theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

All customer communications are brand communications

Marketing communications are almost always tested with customers. But many operational communications are not, and it shows. I get a statement every year from my telco summarizing my annual telephone activity. The thing really needs to be accompanied by a rosetta stone, it's such a mystery to unravel. Definitely not adding value in my life, and always makes me vaguely nervous that I might be missing something important.

I heard a really good example of just how damaging operational communications can be.

NSF stands for Non-Sufficient Feeling

A marketing guy working at a bank recently told me a story about the NSF notification letter they were sending out to customers who had deposited an NSF cheque.

Instead of sympathizing with the customer's obvious problem of receiving a bad cheque, to say nothing of the charges incurred, the letter subtly suggested that the customer should be taking greater care of things. While perhaps well intentioned, customer complaints of the "how dare you" kind put the spotlight on this wording, and said letter has now been changed.

All communications are brand communications. And they had better not go out NSF.

Creating Nuanced Customer Communications

Regular reader and colleague Nick W. sent me some interesting thoughts and reactions to an e-mail he gets from his credit card company.  It show how difficult it is to get the right nuance when you are communicating to a large group of individuals, but why it is really worth the effort. [The headings are mine]

The credit card company reminder e-mail

"The other day my wife’s credit card company notified her that “Your **** card payment is due”. Nice touch.  Attention-getting.  They send this out about a week before the payment is in fact due.  They ALWAYS send a second reminder with the exact same wording on the due date (which of course, means payment WILL be late) regardless of whether the bill was paid or not. Then about a week or two after we make payment we get a “Thanks for paying your bill on time” email. Then a couple days later we get the note on the next month’s bill…

How the customer feels

Nick deconstructs the history of his reaction to this e-mail:

"Is the feeling when I see one of these emails one of fear – 'omg I missed a payment' or a 'thankful for the reminder – so that I don’t miss a payment'. 

"Initially we started in the “fear” category (wife to husband… did you forget something recently?) but is now sometimes in the “thankful” category. ..."

But...

"I really do wish they would get the stream of emails straight, so I don’t get that fear reaction that the ebanking failed us!  Which is exactly what happens when we get the second email. Since we get the second notice regardless of whether we paid or not.

"Of course somewhere along the way there is the “stop begging for my money” feeling, too."

Is this a gentle nudge to e-banking?

"Now that we are used to the notices, it seems to me that this “reminder” notice does help us and does gently stimulate us to move us out of check writing mode and more into electronic banking (which we are resisting because of experiences with ID theft).  The benefits for the bank must be enormous… they are slowly winning us over by the nudges… and it does probably improve their profitability too (since we probably pay a little earlier than the last day)."

I think Nick's analysis is right on. The bank probably is trying to nudge people to e-banking, but they are doing it in a positive way that actually helps the customer manage their money.

Nick tells me that only one of the 4 banks they are dealing with is doing this nudging in a positive way, despite the clumsiness of the second reminder. The rest are "screaming at us about going paperless", instead of "teaching us how to benefit from e-banking".

"Clumsy" is better than "screaming"

Nick wrapped his story with the conclusion that "'clumsy' is somewhat less irritating and maybe more effective than 'screaming'." 

I really like the idea of these e-mails, since I presume it is easy to opt out if you find them more irritating than useful.  The second reminder e-mail would clearly be more helpful if it only went to those customers who had not initiated a payment.  Let's assume this is not currently possible on the bank's systems, for whatever reason.

They could still likely change the wording of the second e-mail to be more effective. Along the lines of, "if you have already paid your bill, please ignore this notice", and a tip as to how to check or confirm the payment online.

Value added alerts

There are a lot of sophisticated alert systems out there being used in banking and telco applications. But this story illustrates for me that you probably don't need a whiz-bang alert technology to get started -- an e-mailer application might do just fine.

And the effort to engage with the customer in a customer-focused way is clearly differentiating this one bank from the other "screamers"

It's shocking to think that some of your customers may think you are shouting at them, isn't it? I doubt that is an isolated sentiment.

Is it beautiful, useful or sentimental: Design lessons from PicoPad

To create something innovative that solves a problem, you can start with a group of people that have a lot in common -- teachers, auto mechanics, musicians -- and start trying to understand their lives and needs.
Or you can look for problems that are common to great swaths of humanity.

I came across PicoPad thanks to Business 2.0, and went to their website for a visit. This company appears to have exactly two products, both apparently invented to fill a personal need of the founder, Alan Regala.

Tips to Steal

There are some tips to steal from PicoPad's approach to design and marketing.

1. The product looks nice. It comes in several colors. It does not have their own branding all over the place. Why bother when you are so unique that it's obvious who you are? Plus who wants to carry another card that has a giant company logo on it?

2. The pictures are very clear, and show the product in action. What's even better, is that the pictures are HUGE. A lot of catalog clothing companies could learn from this. In fact, just about anyone selling online could learn from this. We want multiple shots of the product, big enough to really see. Oh, BTW -- some of us need glasses, so test your text size with the grown-ups, not the 20-somethings.

3. Demonstrations of the product in use. I loved the little video demo that is on the site, as well as the lovely line drawings of the product that make its features completely clear.

4. The product itself addresses a genuine problem -- not having pen and paper when you need it. It's not a complete system, it does not address your entire stationery needs, it just does its job.

5. Design within tight and demanding constraints. Like: "must fit into a wallet, must have a pen that fits into a wallet." When I learned that the founder used to work at IDEO, it made me smile. So much of what is around us appears to be designed with constraints that meet only the company's needs, not the customer's. 

Aren't we all guilty of this sometimes? -- and consultants are no exception. Some of my most innovative research designs came about because a client pushed for better research within tight constraints. I could have just said 'it can't be done,' but I spoil my clients and I like a challenge, so I pushed for different approaches. Do you love your customers enough to do that, or are you just hoping that force of habit will keep people loyal?

6. Show people how it works. Showcase your products and services like you are a Parisian fashion house. The Everyday Innovations -- PicoPad's maker -- site is so visually engaging, I sent them a request for a quote for a promotional order for my next conference giveaway. Now that's conversion. I already feel like a fan, and I don't even own the product. Yet. But some products just have that Gund quality to them -- we adore them whether we own them or not.

Beautiful, Practical, Essential

So often, we want to be perceived as being better than the competition without actually being a whole lot better. We can't rely on a just-noticeable-difference. We need uniqueness, beauty and practicality to capture new customers.

I live in a small house in a great neighborhood. We do not have room to continually add more stuff. So we created a couple of guiding principles. First, when new stuff comes in, an equal quantity of stuff has to go out to maintain storage equilibrium. Second, and even more important, nothing can stay unless it meets at least one of these criteria:

It's beautiful -- it can stay because it has aesthetic value.
It's useful -- it can stay because it performs an essential function
It's sentimental -- it can stay because Aunt Fannie who we love gave it to us

If customers evaluated your product or service on these terms, how many check-marks could you get?

More collaboration tools - maybe for research?

One of the joys of having a moderately successful blog is that I now get requests from people to check out their a) book b) new research application c) creative marketing or promotional strategy.
[One could easily do this full time, if said one were independently wealthy....]
In any event, some worthy candidates have passed by recently. Here's one I want to tell you about.

ReviewBasics

ReviewBasics is a feedback gathering platform which allows professionals across many industries to exchange ideas, gather thoughts, and review various types of creative, interactive, motion, and written content. We take a familiar, paper-based content review process and bring it online." [From a news release sent to me.]

I spoke to Tim Shih today, who is VP and sales manager for this new company. Mr. Shih says ReviewBasics is, "The next generation of tools for the online marketing research industry."

The company was started by a technology consultant and a product developer, both with experience in the e-learning space. They saw an opportunity for a rich feedback platform to support collaboration and research, and this is the result. The development team is in Russia, but Mr. Shih and team are based in New York.

Going for a test drive

I spent some time on their beta site, which is very nicely set up. I particularly liked their easy-to-follow graphic walk-through (see the screen shot below). I'd love to see more applications that do this.

This next shot shows the basic interface. You have a page where you put up an image, a graphic or whatever. This could be a screen shot of your web page, or creative concept, or a new packaging design.

You then invite some people to review what you have put up. Reviewers can mark items with arrows, text boxes, call-outs, emoticons and similar tools. There is also a space at the bottom right where they can provide generalized feedback in an open input box.

All this input is gathered together for the researcher to review, but the reviewers cannot see each others' comments.

Application in marketing research

For creative testing, we usually want to have a fair bit of control over the exposure time and conditions for the stimuli. So I don't see this being the starting point for that. But it could be a nice add-on at the end of an online questionnaire, for example.

I could also see using something like this to gather ongoing feedback from users of an application in something like B2B settings. 

I'm less sure about consumer research, but for the right project, maybe it would work. It has some of the features of a web-meeting interface, but it's asynchronous, so everyone doesn't need to show up at the same time.

What happens with this type of tool is that clever people figure out innovative methods once they get a look at it and start fooling around with it. As researcher Betsy Leichliter once said to me, and I'm paraphrasing: "A focus group room is just a room with some chairs. You can do a lot of things in a room with some chairs. Online tools are no different."

Breeze was started as an educational tool that could leverage Macromedia Flash for easy e-learning presentations. Now, the underlying Breeze platform is used for a variety of different types of applications, including some online qualitative marketing research tools.

You can still participate in the free beta test for ReviewBasics, by going to their site and clicking on the "RB – Click to Review Button” near the bottom of their homepage.

Teaching your customers - how to do it well

Customer experience quite often relates to learning. Examples:

1. The flyer in your bank statement that is telling you why you should buy insurance, or how to use the telephone IVR system.
2. The binder in your hotel room that tells you about the services of the hotel, and how to access them. If you don't know the protocols of a spa, do they help you avoid looking like a goof?
3. Learning how to set up the machines in your gym. Do they make it easy for you, or were you supposed to be born knowing?

If you conduct seminars for marketing, business development or as a customer loyalty offering, you are also asking people to learn something.

If your employees ever have to deal with new products or procedures [jeez, likely every week, if not every day in some businesses!] then understanding how people learn can save you a lot of grief.

So how good is your teaching?

There's a great list on Hacking Knowledge called 77 Ways to Learn. Consider a few, and how they relate to customer communications, from signage to seminars:

Use acronyms and mnemonic devices
Yup, that's how I made it through many courses over the years, and I bet you did too. So why not leverage these for interactive telephone systems, or other regular processes to save customers time?

Use visual learning techniques
Show the structure of information visually; use mind-maps, graphical process flow, or any other technique that communicates in pictures as well as words. The site lists 6 methods, and provides links.

Engage people
"Lectures are one-sided and often counter-productive. Information merely heard or witnessed ...  is often forgotten. Teaching is not simply talking. Talking isn't enough."
No kidding. Do your customer communications just talk at people... or do they engage?

We are all learners and teachers every day of our lives. Too often we act like there's no need to pay attention to what's been learned about adult learning. And what a waste that is.

Getting Your Users to Tell You What to Do

Can your users tell you what to build / fix / enhance?
Sometimes.

We're seeing a lot more instances of some kind of contest or voting process where users submit ideas, and other users vote on their favorites. To see a current example of what I'm talking about, check out this contest being run by SNAP.

SNAP is a visual search engine that allows you to preview the search results without actually having to browse to the page. Pretty cool, actually. They are asking users to tell them what to build / fix / enhance in their next round of developments. And offering prizes for the best ideas, and for the best comments on ideas others have submitted.

Will we see more of this... i.e. Should I be worried?

Yes, I think we will see more of this. It's a neat way to really open up your development or innovation process to your user community. For a relatively small cost, you can enlist a lot of good ideas. 

I'm not sure what platform people are building this type of application on [comments anyone?], so I don't really know how hard the interface is to set up, but I'm guessing it's not worse than launching a bulletin board or some similar interactive application.

Why I'm not worried

This kind of approach makes a lot of sense when you have users that are fans, and that have enough knowledge to make suggestions. If you browse the contest, you will see that many of the individuals seem to have programming knowledge far beyond the average surfer. Personally, I didn't actually understand some of the suggestions.

There is a sampling issue here -- this kind of input only reaches the raving fan, or those that enter contests as a hobby. If these are your core users, then you are in great shape. If not, you will need to find other ways to tap into the customer experience.

Finally, this approach actually asks the users to suggest new features i.e. solve the problem. A more effective strategy for sustaining innovation is actually asking your customers to tell you about their problems, or tell you about their experiences, not ask them to solve the problem.  When your own development team has a deep understanding of customer experience -- including all the joys and the pain points -- they should be in a better position to articulate possible solutions.

The bottom line
I love triangulation -- where you look at a situation from as many angles as you can. And this kind of user-input is a great adjunct to anything else you might be doing to reach your users. As a nice side-benefit, it will likely also create some buzz, and engage the hearts and minds of at least some of your community. And that's all good.

Enquiring minds want to know
Like the Joker said of Batman, "Where does he get those toys!?", enquiring minds would like to know how to launch one of these contests with a vote. Is this kind of application available off the shelf, or is it a custom programming job?

Social Networking on Four Legs: Pets are People Too

You can now build a page for your pet in an online pet community. Or rather, a people community about their pets....
Dogster is for dog lovers...Catster is for cat lovers. Hamsterster is for -- well, you get it. PetPop promises that you can "meet new pets in your area".

NeoPets, one of the smaller sites, claims 70,000 members. with 70 million members, is actually a virtual pet site, providing a full suite of community-type functions for the neo-pet-owners, including virtual travel opportunities. 

SNiFLabs takes all this to the next level with their  new dog collar that wirelessly monitors Rover's activities. In addition to keeping tabs on your canine, the service can facilitate people networking via Rover's friends and acquaintances in the park.

Unlike impersonal web services, SNiFlabs lets someone you know and trust make personal connections for you: your dog. Every time you take your dog out for a walk you meet other dogs and other dog owners in your neighborhood. The SNiF® tag takes advantage of this and automatically keeps track of the dogs you have met while out and about. Want to meet new people? You already have something in common with other dog owners. Need to find a good plumber? Want to try a new neighborhood restaurant? Chances are that some one in your dog's social network can make recommendations for you.

We seem to be hungry for community and connections, but we're finding new ways to meet those needs.

Service Extras: BMO differentiates

Media in Canada reports that Bank of Montreal has added a couple of interesting extras for their clients.

First, a podcast series offered by the private client group.  Yes, we've heard of these before. But this time, they're using a household name journalist, and genuine personality, Pamela Wallin. Wallin recently finished a stint as Canadian Consul General in New York City, and is now Chancellor at the University of Guelph. Most Canadians know her as a great interviewer from her days on radio and television.

♥♥♥ Now we're talkin'! You want people to listen to your podcast, you need to give them a voice and content worth listening to.

They are also launching a concierge service for the BMO Harris private banking clients, to help with such things as concert tickets and vacation bookings.

♥♥♥ I don't know if this will bring in business, but I bet it works from a loyalty perspective. 

References:
"BMO thinks outside the bank", by Annette Bourdeau, Media in Canada , March 9, 2007

Optimum Mess: should staff decorate the store for spring?

I was thinking about messiness while I was working out yesterday. My little neighborhood gym is a branch of a huge franchise. But it feels very local. Part of what makes it that way is the constant changes in decor, hand-made by the staff.

Right now, the staff has a food bank drive on, and are building a mountain of food in the middle of the gym. If you bring in a bag, you get your name on a paper grocery bag on the wall. [Naturally, I wanted to be up on the big board, so did my duty as I saw it]. They are weighing the food as it comes in, and tracking the total weight on a huge, colorful chart on one wall, with giant painted flowers marking the big milestones of the group effort.

It's the antithesis of a managed environment, but it works.

Perfect Mess

I was reading this morning an article about the perfect level of messiness. Eric Abrahamson, author of the "The Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder", says:

"If you devote all your time to organizing, you won’t get anything done. If you don’t spend any time organizing, the resultant mess bogs you down completely. When you find the ‘sweet spot’ between messiness and order, then you have a perfect mess."

Abrahamson extends this idea to over and under organizing at all levels of organization activity. Too tight a strategy or budget doesn't allow for useful messiness, and takes too much effort to maintain anyway.

I think we should also extend this idea to customer environments.

The kind of "slightly messy" environment I described above feels friendly and local. It's in the context of the reliable national chain. You get the best of both worlds.

I used to be a regional manager of a group of retail bank branches. I was on a mission to clean up the merchandising of the branches, and wanted to put an end to too much mess that was interfering with a clean and orderly customer environment. You couldn't have your collection of crystal animals beside your teller wicket. You could only have one family photo in your office, not a dozen. Every local charity could not put a collection box by your reception desk.

It was a positive change, on balance, but you have to be careful about going too far. If you go too far, what you have is a sterile environment, which is how most bank branches feel to me today.  There is no personality there.

There are no painted tulips stuck to the counters in the spring. There is no mountain of donated teddy-bears just before Christmas. In short, no local flavor, and no feeling of personal connection with real people.

The effort to create a consistent environment has created consistent sterility, not consistent warmth and ambiance.

We need to help people find the right balance.