Portfolio of Services and Capabilities

Click on the + next to each capability to learn more.

    Insights

    Voice of Customer Analysis

  • It all starts with listening to the customer to generate insights and identify opportunities to address unmet needs.
    Listening starts with analyzing and synthesizing Voice of the Customer data from a variety of available sources including social media activity, surveys, comment cards and call center calls.
  • Qualitative & Quantitative Research

  • Gaining a robust insight foundation typically requires focused primary research. Utilizing qualitative and quantitative research techniques provides a rich understanding of customer needs as well as insights into opportunities to address those needs in potentially new ways. The primary research can be used to support the identification of customer segments as well as sizing and prioritization of opportunities.
  • Storytelling Ethnographics

  • Ethnographies provide a powerful way to get to know individuals and their stories to understand a broad context for where certain gaps exist. In depth interviews, diaries and observation provide rich insight into customers’ objectives, needs, barriers, fears behavior and perceptions.
    Videotaping consumers and sharing their stories can support a deeper appreciation of the customer as well as contribute to buy-in and engagement across the organization for new initiatives.
  • Customer Co-Creation & Idea Generation

  • Establishing customer advisory boards and facilitating customer co-creation sessions is an impactful way to engage customers, where they become invested in supporting the brand’s mission.
    This customer insight ultimately provides a foundation for innovation of new products, services, experiences, internal employee engagement and marketing approaches that propels a strategic approach to profitable growth.
    Here’s an example of Customer Co-Creation and Idea Generation in action: Cruising for Ideas with Regent Seven Seas Cruises featured in Travel Weekly: http://www.travelweekly.com/Cruise-Travel/Regent-Seven-Seas-goes-cruising-for-ideas/
  • Customer Journey Mapping

  • Customer Journey Mapping provides a visual representation of different customers and their journeys across touch points, across the lifecycle. Identifying Moments of Truth, for example, supports the discovery of opportunities to “Surprise and Delight” and minimize “Pain Points,” providing an important foundation for customer experience planning and innovation.
    Innovation

    CRM/Customer Experience Design

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is fundamentally about developing a “Learning Relationship” with individual customers so that they can be treated in a way that is customized to their needs and value to the organization. Ultimately, the goal for companies is to increase the return on their customer base. Optimizing Return on Customer (ROC) requires a systematic and disciplined approach to managing customer relationships, including a focused understanding of the characteristics of the most valuable and most growable customers in the portfolio and the opportunities that are most likely to impact their behavior.
    The customer experience is established through the sum total of all interactions that consumers have with a brand across all touch points. Designing a customer experience that reflects a brand’s positioning and delivers a highly relevant experience across channels and across the stages of the customer lifecycle can be a key differentiator.
    Customer experience design and contact strategy development includes analyzing the current communications and identifying ways to enhance the overall approach to make it more efficient and effective. Each interaction has the potential to strengthen the relationship and the emotional bond a customer has with your organization.
    Customer experience design typically involves persona development and customer journey mapping of treatment and contact strategies. This approach identifies opportunities to integrate personalization and 1 to1 marketing and provides the planning roadmap of initiatives for the future state customer experience.
  • New Product, Service & Experience Developement

  • Innovation is about creating the new — new products, new services, new experiences and new strategic partnerships.
    Supporting the innovation process can involve facilitating brainstorming sessions for ideation, concept testing, pilot design, development of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), optimization, refinement and launch.
    Gaining consumer insight along the way in the development process can be critical in successful implementation.
  • Marketing Strategy & Implementation

  • Developing a marketing plan requires an assessment of the effectiveness of previous marketing activities as well as the prioritization of potential initiatives under consideration.
    Implementation support involves road mapping of various initiatives, developing specific marketing strategies and tactics and measuring and optimizing activities.
    Precisely defining a brand’s positioning is a critical exercise for developing marketing strategy.
    What is the frame of reference that is being used in addressing their need? What is your brand’s differentiation? What are the reasons to believe? What benefits are you providing that address both rational and emotional needs?
    Establishing the opportunities to strengthen a brand’s positioning typically requires facilitating sessions with key stakeholders as well as customers, prospects and competitive customers.
    This insight provides a valuable foundation for effective marketing implementation across channels as well as growth planning.
    It’s much cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Developing an impactful loyalty program can be an effective approach to driving frequency and volume of purchases. Determining the best approach for doing this and strengthening the emotional connections that customers feel towards your brand requires. Advocacy tools and approaches can also be an untapped area that can drive growth. Identifying the most effective approaches to inspire existing customers to become advocates can be a very valuable strategic exercise for growth. Understanding the profile of existing customers is also critical for effectively prospecting for new customers.
  • Employee Education & Engagement

  • Inspired employees are those who are aligned with an organization’s mission and are highly motivated by the organization’s purpose. Helping employees understand how they can address customer needs and add value to them, can make a tremendous difference to engagement.
    Developing educational training modules, which integrate customer insights from video ethnographies, for example, can be a powerful and inspirational approach to gain organizational focus on the customer and alignment about the role each employee has in contributing to the organization’s vision of delivering the ultimate customer experience.
  • Strategic Innovation Planning & Execution Support

  • Strategic innovation planning is about framing the most significant opportunities for growth. It requires an understanding of key market drivers, internal capabilities and rich insight into unmet needs and opportunities.
    The “Jobs to Be Done” approach to disruptive innovation is an example of the type of process that can be used to frame opportunities for growth. This was initially developed by Clayton Christensen and can serve as a useful methodology that can be integrated into facilitated strategic sessions with stakeholders and customers.
    “Discovery Driven Planning” is another key tool that can be leveraged for pilot and scenario planning.
    Innovating strategically based on a robust insight foundation is an iterative process with the potential to drive significant profitable growth.

Approach to Client Engagements

  • To support client goals and objectives, engagements may focus in a single area or may integrate several different capabilities
  • Expertise ranges from vision and strategy development to facilitation of brainstorming or planning sessions with stakeholders and customers to implementation of marketing strategies and innovation pilots
  • Can serve in a freelance consulting capacity as an extension to a client team or can tap a broad network of subject matter experts to establish a full consulting and implementation support team