Recent events

We invite you to take a moment to read summaries of our recent events, watch our webinars, and consider participating in our upcoming events. If we have piqued your curiosity about improving your own organisation's Customer Experience Management or Customer Loyalty practices, please do contact us:

Contact John Carroll
Telephone: +1 312 526 4809


 
 
The 2009 Customer Experience Management Conference Board Event — Westin New York at Times Square New York, NY

February 26 - 27, 2009

In an effort to reduce our carbon footprint, The Conference Board has decided to go paperless with all of our conferences and seminars. In one year The Conference Board will save almost 2 million sheets of paper, preserving hundreds of trees annually.



Customer Experience Seminar — Lisbon, Portugal

Synovate Chief Loyalty Architect Larry Crosby describes why it's important to connect with customers on both the rational and emotional levels to build customer loyalty in this interview following his seminar in Lisbon, in Portugal – click here


Building Loyalty through Customer Experience Management — USA

The Imperatives of Strategy and Implementation

Synovate Loyalty announces a two-part complimentary customer experience management Webinar!

Good customer relationships remain critical to business success. But competition is relentless and customers are savvier than ever. Whether consumers or businesses, today's customers know that they can have better than merely acceptable business relationships. But what do your customers really want, and how do you deliver it to them in a way that sets you apart?

View this two-part complimentary Webinar to learn how to cultivate engaged customers. You'll hear field-tested best practices and the real work of two major American corporations that used Synovate Loyalty's innovative Customer Relationship Architecture solutions:

Southern California Edison's Seth Kiner, director of customer experience management and marketing, will discuss how his company is transforming from traditional customer service to a broader customer experience strategy.



George Taylor, vice president of customer loyalty with Cardinal Health, will focus on how his organisation used engagement to set the stage for successful implementation of customer experience management.



Synovate Loyalty will share best practices in customer experience management strategies from its cross-industry experience with leading practitioners.


Additional information:

For details, please visit our event registration page here.


Contact for this event:

John Carroll III
Senior Vice President, Synovate Customer Experience
Send an email
Telephone: +1 312 526 4809


Customer Loyalty Conference: Making Customer Loyalty a Key Initiative, The Conference Board — USA, New York

Getting Business Results from Your Customer Loyalty Strategy – Pre-Conference Workshop

— Jon Masland, Senior Vice President and Director, North America Customer Loyalty Practice, Synovate Loyalty

and

— Bud Taylor, Senior Vice President, Customer Loyalty Management Consulting, Synovate Loyalty

Customer loyalty, customer experience, and customer-centricity have taken center stage in the strategies of many businesses. Yet, there is a gap between the desire to build customer loyalty and realizable business return. Questions abound: How do you really create results from a customer loyalty strategy? How do you translate a strategy into actual business improvements that matter? How do you involve managers in a way that enables them to "connect the dots" from what they do to business outcomes? How do you enable the organisation to truly listen to customers and act on what the organisation hears? These are the questions that often stand in the way of success in executing a customer loyalty strategy. But, there are practical processes and techniques to address these questions, build organisational commitment and gain results. In this interactive workshop, you will hear how leading companies have tackled these issues. Specifically, you will learn practical tools and techniques for: Aligning the executive team around the business case for your customer loyalty strategy; Driving planning and resource allocation with customer loyalty insights; Connecting customer loyalty to daily operations and metrics.

"Customer Loyalty: Unifying Organisational Strategy or Just Another Program?"

— Larry Crosby, Chief Loyalty Architect, Synovate Loyalty

Many organisations are tracking customer satisfaction and loyalty. And yet, according to the University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index, overall consumer satisfaction today is no higher than it was in the mid-1990s. What's wrong? In a word, EXECUTION. Most companies have adopted a "program" mentality toward customer loyalty, relying on marketing, customer service, or research functions to "manage loyalty." The full power of customer loyalty, however, is unleashed only when it becomes a transformational strategy of the entire enterprise.

"The Role of Emotions in Keeping Customers Loyal"

— Wayne Marks, Senior Vice President, Synovate Loyalty

Companies in many industries are talking about how to create more loyal customers by addressing the emotional side of human behavior in their customer experience. But the question confronting most firms is "How do we really do that?" This presentation will explore emotional bonding and topics like: What we know about emotions and their role in customer decision making; How to gauge the impact of emotions on customer behaviors; The real business benefits of the emotionally loyal customer; Strategies for building strong emotional bonds with your customers; How to operationally deliver customer experiences that create emotional bonds and loyalty.

"Using Brand Architecture to Drive Customer Loyalty"

— Michael Huie, Global Director, Brand Architecture and Customer Loyalty, Whirlpool Corporation

The over-arching goal of brand architecture should be to motivate positive consumer behavior toward the brands, including both retention and new customer acquisition. These behaviors indicate true loyalty, an asset that increases shareholder value as it grows. At Whirlpool, we see brand architecture as a strategic competency that builds meaningful brand differentiation not only through marketing and communications, but across the entire consumer experience. In this presentation we will discuss how we are shifting the focus of our brand architecture from product-centric to consumer-centric. This means looking at our global brands through the lens of consumer value segments and the full range of loyalty drivers. These drivers extend beyond product performance and price points to include dimensions within other customer touchpoints such as services, purchase experience, information, and relationship marketing. Our goal is a portfolio of brands that enable Whirlpool to create passionately loyal customers for life.

Customer Experience Management Conference: A Blueprint for Building a Customer Experience Enterprise, The Conference Board — USA, New York and Chicago

"Go Ahead...Get Emotional!" – Pre-Conference Workshop

— Brian Lunde, Vice President, Synovate Loyalty

and

— John Carroll, Senior Vice President, Synovate Loyalty

People simply can't make decisions without involving their emotions. In world-wide cross-industry causal research studies, emotional motivation factors on customer behaviors have been shown to outweigh rational motivation by as much as 3 to 1. It is critical to understand how emotions can impact customer behaviors. And it is imperative to create emotion-triggering customer experiences. In this workshop you'll: Understand the power of emotions on how customers make decisions; Learn how to identify the opportunities for increasing emotional motivation; Practice using tools that you can apply in your own organisations to hard-wire emotions into your customer touch points.

"Changing the Culture to Embrace the Customer Experience"

— Jessica Rivera, Assistant Vice President, Customer Experience Integration, Allstate Insurance Company

and

— John Carroll, Senior Vice President, Synovate Loyalty

The adoption lifecycle of customer experience management will usually bring an organisation to a point where it must address culture change. An organisation's culture - the values, assumptions, and norms that drive its management style and employee behaviors - must shift to embrace both the voice of the customer as well as the value of delivering consistent and differentiating customer experiences. Without this cultural shift, customer experience management becomes another "program" that fails to produce lasting results, or worse: no results at all. But how do you initiate and manage such change? Large organisations face a myriad of challenges in making such a shift: functional silos, management layers, highly variable internal knowledge around the current state of actual customer experience, passive resistance to change, and other barriers both common and organisationally unique.

Allstate has learned that organisational patience is a necessary ingredient in the creation of lasting change. Nonetheless, it is tackling these challenges head-on and in this session it will share its experience in: Developing internal communications programs that are working to improve employee understanding of the company's customer experience strategy; Driving change management from top leadership all the way to front-line employees; and Building a knowledge base of customer experience initiatives occurring throughout the company, and facilitating best practice sharing and escalation.

"If Only I Knew Then What I Know Now About the Customer Experience"

— Brett Parsons, Customer Experience, Director, Analytic Services, McKesson Corporation

and

— John Carroll, Senior Vice President, Synovate Loyalty

Successful organisations grow and growth breeds complexity. As a result, successful firms can begin to experience divergence between what they think they know about customer experience and what is actually true "on the ground." When an objective measurement process reveals this divergence for the first time, the internal management and operational challenges begin.

McKesson is America's oldest and largest healthcare services company, delivering more than a third of all medicines used daily by pharmacies, hospitals, nursing homes and doctors' offices in North America. Early in 2006, McKesson began its journey to gain an objective understanding of customer experience among its Independent Pharmacist customers. This talk will focus on what McKesson has learned about how to manage through new insights that challenged conventional wisdom. Sample issues include: What if the customer results for one business unit are being impacted by the performance of another business unit managed by a different team? What if the role of the sales force in influencing customer loyalty is different - and more powerful - than managers expected? How do we truly manage customer experience through thousands of front-line, day-to-day human interactions?

AMA Executive Insights Conference: Creating Clarity in an Unfocused World — USA, Scottsdale, Arizona

"Prove it! How TELUS Unleashed the Power of Integration to Connect the Dots from Employee Engagement to Customer Loyalty and Financial Success"

— Shauna Moscovich, Manager, Customer and Market Research TELUS Communications Inc., Synovate Loyalty client

With the opportunities and challenges presented by converging voice, data and video technologies, building customer loyalty has never been more critical for TELUS, Canada's second largest telecommunications company. TELUS' Customer Value Measurement (CVM) program is moving from simply measuring the voice of the customer towards providing management with an integrated view of how downstream operational metrics contribute to the customer experience, and ultimately create upstream financial outcomes. Shauna Moscovich, will provide insights into the process, benefits and hurdles of undertaking an integration journey.

"Building Relationships with Electric Utility Customers"

— William Twardy, Manager, Market Research & Information Salt River Project, Synovate Loyalty client

To what extent do brand and other attitudinal measures play a part in customer relationships in an industry that would seem to be driven strictly by rational evaluations of reliability, price, value and customer service? SRP, a Phoenix-based water and electric utility has been measuring customer relationships for over ten years and has found that brand and other attitudinal connections with customers are important in both the B2C and B2B environments and that they vary by segment.

"Moving Customer Loyalty to the Center of your Business Strategy"

— Lawrence A. Crosby, CEO Synovate Loyalty

Business growth requires a clear focus on a common strategy and organisational clarity and alignment on how to achieve it. Companies that have moved customer loyalty to the center of their business strategy are changing how they do business and are seeing sustainable market and financial results from those changes. Using case studies, this presentation will show you how leading companies are creating focused customer-centric strategies and organisations through:

  • Developing a customer loyalty strategy consistent with business strategy
  • Discovering pinpoint insights through customer loyalty measurement and modeling
  • Redesigning planning and resource allocation processes to be driven by customer insights
IIR North American Conference on Customer Management (NACCM): Putting the Customer at the Heart of the Business — USA, Orlando, Florida

"Strategic Research and Modeling to Set Your Priorities for Customer Loyalty"

"Strategic Research and Modeling to Set Your Priorities for Customer Loyalty"

— Steve Pekala, Director, Market Knowledge & Pricing Andersen Windows, Synovate Loyalty client

When Andersen faced significant changes in their industry, they knew they had to start with a new comprehensive, strategic understanding of their market. The foundation of these new insights came from their customer loyalty research and helped Andersen Windows determine the rational and emotional motivations of customer loyalty behaviors through causal modeling; pinpoint the customer experience touch points that are key drivers of customer loyalty; and prioritize initiatives to build customer loyalty.

"Experience Monitoring: Listening to Your Customers & Making Changes"

— Carl Ragsdale, Vice President, Dealership Operations National Automobile Dealers Association, Synovate client

Despite the evidence that follow-up is a proven driver of customer satisfaction and subsequent loyalty, follow-up performance across automobile dealers tends to be sporadic and inconsistent at best. Dealerships wanted to offer a responsive and efficient means of gathering immediate customer feedback on an experience in order to build stronger customer relationships and recover quickly from any problems. They learned to stay on top of what their customers are experiencing by listening to audio files with the actual recorded voice of their customer explaining the details of their positive or negative experience at the dealership that day; receiving immediate e-mail alerts on customer problems, explaining the problem and providing follow-up instructions; and using comparative data for tracking and benchmarking dealer operations.

"Building Loyalty is a Team Effort: Breaking Down Functional Silos"

— Marise Kumar, Vice President, Business Strategy & Core Competencies Whirlpool Corporation, Synovate Loyalty client

One of the reasons customer loyalty strategies fail is the existence in many firms of organisational barriers. The traditional functional organisation model is aligned according to activities – marketing, operations, finance, HR, R&D – and many times they never talk to one another. When Whirlpool launched a new strategy to build loyalty to their brands, they knew that breaking down these barriers would be a key success factor. Find out how Whirlpool drives customer loyalty into functional planning; manages a loyalty pipeline of innovation ideas; and communicates, communicates, communicates.

"Performance Measurement Systems: Metrics to Link Your Frontline to Your Corporate Loyalty Goals"

— Henrik Schouboe, Director CPE and Field Operations Microsoft EMEA, Synovate Loyalty Client

Most organisations struggle with linking customer loyalty information to daily decision-making. A practical and accurate dashboard puts customer loyalty in front of your people and assists in changing behaviors. Key Take-Aways: Determining which dashboard metrics to pay attention to; Demonstrating the cause and effect relationship between the metrics and customer key driver attitudes; Getting the organisation to buy into using the customer loyalty dashboard.

"Pulling it All Together: Getting Results through Loyalty-Based Leadership & Strategy"

— Diana Bell, Senior Vice President, Total Customer Experience & Corporate Affairs Hewlett-Packard, Synovate Loyalty Client

Customer loyalty is a top priority for CEOs and senior executives around the world. Turning customer loyalty from a challenge to an organisational competency requires solid strategy, leadership and the information, tools and processes to guide, monitor and refine decision-making. Hewlett-Packard has pulled it all together to drive an organisation committed to providing a total customer experience that builds loyalty. Key Take-Aways: Integrating customer loyalty into their business strategy, structure and culture; Getting top managers committed by developing a strong business case for customer loyalty; Equipping their leaders and teams to succeed; Inspiring the organisation to follow the vision.