It’s time we seriously talk about employee experience

There’s been a lot of focus over the past few years on the user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX), for good reasons.

According a recent North Highland whitepaper, a Gartner research shows that in 2016, , nine out of 10 companies planned to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience. Nothing— not price, not product—is more important than the experience you provide. Organizations that deliver compelling customer experiences have a competitive edge.

However, in doing so, many organizations have failed to focus on the experiences of their most important competitive advantage: employees. It’s now time to talk about the employee experience (EX).

“Your employees are your company’s real competitive advantage. They’re the ones making the magic happen— so long as their needs are being met.”

- RICHARD BRANSON

Companies focus on reaching out to their customers wherever they are across multiple channels, but yet fail to reach out to their employees/talents wherever they are.

Companies focus on their customer journey, drawing roadmaps to better identify how their customers interact with their brands (touch points), but yet fail to understand their employee journey.

Companies design spaces to deliver unparalleled brand experiences to their customers, but yet fail to design spaces to deliver positive employee experiences.

Companies focus on customer retention but yet fail to focus on employee retention.

Companies invest time and resources in customer research/segmentation but yet fail to spend time on employee research/segmentation.

Companies offer different services/products to address the needs of different market segments, but yet fail to address the diversity of their employee groups/segments.

Companies have tools to track, monitor and analyze customer behaviors, satisfaction and engagement, but yet fail to adopt tools to measure employee behaviors, satisfaction and engagement.

 In 2015, only 21 percent of employees globally were highly engaged. In the U.S., the majority of employees—51 percent—were not engaged. And perhaps most critically, another 17 percent were actively disengaged. (Gartner)

North Highland notices that the opportunity is there. Your organization is already offering some sort of an EX, and every employee is already experiencing your brand, but how good it that experience?

That’s why I’ve founded eX Summit, a space to debate the importance and impact of the employee experience. Our first event eX Indy will take place on September 22. Many of the above topics will be discussed. Check out our event page to see which topics our thought leaders will speak about. We hope to see you there and let’s start a true discussion on EX!

Branding lessons from the Brexit

I'll be brief because:
a - nowadays politics aren't worth spending too much time discussing, unfortunately
b - there's already too much literature on the subject.

The bottom line is: politics is like branding. If you don't give a crap about your electors/consumers, they take you out of their lives.

When decisions are made at the C-suite level/government level, with little if no empathy towards the base (electors/consumers), your message becomes irrelevant to your audience.

If you want to stay relevant in politics and in branding, you must identify what your constituents/consumers need and want, in order to offer them something they can believe in, relate to, buy into. If you make decisions based on what yourself think is good for the masses, the masses merely take you out of their lives.

Electors/consumers are not stupid, even though many politicians and top executives think they are. Real leaders show empathy, understand their audience's pain points, and respond to these pain points with an answer that meets these expectations.
Do political and business leaders understand the growing demand for change? Can they meet those demands without inflicting irreversible damage on their politics and their economies?

Organizational business lessons from Leicester City’s amazing run

If you’re somehow interested in sports history, you heard yesterday that Leicester City won the EPL (English Premier League). At the beginning of the season, their odds to win the championship were 5000/1!! Leicester only narrowly survived relegation last year…
It happened because of numerous factors, both internal and external, that fell into place perfectly. We can all learn from this amazing journey, and apply some of the fundamentals to our business practices.

Owner’s vision. When Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, a Thai billionaire businessman, purchased the club in 2010 – at that time playing secondary roles in the tier-two division (equivalent of Baseball’s AAA) – he  had the humble vision to move the club up to the elite league (EPL), keep it there in the long-term, knowing that it would be hard to compete for the top spot behind the “Big Four” (Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal), or even behind other teams with much bigger budgets such as Liverpool and Tottenham. His goal was to offer a good show to the club’s fan base, and play the disruptors in the league. Vichai’s son, “Top”, who is the club’s CEO, said of this father a few days ago: "This is one thing that in his dreams he wanted to own the club, and he said I think two or three years before that he wants the team to be a success in the Premier League, and now we are."Having a humble and realistic vision for your organization does not mean you can’t accomplish great things. It simply means you’re grounded and focused on getting things right before dreaming too big.
COO’s role. At the beginning to the season, Leicester hired Claudio Ranieri as their head coach. Ranieri had coached some of the best teams in Europe, such as Chelsea, Juventus, Monaco, Atletico Madrid. Although he’d never won a major title with any of his teams until now, he had always been very good at nurturing young players, developing their skills and as a consequence increasing their market value. He just happened to “never be in the right place at the right time”. Having a big name coach doesn’t guarantee success, Chelsea being a great example, who sacked Jose Mourinho half-season, or Arsenal with Arsene Wenger, Manchester United with Luis Van Gaal, etc. Claudio Ranieri was the right COO in the right organization at the right time, fitting in the club’s culture and value, focusing on developing talent first. It is critical to have a COO to run day-to-day operations who shares the organization’s culture, values, who is focused on developing talents within the organization and building a solid foundation.
Have fun every day. Ranieri was able get his players buy-in in his philosophy, by quickly adapting to their needs and wishes, instead of pushing his own style down their throats (more of a Mourinho management style). During training camp before the season, Ranieri quickly realized that some of his principle would not resonate well with young players, so he decided to have a more casual approach. On his second day of practice, after of first very-intense day of practice, he rang a cow bell like crazy just before the session started. All players and staff came out of the building to see what was going on. Ranieri casually said that he would ring the bell during practice every time he saw a play that needed improvement. The players laughed at him at first, then quickly adhered to his casual management style. He even offered a cow bell to each his players for Christmas. He also decided to give his players two days of rest every week, very uncommon in professional sports, only to allow his players to relax, enjoy life. Players and coaching staff always shared some good laugh during the week at practice. Even the players would laugh during games when they missed a pass or a goal. They were still committed to winning, but they first and foremost wanted to enjoy playing football.Having fun at work doesn’t mean you take things lightly. You spend most of your life working, and if you can’t find any fun doing it, while focusing on growing the business, what’s left? Besides, having fun reinforces the bond between your employees and your management team.
You don’t need superstars, you need talented and committed people. The vast majority of Leicester’s roster was not in an elite league two seasons ago. Many players did not make it through their former club’s youth academy before coming to Leicester, and most of them played in sub-leagues. Think of this… Vardy, Mahrez and Kante were never recruited by big teams, but they were named this season’s best EPL players in various categories, ahead of the Hazard, Rooney, Willian, Aguero, and Ozil… None of the players were a house-name, even Ranieri did not now most of them when he took charge of the team. What Ranieri did was to adapt his tactical game plans to his players’ skills and abilities, to get the best out of them. In return, they adhered to his game plan.Good leaders make the best out of the talents given to them, adapting their management style and way of working to get buy-in, commitment from their teams. Committed employees are more productive than superstars who tend to play individually.
There are things you can’t control; you just have to take advantage of them.  Leicester’s ascension to the Grail should’ve never happened. After all, the odds for them winning the EPL were 5000/1! They needed the stars to be aligned and rely on the misfortune of the big teams to get to that point. Some may argue this is why they won the championship. I’d say “yes and no”.
“Yes” because indeed Chelsea, Man U and Man City struggled with injuries, bad coaching, players more towards the end of their careers. Before Boxing Day in December, many EPL fans and followers predicted that Arsenal would win the EPL, given its rivals’ struggles…
“No” because Arsenal is the perfect example of a healthy team, a long-tenure and well respected coach who can’t seize the other teams’ misfortune and win the championship.
There is no miracle in a 38-game season. This is not a one-time burst where a small team beats a big team in one game. We’re talking here of 38 games! It’s perseverance, commitment and resilience that allowed Leicester to win, values which teams like Arsenal lacked of when the opportunity was offered to them.You’ve gotta take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to you. You can’t control everything, what you can control is how quick you are to adapt to evolving circumstances and seize what’s offered to you. If you don’t, someone else will.

My 5 wishes for successful branding in 2016

I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions. Bottom line is, these new resolutions often only last the first couple of months, due to a lack of long-term commitment. If it's not part of our DNA, it doesn't last. Think of how many people sign up in January at the local gym. The first couple of months are crowded; when comes March you only see the regulars.
The same applies to brands, as brands are created by people, and in some way are living entities. People create a brand's new resolutions, and are accountable for the brand's commitment to successfully implement them in the long (or short) term. 
Going back to the gym analogy, you are more likely to stick to the gym over several months if you are working towards a goal, such as participating in a (mini) marathon in June. Chances are, by June, you will have settled in a work-out routine and exercise will then be part of your DNA. The same applies to brands as well.

Here is what I wish brands will do more in 2016 to be successful:

Show empathy
Your brand's purpose is not defined by what you do for your customers. It is defined by why what you do matters to your customers. By focusing on the why, you show empathy to your customers.

Not only do you understand your customers' needs (which leads to innovation and new product ideas), but you also understand their emotional journey and what message resonates with them (which leads to defining a roadmap for the customer experience, the foundation for your brand strategy).

Focus on insights & personalization
Many companies develop their products on what the CEO thinks his wife or children (or even himself) would want; on what the R&D team or Software development team think is cool to create based on the engineering complexity of it; or simply on the principle of what-competitors-do-and-we-can-do-it-cheaper-or-better. It sometimes works, at least in the short time, often time it does not.

Empathy for customers based on research and customer insights are so important to uncover unmet needs, understand customers’ behaviors, and define the customer journey. If you don’t focus on customers, customers won’t focus on your brand. Your brand will mean nothing to them.

Customers connect with brands who resonate with their beliefs. They expect a personalized experience and a personalized message in return. With mobile technology nowadays, coupled with beacon/location-based technology and big data, brands have the opportunity to cater and deliver an experience and a message that is personal to one individual, not just a demographic group anymore.

Successful brands in 2016 will be able to deliver personal experiences and messages in the relevancy of time and location.

Bring excitement
With a click of a button on a computer or a tap of a finger on a mobile device, customers can in real-time compare product/service offerings, prices and make a purchase decision instantly. Only 28% of consumers are loyal to their providers and brands. Because customers are more volatile than ever, bringing them excitement is critical to create than instant need and trigger to purchase. 

Excitement is a neurological push that triggers customers to make an impulsive purchasing decision. While empathy helps define how to create loyal customers in the long term, excitement helps convert a "lead" into an instant customer. The repetition of exciting personalized experiences and messages will help keep customers coming back.

Give back to the community
Successful brands are successful because they make a difference in people's lives. It's only natural for brands to continue to show empathy and to give back to the community to support other organizations making a difference in people's lives.

More than 85 percent of millennials correlate their purchasing decisions and their willingness to recommend a brand to the social good efforts a company is making. Businesses interested in selling to millennials can't afford to ignore the opportunity to create social good. The "one-for-one" model proved that companies could have profit-driven goals while integrating philanthropy into their business’s bottom line. Millennials now want even more.

Be socially and environmentally responsible
According to a recent Nielsen survey, two-thirds of the “sustainable mainstream” population (a cluster of three of the five segments) will choose products from sustainable sources over other conventional products. These consumers will buy as many eco-friendly products as they can and have personally changed their behavior to minimize their impact on global climate change. Additionally, these consumers are more likely to buy products repeatedly from a company if they know the company is mindful of its impact on the environment and society.

Millennials (age 21-34) appear more responsive to sustainability actions. Among global respondents in Nielsen’s survey who are responsive to sustainability actions, half are Millennials; they represent 51 percent of those who will pay extra for sustainable products and 51 percent of those who check the packaging for sustainable labeling.

What are your 2016 wishes for successful branding?

WHITE PAPER: New guest experience is within proximity - the next frontier in marketing & guest engagement

INTRODUCTION
Mobile phones and tablets have become the average traveler’s essential companions, whether it is to get driving directions, flash a boarding pass, find the best places to eat nearby, make hotel/restaurant reservations, shop online, or watch movies... Mobile technology is ubiquitous; it has changed the way we live and conduct our day-to-day personal business.

By embracing this shift to mobile technology, hoteliers can better understand and address the needs of their guests and engage them in more personalized, relevant and contextual ways.

With this whitepaper, our intent is to explore new solutions for proximity-driven mobile engagement, and educate hoteliers on how these solutions can be adopted to drive direct value (engaged guests tend to spend more) as well as indirect value (through increased customer loyalty).

PICTURE THE SCENE
Melanie, a 35 year-old mother-of-two and marketing executive in a large Midwest appliance company is flying to Seattle for an industry trade show to meet with customers. She has decided for once to arrive a day early and take a “day off” to unwind before this big conference.

She is glad she was able to confirm her arrival time 24-hours ahead in the hopes that her room would be ready as she gets in. When her plane lands mid-morning in Seattle, she wonders if she will be able to get into her room that early. As she hails a taxi, she gets a text message advising her that her room is ready.

She enters the hotel lobby and notices the long check-in line at the front desk. She smiles as her hotel app automatically detects her presence and checks her in right away, allowing her to skip the front desk and go straight to her room – only using her mobile phone as a key. As she opens her room door, she feels almost at home as the lighting and temperature are set to her likings, based on her preferences she set in her app profile. Even a bottle of Perrier is waiting for her in an ice bucket, as she had requested via the app the day before. Away from home and the family, but still in a personalized setting...

After a few hours of work to prepare for the conference starting in two days, she decides to go out for dinner, starving for local seafood. Having never been to Seattle before, she checks online quickly and finds a nearby seafood chain restaurant, unaware that at the back of the hotel is a hotel-run seafood restaurant with much better food and similar prices. As she is walking through the lobby, she receives a text message from the hotel about a special offer at the in-house restaurant. She decides to give it a try. She could have missed out an experience unique to the property.

The following morning, she decides to do some shopping and heads to the nearby mall. As she browses through stores, she notices a small pop-up massage store offering a 15-minute neck massage for a good price, which reminds her of the discount the hotel’s spa extended to her earlier through the app. As she heads back to the hotel, she makes an appointment at the spa for the afternoon from her phone app.

The hospitality industry is missing out on many opportunities to better engage their guests on property through direct, simple marketing and communication channels...

To read the full white paper, click here.

What does it take to define your brand experience?

The old adage said that companies defined their brands, and through simple advertising and marketing, customers embraced the brands and bought products.

As a matter of fact, customers – not companies – define brands. Brands are only relevant if they resonate with customers. It’s no longer the brand who spends the most money in advertising and marketing that gets customers’ buy-in. In today’s advanced technological world, customers are not brand loyal anymore, or at least they are loyal to a brand as long as the brand remains relevant to them, which can be a few weeks, or a few seconds at the speed of the click of a button on their mobile phones or tablets.

Brand experience draws customers to connect with the brand and buy products, but only if the brand delivers on its promise. Brand experience must be simple, contextual (engage with the audience at the right time and place), and personalized.

So, what does it take to define the brand experience?

Company leadership must be committed and lead the definition of the brand experience.
Leadership sets the vision, the purpose of being in business. Selling products and making money is a consequence of doing business, not the purpose. What are the customers’ needs that you can satisfy and how do you create an emotional connection with your customers so that they believe in and adhere to your value proposition?

Show empathy.
The brand’s purpose is not defined by what you do for your customers. It is defined by why what you do matters to your customers. By focusing on the why (watch Simon Sinek’s video on why/how/what), you show empathy to your customers.

Not only do you understand their needs (which leads to innovation and new product ideas), but you also understand their emotional journey (which leads to defining a roadmap of the customer experience, the foundation for your brand strategy).

Insights.
Many companies develop their products on what the CEO thinks his wife or children (or even himself) would want; on what the R&D team or Software development team think is cool to create based on the engineering complexity of it; or simply on the principle of what-competitors-do-and-we-can-do-it-cheaper-or-better. It sometimes works, at least in the short time, often time it does not.

That’s why consumer research and consumer insights are so important to uncover unmet needs, understand customers’ behaviors, and define the customer journey. If you don’t focus on customers, customers won’t focus on your brand. Your brand will mean nothing to them.

Brand promise, internal buy-in and collaboration.

Once you’ve identified and segmented your key audiences, it is important to define what messages you want to convey to them, what your brand promise is. What companies often miss is that if there is no internal buy-in on the brand promise, it is hard to define and convey these key messages to your audiences.

Painting your brand promise on a wall, or repeating it at every staff meeting doesn’t do it. Internal buy-in is critical because you want to stimulate, inspire your employees to develop innovative products, create engaging marketing campaigns, provide great customer support, etc.

How you get employees’ buy-in is by getting them involved in defining and carrying that brand promise. R&D, marketing, sales, customer support, finance should not work in silos. You must encourage, foster collaboration between teams. R&D can’t make products customers really want to buy if marketing does not tell R&D what customers want. Sales can’t sell if they don’t understand how the product works, or if the product is too expensive because of its engineering complexity while customers want just a simpler and cheaper version, etc.

Communication between teams is important, but what’s more important is to get teams work together on projects. By bring together engineers, software developers, marketers, finance guys, customer support experts, you get different perspectives, you confront ideas…

Collaboration, internal buy-in not only help define your brand promise, but more importantly collaboration keeps it alive. Your employees are your first brand ambassadors.

Keep delivering on your promise.
Gone are the days when once your brand was established, it was in the customers’ minds for the long run. Now customers are more versatile then ever, brand loyalty is a matter of seconds, or best of a few days, before they switch to a different brand. What’s critical is for your brand to STAY relevant.

You’ve got to ask yourself these questions over and over again.
- is your brand deeply focused on what drives experience within the market? You can no longer rely on the market research you did 5 years ago, because it’s no longer relevant.
- are your marketing messages in sync with the customer experience? As agile process and design thinking work for product development, it also works for marketing. Customers’ needs evolve constantly, thanks to the simplicity of buying products anywhere at anytime, the plethora of similar products available, the convenience of buying online vs. in stores, the technological improvements that make an iPhone 6S obsolete in 3 months, etc.
- do customers (still) share your view of who you are and what you want to be? Think of the Apple brand which in its early years meant that the buyers were the mavericks, the anti (PC) system, the rebels. Think of the Apple brand today, mass-market, ubiquitous, mainstream, to the point that many early Apple adopters have gone away because they’ve lost the connection with the brand (“too mainstream”, “now, everyone has an Apple”, etc.). Worst cases: Kodak, Nokia, Borders…
- are your products easy to use? If you make a product that is too complex to use, doesn’t provide a gain in time, is not convenient to use, you won’t succeed.
- what’s your roadmap for new products? You can’t rely on your laurels and your cash-cow product. You must always look for what’s next, what are the customer needs that we haven’t met yet. Innovation is key to keep delivering on your brand promise.


Do you want to be the next Kodak, the next Apple or the next Uber?

Things that still surprise me after 13 years in the US.

This week will mark my 8th anniversary of becoming a US citizen, and I’m proud of that.
However, while planning a trip to France next year and recalling our last family trip to my (former) home country, I realize that after all this time in the US (13 years), there still are many things that either surprise me, or simply irritate me.

1. Air conditioning. Although I do appreciate the fact that I don’t have to sweat every time I lift even one finger thanks to a full-blown air conditioned indoor environment (unlike in France on hot summer days where the only way to stay cool is to put a full ice pack under my armpits), I still have to fight with co-workers over thermostat control for who gets the right (humanly livable) temperature. Every time I go to see a movie, I need to bring my ski jacket because I feel like I’m in Antarctica.

2. The non-metric system. After all this time, I just can’t figure out the way we, in America, calculate distances or volumes. There are 16 ounces in 1 liter, there are 3 feet in 1 meter, there are 2.6 cm in 1 inch… What the heck? Why can’t Americans use the metric system like British drive on the right size of the road? Whazza?

3. How are you doing? I love the lack of formality in the US. You can call (almost) everybody by their first name even if you’ve never met them before. Maybe the fact that there is only one “you” (unlike the “tu” and the “vous” in French) makes it easier. In the French language and century-long social etiquette, you have to remember that you say “vous” to a woman you’ve never met before if she is older than you, but also younger than you if you’re much older, but it depends on the context and if you’re in social or professional setting, but also if you’re with a group of friends or colleagues that are more casual or more traditional... WTF?I’m still amazed that people in the US ask me how I’m doing, with no expectation for an answer. Sometimes, just for the fun of it, I like to respond “I feel terrible, my dog just died and my house got on fire”, because often times people don’t listen to my answer and reply “wonderful”, if they reply at all.

4. Clothes sizes. Maybe it goes with not using the metric system, but I used to wear XL or L when I lived in France, and now in the US I wear M or S, if not going to the kids section to find a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that is “fitting”. At the same time, everything is XXL in the US: cars, houses, meals… 

5. “You’re gonna love the way you look, I guarantee you”. I recall being in France and dressing up to go to the supermarket or just down the street to buy a baguette. French people are very conscious about their appearance. It’s almost like you have to wear a tie and jacket to be allowed to “enter” a bakery to buy your baguette. But I have to admit I still am picky about clothes. I rarely buy pants or suits in the US because I don’t like the style. I buy clothes every time I go to Europe.I like the fact that I can wear a T, shorts and sandals to go to the restaurant in the US, especially when it’s bloody hot and humid outside and that if I had to wear a suit and tie just to go to dinner, I would need a second set just to change as soon as I get in the restaurant. Although I still have to remember to bring my ski jacket with me, in case the AC is way too high in the restaurant. Now, that’s very stylish: T, shorts, sandals and… ski jacket!The only thing I will never do though (I still have to maintain some French fashionable style after all) is to wear white socks all the way up to mid-calves, while wearing shorts and sandals. NEVER.

6. The customer is king. Speaking of dinner, I like the fact that service is expedited in the US. In France, you must wait for 20 minutes only to get a waiter greet you at your table and bring two slices of baguette and tap water (with no ice). I love the “customer service” focus in the US (maybe it is because tips are not included, unlike in France – this is probably why French waiters are so rude and don’t give a crap about you), although I have a hard time being interrupted every 5 minutes by a waiter “is everything OK” while I’m in the middle of a conversation or have a 4-pound juicy burger stuck in my mouth that I’m trying to chew without getting all the grease taint my T-shirt (luckily I don't wear a suit), and trying to answer the waiter “mmhmm, uh mmmhmmm uh”. That’s how I learned the sign language: thumbs up, big smile (no one cares to see bits of meat and fries stuck in your teeth – all that matters if that you, as the customer, are happy), and a nod of the head.

I’ve traveled a lot abroad since I moved to the US, and every time I am in another country (even in France), I just can’t wait to go back home (the US), and still be surprised or irritated by the same things that remind me how much I love this country. Cheers!