Jim Bampos, VP of Customer Quality at EMC Corporation, was one of [...]]]> When you can attribute a 20% revenue gain to a customer centric culture or program, you get noticed. And that’s exactly what happened to several Voice of the Customer thought leaders during the annual Allegiance Engage Summit 2011 in Deer Valley, Utah.

Jim Bampos, VP of Customer Quality at EMC Corporation, was one of the show stealers–and for good reason. Unlike many companies who talk a good game about putting customers first, EMC can prove it.

EMC dances on the leading edge of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) movement.

Click here to watch the 7 minute Jim Bampos EMC interview.

VoC programs emerged from the market research milieu. This term describes the in-depth process of capturing a customer’s expectations, preferences and aversions. Specifically, VoC systems produce a detailed set of customer wants and needs and prioritizes them in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives. Highly evolved VOC program leaders also analyze and act upon free form customer comments from multiple sources, including call centers, salespeople, Twitter, etc.

VoC solution providers such as Allegiance, based in South Jordan, Utah, have flourished in response to the VoC movement. EMC became one of their early adopters out of necessity.

Although EMC was enjoying double digit growth, it was facing intense competition. They needed to think differently about the customer experience. Says Bampos, “We really did not understand the full customer life cycle from the time that they were made aware of our solutions to the end of life of our products. The professional services organization was the first to launch a pilot VOC program to bridge the gaps between the customers and the internal support organization.”

EMC’s VoC pilot program gained traction within two years. Since launching the VOC program, they have witnessed a 30 point Net Promoter Score improvement and over 20% revenue increase–representing hundreds of millions of top line revenue.

Other competitive industries are following suit. During her Summit keynote presentation, Bonny Simi of JetBlue also shared details about their Voice of the Customer program. “Our mission is to bring humanity back to travel. How can you know how you are doing without asking your customers?” Simi, an accomplished business strategist, Olympian and airline captain, described their palpable two year VOC journey. Simi and her team juggle 50,000 survey responses per month and 1.6 million Twitter followers. Gathering and analyzing customer data is a small piece of the VoC puzzle. She spends a great deal of time demonstrating the value and ROI of their program, as well as gaining sponsors across departments and locations.

Click here to watch the 5 minute Bonny Simi JetBlue interview.

The right survey tools can help smooth out the VoC journey, but should not precede solid branding, a customer-obsessed culture, and strong executive sponsorship. Bruce Temkin, founder of Temkin Group in Boston Massachusetts, emphasizes that companies need to master four customer experience competencies in order to become truly customer-centric: purposeful leadership, compelling brand Values, employee engagement, and customer connectedness. Temkin posits that “It turns out that companies are only as strong as their weakest link. VoC Programs are often an important tool in building the Customer Connectedness competency. We recently had more than 200 large companies complete our competency assessment and only 3% ended up at the highest level of customer experience management maturity, what we call a Customer-Centric Organization.”

After spending three days with over 300 VoC zealots, these statistics do not surprise me. The majority of companies attending the Engage Summit are still in the early stages of determining the ideal data collection and validation methods. VoC leaders still spend most of their time discussing the right listening posts, choosing the questions to ask, and debating ideal metrics to use.

Clearly, most B2B companies have a long way to go towards becoming truly customer-centric. Allegiance is clever enough to create an annual event that attracts fervent customer evangelists–half of whom are not yet their customers–to accelerate industry adoption.

If your company is considering a VoC program launch, beware of the rush to select a technology solution. First, invest the time in defining the purpose of your program. Executive support will take time. Tell people why you are embarking on the program, and how you will use the customer data once you have collected it. VoC programs typically provide these benefits:

1. A detailed understanding of the customer’s requirements
2. A common language for the sales, marketing and product development teams going forward
3. Valuable, real time input to set appropriate design specifications for the new product or service
4. A springboard for innovation.

VoC evangelists Bonny Simi and Jim Bampos have their work cut out for them. With only two years of VoC under their belts, the journey ahead will be met with some resistance. Let’s hope they focus their energies on the art of enchantment and influence, and leave the community building and tool making to market leaders such as Allegiance.

Lisa Nirell is the “Chief Energy Officer” of EnergizeGrowth® LLC. She advises B2B companies who aspire to create sustainable companies by attracting great customers.  Companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Wells Fargo Advisors, and dozens of mid-market companies have worked with Lisa to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.  Visit www.energizegrowth.com and http://blog.energizegrowth.com to assess your company’s readiness to grow by downloading your complimentary Wealthy Company Scorecard.
Copyright 2010, Lisa Nirell. All rights reserved.

So far e-books represent 1 to 3 percent of total book sales. But [...]]]> Book Expo America is one of the three major annual events in the world of publishing, along with the London Book Fair and the Frankfurt Book Fair. This year BEA is taking place in New York City. And the buzz is all about e-books. 

So far e-books represent 1 to 3 percent of total book sales. But they make up the fastest growing part of the industry, and publishers, authors and booksellers have no idea just how big they will become and how they might affect profits and reading habits in the future.

People will always want paper, but buy-click-download is going to revolutionize the way readers read and authors connect with the market.

Second, the news that Facebook is going open-source with [...]]]> Over at the Times a pair of bellwether articles. First, the news that Microsoft is shelving Encarta, its CD-Rom encyclopedia. After eclipsing the bound encyclopedia that was once a major purchase of striving families, the CD-Rom has itself succumbed to the search engine and dynamic sites like Wikepedia. 

Second, the news that Facebook is going open-source with the tools it makes available to members. The weakness of any networking site is that it binds members to its location – people and ideas outside of that realm don’t exist in a networking sense. Facebook is reading the tea leaves correctly. People want flexibility in their devices and their virtual communities. 

We wonder whether organizational learning strategies are keeping up with the spirit of the times.

Maybe Steve Jobs doesn’t think there’s a market for e-books on the iPhone, but Amazon seems to. On Monday, it acquired Lexcycle, the company that developed the popular Stanza iPhone and iPod-Touch e-book [...]]]> It may not seem as noteworthy as two railroad giants merging in the late 1800s, but we did see an interesting move in digital publishing yesterday:

Maybe Steve Jobs doesn’t think there’s a market for e-books on the iPhone, but Amazon seems to. On Monday, it acquired Lexcycle, the company that developed the popular Stanza iPhone and iPod-Touch e-book reader application, for an undisclosed sum.

Alas, the competition between the two services seemed promising, but Amazon probably recognizes better than most that when it comes to digital content, consumers want a good e-reader, but they also want flexibility to move between devices. Stanza and Kindle can actually sync your bookmark even when you use your iPhone and your Kindle to read the same book.

Although many thrillers seem “film ready” even on the page, we’re less sold [...]]]> This NYT article profiles Bradley Inman, a rare entrepreneur who combines Silicon Valley and New York publishing experience. His Vook.tv is a platform for embedding video and twitter feeds with text, a melding he thinks will be the natural evolution of the digital reader.

Although many thrillers seem “film ready” even on the page, we’re less sold on the idea that fiction should be merged with video and other communication tools. But the idea of turning a business book into a box containing text, online tools, video-cast lectures, and Facebook-style interaction seems not only plausible but exciting. Open the book and the author pops out, along with a social network of other readers with whom you can share and exchange ideas.  

The Morning News is currently holding its Tournament of Books – an event that’s wonderful [...]]]> At Unbound Ideas, we follow the development of the e-ink and e-reader technology with great interest. We think the “e” is a large part of the future of publishing, and will provide a dramatically new way for readers and authors to connect.

The Morning News is currently holding its Tournament of Books – an event that’s wonderful fun for lovers of fiction.

One of the judges had trouble obtaining one of the books and finally ordered an e-version through Amazon. He was able to read the book on both his Kindle and his i-Phone.

Prior to the experience, I imagined that reading on one of these devices is, for sure, inferior to reading a good, old-fashioned book. I was especially dubious about the iPod, since I’d found the device totally frustrating and unacceptable for reading online newspapers or articles. But I have to tell you, I actually found reading on the iPod totally pleasurable. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible that I read with deeper engagement and absorption than I would’ve had I been reading the physical hard copy.

What’s more the two devices kept in synch as to how far he’d progressed in the book.

When last we left off, I had described the futility of trying to acquire a copy of the physical book despite trips to more than a half-dozen bookstores (chain and indie) a mere four months after the book’s release. Yes, I considered the library, but our local at the time did not have a copy listed, and as I mentioned, I was aware that online options such as tourney sponsor Powell’s as well as Amazon could put the book in my hands within a few days, but I also already had a dozen other titles lined up and it became a low priority. If not for the tournament and more importantly, if not for City of Refuge advancing in the first round, there is no chance I ever would’ve come back to actually read the book as that passing desire would’ve quickly been buried under the avalanche of new books that made it onto my radar.

Our tale ended with me downloading a copy of City of Refuge to my wife’s newly arrived Kindle 2 and the Kindle “app” to my iPod Touch.

I’ve now read City of Refuge, and while I have some things to say about the book itself, I’m going to save them for the next round so I can stop talking about 2666, which mostly seems to annoy our readers.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the experience of reading City of Refuge on my iPod and the Kindle. Here’s the headline: Bookstores Are Screwed Unless They Adapt.

People have no idea how much it pains me to say this. I was, quite literally, raised in an independent bookstore that my mother founded with her partners when I was a year old. She was one of the owners until the year I graduated from college and the store still exists today a couple of storefronts down from its original location. The number of hours I spent reading in a special seating area in the children’s section cannot be calculated. I was practically a human display. Going back to do a reading at the store when Fondling Your Muse came out was one of the highlights of my career as a writer.

I love books, physical books. When I left Chicago for graduate school in Louisiana, the only things in my car were my dog, my guitar, and my books. As I type this, I am surrounded by books and if my office were bigger, I’d be surrounded by even more of them because I have easily twice as many stowed away in boxes. I can look at my shelves and remember the time and the place I read each book.

But now that I’ve read City of Refuge on a digital device (70% on the iPod/30% on the Kindle), I can now see the future and it looks very, very different for publishers, writers, and booksellers.

Prior to the experience, I imagined that reading on one of these devices is, for sure, inferior to reading a good, old-fashioned book. I was especially dubious about the iPod, since I’d found the device totally frustrating and unacceptable for reading online newspapers or articles. But I have to tell you, I actually found reading on the iPod totally pleasurable. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible that I read with deeper engagement and absorption than I would’ve had I been reading the physical hard copy.

I know, blasphemy.

Rather than being a liability, the small screen is an asset because it makes it almost impossible to skim since there’s not enough text on the screen to bother skimming. If I lose focus while I’m reading a physical book, I often find myself skipping down the page, looking for a fresh point of purchase into the text. With the iPod, it was remarkably easy to stay absorbed in the text. (That City of Refuge is an absorbing book likely had something to do with it.) On the Kindle itself I had much the same sensation. Plus, whenever I switched between the two devices, thanks to some sort of magic fairy dust sent through the ether between them, each device always knew where I was in the book.

In the end, my experience reinforced what I think we all know, but are perhaps afraid to admit because it means reconciling with the change that’s going to come: it’s the content that’s important, not the container. I’m not saying that digital technology is going to wipe out printed books or bookstores altogether, but in an industry already in decline and needing very little to topple it over the edge, it is going to cause radical changes.

The good news is that I think most of them, ultimately, will be for the good. I don’t think anyone believes the Shamrock Shake limited-time-only hardcover release-and-return policy is viable. I also think books are a product that deserve and demand the chance to live beyond that three-month window that the current publishing model is tied to.

I think I know all the objections most people have to e-book platforms because I would’ve agreed with them until I actually tried them. The distribution system that’s tied to the Kindle is simply and literally killer. One of the commenters on the round where I offered my initial rant called my expectations to be able to acquire a book in less than three days at a price below list “ridiculous,” and while I’ll admit that those wishes have more than a whiff of entitlement, they exist because they are the reality of the marketplace as it exists right now. People almost never pay full-price for books, particularly hardcover books, and on-demand isn’t just a service on my cable, it’s the prevailing attitude of the American consumer. We can bemoan the prevalence of this attitude all we want, but those lamentations aren’t going to save publishing. We are where we are and trying to talk book buyers out of their wishes isn’t going to help much.

Now, I’ve got all kinds of qualms about Amazon’s digital rights management policy and the potential for them to choke out the e-distribution market. I’d love to see some kind of universal distribution format that would allow someone like tourney-sponsor Powell’s to compete on equal footing in this arena, because, in reality, even with a different distribution model, we’re still going to find most of our reading via good old-fashioned word-of-mouth (even if the mouth is the Internet, as illustrated below) and a company like Powell’s that is tied into readers and offers additional value to the book selection process in ways Amazon doesn’t and can’t, likeBrockman’s blog or their staff picks can be plenty competitive. One of the reasons I’m so exercised about this stuff is because I desperately want to sound the alarm so we can all get on the train before the whistle blows and it leaves the station with just Amazon on board.

If the bookstores we love are going to survive, they’re going to have to change to meet the new reality. I think the additional good news is that independent stores are in much better position to adapt to the technology than the big-box chains. The advantage Barnes & Noble has over most independents is the amount of inventory. With changes in distribution, this is no advantage at all. We already see Borders essentially circling the drain and Barnes & Noble suffering significant declines in sales. We’re still going to need places that support and nurture book culture and that’s what independent stores can do in a way that Barnes & Noble can’t. Independent stores that experiment and find a niche in the changing landscape will not only survive, but thrive, as long as they don’t bury their heads in the sand and try to wish away reality.

One last anecdote to reinforce how and why I think change is going to come. Some months ago, on Jessa Crispin’s Bookslut I read a short piece about the reissuing of Raven: The Untold Story about Jim Jones and His People to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre. At the time, I filed this nugget away in my mental rolodex, thinking it sounded like a cool book that I should look for some time. As luck would have it, I literally tripped across it in the store about a week later and bought it, even though I knew that I had tons of reading for the ToB ahead of me because I also knew it was entirely possible, or even probable that when I did want to try to read it, I wouldn’t be able to find a copy.

Last night, for the first time since I started reading for the tournament I found myself looking for a new book and I chose Raven. As my wife clicked away happily on her Kindle next to me (she’s reading Trevor Corson’s The Secret Life of Lobsters), I cracked Raven and learned that the book had been out of print for many, many years since its original publication in 1982, something that would never have happened with digitally available books. I also realized that this monster is close to two pounds with big pages and small print and I could not comfortably balance it in on my chest with one hand.

Amazon's Kindle 2

Slate’s technology expert, Farhad Manjoo, is one of our favorite popular writers about all trends digital. His recent commentary about how primitive the Internet of the 1990s seems now, and what that implies about the Internet of today was fun and thoughtful. (”In 2020, we’ll get the Internet over electronic ink [...]]]>

Amazon's Kindle 2

Slate’s technology expert, Farhad Manjoo, is one of our favorite popular writers about all trends digital. His recent commentary about how primitive the Internet of the 1990s seems now, and what that implies about the Internet of today was fun and thoughtful. (”In 2020, we’ll get the Internet over electronic ink scrolls powered by algae….”) In another piece today, he raves about the experience of using a Kindle, which he describes as the future of publishing. Among the claims: skeptics will become true believers the moment they use them; the Kindle will allow you to organize and gain control over your reading life like the iPod allowed you to manage your music life. (A favorite aspect for me.)

But Manjoo also fears that this will make the Kindle as dominant and omnipresent as the iPod, circumventing all other book avenues. This seems dubious, and just another form of change fearing. While e-readers seem to have reached a popular tipping point, they have a long way to go before they achieve the kind of ubiquity of the television set or even the iPod.

But Manjoo does mention something we’ve suspected and mentioned before. Digital readers increase book sales. In the same way, digital music players increases music sales. When you can click-buy, you buy more. Maybe the future of publishing isn’t as bleak as people fear. In fact, we think it’s soongoing to hit its information age stride – whether it wants to or not.