theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Consumers and Advertisers: where's the love?

This is must-see video on the relationship between advertisers and consumers. Oddly enough, created by Microsoft ....

Here's the link to YouTube.

I particularly liked the part where the guy channels the Tom Cruise frown-look. I thought there might be mash-ups of this by now, but there weren't any when I was there. 

Customer Contact Reduction: is Wal-Mart on brand with this program?

Wal-Mart has announced a Customer Contact Reduction Program. They certainly deserve an award for honesty and transparency -- many organizations have launched programs with this intention, but I have never heard of one that was accurately labeled.

Most of WalMart.com's calls relate to order tracking, and they are investing heavily in an order tracking system. As a result, they won't need a phone number. That's the plan, according to Katie Hafner at the New York Times.

Is this on brand for Wal-Mart?

Most commentators seem to think this is a bad idea. My view is somewhat contrarian. The question we need to ask about any customer experience is whether a change is on-brand or off-brand.

Wal-Mart is all about convenience and low prices. So if they can pull this off, they will reduce costs to serve customers, and perhaps even improve the online experience. If you are shopping at Wal-Mart online, you're not looking for a high-touch experience. You're looking for plentiful, cheap and convenient access to stuff.

Operational challenge of withdrawing all phone support

The challenge Wal-Mart will have is that completely shutting off any door to a human helper might slop over somewhere else. Few processes are so goof-proof that they never have issues. Even at Six Sigma, you have 3.4 defects for every million opportunities. At Wal-Mart's scale, and if they're less than Six-Sigma reliable, there will be lots of customers who have problems that their web site can't solve.

If there is really great e-mail support, that might be sufficient. They might also have a "secret service" option. This is what I would call it when there is human support available, but it isn't publicized. It's only available after you are well into the service hierarchy. Amazon, for example, does have phone support available, but you have to dig for it.

We expect vastly different things from Wal-Mart and from Williams-Sonoma, for example, who's phone number is one click from their home page.

Good customer experience is not always high touch; it is always on-brand. And that's not the same thing.

Resources:

Sam Walton's philosophy of business, as reported on WalMart.com: 

"The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want. And really, if you think about it from your point of view as a customer, you want everything: a wide assortment of good-quality merchandise; the lowest possible prices; guaranteed satisfaction with what you buy; friendly, knowledgeable service; convenient hours; free parking; a pleasant shopping experience."

- Sam Walton (1918-1992)

Thank you to Dan Obregon at eStara for bringing this to my attention.

Katie Hafner, BITS Blog on NY Times: "Walmart.com to Customers: Stop Calling"

Image of the Emerald City from MGM Wizard of Oz from OutNow

We're still calling it new media, but the media keep changing

Strategic Leadership Forum, if you're in the Toronto area, is a good place to hang. They may seem dusty, if you judge them by their web site and brochures, but they have great programs and speakers. Case in point, this week's session on using new media to communicate with customers.

James Powell, currently a Marketing Director at Rogers, and Sean Moffitt, word of mouth expert and world class networker gave a fabulous evening to a group of about 20 marketers. Good speakers, great examples, well prepared and engaging.

Some of my takeaways:

[1] Know your customers. There's no one right medium to reach them. You need to reach them where they live, where they have fun, where they shop, and of course in the media they encounter while doing those things.When you know your customer, the choices are much clearer. [Of course, how can I not love someone who wants to go deep into customers' lives???]

[2] You don't have to use new media to be heard. You could just be creative with existing media. The point is to think about the media, not just blow the budget on television

[3] Don't assume the execs will see your edgy stuff. That's not the neighborhood they live in, and those aren't the magazines they read. Take responsibility for marketing IN to the organization

[4] When faced with questions about ROI and GRP and other payback-type acronyms, focus instead on the opportunity cost of shifting the budget to something different than your traditional spend. For the cost of one full page ad in a major newspaper, you could run a whole new-media campaign

[5] Major agencies have business models that don't support these kinds of projects all that well. Try out some small shops that want to win awards. And give them a bit of room to have fun and do cool work -- after all, you have them on a shoestring budget

[6] The blog world tends to say 'gotcha' a lot when a major company tries something different and it isn't totally brilliant. Ignore that and get out there. There's learning to be had and the risks are small relative to the potential

[7] New media are driven by advocacy, dialogue, authenticity, openness. Yes, you're heard that before. It's not going away. If anything, these themes are gaining momentum 

Key insights:

It's pointless to talk about the internet as a specific, monolithic medium. E-bay may be a medium. Google Ad-words may be a medium. Facebook may be. Blogs may be. But the internet really is infrastructure, like asphalt or paper, that can carry many different kinds of things.

When we add the new, the old doesn't always go away. We have credit cards and debit cards and internet bill payment, but we still use cash and we still use cheques. They may be buggy-whips, but they linger on. Communication tools appear to be similarly constructed. We may have reduced our snail mail, but we still use it, and sometimes in new and creative ways.

Resources:

James Powell talks about the Rogers Picnic, an event created to target males aged 18 - 24, in Marketing Magazine.

Facebook's plan to hook up the world, by David Kirkpatrick, Fortune, June 11, 2007. Talks about Facebook's move to let anyone write applications for their platform. A blog buddy recently suggested we start a remote Scrabble game using -- you guessed it -- an add-on to Facebook. If you haven't taken the plunge, you'd be well advised to invest a couple of hours in your education. Be forewarned however -- as Sean Moffit told me a while back, it can take a lot of your time if you let it.

Sean's blog -- Buzz Canuck -- is worth a read. He's launched a blog-off which will make us all entered raise our game.

New in credit cards -- the iCache

A brilliant concept here -- it'll be interesting to see how this performs in the marketplace. The device you are looking at is called icache. It's a thin wallet that contains a 'credit-card' that can mimic any of your cards. You select the card you want to use, and the mag-stripe is programmed with the needed information.
The data on the 'dynamic mag stripe' is overwritten by the next transaction, or expires.

Biometric security reduces the risk of having all your plastic in one place.
It isn't a hosted solution -- the biometrics and card data is stored with the consumer.
It requires no modifications at the merchant level -- one of the major barriers to a consolidated solution.
It works on contact-less units as well, such as RFID (which we'll be seeing a lot more of).

Icache wisely plans their initial roll-out via financial institutions, and will give them the opportunity to brand the device.  I would assume the reason for this is to try to forestall some kind of defensive or competitive manoeuvre on the part of the banking community.

The company plans to migrate the technology to cell phones when cell-payment becomes more widely available.   

This all seems really great, for a device that might sell for less than $100. It even has the cool-factor potentially going for it.
One major bit of fallout will be card branding.

Resources:
Thanks to Business 2.0 for bringing this to my attention. "One card to rule them all", Sept 2007

The social etiquette of blogging -- corporate bloggers, too

I noticed in the newspaper that business students are being taught which fork to use. Makes great copy. It got me thinking about the norms and conventions -- you could call it etiquette -- that have arisen around things like blogging and other social networking.

We often don't notice these norms until someone violates them, and we feel annoyed. A great example is to violate the norms of conversation, and see what happens. Don't let the other person speak. Don't take turns. They'll think you are a complete boor, but you'll know what a social norm is.

Here are some of the conventions that I've been annoyed about when people violate them. If you are starting a business blog, or writing a corporate blog, you will do well to stay inside the lines. If you are a PR publicist for a company or an author, you could pick up some tricks here, too.

Some ideas about blogging etiquette

1.  Share the link love

We're all trying to make a go of things out there on the long tail. It's not easy to find readers. So when we cite other content, we link to them. Permalinks make this easy. Publishing a blog roll is another way to share the link love, and let your readers know other interesting places you have found worthwhile at least once. This one rule actually drives many of the others.

2. The web is full of wonderful content. It's a conversation. You cannot build a walled garden, and it annoys others when you try

You want people to find your blog and your posts, but you don't want to help people find other interesting content. Not fair. Anything that smacks like this is kind of annoying. If you have 10,000 readers already, maybe you can get away with it. It's still annoying. Big corporate sites might struggle with this one, and we are probably prepared to forgive them.

3. Make it easy for others to find and reference your content

Your permalinks should be as easy to find as your Digg, Technorati and Delicious bugs. You don't want people to track back to their own article on the same content ... you don't want to risk them linking to their content in comments? Wow ... sounds like a newspaper column, not a blog. [Below you can see the Globe and Mail's share-this-article pop-up. No permalink. Grrr.]

3. Be brave. Use your name.

It's personal, and it's a conversation. Don't make me hunt all over your blog to figure out who you are, so I can use your name when I reference your post. Anonymous comments are equally tired.

4. Remember that most of us are not getting paid for this, we're doing it for profile or because we are passionate about the subject matter, and enjoy writing.

I review the odd book. Some I buy. Some are new publications that are sent to me, unsolicited. I invest quite a bit more time reading your book and writing a post than you did when you sent it to me. Most publishers and publicists totally get this, and are grateful for whatever coverage they receive. [And I'm grateful for the books and galleys.] The best ones provide access to author Q&A, as with the recent Chocolates On the Pillow Blog Book Tour.

Not long ago, I sent a publicist a link to the review I wrote, a very positive review, I might add. They wrote back asking me to insert specific wording into my post linking to the corporate web site of the authors, who sell training. Um ... that's a bit over the top, OK?

5. You want me -- or anyone else -- to comment on your technology, your company, or your upcoming webcast? Make it interesting.

My readers -- and my clients -- are very interested in staying current. What's happening, what's new in their industry or in other industries, what technologies do they need to know about. I spend a lot of time working on this. Don't we all? 

So I'm interested in hearing about anything new. But you've got to provide me with a little real information. Even better, let's do a little e-mail Q&A. Don't just send a link to your corporate home page. Really, this is no different than any mainstream media journalist. You want someone to pay attention to your press release, it needs to say something worth paying attention to. Are your customers getting better results? Does your new widget solve a long-standing problem? Find something to say. Offer to make a senior person available for interview by phone or e-mail.

6. Copyright applies

There are blogs that are aggregators. They scour the web for interesting content and put it up on their own site. Many don't even link to the original content. Others link, but take entire articles and post it without permission. I don't have the time to police this, and I suspect most others don't also. But it's beyond annoying. Especially when they get more traffic than I do with content they didn't write. Grrr.

7. Making people open your web site so they can see your advertising in order to read your article, which arrived by RSS or e-mail is annoying

I don't have an answer to this one. I've considered doing it myself to boost ad revenue at least enough to cover the out of pocket costs. I decided it was disrespectful to my readers, so haven't done it. Now I find that FeedBlitz, the people who bring you e-mail subscription capability, are adding advertising to the e-mail. This is a little annoying. I can stop it by paying a monthly fee. Sigh.

Resources

The Long Tail -- an article in Wired, which became a book, by Chris Anderson. You can find it here on Amazon The Long Tail.

Permalink -- a permanent web link to an article that will not change its address as long as the article is on the web. Wikipedia entry here.

Trackback -- a link code that lets me put a link in your blog to my article on the same topic. It's considered polite to actually reference the blog and the content as part of an asynchronous conversation. Anything else is considered spam. Not having trackback capabilities on your blog -- it's not really rude, but it's not conversational either. It's like not letting other people get a word in edgewise. It's not equitable. Here's the Wikipedia entry. I know that all blog platforms do not have trackback links. And that's also annoying.

I found some interesting posts about blog etiquette. There are likely thousands, if not millions more. But here are a few links:

Ward Jenkins at Ward-o-Matic -- inspired to write about blog etiquette after his fabulous article on Polar Express animation attracted an avalanche of links, many of them comment spam.

Lisa Williams at Learning the lessons of Nixon published a blogging code of conduct. Not far off Thumper's Mother's Rule, and the world would be a better place if everyone did this.

James McGovern at Thinking Out Loud says blog etiquette is all hogwash.

Rohit Bhargava at Influential Marketing Blog wants to combat snarkiness by creating the Golden Rules of Blog Etiquette. You need the password 'be good" without quotes to enter the site. [Apparently one of the golden rules is to write short posts. I see I have violated this one, and often, so please accept my apologies. I'll try to be more concise in future.]

Are all customers created equal? or why does everyone forgive Apple so easily?

Apple dropped the price of the iPhone. You probably heard about this too.
Very shortly after the big launch at $599, the price is now down to $399.
If you bought early, you get a credit for $100. But it's only good in the store if you buy some additional stuff.

"Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these"  -- Steve Jobs

Companies with less goodwill might find themselves in a descending spiral with stuff like this. People might say that they should have seen this coming. But Apple seems to have such a deep well of goodwill that they don't pay full price for these slips.

I'm just as interested in what is behind this move, and how we might understand what is going on here. Here's the most interesting chatter I found out there:

Steve Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, writing in the New York Times, says that economic models for pricing generally ignore the consumer response to the reason for the price:

"What economists (and Apple too, I guess) ignore is that consumers hate it when companies follow practices that look like they are designed to maximize profits. You won’t find it in economic models, but consumers care about the reason a firm chooses the price it chooses. ...Apple’s price cut looks like one driven purely by a desire to maximize profit, which is why everyone is so mad."

As Levitt goes on to point out, something like 10 - 20% of the gift card recipients will not use the $100 coupon. He suggests that Apple should have gone all the way and offered the early buyers a $200 coupon, which would have made it harder for people to be angry with them, and not cost all that much more.

Seth Godin says the trouble with this event is that it was differential treatment of customers that was random and unpredictable. Instead of spending $20 million on these coupons, Apple could have offered customers some other kind of preferential treatment in keeping with their early adopter status. Among his ideas:

• free exclusive ringtones commissioned from major artists like U2 and Bob Dylan, and available only to early adopters
• free head-of-the-line pass for their next big thing
• ability to buy a specially colored, limited-edition iPod

Godin's conclusion is brilliant, and worth remembering:

"The key is to not give price protection to early buyers (that's unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less."

Some lesser luminaries have also weighed in with some interesting variants on this theme:

DV Hardware reports that the iPhone -- even when turned off -- continues to download e-mail. This can result in some big-time data charges if you happen to be traveling abroad with your iPhone turned off.  Author Thomas De Maesschalck speculates that this is the reason Apple was able to reduce the price so quickly!

Nerdblog suggests that this type of price cut is standard practice in the mobile phone industry. [So why was my Razr still so expensive a month ago, after the original had an unfortunate encounter with a small body of water??? Perhaps because I live in Canada... sigh]

Way back on July 24, BrandCurve predicted this price drop would be coming as a result of poor subscriptions due to the high price of the phone+subscription combo:

"I can’t say I’m surprised by the low numbers.  With a price tag of $500, the iPhone isn’t going to fit in the budgets of the masses.  It’s a cool toy but hardly essential.  Also, consumers are educated about electronics these days.  They know if they wait a little longer, the prices will drop.  There is little need to rush into laying out $500 when that price will plummet not too far into the future.  And of course, there is always the question of how AT&T is negatively impacting sales.  Their wireless services are not known for top-notch coverage or customer service."

The marriage with telco's known for their hostile customer relationships is something I've also wondered about.

I do still feel that Apple is becoming more part of the mainstream, and that they will be less lovable as a result, cool products notwithstanding. Time will tell, as always.

September 14 addendum:
Reader Rich McIver from Inside CRM drew their post on Apple to my attention: 12 Effective Strategies Apple Uses to Create Loyal Customers.  Personally, I think this is a great title for a book, and the mere presence of Apple's name is probably enough to make it sell.

I'm not sure I totally agree with all their points, but my brand is not as successful as Apple, so what the heck do I know? See what you think. Feel free to add to the conversation by commenting here. Do you agree with the 12 points?

Keeping in touch with customers: Long Term Client has innovative idea

I heard about an interesting service today from a virtual assistant I was interviewing -- it's called Long Term Clients, and I thought you might also be intrigued.

This service takes your contact list and helps you stay in touch with a personalized greeting card. "Personalized" means a note in the card that is unique and different, and could only come from you. And then they produce these for you, using an image you have chosen, and send them to the list you provide.

They have note-writers that help you craft an interesting note, in case it's not something you can do for yourself. I suspect that part of the service is crucial to the success of the notes, actually. A while back an old work buddy who is now a financial advisor sought my help on something like this. I suggested he add a topical and changing PS to the e-mail he sends out on a regular basis with economic reports in them. I suggested a few to get him started. Topical, personal notes that would make the e-mails much friendlier and feel more like authentic communication. My friend started out pretty well, but it wasn't long before his PS became a simple request for referrals and is the same all the time. Not very interesting. So having a good note-writer help you with your card content makes a lot of sense to me.

Here are some of the other tips from Long Term Clients, gleaned from their web site:

• Facts are best for seasonal cards. Quotations are best for birthday cards.
• Avoid verses and meaningless platitudes
• Clients are sensitive to the quality of their relationship to a service provider such as a financial planner. It pays to make an effort
• It's better to send nothing than to send a 'signature only' card
• An effective greeting card has a long shelf-life -- people keep it on their desk, wall or refrigerator for a long time
• Your personalized note should contain the same facts about you -- personal facts -- that you would share with your top clients in person when you are having coffee or playing golf
• The note needs to be personal, not business-oriented
• Use this form of contact three times a year -- two seasonal notes and one birthday note

This seems like a really great concept, and frankly a vast improvement over what one usually receives. Even if you know it's a mail merge, it is still contact. Some effort has gone into it. Some expense has gone into it, which means you cared enough to spend some time and $. And it's not sales oriented, it's personal and relationship oriented. Very neat idea.

Anyone know of other services like this?

The hardest part of retail: coordinating execution or why marketing executives need to get out of the office more

Sean Howard reports on a tale of good marketing gone bad in this post. Volkswagen starts off great with a joy-ride and free movie tickets campaign for their Touareg, and ends up taking the leads generated and turning them into a hard-sell when the lead gets to the dealer. And creates negative word-of-mouth while doing it.

Sean's conclusion is so right:

"The hardest part of retail is that you can't sell your idea to corporate and be done with it.  You gotta take it all the way down through a channel you may or may not control.  But not fighting this fight is bad news."
-- Sean Howard, word-of-mouth consultant, on his blog Craphammer

Marketing departments are seriously challenged to manage this downstream contact, and may not really understand what even happens in the channel. It's not all the fault of sales, of course. Marketing may not have communicated effectively with the channel about what is supposed to happen. A hundred things can go wrong on a campaign of this type. But it's crucial to at least try to manage all the levers.

The role of the marketing executive is not all about tactical communication any longer -- if it ever was. If you are one, you need to start broadening your sphere of influence, and get out of the office more.

Web 2.0 watch: why Facebook is the new LinkedIn, or something like that

Perhaps, like me and one of my blog buddies, Stephanie Weaver, you have been avoiding the whole Facebook thing. You thought it was for 'young people'. You thought it was about getting hooked up, and not in a business-kind of way.
So did I.

Then I saw who was starting to fool around on Facebook. So I came to the party, albeit a bit late. [I'm hoping to claim fast-follower status here ... is it too late for that??]

LinkedIn is a great application in terms of business contact information. It's much easier to maintain LinkedIn than it is to maintain your own Outlook contacts. So it's a bit like one of those updating services, but without the annoying e-mails form other people's executive assistants, asking you to update your business card. The problem with LinkedIn is that it is kind of ... dull. Static. There's no sense of connection.

Enter Facebook. Once I got on to it, I could see why it is so magnetic. You get the feeling -- however foolish and unfounded it may be -- that you are keeping in touch with people. It's actually kind of fun.

What we really need is some kind of marriage of these two things.

More important... there are many more commercial applications being tested, just like there have been in Second Life. Here are two I'm interested in right now -- stodgy banks, OK?  But they are experimenting, and trying to find their way.

Royal Bank - RBC Financial -- has something called Campus Connection. And TD Canada Trust has the Money Lounge.

I had no idea there were so many employee groups. Bank branches. Store locations. You name it. I think the corporate IT people are trying to shut this kind of thing down, just as they have with blogs. Several of my clients would like to be able to monitor blogs as part of their work, however they are blocked by the corporate firewall. [I know, I know  ... !!!]

What to do, what to do...
Don't be thinking you've seen it all. This stuff seems to be picking up speed every day. I'm wondering if it might be a more useful collaboration tool than the online thing I've been paying big bucks for and nobody seems to want to use.

And don't be thinking you've got to get it right, waiting on the sidelines. How well did that strategy serve anyone in the early days of the web??? I'm not saying, go blow the bankroll. What I am saying is ...

Start experimenting. In small ways. With audiences that might be more receptive. Be transparent, in case you didn't already know. No fake Facebooking, OK?

Give it a little budget and resources. If I can spend half the day on this stuff without even trying, building something meaningful is going to take actual time. And probably some out-of-pocket cash. Maybe not huge, but don't ask people to do it on the side of their desk. That's not the way to success.

But you also need to get the learning started. Soon. It's September... what are you doing this month?

Resources

I found some of Grant McCracken's posts on this topic quite informative. Try this one: How Social Networks Work

Same thing for Sean Moffitt, aka Buzz Canuck. You might want to start with this post: Facebook: the United Nations of Digital Life.

You are here: keeping your customers informed about what is happening and when

Something came up in a research project I'm currently working on that I think has general applicability ⇒  knowing where you are at in a multi-stage process, what's coming next, and when it's likely to happen.
In my current project, a lot of the unhappy people experienced confusion over this. Most of the happy people felt they knew what was going on.

[OK ... get to the point, Susan, you are probably saying. Bear with me for a minute.]

I was trying to think of good examples for my client about who does this well. Naturally, I thought of package delivery (FedEx, UPS, Purolator) and books (Amazon, Indigo, et al). We have come to expect e-mails letting us know where things stand every step of the way when we are ordering things online. If we're not sure, we can log in and check our status using a special code (also e-mailed to us, with a link).

And then, in a burst of universe synchronicity, this notice arrived in my in-basket from Dell. [Yes, we are buying new desktops. I've come to realize that computers are like cars. They don't last forever, and there will be maintenance. And as soon as you buy one, a cooler color comes out. But back to our story.]

What I loved about this e-mail from Dell: 

⇒ It's colorful and bright. Yes, I had to download pictures. But I don't mind doing that when it's something important to me. We are all excited about the new computers, and this message says, yes, you should be excited, something good is happening here.

⇒ It's got a graphic indicator that spells out a number of things VERY FAST. First, it's showing me that there are stages, because it has a little bar for each stage. Anyone who has ever installed software or done an online survey knows what the little indicator bars are about. It also sets up a really nice expectation that there will be more communication coming at each stage. Imagine covering all this in - Yawn - text.

⇒ And there's another nice graphic message that I can talk to a live agent if I have questions. A friendly face, right there under the contact info button.

⇒ What you can't see, below the screen shot, is that they have also given me a nice recap of what we ordered. The full details, actually. 

⇒ There's nothing saying "print this and keep it safe". There's no babble-speak. They say thanks TWICE. 

What you might want to consider:

⇒ If your service costs less than shipping on a book, perhaps you don't need to invest in this kind of status communication. But what about their mortgage? What about their insurance application? There are many important things that take time and happen in stages

⇒ If you are providing something that people have anxiety about, status communications could help them feel more comfortable. They are likely to reduce upset calls to your contact centre. Maybe you'll even avoid other problems because errors will be caught early

⇒ What about bringing supply-chain thinking and tools to customer communications??

⇒ If it's something with a short cycle time, e-mail might not be the most relevant channel. Maybe it's text messaging. Certainly texting would be much better for certain kinds of groups -- those without e-mail, and those that live their lives on a cell-phone

⇒ Dell just raised the bar. Looks like they are back in the game again. Where's your bar?