Customer Experience in a Down Economy

As economic cycles change, customer experience strategies must adapt to evolving customer expectations, competitive forces and financial realities. To offer timely advice on customer experience strategies, a group of 18 experts contributed to a free publication sponsored by OgilvyOne’s Customer Futures Group. This 83-page document is titled The Importance of the Customer Experience in a Down Economy.

Five themes characterize the advice for customer experience strategies:
- What customers are expecting, why it matters & what to do about it
- Leadership and strategy in troubled times
- Economics that justify a customer-focused strategy
- Delivering more with less
- Employees: stressed but so essential

My article is about CEM on a shoestring budget, described in the executive summary:
Lynn Hunsaker believes significant improvements in customer relationships can be made on a shoestring. Drawing on her experience as a corporate executive, Lynn spots seemingly hidden opportunities to better align offerings and ways of doing business in ways that matter to customers and are hard for competitors to copy. In her paper she shares six of these hidden opportunities.

Here's the abstract of my article:
Creative use of existing data and processes can propel customer experience improvement without a big budget. Systematic analysis of customer data serves as an essential guideline for customer experience listening, innovation, internal branding and affinity development. Holistic deployment of these strategies and tactics involves employees at every level and in every department in ‘living the brand’ for big gains in customers’ experiences. An economic slowdown is a window of opportunity for re-aligning culture, processes and innovations for sustainable differentiation that reaps big rewards for the company and customers alike.

Get your free copy online at www.customerfutures.com/downeconomypublication/registernow.

Contributors:
- James Barnes, Barnes Marketing Associates, Canada
- Jenny Belser and Naras Edchambadi, Quaero, USA
- Marco Bevolo, Philips Design, The Netherlands
- Jeanne Bliss, Customer Bliss, USA
- Graham Hill, CACI Solutions, Germany
- Jan Hofmeyr, Synovate, South Africa
- Lynn Hunsaker, ClearAction, USA
- Sampson Lee, G-CEM, China
- James Lucas, Luman International, USA
- Bill Price, Driva Solutions, USA
- Colin Shaw, Beyond Philosophy, UK
- Merlin Stone, WCL, UK
- Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy Group, UK
- Shari Swan, Streative Branding, The Netherlands
- Bob Thompson, CustomerThink, USA
- John Todor and William Todor, The Whetstone Edge, USA
- John Turnbull, Customer Connect, Australia
- Lauree Vallery, Experience Renewal Solutions, Canada