Blink and you missed it, there goes March and at our headquarters in DC, finally an end to the snow and more importantly maybe an end to colleagues gloating that the weather outside their Tahzoo office was better than ours, whether it was Seattle, Richmond, San Diego or London – although, of course, San Diego wins that competition on pretty much every conference call.
Anyway, a lot to cover in our roundup for March, beginning with the theme for the month: Accountability.
Andy Myers started the ball rolling by sharing a little of what makes us tick here within our agency, in the The Good Consultant Andy shares a parable that was shared with him early in his career, words to live by if you are in a our business.
Good consulting is about accountability. Accountability is the quality of offering one’s very best analysis, insight, advice, and, of course, hard work—the collective product of years of training and experience—in the best interests of one’s client in every detail of every engagement and being willing, regardless of the potential financial reward or professional opportunity at stake
Lisa Bonanno picked up the accountability baton, by taking a look at the customers role in the customer experience, in her post Accountability is a Two Way Street she emphasizes how a good customer experience is a dialogue:
in order to ensure a positive experience, the customer must have accountability in the relationship. For example, rather than a brand simply giving the customer whatever they want, the customer should participate in an interactive dialogue.
This was followed by Andy digging a bit more into what all this means for our clients in Financial Services with his post Suitability vs Accountability; as a “word guy” he explores the linga franca of that industry, language that is supposed to keep the clients best interest uppermost in that customer experience, but in fact probably obfuscates whats really going on – suggesting a better content strategy and customer experience is a bit more transparency. Along the way, he quotes Shakespeare – now that’s a “word guy”.
To paraphrase Shakespeare: “That which we call suitability by any other name would smell as sweet.” I would venture that if the standard were raised to one of accountability, the industry would, in fact, smell all the sweeter.
Also on the subject of Financial Services; David Dorian brought together a couple of hot topics that you’ll see us talk about here on this blog in New Ways to Gain Insights on Millennials’ Relationships to Financial Services, he shares some really nice data and I especially like his observation that:
Millennials are also often treated as a monolithic entity – i.e. “millennials do this, millennials feel that” – rather than as a generation full of different segments with differing motivations and behaviors”.
Well observed, which he then followed up by asking What does customer centricity mean to a Financial Services customer? in which he discusses how we deconstruct these monolithic groups (like millenials) into more relevant and addressable audiences and content territories, like “money mind states”.
In amongst all this, Thomas Smith, our expert in residence also concluded his series of Financial Services Predictions for 2015, in which exposes his one man mission to save the industry he’s been in for twenty years from the specter of digital disruption (which I can only imagine means he’s been selling insurance since he was a child) and he concludes his series with a look at mobile. Tom also had the opportunity to further his crusade with a splendid webinar that he summarizes in Becoming Customer Centric Is a Journey Not a Destination.
March also saw the conclusion of another blog and podcast series we’ve been running here, myself and Denasia Pinkard closed out our Get Content Fit series, with Six Steps to Shape Up Your Marketing and Get Content Fit.
Other blog posts for March:
- Insights Journey from the Super Bowl: Part 3 – David Dorian continues to dig deeply into the data-fest that is the Super Bowl and the winning and losing brands.
- Rising Above Data: How Marketers Can Turn Insight into Action – A 21st century marketer is bathing in data, in this incredibly useful post Anusha Anand explores how to turn this into action.
- Lessons from the Adobe Marketing Summit – Our resident Marketing Technologist, John Kottcamp, shares his perspective on the recent industry jamboree that is the Adobe Marketing Summit
- There’s magic in the future of the digital experience – Still breathless from the typing frenzy that is a CMS Wire tweetjam; John Kottcamp shares what he learned during the March #CXMChat.
Lastly, but by no means leastly in this show reel of the blog for March, you should really check out a story that Jiawen Shi, shared that blew us all away here – how a wonderful customer experience from Alaska Airlines gave her a story that her friends and family will be sharing for many years in Going the Extra Mile.
In April we’ll be tuning the collective Tahzoo minds to the theme of innovation, we’ll share our experience in retail as we prepare to join our friends at Loyalty360 for the Loyalty Expo in a new blog series about the Retail Revolution and I dare say you’ll be hearing about what we have in store for our keynote presentations at the SDL Innovate series of events in London, Amsterdam and San Francisco.