While we expand our operation network day by day, we also target to improve our service range and quality through new designations to our young and dynamic team. We think the crux of doing good jobs lies in true harmonization of dynamism and experience. As a software company, we seize the zeitgeist and as a customer experience firm, we try to absorb the experience we gain over time. Concordantly, we aim to utilize decades long cumulative know-how of marketing, customer services and retailing industries. The latest fruit of our efforts towards becoming much more than here and now, is Uğur Özmen’s engagement into our team.
A doyen of marketing industry, an academic, a well-known critic of good and bad ideas; Uğur Özmen, began his career at Price Waterhouse Consultancy after his graduation from the Middle East Technical University Department of Business Administration in 1981. He blazed many trails in the field of retail banking, including the creation of Turkey’s first ever installment bank card and the transformation of “credit card oriented” traditional bonus practices into “customer centric” ones through empowering clients to rate banking services.
Özmen is promoted by many marketing bloggers among “Top 10 Must-Follow Marketing Authors” since 2008. He now prepares to share his wisdom of 30 years in the fields of marketing and customer experience with organizations in participation with Pisano. Our readers can follow him via social media and on his personal website
Please enjoy our interview below with Uğur Özmen on his career journey, customer experience design as well as on his ideas regarding the potential services to be offered in cooperation with Pisano.
How did your story begin with Pisano?
Our story with Pisano began in 2015 when I first met with Pisano’s founding partners Kemal and Özkan during a gathering at Endeavor. They told me about their project and I was instantly convinced. The idea would be extraordinarily efficient regarding the reduction of potential customer losses through properly measuring the satisfaction at touch points and instantly reporting troubles. I admired both the idea of the project and the enthusiasm of the partners I met.
Later, we teamed up whenever Pisano required my expertise. We occasionally came together to discuss issues regarding various organizations and several industries. Then we finally decided to work together when Pisano reached its international growth stage.
What are your plans about Pisano? What will change over time?
Pisano is currently developing an infrastructure to gather customer feedback not only at physical touch points but at each phase of the customer experience journey. This infrastructure also has a notification automation that pushes the relevant issue to the right person through appropriate channels. This enables the relevant organization to take the required action in real time.
This extraordinarily progressive and nearly universally compatible approach has already been in motion. My contributions to that infrastructure will be:
- Comprehending our clients’ expectations better. After all, I have almost 40 years long work experience.
- Bolstering a roadmap via handling feedback in harmony from an information management perspective and in parallel with higher growth targets. We can also call it an advanced version of feedback management.
We know that you provided many organizations with consultancy services over the course of 20 years. What are Pisano’s distinctions compared to those?
Since my fields of proficiency are information management, data interpretation and CRM, organizations that I work for are required to be advanced ones. An SME does not or, let’s say, is unable to consider the importance of information management and data interpretation for its own future. Thus, I was mainly working for large scale companies with high governance standards.
In this respect, Pisano has innumerable distinctions. First of all and for the first time in my career, I work with such a young team also such a young management. Pisano’s awareness of the importance of information management even at their early growth stage and their efforts to build an information management system on solid grounds is also attractive to me. The egoless management, people calling each other by their first names are huge differences for me.
The importance of a better customer experience design has begun to be accepted in all over the world. What do you think about this issue in Turkey and in foreign markets?
Technology (albeit the majority names it with an improper notion of “digitalization”) facilitated great conveniences for the both sides of organization – customer relationship. Traditional concepts depending on one-way communication have entered into a new era of “interaction” (mutually influencing each other).
Customers, thanks to easier access to information, reached all type of information they need and loyalty diminished as a result. As differences among different brands scaled down, unreasonable loyalty dwindled. Customers rushed into the brands offering them remarkable experiences to share with others.
Organizations, meanwhile, developed competent models through gathering data over each customer touch point with the aim of making the true offer at the most appropriate time. Organizations that utilized this chance to improve customer experience began to make difference. Their names pronounced more and more in social media, their brands were spread by word of mouth. Quick interpretation of the gathered data over customer touch points and ability to establish a “flawless and frictionless customer experience” are the key elements here. The meaning of loyalty altered over time. Both in Turkey and abroad, loyal customers to the brands offering such great experiences to share with others appeared.
Ultimately, all companies realized the necessity of differentiating their customer experience. Therefore, designing the customer experience to fuel brand recall rather than letting it casually slide gained importance.
Is there any recent project at Pisano that excites you?
There are currently many projects at Pisano that excite me as well as the rest of the team. Being able to receive feedback at each step of customer’s journey from need recognition, solution seeking, deciding on an organization or on a company, purchase, warranty or maintenance/repair, and finally to the expiration of product or service life cycle…
Existence of a Pisano product for each step of this journey and adaptability of it to every organization or industry really excites me.