IDM Annual Lecture 2012: How to profit from Customer Experience discipline

Guest Speaker

Harley Manning, Vice President and Research Director, Forrester Research; co-author "Outside In".

Harley founded Forrester's customer experience research practice when he joined the firm in 1998. Today he leads a team of analysts who cover customer experience topics ranging from strategy to design to metrics.

At Forrester, Harley has authored many top-read reports and created a number of widely used methodologies. The methodologies include the firm's Website User Experience Review, which the team has now used to evaluate more than 1,500 sites, as well as techniques for evaluating website brand experience and for modelling the ROI of customer experience improvement projects.

A highly rated speaker with a love of the stage, Harley is the founder of Forrester's annual Customer Experience Forum, which he hosts and moderates. In 2011, the Customer Experience Forum became the firm's largest event, attracting more than 1,300 leaders from the financial services, technology, retail, travel, and professional services industries.

Prior to joining Forrester, Harley spent 18 years designing and building interactive services for companies including Dow Jones, AT&T, the pioneering online service Prodigy, and Sears. He developed his love of research while he was at AT&T Bell Labs, where he was brought in to design user-friendly interfaces for inventions in the field of applied artificial intelligence — work that resulted in two patents. He holds an M.S. in advertising from the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Outside In

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business
Authors: Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine; publication date August 28 2012.

What simple innovation brought billions in new investments to Fidelity? What basic misunderstanding was preventing Office Depot from achieving its growth potential? What surprising insights helped the Mayo Clinic better serve both doctors and patients?

The solution in each case was a focus on customer experience, the most powerful—and misunderstood—element of corporate strategy today.

Customer experience is, quite simply, how your customers perceive their every interaction with your company. It’s a fundamental business driver. Here’s proof: over a recent five-year period during which the S&P 500 was flat, a stock portfolio of customer experience leaders grew twenty-two per cent.

In an age when customers have access to vast amounts of data about your company and its competitors, customer experience is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage. But how to excel at it?

Based on fourteen years of research by the customer experience leaders at Forrester Research, "Outside In" offers a complete roadmap to attaining the experience advantage. It starts with the concept of the Customer Experience Ecosystem—proof that the roots of customer experience problems lie not just with customer-facing employees like your sales staff, but with behind-the-scenes employees like accountants, lawyers, and programmers, as well as the policies, processes, and technologies that all your employees use every day. Identifying and solving these problems has the potential to dramatically increase sales and decrease costs.

About KBMG

KBM Group is a consumer-engagement agency that delivers an enhanced view of a brand’s whole consumer by connecting offline and online consumer data from a network of unique data assets. KBM Group transforms marketing efforts into mutually beneficial customer conversations through data-driven insights, allowing brands to achieve high-performance engagement strategies and marketing ROI.

Programme

Feedback

In 2011, 91% of the evaluations rated the Lecture content “Excellent” or “Very Good”. Here’s what some of our audience said of that Lecture, featuring Peter Fitzgerald of Google:

"Once again IDM have illustrated its positioning with a cutting edge presentation."

"A really thoughtful insight into how the internet is developing."

"Excellent speaker. Relevant topic. Concise and highly insightful."

"Peter gave us a wonderful tour of today's digital world."

"Above all the speaker was fantastic…great stuff – thank you!"

Prestigious Awards

Such a seminal event is the perfect context in which to honour excellence in the direct and digital marketing profession. That’s why the IDM Annual Lecture is the place where the Institute presents some of its highest awards.

This year, two very special awards were presented for outstanding contribution to the profession. The IDM’s 25th anniversary Honorary Life Fellowship went to Rory Sutherland Hon F IDM and the IDM’s highest honour. The IDM Lifetime Achievement Award was given posthumously to the Institute’s late founder, Professor Derek Holder.

View the IDM’s prestigious roll of honour for a list of all IDM Honorary Life Fellows.

DST Drinks Reception

This year’s complimentary Drinks Reception was sponsored by DST.

DST specialise in print and electronic communication delivery.
Learn more »

Venue

This 25th Anniversary Lecture was held in the luxurious surroundings of the 5* Millennium Gloucester Hotel London Kensington.

4-8 Harrington Gardens

London

SW7 4LH

United Kingdom

T+44 (0) 20 7373 6030

Map: http://www.millenniumhotels.co.uk/millenniumgloucester/hotel-location/