theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Corporate Blogging: It's not about the blog, it's about the authenticity

People are now researching corporate blogs: what makes them effective, how to do it, etc. Answering someone else's questions on this helped me get clarity on my own thinking. [Children and coaches excel at this, but I made do with a survey.]

Corporate blogs are an interesting phenomenon not because they are blogs, but because of the characteristics of the communication:

• Uses a personal, not a corporate voice
• Shares information in a way that feels more like a conversation than a brochure.  Stories, personal insights, and opinions, not just factoids
• If successful, are as much about the reader as the writer -- not unlike being a successful newspaper columnist.  The best blogs are interesting in their own right.
• Characterized by honesty and authenticity -- both attributes that are often seen as lacking in corporate communication and marketing generally

Do you need to have a blog to have authentic communication?

No, of course not.  You do need to have a culture that is comfortable with these characteristics, however.  Consider the differences between Ikea and most financial institutions. Ikea's communications feel authentic, but I don't think they have a blog. On the other hand, they have so many raving fans that blog about them, perhaps they don't need a blog of their own.

There is a real risk of damage to a brand if a corporate blog is not well handled.  Most of my clients are financial services related, and these corporations are characterized by high degrees of centralized control over communications.  However, they could still have successful blogs. My suggestions would be these:

• Find a topic area that has enough content to stay fresh.  You really need at least one new post weekly.
• Find an individual who enjoys writing and speaking and already does some of this in their role at work.  If they are representing the company, they need to be someone who could give a media interview without asking permission, and senior enough that they can use good judgement in how they handle a topic.
• Writing takes time.  You can't just add it on to someone's current to-do list.

Regardless of whether you have a corporate blog or not, you still need a blog policy to cover the employees that might want to have blogs of their own -- unofficial ones. There are lots of good ones around online that could get you started.

My take

Honest communication and transparency are the critical elements in corporate blogging, not the format of the communication.  Authenticity and transparency are becoming increasingly important to business and brands, and corporate marketing generally, and blogs tend to be good places to express these concepts. But you don't need a blog to have authenticity.

Resources:

Initial study by Nora Ganim Barnes from the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth: Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere

New study, Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson, "Thinking like a Blogger". If you can add useful data to the study, here's the link to the survey. Their cutoff is August 23, 2006.

Validate Your Customers

Have you ever had a choice to make and when you finally decided, still felt some doubt?  This is very human, and has been studied.  In fact, the more options you had to choose from, the less likely you are to be satisfied with the choice you ultimately make. 

One of the earmarks of a good customer experience is validation for your choice. Let me give you a good example, and one that didn't quite hit the mark.

A good example
I've been looking for a folding chair where I can put my feet up.  We used to call these a chaise lounge, but now they don't fold, weigh a ton, cost a lot, and take up a lot of room on the deck.  I wanted the old fashioned kind.  After ages of looking, I finally found one in the camping section of Wal-Mart. At the checkout, the clerk said "My friend has one of those chairs, and they're great!".  I instantly felt validated in my decision.

Not so good
In a good bistro recently, I asked about the Pad Thai... would the server recommend it? The server assured me it was excellent.  After I ordered, he said, "Guess what the main ingredient is, in Pad Thai  sauce?" I was trying to think of tamarind, but persimmon was what came out.  "No", he said, "It's ketchup".  It was an awkward moment.  I didn't change my order, but wished I had.  My dining companions were horrified.  In trying to be friendly, the server had botched the validation thing, and pretty much took the fun out of the meal.  Why, oh why hadn't I ordered the lamb curry like everyone else???

Why is validation important?

Being overwhelmed with choice is not the only thing we are working with here.  We are also working with the Peak-End rule, initially hypothesized by the great Daniel Kahneman.  We judge an experience in memory by the peak (either high or low) and the end. 

This is why we have the saying, "you're only as good as your last [...]"  We know that the last part of any experience is the part by which we will be evaluated.  The last muffin or hamburger.  The last encounter. We know this, even though we aren't as clever as Daniel. 

So why let your customer leave the experience feeling uncertain or doubtful?  Tell them what a good decision they made.  Give them a little validation.  You'll both benefit.

References:
For a good explanation of Daniel Kahneman's Peak End Rule, check out this Wikipedia entry.

For an excellent book on the science of making choices, check out The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz.

Technorati Tags: peak end rule, kahneman, validation, customer experience

What Integrated Brand Messaging Looks Like

I received a nice insert in my newspaper recently.
Even before I looked at it, I knew what company issued it.

Typeface: clear, clean look, very open, san serif.  Always the same.

Colors: bright, often changing, but something about the colors and the way they work together sends a clear message. The corporate color is there, but it isn't the only color.  These people have put the whole rainbow to work, and very effectively

Words: friendly, low key, and uses words a customer would use.  It's all about the customer, not about the company.  And there's just the tiniest bit of humour, always a refreshing change in this category.

Do your marketing materials work this hard?
This kind of consistent messaging is a high standard for any organization to reach, large or small. 
It's not just consistency that counts.  It's consistency that means something to your target audience, and that helps them engage with you.

And consistency is in tone, product design, everything you've got. 

So kudos to Scotiabank for doing such a consistently good job on this. 

Technorati Tags: scotiabank, integrated brand communications

Join us for a Web Cast on Online Qualitative Research

If you are interested in Qualitative Research, you may want to join me and colleague Betsy Leichliter for a webcast sponsored by QRCA on Thursday, August 3 12:00 Eastern Time.

When Online Qualitative Shines: Solving Business Problems

About a year ago, Betsy and I interviewed about thirty experts in the area of online qualitative research, and documented some illustrative case studies, which we presented at a conference in Beverly Hills last fall. Since then, we have had a lot of interest in the material. 

Unlike the conference, the web-cast is not only FREE, but also open to anyone.  We've restructured the material to focus on the themes most of interest to business people  - namely solving business problems. We won't be spending much time on logistics that only other researchers care about.

Q-Casts, as these are called, provide for interactive chat as well as phone questions, so I encourage you to join us and make it a lively event. 

More info about the topic of the session is here.

You do need to sign up in advance, but it's not a big deal, and you do it here.

Technorati Tags: Q-Cast, QRCA, online qualitative research, Leichliter

Dear Mr. Sabia: Why Won't the Vacation Message Work?

Dear Mr. Sabia*:

My business has been a Bell Customer since inception, and we currently use your high-speed internet service as well as multiple business phone services. I have been a loyal supporter in the past, but it seems that nothing is easy with your company, and the user experience continues to deteriorate.

The main reason I am writing to you now is because it is the only way I can be sure someone will actually pay attention to this complaint.

Please indulge me as I tell you about the latest installment, as I try to set up a simple vacation auto-respond message.

Yesterday, I spent time trying to get a vacation message set up on webmail, but it would not work. I did check online help and FAQs, with no obvious reason for the problem.

Today, I spent an hour on the telephone with one of your service representatives (from 10:00 am to 10:12 am on musical hold, and thereafter until 10:54 with Vladimir). 

The problem is this: I have e-mail addresses that are at domains not hosted by Bell, such as my company domain, abbottresearch.com. Any mail that is originally sent to another domain will not receive an auto-respond message, regardless of the fact that it is visible in my in-basket on webmail.  This information is not in your FAQ.

Mr. Sabia, I know your time is valuable, but so is mine. Please ask your engineers to 1) make your webmail functionality less parochial and 2) immediately amend your FAQ on this issue to make it clear to customers that your service does not work with any address that isn’t a Bell domain. How hard can this be?

Your technician’s recommendation is that I seek a solution from my web host. And you can be sure I will be seeking a solution. Because this is not an isolated incident. Here are a few of the other problems I have had in the past year with your company:

· Difficulty setting your account numbers up on electronic payment functions so I can pay my bills online. You should really give people a prize if they can figure out which number on your bill is the actual electronic billing number. 

· Finding out that I cannot get cell-phone coverage in Jamaica, where one of my clients is. Your competitors don’t seem to have this problem

· Finding almost anything on your web site.  I thought about trying to consolidate my bills, but this is something that requires more than an MBA to master, and was too complex for me

· Taking the time to set up online bill information access, and finding out that a) it is really designed for people with advanced engineering skills and b) you can’t get the information any faster anyway, so it’s not that useful for a small company

· Constant phone calls from people who purport to be enquiring about service but actually want to sell me something.  The most recent one wanted me to lock in for several years in order to get a discount.  There is no discount that would make me want three more years of this

Mr. Sabia, I urge you to cash in your options while there is still time, because the future of this organization is in serious doubt.

Yours truly,

Susan Abbott

PS I invite you to put the word “complaint” into your own online search engines and see what happens.

*CEO of Bell Canada

Technorati Tags: bell canada, how to complain, customer experience

Customer Power: The Cluetrain is Pulling in Again

When Cluetrain Manifesto first highlighted the power shift from companies to consumers in 1999 we all waited and hoped for change.

But very few executives actually sat up and took notice.  If anything, the drive for ever greater efficiencies has led to significant decreases in service levels when things go wrong. But the shift in power to consumers has not stopped; indeed the train is picking up speed all the time. Two recent news events illustrate this brilliantly.

Viral marketing meets customer service: the video

A Comcast Technician Sleeping on My Couch is a video that a customer uploaded to YouTube that documents the hour spent by a technician on hold at a customer's home, calling in for support, finally falling asleep. Comcast may not have been trying for viral marketing, but they got it anyway, with 600,000 people having now viewed the video, to say nothing of the related media coverage. The brief video is a must-watch.

Viral marketing meets customer service: the audio

After years of hearing "this call may be recorded for quality control purposes", customers have taken the hint and are also playing the quality control game.  AOL, notorious for the hassle they give to customers who try to cancel, has had one of their cancellation calls recorded and made public via the Insignificant Thoughts blog.

During the four minute recording, the service rep argues, stalls, asks to speak to the customer's father (!) and indicates the customer is being difficult to get along with, as well as insisting that he be allowed to read verbatim from a lengthy script rather than just act on the customer's clear direction to cancel his account.

AOL spokesman Nicholas J Graham told the New York Times

"By my count, he used the word 'cancel' 21 times," said Nicholas J. Graham, an AOL vice president and spokesman. "That's not counting the I-don't-need-it's, I-don't-want-it's and I-don't-use-it's. Add the other inferences, it's probably closer to 30."

One unhappy customer tells...

You've probably heard that one unhappy customer tells ten others.  This is clearly no longer accurate.
When customers are dissatisfied, they have always done one of three things:

1. complain
2. leave
3. get even

Complaining may not get you very far with a service organization like AOL's.  Leaving (if they'll let you) doesn't provide much sense of justice.  Getting even is now a rich and readily accessible experience.  Customers no longer care what the root cause of the problem is.  They want a reasonable standard of service and if they don't get it, they're prepared to go public.

Don't say you weren't warned.

References

Randall Stross, New York Times, "AOL Said, 'If You Leave Me I'll Do Something Crazy'", July 2, 2006

American Customer Satisfaction Index.  Comcast scored 60 for Cable and Satellite TV, and 69 for Fixed Line Telephone in Q1 2006. AOL Time Warner was last scored in Q2 2005, at 71. 

Christopher Locke, Levine, Searls, Weinberger, Cluetrain Manifesto, 2000   (Or read it here for free, at the Cluetrain site)

J.G. Blodgett, Granbois, Walters. (1993) The effects of perceived justice on complainants’ negative word-of-mouth behavior and repatronage intentions. Journal of Retailing.

J. Goodman, J. (1999) Basic Facts on Customer Complaint Behavior and the Impact of Service on the Bottom Line. Competitive Advantage. Research conducted by TARP.

Qualitative Research: Storytelling

Once you have found the right people to talk to, covered in an earlier post, and you have determined what you actually need to know about, then you must determine how you will get that information. In short, what are you going to ask them?

Amateurs say things like: what do you think about X?  Do you think you would buy X?  How would you improve X?  Attempts to get directly at the information you seek are often of limited usefulness.  You may get some data, but not likely anything that is not already reasonably well known. And the conventional wisdom is seldom helpful to clients who want to differentiate themselves in the marketplace with leading edge products and services. 

It's crucial to get beyond the literal if you are going to find out anything meaningful. And good researchers will have hundreds, if not thousands, of alternative ways to do this.  Storytelling is one powerful method.

Storytelling
Stories are as old as humanity, and we can all relate something we have experienced. That experience could be using a product, shopping in a store, or managing an IT outsourcing project.  When you ask people to tell a story, they engage completely different parts of their brain. 

We don't tell stories that are boring, we add the details -- the human details -- that make it interesting to others. And in so doing, we relate much more of our full range of perceptions about the event, and even the whole category under discussion.

If invited to tell a story using a familiar template, most of us could do that too.  The template might be telling the story as a fairy tale, telling it as a news report, telling it as a country music song. Or just plain old, "tell us the story of..."

The skill of the facilitator is setting up the environment that makes it comfortable for people to tell a story in detail. 

Storytelling is not just good for research, by the way.  It's a very useful approach in change management and visioning exercises as well. 

All of the great religious traditions relied on stories like parables to convey deeply meaningful information in a simple way.  Listen carefully to the stories people tell and you can learn a great deal about what is in their hearts and minds.

Technorati Tags: qualitative research, storytelling, asking good questions