Insights

by Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX

With the economy expanding, finding great talent is harder than ever. We’re seeing new trends that make it even harder to attract high quality talent. The power of recruiting is moving from the employer to the employee and we will need to adjust to retain and attract the best and the brightest.

1. Put the needs of candidates first

We need to begin our transformation by thinking about the needs of the candidates, not just the needs of the company. How do we nurture job seekers? Do we give them the same respect we give a potential customer? Do we make it easy for potential hires to find out about our job openings?

We have a new trend in recruiting called “ghosting.” This means a person who disappears, or goes missing in action without any explanation. According to NPR employees may not bother to tell you they are resigning, and they may skip on jobs without a text, email, or other communications. The same thing is happening with potential candidates. According to Cutch, a market insight firm, 50% of job seekers think it’s reasonable to ghost a potential employer, meaning they don’t show up for interviews, or work, and lose interest in the recruiting process.

No one is sure if this is because of the power shift in a tight market, or millennial malaise, or something else. Regardless, it’s a growing trend we need to avoid.

We need to start things off with new candidates on the right note. This means having a tight hiring process where everyone knows what to expect and candidates are constantly updated as things go along. Gone are the days where you can take weeks to get back to them.

2. Improving your Company Reputation

It’s also important to protect your company reputation. If you keep candidates in the loop too long, word spreads and it will come back to haunt you. Clear communications during the early stages are essential to avoid ghosting. 

94% of potential candidates  (ICMS study) will check out your company reputation on Linkedin, Facebook, Glass Door, etc.  They listen to the opinions of their peers. One third of potential candidates have not accepted a job based on the employer reputation ( ICIMS Modern Job Seeker Report).The only way to counter this, is to get your employees to share their positive workplace experiences on these platforms and to recognize that employees are a critical part of your long-term success. Build your brand reputation by showing the world what good you do and building a workplace where people are respected and valued.

Implement an employee referral program. Make it easy for employees to share open positions and job postings with their friends. Recognize and reward employees for bringing new employees into the company.

3. Improve your on boarding process

As an executive recruiter we find the onboarding process in the first 90 days to be critical to the candidate’s success. You need to take time to get the new employee up and running. Introduce them to people they need to know, build a detailed 90 day plan that outlines the expected goals and outcomes. Be sure management and the employee participate in the plan. Hold regular meetings to provide  feedback so the employee knows how to adjust their style to be successful. Look for some short-term wins to help the employee feel comfortable that they are making a positive contribution.

We think that all executives should have an executive coach for their first 90 days. This helps them make the required adjustment and get 360 feedback so they get off on the right foot. Making the right first impression can be  the difference between success and failure.

4. Invest in your employees and your culture

Employees need to feel that they are developing and learning new things along the way. An IBM study found employees are 12 times more likely to quit when they feel like they aren’t developing.  Find ways to challenge your employees and help them grow. This can be course work, attendance at trade shows, shadowing other employees, visiting with co-workers in other locations, special projects, time off for charity work etc.

Invest in your culture. This is a combination of your mission, values and work environment. On a regular basis be sure you are communicating your values and showing how you live those values every day. Employees want to be a part of something bigger then themselves, so think about how you want to reinforce your values. Ask employees what you could be doing that you are not. Highlight he values you want in your internal communications and be sure to celebrate your success and the employees who make it happen.

5. Think about your total offer package

Your total offer package is more than the salary/compensation people receive. It includes your employee benefits, your working environment, your cafeteria, educational opportunities, work-life balance, recognition, family leave policies, community service, etc.

One perk that is getting more attention these days is flexible work hours and the ability to work from home to help employees meet their family obligations. This enables employees to be more productive and increase their productivity while balancing their personal lives.

Recognizing employees and their teams for a job well done, so employees know your value their contributions. Gift cards for employee of the month, or those that have gone above and beyond.

Encouraging employees to take vacation is another important part of the work balance environment. Places who have unlimited vacation are finding employees may actually take less vacations. Be sure to have senior management take their full vacations so employees feel that taking their vacation time makes a positive contribution.

Summary

Make your company the place that people come to build their careers! Build an authentic culture and work to continuously improve it. With the market demand favoring candidates in high demand areas (i.e., Analytics, CX, MarTech), it is advisable to retain an experienced, well-regarded executive search firm partner to help find the right talent, shorten recruiting timetables, and assist in placed candidate transition support coaching/consulting. Pls. call our firm, Executive Connections LLC, if we can be of assistance in upcoming talent acquisition needs.

As we write this month’s e-zine the April jobs report was just released showing 263,000+ new jobs added in April and unemployment falling to 3.6%. In our domain and specialization building global marketing and marketing services organizations, we are seeing in 2019 the emergence of a strong “seller’s market” in terms of the demand, movement, and cost of executive-level marketing talent.

Especially in “hot” areas including Analytics, Customer Experience (CX), and MarTech (Marketing Technology), current demand is far exceeding supply of qualified talent and this has led to top-tier talent being snapped up quickly at ever higher compensation levels. In 3 of our recent search assignments, qualified candidates we identified accepted new job offers (at significant compensation increases) even before we were able to schedule initial interviews with our clients. Now may be the time to review your hiring procedures to see if you can streamline your hiring process to reduce the cycle time from interview to offer. 

In this “hot” talent market, companies are well advised to place an increased emphasis on retaining their best talent while re-evaluating and adjusting target compensation levels for various “high demand” roles (Analytics, CX, MarTech) where market pricing has increased dramatically based upon market demand. It’s also important to invest in your company reputation to attract the best talent. Look at your Glassdoor reviews and your online social media to be sure the company is positioned as a great place to work. 

At EC, we advise our clients to emphasize selling the attractiveness of the company’s vision and culture, long-term career path opportunities, and the long-term financial rewards (i.e., stock grants, profit sharing) associated with joining their organizations with the expectation of a long, satisfying career run leading to mutual financial prosperity.

Executive Connections has recently completed analytics, branding, CX, digital, marketing, MarTech, and mktg. operations searches for clients including Accenture Interactive, Avenues – World School, Deloitte Digital, OneTouchPoint, Prudential, RRD, and Staples. We would love to assist you in upcoming talent acquisition needs, so pls. schedule a conference call with our team to catch up.

Best, 

Jeff Gundersen, CEO

Abby Spatz Joins Avenues as VP, Global Marketing 

EC is pleased to announce Abby Spatz has joined our client, Avenues – The World School, in the newly created role of Vice President, Global Marketing. In this role, Abby will be responsible for establishing and executing Avenues’ marketing strategy around the world to build their global brand, attract and engage all audiences and achieve key organizational goals, including full enrollment, in each country and market where Avenues operates. Abby’s career includes more than 20 years of integrated marketing expertise with global consumer lifestyle brands, including NYC Tourism, Hilton, American Express, Chanel, Coca-Cola and eBay. With experience on both the brand and agency side, Abby has developed a proven track record of success working across a broad range of disciplines including brand strategy, advertising, media, PR, experiential, engagement and partnerships, and has extensive experience with traditional and digital media, content and activation. Named one of Brandweek’s “Next Generation Marketers” for her work leading global marketing and advertising at Hilton Hotels, Abby has focused on brand strategy and strategic platforms and program development for domestic and international brand development and activation. Most recently, Abby worked with a number of smaller, high-growth companies to launch and build their brands, drive revenue growth and increase customer engagement. Abby holds an MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, as well as a BA in English and Sociology, also from Emory University.  Abby will report to Peter Vaughn, Chief Experience Officer, a long-time EC client and friend from American Express prior to Avenues.

Executive Connections handled this exclusive, retained search assignment for Avenues. As part of Abby’s transition into this new global marketing leadership role, EC will be providing our unique, proprietary “Blended Solutions” offering including 6+ months of one-on-one confidential consulting/coaching to assist Abby in her successful transition into Avenues. We wish Abby continued success in this new career opportunity!

The Challenge of Hiring Experienced Talent in the Age of Full Employment

We are in a war for experienced talent. In our firm we see very high demand for people with Customer Experience, Analytics /Data Science and Marketing Technology skills.

Gone are the days of creating an online ad and expecting you will find hidden gems. Instead you need to change the way you address hiring in order to attract the high-quality talent you need. Today , people aren’t your most important asset , they are your only asset.

Step 1: Forget your current job descriptions. You need to rethink what is required versus what is nice to have. How many years of experience is enough? Does an MBA actually  matter? Do they need experience with  your particular platform or is knowledge of a similar product sufficient? Interview the staff to find out what is really important, gain consensus on the key mission of the job, and update the job description accordingly. You should be looking for people with experience and a continuous learning mindset who can learn the “new” thing in your environment because you are constantly evolving and you want a person who will grow with you. 

Step 2: Sell the job and the company.  A job description needs to sell the company and the position so put your best foot forward. Selling the company means thinking about how you are going to empower the potential employee. Are you giving them responsibility and authority to take on the task at hand? Do you have sufficient resources (money and people) to help the candidate succeed and thrive in this role? Will you provide an executive coach to help them make the transition and integrate quickly into your culture? Will you assign a mentor? Can they work remotely? Why is your company a great place to work?

Step 3: Update your salary ranges. You need to update your salary ranges to reflect market reality in your geographic area. Skilled resources are in demand and can work anywhere. Your first choice should be a local resource, not someone you have to relocate from another market and hope they will succeed. When you re-examine the compensation for everyone in the department you may find you are under-paying and are vulnerable to getting poached. Even if it seems expensive reconsider how you will get the team to parity with the marketplace. New Federal law prohibits discriminating (i.e., against women and other diversity candidates) by asking for a person’s current compensation, so be careful and state what the job pays. Don’t be afraid to pay someone a big increase if you feel they are qualified.

Step 4: Build your organization’s brand reputation. You should be building your organization’s brand reputation every day using online and offline methods. Today’s employees are interested in understanding your brand promise and your mission. State them clearly and then reinforce them. Prospective employees need to be convinced that you are a great place to work. You should be monitoring Glassdoor, Facebook, LinkedIn, other social media sites, and news to understand your organization’s reputation. Assign someone in HR to monitor and report on your organization’s brand reputation.

You should be surveying your employees and collecting their feedback on a regular basis. This will help you understand what issues need to be addressed. If you need help your marketing team and customer experience teams should be able to provide some guidance.

Step 5: Streamline your Interviewing and hiring process. In order to attract the best talent, you will need to create a seamless process that provides timely candidate feedback and  makes hiring decisions quickly. It is not unusual for Executive Recruiters like us to recommend a candidate only to have them take another offer within 2 weeks. If you are looking for great talent-so are your competitors. You need to:

1. Set up a formal screening process that is responsive to candidate flow so you can screen people in a few days.
2. Establish your internal criteria for how you will evaluate candidates and get all the interviewers on board. Require interviewers to provide feedback in 24 hours.
3. Bring people in for a day and get as many people as you need to interview them. If someone can’t be available on site, provide for Skype or Zoom or some other tool to make it possible to have a “face to face” meeting.
4. Work with the HR team so you can make an immediate offer without going through a lot of internal approvals that may slow down the process.

If you need help finding and hiring senior marketing talent, reach out to Executive Connections LLC. We are experienced marketing practitioners who are focused on executive recruiting. We are happy to help with improving the employee experience and helping you hire the talent you need.

Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director – Analytics/CX/MarTech – Executive Connections LLC DBevelacqua@executiveconnectionsllc.com

Happy New Year!

At Executive Connections LLC, our executive search/placement business is a leading indicator of business activity, either upward or downward, based upon the intentions of global CEOs.

We are pleased to report we see continued strength on the horizon with many signs of strong talent acquisition demands on both the marketing and marketing services sides of our business.

Marketers, and their CMOs, are focused on reimagining omni-channel customer experience, in addition to branding, communications, and marketing. This has resulted in CMOs transitioning to Chief Experience Officers, heightening demand for talent in Analytics and Customer Experience (CX), in addition to traditional Branding, Communications, and Marketing.

Marketing Services firms (Agency Holding Companies & Technology Consultancies) are increasingly focused on assisting CMOs, CIOs, and CXOs in transforming global omni-channel customer experience, and the market share gains and inroads over the past 5-10 years by technology insurgents (including Accenture Interactive & Deloitte Digital) have led many industry analysts to the conclusion the technology consultancies are setting the tone for the future.

We are including in this month’s issue an interesting article published last week by Allison Schiff at AdExchanger, an interview with Andy Main, CEO of Deloitte Digital, titled Deloitte Digital: We’re Setting The Tone For The Future, Not Trying To Invade And Take Over Agencies”

We wish all of our clients and friends a safe, prosperous New Year…..and we look forward to working together as talent acquisition needs arise in 2019!

Best,

Jeff Gundersen
CEO & Founder

Deloitte Digital: ‘We’re Setting The Tone For The Future, Not Trying To Invade And Take Over Agencies’
by Allison Schiff // Wednesday, January 2nd, 2019

Andy Main, head of Deloitte Digital, is a little tired of hearing people say consultancies are trying to muscle the agencies off of Madison Avenue.

“I’d actually say the agencies are trying to copy the Deloitte Digitals of the world,” Main said. “And when someone copies you, I guess you should be flattered.”

Unlike Accenture, which launched its own programmatic services unit in May, Deloitte Digital isn’t much enamored of the media game. Leave that to the duopoly, Main said, and, well, the media agencies.

“We actually work with a ton of media agencies and placement companies, and we partner with Facebook and Google, to bring that part of the repertoire to the client,” he said. “We think that focusing on owned media is a much better use of marketing spend than paid, because you can capture first-party data and use it for personalization.”

AdExchanger chatted with Main about agency mergers, digital transformation and the changing role of the CMO.

AdExchanger: Deloitte Digital describes itself as a “creative digital consultancy.” How’s that different from, well, an agency?

ANDY MAIN: When we started, we were focused on helping businesses compete on customer experience and customer relationships. A lot of that was on the creative front-end. We bought Magnetic in September for analytics and algorithms to feed into the experience, and that required the confluence of technical design, business skills and creative. We scaled our creative and digital consulting to reflect that. It’s about business model innovation and enabling businesses to come up with new value propositions.

In a way, Martin Sorrell is copying that model with S4. He bought a programmatic business [in MightyHive], but if you look more closely, it’s really about technology plus design, marketing and experience all wrapped together.

Any plans to acquire a programmatic media company of your own or launch a programmatic service unit like Accenture?

We place media through Facebook and DoubleClick. It’s not as if we don’t do it, it just hasn’t been a focus on the business, and that’s because the margins in media are so poor. Why would I enter a market others want to get out of?

We also thoroughly believe in the notion of ecosystem. If you don’t have an asset yourself, but you have a friend who does – like media, for us – why not simply partner?

When brands bring you in, I assume you sometimes find yourself sitting around a conference room table with people from their agencies. Does that ever get awkward?

It’s usually quite friendly. We’re not really adversaries. We’ve all got one common interest and that’s to serve the client we’re working with.

There’s a narrative out there that consultancies are pretty much trying to steamroll Madison Avenue, though. Fair?

I’d actually say we’re setting the tone for the future, not trying to invade and take over agencies. The media business has essentially already been taken over by Facebook and Google, and they’re the ones eating the agencies’ lunch, not us. Agencies with a media-heavy bias to their business model are struggling to shed that as a main source of revenue, but they can’t change quickly enough.

What do you think about the recent spate of agency mergers, like Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R?

It’s inevitable. It makes total sense to merge these assets together, and I would do the same if I were running a holding company, because the market needs greater versatility from agencies. One way to get that is by combining the bits you’ve already got.

But big companies haven’t been taught to work this way, and agencies within a holding company are often competitive on the P&Ls and generally suspicious of each other. Culturally, this sort of thing is very hard to pull off. It’s not as easy as it might sound when it’s being described in a press release.

Seems like everything’s in flux. How about the CMO role? How has that changed over the last year?

CMOs are more like chief experience officers now. Their job description is being redefined, because there has to be messaging at all touchpoints, not just when someone is buying something. Smart CMOs have realized that they need to care about the entire customer experience, not just marketing, awareness and demand generation.

We’re also seeing a trend toward more moments-based customer experience design as opposed to linear progressions and journey maps, which are outliving their usefulness. People don’t operate conveniently in sequential steps – they operate in moments that best suit their lives.

Now’s probably a good time to talk about digital transformation. How are you helping brands through that evolutionary process?

Digital transformation is about discovering unmet human needs to help a business win for the future, and that means figuring out what needs to be transformed across experience and services. Marketing agencies aren’t doing that, because they only really focus on marketing, awareness, influencing me to buy a new product.

Marketing is the thing you do at the end of business transformation, once you’ve figured out what you’re transforming to. For a life insurance company like Transamerica, that means helping them rethink the intersection between health and wealth, while for a Starbucks or a Chipotle, the unmet need might be enabling people to order ahead so they don’t have to wait in line.

Our job is to flip these unmet needs into an offering and put it into the market quickly and successfully. To do that, you need to be super adaptive and have strategy skills, innovation skills, creative skills, digital technology skills and human-centered design all under one roof. Marketing is an integral part of transforming a business, but it comes in toward the end of the journey, and it’s far from the only thing a business has to solve for.

How do you approach hiring talent?

Our hiring is tied to the agency world. A lot of people have come to us from Sapient and Razorfish, in particular, because they’re looking for more of a confluence between technology and creativity. That’s appealing to a lot of creatives.

“Cagency,” “consulgency,” “agencelcy” – all of these are terrible, but what portmanteau should we use when the line between agency and consultancy gets completely blurred?

Ha. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Congratulations, Taylor!
EC wants to acknowledge Taylor Patchen, Director of AR/VR Brand Strategy at Vertebrae, for recently being named one of the “Top 30 Under 30” in Marketing & Advertising by FORBES magazine. Congratulations Taylor, who was an EC “Rising Star” in 2013 at the outset of her marketing career.

Current Career Opportunities

• Global Director of Marketing Private School
• Director Digital and Media Analytics
• Marketing Manager, Cloud-based Legal Practice Management
• Senior Full Stack Engineer

To Our Clients & Friends,

The Thanksgiving season is a time for us to reflect on our gratefulness for the family, friends, and many blessings we have been fortunate to receive and experience throughout the current year.

To all of our clients, connections, business partners, family, and friends, we thank you for your support throughout the year and we send our best wishes to all for a safe and Happy Thanksgiving and upcoming holiday season!

Jeff Gundersen

Improving Employee Experience through Digital Transformation

by Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director – Analytics & Customer Experience

Forrester says 56% of companies have official digital transformation projects underway, but many don’t realize transformation will be a permanent state of being. 21% of businesses think they are “finished” with digital transformation but they are just past the beginning phase.

We all know that as a company leader we are constantly being asked to do more with less resources. We have to manage our people and our culture to make it a great place to work and a great experience for our customers.

How do we facilitate innovative and flexible working practices to keep us moving forward? We need to work with our management team to create tech-based solutions and tools to allow employees to be productive, creative, and engaged at any time, in any place.

Even though the pace of change is very rapid, technology innovation has transformed the way we live and work. We need to be able to communicate, collaborate, share knowledge, and engage each other on demand. If we can’t do this, it will have a profound impact on our productivity and innovation no matter what size organization we work in.

Our workforce is more diverse (more cultures, languages, generations) and we need to be able to work with each other, other companies (partners), and outside contractors effectively. Teams can be assembled on demand from all over the world. However, they all need to work together closely communicating and collaborating. We need to enable an accessible digital workplace that is responsive to globalization and technology change. We are in the middle of a talent deficit where the average tenure of US employees is shrinking from 4.6 years in 2014 to 4.2 years in 2016 (Deloitte). However, getting the employee experience right is a challenge. It can have crippling effects on productivity, employee engagement, security, and the pace of innovation.

The real challenge is enabling our workforce to function in new ways when we are in the middle of a talent crunch. We need to find ways to engage with openness, equity, community and purpose. When the world is driving people apart – organizations need to find a way to unify and engage. These 6 steps should help.

1. Create knowledge management and work product management solutions: This is a secure place to retain information and knowledge across the enterprise. This is a place to store information, look up policies and procedures, and find the right internal contacts.
2. Communication and Community: We need to connect people across all platforms – including countries, languages, and departments. Let people review, persuade, check in, and engage with one another. Empower people to express themselves and share news.
3. Collaboration: Enable co-authorization, file sharing, calendar coordination, in order to bring people together physically and contextually. Create “gathering” areas for employees to share and discuss.
4. Social Engagement: Allow employees to manage their own profiles, share their opinions and knowledge, and comment on what is going on. This lets employees connect with other people and get to know them on a more personal level.
5. Security: User authentication, identity management, data loss recovery, encryption, and employee privacy protection.
6. Tech Support & Flexibility: Be able to grow and evolve your technology platforms to integrate with other systems such as Salesforce, HR, IT, ticket management, Office 365, Google Suite etc.

We know that the coming year 2019 will bring us success and challenges. Preparing to be the best to attract and retain the right talent will only make it easier to achieve your goals.

Chris Hendren – Managing Director – Analytics, Retail & Technology

EC is pleased to welcome Chris Hendren who recently joined our firm as Managing Director – Analytics, Retail & Technology.

Chris is a business strategy, digital transformation, and technology professional with more than 25 years experience leading clients as they redesign and re-architect their businesses leveraging data and technology to transform operations and customer experiences. As a former member of IBM’s exclusive Industry Academy, Chris is a recognized retail thought leader, innovator, and speaker with deep experience in all aspects of the consumer industries.

Chris has spent the last 15 years at IBM in a variety of executive sales and consulting leadership roles having joined IBM as part of IBM’s acquisition of PWC (Price Waterhouse Coopers). Most recently as Vice President Analytic Solutions, Chris led sales and delivery of IBM’s Watson and Advanced Analytics portfolio. Prior to that he led an incubation unit in IBM software group focused on advanced analytics and AI (artificial intelligence). His skills span business, technology, and organization strategy, solution design, implementation, and technology and sales consulting, having held senior roles in global solution sales, software and offering management, and technology consulting.

Throughout his career Chris has assisted his executive clients achieve outstanding results having led some of the most strategic transformations and sales programs for leading retailers in big box, food, food service, entertainment, luxury & fashion apparel, discount, and department store segments. He’s especially proud of his leadership of IBM’s industry solutions strategy & sales enablement during a critical period in IBM’s transformation from products to solution provider. In addition to his technology breadth, Chris brings deep functional expertise having held officer roles in finance, operations, and supply chain for progressively larger retailers earlier in his career.

Chris is a long-time supporter of children’s welfare causes and serves as executive advisor to the CEO of organization serving underserved youth. He is a former board member of a charitable regional mental health organization and is an advocate for the support of the homeless.

Optimizing hiring, engagement and retention strategies
by Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX

A recent Gallup report on the State of the American Workplace, is a study to help business leaders optimize their hiring, engagement and performance strategies. The study collected data from 195,000 US employees. They asked “What are top reasons you would consider leaving your firm for a different organization?”

The primary answer was “My work doesn’t have meaning and purpose.” This is what employees valued most. If employees aren’t able to link what they do best on a regular basis, they tend to quit. Add to this the fact that only 1/3 of US employees are engaged in their work and their workplace right now. It’s not surprising that according to Gallup 51% of American workers are actively looking for a different job or watching for openings right now.

Gallup says “employees feel rather indifferent about their job and the work they are being asked to do. Organizations are not giving them compelling reasons to stay.”

How do you fix the problem?

Since we know that employees need to have a purpose to have a fulfilling life, we need to think about closing the gap between work and lack of purpose.

Employees love to use their unique talent , skills and knowledge to help a company succeed. How do we help this happen?

1. Take time to get to know your employees and what their unique strengths are.

Find out what your employees are good at and find ways to bring out the best in them by assigning meaningful work that goes beyond their day to day job description.

2. Match your employee’s jobs to their strengths.

There is a need to think about matching employees with jobs to be done. The closer you can align the employee’s skills with their purpose, the less likely they are to struggle and become bored or uninterested. Help them help you by building on what they are good at.

3. Help employees in the wrong roles find another job inside your company.

Encourage your best people to move around inside your company. Get them exposed to other areas. This helps everyone and keeps the employees engaged. Let them see there are plenty of options inside the company and they don’t have to leave to get new challenges and opportunities.

4. Institute the “stay interview” method

We all have a process for exit interviewing employees who quit-but most of this information is never used to improve your company. Instead this is a formality that is left up to HR. Instead managers should be asking questions like : What do you like about your job? What don’t you like? What would you prefer to be doing that you aren’t doing now? Do you feel we are using your talent to its full potential? What could be done to align your job with your purpose?

Summary

As management it’s our jobs to engage our employees and retain our top performers before they look for other opportunities. Look for training programs, special projects, employee “internships,” community involvement, mentoring programs, etc. to get your employees involved and fulfilling their purpose. And check in with employees regularly to assure they are feeling utilized to their best and fullest potential and appreciated, recognized and rewarded for their contributions.

EC has been writing for some time now about the rapid transformation of marketing in this digital and mobile-first era. Marketers in every sector are being challenged like never before to market with the customer instead of marketing to the customer. While branding and advertising are still important elements, marketers are challenged to re-engineer omni-channel customer experience and engagement in order to provide timely and relevant offers and content to customers and prospects while shopping or researching considered purchase items.

Customer Experience Is Not About Redecorating It’s About Remodeling
by Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX

We all know that customer experience is hard to implement. It can’t be fixed using surveys and promotions, social media influencers, viral videos, or faster call handling times.  Customer Experience requires a new way of thinking and working.

Customer Experience is more than digital transformation. It requires that we build relationships over time using multiple channels to interact and connect. We need to put the customer first by understanding their needs and building shared experiences.

This requires we rethink how we organize and incentivize our teams to achieve success. It means we need to establish training to get all our employees on the same page as to what we are trying to deliver and what success looks like. Unfortunately, this takes a long time. There are no overnight successes. Most organizations have been doing this for 5+ years before they see significant financial gains.

Customer experience needs to be lead from the top of the organization. It requires the effective integration of product innovation, marketing, sales, operations, service, finance, and legal. The customer doesn’t care how you are organized they want to be understood and served regardless of how difficult that may be for the organization. They expect you to know about all the products and services they use, not just for one brand but for all the brands in your portfolio.

Corporations and employees have a natural resistance to change so delivering this new experience isn’t easy. It has to be done by people who have good listening skills, strong influence management skills, and people who are passionate and willing to stand up for what they believe. Companies like Amazon, Uber, and Google are setting customer’s expectations and we need to respond accordingly.

Here are some ways to get started:

1. Stop hiding from customers. Make it easy for customers to reach you any time , any place by phone, email, or text. Don’t send them to Google to try to find a customer service connection.
2. Customers rely on what other people say about your brand -not what you say. Start listening and learning about your reputation and make changes to improve it.
3. Hire and train for customer experience skills across the organization.  Most likely you need more user experience skills, user testing and prototyping, design skills, ethnographic skills and customer analytics skills.
4. Integrate all your customer information in one data repository to make it easier to use machine learning to recognize patterns.
5. Technology will not replace the human connection but technology can be used to provide your team with the right customer information at the right time. Customer service is what happens when the customer experience is broken. Be sure customer service has what is needed to create a happier customer.

Get started and keep focusing on improvements. You will get better and build your brand reputation and increase your customer life time value.

Forrester reports that customers who report an excellent customer experience will be 2 times a likely to refer your brand as compared to others who rated you as good or  worse. Accenture reports 51% of customers switched brands due to poor customer experience . Cap Gemini says 81% of customers will pay more for a better experience.

We all know a better customer experience pays, so let’s focus on growing our market share and building our brand for the future.

Aileen Cahill, Director of Customer Experience : Prudential Insurance – Worksite Solutions Group

EC is pleased to announce Aileen Cahill has joined our client Prudential Financial – Workplace Solutions Group as Director, Customer Experience. Aileen is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) & Classically-trained CPG brand marketer who blends “Big Data” analytics with marketing expertise to create engaging omnichannel CX.  She began her career in CPG with such brands as Hershey, Pepsi, Conagra. She worked in consulting  with a variety of companies including Peppers and Rodgers helping major brands become more digitally savvy and driving them towards 1 to 1 Marketing. She has also served as a CMO for an internet startup and global Veterinarian healthcare company. She has specialized in Customer Experience since 2009 when she became the chief customer officer at Hurley travel. In the last few years she was the SVP Client Partner Retail and Consumer Goods for Merkle, and the cofounder of a small full-service Customer Experience consulting firm called Agile Marketing. Aileen has been a professor and lecturer at Cornell, Northwestern Harvard, Chicago and the USM. She also published a book Internet Marketing -Building Advantage into a Networked Economy. She has a BA in Applied Analytics from SUNY Binghamton and an MBA from in Marketing from Cornell. Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX at EC, managed this exclusive search for Prudential.

Liza Amezquita, Manager of Customer Experience: Prudential Insurance – Worksite Solutions Group

EC is pleased to announce Liza Amezquita has joined our client Prudential Financial – Workplace Solutions Group as Manager, Customer Experience. Liza is a certified Customer Experience professional. She has been working at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield for the last 11 years, earning 4 promotions along the way. She worked in Customer Experience, Product Development, Underwriting, Sales, and Customer Service. Prior to Horizon Liza worked at Rapid Recovery as a project manager and sales leader. In her early career she worked in medical billing for Ortho Shockwave Consultants, Pediatric Ophthalmic Consultants and EBI. Liza has a BA in Theatre Arts from Rutgers and an MBA in Risk Management from Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City. Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX at EC, managed this exclusive search for Prudential.

Open Career Opportunities

• NEW – AVP, Advisory Marketing Strategy
• NEW – VP, Advisory & Distribution
• NEW – AVP, Marketing Innovation
• NEW – Senior Full Stack Engineer
• Chief Product Officer/CTO – Experience Services Platform (XSP)