theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Webcast on Creativity: Finding Aha moments

I'm headed to the annual QRCA conference in October, and am particularly looking forward to hearing a presentation on creativity from Dr. Joanne Brunn, who studies this sort of thing, and also has a lot of practical, real-world experience.

Fortunately for you, this particular presentation will be webcast (free). Here's the topic description:

Why is it so hard to get to that Aha moment? Creativity is often misunderstood and may seem overwhelming to put into practical use. However, we all naturally follow the creative stages of preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Through understanding these research-based stages of creativity, you will learn how to identify and manage the stages to encourage creativity. The stage that often gets neglected or outright prohibited is incubation – yet that is the major factor in getting to that Aha moment of illumination. Come and learn practical and fun ways to best take advantage of everyone’s natural creative flow.

To find out more and register for this Q-Cast, click here. These sessions are archived and can be viewed later if you miss the live session.

This event is unusual in that we don't allow a lot of veiled "pitching" -- presentations are usually excellent. So if you can't be in Vegas at the conference having a great time, you can take in some of the cool learning, and it's even free.

I'll be speaking as well, so will have to contain my partying. [I have a 9 am slot on a Friday, so wish me luck!]

The future of social media for customer loyalty

A really good question was posed on the Focus Network about where social media and customer loyalty is headed.

“What's the role of social marketing in customer loyalty today? What about a year from now?”

Here's what I think, and what I posted -- what do you think?

Permit me a short anecdote first:

This week I experienced problems with my e-mail and Blackberry synching. I use a hosted exchange service, and went to their web site to see if there was a notice about a system outage (there wasn't, or at least not where I was looking).
After wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on, including being abandoned by their chat support, i finally searched the company on Twitter. There I saw any number of people grumbling about the server outages.
The company was not responding very rapidly to the Twitter talk, and chose not to engage with any of the individuals who posted about problems. They posted about once a day, saying they were working hard to fix the problem. I noticed that others who were irritated were posting links to review sites where they had newly created negative reviews about the company's service.

This kind of behavior is surprising in 2011, but it will be toxic in 2012.

Service problems are one of the opportunities that any organization has to demonstrate that they put some commitment behind their brand promise, whether that promise is appliances that work, friendly flight attendants, or excellent hosted server support.
Every business needs a strategy to respond to customer issues and problems expressed in social media as part of their loyalty strategy.

The larger the business, the more rapidly an issue can escalate -- remember the Domino's pizza YouTube debacle way back in 2009? Domino's had done nothing -- it was two employees -- but they nevertheless experienced damage to their brand and their business.

The communications environment is now a social environment. Thinking about social media as somehow "different" is no longer a productive point of view, because it is completely pervasive. Even your print campaign has a QR code in it, which is likely linked to a site offering social possibilities of some kind. Hotels have QR codes on their front doors with "Like" stickers. So the physical environment has become a virtual link as well, and we will see many more examples of this.

One critical first step for organizations: Ensure you can respond quickly and effectively to problems that arise where your customers are communicating about problems in social media channels (Twitter, Google+, wherever). Implicit in this is needing a real-time monitoring strategy which usually involves putting a listening platform in place (e.g. Conversition, Radian6, etc.)

In the future, social media efforts in larger organizations are going to become much more mainstream in terms of media planning and measurement. They won't be in a cubbyhole by themselves in the leading organizations, they will be part of integrated brand and customer communications.

Opting out isn't an option, because it will create negative impressions. When you see a business with no website today -- even a small business, like an upholstery shop, you form an immediate impression of them as somewhat backwards.
A major enterprise with a poor presence on major social media platforms will soon communicate that they are behind the times.

We are so used to communicating through multiple channels, that I do think customers will start to wonder why they can't communicate with their bank or telecomm carrier this way. So the call centre of the future is likely going to have to figure out strategies for other kinds of channels, not just telephone, e-mail and chat on the company's web site. It might be chat via Facebook, for example.

I don't see the complexity of the environment diminishing at all. There will be more options, as well as greater risks. But also, greater potential rewards for those that choose to invest in experimenting and learning. It's still the frontier, and the patterns of behavior are shifting rapidly.

If you want to follow the thread on Focus, click here.

Confirmation messages: a nice touch and a good example

There is a local retailer of housewares and small home appliances that works very hard to set themselves apart from the national chains, called Cayne's.

We recently bought some soda chargers (for making your own soda water) via their web site. Here's the nice confirmation e-mail they sent. First time I can ever remember getting anything like this.

If you combined this with Dell's order status updates, you'd have something really spiffy.

These folks do a nice thing with pets as well, which I have written about here.

Can BankSimple live up to its promise of "not sucking"?

BankSimple is a new internet-only banking offering. Not quite a bank, but more like the front-end of a bank, linked to actual banks. So something like Mint, but with transaction capability.

"Our core brand value is 'Don't suck'" according to CEO Josh Reich, as reported in Fast Company. On their web site, the vision is a bit more conventional:

• Real service, real support     
• Putting people, not policies, first   
• Mobile from the ground up
• No surprise fees ever
• Plain, simple language

Other Internet Only Banks

It's an interesting idea, but certainly not the first attempt. ING Direct was created with a very similar philosophy. There have been a few other internet-only banks that started and folded. These were all actual banks, however, with all of the regulation and capital requirements that entails.

A few that come to mind:

President's Choice Financial -- not quite internet only, because they have grocery store kiosks. Still rolling.

BizSmart -- had a few kiosks in what is now Staples stores. Targeted to small business with a free checking offer. Closed a few years ago and folded into their parent, CIBC.

Bizner -- an internet only bank targeting small business launched by RaboBank. Very innovative offering, especially their linkage to online accounting software. Folded back into RaboBank in 2010.

Swift Financial -- a branchless bank focused on small business launched in 2007, and made it as far as 2010 with that model. Their vision was documented by CEO Ed Harycki on YouTube. They are now doing business as Swift Capital, and appear to be only in the business of factoring merchant receivables. I really thought their model was cool, but they've changed their strategy.

The fact that others have tried this actually confirms the market need, in my view. So eventually someone will get something together that is robust enough to make a profit long-term.

The challenge of "not sucking"

I did find the "doesn't suck" line just a wee bit arrogant, however. If only it were so simple. I guess the rest of the industry is filled with people who don't really get it, or don't care? 

New innovations like this do force the rest of the industry to stay on the game and keep making their experience better, and that's a good thing. If these folks can stay focused on serving one segment really well, perhaps they can survive over the long term.

Resources

A bank that doesn't suck, by Tim Fernholz, Fast Company, July/August 2011

What is Bank Simple? by Jim Bruene, NetBanker, May 2010

Swift Financial Launches Product to Increase Small-Business Access to Capital -- company press release, August 2010

Online only banks list 2006, Bankwatch, -- a good list of the leading online only banks at that time. Only a handful are still around with the original business model.

 

 

Capturing every dollar of sales: what I learned from my fight with a bottle of white

I'm out of town for a few days getting creativity training. [With luck, the content of this blog will improve as a result.]

My room here is equipped with a microwave and small fridge, so I thought I would just eat in the first night. I had a pleasant trip to Trader Joe's, a place not available in my home town. Joe supplied a nice salad and a frozen butter chicken entree.

Since I was economizing on the meal, I decided to splurge a little on a nice bottle of white wine, Toasted Head chardonnay. It had a cork. I knew I had a corkscrew in my suitcase (checked, of course), but it is one of those kind you have to pull.

Sure enough, after half an hour of back-straining pulling, the cork had moved not a millimetre.

I headed to the grocery store across the street, which has an ample wine department. A couple of aisles of lovely wines. And one type of corkscrew, same kind as mine.

The chardonnary is still in the fridge, awaiting the prince to pull the cork.

My observation is that this grocery store is likely missing the opportunity to sell corkscrews. They sell frying pans. They sell egg flippers. But not a decent corkscrew.

Must read article: Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy UK on how to measure advertising

Every time I talk about advertising measurement as a 'black art' I get objections from people telling me how their normative metrics are well tested and very useful, blah, blah, blah. Let me be clear here: I do qualitative testing on advertising, and I'm not too positive on that approach either.

Why so negative? Well, there is a lot of good evidence that our actual preferences and behavior are not all that well related to what we say.

A brilliant article, "Questioning the Nature of Research" reports on an interview with Rory Sutherland, chair of Ogilvy UK, who makes a strong case that our current measurements are not strongly rooted in behavioral economic theory.

Sutherland's point is not that research is a bad thing in general, it's that the current norms for how research is done on advertising don't work.

...as you get closer to the point of decision, there are factors at work which never really appear in conventional market research. They are contextual factors, social factors. No-one in any research group would ever say, “If there are four brands of shampoo, I’ll buy the one that has most bottles on the shelf”

This is true, by the way, not just of survey research, but also of qualitative.

The best qualitative research approaches come at the topic from right angles -- indirectly. Like a magician's deception, we want to focus your attention on something so that you respond as naturally as possible. Or we try to mimic the actual circumstances of your decision. Still, no self-report in the world is as good as watching a thing happen. Or setting up experiments that show you what is actually happening.

What we have learned from behavioral economics research is this: "Your preference is a product of your behaviour and not the origin of it." If you customarily go to one drycleaner, you will be able to provide a rationale for that choice, (e.g. quality, service) which is likely to have little to do with the real reason (e.g.location).

A useful and thought-provoking article to get your synapses back to school and making new connections.

 

Innovation in Government: Calgary raises the bar

On a recent visit to Calgary, I was impressed to learn about their parking meters. [Okay, I'm weird, but hear me out.]

Excited about parking. Really.

My business colleague input his license plate, then paid, but didn't have to march over to put a piece of paper in his car. This definitely got my attention. Then he told me he could add more money using his cell-phone!  I asked how the system was controlled, and he told me that cars with automated cameras drive around checking the lots. [So even that part is pretty automated!]

This was cool enough, but here are a few more things I learned about ParkPlus later:

• You can find out real time availability of parking spaces in city lots, and even get an RSS feed if you need it.
• You get a discount for a small car, because it takes up less room in places that are flexible, like on-street parking. Now that is seriously cool.
• Because the system is ticketless, they can collect parking fees from scooters and motorcycles. [As a scooterist myself, i kind of like the free parking I get in my home city Toronto, but governments need the bucks, so this is still a cool idea.]
• You can actually set up an account with them, and fund it, which you can then use your cell-phone to access

It's a pretty cool web-site, with well organized information, very clear, and looks pretty user-friendly.

Then I found out about their main web site.

It's not just their parking meters -- they are doing things with their web site that are even cooler. Here's the City of Calgary home page. Pretty, isn't it? So clean, so simple looking.

The image background revolves through a series, but the Bing-like search page, powered by Google, has the one search box.  It's not stuffed up in the corner, saying, in effect, "if you can't find what you need, you can try this". It says "how can i help you?" A bold step for a government institution.

There's an interactive map, a news feed streaming at the top of the main page, a calendar, and numerous other cool things. Every search I tried loaded with blinding speed. Who would suspect a municipal government showing leadership in web site design?

As Ivor Tossel said in a recent Globe + Mail article (how I learned of the web site),

"In the age of Google, most government sites still work like Yahoo did a decade ago."

To find anything in most city web sites, you need to know how the city is organized, so you know what department to look in.

My own city's site tries, but doesn't make it. See the screenshot below:

 

I did three searches on the site, and each one took me to a different landing page with different navigation structures. It would be much easier to just use Google, and not even try navigating through the city's structure.

I loved Ivor Tossell's conclusing remarks:

"The solution that Calgary adopted may be most remarkable as an act of institutional humility. Governments are big, complicated machines, and their instinct will always be to make a show of all the things they do. But Calgary’s site advertises nothing except its interest in what the citizen is looking for. Usefulness is the best municipal service of all."

My take

It's nice to see innovation that benefits taxpayers, isn't it. Have you seen any lately?  I love to have your comments, and publish anything that isn't outright spam.

 

People that put you on hold: is there anyone that doesn't?

Reader Lindsay Willison sent me her article "10 Companies that Always Seem to Put You on Hold", naming basically any organization that a consumer is likely to call for service, ranging from the phone company itself to your insurance company, your cable provider, and even your health-care service.

Then there are those of us who no longer answer our own phones (guilty) because 80% of the calls are an unqualified* sales call.

I've met a number of people recently who carry two smartphones, one for family and actual friends, and the other for work. This way they can stream not just the calls, but also the e-mail. This shows just how polluted the phone lines have become with dreck of various sorts.

And it's not just the phone either -- I find that chat support if kind of like this too. There's one person chatting with multiple customers, and you have to twiddle your thumbs waiting for them to come back. (How many people can one person chat with I wonder?)

We like to complain about this, but really, what's the alternative? Because we sure don't want to talk to someone who doesn't know and can't help.

What might help:

• Sending a digital signal to your phone that shows you where you are in the queue
• Telling you where you are in the queue
• Not repeating that my call is important
• Letting me opt out of music by pressing a number key  "press 1 for soft jazz, 2 for sales pitches**, 3 for complete silence"

More troubling, I find, is that after 15 minutes of doing something else while on hold, when the agent finally arrives, they are all focused and in a hurry, and expect me to be able to kick my brain rapidly into gear. And who can blame them -- they're being judged on a pile of metrics that relate to speed.

I'm not sure what the answer is here. What's your take?

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*Unqualified sales call meaning I'm a poor prospect for their service and the whole thing is a complete waste of time for both of us because I'm not going to buy anything regardless of the quality or the frequency of the pitch.

**Okay, call them product updates if you want