Conversations with Thinkers: Radio interview on RET

A key objective of the Cranfield Customer Management Forum (CCMF) is leading edge research.  CCMF members benefit by being the first to hear about this research and sometimes through participating in it.

A topic we’ve returned to a few times over the past couple of years has been the work Hugh and I have been doing with MESH Planning.  MESH developed a unique Real Time Experience Tracking (RET) method which enables companies to get closer to their customers.  For more about our work with RET, listen to this recent radio interview I gave on New York radio show, The John Batchelor Show, which can now be played on the “Conversations with Thinkers” blog.

The interview was related to our recent HBR article:  ”Better Customer Insight – in Real Time”, Harvard Business Review article, Sept 2012.

The interviewer was journalist, author and blogger, Chris Riback.

The interviewee was myself, CCMF’s research director, Dr Emma Macdonald.

For more about MESH Planning go to: www.MeshPlanning.com

Posted by: Dr Emma Macdonald, Cranfield Customer Management Forum – Research Director

Cranfield conference: Moral crusade or trip of a lifetime?

Engaging our customers and consumers on the sustainability journey

Conference, 25 April 2013 at Cranfield School of Management

Sustainability and ‘social good’ are increasingly pressing topics for management. Resource scarcity is fast becoming the ‘new normal’, and stronger demands for transparency and demonstrable responsibility mean all businesses need to re-evaluate how they engage with those around them.

But whilst supply-side operations work hard to adapt their supply chains accordingly, changing the way things happen inside the organisation can only go so far. For a full-scale transition to sustainable consumption models, consumers and business customers need also to change the way they behave.

The hidden treasures of the green consumer have long been touted as the next best thing, and marketers continue to segment and target, with increasing granularity, to unlock this potential. Yet the socially engaged consumer seems to remain tantalizingly out of reach.

So what next for marketing? How can the discipline best use its considerable resources and capabilities to engage customers in more sustainable behaviours? Do we need to get better at ethical appeals? Or do we need explore other ways to engage? As all businesses embark on this long and complicated journey towards sustainability, which should we market – the moral crusade, or the trip of a lifetime?

The Conference

The Cranfield Customer Management Forum and The Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility are joining forces for one day, to host a conference and workshop to explore this question.

As a unique blend of academic research and practitioner best practice, the conference will host fresh global polling data, reveal innovative consumer behaviour insights, and explore rich case studies and insights from some of the world’s most successful brands.

Booking and prices:

Book now at: www.cranfield.ac.uk/som/sustainability

CCMF members: To register for your two free spaces, contact your company contact or email Maureen at CCMF@cranfield.ac.uk

• Price: £790.00 +VAT
  Early Bird Discounted Price: £590.00 +VAT (Available until Feb 28th)

• Academic/Alumni/CCMF Member Price: £590.00 +VAT
  Academic/Alumni/CCMF Member Early Bird Price: £490.00 +VAT (Available until Feb 28th)

First time around, CRM promised the earth…..

Next CCMF club members meeting (28 Feb 2013) reflects on CRM: The next generation…

First time round, CRM promised the earth but delivered little more than integrated customer databases and crude cross-selling that all too often felt like hard selling. But CRM is back. This time, it’s real-time, as relationships are built on conversations, and they work best when they’re two-way. It’s customer centric, which implies listening to customer needs via perceptual sources and not just crunching transactional data. And it’s social, reflecting the need to talk wherever the customer wants – and often, they’re in company. This workshop explores how all this can add up.

Speakers will include:

Lisa Shattock, Senior Marketing Manager at BT and Andy Scott, Director, GfK Business & Technology. They will be speaking together on Underpinning CRM with insight fusion at BT.
Transactional data might tell you where there are opportunities to up-sell, but you need perceptual data to triangulate this with opportunities to add value in the customer’s eyes. BT report on the benefits of their innovative fusion of insight sources to create actionable segmentation, across both B2B and B2C sides of the business.

Guy Shone, Head of Customer Insight at Money Advice Service and Tim Crick, Decisioning Blueprints on Experience personalisation at Money Advice Service.
Money Advice Service is a public service offering financial advice. Its strategy director and Tim Crick, until recently head of CRM at RBS, discuss how it is leveraging the power of predictive analytics to improve customer experience and value.

Debi Bester, Founder of FMLY on SuperSavvyMe: P&G, social CRM, and the next generation.
Debi launched P&G’s SuperSavvyMe community, with a million members, among numerous other projects. She will reflect on how social and CRM are merging and what to do about it.

Helen Crowley, CEO of Alchemy Social on Social CRM: the next generation
The leading edge is combining social media advertising with analytics that bring social media into the firm’s CRM processes. Helen will draw on multiple client projects in telecoms, hotels, financial services and fashion to outline what’s working now and what’s next.

• “CRM: The next generation”, 28th Feb 2013, Cranfield School of Management: 
  - Already a CCMF member? Book your place with your company contact or get in touch with Lynne Wood at CCMF@cranfield.ac.uk 
  - Interested in membership? Contact Pippa Highfield at CCMF@Cranfield.ac.uk

Improving marketing effectiveness

We’ve had some great speakers at the Forum this year.  Two recent speakers on the theme of improving marketing effectivness were:

Aly Richards, Chief Experience Officer at idioplatform, on implementing a “Next Best Content” approach for client, Guinness.  This was really fascinating stuff and an early indication of how brands are developing a personalised conversation with customers which extends beyond the products and services that we deliver.  Amongst other things, Aly talks about the role of the marketer as a “curator” of content.
CCMF video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA4xG5fu5Sw

Becky McQuade, Commercial Research Manager at Sky presented on improving online engagement.  She talked about the use Sky has been making of a tool developed by Cranfield doctoral researcher, Anne Mollen, for profiling the engaged consumer.  This has been helping to make online advertising more effective.  Becky and Anne recently won an award for Best Research & Insight Project at the Association
of Online Publishers Digital Publishing Awards 2012
CCMF video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNwAiG6QY60

Harvard Business Review: Better customer insight – in real time

Real time experience tracking: How it works

We’ve been working with MESH Planning for the past 3 years to develop the analytics around the unique real time experience tracking tool they developed.  A paper drawing on this work appeared in the September issue of Harvard Business Review (http://hbr.org/2012/09/better-customer-insight-in-real-time/ar/1)

Here’s a brief video interview where I talk about our work at Cranfield using this unique approach:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC2bwWUeFMo

Dr Emma K. Macdonald
CCMF Research Director

Orchestrating great customer experiences

Experience never leaves the agenda of marketers so it never leaves our agenda at Cranfield.  Forum Director, Prof Hugh Wilson outlines the key focus areas in a recent video interview:   http://youtu.be/ZB3M1xhkYfM

November 22^nd – Orchestrating great customer experiences

The theme of the forthcoming workshop of the Cranfield Customer Management Forum is managing the customer experience.   In a world in which the core product/service is often commoditised, we need to understand our customers’ holistic experience of us, and then optimise it to their benefit and ours. The November workshop provides leading-edge input into each of these topics.  Topics include:

SAS and MESH Planning: on the application of real time experience tracking (RET) technique to a key multichannel challenge: how to gear up the firm to serve the very different channel combinations preferred by different customers.

Cranfield and Spectrum Insight: on how social media data can be used not just qualitatively but quantitatively to understand what brand attributes are driving sales, and where action is most urgently required.   Case studies in the automotive and supermarket categories will be presented.

RBS:  Experience insight is useless unless it’s actioned. And if you want some serious action, hire a black belt! That’s what RBS did when they appointed a Six Sigma expert at improving the customer experience. The results from RBS’s Group Head of Customer Experience are fascinating and insightful.

Attending the November workshop:  If your organisation is already a member of Cranfield Customer Management Forum, then ask your lead contact about attending the forum in November or call Yvonne Thompson on 01234 751122.

Not yet a member?  If your organisation is not yet a CCMF member, then contact us for more information:  email Pippa Highfield at P.A.Highfield@cranfield.ac.uk

Hugh, Emma and the CCMF team
CCMF@Cranfield.ac.uk

Cranfield in Harvard Business Review

Following on from our recent HBR.org blogpost (August 2012), we’re delighted to let you know that our 7-page article “Better Customer Insight – in Real Time” appears in the September issue.   (If you are fortunate enough to read the glossy magazine you will notice the article is listed on the front cover!)

http://hbr.org/2012/09/better-customer-insight-in-real-time/ar/1

This paper on real-time experience tracking (RET) is based on the work we’ve had underway for the past three years with innovative research agency MESH Planning.  MESH developed a technique for capturing customer data via the mobile phone which is revolutionising how companies understand the customer experience.  We’ve been helping MESH and their clients with the analytics to make the most of the data.  This article illustrates some of the applications of this new tool.

For the next few days the article can be read free online (until end of next week 14 Sept 2012).  Please do take a look at it and let us know what you think

http://hbr.org/2012/09/better-customer-insight-in-real-time/ar/1

Dr Emma Macdonald and Prof Hugh Wilson