Act SMART: A Five-Step System to Better Anticipate, Meet, and Exceed the Expectations of Your Customers | McorpCX

Act SMART: A Five-Step System to Better
Anticipate, Meet, and Exceed the Expectations
of Your Customers.
Methodically assess opportunities to drive better experiences
for your ever-smarter, digitally enabled customers.
At its core, acting
SMART is a framework
for consistently driving
business success in a
world of rapidly changing
digital innovation.
White Paper

Key Takeaways:
1. Segment customers by
understanding their needs
and their value to your firm.
2. Modularize products,
services, processes, and
capabilities to increase
flexibility and responsiveness.
3. Anticipate customer needs
by understanding the data
that surrounds them.
4. Reward employees by
aligning their incentives with
the needs of your most valuable
customers.
5. Transform touchpoints by
making them more intelligent
and responsive.
Overview: A five-step system that
helps companies organize around—
and effectively respond to—today’s
demanding customers
The rise of smart customers has influenced the
very nature of the relationship between customers
and the companies that wish to serve them.
Digital innovation means your
customers are smarter than ever
No matter what business you’re in, a fast-
growing number of your customers are
nearly always connected, leveraging digital
devices for instant access to whatever
products, services, and information they
desire. They research and purchase online
with laptops, tablets, and smartphones
with instant access to more advanced
tools and detailed information than many
enterprises had just a few years ago.
These digitally empowered consumers can
behave in a far smarter and better-informed
manner than ever before. And this rise of
“Smart Customers” has influenced the
very nature of the relationship between
customers and the companies that wish
to serve them.
Today’s customers have higher expecta-
tions: greater demands for customization,
innovation, and more personalized
products, services, and experiences.
Likewise, they have lower tolerance for
mistakes, inane hoops, and interactions
that require mindless repetition.
Act SMART: A proven
approach to better serving
smart customers
To attract and retain smart customers,
companies need to take strategic steps
to stay ahead of the competition. This is
where acting SMART fits in. High-performing
companies that understand shifting cus-
tomer needs and changing competitive
landscapes leverage the five-step SMART
framework to better serve and retain their
most valuable customers.
While no one system perfectly fits every
company, we’ve found that this framework
helps companies of all types and sizes
better assess opportunity, while acting
methodically, intelligently, and confidently in
response to evolving complexity, potentially
infinite touchpoints, and multi-channel
customer journeys.
And while you can’t just install a smart
system,the framework can help quickly
identify opportunities and easy wins to help
any organization meet the needs of smart,
digitally enabled customers.

Act SMART: A Five-Step System | 2McorpCX | www.mcorp.cx
Smart companies are reinventing
their connections with customers
SMART helps companies balance a need
for simplicity with the overwhelming
complexity of customer experience systems
and strategies. It provides the lenses you
need to assess opportunity and react quickly
and seamlessly to fast-paced, continually
evolving customer expectations, enabled by
disruptive technologies that keep customers
linked in with anytime, anywhere access.
SMART
CUSTOMERS
DISRUPTIVE
FORCES
Looking for help, looking for
information, and transacting
Anytime
Access
Social
Influence
Pervasive
Memory
Digital
Sensors
Physical
Web
Anywhere
Access
S A TRM ANTICIPATE
the needs of
customers
REWARD
employees
for win/win
behaviors
SEGMENT
customers
by need
and value
MODULARIZE
products and
capabilities
TRANSFORM
touchpoints,
and make
them smart
“More than 60 percent of retail managers surveyed
believe their customers were better informed about
products than their in-store associates.”
Motorola Solutions, “Rise of the Connected Shopper”
A storm of digital disruption
Before we share the Act SMART framework
and how it can help companies serve
digitally connected, demanding customers,
we need to understand the four disruptive
forces driving this innovation. Not only do
companies need to stay ahead of these
forces, they must learn to harness them
to remain relevant and better serve smart
customers.
The 4 disruptive forces include:
1. Social Influence: The result of people
being linked in 24/7, able to share
information anywhere and anytime.
It inserts a crowd between a company
and its customers.
2. Pervasive Memory: Driven by the
digital data trails left after we interact
with a company via phone, web, or
other digital device. The data creates
a “memory” of interactions across
numerous databases.
3. Digital Sensors: Embedded in smart
phones and countless unexpected
places, they track and link our world
to events, locations, and preferences,
transforming objects from dumb to smart.
4. The Physical Web: Just emerging, this
links things, ideas, and events as people
begin to “surf the real world” much as
they surf the web.
Only “smart” companies
will thrive
Thriving in the face of these disruptive
forces depends in part on the willingness
of organizations to adopt the Act SMART
mindset. Act SMART helps organizations—
regardless of size, industry, or structure—
implement ongoing systems and capabilities
to better serve smart customers, creating
nimble and responsive organizations
designed around customer needs, driving
profitability and loyalty as a result.

Understanding your customers at a granular
level is key to serving them well, and the engine
for driving smarter customer experiences.
One of the most common barriers to being
intelligent about the customer experience
is a lack of customer knowledge or under-
standing. While many market analysis
tools focus on a customer’s value to the
company (what your customers are or may
be worth to your firm), they neglect to help
companies define what customers actually
want, need, and expect from you.
If you focus only on what your customer
can do for you monetarily, you miss the
opportunity to discover and anticipate
what you can do for your customer.
Looking through the lens of SMART helps
you understand the interconnectedness
of Needs and Value.
Differentiating customers
by need and value is key to
relevant service
Value segmentation helps companies
focus their efforts on the right customers.
It also identifies groups that might be better
served with lower-touch, lower-cost digital
strategies, and those select customers
who need high-touch contact, and who will
reward the company when they get it.
While value-driven segmentation is an
important first step, it isn’t a standalone
solution—yet most companies stop here.
You can’t afford to. Why? Because value-
based segmentation doesn’t help you
understand what one customer needs
versus another.
The bottom line is that if you don’t
segment customers by their individual
needs, it will be incredibly difficult to deliver
the exceptional customer experiences
needed to remain competitive in today’s
interconnected world.
Unfortunately, many companies don’t
look at customers this way. Or if they
do, they miss opportunities to share the
information across silos and internal
groups. Without a definitive understanding
of your customers’ needs, everyone in the
company is essentially flying blind when
it comes to delivering good customer
experience.
Questions to ask:
ƒƒ Do you know what your customers
really want and need?
ƒƒ Is there a shared understanding of
who your most valuable customers
are, and how to meet their needs?
ƒƒ Do you understand common needs
that all your customers have, and the
unique needs each segment has?
ƒƒ Is your customer data integrated
and easily accessible across your
organization, or is it stuck in silos?
Steps you can take:
ƒƒ Analyze and summarize the
big data that your customer
relationships and smart
touchpoints generate.
ƒƒ Integrate “outside in” Voice-of-
the-Customer (VoC) data.
ƒƒ Use segmentation to predict
customer behavior and needs.
ƒƒ Empower employees to make
decisions based on customer
value and customer needs.
ƒƒ Reorganize business functions
around key customer segments,
based on segmentation insights
and customer needs.
Benefits you can expect:
ƒƒ Significantly more effective
marketing and improved sales.
ƒƒ Improved customer experiences
and stronger relationships.
ƒƒ Increased lifetime value of your
customers.
S M A R T
Segment customers by their value and their needs
Customers expect
the companies that
serve them to invest
financially, intellectually,
and emotionally in
understanding and
consistently meeting their
evolving expectations.

Segment your customers into the
smallest logical groups
The greatest benefit of segmentation is that
you can see the differences between—and the
similarities among—your customers. This will
enable you to:
ƒƒ Reach a consistent, company-wide
understanding of who your customers are
and how to best meet their needs.
ƒƒ Understand common needs that all
customers have, as well as the unique
needs of each segment.
With these insights, you can prioritize the
experiences you deliver, inform the products
and services you design, and customize the
messages you communicate.
In short, segment-level understanding of your
customers is step 1 for enabling stronger,
more personalized relationships.
Designing better customer
experiences
Knowing your customers’ needs means that
you know how to give them what they want
at any point, virtually ensuring that
you will deliver satisfying experiences at
the right moments.
Defining customers by value and needs
on a segment-by-segment basis provides a
highly efficient lens through which to make
your customer experiences smarter and
more effective.
The Results of Segmentation Drive
Segmentation Models
Data Analysis
■ How you’re structured to
serve your customers
■ Which customers to serve,
and how to serve them
■ Which touchpoints to put
where and which to make smart
■ What experiences to deliver,
and to whom
Customer Value
What your customers are or
may be worth, both today and
over time
Customer Needs
What your customers actually
want, need, and expect from you
and your competition
It also provides the framework for a
methodical approach to targeting,
designing, and delivering the right customer
experiences to the right customers.
It’s a win-win proposition for you and
your customers—and a good basis for
a strong customer relationship.
CVS is using big data to help segment its
customers not just by value, but by customers’
wants and needs. It uses at least five segmen-
tation categories, frequently in concert with
one another, which include psychographic
(lifestyle, values, personalities, etc.), behavioral
(attitudes, use, and responses), benefits
Intelligent Segmentation in Action: CVS
(functional and emotional), geographic (who
lives where), and occasion (events and
purchase intervals). This level of intelligent
segmentation crosses functional areas of
any business and all customers, leading to
significant, intelligent customer experience
planning and curating.
The rise of cloud computing
and social media was the
tipping point in the relationship
between customers and vendors.
Empowered with readily available
information, rich analysis, and
access to peers around the
globe, buyers took full control
of their purchase processes
and vendor relationships.

Modularize your capabilities
to increase organizational flexibility
and responsiveness.
Your company needs the flexibility to
accommodate the differences between
customers. It also needs the agility to
respond to changing customer needs,
market dynamics, competitive threats,
and other potentially fast-moving tech-
nologies, trends, and forces. Developing
modular capabilities allows an organization
to leverage strengths and minimize
weaknesses, while also becoming more
responsive and more flexible.
Modularize your teams,
processes, and products
Modularity gives an organization the
capability to respond more quickly—and
therefore more profitably—to customer
interactions by becoming more responsive,
flexible, and efficient.
In addition to helping a company better
accommodate the differences between
customers, modularity also improves the
ability to respond intelligently to com-
petitive threats and other external forces,
better positioning the modularized
company to thrive.
What do modular capabilities
look like?
By “modular capabilities” we mean
developing components that play well
with others. To use a simple example,
if you own a smartphone, you can quickly
customize it by downloading apps. If you
operate a WordPress blog, you can choose
from thousands of plug-ins to add new
capabilities and layouts.
Organizations achieve modularity by
reorganizing people, data, systems,
processes, and assets, until they function
cohesively.
Modularity is Apple leveraging customer-
centric design skills across platforms,
channels, and products. It’s Amazon using
its computing and distribution expertise
to build new businesses and product
offerings. It’s apps and plug-ins, and
making functional parts that “play nice”
with other functional parts.
Questions to ask:
ƒƒ What capabilities is your
organization particularly adept at?
ƒƒ Can you profitably provide
personalized and/or customized
products, services, and experiences?
ƒƒ Can you define and bring offline
capabilities online?
ƒƒ Where can you replicate experi-
ences to meet different needs at
different lifecycle stages?
Steps you can take:
ƒƒ Bring your customers into the
design process early on.
ƒƒ Look for opportunities to change
the look and feel or function
of your products, services, and
experiences.
ƒƒ Create cross-functional teams to
identify core competencies.
ƒƒ Look for opportunities to leverage
digital technology to allow
customers to personalize
experiences or services.
Benefits can include:
ƒƒ The ability to deliver individualized
customer experiences, driven by
the preferences and needs of
individual customers.
ƒƒ Reduced costs, driven by lower
delivery expenses and eliminating
redundancies and waste.
ƒƒ Increased margins, through the
delivery of differentiated products
and services and increased
customer loyalty.
S M A R T
Modularize teams, processes, and products
Customization will become
both routine and cost-efficient
as you tailor the way you
treat and interact with your
customers.

Create modularity (and repeatability)
around your core capabilities
While modular capabilities should exist
across your organization, they tend to be
most efficient when leveraged in these
three key areas:
ƒƒ Teams: Organize them around talent
and competencies.
ƒƒ Processes: Design them to efficiently
support your people, your products and
services, and your customers.
ƒƒ Products: Develop them to incorporate
personalization and mass-customization.
Modular Capabilities
When Planning for New Projects,
Combine Existing Elements in Unique Combinations
Products
Use components that
can be repurposed in
products and services
Processes
Develop reliable
processes that have
multiple applications
Teams
Help employees gain
new skills, combined
in new ways
■ Increase organizational
flexibility and responsiveness
■ Speed reaction to changing
market dynamics
■ Reduce cost and duration of
product/service development
■ Lower the cost of providing
customization
Identify and Cultivate Elements That Can Be Reused in New Ways
Nike uses modular components to create
mass-customized shoes for customers around
the world. The NikeiD®
website gives visitors
an easy-to-navigate experience, letting them
choose from—and customize—a wide array of
shoes. Customers can personalize almost
every aspect by choosing their own colors for
Modularity in Action: Nike iD®
the Nike “swoosh,” shoelaces, tongues, tops,
and soles. They can also add graphics, initials,
and icons. The truth is, any company can
leverage modular design principles to
personalize and customize products and
services for their customers.
Defining the modules right for
your company
A modular mindset needs to pervade
the organization, enabling you—and your
customers—to mix and match channels,
products, services, and experiences to
respond to changing market or mass-
customized needs.
Modularization will become both routine
and cost-efficient as you tailor the way you
treat and interact with your customers.
Eliminating redundancies and waste will
lower delivery costs and increase customer
loyalty, while also bringing your competitive
differentiation into sharper focus. Bottom
line: higher margins will drive revenue up.
Every organization has core capabilities
that it performs exceptionally well.
Recognizing these areas and using them to
speed everything from product and service
design, to analysis, understanding, and
delivery, will give you advantages that your
competitors cannot hope to replicate.
multitel / Shutterstock.com

Understand your customers’ changing
needs and expectations by understanding
the data that increasingly surrounds them.
Whether you have hundreds, thousands,
or millions of customers, every interaction
they have with you leaves a trail of valuable
data. This is where big data and customer
experience overlap, giving organizations the
insights they need to anticipate customer
wants, needs, and behaviors. And these
breadcrumbs aren’t limited to interactions
generated directly with your organization:
opinion, commentary, and other unstruc-
tured, unsolicited data across the social
web provide valuable data as well.
Just a few years ago, storing and analyzing
the massive volumes of customer-generated
data required so much computing resource
that only large companies could afford to
do it. But today, any size organization has
the potential to analyze and understand
customer data, and use it to better anticipate
and respond to customer needs.
In fact, the complexity of the legacy
systems that gather and store this data
in disconnected operational silos means
the advantage has shifted to smaller, more
nimble organizations who are creating
their data-gathering systems now, using
current technology.
How understanding data can
help anticipate customer needs
When you look at the data surrounding your
customers—how and when they look for
help, what they buy, and how they use your
services, for example—patterns and insights
emerge across customer journeys, through
specific touchpoints, via various channels.
You can identify patterns in website usage,
customer service calls, customer orders,
and even product returns, all of which
inform you of customer needs at each step
of the sales and service process. In addition
to guiding a positive customer experience,
you can use these insights to prevent
annoying incidents from happening as well.
Not only will the process and the experience
be tailored to customers’ needs, but rather
than waiting for them to reach out to you
(or a competitor) in frustration, you’ll have
the systems in place to be proactive,
reaching out to your customers in advance
of an issue.
Questions to ask:
ƒƒ Are you learning from the cus-
tomer data being generated by
current digital relationships?
ƒƒ Do you have a unified (cross-channel
and cross-functional) repository of
customer intelligence data?
ƒƒ Can you respond proactively to
customer actions?
Steps you can take:
ƒƒ Identify existing repositories of
customer knowledge and integrate
them into a single business
intelligence platform.
ƒƒ Measure experiences with and
across all types of touchpoints.
ƒƒ Gather structured and
unstructured customer perception
data, as expressed to your
company and across the internet.
ƒƒ Make customer insight data
available across the company.
ƒƒ The ability to respond to customer
needs with personalized products,
services, touchpoints, and
experiences.
ƒƒ Automated customer interactions
through smart touchpoints.
ƒƒ Aligned and seamless customer
experiences across all channels
and customer segments.
ƒƒ Leverage of customer data as
a strategic asset to improve
operations and drive customer
engagement.
S M A R T
Anticipate the needs of your customers

Anticipate customer needs by following
the data trails they create
Despite understanding the value of data-
driven decisions, many established firms simply
have not anticipated their customers’ needs
by following the data trails their interactions
create. Be an early adopter in your industry—
and get ready to crush your competition.
ƒƒ Find the customer data you already have,
and consolidate it.
ƒƒ Leverage readily available technology to
start gathering insights across channels.
ƒƒ Start a formal Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC)
program. Now.
Amazon was recently granted a patent
for what it calls a “system for anticipatory
package shipping,” which basically means
they plan to start delivering packages before
customers even think about clicking “buy.”
Put another way, they’re planning to ship
the things they know their customers want,
Anticipating Customer Needs in Action: Amazon
before their customers know they want
them. Like Amazon, your company can
leverage customer data to become dramati-
cally more intelligent and more responsive
to your customers.
Anticipating what customers
will do—or need—next
The fact is, intelligently anticipating customer
needs is the best way to get more business
from them. With the help of Business
Intelligence software, firms that gather
customer data can identify the patterns that
will help them be proactive. From there, they
can design processes to speed relationship
and journey progress, and prevent the things
that cause annoyances.
According to a Harvard Business Review
article, the average Fortune 1000 marketer
depends on data for just 11 percent of all
customer-related decisions. With established
companies like these so far behind the
curve, just imagine the competitive benefits
for more proactive organizations.
The ability to use customer data to
anticipate customer needs and intelligently
respond is what will separate the firms
that thrive from firms that dive.
Structured and Unstructured Data Analysis
Customer Interactions
■ Process automation
■ Decision support
■ Customer acquisition and
retention efforts
■ Experience, service, and
touchpoint design
■ Operational planning
■ Strategic planning
Social Data
Opinion, “word of mouth”
& commentary from
social streams
Derived Data
Demographic,
transactional &
behavioral data
Expressed Data
Preferences,
expectations, attitudes,
beliefs & perceptions
Historical Data Real-Time Data
Execute Today Plan for Tomorrow
Alexander Supertramp / Shutterstock.com

It’s not possible for companies to consis-
tently deliver high-quality customer
experiences without employees who are
enabled, trained, incented, and rewarded
to do so.
In most companies, employees simply
aren’t clear what their roles and
responsibilities are when it comes to
delivering customer experiences or
delivering on the brand promise.
More often, employees are incented for
behaviors that drive short-term results.
For example, when people are rewarded for
making sales—whether through raises and
promotions, or less formal methods such as
awards, events, or parking spots-—they’re
going to make sales. Even if that means
calling a customer who was recently sold
an auto loan in an attempt to get her
to buy another.
When employees are rewarded for meeting
customer needs, the question that will
remain top of mind for them will be, “what
does this customer need and what do we
have to offer that can best meet that need?”
Are your employees incented to
meet your customers’ needs?
Too often, they aren’t. Some key tactics
employed by highly customer-centric
companies fall into these categories:
ƒƒ Reward employees for serving the needs
of the most valuable customers, and
provide the right information and data
to do so.
ƒƒ Enable employees to better understand
their customers through easy access
to tools such as Voice-of-Customer
insights, customer personas, and
customer journey maps.
ƒƒ Reasonably empower employees to
improve customer experiences by meeting
their needs in ad-hoc ways.
ƒƒ Create a system of reporting employee
ideas and suggestions, and then follow
through on those that improve the
customer experience and mesh with
the organization.
In many cases, you can drive radically
positive results without significantly altering
the ways you formally compensate your
people. Many of the best employees—
whether behind-the-scenes or customer-
facing—are driven more by a desire for
recognition than money.
Questions to ask:
ƒƒ Have you empowered employees
to solve customer problems and
improve customer experiences?
ƒƒ Does your onboarding process
help new hires understand their
roles in serving customers?
ƒƒ Are your reward structures in
alignment with the needs and
desired actions of your most
valuable customers?
Steps you can take:
ƒƒ Create profiles (such as persona
and journey maps) of your most
valuable customers and their
needs, and share them across
the company.
ƒƒ Ensure that your brand—and
the customer experience that it
promises—is clearly articulated
and understood by all.
ƒƒ Give employees the tools they
need to serve customers, including
authority and access to data.
ƒƒ Reward, compensate, and promote
employees for serving customers’
true needs.
ƒƒ Focus on ALL employees, not just
customer-facing ones.
ƒƒ A more adaptable firm that can
quickly respond to changing
customer needs and rapidly
evolving markets.
ƒƒ Increased employee engagement
and loyalty, which will improve
customer experience.
Increase customer-centricity by aligning
employee incentives with customer needs.
S M A R T
Reward your employees for win/win behaviors

Reinforcing the right behaviors
Customer-centric organizations understand
the importance of sharing stories and
recognizing employees for meeting
customer needs. Whether through informal
rewards such as public thanks and ad
hoc gift cards, or by more formalized
means built into compensation and review
structures, they recognize those who deliver
on the needs of customers.
Value how employees impact the
customer experience.
Do employees understand the value of their
interactions with customers, and do you
reward them for good performance?
ƒƒ Learn what employees believe about your
customer experience culture.
ƒƒ Codify your customer experience culture,
and how you want employees to treat
customers.
ƒƒ Identify the biggest gaps and identify ways
to close them.
This sounds easy—but often, it’s not. For
example, one company we worked with found
employees would only send examples
of the ways they helped customers if they
could submit anonymously. Why? They
thought management would be upset they
were spending too much time with customers.
Sadly, these types of unspoken beliefs are all
too common. Make sure they don’t exist in
your company—and eliminate them if they do.
Actions and reward systems like these
enable companies and the individuals
who power them to become more customer-
centric. And customers notice the difference.
The truth is, if you want your employees
to put the needs of your customers first,
your employees must be both motivated
and enabled to do so—and great customer
experiences will follow.
A past winner of Forrester Research Inc.’s
Voice-of-the-Customer Award, American
Express focuses on rewarding employees for
meeting customer needs, and gives them
the tools to do so. This financial services
leader ties customer service representa-
tives’ performance assessments directly to
Rewarding Employees in Action: American Express
customer feedback scores, so incentives
are well aligned with meeting or exceeding
customer expectations. At the same time,
formal training programs in techniques such
as active listening means employees have the
skills they need as well.
Your Organization Adapts
Reward Employees for Desired Behaviors
Formal and Informal Rewards: Compensation and Recognition
■ More flexible
■ More responsive
■ Greater loyalty
■ Lower cost
■ Higher revenues
■ Creating a customer-centric culture
■ Improving your ability to meet changing customer needs
■ Needs are met
■ Experiences are easy
and enjoyable
■ Products and services are
more personalized and useful
Build Share of Customer Create Modular Capabilities
Company Wins Customer Wins
Nadalina / Shutterstock.com

Touchpoints are all the places a company
intersects with its customers: product,
packaging, store, website, call center,
Twitter, invoice, help desk, etc. And while
customers are hyper-connected, far too
many companies still manage touchpoints
from a silo- or channel-based perspective.
Marketing promotes a product or service,
creating touchpoints along the way. Sales
creates touchpoints to help sell said
product or service. Accounting rolls out
touchpoints to collect information on those
sales. IT rolls out customer-facing systems
to manage them, and call centers have
phone-based, human touchpoints to
solve problems.
In many companies, the data that flows to
and from these touchpoints isn’t integrated,
and customer journeys aren’t connected
when customers move from one channel
to the next. Today, touchpoints have the
ability to be dramatically more powerful
than a random series of communications
and patches.
By bringing digital innovation into the
mix through the creation of smart,
interconnected touchpoints, companies can
radically transform the ways they interact
with customers to create highly personal
experiences that competitors can’t easily
match. This means transforming your
touchpoints from dumb to smart.
What are smart touchpoints?
“Smart” touchpoints allow data to flow in
multiple directions: from your company to
your customers, and from your customers
to you. A digital device gives you the
potential to sense a customer’s location,
actions, or intentions, as well as monitor
what happens when customers use your
product or service.
In contrast, “dumb” touchpoints such
as a printed statement just sit there, not
gathering useful information that could
radically alter a company’s understanding
of how customers interact with it.
Smart touchpoints give companies the ability
to respond intelligently, and better yet,
proactively. They focus on the customer’s
needs and journey, and have the ability to
gather and transmit meaningful data back
to your organization. The more you know,
the better you can customize, and the cycle
of improvement goes on.
Today, digitally enabled smart touchpoints
are increasing exponentially. Customized
and personalized services are the
foundation for innovative customer
experience, and making touchpoints
more interactive (or “smart”) is the key to
developing that foundation.
Questions to ask:
ƒƒ How can smart touchpoints help
you better understand customer
needs and improve experiences?
ƒƒ Which dumb touchpoints can be
made smart? Or eliminated, if not
that important?
ƒƒ How can smart touchpoints drive
mass customization, personalizing
customer experiences and products?
ƒƒ Can you bring offline processes
online?
Steps you can take:
ƒƒ Map your customer journey to see
where needs could be better met
and experiences improved through
smart touchpoints.
ƒƒ Map touchpoints to learn which
are most important and if the right
touchpoints are in the right places.
ƒƒ Map systems for touchpoint
management and delivery to reduce
cost and increase efficiencies.
ƒƒ Improved customer experience,
because the touchpoints
customers encounter will be
tailored to their needs.
ƒƒ The ability to see into the future
by analyzing the data that smart
touchpoints generate from
customer interactions.
ƒƒ Reduced costs and increased
efficiencies, as you remove or
modify dumb and redundant
touchpoints.
Smart Touchpoints deliver personalized
experiences, while simultaneously making
companies smarter about their customers.
S M A R T
Transform touchpoints to better meet customer needs

Touchpoints that connect
with customers
Smart touchpoints are at the heart of
delivering more refined, relevant, tailored
customer experiences. For example, Sage
Software has downloaded more than a
billion data points from its customers’
daily usage, and uses this information to
help customers understand how to better
leverage their software. It also uses this data
to intelligently upsell products and services.
While we don’t all have the firepower
of Sage, the smarter the customer
touchpoints, the more data there will be
to mine. Data feeds intelligence, which
in turn can drive the creation and delivery
of highly personalized experiences. And
it’s that level of data-driven customization
that will put you ahead of your competitors.
Smart touchpoints are within the reach
of just about any company. Regardless
of size or industry, the development of
mobile apps and data-enabled products
and services can open up a world of
opportunity by helping companies better
understand and meet customer needs.
It’s time to make smarter touchpoints
Across virtually every industry and every kind
of company, digital touchpoints are changing
customer experience. To unlock the power
of your touchpoints:
ƒƒ Understand the importance and
effectiveness of existing touchpoints.
ƒƒ Understand where and how customer needs
are not being met today.
ƒƒ Look for opportunities to innovate customer
experience by customizing touchpoints to
better meet customer needs.
ƒƒ Make dumb touchpoints smart and smart
touchpoints even smarter.
Smart touchpoints give you the ability to better
sense and respond to customer needs. So
start by examining how to better harness the
digitally enabled touchpoints you have now.
Consider Zipcar. As a Zipcar customer, your
experience is totally personalized, based
on previous interactions, where you are,
and what you want. Zipcar brings offline
processes online, helping you find and
choose the best car for you, no matter
Transformed Touchpoints in Action: Zipcar
where you are. Zipcar also uses this data
to help improve experience and drive value,
giving the company almost double the
revenue and efficiency of a traditional car
rental company.
Determine Touchpoint Value and Effectiveness
Inventory Your Touchpoints and the Processes That Support Them
Make Dumb Touchpoints Smart
■ Automate, digitize, and embed
sensors in your touchpoints
■ Add missing touchpoints
■ Eliminate redundant touchpoints
■ Improve underperforming
touchpoints
Digital
Smart touchpoints
are multi-directional:
data flows in every
direction
Human
Human touchpoints
are bi-directional:
information flows
two ways
Static
“Dumb” touchpoints
lack interactivity:
data flows just
one way
Customer Experience Business Results

Today’s customers expect the companies that
serve them to invest financially, intellectually,
and emotionally in understanding and consistently
meeting their evolving expectations.
“According to a CEI Survey,
86 percent of buyers will pay
more for a better customer
experience. But only 1 percent
of customers feel that their
expectations are consistently
met. These statistics highlight
the magnitude of the growth
opportunity before us.
What if you just increased the
percentage of consistently
happy customers by 5 percent?
For any company, large or
small, that would be a game-
changer in terms of revenue
and profit.”
Christine Crandall, Forbes
In conclusion:
it really pays to get—and
act—SMART
The framework we present in this paper
provides a way for organizations of all sizes
and types to better serve their customers,
and increase margins and revenue in
the process. At its core, however, acting
SMART is a way to leverage technology
and innovation to do something the best
companies have always done better than
their competition: Give customers what
they want.
It’s as simple as this: Listen to your
customers. Respond to their needs, even
those they don’t yet know they have.
And make this a priority for your team.
Key takeaways:
act SMART, starting now
ƒƒ Segment customers by needs, and
your company will have an easier time
setting priorities and making investment
decisions.
ƒƒ Modularize your capabilities to make
your company more nimble and better
able to adapt to changing customer
needs.
ƒƒ Anticipate customer needs by
recognizing patterns and responding in
a manner that saves customers time,
money, and effort.
ƒƒ Reward employees for win/win
behaviors and embracing this SMART
approach to business.
ƒƒ Transform your touchpoints to better
meet customer needs, by giving each
the ability to sense and respond, so your
products and company can act smart.

This white paper is one of a series based
on concepts first published in Smart
Customers, Stupid Companies: Why Only
Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How
To Be One of Them. This best-selling book,
co-authored by McorpCX President Michael
Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff, was written
for those companies—and the executives
who run them—interested in leveraging
digital innovation to better serve their
customers. It shows what can be done
today to create sustainable competitive
advantage, and what it takes to profit from
disruption instead of getting crushed by it.
With coverage in publications including
Harvard Business Review, Time, Huffington
Post, Fast Company, and Bloomberg
Business Week among others, Smart
Customers, Stupid Companies challenges
business leaders to understand and
embrace the wave of disruptive, digital
innovation that’s affecting virtually every
industry—and presents unprecedented
opportunity for those who grasp it.
Learn more about the book by visiting
www.smartcustomers.com.
How can McorpCX help you?
McorpCX is expert at driving customer
experience transformation in an increas-
ingly connected world. If you’re interested
in learning how we can help you better
understand and improve your customers’
experience with your organization, give
us a call at 1-866-526-2655 or visit
www.mcorp.cx/contact.
McorpCX is a experiences services
company. For more than a decade, our
blend of strategic thinking, technology
solutions, and design innovation has
helped companies transform products,
services, customer experiences, and the
processes that support them in exciting
and profitable ways. 
We deliver category-leading customer
experience insights and tools that
help clients—from fast-growth market
leaders to the Fortune 100—build
stronger relationships, seize competitive
advantage, and drive differentiation.
The result is increased loyalty and
engagement in a world where customers,
markets, and industries are undergoing
radical change.
Our practical, problem-solving approach
to customer experience and brand
research, strategy, and design has led to
successful business outcomes for clients
including Microsoft, GE, T. Rowe Price,
Danone, and Blue Shield of California.
Whether your organization is just
beginning its customer experience
journey or is well down the experience
transformation path, we’re the customer-
experience service company CX leaders
turn to to drive value across businesses,
accelerate innovation, and drive the
change that delivering differentiated
customer experiences requires.
Visit us online at www.mcorp.cx
© 2002–2015 McorpCX all rights reserved. Touchpoint
Mapping
®
is a registered trademark of Touchpoint Metrics, Inc.
“This is a very insightful book, and
one that provides a really different
(smarter) perspective on customer-
centric value co-creation!”
Frank T. Piller, professor of management,
RWTH Aachen University, Technology
& Innovation Management Group, and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
MIT Smart Customization Group
“Technology-enabled customers
are getting smarter every day,
while companies mired in the
same old ways of doing business
just come off as stupider and
stupider. Do not let that happen to
you. Instead, follow Hinshaw and
Kasanoff’s prescription to ride the
waves of today’s perfect storm of
disruptive innovations.”
B. Joseph Pine II, co-author, The Experience
Economy and Infinite Possibility: Creating
Customer Value on the Digital Frontier
“So energizing it actually made my
skin tingle and my pulse race. Lots
of books prod you to think about the
future; this book is like a punch in
the face. My thinking has changed
and I’m now light years ahead. I’m
fortunate I had the opportunity to
read this before my competitors.”
Chris Zane, founder and president, Zane’s
Cycles, and author of Reinventing the Wheel:
The Science of Creating Lifetime Customers
“One of the most exciting business books I’ve
ever read—I dare you to try reading this book
without getting at least ten brilliant new ideas
for your business. You won’t be able to do it.”
Don Peppers, founding partner of Peppers and Rogers Group, and co-author of
The One to One Future.

McorpCX is a leading customer experience
services company. For more than a decade,
our blend of strategic thinking and design
innovation has helped companies—from
fast-growth market leaders to the Fortune
100—transform products, services, customer
experiences, and internal processes in
exciting and profitable ways.
McorpCX
1-866-526-2655
www.mcorp.cx

Act SMART: A Five-Step System to Better Anticipate, Meet, and Exceed the Expectations of Your Customers | McorpCX

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