theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Tapping the teen market, and giving adults streaming video: recent research findings

The continually evolving Internet habits of just about everyone defy simple categorizations, as these two recent research releases show. 

More than Half of Teens are Content Creators Online
The Pew Internet Research project reports that, of the 87% of teens who use the Internet, half are creating things online, like blogs, webpages, posting original artwork or stories on other sites.  An amazing 38% of online teens read blogs.  About one fifth report having a blog or a web page of their own. Older girls are more likely to have blogs.

Adults and Streaming Video: Show Don't Tell

Grown ups are more likely to watch streaming video, on the other hand:

Contrary to public perception, it's not just 'college kids' or 'bleeding edge' Internet users who are streaming videos. Publishers are using innovative approaches to deliver their content, using high-quality video product clips, music videos, movie trailers, (and) full news broadcasts to engage their consumer. This creates a fantastic opportunity for advertisers to capitalize on what is now a mainstream audience."  [Eric Hunter, comScore Networks, who conducted the research]

ComScores's research showed that the 35 -54 age bracket are the most likely to watch streaming video, followed by the 25-34 group. [summarized on the Media Briefing site, free subscription required]

My Take
The teen trend is important because it suggests that this group will want to be more fully involved in collaboration to create products and services.  They are also savvy to the ways of information technology, so their expectations for how well information should work will be high.   

If you want to engage teens, consider how to involve them in a collaborative, co-creative process.

For adults, I see the streaming video as a desire to have denser, richer information that covers a lot of ground quickly, and doesn't require a lot of reading and clicking through.  There is so much coming at people now, that communications which can be more friendly and engaging, more human, cut through the noise better.  The interesting and informative television or radio advert is a medium this group has grown up with.  Hardly surprising that they readily adopt it online.

If you want to engage adults online, think about value added video and audio to enhance your message.   Can you show instead of tell?

Articles and Resources:
Centre for Media Research - love their research briefs.  Easy sign up and subscription.

Pew Internet Study on Teens

Things to Do in the Office on Holiday Week

When I worked in an big company, I used to look forward to Christmas week as a time to catch up, clean up, and do a few interesting things that had been put off for months. 

Here's something to check out [quite legitimately, by the way -- they all relate to customer experience.]

Is your website focused on you, or on your customers?
Run your website through FutureNow's WeWe Calculator to find out how your web site language stacks up. For even more fun, compare with competitors.

This is basic, isn't it?  But it is surprising how often this basic rule is broken -- we need to talk to customers where they live, about issues that matter to them.  It's everybody's station, WIIFM:  What's In It For Me?

Trying Again to Get it Right -- Don't Do This to Your Customers

Bell has been encouraging me to use a variety of online subscriber services to manage my business account.  They are really trying to be customer friendly, but it's not their strong suit. They've got some reasonable features in the new interface, but they are buried beneath layers of intimidating interface.  If you have an appetite for usability testing with a sample of one, read on...   

Doing Communication Right ... and Not So Right

Right:  CCH - Wolters Kluwer
I received a letter last week from CCH explaining their decision to rebrand around the global Wolters Kluwer name.  They told me that e-mails are changing, so I can still get in touch with key contacts there.  Nicely done.  Many organizations would not have gone to the trouble.  This approach really supports the brand positioning as an expert organization that can get ALL the details right. 

Not so Right:  Two Municipalities Suing Citizens for Libel

The Globe and Mail reported this morning that two Ontario municipalities are suing citizens who complained a bit too publicly.  Canada's chief defender of free speech tends to be Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who said this:

"The issue is the propriety of a government in a democracy suing a citizen for defamation arising out of criticisms that citizen may make of government conduct. . . . Legal actions of this kind are incompatible with a viable right to free speech."

Susan Abbott says,

"You don't manage your reputation by taking your detractors to court -- you mediate, you hire public relations specialists if you need to, and you try to address the actual issue that caused the problem in the first place. Suing your citizens can only make you look mean-spirited and vindictive, even when the citizens are acting like jerks."

Doing it Wrong, then Right:  Rogers de-fuses PR Implosion

One of Rogers' cell phone customers has been battling the company for some time now over a $12,000 bill incurred when she went travelling for a month and her phone was stolen.  She claims their fraud detection software (some kind of neural network likely) would have red-flagged the activity, but that they didn't try to find her becuase her credit rating was good, and they felt confident of being able to collect. 

A slight miscalculation on the part of the company:  the customer in question is a law professor.  [Oops]. By the time this story hit the front page of the largest national newspaper on Saturday, it was also revealed that terrorists had cloned at least one executive telephone number before the company had converted to GSM security. 

The next day, we learn that legendary entrepreneur and executive Ted Rogers, one of the wealthiest people in the country, has personally apologized and wiped out the debt.  He has also promised to have tea at the customer's house, no doubt so she can berate him in person.

Good recovery, but how unnecessary. 

Your work just got more difficult

What happens to work when you try to integrate customer experience across the business:

Managing the customer experience is making management work more complex

In the organization of ten years ago, it was okay for different lines of business to treat the customer in a non-integrated way.  If marketing and operations didn't see eye-to-eye, it was sub-optimal, but perhaps not essential.  There was no need to co-ordinate the online and offline experience, because there was no online experience in most businesses.

Today, the need to co-ordinate the customer experience smoothly across several lines of business has increased the complexity of work.  More factors need to be taken into account in making decisions.  More people and points of view need to be taken into account.   Roles that required Senior Manager skills and capability a decade ago now require Director level skills and capability.  Roles that used to be competently handled by a Director now require a Vice-President.  This is not title inflation, and it's not about a lack of good people...it is a real phenomenon.

The New Orleans Example

A real life example will help to illustrate what I'm talking about.

When New Orleans was having its Katrina crisis, a few unfavorable comparisons were made between how New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was handling things, compared to how Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York City during the 9/11 crisis handled things. 

These comparisons were completely unfair to start with, of course.  New Orleans was a city of about 500,000 people, and the greater New Orleans metropolitan area had about 1.4 million people.  New York, on the other hand, has about 8 million people in the city proper, and 18.3 million in the metropolitan area, and is the largest city in the USA, and among the largest in the world.  New York is a driver of the global economy; New Orleans is not. 

It's safe to say that the job of mayor is more complex in NYC than in NO, even when everything is working more or less fine.   In fact, we might suspect that being mayor of NYC is as complex as the CEO role in a major corporation.   And we might suspect that being mayor of NO is as complex as being the Vice-President of a function in a major corporation -- such as the head of sales for a region.  Indeed, before Mr. Nagin became a mayor, he was vice-president and general manager at Cox Communications.

What happened to Ray Nagin's job when Katrina hit

Ray Nagin's job became massively more complicated overnight.  And so did the jobs of many of the people who were supposed to be helping him.  Suddenly, he needed to coordinate many more lines of information than he was likely used to coordinating.  He had to consider decisions with extremely long range impact, making trade-offs that affected whether people lived or died, and would affect the local economy for decades to come.  And he had to make many of these decisions very rapidly in an atmosphere of very little hard information and tremendous uncertainty. 

Mayor Nagin's job went from a VP level job to a CEO level overnight.  Looking at the chart above, Katrina was the precipitating event that occurred at the arrow. 

Rudy Giuliani was either already operating at this high level, or he was "ready for a promotion".   And he himself has argued that the 9/11 situation was more manageable than New Orleans after Katrina, because it was contained.  He may not have known that at the time, of course. 

A merger is like a hurricane

A merger is a lot like a hurricane or a flood -- suddenly there is a lot less certainty and a lot more information to deal with.  People who were functioning at a high level in their role pre-merger may find themselves swimming over their depth after.   Did they suddenly become incompetent?  Not likely.  More likely is that the work suddenly became a lot more complex.  Not just more of it, but qualitatively different in substantive ways.

How Customer Experience fits in

The advent of cross-functional teams were the first big organizational effort to find a way to manage work that requires integration across lines of business.  Here's the problem:  it isn't about teamwork, it's about information complexity. 

When the operations people can't deliver the brand promise that the marketing people think is needed, you need to go up a level in the organization to address this issue.  The thing is, this kind of issue is no longer isolated, it is ongoing and pervasive. 

Customer experience is the internal response of an individual to their interactions with an organization's products, people, processes and environments. 

Integrating across these dimensions is much more complex than managing within one dimension.  And we need to integrate more often and more effectively to compete successfully.  This is the real reason that many managers' work lives are a parade of meetings sandwiched between marathons of e-mail reading.  It's not because they are terrible at time management -- it's that a tremedouns amount of coordination is required to create a differentiated customer experience that feels integrated and seamless to customers.

Take a look at who is thinking about customer experience in highly successful businesses.  You'll often find that it is placed very, very high in the organization.  Steve Jobs at Apple is a fine example.  He's apparently leaving the financial engineering to someone else, and focusing on integrated brand experience. 

Maybe you think I'm stretching a point here.  Perhaps you'll believe AG Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, who says that the way work is organized has changed.  It used to be organized along functional lines, but now, the importance of design has created a need for greater coordination. 

On the one hand, design is simple. On the other hand, it didn't fit in the way branded consumer products companies work and are organized. I've been in this business for almost 30 years, and it's always been sort of functionally organized, you know, marketing, product development, manufacturing, and sales. Where's design? The answer is, in all of the above. [Fast Company, "Designing Innovation"]

To create products that provide a really great customer experience, leading organizations are turning to design.  But design is pervasive: it is part of process, it is part of environment, it is part of product, it is part of the way people behave when they interact with customers.  Design is an essential skill in creating customer experiences that drive results.   But you can't put it neatly into a functional department.

My take

If you feel like your work is a lot more complicated than it used to be, you're right.  It's not about bureaucracy.  It's because the work itself has become more complex.  Start to accept that, and your life will be a lot less stressful.

The work of coordination across functions is executive level work.  Managing an integrated customer experience is not a marketing function, an operations function or a sales function -- it touches all of those functions. 

Senior executives need to understand that customer experience and brand experience cannot be delegated very far down the organization chart.  You need to pay as much attention to this stuff as you do to compliance.  Fortunately, managing customer experience is a heckuva lot more interesting than compliance. 

Examples of Comparisons of Nagin to Giuliani:

Washington Times: New Orleans Mayor no Giuliani

Thomas Galvin - A Tale of Two Mayors

Rebuilding New Orleans: Nagin Overwhelmed, Blanco an Embarassment

How to win with the B players: about sports, strategy, and doing things differently

You don't have to be a football fan to get a lot out of this story from the New York Times Magazine about an unusual coach at Texas Tech that has taken a team full of B players and set records. 

I'm not a football fan, but this is a great read, and had some good lessons for business and leadership.  Here are a few of the lessons I saw:

Don't do what the big guys are doing
Texas Tech can't attract the calibre of player that the elite schools can.  So they can only win if they play a different kind of game, using a different strategy.  They play a passing game, with more receivers than most teams. They spread out their offense so the Quarterback can see what's going on.  They spend time on the field studying their opponent's reactions to various plays.  Then they use that learning to advantage. 

If you run a business and you aren't the best funded, don't have the best locations, and aren't the market share leader, you'd better have a different plan than the big guy.  Because you can only lose playing the big guy's game.

Change the nature of competition
This is a major strategy in negotiation, and clearly it works in football too.  Don't accept the conventional wisdom about how to win -- change the game to your advantage.

This is much easier said than done, of course.  But you can do these things if you think carefully about your customers, the competitors, the dynamics of your market space, and your own areas of strength.  Can you design better products that make your competitor's distribution advantages irrelevant?  Can you provide customized service that makes your competitor's pricing irrelevant? 

Give your staff the room to use their own judgement -- they're the ones on the field watching the action
Managers act as if you need to give front line staff full latitude or no latitude, and often seem to ignore the middle ground.  Coach Leach calls the main play, but the QB customizes it each time, based on what he sees happening in front of him.  They don't have as many plays as other teams, but they customize them a lot based on local conditions.  Players don't have to memorize a giant play-book -- they memorize the main formations, and the variations. 

When we limit the ability of staff to respond to what is in front of them, we reduce the chances that we will succeed.  We also remove most of the fun and intrinsic rewards from the job.

Have you found the balance between too much direction and not enough?

You Don't have to be a Great Player to be a Great Coach
Leach played football only in high school.  He studied law at Pepperdine.  Then he decided he wanted to become a football coach. 

A lot of people in business excuse themselves from coaching because they don't think they are better at -- say selling -- than the people working for them.  That's not what good coaching is all about.  It's about observation, strategy, direction, focus and feedback. 

Motivational Speeches and the Importance of Tempo
What are you saying to people at your daily huddles before the start of play? 
Here's what Leach says to his players:

One - Do  your job.  DO - YOUR - JOB!
Two - Play together with great tempo
Three - Your body is your sword.  Swing your sword.  SWING - YOUR - SWORD!

The last bit comes from an ongoing pirate ship analogy that Leach has developed.  The tempo thing is interesting too:  Leach thinks that teams that are winning and teams that are losing fall off tempo and slow down.  He thinks the team with the best tempo wins. 

When you are in a restaurant and the service is great, look around you at the wait staff.  They are usually moving in a rapid motion ballet, scanning the room, bending around corners, everyone working at a high tempo together. 

A trading desk that's having a hot day on the markets looks just like this.

Tempo counts.  How's the tempo in your shop today?

Article:  Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep - New York Times Magazine, Dec 4, 2005

Is it a relationship or just a Rolodex? How do you define a relationship with a customer? Or a donor? Or a 'friend of the family'?

 

How I got into the wrong category in someone's contact database 
This week brought a new request for fundraising support from a nearby naturopathic college.   I get e-mails, phone calls, and even follow-up calls from these guys.  They clearly think I have a relationship with them. 

Here's our history together:  about 2 1/2 years ago this college asked us to submit a proposal on a research project.  Since the proposal involved several different research elements with some specialized audiences, I asked another firm to co-present.  This type of proposal involves several full days of work, including background research on the industry, structuring the problem, designing and costing an approach. 

We lost the bid, and were advised by fax of this news.  [Not exactly a classy approach, but that's the RFP process for you].  When I called to follow-up and learn what factors influenced the decision, I was told that this information was not public and that no one would talk to me. 

But somehow, we made it on to a list of supporters, and they continue to think I might cut them a cheque.  Of course this is non-sense, right?  But we're all guilty.

Who's in YOUR Contact Database?
When I was assembling my Christmas greetings list this week, I realized there are quite a few names in my contact database for people who I don't know very well.  A handful, I'm not even sure how we met.  Some of these people probably don't know who I am either. 
When it comes right down to it, probably only a third of this contact list would be someone I could actually pen a personal note of greetings to.  Another group don't really require a greeting of this type, because I talk to them all the time.  And that leaves a whole list of people with a dubious connection. 

What the heck are they doing on my contact list???

Defining what constitutes a customer relationship
It's complicated enough doing this as an individual or a small company, but much more difficult for my clients.  Businesses usually try to define a relationship in terms of how much business a given customer brings to them, relative to other customers.  Not a very customer-centric approach, but very common.  Some try to define customer relationship based on what share of the  customer's total business they have (share of wallet).  Future potential may be a consideration.  Other segment characteristics, such as life-stage, may be a consideration.  The whole effort is around designing business rules that can help define who is who, and who gets what kind of contact.

If you read the literature for the CRM technology firms, they make this process sound straightforward.  But the process of defining the business rules is usually a tough one.  Just last week, someone at a client firm told me that a model they have been refining for two years "doesn't really have buy in yet".  The reason it's tough to define rules for what contitutes a relationship is that it relates DIRECTLY to strategy. 

Business-to-business sales models often talk about leads versus opportunites, or suspects versus prospects, or qualified versus unqualified prospects.  In the words of that famous sales trainer Steve Schiffman, opportunities without a next step amount to  "bupkis".

Another category that I often think about is what I call "friend of the family".  This is a person or organization that may not be a customer, but is positively disposed towards helping you, perhaps due to some past relationship, or perhaps along the lines of a cross-referral relationship.

I have a lot of people I think of as "friends of the family", and I count myself as one of these for many people and businesses.  They aren't clients, and I don't expect them to be, but I think highly of them and would like to help them succeed. 

What does it all mean?
Don't assume that anyone else in your organization defines "customer relationship" the same way you do, unless you've actually talked about it at length and agreed on definitions.  And then created the business rules to make those definitions work operationally. 

The "One-Sheet-of-Paper Test"
Actually getting clarity around this type of question can be a powerful driver of improved business results.  You need a definition you can put on one sheet of paper, and explain to anyone who asks. 

Even better is if everyone in the organization can explain it to anyone who asks. 

Fortunately, it is a lot easier to help other people to address this kind of issue than to solve your own.  [Shoemakers children and all that]  We'd be happy to help you.  And if you've got ideas for me, I'm all ears. 

Dialogues from the Service Edge: Consultant X gets his own page

We recently started running occassional pieces from a colleague of mine who is doing some extended first hand research as a part-time employee in a high-end food emporium.  After hearing his stories over coffee, I encouraged X (who prefers to remain anon) to write them up. X has taken the plunge, and has his own space for his latest story, here.

The latest tale involves a customer getting a bit too close to the help, and even moving behind the counter... worth a read, and I'm sure every word is true. 

My take on this is that the kind of training we offer staff deals with a relatively small range of behavior and preferences.  X has earned his grey hairs, and I presume has a repertoire of skills to deal with most of what comes up in a typical day.  But as he told me recently, "The young ones take some of the abuse pretty hard".

In any event, if you are looking for a smile today, read the lastest rather steamy installment of X's adventures Acknowledged on Entry.