Customer's New Voice

Extreme Relevancy and Experience through Volunteered Customer Information

John S. McKean

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781119002321
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119004363
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Find out how to reap the benefits of motivating and engaging the new, direct customer voice

The Customer's New Voice shows businesses how to motivate and transform directly volunteered consumer knowledge into profitable insights, enabling a new echelon of marketing relevancy, customer experience, and personalization. With a deep look at the inner workings of how a modern generation of business innovators are tapping into the fresh opportunities with the customer's new voice, this book describes how businesses are transforming "inference-based" predictions of purchase intent with direct consumer knowledge of their actual intentions and buying context. The result: An untouchable/unprecedented level of offer relevancy, experience, and personalized service levels.

Those offers range from the most basic app model of "Give me your physical location, we'll find the best Thai restaurant near you, and give you an instant coupon" to a more complex model such as an Electric utility value proposition: "We'll give you discounts to charge your Prius during certain times to help us optimize our grid efficiency while allowing Toyota to monitor and optimize your battery to enable Toyota's R&D and customer experience enhancement." Forty case studies detail proven approaches for directly engaging the new consumer, showing companies how to take advantage of rapidly evolving personal technology—smart phones, homes, vehicles, wearable technology, and Internet of Things—and the new sharing culture to collect the higher value "intentionally/ discretionarily" shared information. Readers gain access to a robust tool set including templates, checklists, tables, flow diagrams, process maps, and technical data schematics to streamline these new capabilities and accelerate implementation of these transformational techniques.

Ninety percent of the data that businesses use to determine what they sell or how to personalize a customer experience results from consumers unintentionally volunteering "indirect" data; however, this type of data has less than 10 percent accuracy. This low effectiveness also necessitates up to 70 percent of a business's cost infrastructure. Direct consumer knowledge is now available and boasts up to 20-50 percent accuracy, yet businesses remain anchored in the old "indirect" competencies. This book helps companies integrate compelling sharing motivators and controls for consumers to feel motivated and safe about directly sharing their product and experience desires, providing the ultimate market advantage.

• Learn how to catch up to the new digitalized consumer
• Leverage direct consumer information from current megatrends
• Navigate privacy's current and future metamorphosis
• Unlock the untapped value of Big Data's true enabler—Little Data

Parsing "incidentally" volunteered data has been stagnant for decades due to the capabilities and expectations of a new generation of enabled consumers

The timeless reality is that any level of investment in computing power, data, and analytics will never approach their full ROI potential without interfusing the direct, intentional insights from the consumer. If today's forward-thinking companies want to profitably engage the new consumers, they must learn the secrets of motivating and safeguarding this new potential of customer transparency. The risks of not engaging these new consumer voices? Irrelevancy and Silence. The Customer's New Voice shows businesses how to fulfill the promise and caveat of the new consumer: "If you make my life easier, reward me, and respect my shared information: I will tell you my secrets."

PART I
Dawn of the New Customer

Consumers are born and subsequently brought up in a world increasingly dominated by increasingly sophisticated and friendly personal information technology (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops) interconnected by an increasingly pervasive Internet and mobile infrastructure. Each succeeding year, consumers are exposed earlier in their lives and are more deeply immersed in the competencies of how to leverage the information components of these technologies. Their motivation is the opportunity to leverage the information to better fulfill their needs and wants (e.g., connect with family and friends, make their lives easier, save money, do their jobs, find information). The key transformational piece is the direct connection to information, people, and organizations. This is analogous to the original vision for the Internet—to “directly connect to anything without an intermediary.”

This directness to information, people, and organizations has radically changed our lives forever and will continue to do so.

CHAPTER 1
New Information Masters

The new Information Masters of this era are not the expected technology-rich business contingent but in relative terms are the new direct consumers. Armed with mobile devices and the infinite network of the world’s Internet infrastructure, the new direct consumer can directly view unbiased, unmediated, and unadulterated information about a business’s products or services relative to any of its competitors in almost any market or geography. The consumer’s view into a business’s world is far more transparent than the business’s view into the customer’s world (i.e., asynchronous transparency). While businesses grapple with leveraging with the exponential increase in the amount of data that consumers unintentionally generate on a day-to-day basis, their lack of relative consumer knowledge is reflected by marketing accuracy of less than one in 10 offers.

In one minute, the new Information Masters produce 694,980 status updates and 522,080 tweets. The new Information Masters collect, share, and manage 300 petabytes of personal data in Facebook alone.¹

Previously people would have an average of 150 friends (past, present, and future) in real life, whereas the new Information Masters can now communicate and engage with an average 245 friends (e.g., Facebook). The ability to have a wider pool and definition of friends is enabled by the new information environment. The new Information Masters have a broader span of intimacy where 82 percent of their online friends are known in real life and 60 percent are known through mutual friends. Because the new information environment is visual, they can choose new “friends” just by their appearance (29 percent of online friends are based on appearance).

The intent of the new Information Masters is not just about personal information mastery but is increasingly about mastering their personal information in the context of a business network. Some 11 percent of online friendships are related to business interactions and relationships.

Informed

Today’s new Information Master is more informed and capable of sharing on a massive scale than at any other time in history. The proliferation of the Internet spans not only geography but also the demographics of gender, ethnicity, age, education level, income, and community type. An amazing 88 percent of individuals who were born 50 to 64 years ago access the Internet. On average, 87 percent of all U.S. adults use the Internet, including e-mail or accessing the Internet via a mobile device, as shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Internet Users in 2014

Among adults, the % who use the Internet, e-mail, or access the Internet via a mobile device
All adults	Use Internet 87%
Sex
a Men	87
b Women	86
Race/ethnicity*
a White	85
b African American	81
c Hispanic	83
Age group
a 18–29	97^cd
b 30–49	93^d
c 50–64	88^d
d 65+	57
Education level
a High school grad or less	76
b Some college	91^a
c College+	97^ab
Household income
a Less than $30,000/yr	77
b $30,000−$49,999	85
c $50,000−$74,999	93^ab
d $75,000+	99^ab
Community type
a Urban	88
b Suburban	87
c Rural	83

* The results for race/ethnicity are based off a combined sample from two weekly omnibus surveys, January 9–12 and January 23–26, 2014. The combined total n for these surveys was 2,008; n = 1,421 for whites, n = 197 for African Americans, and n = 236 for Hispanics.

Note: Percentages marked with a superscript letter (e.g.,^a) indicate a statistically significant difference between that row and the row designated by that superscript letter, among categories of each demographic characteristic (e.g., age).

Source: Pew Research Center Internet Project Survey, January 9–12, 2014. N = 1,006 adults.

Sharing

The new Information Masters can share almost anything, anytime, anywhere given that there is a motivating factor and that they feel safe in that particular sharing context.

Every 60 seconds, there are:

• 98,000+ tweets
• 695,000 status updates
• 11 million or so messages
• 698,144 Google searches
• 98,000,000+ e-mails sent
• 1,820 TB of data created
• 217 new mobile web users²

Philosopher Helen Newson notes that sharing (and privacy) is rooted in context. This reality started roughly 10 years ago when social media entered the everyday lives of our communities. Prior to social media, terrestrial (offline) sharing was more private by default, and great effort was required to share personal information broadly in public. In contrast, social media is “public by default” and “private with effort.”³ As a result, individuals share prolifically intentionally and incidentally. As Figure 1.1 shows, 73 percent of adults who are online use some type of social networking site (42 percent of adults who are online use multiple social networking sites).

Figure 1.1 Social Media Use over Time

Source: Pew Research Center, www.pewinternet.org/2013/12/30/social-media-update-2013/.

Mobile

The new Information Masters are more informed, more capable of sharing, and more capable of doing both of these activities any place, at any time, because of new mobile device platforms. Mobile platforms are not confined to smartphones or tablets but extend into a proliferation of wearable technology and drivable t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface: New Voice, New Competencies
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Dawn of the New Customer
• Part II: New Voice Innovators’ Win-Win
• Part III: Engaging Tomorrow’s New Voice
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement