One Voice Strategy for Customer Engagement

For most of history, service exchanges involved face-to-face interactions between customers and firms. Technology shattered that constraint, and today there are more kinds of services delivered in more places, at more times, and at lower cost than ever before. This enabling technology is complex and changes quickly.

A firm’s challenge is to deliver a coherent stream of seamless, harmonious, and reliable experiences across customer journeys by developing, what we conceptualize, as a One-Voice Strategy to win customer engagement.

Our research shows that an effective one-voice strategy requires the integration of three factors:

• Interfaces that require interactions
• Learning capabilities that generate intelligence
• Coordination capabilities that use this intelligence to enhance subsequent interactions

Our research also shows that a firm's success at One-Voice Strategy comes from mobilizing practices and resources in their workplace to reflect three insights:

➣ Customer-firm interaction is the basic unit of analysis in winning customer engagement. Every interaction can be viewed as located in a Service Interaction Space (SIS)---a universe of possible, feasible and imaginable points of customer-firm interaction, where each point involves a specific interface that permits a firm and customer to connect over time and space using varying devices. Both the customer and the firm have a continuum of choices that runs from 100% human to 100% machine-mediated. Crossing these two continua creates the SIS.

Where in the SIS should we compete?

When should we invest in new interfaces, so that they are neither too soon nor too late to serve customers’ shifting preferences?

How are we to manage the multitude of potential interactions created by different combinations of devices and interfaces?

How should we make tradeoffs among the attributes, which are quality, speed, cost, agency (the customer’s sense of control), and social functionality (the capacity to detect or display emotions), to create desired customer experiences?

➣ A firm’s ability to capture data and learn from interactions creates the potential to take effective action in subsequent interactions. Learning may produce local intelligence, for instance what a frontline person learns in an interaction, or collective intelligence, learning that can empower the entire organization.

What parts of the learning function can be automated with marketing technology (martech) software?

What parts require human insights to identify subtle patterns or nuances?

How can local intelligence be converted to collective intelligence without overburdening frontline employees with data management tasks?

➣ Learning from collective and local intelligence informs the firm’s ability to coordinate interactions along a customer’s journey to anticipate and take effective action. Again, many tasks can be automated to increase the velocity and impact of the firm’s coordination actions and reduce costs. But the larger impediments to effective action are organizational.

How is the matrixed firm to avoid silos that slow cross-functional decision making?

How can they offset the effects of geographical dispersion and communication overhead that slows collaboration?

Thus, a One Voice Strategy enables a firm to integrate all the organization’s frontline and backend processes to deliver competitive interactions anytime, anywhere, and with any combination of human and machine devices. Liebig’s law of the minimum applies here: the weakest factor – interfaces, learning and coordination capabilities, or strategy – limits how well experiences can be delivered and hence the quality of customer engagement achieved.

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B2B E-Negotiations and Influence Tactics

How to manage e-communications and win contracts

According to reports, 77% customers prefer e-communications over other formats resulting in 75% increase in e-negotiations and, by one estimate, 80% of U.S. sales negotiations are conducted online. Yet, little is known about effectiveness of B2B e-negotiations.

• How salespeople use e-communications to influence buyers and win contracts?
• How do buyers process salespeople’s influence tactics during e-negotiations?

The first question addresses what works, and the second explains why it works.

Our research team worked with a B2B firm to collect data for more than 40 e-negotiations over a two year-period. We predicted the probability of wining multimillion dollar sales contract in competitive bid negotiations. We identified influence tactics expressed as textual cues, and used by salespeople in interactions with buyers during the e-negotiation sales process. Specifically, we identified four influence tactics:
• information sharing, sharing knowledge about solutions/services/products
• recommendation, explicit suggestion favoring a particular solution/service/product
• promise, committing to a future course of action, activity and/or benefit
• assertiveness, call-to-action for the buyer to ensure continuity of the exchange/relationship

What Works to Win Contracts--Findings

• No individual influence tactic is sufficient to hold a buyer’s attention and to win the contract award.
• A 30% increase in buyer attention increases the likelihood of a contract award by 7-fold.
• Effective use of influence tactics requires the concurrent use of complementary tactics.
• Concurrent use of assertiveness and promise tactics boost buyer attention by 14% on average. Assertiveness and promise are complementary tactics.
• Concurrent use of information sharing and recommendation tactics results in a 15% increase in buyer attention. Information-sharing and recommendation are complementary tactics.
• Concurrent use of recommendation and promise tactics results in a 30% decrease in buyer attention, and a 7-fold lower probability of contract award. Recommendation and Promise are competing tactics.

Why it works—Findings

While past research identifies what influence tactics are effective in different sales contexts, our study explains why influence tactics work.

• Waxing and waning of buyer attention in B2B sales negotiation, visible in the signals of buyer’s messaging, is an early indication of sales effectiveness and diagnostic of the likelihood of sales contract award.
• Buyer attention explains how buyers notice, process and respond to salesperson influence tactic in accord with attention’s role in a selection, resource-allocation and action-motivation mechanism, respectively.
• Information sharing and recommendation work to gain buyer attention by persuading the receiver to focus on the merit of the argument (internal-analyzing).
• Promise and assertiveness work to gain buyer attention by mitigating decision risk, simplifying information processing, and/or reducing uncertainty (risk-shifting).

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How to Stem Knowledge Losses in Marketing Frontlines, and Enhance Customer Satisfaction, Efficiency and Revenue

Why are so few firms successful in delivering high quality in service interactions without unnecessarily increasing costs? Why do firms find it so hard to cut through productivity-quality trade-offs?

Productivity or quality is a perennial dilemma in modern organizations. Most organizations are either productivity focused by controlling costs (Model P) or quality focused by delivering excellent customer service (Model Q). Few organizations can achieve or sustain a dual focus that cuts through productivity-quality trade-offs (Model PQ). Empirical data consistently suggest that Model PQ organizations are most profitable and outcompete Model P and Model Q organizations in their category. Our research shows that business units that are successful in cutting through productivity-quality trade-offs have one thing in common: they are more effective in learning from the frontlines and in leveraging this bottom-up learning to innovate service processes.

We refer to our insight as the Cycle of Bottom-up Learning for Sustainable Model PQ Organizations (see Figure below).

Our results show that the cycle of bottom-up learning leads to a 37% gain in customer satisfaction, 25% increase in efficiency, and 15% higher revenue. The bottom-up learning cycle has three knowledge components that organizations need to cultivate and connect: Knowledge Generation, Articulation and Codification.

•Organizations cultivate new knowledge generation when frontline employees are empowered to break from the standard operating procedure to creatively construct or improvise PQ solutions that address unanticipated customer needs, requests or complaints.

• Knowledge generated in the frontlines is often lost because it is hard to capture and codify directly. To stem these losses, organizations cultivate knowledge articulation where frontline employees are connected in innovation councils to share, process, and distil generated knowledge to discover new ways of practice.

• All articulated knowledge is not useful in delivering PQ returns. Organizations make middle managers accountable for sifting, sorting, and synthesizing knowledge articulated by frontlines to codify useful knowledge as new operating practice.

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Performance Losses in Service Innovation Implementation: A Frontline Perspective

Good ideas often fail at the altar of execution. A 2007 McKinsey Global Survey of “Innovation in Financial Services” shows that over 70% of senior executives agreed that innovation is critical for organizational success, yet half indicated that their organizations suffer from “performance gap” due to poor implementation that robs service innovations of bottom line payoffs.

What is the remedy to close the performance gaps?
The 2007 McKinsey Survey provides a clue: “When asked which practices, if implemented effectively, would promote successful innovation, executives make people-related [factors] their top priorities.” The Centre for Services Leadership at the Arizona State University concurs by noting that understanding when and why service innovations fail or succeed requires placing frontline employees “squarely within the theoretical domain of innovation implementation.”

Our study provides this understanding and offers insights for managers interested in stemming performance losses in service innovation implementation.

Our point-of-view is that understanding how frontline employees make sense of service innovations and how this sense making amplifies or abates their resistance to it is critical to detecting and understanding performance losses during implementation.

Our studies of frontlines in service organizations have uncovered three patterns in frontline sense-making and performance loss (see Figure below).

- When service innovations focus on revenue enhancement through quality improvement initiatives, frontline employees perceive the change as less disruptive; by contrast, service innovation focused on cost containment is perceived as more disruption to their role.

- Change and disruption of roles diminish performance by provoking frontline resistance. However, change in itself can be motivating and bolster performance. Thus, service innovation implementation generates both a performance loss pathway (red connections) and a performance gain pathway (green connections).

- When performance loss dominates, it drains away performance gains and service innovation implementation is ineffective. Frontline participation in innovation development and implementation can subdue both the degree to which frontlines resist change, and the negative effect of resistance to change.

For more details on how frontline participation mitigates performance losses, Click Here

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