A common customer vocabulary with Thunderhead's ONE Engagement Hub

As this exciting ride with Thunderhead continues, I'm experiencing something with a thrilling new frequency:  I am in more and more meetings where someone looks across the table and says something like, "we've been trying to have this conversation forever, we just never had a focus for it."

We could label this conversation they've been trying to have in many ways--omni-channel engagement, customer centricity, customer experience, 360 degree view of the customer.  But if I were to really boil it down I'd describe it like this: "defining a common vocabulary of customer intent".

The reason I like this definition is that it rolls all those other (buzzword stained) terms into a concise reason for having the conversation in the first place.  If we're doing things right, we're:

1. Thinking about what the customer wants to accomplish, in their terms.
2. Realizing that the customer is going to accomplish those things where and when he wants to.
3. Appreciating that the customer isn't going to care about my internal systems or the challenges I have integrating things.

The ONE Engagement Hub provides the perfect canvas to facilitate this conversation.  Rather than coming from a particular perspective (campaign management, content strategy, mobile app development, CRM operations), ONE is built to appreciate the strengths and gaps in those existing systems and strategies.  Rather than insisting on a wholesale replacement of things we're working with today, it starts to raise them up, fill those gaps, uncover insights and opportunities locked therein.

Our conversation to evolve the common vocabulary is fundamental to this.  When we don't weight ourselves down with the specific capabilities and challenges of one system, we start to talk more clearly in the customer's voice, around her intent.  We discuss customer activities (not where or how they happen).  We talk about our banking customer who wants to open an account, and not the need to just optimize the form where she (might) want to open it.  We talk about the conversational opportunity around the opening of the account (wherever she decides to talk about it).

Yeah, it's freeing.

Probably my favorite thing about ONE in these conversations is that we can put it to work right away, visualizing REAL WORLD customer activity--happening today--against this shiny new common vocabulary we're starting to agree on.  And like any great project, this new vocabulary is flexible to changes in that real world, to the exciting follow up conversations that result from quickly gained initial insights and to the evolution of our customer conversations wherever the technology world takes us.

Looking forward to working with your team to create this new vocabulary.