theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

How to say thank you, part 2

In yesterday's post, I offered up a little matching quiz. Let's see how you did.

A through D is the list of charitable gifts, and [1] throught [4] is the list of responses

A. I make a generous gift to my business school every year, as part of a five year commitment that I keep renewing. This is the largest individual item on this list.

B. A number of annual donations to worthy causes

C. One of these annual gifts is to the Salvation Army, who gets about the same amount as the others in B above

D. I recently made a campaign contribution to a candidate for leadership of a political party

Here is the list of thank yous:

[1] and [2] Handwritten and personalized thank you card comes from two of these

[3] A tax receipt, followed up by mailing labels and a request for more funds

[4] A form letter

Answers: A-4, B-3, C-1, D-2

I was surprised and pleased to get the personalized card from the candidate. And impressed. This is very memorable. It looks genuine. It has had the effect of making me feel more strongly supportive of the candidate than I already was. I have started deleting and ignoring messages coming from the others.

The annual note from the Salvation Army is also impressive, and it makes them completely stand out from the pack of annual gifts. They are the only ones who don't seem to overly pelt us with additional requests all year. It feels like a tremendous amount of work on their part, but also has really cemented for us that the funds are appreciated.

The university sends me a form letter filled with platitudes. In fairness, they also have a person call me, but that person is trying to cultivate more; it's not really a thank you. The form letter is actually somewhat damaging in my view, because it serves to remind me what a small donor I really am, that I do not warrant a genuine signature from anyone.

The constant requests from other charities is annoying. I don't want the labels. But I guess they must work. It's a bit depersonalizing.

How about you? What are your insights on this topic?

How you say thank you

Occasionally we talk here about marketing not-for-profit organizations. These are the people who sell you the opportunity to feel good, or feel involved, instead of an opportunity to obtain a good or a service. It's still a sale, but it's the sale of an intangible.

Here's a little matching quiz for you. I will post correct answers tomorrow.

A. I make a generous gift to my business school every year, as part of a five year commitment that I keep renewing. This is the largest individual item on this list.

B. A number of annual donations to worthy causes

C. One of these annual gifts is to the Salvation Army, who gets about the same amount as the others in B above

D. I recently made a campaign contribution to a candidate for leadership of a political party

Here's what comes back. See if you can match up the list below with the gifts above:

[1] and [2] Handwritten and personalized thank you card comes from two of these

[3] A tax receipt, followed up by mailing labels and a request for more funds

[4] A form letter

Can you match up correctly?

Find out tomorrow.

Why no one is reading your killer e-mail

I stumbled on this great article about e-mail subject lines. Which must be very compelling, or no one will read the rest.

It's just more WIFM, right?

There's a great piece on Social Media Today, by Nate Goodman: "What do you mean my email subject line sucks?" that explains a lot of dos and don'ts and how tos. 

Most surprising to me were some of the "don't" items. Such as don't mention a big discount, (smaller discounts work better), don't ask for help of any kind.

FREE, of course, is not a discount. FREE is it's own special thing.

Let's hope some of the people mailing us this year read this post, and make their endless e-mails a little more worth looking at.

 

The wall of distraction: Three rules of communication that will help you get over

This morning my workout buddy told me she was so distracted thinking about all the things she has to get done, that instead of gargling, she swallowed her mouthwash. Her explanation: "I have about 3,000 things on my mind right now. Do you ever have that problem?"

Oh yeah.

One recent morning, distracted with a dozen things and dabbing at the remains of the mascara from the day before, I noticed that the eye-makeup remover smelled odd. Odd, but familiar. Fortunately I noticed that it was actually nail polish remover before I actually got acetone in my eye. (Yikes!)

It's easy to find distracted and overwhelmed people -- just get into your car and go for a drive, they are everywhere.

I could have called it the wall of irritation, because there are so many little irritating things we all need to do ... follow complicated procedures, install things on our phones, reset passwords, find forms, meet deadlines, find answers in support forums, replace broken appliances, get new watch batteries. In the face of this, the world wonders why we aren't paying more attention to our health, spending more time with our families, and making good financial plans for the future.

There is now so much information available, that we can even feel guilty if we don't find the right answer to a great many things, like the best price on a car, or the most durable washer. The information has helped, but it has also added to the great wall.

We don't even have time to be good consumers. We don't read the fine print, we don't follow the instruction manual, and we click "agree" with abandon. Is it any wonder we re-use the same password over and over, even though we know this is not a good security plan?

Three ways to get over the wall

When I think about this in the context of my clients, I always come to the same conclusions:

• Keep it short -- our attention span is shorter than ... sorry, wait, what was I saying?
• Keep it simple -- none of us have time to sort out confusing messages
• Keep it relevant -- your product/service is not the thing we are most worried about (-- unless of course, you have really made a hash of things)

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.

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?

____________________________________________________________________

*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

Using Facebook to engage with consumers: keep it simple

New media channels are becoming as complex as the old media channels were. Actually, scratch that -- I think they are more complex, because they are interactive and dynamic.

So the things that work for blogging (or general content marketing strategies), let's say, don't necessarily work for Facebook marketing.

 
Buddy Media just released a study suggesting that successful FB marketing strategies in some cases are counter-intuitive.They looked at two weeks of FB activity for 200 of their clients to come up with the strategies discussed.

Here are a few of the things that caught my attention:

• Wall posts of 80 characters or less had 27% higher engagement rates (likes, etc.) than longer posts. 80 characters is not a lot -- a Twitter post is maximum 140 chars -- so keep it short.. A short post, almost by necessity, has to have something useful in it, like a new product launch, a sale, etc.

• Full-length URLs do better than shortened URLs -- 3 times better. The report suggests this is because readers know where the URL will take them. Note that URL shortening is virtually a necessity in Twitter, so this is also different.

• Posting outside business hours (referencing Eastern Time) creates higher engagement than posting during business hours. Considering how many businesses block access to social media sites, this isn't all that surprising. What IS surprising is how few of BuddyMedia's clients are posting outside business hours -- 60% of the posts in their study were between 10 am and 4 pm.

• Thursday and Friday are the best days to post, followed by Sunday (see graphic above). The report shows some differences by industry which are quite dramatic. For example, Sunday is when people pay attention to automotive. Food and beverage is highest on Tuesday. Fashion is highest on Thursday. Their advice: study your own patterns.

• Soft-sell key words seem to work best, but direct and simple calls to action get results. Do you want people to click "Like"? You need to ask them to do that.

You know that phrase, "conventional wisdom"? It doesn't have any relationship to new media. Test and learn should be your mantra.

Resources

Download the Buddy Media Facebook study here.

I learned of the Buddy Media report from Marko Saric's very good blog, How to Make My Blog

Trust in the digital era: Epsilon e-mail breach triggers notices from big brands

We've received four notices so far this week about Epsilon's e-mail security breakdown -- everyone from Abe Books to Best Buy has been saying sorry. The notices are a good idea, and probably necessary for them to limit / mitigate liability (in certain litigious market areas).

But I found these e-mails fairly alarming, especially when they kept coming.

But wait... there's more

Turns out that only 2% of total clients were compromised, and it was just e-mail addresses, according to Epsilon's press release. Initially, this felt reassuring, but then I started wondering... what does 2% really mean, when you are operating on this scale?

Elsewhere in the Epsilon website, I learned that they can send "15 million dynamic messages in one hour, or more than 40 billion emails a year."

Turns out that 2% of their clients amounts to about 50 companies, many of them of significant size -- according to this list. (I guess they used the 2% of clients number because the e-mails number was just too big and scary?)

So, finally I know why I am getting so many heartfelt notes from celebrities offering to help me improve my body parts, and have better date nights.

Resources

PC magazine posts more information here about the topic, and offers the suggestion of using a specific e-mail address for online shopping purposes.

But this solution means... if i actually want value-added e-mails and offers from a trusted business I deal with (e.g. Best Buy, for example, or perhaps a hotel or airline), I then have to wade through a ton of spam to get it.

Who talks to customers in a Warm'n'Fuzzy way? Nominate them here.

I thought I'd try out Pandora radio today, after learning about it from Chris Brogan's blog. Or more correctly, a rabbit hole I fell into while reading his blog that led me there... Anyway.

I came upon this lovely error message from Pandora gently telling me that I can't use their service. So I've given them the first Warm'n'Fuzzy award for great communications. Who else should get a Warm'n'Fuzzy certificate? Nominees?

Makes you think how few communications really stack up well, doesn't it? Who does a good job talking to customers? Should they get a Warm'N'Fuzzy?

[Sorry the badge isn't more exciting -- i need to write a report, and can't play with graphics all morning today.]

Focus groups are a waste of time: or are they?

Researcher Chris Kann, (pictured left) and I spoke a while back about the reasons that people bash focus groups. The result of that discussion was an article that was published in Greenbook, called Don't Blame the Focus Group.

One of the most frequent negative examples trotted out about focus groups is the Herman Miller Aeron Chair story, a story of a very innovative product that was so foreign to consumers when introduced, that initial reactions were not all that positive. This story is often told as a cautionary tale about research -- it shouldn't be.

"That Herman Miller management chose to go ahead with a launch of the chair despite these findings and generated a massively successful product, is taken to mean the focus group did not do its job.

But perhaps this is a story of a focus group doing its job well, and management doing its job well too. Management knew what initial reactions to the new product would be and could plan accordingly. The history of the Aeron chair on the Herman Miller website in fact makes it clear that extensive consumer research, including focus groups, informed the development of the product."

We think it is pretty ironic that companies are invited to listen to consumers more, but only in certain ways.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the challenges of management in client organizations. So is Chris. The truth is, we've both been on the other side. Managers have to make a lot of tough calls, and they hope the research will help. And it often does help. But no research, regardless of method, can save leaders from the pain of making actual decisions, and some decisions will inevitably be wrong.

Bad research won't help your decisions much. But good research will save your hide over and over -- save you from making expensive mistakes, help you see the potholes in the road to success, and point to new opportunities.

Focus groups are not the be-all and end-all. But there's a reason they have stayed around, and it's because they are a good tool in the hands of a skilled researcher.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

 

Resources:

Don't blame the focus group for leaders' shortcomings, by Susan Abbott and Chris Shields Kann, Greenbook, 2011.

About Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, designers of the Aeron Chair

Company history of the Aeron chair, including video with the designers.

Your service doesn't have to be perfect: but it can't be hideous. Bonus: hostage loyalty versus natural loyalty

We decided to cancel our HighBeam research account a while back, and just waited until the renewal date was upon us to do it. [Ed. note: where's the link? Me: I am not helping their SEO by linking to them. Forget it.]

Hostage loyalty versus natural loyalty

This organization is one of many these days that has a rather obnoxious approach to renewals: they automatically renew you unless you cancel. There is no notice, there is no reminder, there is no opt-out.

Naturally, this begs the question of why their natural loyalty is so poor that they can't count on renewals... When any organization uses a hostage approach to loyalty, this is not a good thing.

Our chief money guy thought he had issued cancellations on all of our accounts. Then a charge went through. A phone call to the company generated no happiness. Here's what they said, roughly:

• Each account has to be cancelled separately
• There's a no refund policy, didn't you read the contract
• The fact that the charge went through only yesterday is irrelevant -- our no refund, no pro-rating policy still applies
• The fact that you have an e-mail confirmation of cancellation is irrelevant
• We can, however, offer you a discount right now if you extend your subscription
• There is a supervisor, however we are not authorized to transfer any calls to this person

Okay, that pretty much defines hideous, doesn't it.

Not only is there no help to resolve the issue, but pretty much an attitude of 'we got your money, jerk, and we plan to keep it. You could cancel now, but you'd lose access to our database for a year that you just paid for.'

Money guy asks me: Did you renew? Did you get a notice? I say, no siree, I did not

Next step: contact VISA

Biggest point in their favor: trying to help. Explaining what is going on. Advising of options. Being calm and respectful.

Key learning from VISA person:

• If you sign an automatically renewing contract, your bank will put the transaction through even on an expired card [so your expired card on the account is no protection at all]
• If you change your card number with the same bank, your bank might put the transaction through, even though that is not the card you gave the automatically-renewing-jerks

But, and happily...

• if they sent you a cancellation confirmation e-mail, we just might be able to get your money back for you

You don't have to be perfect, just don't be awful

So VISA wasn't really promising a lot. But they did calm down the chief money guy. They offered helpful information. And they tried to find a way to help. They did not suggest by tone or word that any fool who ticks "yes" to such an agreement is beyond help.

You just have to be nice. You have to try. And if you do, you will look so much better than the other guys, that you don't really have to be perfect.

Are you counting on hostages?

I don't want to tell you that hostage marketing tactics will not work for a while. But they will not work in the long term. And they will hide the fact that people don't want to renew, they just got suckered. If you were valuable, they'd renew.

Clever or annoying?

I'm curious -- what's your thinking about these automatic renewal contracts? A convenience (ie. clever) or annoying (seriously annoying)?

The battle for your attention in social media

Markets for interesting ideas

I liked the title of Michael Bungay Stanier's latest e-book, Stop the busywork!, so I went to the download site. Which turns out to be ChangeThis, another creation of marketing maestro Seth Godin.

I knew about ChangeThis, but was curious to see what they are up to, so I browsed around a bit. Not only have they got some impressive design work happening here, but some impressive stats as well.

We know that 30,000 of you subscribe via email and RSS feed, and that you download around 500,000 to 700,000 manifestos a month

The site publishes four to six manifestos each month, based on reader voting on proposals. Submit a good proposal, get it voted up, and then you will be invited to submit the 2,000 to 4,000 word document. Manifestos remain up indefinitely, so can reach very high download numbers if popular.

The ChangeThis site is now managed by 800-CEO-Read, a site that sells and reviews business books. Many of the manifestos posted on ChangeThis are actually extracts or themes related to business books, so there's a bit of a fit there.

Their submission criteria are interesting, too:

Passion. Conviction. Knowledge. Education.
Thought. Persuasion. Freedom. Appeal. Change.
Point of View. Self-Betterment. Inspiration.

I believe one reason their e-books are so successful is that they control the presentation, and the e-book format they use is gorgeous and highly readable.

A point of view is the price of admission

Although ChangeThis is about disseminating ideas, those in the idea business find it a useful place to support their brand building efforts. For example, Tom Peters has seven manifestos published.

You can only get your manifesto published when you can take a point of view in a highly engaging way, and offer thoughtful and useful information to readers. This is a tough thing for a larger organization to do, and there isn't a lot there published by a large organization. Notable exception: Amnesty International has something called Stop Child Executions. 

This kind of point of view is very difficult for corporations to take, but is pretty much essential if you are going to attract readers. And not just on this site, but in most social media. 

To win attention you must be interesting

In our information-laden world, if you want people to pay attention to your message, you must be interesting.

• You can be interesting by having a point of view on an important topic. e.g. ChangeThis
• You can be interesting by being funny. e.g.YouTube
• You can be interesting by being informative. e.g.Instructables

I personally believe corporate messaging -- aka advertising -- can be interesting. But most of it simply is not.

When you hear/see/read a lot of hand-wringing about the challenge of winning eyeballs, this is what it really comes down to. You win eyeballs by being interesting.

Boring only works in the interruption model

Last night I was watching 24 on tape. I confess, I fast-forwarded through most of the advertising. Not because I hate advertising. Just because nothing caught my attention. And boring only works if you are forced to watch.

Social media takes the attention stakes up -- way, way up. Even though a lot of social media is drivel, it is often funny drivel. Which beats boring.

Talking e-mail: An interview with Adam Piandes of Goldmail

I wrote about an interesting product called GoldMail a while back, which triggered some correspondence with Adam Piandes there. He kindly agreed to be interviewed for the blog, and here's the result.

Adam, can you remind me what GoldMail is again – it’s kind of an audio e-mail with a slide-show, right?

GoldMail is a publishing tool that lets you quickly and easily create an audio-visual message. As an example, we say that GoldMail allows you to put your voice over Powerpoint because it resonates with the business user. But you can put you voice over any content – or combination of content - jpegs, PDF’s, screen shots, etc.

Once the slideshow is arranged in a compelling manner, it’s time to record your voice over the slides and then share the message, which you can do by posting it on your blog, sending it by e-mail or putting it on Facebook and other social media sites. It’s about conveying emotion, connecting with the viewer.

Combining audio (voice) with visuals touches upon two different learning styles and retention rates skyrocket versus just sending an e-mail or leaving a voicemail … it’s a simple process: Create, Record, Share.

You can view a quick two minute GoldMail I created for this interview here

Wow, I love that you were brave enough to put yourself out there for us like that. Thank you!

Can you give me a snapshot of the company’s history? Who started this thing and why?

The idea of GoldMail was “birthed” by Tom Hakel, our CEO and David Simpson, our president in 2006 as an audio-visual messaging platform. They were investors in a “more complicated” collaboration software project and discovered two things:

1) People are “over contacting and under connecting,” as live meetings were getting harder and harder to get; general business communications (i.e. email and phones) were not nearly as effective as in the past.

2) Most people don’t have much time to learn new software and they are not technically oriented – they just wanted simple tools that have an immediate impact. 

From the on-set, GoldMail has been affiliated with a non-profit organization that runs summer school programs for middle school youth called Aim High. This organization is a shareholder of GoldMail, and this relationship is a big piece of who we are and what we represent. Also, the founders – at the outset -- wanted to create a tool that would help all non-profits spread their message. It’s cool for me because I feel connected to a great organization and because I’m a huge believer that we will have a long-term impact on fundraising efforts by non-profits everywhere, as we’ve already proven so in several instances.

I had no idea of the not-for-profit connection!

Adam, I know you see this as a product that anyone can use. Which may be true. But every product has a sweet-spot, a natural market of people who really appreciate the benefits and drive usage. What or who is the sweet spot for GoldMail?  I’m guessing sales people working in B2B sales, but who is it really?

Yes, it’s true, GoldMail can be used by anyone who is looking to humanize their on-line communication and wants to easily send messages that people remember. B2B sales is a key area, and this has been one of the early sweet spots for us.

Sales people use GoldMail to get their value proposition across in a personal manner; it enables them to inject their personality and to connect with a prospect or client. It’s nice because a sales person can send out a GoldMail message and the recipient can listen to it as many times as they choose and then can share it with others.

Most of our conversations, at GoldMail, with partners/clients get started with a GoldMail message. I can send a GoldMail message to the recipient as a way to introduce myself and the partnership opportunity or to follow up from a previous conversation. The end goal is to get a meeting or to take a conversation another step further. The response has been great, as we’ve formed some great partnerships using this approach.

One of our partnerships is with Constant Contact. GoldMail now enables their customers to better connect with their recipients, whether it’s to drive sales, to send out a marketing campaign, for fundraising, send a celebratory message or advocacy. Regardless of the intent of the message, GoldMail adds the human element that is so important in establishing relationships and is missing in today’s on-line communication.

I use Constant Contact (as do many), and noticed that they had announced this feature. It seems like a natural fit. Anything else?

We also see a lot of people using GoldMail for internal communications. I create a two to three minute GoldMail message for my CEO at the end of the every week to give him an update on all of my happenings on the business development side. He receives a GoldMail message from all of our departments and in 15 to 20 minutes, he has a great understanding of what’s happening in the company.

Of course, he is involved in the company on a more intimate level, but these GoldMail updates save him a ton of time. On the flip side, he sends the company internal updates on GoldMail’s progress and provides our investors with updates as well.

I love getting a GoldMail message for company updates because it makes me feel included and I always have a general sense of “who’s doing what” but more importantly, “why” they’re doing it. I know that our investors love getting these messages as well.

I hadn't really thought about the internal communication angle, but it makes sense. I think we're all hungering for some human touch, and corporate communications can certainly use humanizing.

What about your raving fans -- what can you tell me about them? Any compelling anecdotes you can share? 

We have fans from all walks of life. From the CMO at Accenture who uses GoldMail to add impact to his most important messages going to their broad management community and senior leaders to an area manager, working out of her home, for a well respected direct-selling company, who uses GoldMail to “increase sales by $2,000 in two days without picking up the phone.”

We’ve had so many incredible stories of how GoldMail has helped people communicate and improve their business; there’s one that sticks out for me.

One of our customers sent out a GoldMail message to notify their customers of some changes to their website. They received a bunch of requests for more information and one of these requests led to a conversation with a project manager that landed the company a $200mm project. They claimed that this never would have happened if they had not been using GoldMail to stay in touch with their longtime and new clients. Not bad for a $10/month investment.

A $200 million project, and they leveraged Goldmail. That's a pretty amazing story! I may have to rethink this ....

You and I chatted about a freemium model. And I see you have now launched this.  Dare I say "What took you so long?"  What kind of impact is this having on usage right now? What do people get for going from free to paid levels?

Ha! Yes, it has taken us a while to realize that people want things for free, hasn’t it! We sort of went about things in an atypical order to how you see things unfold these days. For a few years, we charged people for GoldMail by either a monthly or annual rate and in doing so, it forced us to learn more about our customers. We’ve been able to refine the product and get it to the point of where we are today. We have thousands of paying customers and recently launched our free version; we know that people will pay for our business version and for our enterprise version, which we’ll officially be launching in the coming weeks, so the upgrade path has been proven.

With the launch of the free version, the doors have opened for more partnership opportunities and the downloads have gone up significantly. As the word starts to get out on GoldMail and more and more people receive and see GoldMail messages, I believe the downloads will go up exponentially. GoldMail is unique in that it has proven to be an extremely useful business tool and also has a viral feel to it, as more often than not our customers come to us as a result of receiving and/or seeing a GoldMail message. 

That makes sense to me -- that people would experience it, then be interested in trying it.

The upgrade from the free (personal) version to the business version gives the end user longer recording time, unlimited active messages, full branding capabilities, reporting and tracking on the back end, the ability to administer multiple accounts and 24/7 phone support. For our enterprise version (GoldMail Synergy), a company has the ability to preload templates into multiple GoldMail accounts. For example, a marketing team can create the images and scripts for their sales team and then upload and edit these templates into each sales person’s individual GoldMail account. This way, the sales person can login to GoldMail, select a template for their message, record their voice and send it off to a prospect or client.

Well, I can't say that I'm a big fan of scripts... but I know organizations often are. No doubt many sales people do not have your skill or finesse, Adam.

To wrap up, what do you think the future of this market looks like? What will GoldMail be offering in a few years, and what will we all be doing with e-mail (or whatever replaces it)?

Our goal when we started GoldMail was that “one day, everyone who communicates across the internet will use GoldMail.” Our focus is to provide people with a tool that is easy and non-threatening and enables the creation of a personal and powerful message in minutes. GoldMail gives people a wonderful publishing platform to express themselves and to stay connected to others.

I think we’re going to see a lot more GoldMail messages being created by people who have “something to say,” an idea to share and will use the tool as a means for creating interesting content.

I’ve always believed that GoldMail is the perfect tool for the blogging community. Firstly, when used selectively, a good blogger can insert a GoldMail to connect with their readers and to add a voice to the person behind the blog. 

More and more bloggers are using video these days and video can be cool and a very useful tool, but I often find it difficult and not very appealing or engaging to watch a person talk into a camera. GoldMail differs in that it doesn’t “force” someone to get in front of a camera and it allows the recipient’s mind to effectively be stimulated and to retain information with the voice and visual combination. It also allows the creator of a GoldMail message to speak over graphs, pictures, data and other content that isn’t easy to share using a video camera. And, most of all, it’s very cost effective and very easy to use.

Getting in front of a camera is indeed a whole bigger level of commitment than just recording to slides.

We anticipate launching both a mobile version within the next few months, and GoldMail will add other requested features, but will always maintain the product’s simplicity and ease of use.

There are so many different means of collaborating with people these days; it will be very interesting to see what we’ll all be doing with e-mail. We’re excited because regardless of the platform people use to share information i.e. e-mails and social media, GoldMail will always enable people to communicate and “connect” with others with a personal touch.

Adam, this was great. Thank you for your time, and for telling us about the business. Personally, I'm getting so much sales-oriented e-mail that asks me to do all the work, that this could be a relief. I and the readers here will be interested to see how this evolves. Good luck with the business!

I’m not a regular blogger but thought it would be fun to demonstrate how GoldMail can be used in a blog. Thank you!

Adam provided a link to his blog, where he has embedded a Goldmail message. Click the image to see/hear it.

Focus Groups: how can a table and some chairs cause such controversy?

Dan Pallotta created an interesting range of comments in response to his trashing of focus groups on his HBR blog post, Real Leaders Don't Do Focus Groups.

The comments are a much better read than the actual post, which coughs up the same tired mythologies you've already heard a hundred, if not a thousand, times. [e.g. Henry Ford and the "faster horse" soundbite, the "Apple doesn't do research" myth, and more of the same.]

Mr. Pallotta talks about his experience creating a successful charity fundraiser ride as if he created it in a complete vacuum, but it was successful because it was bold.

There are truths to be made on both sides of any controversy.

Truth #1:  Good ideas are sometimes killed with bad research. I've experienced this personally, although I'm bold enough to claim that I haven't contributed the bad research, just some good ideas that died at the hands of others.

Truth #2: Leaders who claim to not need insight research are either idiots, or they have a strong pipeline of connection to customers that they are calling "not research." Sometimes the connection is a simple one -- they are part of the target group personally. More often, in large organizations, a lot of people are actually gathering insights all the time. But they might not call it that.

Truth #3:  The focus group is only as good as the people using it. [aka: It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools.]

A few of the more insightful comments:

From Tony Flanders:

"The new model is --- engage, listen, dialogue, synthesize -- oops; that's actually the old focus group model." 

[Tony has posted an interesting article on focus groups on his blog, here]

From Nick Coster:

"The opportunities for innovation exist when we are able to strip what the market says it wants back to it’s underlying needs.This removes any given solution from the discussion (ie horse or internal combustion engine car) and abstracts it to I need to get from A to B in less that 1 hour."

From Richard Harris: 

"First, congratulations. I think you're the first person to post something on the HBR blog that pissed people off.
Second, I would have been curious to know what market-sensing mechanisms you do use to decide things like how bold to be. Something made you choose 7 days/600 miles/$2000 as your standard. It sounds bold, but you weren't so bold as to go for the round trip. How did you know how far to push the envelope?"

From Matt Towers:

"On the surface, it is sort of a flat Earth mentality that advocates that less information is better than more. It bespeaks a lack of confidence in understanding how to use information to make decisions."

And this gem: "Apple does do research, they just don't talk about it."

From Steve Willson:

"The key point that runs through the discussion is that to be successful an organization needs to listen to it's customers. They are talking, so you need to pay attention.

Whatever methods you use to engage them in a constructive dialog are better than shutting yourself off from the world and emerging with a set of features that are based on what you can build, not on what people want."

Care to add your own experiences? Please do.

Truth, lies and feedback (part 3)

I've been posting about truth, lies and feedback -- you can read the previous posts here and here.

On the same trip to Baja Mexico referenced earlier, we were traveling while the H1N1 situation [scare? epidemic? what are we calling it now?] was still rolling. Going in and out of Mexico, we had to pass through an extra screening at the airport.

There was a woman on our outbound trip who wore a face mask on the plane. Whether worn to protect herself or others was not clear to me, as she seemed the picture of health. But the mask quickly disappeared before we left the plane.

Both times, we had to fill in a small questionnaire and have our temperature taken and recorded on the same slip of paper. Questions had things like "have you had a fever in the past week", "do you have symptoms ...", and weirdly, our e-mail address.

It wasn't totally clear what would happen to you if you answered yes to any of these questions. Or what would happen if you had an elevated temperature. Most people likely assumed, as I did, that we might be denied passage.

The real mystery here is why anyone would answer such a questionnaire honestly. I would guess that most of the questionnaires were completed with a line of "no" answers.

The whole procedure was so apparently meaningless that I thought it was an exercise in government relations.

There are times people are really inclined to lie. This was definitely one of them.

I recently heard a law enforcement specialist speak about this topic, and it was fascinating. I'll cover that in the next post.

[Meanwhile, if anyone can shed light on the temperature screening process, please take a minute and add a comment.]

Truth lies and feedback (part 2)

I mentioned the story of my kayak guide asking for feedback before the trip was over in the previous post. It's pretty easy to see why we all provided something less than full and frank disclosure to this man.

• We liked the guy. Despite our gripes, we now had something of a social relationship with him, after several days of constant contact.  SOCIAL INFLUENCES

• We were painfully aware of our abundant wealth compared to most everyone we encountered, including our guide. As right-thinking liberal minded educated persons, we didn't want to place inappropriate expectations on someone from a less developed country without our advantages. At it's worst, this pattern is the bigotry of low expectations. But I'm going to call it just CULTURAL INFLUENCES

• This person was in a position of significant influence. Not only was he cooking our meals, we were entrusting him with our safety in a wilderness environment. POWER INFLUENCES

• In a couple of days, we'd be on an airplane headed home. Why risk damaging the last couple of days of our holiday just to give him some feedback? RISK REWARD IMBALANCE

The other traveler in our small group assumed there would be an internet questionnaire when we got home. But there wasn't. So the guide, wanting feedback, was left to his own resources.

How to ask for feedback in person

In this situation, our guide could have obtained much better and more informative feedback by changing his questioning strategy. 

First, he needed to leverage the social connection more to make us feel more obliged to help. For example, he might say how much he valued our opinion as the wonderful people we were, and how important it was to his livelihood to stay competitive.

Then, he could have avoided some of the other challenges by asking us for future help, not past commentary. His question might go something like this:

"I'm thinking about making some changes to improve this trip for next time. What things would you change if you were me? What things would you definitely keep?"

The strategy here is to focus on what can be changed -- the future -- rather than the past. Clearly solicit both positive and negative. Shift the discussion away from the person to the activity or behavior.

Balanced feedback

In coaching, this technique is called balanced feedback. You provide the positives, and you provide the "next time", future oriented feedback.

At the end of events I facilitate, I often ask people to put up sticky notes under three headings: do more of, do less of, do the same. Sticky notes create the feeling of anonymity. But inevitably, in the debrief, people will volunteer to explain their sticky note. The "do less" column is the negatives, of course.

If there are no negatives in your feedback, this is a big clue that you're not getting the whole story.

[Unless of course your customer experience truly IS perfect. In which case, please get in touch, because I'd like to interview you for this blog.] 

Your thoughts?

Legal agreements: how simple systems evolve into nightmares

When I'm not blogging, I actually run a research + consulting enterprise. One time some years ago we bid on -- and landed -- a contract for a large municipality. They required us to have insurance. And so it began.

Somewhere in the distant past, insurance had its origins as a way of pooling risk. Everyone pays a little, and then if your ship sinks or your house burns down, you have that major loss covered. Absolutely brilliant idea.

I like to imagine that these early contracts were pretty straightforward. Then some fool or crook set fire to their own house, and the first exclusion clause was created. 

You can see how these things work, really. First, a few simple exclusions. Then some contracts are disputed in court, so the language becomes more precise. Then other things happen and more exclusions are needed.

After a few hundred years of this dance, we now have insurance agreements no-one can understand. My commercial policy has a printout of dozens of pages, and this is the short form! Even the summary document is mystifying.

It might as well be Latin

We pretty much have to take it on faith that there's something there for us if disaster strikes.  And it's not just insurance contracts. I feel the same way when I click the "Agree" button with every application or online service. Not to forget the waiver you sign whenever you go skiing or rent a canoe. Then there are the multi-page confidentiality agreements that large clients insist we sign. 

Like parishioners before the reformation, we know there's some important message in the service, but we never learned to speak Latin.

And it's just as well. Because when you do know what it means, it can scare the heck out of you. I've seen a few of these that are pretty onerous. I told one client something like this: "If you don't like what I do, you don't have to pay me. But you can't take my house." Thank goodness they agreed to remove the offending clause, because we wanted the work.

There's an opportunity here

This year, another massive policy increase has us shopping around.

All of the forms and questionnaires seem to have been created for people that drive dozers around, build bridges, and otherwise do concrete STUFF.  When you work in the airy-fairy world of ideas, which is pretty much our stock-in-trade, it's hard to connect.

I think there is a huge opportunity here for some innovative organization to clean up in this industry. Hire us, and we'll help you figure it out. And I'll be first in line to sign up for the policy.

Respecting your customers

I think you'll like this little story, but I have to tell you the situation first: I'm in Palm Springs at a Renaissance resort for the annual QRCA conference. Since I'm three time zones away from home, I'm up early.

So yesterday, I decided on a quick swim and a hot tub shortly after 7 am, when there was no-one around except the guys making the pool ready for the day.

I thought I saw a big pile of towels on the lounge seating. These are like giant outdoor livingrooms with fire pits to ward off the desert chill at night. The chairs are oversized bamboo and cushion affairs that are quite nice.

Turns out the towels had men under them. Two guys to be specific, both covered in big striped pool towels, with their street shoes and suits still on, and the evidence of the party the night before all around them.

What I loved is that the hotel did not chase them away at 2 am. They worked around them.

I didn't think the Marriott chain's service could surprise me anymore, but they show tremendous respect for their customers. And this was just one other example.

More on Curves: how not to re-engage lost customers

I've written in the past about Curves, a very interesting franchise operation. They've done some brilliant marketing in the past, and the very concept of the operation is a great example of building a service offering for an under-served market segment. I used to be a member of the local operation, but now I'm at a competitor around the corner.

I drifted away in a familiar pattern. Not going very often. Then even less often. Not knowing the staff anymore. And they didn't recognize me either. Finally, it just seemed like a pointless waste of money to keep a membership going that only made me feel guilty and wasn't making me any fitter.

Now they want me back.

A letter showed up at the house a few weeks ago. [And is now part of my collection of good, bad, and ugly customer experience stuff.]

"Dear Past Curves Member" it starts out. A harbinger of the tone of the rest of the letter.

The signature is photocopied.

You know, it's totally possible that they had a few hundred past members they wanted to send mail to. But instead of hand-writing the envelope address, they should really have personalized the inside, and signed each letter.

And their offers kind of left me lukewarm. I can avoid the service fee if I bring in something for the Sick Kids Toy Drive "minimum value $30".

I saw "ONE FREE MONTH", but then read that it's a draw for one free month, and I'm only entered if I bring a friend who also joins. When you are trying to re-engage someone who was a customer, offering a genuine enticement is a good idea. This doesn't really cut it.

This offer was only made available for two days. That's right folks, they're on a tight schedule. They want you back, they want you to buy and bring a $30 toy, they want you to bring a friend and get them to sign up, but you need to do it on two specific days.

Here's the best part: "Appointments will be limited".

Imagine putting all these things together, the toy and the friend and all, and convincing the friend that even though you dumped the membership, we should all just go back because they've repainted or something. Then making the call and being told, 'sorry, we don't have any more appointments during this offer period. We'd love to have you come in at full price next week."

Susan's tips:

If you want your former customers to take a chance on you again, you need to offer solid incentives. No catches. No gotchas.

If you are a neighborhood operation, as Curves is, you should really make the offer as personal as possible. Signing the letter personally is a good idea. So is personalizing with the customer's name. Definitely do not call me "former customer".

References:

I've written about Curves before. I had to finally close out the comments because the Curves nation was starting to take over the blog.

Making tradeoffs in customer experience design: CurvesSmart, and what it means for the Curves experience. CustomerCrossroads Blog, October 9, 2007

Designing experiences: Prototype, pilot, tweak and adjust. CustomerCrossroads Blog, October 17, 2007

Qualitative research in segmentation: why you need it and how to get value. Slides on Slideshare of a presentation I gave. Curves was in the "good" examples section.

Was the CurvesSmart Program a Smart Choice, November, 2008,on the Leximancer Blog references my earlier posts, and uses their analysis tool on some Curves comment data. Sadly, they got me confused with some other Susan and got the attribution wrong. Such is life in the blog-o-sphere. Their article is interesting all the same, and an example of what can be done with some of the new text analysis tools available.

This just in: digital nomads, social networking in the workplace, Burger King Studio reprise - how to manage social media

I have to tell you that the guys who created Burger King Studio -- Mess Marketing in Chicago -- demonstrated awesome social media management skills.  You will recall my post wherein I gushed about the cool t-shirts you can make online, and gave them what-for about glitches on their purchase process. Look at all the things they did right here:

♥ They are keeping track of social media mentions of their project. [check]
♥ Rob Robinson, creative director, immediately posted a comment on the blog [check]
♥ Then he tracked down my e-mail and sent me a personal note there too [check]
♥ He apologized for the problem, acknowledged my concerns, said they would give the feedback to the web team, and would also try to find my custom designs!  [check, check, check, double check!]
♥ I got an additional wow when a package showed up at my office, with two t-shirts, some cute buttons, and a catalog of the project showed up. [2 checks and a gold star for that one!] 

This is totally going to make workouts more fun while trainer TK - aka the princess of pain - is tossing medicine balls at me.

♥ Oh, and one more thing. They went hunting for my custom designs, and have promised to send them along as soon as they are made. [extra credit!]
Here they are:


I told him, via e-mail, that I was planning on using the t-shirts as prizes for a workshop I am doing for a client on consumer trends. Because I thought their project was pretty leading edge.  Which it is.

Okay, so he's getting a little earned -- aka unpaid -- media. And he had to exert a little effort for it, as do you. But look at this circle of happiness that was created. He gets more profile. I get cool t-shirts. AND I get a killer story for the next dozen or so presentations I give. Everybody wins.

And an even more loyal BK customer, who really likes to have it her way.

***

Stopping by Chris Brogan's blog I found an interesting report from Citrix about web commuters -- the workshifting phenomenon.  Some startling statistics like these: by 2008 there were 33.7 million US teleworkers. Forrester is projecting big growth, such that as many as 1/3 of the workforce will work from home at least part of the time.  Given that you can't flip burgers or change hotel sheets from home, I'd guess that this means knowledge workers will be telecommuting a lot.

A study Citrix Online commissioned found that 73% of American workers and 53% of small business owners want to be able to work remotely.

In the late 80's I was part of a Future of Work Secretariat that the ministry of labour in Alberta launched. We were talking about this stuff then, but the technology just wasn't there. Now it is.

Apart from technology support, what does this group of people need?

***

In a similar vein, Aon Consulting has published a report about employee attitudes around social media in the workplace. Aon is looking at the big shift towards Millennials in the workplace, and their comfort level with social media, and seeing a disconnect with the ways employers communicate.

45% of the 8000 respondents in the study already work remotely. Almost half use instant messaging at work. Four in ten use text messaging at work -- not to talk to family and friends, but to exchange information.

"The internet’s power not only gives people access to a wide range of news perspectives, but it grants each  person an outlet to express his or her own opinion on it. Employees are using social media to collect  information, to interpret and communicate it to others."

So many organizations seem determined to keep the lock on social media. If this study is any indication, it's not going to work.

***

Have a great weekend!
 

Using social media in a traditional industry: Flooring the Consumer Blog

A lot of businesses still struggle with how to use social media effectively to communicate with their end consumers. They don’t see their company or their industry as high tech, or sexy, or particularly cutting edge – in short, they just don’t see the fit of social media for their situation. Manufacturers and wholesalers of consumer durables might well consider themselves in this situation. Take carpeting for instance. I can't remember when I have seen this industry featured in a marketing magazine.

This is why I have been fascinated with the success Christine Whittemore of Solutia has had with her personal business blog, Flooring the Consumer, and have been keen to ask her a few questions.

Ms. Whittemore agrees the carpet marketing environment is traditional. “It’s not high-tech, and not promoted as high-touch – even though carpet engages the senses more than many home products.” Far from being cutting edge in retailing or marketing, price is often a more dominant feature than fashion or design in messaging.

So carpeting is a market few would see as ripe territory for new media.Stay tuned as we find out more about bringing social media to the marketing of a carpet manufacturer.

Seriously good statistics

Flooring the Consumer was launched in June 2006, and is now ranked as #108 on the Ad Age top marketing blogs, and has over 800 subscribers. These are seriously good statistics for a blog of this type.

More importantly, as you'll see in the coming posts, the blog is achieving business results. Ms. Whittemore is the Director for In-Store Innovation for the Wear-Dated carpet fiber division of Solutia, a $3.8 Billion company with 6000 employees. The company manufactures nylon fibers that go into residential carpet. Her work involves training, presentations, and thought leadership at retail for the flooring industry.

Below, authors of the Carpetology blog. The same team "elf themselves" at the Office Max site.

Born out of frustration with traditional marketing

The blog was born out of Ms. Whittemore’s frustration with traditional marketing to achieve her business objectives. “I had been flirting with the notion of a blog -- actively for 9 months prior to taking that step -- because I was so frustrated with traditional marketing, had things to share with my audience of flooring retailers and retail salespeople, and couldn’t get published fast enough and frequently enough by the trade press.”

In addition to this challenge, there was minimal budget for a traditional newsletter, and she felt these had become “inefficient” as a communication tool in any event.

After attending a Columbia Business School conference on marketing innovation, Ms. Whittemore says she realized “most of the people in the room not only blogged, but were also cutting edge marketers…  and true innovators.” She took her content ideas and her sense of urgency to work, and the blog was born.

About consumers and retailing, not just carpeting

There are now three blogs as well as a Twitter feed, and Facebook activity. The blogs each have a distinct audience. Flooring the Consumer is targeted to the trade, and addresses topics such as marketing to women, the retail experience and consumers in general.

Carpetology, launched in December 2007, is a consumer blog about all things carpet.

The third blog, The Smoke Rise Blog, is a community-oriented, more personal blog.

While the consumers are online, not all the retailers are. There are retailers keen to reinvent the experience, however, and these are the ones that Flooring the Consumer reaches, and that keep the author motivated.

---

Next up: how to keep people engaged with relevant content, and how to measure success.

So you launched an improvement and nobody came?

It took me almost two years to learn that the car dealer nearest my house had Saturday hours for repairs. I wanted Saturday hours, so I went to a dealer a long ways away. It was completely by chance that I found this out.

We are often so absorbed in our own category and our brand that we fail to connect with customers on fundamental benefits. Or we make a single announcement, and assume the message is out.

Ged Parton makes a similar point in this story by Aaron Barr of MediaPost's Marketing Daily: If Obama is Nokia then McCain is Diet Coke (25 Oct 08)

If one is a venerable brand whose only strategy has been to focus on yourself, there has to be something tangible for consumers to latch onto to change opinion. "If you want to change perceptions in people's minds, you have to demonstrate how you're going to change things," Parton says. "It's the tangibles that legitimize mind changes. Without the tangibles, you're only asserting."

Mr. Parton is referring to a Synovate study of the brand attributes of Obama and McCain. But of course this is true for brands generally.

You may think you have the best customer experience. You may have the surveys to show it. You may even be advertising those surveys. But none of this is going to help non-customers understand what is great about this experience unless you tell them.

Brand advertising is a good thing. But support points are good things, too. Find them and use them. Especially is you have something people might not know about.

Unsubscribe - or what readers do in their spare time

I've been spending a few minutes unsubscribing this morning. It's a necessary side-effect of my work -- to keep on top of trends, I subscribe to lots of things to see what they are all about. [This is actually a very good method indeed, if you are looking for trend-watching tips.]

But the nasty side-effect is you continue to get reams of meaningless newsletter cruft.

Let's skip to the point here: your e-mail newsletters are hitting people who are wading through a pile largely composed of cruft, from their point of view. Or worse than cruft. If you want readers, make it visually appealing, make it useful, make it relevant. [Don't think I don't sense the irony here.]

The unsubscribe survey

An unsubscribe survey is a good idea. Most seem to limit their question to "why don't you like us anymore". I wonder how useful that question really is. Is it helpful to know that 30% thought you were "sending too much mail", and 27% thought it was "no longer relevant"?  What do you learn from 18% "other"?

There's likely enough goodwill to answer one or even two short questions. It's probably worth spending some time making those questions really useful. And even change them from time to time. It's free data, if you can make it useful, your ROI is pretty high.

A good second question might be...

Here's my best idea this morning, before I've finished my first cuppa, on a good second question: An open ended question that enquires about the brand relationship in general, or propensity to consider the brand again. Something along the lines of, "Can you give us some general feedback please?", "How can we best serve you?" or "What were you hoping to get from this subscription?"

I invite you to build on this. How can we make the unsub questionnaire better? What do you really want to know that people might be willing to say quickly?

Happy rituals and customer dialogue: Take a lesson from Curves

I posted a while back about Curves...

4Oct07 - Design a great customer experience: find a segment and meet their needs
I was very impressed at the process that Curves' founders seemed to follow to get their original plan. In the post, I talked about how they had figured out what some of the barriers are for women to using conventional gym programs, and how they overcame them, thereby creating a new market, and triggering tremendous growth. [Which, by the way, is still a really good idea] For example,"Not rewarded for my progress. Always measured against a standard I can't meet."

9Oct07 -Making tradeoffs in customer experience design: Curves Smart and what it means for the Curves experience
In this post, I looked at their introduction of new technology to track each workout. The technology changed the happy ritual of heart-rate monitoring from a human interaction to a machine interaction. Personally, I missed it a lot. As I suspected, at least in my local establishment, this change led fairly quickly to a lack of interaction between staff and customers. Here's what I said then...

"Part of the ritual of Curves has been the heart-rate check. Everyone on the circuit stops and does a 10 second heart-rate count at the same time. It's part of the routine, ensures you aren't about to expire from heart failure, and also ensures you are working hard enough to get some benefit from the exercise.

"But the happy ritual is also that the fitness coaches stop the music while this happens, and ask everyone "are you OK?". With the new equipment, this ritual has been dropped. The new equipment has a heart-rate monitor on one piece of equipment. It's all automated now."

Little did I know that this second post would become among my most popular posts of all time. Not only that, but it has attracted an astonishing [for me] number of comments.

Here's what has been happening, I think. These Curves fans are concerned. Things are happening. Things aren't working as well as they used to work. They have questions.

So ... they go to the web to seek out answers. And they are finding, not a Curves forum, but this blog about customer experience and human behavior. They are sharing their worries with each other in the comments on my blog. Yes, folks, this is what your customers are doing when they can't talk to you. They find each other somehow, somewhere, and they still talk. The conversation is happening without you. The brand story is changing, and you're not involved in it.

The posts have continued to grow and expand. The company appears not to be in the dialogue, with the exception of a few brave individual employees.

I'd love to know what is happening to their user base as a result of this change. But I can tell you one thing -- there are people who are raving fans that are upset, and no one is giving them any kind of a forum, and they sound pretty let down by this. Here are a couple of extracts from the comments:

"No matter how hard I work, it doesn't stay in the green, and I feel as though I'm going to pass out or burst into tears. I have no problem working hard, and I admit I'm out of shape, but I am not morbidly obese and I am only 25 years old. I should not feel miserable after I leave."

"Today a staff member told me that I must not be working hard enough...At first the computer coach was great but now we are all getting frustrated about our negative results."

" I feel as though I never can make progress. When I spoke to one of the counselors her response was that since I work out more than 3 times a week the machine may be confused. NOT a good response. I don't want to pay for confusion and I don't feel as though I am making progress."

You could spend a lot of money on research getting findings like these. This is pure gold, and it is just sitting there.

What is clear to me is this. For some users, this change put back a barrier that the previous experience had overcome, #5 shown above. The original system was set up to provide a lot of positive feedback through monthly measurements and progress charts. Positive feedback through staff interactions. But the new system is giving people a lot of negative feedback. It's all about the computer now, not about the people passing on atta-girls to the members who are trying to get fit.

My favorite is this comment...

"The owner of my Curves says that I am the only one having this problem"

People have researched this kind of thing. It's a pretty safe bet that the ratio of people having a problem to people reporting a problem is about 10 to 1. So if you hear about it, it's a problem.

Of course, you won't hear about it if you aren't listening.

Timing issues: that old back to school season, and wanting to be a grasshopper just a little longer

It was in late July that I heard the first back to school advertising. I was driving along back roads in Maine, dreaming of a summer that could last forever. Like a thump, reality came crashing in.

But worse shocks awaited me. Among the flyers waiting for me at home was an offer for the Sears Christmas Wish Book for 2008. I can pick the catalog up at a nearby location, and if I order something between August 13 and September 12 worth more than $100, I can I can earn Sears Club points.

It was with a weary heart that I realized the Christmas shopping season was just around the corner. There's a brief reprieve until Hallowe'en is over, and then the floodgates will open.

In a store a few days ago, I heard a young lad complain to his father that the shorts were all gone, while looking at a rack of fall coats. "What if I want to buy shorts?" he said. "It's still summer -- where are the shorts?" I could only silently agree.

Some of these calendar rituals work, and some of them are just habits that have encrusted the media calendar like barnacles on an old boat. [Dare I say a little research would reveal which.]

Instead of calling it the end of summer sale, try the forever summer sale. Because I'm not tired of it yet.

Service Recovery: a few well chosen words go a long way -- aka clean up on aisle two

There's no substitute for simple human concern and simple empathy when things go wrong. A human response can soothe the savage customer, and create an opportunity for useful communication. Starting from a posture of defence -- "we didn't do anything wrong" -- is almost always the wrong thing to do. You may 'win the discussion,' but lose the customer.

Here's a great example of how a customer who goofed [me] tried to get some help, and instead was turned into a raging virago of emotion by the defensive and unsympathetic posture of the service staff. [At least the gas station is still standing. Thank heaven for small mercies, as they say.]

I was putting gas in my shiny new Vespa 150S yesterday after riding back from a meeting downtown. So the bike was naturally pretty hot.

I guess I made a newbie mistake, thinking that most pumps will stop pumping when the tank is full. [I mean, I've only put gas in about four times, heh, heh. And some pumps do stop, even with my wee bike tank].

You can imagine my state of mind when I realized gasoline was pouring all over the hot exhaust pipe and puddling around my feet. Yikes! After shutting off the nozzle and stepping back to assess matters, I used the handy intercom. "We'll look into it" was what I heard.

That didn't sound too promising, but thinking help would arrive, I waited. Another try at the intercom generated no answer. Then I moved the bike away from the pumps and went into the store.

Now there are a few things the store operator could have done. He could have said any of these things, which would have been great:

• "Are you OK? Is there a lot of gasoline, do we need to come out with some sand? Is there a fire danger?"
• "Wow, I can see you are upset. Why don't you grab a coffee on me and wait while your bike dries off before you start it up."
• "Hey, that happens sometimes, really sorry. You can't trust these pumps with a small tank. I was just heading out there to throw down some fire retardant."

Instead, I got a little lecture about how it wasn't the fault of the pump, it was my fault. No concern for the people standing around at 11 other pumps while a puddle of gasoline was waiting to do something ugly. And some pretty bad behavior on my part as I realized this guy a) didn't care about me, b) wasn't the least bit worried about a major fire hazard, and c) thought I was wasting his time and upsetting the giant line of people trying to buy a Tim Horton's coffee. There's little doubt that they heard me talking about "risk of fire, and you don't seem to want to do anything about it!"

So who's right here?

If that's the question you asked, you are asking the wrong question. It doesn't generally matter who is right.

Customers do screw up. And you need to help them calm down and fix their problem. And fix your problem, too, if they created one for you.Yup, clean up in Aisle 2. And a little empathy with that mop, too, if you want this person to ever darken your door again.

References:

Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows, by Lesley Gore.

Marketing savvy consumers and what this means for marketing

I was cleaning six months of paper out of the office last weekend. Predictably, after a few hours of energetic tossing out, recycling, and crisp decision-making, I started to drift, re-reading this and that, shifting paper from place to place. [But also ... uncovering things worth sharing!]

I heard Chris Barnham speak at the QRCA conference last October. I had a few notes on this presentation that seem worth sharing.

[1] the consumer has become more sophisticated. They see brand owner "intentionality" everywhere. And they want to know what the brand's agenda is

[2] consumers may like the brand but distrust the marketing

[3] the brand and the brand owner are no longer the same thing. the brand owner has become a force behind the brand with an agenda of its own

[4] when the brand owner is not synonymous with the brand, the brand is not a vehicle for the owner's message, it is the thing that is being experienced. The brand is a repository for meaning. A wonderful analogy to explain this: the brand is to the company as the novel is to the author. We see the connection, but we don't see them as the same. We experience the brand as text on its own. Another analogy: Macbeth is not just a story about witches, it has much more richness than that.

[5] this situation makes the whole awareness --> interest --> decision --> action model of advertising / brand communications pretty unhelpful in unpacking what is going on with a brand, and a consumers relationship to a brand

[6] the brand is instantiating the values and meaning of the brand essence.

[7] the reality of the brand is in the mind of the reader, the watcher, the experiencer.

Mr. Barnham made reference to G.P.Radford, and his book, "On the Philosophy of Communication". Radford says that before the 17th century, the word communication is more about sharing, participation and association. Our notion of the word communication implying transmission of a message is relatively new. We went from the notion of sharing an idea to the notion of conveying an idea.

In the new world of branding, this old notion of communication is back. The one being communicated with is in communion with the sender -- in fact, both are sharing the creation of the idea. [Co-creation anyone?]

So, where does that leave us?

According to Mr. Barnham, if the brand is the manifestation rather than the sender of the message...

Then marketing activity becomes the actualization of brand essence ...

And brand communication needs to refocus on 'sharing' rather than 'sending'.

More practically, when we are conducting research, we may be going down the wrong path if we ask what a brand is saying. We should ask how a brand is being.

These are biggish ideas, with heavy duty implications. 

Also learned from this presentation:

[8] red type on a purple background is practically invisible. But the message was so good I stayed with it.

When metaphors go wrong

I've been spending time recently evaluating print materials for a client. In this case, a multi-page document that we might call a booklet or a brochure.

And I discovered something new. Like so many discoveries of new things, once discovered, they are perfectly obvious. I've been hovering around this one for a while, and suddenly it gelled for me. We each have our own internal library of metaphors and meanings, and while they may be similar, they are not all the same.

But I need to set the stage here. We need to first consider the creative process -- how this print material came to be.

A graphic designer and a creative development team takes a bunch of requirements from the client. In this case, the requirements have been informed by our previous research into the topic. There are some concepts to be communicated. There is language to be chosen. There is a flow and a tone and a manner to the whole concept. And there are graphic elements that will bring the whole thing to life and add richness. Everything from the finish on the printing to the weight and feel of the paper stock will be chosen to support the overall concept and mission of this piece of creative work.

Everyone involved in creating this messaging is drawing on their own internal library of meanings, of symbols, of metaphors. They are drawing on the nuances they understand for words, their knowledge of how typeface affects those nuances. And so forth.

When the work is done, or at least done enough to test, here's what happens.

These words and metaphors are sent out to the target audience, who is supposed to take a certain meaning from them, perhaps have certain emotions evoked, and generally be moved in some way.

But it's entirely possible to have graphic metaphors used that aren't in the library of the recipient of the message. It's like saying something in a foreign language. It's not that you don't want to understand, it's that you simply don't have those words, those meanings, in your internal dictionary.

And this is what happened on my project. There was a visual metaphor that was just as clear as anything for the project team, and that meant nothing at all to the target group. Well, not quite nothing... it meant something entirely unconnected.

When you consider how rich and extensive the internal library of visual metaphors must be for an experienced visual design person, it's a wonder this kind of thing doesn't happen more often.

The more subtle and refined the communication needs to be, the more of a challenge this is. Because a rock is not just a rock, it can stand for many things, from solidity and reliability, to stubbornness and old-fashioned thinking, and a thousand other meanings.

Ultimately, a brand often needs to develop and assign their own meanings to things, to shapes, to colors, to words. Because this is the only way to really reference unique meanings. If you don't do this, you have to share meanings with every other product, object and image out there.

Consider Apple's white color and finish. It's to the point where you see an object with this look, and assume it is Apple even if it isn't.

I have to admire the art of the creative process. To be able to take the brief, the research, the instructions, and to find ways to imply things without saying them directly. To imply things very precisely. With just the right amount of humor, of intelligence, or seriousness, of history, of whatever is desired. This is truly amazing, an amazing skill. It is truly magical.

Are you using pseudo-language with your customers -- or are you communicating?

The articles in management consulting news often have gems that relate generally to customers and customer experience. I saw another excellent example in this interview with author Tom Sant. Here's the paragraph that made me stop:

"I think many people are afraid to put important messages in writing, or they don’t feel confident that they can write well. The mistake they make is that, instead of trying to communicate in their own voice, they try to use somebody else’s voice. They lapse into what I call pseudo-language, a nonfunctional way of communicating which they think is somehow superior to what they could produce themselves."

Doesn't that just sound like so many marketing letters you have seen? Especially the ones vetted by something called the brand council, or similar committee whose job is to extract all meaning from letters sent by big companies to their customers.

When you go through your stack of mail today, see how many examples of this you can find. I guarantee they'll be in abundant supply.

But no one wants to read this stuff. We don't have the time trying to tease meaning out of paragraphs thick with marketing speak.

Sant identifies four types of pseudo-language. I'm sure you've seen all of this, as I have:

• Fluff -- vague generalizations and assertions. Phrases like "best of breed products." Non-specific and lacking any supporting evidence
• Guff -- big words, long sentences, convoluted construction and passive voice -- all designed to show how smart and sophisticated the writer is, and difficult to extract meaning from
• Geek -- jargon and acronym-filled writing that assumes insider knowledge -- people who either don't care, or are just too lazy to try to say something in simple language
• Weasel -- qualifiers like "might be," "prudent to," and other approaches that lack a clear statement of recommendation

Susan's cure:

There may be no cure for the brand council but there is a cure for this kind of writing.

Stop yourself and say out loud the things you are trying to communicate. Now write down what you just said. Now you have something to work with. Force yourself to limit the number of words you add, especially qualifiers and meaningless adjectives.

If you get writing like this from someone else, ask them to just tell you what they are trying to communicate.

When you look at the result, it might not look like a typical corporate communication. That's a good sign you are on the right track.

People love to have key metrics, so here's one to try: track the number of people calling in to get a real explanation of the letter. If there aren't very many, you're on the right track.

How to follow up: Premiere Global revisited

I posted recently about the productivity morass our general approach to customer service has created. I still think this is true.

However, I want to wave the flag for the folks at Premiere Global, who did respond effectively.
First, after I called and/or e-mailed to find out what was up with the account numbers, I got a call back from my account guy, who explained the situation, and promised to send me stuff. (I won't bore you with the details, but I was satisfied with the explanation).

Earlier this week, I had a call booked with a client. 15 minutes before, I went to set up the web meeting portion, and panicked because I couldn't get it working. The services I used to know how to use had been moved around, they had different names, etc. Very frustrating, and the clock was ticking. I called their customer support line, and the person there had me up and running right away. I got through the call, no problem.

Meanwhile, back in PR land, someone twigged that a blogger was posting things about them. [That would be me]. So while I was off-site at a client's ideation sessions yesterday and today, I got at least two calls from people who want to talk to me and sort things out. This is good. I like it. And I will call them back the second I get a break in my schedule, sometime next week.

This is the first time I can recall getting phone calls in response to a blog post, so give yourselves a pat on the back Premiere people. This is a good thing to do, even if it doesn't feel like much fun at all.

Being authentic equals being less formal

The holiday travel season offers so many opportunities to watch excellent and horrible customer experiences play out before you. The annual year-end parade of travel horror stories -- presented as comic -- must have felt awful to the people who experienced these nightmares. (e.g. waiting up to 11 hours on the tarmac)

When you know your systems are going to be stretched to the limit, it can really help people to experience a human voice in communication. This hand-drawn sign I saw at a WestJet counter recently is exactly the kind of thing I mean. It engages because of its humanity. It's the antithesis of bureaucracy-speak.

The words at the top say: "We all thank you for being prepared ... especially the guy behind you in line."

A bank manager taught me a similar lesson some years ago. He was writing things like "Manager's Loan Sale" on a similar white-board and putting it near the teller line. It stood out precisely because it wasn't official, wasn't formal, wasn't a pre-printed poster, and wasn't scripted by head office.

Sometimes we need to let go of consistency in communication in order to leave enough room for some humanity.

Web-Cast on testing communications using qualitative methods

The Qualitative Research Consultant's Association has a series of web-casts (they call them Q-Casts) that are free and available to anyone. The next one relates to a topic that may be near and dear to your heart: how to test communications, including advertising, packaging, concepts, media content, and other communications. The organization's guidelines restrict 'pitching', so the presentations usually have solid information, and you can ask questions via the chat room.

Here are the details:

The 4 Cs of Truth in Communications

Thursday, December 6, 2007
12:00 p.m. ET (GMT -4; BST -5)
Speakers: Isabelle Albanese and Eileen O'Malley

For more information and to register for the free online Qcast click HERE.

The 4Cs of Truth in Communications™, a fool-proof framework for researchers to objectively evaluate consumer response to qualitative communication stimuli. No matter what the stimuli – from traditional advertising, to package graphics, concepts, logos, menu boards, media content, applying the 4Cs will help identify if it really rocks or if it’s likely to sink like one! This method is immediately actionable – it can be used in your very next consumer communication project.

The 4Cs model is also an effective way to get disparate constituents (brand clients, consumer insights, ad agencies, etc.) on the same page relative to evaluating consumer feedback – something that can always be a challenge in any communications environment. It’s a great back-room tool for focus group research as well. Observers follow consumer feedback easily by instantly assessing how the stimulus performs on each of the “Cs”. When it comes time for the de-brief, everyone has a consistent format for structuring feedback – which makes the de-brief flow very smoothly.

Targeted advertising algorithms need work

There are a number of sites that target advertising based on profile information, and then serve up Google ads. I'm sure you've been on lots of them yourself. I captured a screen shot from LinkedIn which nicely illustrates the current challenge of this kind of targeting.

Mostly, these ads are about other people like me, not about services I might like to buy.

Which I guess has its uses, such as monitoring who is advertising in your space. But this isn't likely to be helpful to the advertiser. It's so close, but it's not quite right.

The kinds of things I actually buy for the business are on a relatively small list. Qual researchers use sticky notes, index cards, felt pens, and flipchart paper in truly shocking quantities. We rent focus group facilities, and meeting facilities. We hire recruiters to find respondents for us. We use a lot of travel and hotel services. Like all businesses, we use software, computers and telecom. Some of us would buy specialized software or license various online applications like bulletin boards.

But hiring competitors is not a frequent activity. Nor is installing large scale CRM systems. I advise on these things sometimes, but would never be a buyer.

If I had the option, I could tell the company what services I would like to see advertising for, but that would put control in the users hands, not the advertisers. Surely that would improve effectiveness though.
I briefly tried adwords, and found that many of the click-throughs were coming from other organizations like mine, not from potential client companies. The irony of this is that I can define potential clients quite clearly -- I just can't easily target them using these tools.

I'm curious if others are experiencing this.
Are you being served relevant ads?

Something different in automotive marketing: Nissan Rogue City Guide

I actually read an automotive advertising supplement this week, a rare event for me. And came across an interesting effort from Nissan. I can get a widget for my desktop that will keep me informed of events happening in my city. I don't think my social life is quite up to this standard, unfortunately... but what an interesting way to connect with your customers! And clearly based on a lot of insight into their target customer.
You can check out their site here.

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

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?

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?

How To Talk to Customers: Book Review

This wee blog now seems to attract enough attention that I fairly regularly get books to review. When "How to Talk to Customers" arrived a few months ago, I was busier than an an ice-cream truck at a beach. So the book went onto the pile of reading, and didn't really get looked at for a while.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a very practical volume with quite granular advice suitable for front line customer service situations. Authors Diane Berenbaum and Tom Larkin are principals of a company that provides customer service training, and this book presents many of the ideas that they must use in their training and workshops (see resources).

If you are looking for something of a strategic nature, this is not the book for you. But if you run a front-line service area as a supervisor or manager, you can probably use a lot of what is suggested in this book. 

MAGIC

The authors' big idea is the acronym MAGIC (Make A Great Impression on the Customer), which runs through the book as a theme. It took me a while to figure out that they actually had a much more useful version of this acronym, as follows:

M = make a connection: build the relationship

A = act professionally: express confidence

G = get to the heart of the matter: listen and ask questions

I = inform and clarify what you will do

C = close with the relationship in mind

Every section has examples and stories -- "Magic Moments" and "Tragic Moments". There are lots of details on very granular topics, such as how to use a customers' name, how to personalize interactions, and how to listen with empathy.

I found it almost too granular, personally, which means it is probably exactly right for front line staff. When they state a principle, they usually provide a couple of specific examples of a snippet of conversation to illustrate the point.  Each of the five magic principles above translates to several standards, 33 in total. I have helped a few organizations develop service standards, and this list would make a great starting point for anyone.

Coaching

My favorite section was on coaching. A great deal of attention has been paid to the idea of coaching performance, and for a good reason -- it works. However, a lot more people talk about coaching their staff than actually do coach.

The chapter on coaching provides  a solid process for actually talking to your staff in a coaching session. And also makes it clear that a coach must be able to model the desired behaviors -- to walk the talk.

First impressions

Oddly enough, the reason I had trouble engaging with this book was due to poor first impressions. A book this tactical should probably be in a coil binding, not a hardcover binding, and it should have headers and footers that quickly help you locate your position in the 33 standards. It could have used some color and simple graphics to help me navigate this many concepts. And just from an aesthetic standpoint, I didn't like the feel of the paper.   

I was about half-way through the book before I decided it had pretty good stuff going for it, largely because of the visuals.

Resources

How to talk to customers: create a great impression every time with MAGIC, by Diane Berenbaum and Tom Larkin. Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Available from Amazon US here, Amazon Canada here, and Chapters-Indigo here. 

The authors business site is Communico Ltd.

The image is from the Prelinger Archive of films. This one is from a scream called "Are you popular" made in 1947.

The latest news on multi-tasking and what it means for customer experience

Luth Research recently released their IndicatorEDG report on multi-tasking. It looks like we are spending more and more time -- on average, 20 hours a week -- attempting to do two things at once.

"On average, 17 percent of our time awake -- approximately 19.80 hours per week -- is spent using two or more media simultaneously, according to the latest quarterly findings (Quarter 1, 2007) from Luth Research's IndicatorEDG™, an online study surveying more than 5,000 respondents in the U.S. The media in question included all mass media (e.g., TV, radio, Internet) and personal electronic devices (e.g., cell phone, MP3 player, wireless email device)."

Those who aren't employed spend more time in media multi-tasking -- no surprise there. But so do retired people, who average close to 26 hours a week in media multi-tasking. [So your suspicions are correct -- Mom or Dad really are watching the TV while talking to you on the phone.] 

And most of this media multi-tasking is TV together with something else --

"Watching TV was named by nearly half of the respondents to be what they typically do
when working on the Internet or email through a computer. One in five people have their TV on while using their cell phone to make phone calls. TV seems to be a natural fit to co-own consumer time and space with other print media, as 20 percent of the respondents cited TV as the medium they were also using when reading a newspaper, a magazine, or a book."

Those that are spending more time media multi-tasking report that they are less happy overall than others.*

What does this mean for customer experience and customer communications?

If you thought it was hard to get people's attention before, guess what? It's going to get harder. So clarity in all communications is essential.

In these circumstances, is it realistic to expect people to absorb the fine print, or read between the lines of your offer?  Probably not, in my view.

Greater redundancy in communication is also a good idea. Don't assume people are actually informed about your policies or product features or hours of operation. Make it clear, easy to find, and say it often.

If it's directed at anyone who is retired, make the print on the box big enough to scan at a glance, because that might be all it gets.

And your advertising had better be interesting enough to compete with other media. Even if it's only getting half an ear or half an eyeball, it needs to get a message through.

Resources and notes:

Here's the link to the five-page PDF report: IndicatorEDG Research: Media Multitasking

* Note that this should not be construed as a cause -- perhaps the multi-tasking is a response to other life circumstances, which are the underlying cause of the unhappiness

Talking in plain language -- and plain graphics too

Ever wonder if your customers extract any meaning from your brochures, your web site, your information or training materials? A lot of what I see is so filled with marketing-speak that people have trouble obtaining the meaning.

By way of contrast, check out these wonderfully simple presentations about new communication technology, produced by CommonCraft. All short, all entertaining, all communicate brilliantly. (And if you are one of the people who has asked me to explain RSS to you, this will be better than anything I ever said.)

[Links to their presentations on:  RSS, Wikis, and Social Networking.]

While the production method is fresh and engagingly human, I'm not suggesting you just copy this approach. I am suggesting that you test the clarity of your materials against something like this, and try to shift to the plain and simple end of the spectrum wherever you can.

I test brochures and such in research from time to time, and what I notice most is that walls of text are not very engaging for people, no matter what the topic is. Even when they are being paid to read something, you'd be surprised how little time and attention even the best brochure can attract. Imagine how this changes in the day of a normal person's life, where there is a river of information flowing by every second.

By keeping your message simple, you make the experience better. Note how similar this diagram is to  IKEA assembly instructions, or some of the explanations in BestBuy stores? Both are companies known for delivering a highly consistent standard for customer experience, and incidentally, being pretty successful while they do it.

You also have to choose between making your customer feel informed, versus making the brand look pretty. Even better, reach for both.

Thanks to the CommonSensePR blog for this.

3 Myths of Personalized Direct Marketing

I posted a while back about a rather engaging personalized direct mail piece. Michael Simmons of Vialuna Group, who created the piece, sent me an e-mail. So we started talking about what personalized direct is all about.

Michael Simmons' Top 3 Myths/Mistakes in Personalized Direct

1. The “Dear Bob,” Myth: Take an existing direct mail piece and add the target’s first name. Violá! You just built a personalized direct mail piece.

2. Brand Everything: This direct mail piece is my one shot to grab some mindshare, so even if the offer isn’t right they’ll still remember our name.

3. I Know My Target (Audience): I have (or bought) a GREAT customer or prospect list, now all I have to do is add “Dear Bob,” and my mark to this tri-fold mailer to make it effective.

Sadly true, and I know you're getting this stuff in your in-basket as often as I am. According to Michael Simmons, "It's not enough to throw personalized direct mail over the fence without creating a two-way dialogue."  Don't think the old unpersonalized stuff is an acceptable alternative. Because digital printers have made it so easy, you don't have an excuse.

Imagine a 25 per cent response rate

Simmons says a crowded direct mail piece that is "plastered with your value proposition, your mark, your attributes, your favorite color" etc. will LOWER your response rates.

You only have two to five seconds to make a pitch in direct mail, so it had better be all about your customer or your prospect, not all about you. The reward for doing things right is high. Imagine having a response rate of  25 per cent which is the average rate claimed by Vialuna. (Recipients who visit the personalized web site.)

The cure to stodginess: charm and delight

I saw a sample of a new approach that totally charmed me. It put a smile on my face. It made me feel like this guy understands my life! [Except I wanted to pick both swamped AND pressured -- see graphic above.] Check Vialuna's approach out here. It won't be quite as charming if your name isn't Susan, but play along, OK?

"Finally, the truth is personalized direct mail often comes across stodgy because we think we know our target audience, but we don’t know individual targets. To prospects and customers, our company is engaging in a one-to-one conversation with them via post or the Internet. If your friend’s name is Bob and you call him Fred, Bob now knows how much you value the relationship. Customers and prospects react the same way to personalized marketing executed with often BAD data."

If you're not trying some of these new tools, your efforts are going to look a bit cheap to your customers. Like another statement stuffer from your bank, and how charming is that?

Full disclosure

I've never met Michael Simmons, and I have no business relationship with Vialuna. The truth is they made this article easy by giving me some thoughtful responses to an my e-mail I sent. If you want blog coverage, it's worth trying to charm your target. Demonstrate you understand their world. Make it easy for them. Gee, kind of like personalized direct. Hmmm...

New Channels: Can you murmur to your customers?

The Murmur oral history project has created a very interesting way to communicate with people in a location-specific way.

"We collect and make accessible people's personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them. In each of these locations we install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number on it that anyone can call with a mobile phone to listen to that story while standing in that exact spot, and engaging in the physical experience of being right where the story takes place. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze."

This concept feels eminently portable into other environments.

How about having a recording of a decorator helping me understand how to avoid making the wrong choice of paint colors for a hardware store?  Or a label on a line of skin-care products where I could hear how to choose the right combination for my age and skin type? Or a bank poster with a phone number on it that has a recording about the product?

This kind of communication could feel personal if done well. It could give me an expert view without the sales pitch. It could offer an extension of expert help outside regular business hours or outside the regular business location. It offers the potential to provide expert help where none was formerly available. And it can let the customer engage in more information without engaging in a sales discussion. That alone would be of interest to many people.

Murmur started in Kensington Market in Toronto in 2003. You can experience Murmur in three Toronto locations, as well as Dublin, Edinburgh, San Jose, Vancouver and Montreal.  You can sample a Murmur recording by clicking on the maps on the web-sites listed. Not as much fun as strolling around the city and listening on your phone, but a way to take a mini-holiday at your desk on a Friday afternoon.

Riding the customer service carousel

The bank forgot me. Well, not the bank really, but the part of it I interact with most often. Those little shortcuts that saved me from typing in 16 digit access numbers were gone, gone, gone. I thought perhaps I'd inadvertently wiped out cookies or something. [Dang! It's probably your own fault, you idiot.]

In the process of trying to get set up again, I had a few problems. So I called the 800 number. Twice. That was about 10 days ago.

The problem appeared solved. But it wasn't, it only looked solved.

I was still on the carousel.

No matter which business name I thought I was logging into, I went to the same account. This was pretty alarming, actually.

I couldn't envision going through the whole story again with phone support, so I sent a note to the tech support link. Their initial response, 24 hours later, was pretty much telling me to delete my cookies and try again.

I confess, this did elicit a grumpy response from me.

They then confessed they had been unable to duplicate the problem, and asked me to undertake some further research, and sent detailed instructions of how to do this. 

So I've been catching up on my blog reading while I create said log.

You can read the whole sorry story here: Download the_great_bank_login_project.pdf, with names changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. [Plus I'd hate to bite the hand that might in future be feeding me.]

Of course you probably already know what it says. I'm guessing you've experienced something very like this incident before. Probably dozens of times. Maybe hundreds of times. The frustration, the disappointment. The incredible waste of time. Being made to feel like it was probably your fault, if you can't prove it was theirs. As if normal people choose to spend their life energy this way. ['"What did you do today dear?" "Well, I hassled a bank when I could have just reloaded my browser. It was a laugh a minute! Tomorrow I'm going to call an airline."]

Riding the customer service carousel

No one gets on the customer service carousel willingly. We get on because we have a problem.

A human voice and human empathy makes a big difference. And when it's missing, we feel like we are dealing with a machine. To end every e-mail with "Thanks for visiting www.bank.com" is just dumb, and very likely reinforces the sense of anomie.

Asking me to spend a bunch of time documenting the issue probably didn't seem like that big a deal to the carnies running the carousel. But it took me the rest of the afternoon. There was no acknowledgment of this. And I doubt if they'll send me a plush teddy to thank me. More likely, they'll want more. And they'll want it for free.

These are not the rules of human engagement. There's no shared sense of obligation. There's no real memory. The existence of this issue will never be documented in my CRM file.

If I went in to apply for a mortgage tomorrow, no one is going to say to me, "Gee, did you get that log-in thing dealt with OK? Really sorry about that. Oh, by the way, I just want to mention that the tech people really appreciated your efforts there. I think they're sending you a gift basket. They had no idea this problem existed, and your detailed notes were tremendously helpful."

Storytelling: Upcoming Webinar

Storytelling long predates our written language. Perhaps we are born with the notion of narrative -- if not, it's something we learn to appreciate as children.

Brands and experiences are stories in a sense -- the promise of a story, then the telling of it. And customers tell the stories of their experiences to others.

I thought this upcoming Q-Cast looked interesting because of the focus on story-telling: Practical Storytelling presented by Tom Neveril. You can find archived Q-Casts on the QRCA web site, here. (Q-Casts are all free presentations related to Qualitative Research offered by the Qualitative Research Consultants Association.)

Communicating: do I blog like a boy?

I came across this gender-writing analyzer this week in Grokdotcom.

So decided to run a few posts through the analyzer.

Personalization Trend: design your own credit card    -- female score 550, male score  887 -- MALE!
So You Want Innovative Thinking -- female score 1777, male score 1353 -- FEMALE!
The Power of a Good Story -- female score 1169, male score 1572 -- MALE!

I tried to choose longer posts, with relatively few quotes, which would likely skew the results, so this feels like a reasonable test of the device.

So, does this mean that the gender-genie is wrong? Or that I am cleverly disguised as a female? 

Personality Type and Communication Style

Actually, I think it means I use a lot of words and constructions that are more commonly used by men.

If you have a background in personality type theory (aka. Myers-Briggs), then you know that there is a gender difference on the thinking/feeling preference. Males are 65% Thinking dominant as a decision-making style preference and females are 65% Feeling dominant as a decision-making style preference.  Although the difference is minor, it is strongly reinforced in socialization.  [As it happens, I have a preference for Thinking as a decision-making style. Women with this preference are often perceived as being somewhat aggressive. Men with a feeling preference are often perceived as wimpy.]

The language choices of those with Feeling dominant tend to emphasize harmony and empathy, whereas the language choices of those with Thinking dominant tend to emphasize logic and fairness.

The online tool is based on an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology. They claim their algorithm can detect the gender of the author. I'm more inclined to agree with Mary Dell on Book Blog, who says,

"you can't tell if a writer is a man or a woman, but it is an interesting study in what kind of writing is perceived as male (i.e. concrete) or female (i.e. connective)."

What does it all mean?

I know I need to make some kind of linkage to customer experience here and it's this: we don't all communicate in the same way. Worth considering when you think about customer experience.

References:

New York Times test formula

One of the many academic articles on the topic, which claims 80% accuracy in identifying gender of author.

Gender Genie's story is on Book Blog

Personality Type Theory overviews can be found in Answers.com or Wikipedia. Numerous free online testing tools are available. David Keirsey's temperament sorter is a good one.

Another version of the gender-tester is here. Another online tool that provides the FOG index, as well as a gender assessment.

Are you scaring away customers with mysterious tech talk, confusing terminology or unknown acronyms?

I was reading David Carlson's design blog this week, and wondered what these gravatars are on his blog. Here's what I found on the Gravatar site. My stream-of-consciousness comments are on the right of the graphic.

As you see from my comments, what started out as really clear communication was quickly taken over by baffling insider-speak. The friendly voice was still there, but suddenly it was just telling me to put the whim-wham on the jim-jam and everything would be fine.

Result: I decided I don't have the time today to learn this stuff, and moved on to other tasks.   

[Like stuffing worms into the hungry baby-bird that is a blog. Fortunately, practically everything is fodder for a customer experience blog, so the time wasn't totally wasted.]

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.