Customer Crossroads

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.

You know advertising is hot when it's displacing IT among IT research houses

I always thought of Forrester as an IT-oriented research house. And then they were on stuff like supply chains and outsourcing. However, they are now getting talked about for their thought pieces on where advertising agencies are going.

This suggests two things to me:

1. Forrester is good at figuring out what's hot
2. Marketing, advertising, and brand building are hotter than they have ever been, but also under more scrutiny than ever.

I have other evidence of this trend.

The Globe and Mail, my daily must-read newspaper, never deemed marketing topics worthy of business coverage. [Well, any kind of coverage, actually.]  Not long ago -- within the last 18 months for sure -- they have added regular material on this topic. It's thin, but it's there.

Friday, I heard Terry O'Reilly speak at a conference on qualitative research. Mr.O' Reilly is a regular feature on CBC radio, and known for his expertise in advertising, as both a creator and a commentator. Here's one of the notable things he said on the topic of insight and advertising:

"Creative ideas born of intuition are the last legal means of gaining a competitive advantage over your competition."

I thought this was a) brilliant, and b) true.   

Forrester seems to think that advertising agencies are not helping marketing people connect with consumers and customers in a meaningful way. This is the summary of their recent research report, The Connected Agency: Partner With An Agency That Listens Instead of Shouts

"Today's agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift; they will start by connecting with consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them."

I have not read the whole report, but I am having trouble seeing this as news. And it's far too easy to just blame the agencies, who are under tremendous pressure to deliver results these days. But they can only do what they get a mandate and a budget to do from the marketing people. Surely marketers themselves must take responsibility for connecting with consumers.

And so must executives.

Being in the insight and intuition business myself, I can only agree with Mr. O' Reilly: we need better strategies. We need insights. We need innovation in marketing and advertising.

At the same conference where Mr. O' Reilly was a headliner, I presented with a client a case study on some innovative research we did together. When we got to the Q&A, the biggest question that came up -- which we brainstormed as a group -- was HOW to convince executives to do something less conventional than a focus group or a survey.

These researchers and marketers -- they want to deliver innovation, they want to deliver category-changing insight, but feel challenged to sell it into the organization.

We came up with a flip-chart full of ideas of how to do this. Things like: start small, start with intractable problems where there is motivation to try something different, and so on.

But as one of the research buyers said, "We want innovation, we want to do something new, and we want amazing insights, but we only want it once it's been done before. How do you sell this into the organization?"

Of course, we on the practitioner side have another challenge. Having promised these category-changing insights, we need to stand and deliver.

I only wish these insights that can change the landscape could be produced on demand. [I'll be hunting for a good one this week, wish me luck.]

Girls are doing more online than boys

It turns out that many more girls than boys have web sites, and many more are blogging. This according to research conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, and also by Harvard's  Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

An excellent article on this topic was written by Stephanie Rosenbloom for the New York Times, "Sorry, Boys,This Is Our Domain", (Feb 21, 2008).

No one is much expecting this trend to convert to a change in the dominant gender in the computing industry, it seems to be more about the acculturation of young women to tell stories about themselves, confess, dress to communicate identity, and otherwise put their inner selves on display in public in some fashion.

Very thought provoking.

Using personality type in marketing

I wrote earlier this week about personality type and how it affects fitness activity choices.

I've been interested in the topic of personality preferences and how this influences consumer behavior for years, but there's been very little done on this topic, which has always surprised me.

On a recent foray to seek out research, I found this bibliography, which is pretty thin for such a big topic. CAPT maintains a listing of all research into psychological type. While it may not be complete, it's usually the best place to start.

The dominant ethos of people who work in psychological type is that it is a tool useful for personal growth and development, useful to help people communicate better, and good for organizational and management development applications. There is a real resistance to going outside that realm, as somehow cheapening the use of the MBTI instrument.

The result of this is that if you want to include personality type in marketing research, you are looking at custom work, for the most part.

There is one instrument I am aware of that incorporates psychological type in a meaningful way, and translates type preferences into values orientation. It's the Market Evaluer tool. I've heard Maddie Hamill speak at QRCA events, and have been intrigued to use the evaluer instrument in a project. [Which has not happened yet. I think they were offering free trials at the last conference, but being the ENTP type that I am, all the materials from that conference are still sitting in a pile on my credenza waiting to be sorted, filed, or otherwise utilized].

You don't have to get fancy with this stuff to take personality type into account, however. A considerable amount of research is readily available on type and career choices. So, for example, if you know you are marketing to nurses, you know you are dealing with people who are predominantly Feeling in their judging orientation: they make decisions based on what is good for people. Hospital administrators, on the other hand, don't share that outlook.

Virtually every profession has been studied in this way, from airline pilots to medical specialties. Not only this, but if you understand the language of type, you can see these patterns emerging often through how people communicate.

While type is a finely nuanced field, some of the big differentiators are readily apparent in people. whether we love routine or hate it; whether we love detail or hate it; whether we love closure or want to keep gathering new information; whether we value facts more or ideas more. And so on.

Where we go wrong in marketing

We all tend to wonder why the rest of the world is not more like us. And we communicate in ways that make sense to us. Here's the problem -- even if your temperament is shared by a lot of people, it's not shared by everyone.

Here's a good example in action. I just finished a project where I talked to a large number of retail sales people. They told me that customers didn't care for the aesthetics of the brand in question, much preferring the design qualities of brand y. I passed this information along to the project team. At which point, the brand manager said, "I don't understand that. I like the design of our brand much better than brand y."

Well, it's okay to say that. But it's a so-what as far as improving your marketing performance goes.

The rest of the world is not like you. You may have suspected this before. And now you know.

Resources
If you want to know more about psychological type, there are many links and resources listed here.

Temperament is a different lens for viewing psychological type, and the dominant thinker in temperament continues to be David Keirsey. His very informative web site is here.

How personality affects consumer behavior: fitness

According to Suzanne Brue, an expert in personality type and fitness, I'm a "Quicksilver: Master of Exercise Disguise". That's the type of person who prefers to exercise as a part of some other enjoyable activity, who wants exercise to be convenient, require minimal process and advance planning.  We're also easily bored, and tend to cycle through new activities on a regular basis.

For me that's pretty accurate.

You, on the other hand, might have a very different approach to exercise, closely related to your personality type preferences.

I read about Brue's research recently, and while it is interesting from a personal growth perspective, I found it even more interesting from a marketing perspective.

"Some personalities are attracted to exercise connecting them to another person or to many people. Others are motivated by the privacy of exercising alone. Efficiency motivates some, while others are attracted to exercise offering a mind/body or spiritual dimension. Being surrounded by nature and using their observational and navigational skills are requirements for some personalities, while others crave the familiarity of consistent places and routines, allowing for mental drift. Detailed instructions and exercising "correctly" inspires some while others resist an imposed structure in favor of physical activity through "play." For one and all, there lies a satisfying, successful path toward healthy physical activity and exercise."

Our Calvinistic exercise culture currently says you have to orient yourself to follow a routine, and find pleasure in the following of this routine, because you know it is good for you. This is an approach that would work for just over half the population (54% of adults have a J preference).

Ms. Brue's research found that many J types can maintain exercise regimens that they do not enjoy at all -- they do them because it is good for them.

For the rest of us, there needs to be a play element, or we can't do it, (46% of adults have a P preference).

One of her conclusions was very surprising to me:

"Whether you eventually commit to an exercise routine as you would another job, or you look for a way to enjoy exercise to help you get past your resistance, the thought of exercise in and of itself is rarely much of a draw." [emphasis is mine]

Marketing implications

What really surprised me about this research is that most advertising for fitness-related activities doesn't appear to be speaking to anyone's motivations. It doesn't emphasize the ease of maintaining a routine, and it doesn't emphasize the play element.

Personality type is pervasive -- it influences many of our choices in life, our values, and our communications and decision-making style.

More on this in the next post.

Resources:
Type and Physical Exercise: Which Holds Sway ... Job or Play? APTi Bulletin of Pscyhological Type, Vol 30 No 2, 2007. You may be able to get a download at the association's site, here.

If you want to know more about personality type, you would also find this type of information on the APTi web site, as well as many other sources.

Eureka! The solution to the productivity problem

We've all been hearing about the productivity problem.

Only this morning I was reading how Kellogg biz school is now studying MBA students to figure out which ones are procrastinators and make them change their ways. [An economist's idea of how to handle variations in human beings -- let's change the people!]

This is not the answer to our productivity problems. Indeed, I think I may have found the answer ... it's quality customer service.

Here's my evidence, from two places.

Productivity Mess #1 -- Premiere Global

First, Premiere Global. They bought Enunciate, the teleconferencing and web conferencing company I had been using for a few years. I got a lot of mail from them during the transition, which I dutifully filed for the most part. It was fine print and emphasized the importance of how they were making things simple for me during the transition.

Today, when I went to book a call, I discovered they have sent me TWO completely different sets of passcodes and IDs. This is going to trigger a bunch of back-and-forth between me and their sales rep, thereby wasting a bunch of time on both our parts. Not only that, but there's no way I'm using this service with a client or on a project until I'm sure it's going to work. So there's lost revenue also.

Imagine this scenario being played out thousands of times, which is surely what has happened.

Productivity Mess #2 -- Online services

The Premiere Global example is nothing compared to the thousands of dollars flushed with Dell in the last few weeks trying to buy an upgrade to space on my Dell DataSafe account.

After I had personally spent several hours on the phone with my Gold Tech Support person, a few sales staff he conferenced in, and an online chat support, I decided the problem had to be delegated before I went broke. That was more than a month ago.

The next victim [my delegatee] went through more of the same until he decided to go up ... way up ... and call the executive for Canada. A couple of senior people got right on the problem, and in just over a week (and counting) they have made progress. We aren't done, but we are getting there.

Throughout this process, there has been a continuing stream of e-mails committing to help, there have been apologies, there have been surveys asking us to comment on the service experience, and more than once the original Gold Tech Support person has called to commiserate, but advise that he is unable to help, except perhaps to try bullying someone else. [His exact words.]

A couple of weeks ago, we tried to surrender and just cancel and get a refund. I actually was glad that they decided to stay with us and try to solve the problem, rather than just give us the refund, actually. So we're in it for the long haul and heaven knows how long this will take to fix.

At one point, a senior manager admitted to my delegate that "there is a logic problem" on this service, and "they've had a few issues." The thing is, I don't question the goodwill or effort of anyone involved. This must be driving them nuts, too.

How efficiency initiatives in customer service are ruining the economy

I have no idea how the Dell story will end, but I can tell you one thing for sure: the ratio of expense to revenue on something that costs less than $100 is just staggering.

All of this comes from productivity initiatives that have pulled the brains out of the customer service and support function and replaced it with a fake-friendly script. 

Note to senior executives:

[1] There's no such thing as an isolated service problem. If you see it once, it's a pattern.

[2] The way we handle customer service these days only looks more efficient. It ain't.

Resources:
"Can't wait to put things off?" Philip Jackman, Globe and Mail, Tuesday, Feb. 12,  2008 print edition.

I first heard the words, "if you see it once, it's a pattern" from sales trainer Steve Schiffman. Words of wisdom, and so, so true, for sales, and for everything else.

Coffee Wars

Just while Starbucks is having an identity crisis of sorts, everyone else has decided to get on the bandwagon.
Stephani Ortenzi quoted me in a nice piece about what is happening on the front lines of the coffee wars for Foodservice and Hospitality Magazine. (subscription only)

You can also read the article on Stephani's author site. "Hang Time: The New Language of Coffee"

The value of novelty

Driving through a heavy rainstorm late one night, I had the chance to listen to a wonderful interview with Jerome Kagan on CBC's Ideas. (Unfortunately it is not available on a podcast.)

Kagan, you may know, is one of the great minds in developmental psychology. He has studied the nature vs nurture thing for decades. Kagan, and others, have clearly shown that some human temperaments are inborn. One of these is how much we enjoy new stimuli. About 40% of people enjoy new stimuli a lot. About 20% really dislike change and novelty except on a carefully managed basis. These tendencies are managed better as we grow up -- we don't go all stiff in our cribs and cry. But the tendency is still there.

For all humans, Kagan says, "we enjoy novelty that we understand." Well worth contemplating when thinking about customer experience, communications, and most anything else that involves human beings.

For example, we enjoy a new shampoo, a new fragrance, a new spice mix. We may not enjoy a new job quite so much. A new world order, that's seriously stressing.

We enjoy novelty that we understand. Words of wisdom.