Customer Networks

1. HARNESS CUSTOMER
NETWORKS
THE DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
PLAYBOOK
Rethink your business for the digital ag

2. Introduction
• A pastor, joined Life Church.
•Innovation Leader to help the evangelical
church to reach a contemporary audience
and engage them in Christianity.
•He built a virtual church to reach
believers in their 3D avatar forms.
•YouVersion, the world’s most popular Bible
app
for smartphones. With more than 168
million downloads & in 700 languages.
“We’ll do anything short of sin 2reach ppl who don’t
know Christ. 2reach ppl no one is reaching we’ll do
things no one is doing.”
Bobby Gruenewald
Pastor and Innovation Leader at Life. Church

3. Rethinking Customers
•On-demand, customizable, connected, shareable are what customers seek
from every business today.
•The first domain of strategy that we need to rethink is customers.
•companies have targeted them with mass-marketing tools designed to reach,
inform, motivate, and persuade them to buy.
•Customers in the digital age are not passive consumers but nodes within
dynamic networks.
•Businesses need to understand the five core behaviors—access, engage,
customize, connect, and collaborate—that drive customers in their digital
experiences and interactions.

4. The Customer Network
Paradigm
•How customers find, access, use, share,
and influence the products, services, and
brands in their lives now is deferent.
•customers are passive and are
considered in aggregate.
•Mass media and mass production are
used to deliver and promote a company’s
offerings to as many customers as
possible.

5. The Customer Network Paradigm cont.
•customer network
model.
•firm is still a central actor in the creation
and
promotion.
•wide variety of digital platforms that allow them to
interact, publish, broadcast, and innovate—
and
thereby shape brands, reputations, and markets.
•customers as nodes in a network, linked
together digitally.
•the firm also needs to engage with its
customer
network.
•listen in, observe then
understand

6. Customer Network Model
•Identify and nurture customers who may become brand champions, evangelists,
marketing partners, or cocreators of value
•“Customer” can be any key constituency.
•Interconnected constituencies: end consumers, business partners, investors, press,
government regulators, even employees.

7. The Marketing Funnel and the Path
to Purchase
•sometimes called the purchase funnel: is
one framework for
understanding how customer
networks have such great impact
on
businesses’ relationships to customers.
• “hierarchy of effects” psychological
research.
•invest in retaining customers than in
attempting to acquire new ones.
•“Broadcast” marketing tools
Customer network
• “omni-channel” view of the
customer
Awarenes
s
Considerati
o n
Preferenc
e
Actio
n
Loyalt
y

8. The Marketing Funnel

9. The Marketing Funnel

10. Five Customer Network Behaviors
•Access: They seek to access digital data, content, and interactions as quickly, easily,
and flexibly as possible. Any offering that enhances this access is incredibly
compelling.
•Engage: They seek to engage with digital content that is sensory, interactive, and
relevant to their needs.
•Customize: They seek to customize their experiences by choosing and modifying a
wide assortment of information, products, and services. In a generation, customers
have gone from having a handful of television channel options to a digital world with
more than a trillion webpages.

11. Five Customer Network Behaviors
•Connect: They seek to connect with one another by sharing their experiences,
ideas, and opinions through text, images, and social links.
•Collaborate: As social animals, they are naturally drawn to work together. Accordingly,
they seek to collaborate on projects and goals through open platforms.

13. Access Strategy
•Mobile commerce
•Omni-channel
experiences
•Working in the cloud
•On-demand services

14. Engage Strategy
•Product demos: Content that demonstrates the value proposition of a business or
product in a compelling and engaging way can be extremely effective.
•Storytelling: In other cases, brands can reach a broader audience by creating an
emotionally compelling story that is less product-specific.
•Utility: Content isn’t always about stories and emotions, however. It can also be about
utility. Brands can effectively engage customers by providing useful content at just the
right time.
•Brands as publishers: In some cases, brands move beyond individual pieces of
content and engage customers by becoming publishers in their own right.
•Think like a media company

15. Customize Strategy
• Recommendation engines.
•Personalized interfaces.
• Personalized products and services.
•Personalized messages and content.
•Identify the areas where your customers’ needs and behaviors diverge and
finding the right tools to either personalize on their behalf or empower them to
personalize their own experiences.

16. Connect Strategy
•Social listening: Customer conversations can be a tremendous source of market
insight for businesses, which can listen and learn with the help of numerous tools.
•Social customer service: Many businesses find that social media can serve as an
effective channel within their customer service mix, alongside call centers, instant chat,
and other tools.
•Joining the conversation.
•Asking for ideas and content.
•Hosting a community.
•focus on the social media your customers use and engaging in conversations
to solve problems, learn about your market, and become closer to your
customers. The goal is not conversation for its own sake but value creation
for your business.

17. Collaborate Strategy
• Passive contribution.
•Active contribution.
•Crowdfunding.
•Open competitions.
• Collaborative platforms.
•Understand the motivations of your contributors, giving everyone a stake (so no
one feels exploited), allowing participants to contribute at their proper level of
expertise, and offering freedom for contributors to bring their own ideas while
providing enough guidance to shape an effective final outcome.

18. Tool: The Customer Network Strategy
Generator

19. Step 1: Objective Setting
•Direct objectives: These are the objectives that you are directly responsible for
addressing in your project.
•Higher-order objectives: It is also important to identify what overarching, or higher-
order, objectives you are seeking to support through your initiative.

20. Step 2: Customer Selection and
Focusing
•Get a clear picture of the customers that you are seeking to address.
•Select which customer segments are most relevant to your stated objectives.
•focus on these segments to understand them in the context of your project’s specific
objectives. That involves answering three key questions:
1. What is my unique objective for each customer segment?
2. What is my unique value proposition for each customer segment?
3. What are the unique barriers to success for each customer segment?

21. Step 3: Strategy Selection
• Access: Be faster, be easier, be everywhere, and be always on for your
customers.
•Engage: Become a source of valued content for your customers.
•Customize: Make your offering adaptable to your customers’ needs.
•Connect: Become a part of your customers’ conversations.
•Collaborate: Invite your customers to help build your enterprise.

22. Step 4: Concept Generation
•Generate specific strategic concepts based on the broad strategies, objectives, and
customers you have selected.
•Bringing together a diverse group of people who are ready to push themselves to
generate new thinking.
• keep the focus on how your new ideas can create value for the customer.

23. Step 4: Examples of some
Questions
FOR AN ACCESS STRATEGY
How could you make the experience faster, simpler, easier for
customers? How could you better integrate different interactions?
How could you make the service more accessible, more on-demand, more self-serve?
FOR AN ENGAGE STRATEGY
How could you earn the attention of your audience?
What problem could you solve for your customers with the right content or information at the right
time? Would anyone not working at your company recommend this content to a friend?
FOR A CUSTOMIZE STRATEGY
Where do your customers’ needs and interests differ most from each other?
Why would your customers want a more personalized experience? For better utility? For unique interests? For self-
expression? How could you make it easy, and not overwhelming, for your customers to make the right choice for
themselves?

24. Step 4: Examples of some
Questions
FOR A CONNECT STRATEGY
What conversations are your customers already having that are relevant to your objectives?
How could you enable, facilitate, or enhance those conversations rather than intruding on
them? What could you learn from your customers’ conversations?
What could you contribute to these conversations that your customers would value?
FOR A COLLABORATE STRATEGY
What skills could your customers bring to bear, and what are the limits in their ability to
contribute successfully?
What would most motivate customers? Excitement about your brand, cause, or project? Social
recognition? Monetary rewards? Or some combination of these?
How could you make sure customers feel validated and rewarded

25. Step 5: Defining Impact
•Bring each of your ideas back to the business objectives you set for yourself in
step 1.
•Articulate a measurable benefit to your company and clarify how you think the
strategic concepts you have developed will achieve this outcome.
•Compelling new customer strategies for your team to consider for implementation.

26. Challenges That A Traditional, Pre-
digital-era Enterprise May Face
•Organizational Challenges of Customer
Networks
•Enabling the Network Inside
•Adding New Skills and Replacing Old Habits
•Bridging Silos

27. BUSINESSES MUST LEARN TO VIEW CUSTOMERS
DIFFERENTLY, UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMIC,
NETWORKED WAYS IN WHICH THEY INTERACT, NOW
BOTH WITH BUSINESSES AND WITH EACH OTHER.