I was reading up on some of the VizThink 2008 session summaries that people have been blogging about, and there was one bit from Jim Haudan’s Drawing the Big Picture: Strategy Alignment and Deployment Using Visualization session that sort of stuck out at me:

“Gallup polls indicate that 300 billion is lost in productivity as 25% of a typical organization is disengaged, 50% is ambivalent, and only 25% are agents of change. This lack of engagement results in the fact that 66-90% of strategies that are developed don’t get executed.”

An interesting stat in and of itself, but what happens if we think of this not in terms of productivity within an organization, but rather, from the perspective of a company and its customers:

“…$300 billion is lost in revenue as 25% of a typical organization’s customers are disengaged (buy the product service, but are not satisfied with the level of service or quality), 50% are ambivalent, and only 25% are agents of change (excited about your company/product, and tell their friends). This lack of customer engagement results in the fact that 66-90% of customer service efforts targeted at your customers, don’t succeed.”

Now the numbers in my scenario are completely made up, but if that were the reality - and certainly, it could be in a crowdsourced model where your customers are your employees; what would you need to do differently in your customer service strategy?

…And the best thing about getting engaged with your customers, is that it doesn’t cost you 3 months salary!

(photo credit: rmrayner)