Back from Singapore

I spent three days doing a training in Shanghai (along with an international Customer Management awards program), then went to Singapore to teach a CEM and new customer management models with UNI Strategic, who did a nice job of putting together the sessions.

I had a great group, I think a perfect fit for the seminar: experienced, facing challenges, and looking for organized ways to improve their customer engagement.

As I was flying back, I finally had a moment to pull the plastic bag off my latest issue of Harvard Business Review, and there was a perfect article on customer management issues in service companies. It goes to the heart of business model trade-offs that define/support the brand, and therefore the profit model, that companies must choose.

One point made in the article is that services companies -- and they include Wal-Mart as an example -- have to make choices about what they will excel at, and what they will not emphasize. Again, this is a theme we covered. But recall our Wal-Mart in Germany case study, and how it showed that Wal-Mart's traditional strengths either didn't work for them, or were undermined by a poor customer experience design, or both. The question I pose is this: When you are designing a customer experience strategy, to what extent must you build in globalization? Can you create a "branded experience model" that works globally, or must you vary the model depending on the local conditions (hierarchy of values, etc.)? If you vary it locally, to what extent do such variations undermine your brand?

Got some examples? How is Carrefour doing it? Tesco? Apple? Procter & Gamble?