Posts Tagged Customer Experience
Beyond Social Listening and Influencer Marketing, Leveraging Social Intelligence
Posted by cheuer in CXDNow, SocialMedia on February 1st, 2016
There were so many rich gems from this conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick of Little Bird on last week’s CXDNow, that I’ve rewritten the headline almost 10x and have struggled with how to best synthesize our one hour show for you. Marshall and his team are rightly excited about “Contextualized Segmentation”, I am personally a fan of “Market Engagement Optimization” which I’ve been thinking about for a few years and “Holistic Business Strategy” which I have been touting for over 15 years. But after listening to this whole conversation a second time and reviewing my notes, I think what best encompasses what Little Bird does, especially as it impacts our ability to design great customer experiences, social intelligence is the clear winner.
Why? While Marshall shares that the first thing most people do with Little Bird is to find who are the influencers a company should talk to about a new product launch, as they start to understand the capabilities more fully, they quickly are able to create value across their entire business strategy. From marketing, to recruiting, to trend watching, to content curation and especially for learning from the market to inform their product strategies, Little Bird is able to best identify the truly influential people and the conversations that really matter to your market.
How do they do this? As you will learn in this episode, their key metric is based on the relationships and connections between those who are regularly engaged in conversations about key aspects of your market. It’s not only about who has the most ‘potential reach’, but about how many other connections a given influencer has within a given network. Going further, Little Bird helps you to see the clusters of the types of influencers engaged in the conversation – are they high volume self promoters or are they true influencers? What potential sub-communities exist? And now with the latest release, what are the phrases and language being used within those sub-communities that may be salient but not obvious.
I think the reason I am biased towards thinking of Little Bird as a Social Intelligence tool is best summarized by this quote from Marshall in the podcast when I asked him what is different about his product. He said his best customers are “Leveraging influencers not just for what they will tell the world about you, but for what they will tell you about the world.”
This post only scratches on the applicable insights we uncover in this conversation. To get the most from it, find yourself an hour on your commute or in the evening and listen to our conversation between Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Gray and myself as soon as you can.
Sponsored by XPLANE:
XPLANE is a strategic design consultancy focused on addressing complex challenges on the inside of organizations. We leverage visual thinking, people-centered design, and co-creation to design solutions that accelerate the way our clients envision, explain, and realize their goals.
About CXDNow:
CXDNow is back for season 2 of our series focused on understanding and successfully executing on customer experience design so that your organization may better serve, and ultimately win your market. In season 1, we focused on the fundamentals of CX Design through conversations with CX leaders such as Brian Solis, Risto Lahdesmaki and Tom Illmensee among others. As we move into 2016, we will be bringing you stories from more leaders around who will share their deep insights and practical advice in pursuit of advancing the field for the benefit of all.
If you are interested in being a guest on the show or sponsoring us, please contact us.
#CXDNow – Understanding and Engaging Your Market in Conversations that Matter
It is clear that we all need to better understand what our market is talking about and who are the people influencing our market so we can design better products and share our value with potential customers. But how do we figure out where to start? How do we sort through all of the noise to find the people and conversations that matter most to our organization? How do we optimize our engagement for maximum impact with limited resources?
In the first episode of 2016, Chris Heuer is joined by co-host Dave Gray of XPlane to talk with Marshall Kirkpatrick of Little Bird to dive into a conversation about the contextual segmentation and analysis of a company’s market to effectively engage in influencer marketing. In this conversation, we’ll look at graphs of Twitter friends around companies and markets, analyze their connections for opportunities, and talk about how you can combine data analysis at scale with authentic communication and creativity in your work.
We will also answer your questions! So join us on Blab this Friday January 29, 2016 at 10am PST for an in-depth conversations into the influencer’s role in customer experience design and how we can better engage them to improve the experiences we are providing and increase awareness of what you have to offer the market.
Guest: Marshall Kirkpatrick
Marshall Kirkpatrick is a co-founder of Little Bird, a social media marketing and research technology that does contextual segmentation analysis of target markets, online audiences, and company stakeholders, using social graph analysis. In this episode of CXDNow, Marshall talks with Chris Heuer and XPlane’s Dave Gray about how you can use knowledge about the different contextual segments relevant to a company to optimize your work, in marketing or design, for maximum relevance, efficiency, and impact.
Sponsored by XPLANE:
XPLANE is a strategic design consultancy focused on addressing complex challenges on the inside of organizations. We leverage visual thinking, people-centered design, and co-creation to design solutions that accelerate the way our clients envision, explain, and realize their goals.
About CXDNow:
CXDNow is back for season 2 of our series focused on understanding and successfully executing on customer experience design so that your organization may better serve, and ultimately win your market. In season 1, we focused on the fundamentals of CX Design through conversations with CX leaders such as Brian Solis, Risto Lahdesmaki and Tom Illmensee among others. As we move into 2016, we will be bringing you stories from more leaders around who will share their deep insights and practical advice in pursuit of advancing the field for the benefit of all.
#CXDNow – What’s needed, what’s next?
The time for customer experience design is now! In this final episode of our premiere web series CXDNow, host Chris Heuer interviews Tobias Rose, writer, designer and entrepreneur. Tobias has led a fascinating life, from his early professional life in the wine industry to a chance meeting with a monk who asked for his help with a reservoir for their village that lead to his career as a CX Designer. In the first episode we learn of Tobias’ origin story. How his trip to Cambodia resulted in a nonprofit that forever changed a small village and the people who live there. It’s a fascinating tale of one designers realization of the importance of empathy in all we do. Through his story you will see all of the key characteristics that are necessary for someone who wants to be a leading customer experience designer.
It a longer format part two, Tobias is joined by Sarah Grzybowski from IBM’s Journey Designer team to discuss the future of CX design, what we need and what we see coming next. We get some sneak peaks into the IBM Journey Designer product and its future as a management dashboard to optimize the customer experience across their journey. It’s clear as we discuss in this episode, that technology is only part of the solution. What’s really needed is a greater depth of empathy across the entire business landscape, so that we finally embrace radical customer centricity instead of merely paying it lip service.
In this our last episode of the series one for fall/winter 2015 we were able to touch upon many of the key pieces of advice that everyone needs to be a great CX designer. We will be posting some more recaps of this content and different educational snippets over the course of the next several weeks. Join us again in January 2016 for our next series and a further exploration of customer experience design now. Thank you so much for joining us and special thanks to IBM Commerce and the Journey Designer team for their support of the series.
Need help creating design moving customer experiences? IBM Journey Designer enables you and your team to collaboratively visualize journeys, set shared marketing goals, and create and refine tailored experiences for dozens of priority segments. Learn more on this blog post or try it at no cost at ibm.com/journey-designer.
Tobias Rose Interview – From Global Change Maker to CX Designer
Tobias Rose & Sarah Grzybowski – What’s Needed, What’s Next
Putting CX to Work. See the forest AND the trees with Dave Gray
In this extended episode of CXDNow, host Chris Heuer interviews Dave Gray, founder of world renowned visual communications firm XPlane and author of Gamestorming
During the conversation, we skim across the broad concepts and processes before diving quickly down into the detailed depths of putting CX to work. How do we approach Customer Experience Design? Sure, it’s about empathy as we continue to discuss, but what does being able to draw have to do with it? As Dave Gray says, “whatever strategy you think you should have, if you can’t draw it, you can’t do it”. It’s this approach, going beyond design to use design as a way of thinking that distinguishes the work of Dave Gray and his team at XPlane. In this 20+ minute episode, be prepared for a rapid fire dose of killer insights that will take your CX Design to the next level. From how to see, to how to think, to how to do – Dave walks us through the forest and shows us the trees.
Need help creating design moving customer experiences? IBM Journey Designer enables you and your team to collaboratively visualize journeys, set shared marketing goals, and create and refine tailored experiences for dozens of priority segments. Learn more on this blog post or try it at no cost at ibm.com/journey-designer.
A Conversation with a Master, Dave Gray’s Origin Story
Posted by cheuer in Conversation, CXDNow, Insytes on November 7th, 2015
In this episode of CXDNow, host Chris Heuer interviews Dave Gray, founder of world renowned visual communications firm XPlane and author of Gamestorming
Over the course of 20 minutes we go back to the early 90’s to learn how Dave’s experience doing graphics to support stories in the newspaper became a business, became the signature style for Business 2.0 magazine and ultimately lead to a completely different way of making strategy real. In many ways, the very same evolution that lead to the rise of Customer Experience Design, with Dave at the proverbial ‘tip of the spear’. It’s a fascinating story, and one that is both inspirational and informative. Listen in and find out why XPlane is one of the most sought after firms in the world.
If you would like to be a part of the taping of the show live and join in our post interview conversation, you can join us next Wednesday November 11, 2015 at noon PST as we discuss the future of CX Design, what is needed and where we are headed with several leading practitioners.
Need help creating design moving customer experiences? IBM Journey Designer enables you and your team to collaboratively visualize journeys, set shared marketing goals, and create and refine tailored experiences for dozens of priority segments. Learn more on this blog post or try it at no cost at ibm.com/journey-designer.
CX: Making the Business Case with Risto Lähdesmäki
The time for customer experience design is now! In this episode of our web series CXDNow, host Chris Heuer interviews Risto Lähdesmäki, CEO of Idean. Following up on our discussions with author Brian Solis, and IBM Journey Designer Product Manager Doug Foulds, and Tom Illmensee, Director of UX for Prezi we are now diving into making the business case, or rather selling CX to management, and clients.
In part 1 we talk about Risto Lähdesmäki’s journey from his roots as a designer through his first user research firm and how it evolved to become Idean, with offices now around the globe. His thinking and his agency has grown as the idea of UX and CX has evolved. He talks about how he has been fortunate to connect with so many clients who really ‘get it’, who innately understand the value of CX. He also shares some of the differences between Europe and the United States.
In part 2 we discuss some of the aspects of the value proposition, most especially the reduction of friction in the customer’s journey, and the competitive advantage of those who understand CX and embrace it and iterate on it. In this episode, hear why he believes that every dollar invested in UX/CX can return 10-100x and help them win back market share and earn the loyalty of their customers.
In part 3 we are joined by Rit Mishra, a Senior Design Director at Idean to work out loud by collaboratively discussing and working on the Empathy Map and Customer Journey for our new community movement, We Are the Solution. In this very informative segment, we layout a basic framework of how we look at the CX before, during and after, from both a backstage and front stage perspective. If you are trying to figure out how to start with CX, this is the segment you want to watch.
Finally in segment 4, we dive deeper into some Q&A, talk about the future and about other key pieces of advice for getting the most out of CX.
If you would like to be a part of the taping of the show live and join in our post interview conversation, you can join us next Wednesday November 4, 2015 at noon PST as we interview Dave Gray, author of GameStorming
Need help creating design moving customer experiences? IBM Journey Designer enables you and your team to collaboratively visualize journeys, set shared marketing goals, and create and refine tailored experiences for dozens of priority segments. Learn more on this blog post or try it at no cost at ibm.com/journey-designer.
Risto Lähdesmäki Interview Part 1 of 4 – How did you get into UX?
Risto Lähdesmäki Interview Part 2 of 4 – Making the Business Case
Tom Illmensee Interview Part 3 of 4 – Putting CX to Work, #WeAreTheSolution
Risto Lähdesmäki Q&A – Part 4 of 4
#CXDNow – Making the Business Case with Risto Lähdesmäki from Idean
In working to advance the field of Customer Experience Design, we have talked with author Brian Solis, IBM Journey Designer Product Manager Doug Foulds, and Tom Illmensee, the Director of UX at Prezi. We’ve talked about what it is, why we need it, what challenges we face and even some practical aspects of how to really get started doing it. So now it is time to turn to that all important question of convincing leadership to invest. In our next live Blab on Wednesday October 21 at noon PST, we will be talking with Risto Lähdesmäki, CEO & Co-Founder of Idean about how to make the business case for CX Design.
Following the advice of Tom Illmensee from our last show, it’s always good to start with small things, to show some simple proof. But how do you really get an organization to realize the true value of CX Design? What is the business case to be made if your organization is run by managers who are more concerned with the bottom line then they are creating value for your customers? What are the best ways to overcome the atypical challenges of unfamiliarity, cost avoidance and the dreaded question of ROI?
If you are striving to make CX part of your career path or simply trying to figure out how to bring CX into your organization’s processes around customer engagement and marketing, you must join us to talk to Risto next Wednesday October 21, 2015 at noon PST. With 6 studios around the world and more then 150 professionals, Risto knows a thing or two about the value of UX and CX which will contribute to your future success.
Risto Lähdesmäki – Bio
CEO & Co-Founder, Idean
Risto is an entrepreneur-spirited-jack-of-all-trades-creative-director. With a special talent for identifying business opportunities for his clients and is somewhat water-resistant to the phrase: “this is not possible”. With over ten years background in User Interface and User Experience design, he has been involved in hundreds of design projects and is shaping the future of branding through UX. Risto has led Idean’s rapid rate of growth across the US. Risto is an entrepreneur and designer at heart and has worked with start-ups as well as big enterprises his entire professional career. Risto was recently named PwC’s Most Valuable Entrepreneur 2015 at the Nordic Business Forum.
Need help creating design moving customer experiences? IBM Journey Designer enables you and your team to collaboratively visualize journeys, set shared marketing goals, and create and refine tailored experiences for dozens of priority segments. Learn more on this blog post or try it at no cost at ibm.com/journey-designer.
SPONSORED BY IBM JOURNEY DESIGNER
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Chris Heuer is the founder of Mentor Bureau, a global collaborative of Startup Mentors focused on #SmoothScaling over #Hypergrowth. He has invested his life in working to create a better society through personal and community efforts that brings people together such as Rysing Tyde and Social Media Club. To learn more about Chris, visit his profile on LinkedIn.