Customer Crossroads

Do Your Employees Understand the Sales Strategy?

Glenn Ross at Customer Service Experience tells a beautiful story of his early days working in a jewelry store.  He didn't understand why he should develop "move-up" buyers by selling less expensive gold-filled jewelry and school rings:

Years later I realized that, because of its low price points, we could have started relationships with new customers, then helped them move up to diamonds and gold. But we failed to see the big picture.

...later, as a manager, I realized that teens usually brought their parents (most of whom had never been in our store) to see the rings, either at the time of ordering, or on a later trip to the mall. We had an opportunity to make a favorable first impression on parents who were capable of making diamond and gold purchases.

How often is an effective sales and market development strategy undermined because staff don't understand it?  [Yes, I'm guilty too. But we can do better, can't we?]

Read the whole story here: Customer Service Experience : Are Your Employees Missing The Big Picture?.

Getting Customer Feedback: Are You Asking the Right People?

Our land line phones were out of service for more than a day recently, a frankly shocking and distressing event.  Oddly, the VOIP still worked, and so did the Internet, intermittently.
There are two business people working in this house, and it's the other guy's job to deal with this kind of thing.  So he called the phone company on his VOIP line, to request service on my business land line. [Still with me?]

About a week later, I got a call on the now-functional business line for a post-service survey.  I said "you need to talk to the guy who handled this" and offered his number.  Survey company says "no, for validity of our survey we need to talk to the person at this number".  I explained.  They dug in.  Net result, they preferred not to get feedback rather than call the person who dealt with the problem. 

Please note this is a real business number that I pay real business rates for. So this survey would have been evaluating the business support or perhaps SME support, but not residential phone support. So how can this make any sense?

I found this whole thing rather baffling, but worse, it clearly invalidates their results in my view.  In an effort to ensure rigor, they have created tremendous sampling bias. Their validity process is invalid.  And both this big company and their research agency should know better! 

But now you know better, dear reader, and will not make this bush-league mistake. 

 

How Good is Your Support Site? Customer Problems and Service Recovery

I spent quite a bit of unproductive time on the weekend trying to resolve hot-synch problems on my Palm TX.  When I saw "do you have a minute to take a survey?" you can bet I clicked.  The last of about five questions was this: "would you recommend Palm Support?" 
You've got to be kidding, right?  Not "would you recommend Palm", but "would you recommend Palm Support". 

The "would you recommend" question is a classic loyalty question often used to determine an overall rating benchmark in satisfaction and loyalty research.  But putting it in this context seems like utter nonsense to me.

The only reason anyone would ever be on their support site is because they are HAVING problems. Even more important, the support site does not stand or fall alone -- it is part of the total brand experience.   

Here are some better questions that would make this short survey more relevant and useful:

1. Were you able to resolve your problem to your satisfaction?
2. How much time have you spent on this problem?
3. How easy or difficult was our support site to use in solving your problem?
4. Would you recommend a PALM PRODUCT to a friend or colleague?
5. Thank you for answering our questions.  Is there anything you would like to tell us?

Number 4 is the loyalty question that matters.  It's a short way of asking this:

Now that you have experienced some problems with our brand, how do you really feel?  Do you still like us?  Are you going to tell ten friends how irritated you are and advise them never to buy our product? 

Was your experience of our support site so great that you actually like us even more than before, and you'll be raving to five friends about how great we are? Are you left feeling that you were fairly and justly treated? Or did we act like no-one has ever had a "runtime-error-r6025-pure-virutal-function-call" problem before? 

When you have to replace this product, will you remember us as helpful and caring when the chips were down, or swear never to do business with us again?   

If you solve a customer problem well, your customers will like you more than they did before.  This is not just some squishy, feel-good marketing stuff, this phenomenon has been researched pretty thoroughly. 

But the reverse is also true.  You can make committed antagonists for your brand if you don't solve a problem effectively.

Yes, my Palm is now synching again.  But only because I removed some software. And I'm wondering if I should have listened to my tech guy who told me to buy the Dell.  If the TX can run flawlessly for about a year, I'll probably be loyal again.  I'll let you know.

The Innovation Decision Tree

I'm involved in an ongoing research project about innovation in business that Schulich Executive Education is sponsoring, so my online travels are taking me to some interesting things these days as a result. 

Today I found Dave Pollard's innovation flowchart, pictured here. [click to enlarge] It's a thoughtful chart and article, discussing the role of the customer in innovation: 

There are two opposing views on the role of the customer in innovation. One school holds that all innovations start with conversation, observation, and understanding of the customer (current or potential) with the goal of surfacing and then filling an unmet need. The other school says that customers don't know what they need, at least until they see it, and sometimes a need doesn't even exist until a solution is available to fill it.

My own view is that both of these things can simultaneously be true and often are.  However, let's start with needs and wants.

Needs versus Wants

The chart above seems to give priority to needs over wants.  Unless we are talking safety and security needs [and sometimes not even then], wants drive more behavior among consumers than needs.  I need clothes for business meetings; I want Ellen Tracy.  People in general need to be able to hear their cell phone ring; they want cool ring tones. Or perhaps want to be cool. Or to fit in. 

When we talk about unmet needs in the marketing world, we're usually really talking about wants. Let's face it, quite a lot of our money goes into things we want, not things we really need.  [That's why we call it disposable income, after all.]

Do Customers Know What they Need?

Well, that depends on how you define need, doesn't it?  [And can I just say right now that I wish I had a nickel for every time...]  The Walkman is always raised as a good example of something we couldn't know we needed or wanted until we saw it.  But that is really oversimplifying isn't it? 

We knew that we sang to ourselves in our heads when we went jogging, before Walkman existed.  We knew that lots of places people like to hang out played music on loudspeakers. We knew that people took portable cassette decks around.  We knew about car stereos.  We even knew about portable record players way back before cassette tapes became popular. 

The truth is, music has always been portable for humanity through singing and playing of instruments.  It's as old as the tribe. 

It is not that customers knew they wanted a Walkman.  But they could tell you a lot about what makes for a fun time when you're out of the house.  And they knew music they liked was part of the fun. 

Dave's Prescription for Innovation

I rather liked Dave's prescription for a general approach to innovation:

start with potential customers, observe what they are doing, converse with them about their frustrations and wants, identify constituencies or communities of customers with common needs or wants, and articulate the job to be done by the product or service that will meet those needs and wants... When you identify a whole group of jobs to be done for a whole group of different customer communities, you are ready to start imagining possible solutions...

This is exactly the kind of approach that well run organizations actually do use: generate deep understanding of their customers, from as many angles as possible. Get some ideas together.  Test and refine. 

Susan's Prescription

When you are thinking through the needs and wants thing, challenge your thinking every step of the way. Dive deeply into wants, hopes, aspirations and fears.  Look for emotions.   

There's a nice recap of Abraham Maslow here.  His theory does't explain all motivation, but his list of 15 "being" needs is a great place to start if you are thinking about innovation.  And it certainly explains why we value an Apple I-Pod for it's beauty, completeness, environmental richness, effortlessness, and uniqueness. 

Being Friendly to New Segments without Alienating the Old Segments

At an HMV store on the weekend, I observed that the only area where the sound level was tolerable was right beside the cashiers. 

[I've noticed this same phenomenon in Blockbuster.  The cashiers want to hear the music, so they turn it up louder, and anyone without a hearing problem in the rest of the store can't think for the noise. Regardless of what tunes they are playing]

The sound level meant I was kind of disinclined to browse for long, so my spouse and I got what we were looking for and left.  We did not buy several more CDs, as we sometimes do when in the small independent music dealers.  So these lost sales had nothing to do with free downloads or piracy -- they had to do with a hostile customer experience that didn't encourage browsing or impulse buying.

Near Christmas, I had this inspiration that I would buy my beloved some NEW music, and went looking -- in the same HMV --  for bands I know are current, but I'm not too familiar with.  There was simply no way to know which albums were "good" albums.  There's no "star" system to help me.  And of course no staff who could help me. I gave up and got him a Hilary Radley scarf and some cool toys from The Source instead.

Here's the thing:

I appreciate that I'm not part of the youthful heavy purchaser segment that HMV wants to attract and hold.  But if they were less hostile to other segments, they could probably expand their sales, without alienating their core target. 

For example, I noticed a collection near the checkout that my parents would probably enjoy, and it was inexpensive. Dad's fairly hard of hearing, but I'm certain he still would have found the store too loud to be in for long.   

I also don't know all the fine points of how to use HMV.  For example, I'm just supposed to know, [there's no sign telling me] how I can get to hear a CD I want to try.  I guess I could be a doofus and ask... [not!]

Regardless of your age, you are supposed to know a lot about what you are looking for before you get into the store.   The online experience is frankly much better.  I can hear samples of the music, the site will give me "if you liked this, you might also like this" suggestions.  There's no line-up.  Searching is easy.  And yet it's not quite as much fun as coming home with a new cellophane wrapped CD. 

What's the point?

Be careful about appealing ONLY to your core customer and turning off everyone else.  You'll lose sales.  You can find a middle ground if you look for it.

Resistance = Engagement

I had an epiphany recently about change management:  resistance = engagement. 
The epiphany was inspired by a familiar scenario described to me by the sponsor of a major CRM initiative.  It goes something like this:

"We've been keeping people informed with regular communications about the project.  The project team has representatives from across the organization.  The senior executives in every division have been kept involved at our quarterly meetings. 

We need the business-line executives to take ownership as we move into the implementation phase.  Everyone says they are on side.  We feel like we are doing all the right things... but nothing seems to be happening. What are we doing wrong?"

Let's leave aside what the "right things" are for now, since those are often somewhat unique to each organization's culture and each project (despite what the project management books tell you).

But I can tell you how you can spot real engagement at the level of senior managers:  when they start to disagree, ask for changes and generally be difficult, that's engagement. 

When no managers are creating problems for the project, nothing's happening.  Another client refers to this as "friendly nods and grunts".  That's when you have people at meetings saying, "yeah that all sounds great, let me know how we can help", but they have not put a single action item on their own to-do list.

Real business-line managers don't behave this way when they have taken ownership of a problem.  They start telling you why your schedule is impossible, or why your training plan needs to include another group, or why your new software doesn't take the ancient computing equipment into account.  That's what engagement looks like.

But we all think engagement = agreement.  It doesn't.  You know when people are truly engaged when they start to resist.  If you have no resistance, no one is paying attention. 

Acknowledgements:

You too can make cool signs like this with Sign-Maker

Financial Role Model Lance Armstrong: Role of Celebrity Spokespeople in Investing

How do you find an image or spokesperson that really works to sell financial products?  Do you try for toughness?  Intelligence?  Trustworthiness?  Do you talk to the people we are, or the ones we want to be?  And where do guys like Sam Waterston (TD Waterhouse), Paul McCartney (Fidelity) and now Lance Armstrong (American Century) fit?

Armstrong is the new in-your-face spokesperson of mutual fund company American Century. Anthropologist and culture-decoder Grant McCracken thinks he looks a bit too scary, and represents a level of discipline and achievement that dwarfs the abilities of most of humanity:

"This marketing gesture is designed to put a human face on capital, but, for my money, it just ends up making the enterprise look even more mythical and extraplanetary.  I mean, who are these people?"

Fear and Aspiration

The flash vignette on the web site certainly plays to the traditional themes of this type of advertising, heavy on the fear factor, with a dash of aspiration thrown in.  We see three different characters, a youngish woman at an outdoor cafe, a uniformed older cop, and a professional looking black guy with a briefcase.  His thought bubble says:

"If that's what pre-school costs, how much will college be in 15 years?"

After Lance is done with him, he's feeling secure and aspirational, and here's his thought bubble:

"With smart investment strategies, my kids could go from pre-school to med-school"

Just Gimme Some Help Over Here

 The "Lance" style of approach is markedly different than the alternative that has also gained traction recently: "overwhelmed everyperson who just wants some help".  If you can remember the opening sequence of the Mary-Tyler Moore show, you're close to this feeling. [If you can't, try to imagine the kind of investment advice that would make sense to Alison DuBois, Patricia Arquette's character on Medium ].   

The friendly down-to-earth approach is favored by smaller banks and credit unions, and speaks to the desire for simplicity that is popping up everywhere.

Bite the Establishment Appeals

Then there's the anti-establishment position taken by ING.  I really love their current offering, "Don't get RSP'd off" [which doesn't totally translate to 401k'd off, unfortunately].  They remind us that we've been fed a lot of lines about getting rich and secure as investors, and that hasn't happened for most of us.  So get safe and get back your self-respect by getting a guaranteed return.

How to Choose?

Companies with deep pockets can now test their advertising in highly predictive ways, according to my quantitative research pals.   An exec. from research goliath Milward Brown told me their advertising testing model can predict market performance with 80% accuracy.  Let's be clear here:  this is market performance for a specific segment or segments, since no advertising speaks to all of us.  Somehow I suspect that American Century did not do this type of testing, as the inspiration to use Lance appears to have come directly from the execs, according to Reuters:

Asked how Armstrong and the fund company got together, American Century Senior Vice President Mark Killen said the idea came about after publication of a magazine article about cancer that mentioned both Armstrong and James Stowers Jr., founder of American Century.

Stowers, 82, and his wife Virginia, are both cancer survivors. The couple founded the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in the 1990s.

They may have made the kind of marketing mistake I referenced yesterday: thinking your customers are just like you.  This advertising should work if it makes people feel that American Century will use focus, discipline and determination in managing their investments.  But if it operates at the level of exhortation -- that you and I need to get more focused, disciplined and determined -- it may not. 

Stay Tuned

You can download the scary-Lance face as desktop wallpaper.  It's just the sort of image I need to get through the year-end accounting coming up next week. Reuters reports that the deal with Lance is for 3 years, so you can bet there'll be a message make-over if the first campaign isn't successful. 

And a tip of the hat to Grant, who is always thought-provoking.

Does Lance humanize a capitalist institution?  Not for me.  It's more about saying how tough and determined they are, and scaring us into making a retirement plan.  I don't know about you, but I was already scared about that.

References:

Here's the American Century site:  Put Your Lance Face On  If you click the little teeny weenie arrow at the bottom of the Lance window, you'll get these stong words going by in ultra-large type:  FOCUS.  DISCIPLINE.  DETERMINATION. 

Read the Reuters story about Lance Armstrong's 3 year deal with American Century Funds

Do You Make These Mistakes with New Products? Top 10 New Product Mistakes

When launching new products and services, there are some common mistakes you can make, or try to avoid.  Martin Cagan, of Silicon Valley Product Group has a nice top 10 mistakes list in this month's Ivey Business Journal.  If you've never made any of these mistakes, you deserve to be in the new product hall of fame:

1. Confusing customer requirements with product requirements
2. Confusing innovation with value
3. Confusing yourself with your customer
4. Confusing the customer with the user
5. Confusing features with benefits
6. Confusing building right product with building product right
7. Confusing a good product with a good business model
8. Confusing emotional features with unimportant features
9. Confusing improving functionality with improving product
10. Confusing product launch with success

There were some great observations in this article too, some of which gave me a smile.  Like this gem:

What motivates product engineers may not be the same as what motivates other members of the product team.

Actually, you could substitute just about any role for "product engineers" and this would be true.

One of the most common issues I encounter is problem #3: confusing yourself with your customer.  I remember a senior banking executive I admired telling me debit card would never take off because you couldn't earn free interest from the billing delay on a credit card.  History has proven him so, so wrong.

This list applies pretty well to internal organizational changes as well, such as CRM initiatives, or other internal "products". Change management projects often fail to communicate the benefits of the change.  Systems are often too complex or inflexible for the employees who are supposed to use them.  Managers think they understand the challenges of front line staff.   Etcetera, etcetera.

This is why it is so important to have INFORMED insights -- informed by data, observation and research.

If you catch yourself thinking you have unique insights into the motivations of your customers, I have some easy, low-cost remedies to change your thinking: 

• read a magazine that you would never pick up and can't imagine why anyone would like
• take a public transit route through a different neighborhood, or when the teens are going home from school
• go to a coffee shop that doesn't serve latte and isn't part of a national chain.  Strike up a conversation with your server
• watch the advertisements on the ethnic TV channel
• read all the flyers that come to the door
• buy a lottery ticket

And while you are doing one of these things, try to profile the people who make this activity part of their regular routine.  Who are they, how are they different from you?  Can you see your new product succeeding with this crowd? 
Better yet, make your whole team conduct this exercise, and debrief each other. You might be surprised how it changes the conversation.

Upcoming Presentation: Online Qualitative Research for B2B

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Interested in Business to Business Research?  I'll be presenting at the MRIA's B2B learning series this month.  If you're nowhere near this geography, but would like to have a set of the slides, or participate in a demonstration of the methodologies, just send me an e-mail.  Or download the slides from this link:  [Please forgive this brief lapse into shameless self-promotion!]

Here's the official announcement...

GOING DEEP WITH ONLINE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Speaker, Susan Abbott, CMRP In February, the MRIA B2B Learning Series welcomes Susan Abbott to discuss the use of various Internet techniques for qualitative research. These techniques will be illustrated by mini case studies gathered by dozens of researchers worldwide. The presentation is based on one Susan made to the QRCA conference in Beverley Hills, California in 2005.

Live demonstrations of two of the methods will be created in advance of the February meeting session. If you would like to experience the technology first hand, please e-mail [email protected] or [email protected].

This session will take place in the Boardroom of the Duke of Westminster Pub, 1 First Canadian Place,Toronto, Wedensday February 15th, 6:00pm.

MRIA member registration is $7.00 pre-registered, $10.00 at the door; non-member is $10.00 pre-registered, $15.00 at the door. To register, call Branka Nikolovski at 416-922-1140 ext 125, or e-mail [email protected].

For full details on this upcoming Learning Series event, visit the B2B website.

The truth about change management

Significant changes often begin long before they are visible.  Inside the egg, the chick is silently growing and changing.  The first cracks before hatching seem like the start of something big -- but the big thing has already been underway. 

There's a wonderful piece in Strategy + Business this month by Skip Griffin Jr., who tells the story of the American Civil Rights movement as a transformation project:  Beauty Parlors, Barbershops, and Boardrooms. [Free registration required]

Griffin acknowledges the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., but places it in a context of the twenty years that came before King's famous speeches.  Griffin says, "Many people think of the civil rights movement as a wave of change sparked by a few charismatic leaders", but in fact it was not spontaneous, and was built by deliberate effort by a large number of people over a long period:

"By the time Rosa Parks's feet got tired, a large field of conversational energy was already in place"

Griffin, who now helps people and organizations with transformational changes, says that to understand a change, you need to understand "the parts that are less visible:  the deep, profound patterns of activity under the surface".

His conclusion, in terms of corporate transformation projects:

"It's not just the structures that have to change. And it's not just the culture out there in the organization. It's the culture in here, in ourselves, as well -- the culture that leads us up to the threshold, and then, if we're ready, give us the courage to step across."

His words reminded me of a metaphor used by Jim Collins in Good to Great.  Collins says we tend to hail improved corporate results as being the result of some recent, short-term initiative, rather than the culmination of a long process of getting many things right. 

I don't believe we can actually make people and organizations change.  They change themselves.  When the time is right, we can make the hatching easier.  We can sometimes help the fertilization process.  But there is no real way to rush the embryo into being a chick.

Acknowledgements:  the image above was created using photos from Dreamstime

Obsolete Software Blues

I've got the obsolete software blues... A few years ago, when my Handspring Visor was shiny, new and orange, I bought a small bit of software called I-Data Pro.  It is a lightning fast, easily configurable and searchable database builder. I use it as a contact manager, but it also has indexes for my filing, software, and restaurants I like.  It had conduits for Palm, so I could take it anywhere.

The killer app, however, which I cannot live without, is it's one click label printing.  That application alone has been unbelievably useful over the years.