Technology has rapidly changed the ways in which companies and businesses approach growth and 1………. of clients. Customers research products through digital channels and recommendations before engaging with sales and marketing professionals, social media giants act as gatekeepers for reaching new audiences, and targeted ads are becoming increasingly expensive and easy for customers to filter out or 2……….. As the process of acquiring customers has changed, so too has the process of retaining them. With so much choice, subscription models that allow customers to 3,………. whenever they wish are increasingly popular in everything from gym memberships and phone contracts to entertainment and music. User behaviour across the board has replicated this as customers value experience and flexibility above price or product. These factors, plus the fact that customers both in business-to-consumer and business-to-business environments are 4, ………. to lock themselves into contracts or packages, mean the goal posts have had to move. As acquiring new customers becomes more costly, and customers can freely and easily take their business elsewhere, the focus naturally shifts towards proactively retaining them by ensuring their needs are met and that they are kept happy. After all, happy customers who can give trusted recommendations are the healthiest way for a business to5, ………. customer churn. This is why customer success is increasingly important for growth. Although customer success exists alongside customer support, it is different in several key ways: it is proactive rather than reactive, it aims to drive value from the product or service rather than 6,………. issues and it is focused on the long term, rather than the short term. While there are varying definitions of customer success, generally speaking the key principles remain the same. The first point is the mission, the foundation upon which you can build customer success strategy. This is about values, but can essentially be summed up by goals such as creating a positive image and reputation. Next is customer journey. This includes 7,………. how customer interactions should best happen, which prepares organisations to think about the next step: people. With the right teams in place, with clear roles and responsibilities outlined, they can focus on process which is where the bulk of the detailed work happens. The process has to be constantly assessed and built on over time to make sure it is as honed and effective as possible, tailored to the needs of the customer. Technology can be brought in at this stage to help create solutions, give support, and speed up and monitor processes. This brings us to the final destination: measurement and iteration. At each step it’s important to monitor and reflect on efficacy to ensure customer success is fully aligned with the processes. Customer success is most clearly 8………. in the world of software, particularly with software-as-aservice companies. But clients can only be successful if internal teams providing the services are given the tools to help them manage changes. “A lot of businesses lose sight of the fact that they need to give their teams the tools to help their client, and make sure they are invested and driven to help these changes be 9………. This means key performance indicators need to be 10………. to the whole business, not just executives, and that there is a full understanding of the client’s bigger objectives and long-term needs.
a, reluctant b, recognizing c, combat d,thrive
e,resolving f, retention g, tailored h, prevalent
i, opt out j, efficacy k, mapping out l, ignore
m, implemented n, visible
1,Since the global financial crash, public companies have faced what must feel like a barrage of new reporting requirements. Regulators have pushed for greater corporate transparency in the wake of the 2008 economic carnage in an attempt to regain trust and rebuild reputations. But during the ensuing decade, new global media channels grew, evolved and spread, which enlarged the public’s access to information and the speed at which they receive it, refocusing the spotlight on corporate actions. The risk to reputation has traditionally been seen as an outcome of other risks and not necessarily a standalone risk.
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3, Mr Hutcheon says that most companies still see reputation as a risk of risk. In fact, he says, if that question had been asked five years ago, no one would have seen reputational risk as a standalone risk. Another core reason why reputational risk is more vital is because the balance between tangible and intangible assets has tipped towards intangible value, such as trust, reputation and goodwill, elements that are not as easy to manage as physical machinery. Therefore, the valuation of a business can be increasingly found in its intangible assets.
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5,Uber’s decision not to report to police sexual attacks and other crimes by its drivers for fear of damaging its reputation massively backfired for the taxi-hailing giant when in September 2017 Transport for London revoked its licence. Uber claims to have turned over a new leaf by bringing in chief executive in Dara Khosrowshahi. Its reputation, however, remains tarnished in one of the most important markets for Uber outside America. Companies that try to hide wrongdoing, such as German car manufacturer Volkswagen when its emissions scandal was uncovered in September 2015, are suffering for longer and deeper because news travels fast and you can’t fix a brand like you can fix a misfiring machine.
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7, When those two teams work in silos, lacking any meaningful collaboration, risks can rise up undetected. “That’s where it falls down,” Mr Hutcheon says, “when the gap widens between the comms team, who are the antennae for the business, and the professional risk experts. That’s when companies face real risk exposure.” Some evidence of this can be seen by the fact that with one week to the deadline of April 4, fewer than 4,000 of the 10,000 large UK companies required to report on their gender pay gap had still not disclosed the average difference between men and women’s pay per hour. Increasingly, the gender pay gap is a focus not just for female employees, but for investors and other stakeholders too.
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9 As counterintuitive, and perhaps as painful, as it may be to meet the public’s new demands, management need to disclose more, more frequently. Understanding and managing reputational risk is all part of societal change. Aligning commercial interests with social ones shouldn’t be such a hard place to start. More importantly, it’s not a question of unlimited disclosure, but relevant disclosure. Whether we’ve reached a tipping point in disclosure terms will be determined perhaps by how corporates handle the next financial crisis.
a, “How you are viewed in all manner of different aspects, not just products and services, but your impact on society as an employer is right at the top of the agenda now. This is a new phenomenon in its importance,” says Jon Terry, diversity and inclusion consulting leader at PwC UK. Although it’s high on the board’s agenda, change seems to be slow. Traditional company structures aren’t designed to manage the new risks to reputation, says Mr Hutcheon. They need to restructure their thinking and teams to build early-warning systems that detect reputational risk. “Companies are getting there, but it’s just not joined up enough yet,” says Airmic’s Mr Ludlow. Traditionally, risk is dealt with by risk experts, while reputation tends to be managed by the corporate affairs or communications teams.
b, In contrast, FTSE 100 drinks giant Diageo, which has seen its share price rise exponentially over the past decade, is repeatedly held up as a company to be admired because of its progressive policies, such as its latest one on full pay for parental leave for the first 26 weeks for all its 4,500 employees. “It’s a new era for business. Large businesses enjoy much less control and ultimately that’s an empowering thing. A lot of control is moving out of the business to society. And that will align how business puts back things into society when they are constantly under scrutiny. It’s going to feel hard for businesses, but that’s the way things are going,” Mr Hutcheon says. Research consistently shows that more diverse companies are more profitable and current thinking suggests more open and transparent companies reap the rewards
c,This view has been gradually changing because it is increasingly clear that reputation is critical to the viability of a company. With this greater knowledge and means of communicating, societal norms and public expectations of companies have evolved too. People’s voices are louder and opinions, valid or otherwise, can spread around the world in nanoseconds. Nevertheless, trust in companies has recovered somewhat, according to the Edelman 2019 Trust Barometer. Trust has rallied so much so that 76 per cent of those surveyed by Edelman say chief executives should take the lead on change rather than waiting for governments to impose it. This suggests that despite the consistent demands for greater corporate disclosure, management are still not leading on change as quickly as the public want, and therefore still haven’t understood how quickly reputation can be affected in a highspeed world of global communications. “Traditionally, risk officers have seen reputational risk as a consequence of other things happening. Is it a risk of risks or a risk in its own right?” asks Mark Hutcheon, director of risk advisory at Deloitte.
d,“Companies are good at managing humans and physical assets, but they aren’t good at managing intangible assets. We haven’t got our heads around the idea that we have a whole new class of assets. We have to learn how to manage them, understand the risk and put strategies in place,” says John Ludlow, chief executive of risk managers Airmic. This shift, coupled with the rapid rise in social media usage, has made reputational risk much trickier to handle and therefore more important to manage. Suddenly, the incidents that can damage reputation are a lot more volatile, quicker acting and, in some cases, can become systemic risks to organisations
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Sok bulit rendeztek az utóbbi időben.
Kevés mulatságban volt részem az utóbbi időben.
Sok tanácsot kaptál tőle?
Sok feladatot kaptam tőle.
Kevés új gondolat jutott eszembe.
Kevés tudásom van erről.
Sok új információ van ebben a jelentésben.
Sok új adat van ebben a jelentésben.
Nem sok hírt hallottam.
Nem sok új eszközt vettek.
Nem sok berendezés maradt itt.
Throughout history, societies have used physical tokens to represent units of currency: sea shells, stones, beads, metal coins and paper notes. Increasingly, this relationship between money and material objects is being severed. In 2017, card transactions overtook cash for the first time and the use of contactless payment cards doubled. UK Finance, the trade association for financial services, predicts that by 2027 cash will account for just 16 per cent of all transactions. People pay in person using plastic cards or smartphones; they organise and move their money around an expanding universe of mobile fintech apps and can exchange it into a boggling variety of new systems of value, including virtual and cryptocurrencies.
Richard Thaler, the 2017 Nobel prize winner for economics, made the observation that people tend to treat different sources of money, earmarked for different uses, in different ways. Money, he argued, is “socialised”. This particular cognitive bias, which he called “mental accounting”, is just one of many colouring how we interact with money. Now a number of sociologists are examining how mobile finance and new forms of virtual currency are shaping how we relate to money and think about its value. How will they affect cognitive biases? The most fundamental cognitive bias associated with cashless payments is its dulling effect on the “pain of paying”. Behavioural economists observe that the psychological discomfort experienced when parting with money varies by medium. Contrast the pain of handing over a wad of £50 notes taken from an ATM, compared with the guilt-free ease of a frictionless one-click payment on Amazon. “Many studies have shown that people spend more when there are fewer blocks preventing us from doing so and that our sense of the reality of the money is cut loose,” says Professor Grace Lordan, a behavioural economist at the London School of Economics.
Professor Bill Maurer, legal and economic anthropologist at the University of California, notes that new technological platforms are socially differentiated and differentiated ways of paying that render the money associated with them similarly multiple. Age, gender, nationality and social class can be differentiators, and each comes with its own habits, codes and users. “Different groups tend to gravitate to different payment technologies,” he explains. For instance, teenagers and young people were once the near-exclusive users of the mobile payment app Venmo in the United States, and early adopters of bitcoin were almost exclusively white and male, a profile that has grown more international, though no less male. “Apple Pay is only available on newer and more expensive iPhones, creating a segmented market that itself is further separated for the hoi polloi of commerce because, at least in the early days, Apple Pay was only accepted at select retailers, such as the high-end retail chain Whole Foods,” Professor Maurer says in the book Money Talks. “We’re witnessing something of a monetary revolution,” says Nigel Dodd, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. “Money is morphing from something we have, to something we do,” he says in the same anthology. “It is becoming increasingly apparent that money is a process, not a thing, whose value comes from its qualities as a social relation.”
As the use of new virtual currencies and alternative units of exchange gather pace – J.P. Morgan in February became the first commercial bank to launch its own, the JPM Coin – behavioural research into cryptos is just beginning. Last summer, the Dutch bank ING released a Europe-wide survey into perceptions around cryptos. While 32 per cent of people reported it is the future of investing, most considered it is a riskier investment than holding cash, gold, real estate or government bonds. ING called on behavioural economics to explain: “The average person’s perception of risk is partly based on a natural bias towards tangible and familiar assets, such as gold and property, and less about the actual degree of risk represented by a particular asset class.” The report found that countries with lower per-capita income levels, including Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey and Italy, seem likelier to consider paying with cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin’s extraordinary surge in value between 2017 and 2018 positioned it as a way to augment earnings, according to the report. Recent events give substance to these findings. The virtual gold in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft is now almost seven times more valuable than real cash from Venezuela, according to CNBC. Venezuela, in a desperate bid to mitigate hyperinflation, even launched its own cryptocurrency early last year. Artificial intelligence (AI) presents another dimension to the debate around the use of digital currency. Could AI learn consumers’ behaviour and exploit cognitive biases to part them from their cash or be used for good? Dr Grace Lordan of the London School of Economics notes: “When we think about money, we are affected by our emotions and our autopilot. It is quite easy to manipulate people’s behaviour.” Professor Maurer, who is embarking on a new study into AI, funded by the credit card company Capital One, sees opportunities to help financial and banking institutions develop more responsible and fairer standards in their online services. “Social media and online behaviour may open doors to credit for the underserved, who lack traditional credit histories,” he says. Behavioural economics is a young discipline, just a few decades old, but there are many opportunities for future interdisciplinary research.
- What is predicted about the future of cash?
2, What is cognitive bias concerning money?
3, What does Venmo and Apply pay demonstrate?
4, What was the outcome of the ING survey?
5, Why would it be difficult to involve AI in makingthe digital currencies popular?
6, What can happen to those who do not have credit history?
KEY
1.
1-f, 2-l, 3-i, 4-a, 5-c, 6-e, 7-k, 8-h, 9-m, 10-n
2.
1-c, 3-d, 5-a, 7-b
3.
How much furniture did you buy to the office?
How much luggage did you bring?
They did a lot of research.
He doesn’t have too much wisdom.
They have organized a lot of parties recently.
They have had little fun recenrly.
Did you get much advice from him?
I had few ideas.
I have little knowledge about it.
There is a lot of new information in this report.
There are/is a lot of data in this report.
I haven’t heard much news.
They did not buy many new devices.
Not much equipment has been left here.
4.
1. It will be used only in a small percentage of the payment.
2. People tend to treat different sources of money differently.
3, Different groups use different payment technology. (Venmo is preferred by teenagers, ApplePay is preferred by a special segment of the market)
4. Most people in Europe consider crypto currencies dangerous, only 32% thinks it is the future.
5, AI cannot learn consumer’ behaviour as it van be easily manipulated.
6, They will be helped by social media and behavioural economics.