adaptive Business Process Management

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 10 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Static business processes cannot address continually-changing customer requirements. Design business processes that can be adapted to new requirements and opportunities.

Implementing & Refining IT Projects

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 10 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

This report focuses on how to design your IT projects around the needs of your customers.

BPR for CRM?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 19 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Best practices in CRM are an alluring goal, but make sure you start with processes that the customers care about. Avoid the temptation to improve your messy processes if they don’t impact the customers.

The Spam Conspiracy

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 05 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Spam—unsolicited commercial e-mail—is reaching catastrophic proportions. Could there be a sinister hand behind the glut of porno-spam clogging our inboxes? Here are some suggestions—legal and technical—for dealing with this productivity drain.

Why IT Architecture Is Important in the Selection of a CRM Solution

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 29 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Architecture has become a key consideration when evaluating CRM offerings. Often, IT architects are the key influencers in the decision-making process. This Report highlights the most critical issues in CRM architecture.

What’s Your Portal Strategy?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Portals are Hot! E-Business is not. We believe that you should take advantage of the current portal fad to: 1) make it easier for different constituencies to do business with your firm by providing them the tools, information, and resources they need to achieve their goals. 2) To rationalize your existing Internet, intranet, and extranet Web sites in order to reduce duplication of effort. And 3) to transform your business processes and IT infrastructure by redesigning from the outside in while you refine customer-impacting business processes and re-architect IT to leverage common application services.

IBM/PWC: Is It Good for Customers?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 01 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

IBM has aquired the consulting firm PWC. Can PWC retain its objectivity and keep their customers happy?

Who “Owns” the Customer in Your Company?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 18 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Who owns the customer relationships in your company? Who else is allowed to interact with customers? Who controls what information is captured and what information is shared for which groups of customers? Guess what? Whatever your answers are to these questions, they’re probably the wrong answers for the customer economy. Today’s customers are demanding control over their information and their relationships. We introduce our Customer Manifesto—the seven demands that today’s customers expect every company to meet. How will you meet these demands? We offer implementation tips, best practices, and the six steps we recommend that you take in order to begin transforming your corporate culture today!

The Next Disruptive Technology: Wireless Broadband Data Access (WBDA)

Patricia Seybold — Wed, 03 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

What will jumpstart technology spending? A technology that is both seductive enough and disruptive enough to open up business budgets and consumers’ wallets. We believe that Wireless Broadband Data Access (BWDA) has the potential to be the catalyst that will re-jumpstart IT spending. But there are regulatory and other hurdles to overcome.

Of Mergers and Brands

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 16 May 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Can merged companies, such as HP/Compaq and the proposed Sears/Lands’ End maintain a superb customer experience? After all, these mergers are about more than just brand name; they are all about reaching, and satisfying, more and more customers.

Why Web Services Are Strategic

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 02 May 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Web Services are here to stay. What do you need to know about them? They’re part of an important IT architectural evolution that has strategic implications both for your technology and for your business. Web Services make it easier for you to design your business to adapt quickly and dynamically to changing circumstances. Web Services are also a useful lingua franca in which technologists and businesspeople can communicate and prioritize requirements. Most importantly, you can use Web Services to expose key functions from your operational systems to your customers, distribution channel partners, suppliers and other key stakeholders. While Web Services help ease the burden of enterprise application integration, they are most strategic when used to expose needed functionality to your key customers and stakeholders.

On the Front Lines of the Customer Revolution: Part 3

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 25 Apr 2002 00:00:00 GMT

We call your attention to an easy-to-miss regulatory battle being waged in the U.S. Two new satellite radio providers are lobbying the FCC to place restrictions on providers of broadband wireless service. We favor rapid deployment of wireless broadband in the U.S. to make up for the fact that our cellular infrastructure is inferior to that in the rest of the world. There should be a win/win here for everyone.

On the Front Lines of the Customer Revolution: Part 2

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 18 Apr 2002 00:00:00 GMT

We call your attention to an easy-to-miss skirmish being waged in the U.S.—the battle over Internet Radio royalties. The existing broadcast radio and music label cartel is trying to put Internet radio out of business, depriving customers of a great deal of diversity on the airwaves.

On the Front Lines of the Customer Revolution: Part 1

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 11 Apr 2002 00:00:00 GMT

We call your attention to an easy-to-miss regulatory battle being waged in the U.S.—the battle over telephone number portability. This has been mandated by law in the U.S., but the telco providers keep gaining delays from the FCC. When will customers really gain the upper hand?

The Five Waves of CRM

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 Mar 2002 00:00:00 GMT

In order to understand CRM, you need to understand its evolution. Moving through four waves of customer demands and technology solutions to a current fifth wave that is just beginning, CRM has matured and become more and more strategic. This report helps you make intelligent decisions as CRM continues to evolve.

Will Your Company Be Well-Positioned When the Economy Rebounds?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 28 Feb 2002 00:00:00 GMT

This report outlines steps your company will need to take to be prepared when the economy rebounds.

Why the HP/Compaq Deal is Good for Customers

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 14 Feb 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Why are we still in favor of the proposed HP/Compaq merger when everyone else in the computer industry seems to think it’s a bad idea? Because we think that most analysts are missing the point. This merger is not about PCs versus. Printers. It’s about giving customers the ability to run BOTH Microsoft’s operating software environment and Web Services Framework and Unix and/or Linux along with Java J2EE. HP and Compaq are among the only suppliers that offer customers a complete, heterogeneous environment.

Designing a Customer Flight Deck(SM) System - Customer Goals

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 08 Feb 2002 00:00:00 GMT

The Customer Flight Deck is designed to give you 1) a framework for monitoring the quality of your customers’ experience; 2) a basis for prioritizing and making operational improvements; and 3) a way to validate those improvements by correlations with increased customer retention, lower customer acquisition costs, and greater customer spending and profitability.

Designing a Customer Flight Deck(SM) System - Customer Segmentation

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 31 Jan 2002 00:00:00 GMT

IT Investment Planning & Business Priorities for 2002

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 24 Jan 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Here are five practices that IT managers should be adopting in early 2002 in order to preserve and maximize the investments they’ve already made in people and technology. We’ve also highlighted five key areas of business investment that we expect to see in 2002. Finally, we explain how you can use a customer-focused approach to amplify the work your company undertakes in any of these five areas in order to gain a double whammy: more profitable operations in the short term and more satisfied customers for the long term.

Don’t Wait to Extend Your Enterprise!

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 17 Jan 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Companies that focus on internal operational efficiencies rather than extended-enterprise applications are doomed to failure! To succeed, you must design your extended enterprise from the outside in.

What to Look for in a Web Services Assembly Platform

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 10 Jan 2002 00:00:00 GMT

What’s exciting about Web Services? You gain the ability to assemble applications dynamically using components and functionality that has been previously created. Because Web Services adhere, by definition, to a common set of high-level interfaces, they can be mixed and matched to create Internet-enabled applications. There’s an exciting new category of application assembly platforms coming onto the market. Before you select one, here are some questions to consider.

Defining Metadata

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 15 Nov 2001 00:00:00 GMT

Consistent content management can both reduce costs improve both the quality of your customer experience. Start by identifying the kinds of metadata that matters most to your different groups of customers and to the people who serve those customers.

What Comes After CRM?

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 08 Nov 2001 00:00:00 GMT

Why haven’t CRM systems yielded a strong ROI? Because it’s not enough to know who your customers are and what they want. Unless your company transforms itself to be more customer-centric than product-centric, you’re going to be disappointing customers and prospects. In addition to investing in CRM, let your customers redesign your company’s core business processes.

Designing a Customer Flight Deck(SM) Performance Management System

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 25 Oct 2001 00:00:00 GMT

Designing a Customer Flight Deck^SM System can help you move your company from being product-centric to being customer-centric. This report provides an introduction to how to create your own Customer Flight Deck.

An Open Letter to Carly Fiorina and Michael Capellas

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 07 Sep 2001 00:00:00 GMT

The new HP/Compaq has a lot going for it. In this open letter to the leaders of the two merging companies, Patricia Seybold points out the strengths and challenges facing the blended company. And she provides guidance on where efforts need to be focused as the companies merge—on the customer, of course.

Saving Customers’ Time: Master Customer Scenario® Design

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 07 Jun 2001 00:00:00 GMT

When you design your business processes from the customer’s point of view, you create happy and loyal customers. Our Customer ScenarioSM Design methodology helps you determine what customers want from you and how to deliver it. This report tells you how to start on your own Customer Scenario Design projects as well as providing the real-life success stories of National Semiconductor, Tesco PLC, and Buzzsaw.com.

The Customer Revolution (hardcover)

Patricia Seybold — Thu, 01 Mar 2001 00:00:00 GMT

Describes how global businesses in a variety of industries manage by and for customer value while they continuously improve the quality of the customer experience they deliver.

Hardcover: 395 pages
Publisher: Crown Business; 1st edition (March, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN: 0609607723

Customers.com (hardcover)

Patricia Seybold — Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Provides insight into how successful companies designed their e-business strategies to improve revenues, increase profitability, and enhance customer loyalty.

Hardcover: 360 pages
Publisher: Crown Business; 1st edition (November 15, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN: 0812930371

Making It Easy for Customers to Do Business with You

Patricia Seybold — Mon, 01 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

No description currently available

National Semiconductor Seduces Its Value Chain

Patricia Seybold — Fri, 01 May 1998 00:00:00 GMT

No description currently available

Focus Your Electronic Business Efforts on Saving Customers Time and Sparing Them Aggravation:

Patricia Seybold — Mon, 01 Dec 1997 00:00:00 GMT

No description currently available