Customer Crossroads

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.)

This is what 75 - 79 looks like now

My parents are off to see one of the grandchildren who is at university in Dublin. Then they plan to rent a car and tool around the countryside seeing relatives and making their way to Belfast. At least, that was the plan.

They ran into a hitch -- when they tried to rent a car online, the same way the rest of the trip had been booked, they discovered that no one would book an online car rental to someone over age 65. Yikes! They knew train service was good, but wanted the freedom of their own car.  And the certainty that they had firm arrangements in place before leaving home.

They did some more internet searching and discovered that Hertz had given this situation a bit more thought. According to my Mom,

"I kept checking various sites online and found that Hertz will rent to our age group. (75 - 79) but you need a letter from your Dr stating you are in good health and a letter from your insurance stating you have had no claims for 5 years. [My father] was able to get both this morning so we are back to Plan I. Doesn't matter in Dublin of course but when we go to Belfast we did want to be able to get around on our own - most people we want to see are in rural areas and not all the same spot."

Way to go Hertz! This little policy enhancement won you the business.

Believe me, no-one understands better than another 70-something that not all older people should be behind the wheel. But if you are still driving, you keep it as long as possible. Because driving is freedom, and not just psychologically. It means you go where you want, when you want.  The Hertz solution feels like a good one. It manages their risk, but provides a solution to the customer.

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.

Podcast on Customer Experience

Stephanie Weaver is starting a podcast series on customer experience, and kindly invited me to be her first guest, on the topic, "What is the customer experience"?. Listen to our conversation here.  You can also get it from iTunes here.

Some of you will remember Stephanie as the co-creator of the amazing Bathroom Blogfest (tag: ladiesrooms), which we hope to reprise in October 2007.

Creativity Week Workshops

Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) is a great place to kickstart creative thinking. I knew little about International Creativity Week or Day but the workshops sounded interesting, and the price ($20) was totally awesome. Plus they were promising free sandwiches and cookies. What did I have to lose?

How can you not be energized by this amazing building on stilts? I actually got to ride up the elevator to the top of the box on stilts, and stroll through the industrial design studio space on my way to the workshop. Bonus!

First workshop was "Admit it. You're a Designer!", led by Jules Goss, chair of the Industrial Design Program at OCAD. [And Graham Hufton of the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute]

The workgroup I was in generated a wonderful list of possible design problems to solve using design thinking, which kind of represents a zeitgeist of this moment in time for this group:

1. Replace the styrofoam meat tray
2. Pollution
3. Commuting
4. Information overload
5. Enjoying your digital photos
6. Real sizes for real people
7. Green food supply
8. Paint that changes it's own color, or other solutions to avoid needing to paint
9. Guns in schools
10. Workplaces designed for moms
11. Understanding new technology
12. Security process at airports
13. Baggage pickup process at airports
14. Size of print on all packaged products
15. Better label for the segment currently called 'seniors'

And the one we decided to work on: A cell-phone designed around the needs of 70-somethings who don't currently use cell-phones, but might like the benefits they offer.  There's our team of wanna-be designers.

So what did I learn? That design thinking is really a pretty natural structured process of defining a problem, and the parameters of a good solution before creating a lot of ideas and possibilities:

1. Problem Definition
2. Research / Context
3. Ideation
4. Evaluation
5. Development
6. Output / Resolution

followed by validation of the solution in the market, testing, iteration, and cycling back to Step 1.

On to the next event, where the very high-energy coach Warren Coughlin helped us tap into our inner entrepreneur in Create The Entrepreneur.   

Warren's main message: "If you want to HAVE more, you have to BE more and DO more," expressed as the formula, BE x DO = HAVE.  Warren says: "What you have right now is a function of who you are right now, and what you do right now."

Perhaps familiar to you if you have ever tapped into the well of motivational literature, but I liked it. What's more, I left the room feeling re-energized, and with a renewed sense of determination to follow through on things I want to make happen.

Life Lesson
I left the evening speculating about how wonderful my city would be if everyone was involved in something like this on a regular basis.

April 21 is Worldwide Creativity & Innovation Day

It's not too late to plan your own little local event to celebrate worldwide creativity and innovation day, on April 21. If you want to kick-start some innovation in your organization, large or small, even if you're a company-of-one, I encourage you to check out this site for some ideas.

Last night I attended one of their workshops. Three hours of great value, good ideas, and general inspiration for a mere $20. More on that in the next post.

Resources:
Creativity Day organization main site with global contact information: http://www.creativityday.org/index.htm

Greater Toronto Area (GTA) committee site with events listings: www.creativityday.ca

Tips for getting started: here and  here

Reference list of methods: here

Leonardo DaVinci Awards video: here Presented to organizations in various categories in connection with Creativity and Innovation Day.

Co-creation watch: Make Your Own Wired Cover

I missed the chance to get my real July issue of Wired issued with my own picture on the cover. But we can all have fun making our own Wired cover just by going to this link.

Fun promotion, and a good way to get a story into a blog or two.

Eisenberg on the future of marketing: "Brands don't work the way they used to"

Thanks to Howard Kaplan at Grok.com for posting an audio link to a presentation by Jeffrey Eisenberg  on the future of marketing.

Eisenberg has a lot of interesting things to say about how marketing is changing because of the web, and other new communication technologies.  Here were a few of the things he said that made me sit up and take note:

"More and more money is coming online. More and more advertising is going online. And as more and more money gets spent on advertising it becomes more expensive. It's the simple law of supply and demand. And the people who can't convert high enough will not be able to afford that traffic. And when they can't afford that traffic they will either go bankrupt or get bought by somebody who can afford that traffic. "

"Brands don't work the way they used to ... Take a look at a company like Starbucks. Can anybody name a major brand, not a brand extension, but a major brand that in the last decade has been created primarily through advertising? Nobody. I've never met a crowd that could. If you think of companies like Yahoo and Google and Starbucks and Amazon, these companies have been built by experience and by word of mouth. Marketing doesn't work the way it used to."

"64% of people go out of their way to avoid companies that over-market to them"

Jeffrey Eisenberg is co-author of the bestselling book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?

The Story of PayPal

An interesting read from Chris Skinner at Finextra.com tells the story of how PayPal got started, just over eight years ago. One of the key interesting themes here is that PayPal created their service in full view of the banks, and uses a lot of the same infrastructure.

Mr. Skinner says that PayPal worked where other new payment schemes failed (such as Beenz) because of three vital differences:

• it used the dollar as its medium of exchange, rather than trying to create a new currency for online payments;
• it used email for communications; and
• it used the existing bank networks for making the payment

PayPal is now a huge operation, recording 2006 revenues of $1.4 billion on almost $38 billion in transaction volume. Although their growth rate in transaction volume is slowing, it is still massive: 45 per cent in 2005 and 37 peer cent in 2006.

Well worth reading, and very thought provoking.

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.]

New in Financial Services: cool stuff, interesting bits from here and there

Things are starting to pile up on my desk, so herewith a round-up of the relevant tid-bits on the financial services file.

Biometric Bank Machines in India

Thumbprint bank machines are being piloted in India. Given that the number of ATMs in India is expected to go from 35,000 to 100,000 in the next three years, this could be big. The focus is rural areas that have not had access to financial services infrastructure, and have traditionally done their day-to-day banking through high-priced local middlemen.

Literacy has been a barrier in previous efforts to get adoption in rural areas, according to Sunil Udupa, CEO of AGS Infotech, quoted in the Wired story. Illiterate farmers couldn't remember their PIN code, and couldn't read the machines instructions. The new machines have audio and symbolic instructions, and use biometrics. Biometrics are currently used by some land-records offices in India, so the technology itself is not totally new there.

Few are actually succeeding at cross-selling

A.T.Kearney created an Organic Growth Index to survey 4,000 customers of retail financial institutions, with an objective of tracking organic growth.  They discovered that the average number of accounts per customer across 32 institutions is less than two.

Great customer service scores are the price of entry, but not enough to grow share of wallet, according to author Andrew Green, also a VP at A.T. Kearney. Green concludes that banks have not created the integrated value propositions that could drive growth because they can't/don't/won't work effectively across their silo structures.

"Integrated value propositions represent new territory for most retail financial institutions, which typically are organized in silos around specific accounts. Success requires working across these silos and rethinking product pricing, positioning, marketing and even the traditional measurement and reward systems, which typically focus on one account rather than multiple products."

Tip of Hat to:
CustomerWorld for the Wired reference on thumbrpint bank machines in India.
"Thumbprint Banking Takes India", by Scott Carney, Wired, Jan 9, 2007

"Where's the cross-product value proposition?", by Andrew Green, BAI Banking Strategies, May-June, 2006.

[Strange Technical Issue: for some reason, pictures that format a bit too small in Typepad always wind up looking way too big in Feedburner. I'm knowledgeable in the ways of pixels and DPIs, but this one has me stumped. Anyone??]

So you want innovative thinking...

If you want innovation in your organization, you need to give people clear instructions about where and how you want it. Not what you want ... but where and how. Permit me to explain.

I meet once a month with a few colleagues to talk -- we call it a think tank. This week one of the things we talked about is innovation, since both have been following my work on the innovation project at SEEC. And we are all obsessed with organization development in some fashion, so we talk about organizations a lot.

The startling realization...

Two of us have experienced life in a large organization first hand. We talked about our experiences in innovating, and came to a startling realization. We'd often had ideas we wanted to try, things we wanted to fix, but had NO IDEA what the process might be to put those ideas into the pipeline. We often weren't clear if we had the direct authority to act to make these changes. When we knew we didn't have the authority, we often weren't clear how to put forward a proposal.

What's really scary about this is that we were working for largely well run organizations. And this was not just our own experience. As outside consultants we see our clients struggling with the same problems.  For the really big stuff -- systems investments, acquisitions -- there are always formal business case processes. But few people outside head office would know what these processes are.

In short, there is no clear direction on how to make things happen, even though there is tremendous lip-service being paid to innovation.

By way of contrast...

I want to contrast this situation with something that just happened. I'm doing a podcast with Stephanie Weaver -- or rather, she is doing one, and kindly invited me to be her guest. Stephanie is an expert on process and experience design. So no surprise that she sent me a very clear tip sheet to confirm what will happen. It has instructions on how to set up for the podcast, tips to ensure we don't get interrupted by a ringing cell-phone, and similar clear direction.

These clear instructions will serve to relax her guests and put people at ease, knowing they are on the right track, doing just what they are supposed to do.

Five steps to kick-starting innovation in your organization...

Isn't it so often the case that we have clear processes for the small things, but lack all clarity on the really important stuff?  If you want some innovation in your organization, whether this is a small office or you are in charge of sweeping huge divisions, here's my advice:

1. Tell people where you want innovation and where you want them to just adhere to the current state of affairs. If you want innovation in purchasing but not in product design, say so. If you want innovation in product design, but not in purchasing, say so. If you don't say so, you are guilty of wasting everyone's time through your lack of clarity.
2. Tell people what the purpose of the innovating is. Is it intended to improve revenue? Market share? Customer satisfaction? Loyalty? Reduce expenses? Reduce time to market on new products?
3. If you aren't clear about where you want innovation, where you don't want it, and what you want your innovations to achieve, you need to have a little off-site with yourself and get clear. Then go back to step 1.
4. Tell people how you want them to make their proposals, if the innovation feels like it is outside their authority to just implement. Is it a memo? Do they need to have a bunch of cross-functional meetings to get buy-in? Is it a business case? What is the process?
5. Tell people how to get clarity around the process when they are confused. Can they float an idea informally? Who do they float it to? What's supposed to happen then?

Having done all this, now you can hold people accountable. If you don't see any action, you can legitimately ask why, and keep asking. But if you haven't done steps 1 - 5, any complaints you have about why your organization isn't more innovative are just so much blah-blah.

My bet is that if you start down this road, you're going to be drowning in ideas pretty quickly.

I'd love to hear what others' experience of this is. Call, write, send carrier pigeons, comment or trackback, but please add your views.

Cross-Channel Customer Experience

eStara interviewed me on the topic of cross-channel customer experience for their thought leader newsletter.  You can read the interview here.

You may have read an earlier post about their click-to-call technology.

[Disclaimer: there is no commercial relationship here. I just told them what I thought. And they were good enough to put it in their newsletter and on their blog. I'm just excited to be sitting at the big-kids table. WooHoo!]

Defining Customer Experience

Stephanie Weaver has an interesting post defining the inside and outside of customer experience.

"• Inside. First, the experience happens in your customers’ perceptions. It’s seen from their point of view, created by a combination of their feelings, sensations, and prior experiences. Unfortunately, what you intend doesn’t always matter. All that counts is what’s happening inside a customer on the day he or she is at your site. You can’t control this inside dimension. No two customers will ever have the same experience, since everyone has a unique point of view.

• Outside. Second, an experience is made up of many separate pieces outside the customer. That’s your part. The outside dimension begins the instant a person decides to visit, continues throughout his or her time with you, and ends when he or she leaves. You control nearly every aspect of this outside dimension."

I like this approach. We basically agree on the concept, but this is a nice way to put it. Here's my definition, and you can download the graphic model below.

Customer Experience Is... the internal response of an individual to their interactions with an organization's products, people, processes and environments.

Internal response includes the thoughts, feelings and emotions experienced and the rational, psychological and sensory benefits of the experience.

Download ARC-Customer-Experience-Model.pdf

Co-creation and fashion brands

Reader Sophie R. is studying at the London College of Fashion, and sent me some questions with respect to her dissertation on fashion management. I thought her questions were interesting, and hope you do too.

Sophie: What has changed in the last decades in terms of : consumer behaviour, ways of consumption?  What do the consumers expect the most from the brand today?  Is consumer behaviour in fashion different? If yes, what is different?

Susan: With the advent of the internet, many people expected brands to become less important. This hasn't really happened, except in commodity purchases, where quality and status aren't that relevant. When faced with overwhelming choice, a brand that you trust can help you make a decision. In this sense, brands are even more important.  The big change with brands is that we no longer choose a brand for life; most of us are pretty fickle when it comes to our brand selections.  Another big shift is that we may be luxury brand purchasers in one area of our lives, and bargain purchasers in another, without finding anything inconsistent about this.
This trend is very evident in fashion, with the success of knock-off houses like H&M and Zara providing inexpensive access to high-style and design. Yet luxury brands still have tremendous presence, whether it's a Prada handbag or an Omega watch.

Sophie: Could you explain in a few words the concept of co-creation? How does the consumer react towards co-creation? How could you qualify the presence of co-creation on the market place   
nowadays? Does it have implication on any brands’ success?

Susan: Co-creation is about bringing consumers into a closer relationship with the brand by inviting them to take part in the creative process. This could be by letting people propose advertising. Or it could involve giving customers tools to customize and personalize their purchase. Mini Cooper gives customers an enormous array of customization options, for example. 

We would still want our brand to make sure we look good at the end -- my assumption is that BMW is not going to let me design an ugly Mini. So I can trust the brand, and experiment within the brand's boundaries.

A brand should only choose the co-creation route when they can make it fit into the brand promise -- co-creation is likely not for every brand. A brand that is all about stability, for example, might not be a good candidate for co-creation. I think most financial institution brands would struggle with this concept.

Sophie: Why is interaction important for the consumers? How can co-creation influence consumer behaviour?

Susan: Consumers don't want to be passive recipients of dispensed wisdom from big companies. There are a multitude of personal styles at work today, especially in the fashion world. There are so many 'looks' now, that we can all do almost whatever we want.

Let's consider a fashion organization that is conducting creative design workshops with their target customer on a regular basis. The customer involvement in the creation process will ensure that the product that emerges makes sense. This is a lot more than a focus group -- this is an ongoing involvement of customers in the creation of the future of the brand. The internal designers have the last word, but they have greater access to involve the customer in creation.  I don't see this being relevant for all consumers, but for those that are really engaged with the category or the brand, and are opinion leaders in their segment.

Sophie: Can you describe the role of Internet in the development of co-creation? How does Internet help brands to interact with the consumers?

Susan: The internet has provided a means of communicating with customers on a large scale, and allowing tremendous efficiencies in creating supply chains that can accommodate a lot of customization, and customer interaction. Web 2.0 applications like MySpace give people the opportunity to create and interact on a huge scale. This is now setting the standard for what we expect to be able to do generally.  So the internet has simultaneously improved the ability to create two-way communication, and raised expectations for it.

I expect that people like Madonna have always been able to enter into a dialogue of co-creation with designers like Gaultier. Patrons of the arts have had some co-creation capability since the time of the Medici. But the presence of the internet, and the general flattening of the global economy, has brought this possibility to a much larger number of people -- it has democratized co-creation.

Sophie: Is co-creation a short term phenomenon or a long term change?

Susan: We don't usually want to give up things we have learned to love. So I would say this is a trend that has long-term legs. But no organization, fashion or otherwise, should think this relieves them of the need to be cool and be design-focused, or to understand their customers and segments. In fact, that need has never been greater.

Co-creation does not mean telling me to go ahead and do-it-myself. It means bringing my ideas as a consumer / customer inside the company, creating an ongoing dialogue with this group, and giving them more influence over direction. In this sense, we could consider co-creation as the next phase of evolution of  Voice-of-the-Customer thinking. Except VOC is often a survey, and co-creation is much more connected, more of a dialogue.

Sophie: Last words: suppose you have one advice to give to brand’s managers who want to co-create with consumers, what would it be?

Susan: I think I've said enough already, and am going to throw this one out to the readers. Readers, how would you answer that one?

So Sophie - if you get an A, send us a gold star, okay buddy?

Abandoned Shopping Carts: How does your process rate?

I just had an amazing experience. I was trying to order a small item online -- less than $10. The shipping charges came up as over $3000.00. I tried a couple of times to fix it, and when I couldn't, I just abandoned the shopping cart.

Here's the amazing part. About 10 minutes later I get a PHONE CALL asking me if I still would like to place the order? WOW.

Happy customer, and potentially lost revenue captured by company. Not bad for a quick phone call by an employee on the ball, empowered to make things happen.