Customer Crossroads

Service innovation at the ski hill

I'm headed to Mt.Tremblant for some downhill skiing over Christmas.

Quite a while back, we decided to forgo humping equipment all over the continent and just rent good stuff wherever we happen to be. Quite apart from the cost savings, it's so convenient.

Usually, you still have to hump the stuff to your on-hill accommodation. But not anymore!

Here are a couple of the new service innovations Tremblant has introduced:

[1] you can book your equipment online in advance. Yay! No more standing in line filling out a form!

[2] for a mere $10 they will put the stuff in your hotel's ski locker, ready and waiting for you. At the end of your stay, you leave it in the same place.WOW, I say! Fantastic idea!

If you want to look for some little innovations like this, the place to start is by creating a process map of a given experience. Identify every single step, no matter how small, that your customer or prospect goes through. Write these down. Mix them up. Look for patterns. Look for emotional highs and lows. Figure out how to save time, reduce hassle, move some of the work to another place or time.

And voila! You have a service innovation.

Service innovation in the driveway

People are always telling me they want to find breakthrough innovations. This is fine. But you can accomplish a lot with something smaller. I have a couple of nice examples of this for you this week.

Today, it happened in my driveway.

My beloved had taken our car to Canadian Tire to get a battery replacement, in preparation for the three months of cold that lie ahead. Big line-up. BIG lineup. Head guy comes out and tells people they should plan on leaving their cars there all day, maybe overnight. [I guess a lot of people are winterizing right now].

Plan B was a call to CAA. [I had no idea this was possible, because house elves look after the car and everything related to it. Lucky me!] It turns out that you don't have to have a dead battery to get them to come and replace it in your driveway. You can just ask them to do this, and they do it. [For a fee, of course].

No sooner had I tucked into my second coffee of the day than this truck pulls up outside and Bob's-your-uncle, we have a new battery in the car. And they took away the toxic waste of the old one too.

Service innovation: Save your customers time. Save them hassle. Take the service to them.
Result: Induce loyalty. Provide a new service that makes money. Earn unpaid media.

Next up, something at the ski hill that really made us delighted.

Tracking the buzz: check out blog pulse

I was fooling around with BlogPulse recently, which is one of the free things published by Nilesen Buzz Metrics. So I stuffed a couple of banks into the mix, and got this interesting little graph:

 
You can compare any three things you like, from brand names to abstract concepts.

Hope, according to BlogPulse, went way up on November 4. Now it's only a correlation, but I'm guessing it related to the reaction of bloggers to the US election.

The information age just continues to bring us cool new ways of looking at data supported by amazing amounts of computing power.

Credit where due:

I love to know smart and generous people. They share great stuff with their buddies.
Which is how I found out about Blog Pulse, from Susan Saurage-Altenloh, a very good researcher and business person, who shared this as part of a list on the QRCA Creativity and Innovation SIG Forum.

Blue light specials at retailers starting early

I was in the underground concourse below TD Centre yesterday after a meeting. There's a Laura shop in a prominent location. This is a mid-priced brand that appeals to working women (not executives, but not call centre clerks either). Lots of professional clothes, stylish, many private labels.

Signage throughout the store announcing 15% off everything in the store.

And the most amazing part: a woman with a portable loud-speaker system, walking through the store and announcing things along these lines...

"...everything in the store 15% off today, with even more specials over the lunch hour. Come on in ladies, you won't believe these deals..."

This is among the priciest retail space in Toronto, and this is the state of affairs.

Innovation breakthroughs: now really IS the time or why recycling does not work for insights.

 

People are cutting back. [Oh, you heard that, too?]

I've had a couple of projects cancelled or postponed indefinitely in the last short while. One of them was to help an organization identify new markets so they could escape the commodity price-cycle trap of their current markets.

This is exactly the kind of project you definitely should not cancel -- projects that will help you crack new revenue sources. So what will this company do instead? I'm guessing, they will just push harder at existing markets, and find themselves in the same place a year or two down the road.

While having these thoughts, I bumped into a nice article in Marketing Profs. [Now that the economy is tanking, maybe we can catch up on our reading.] The quote from Jeffrey Immelt leapt off the page.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt has established a class of projects now well-known as "imagination breakthroughs," consisting of ideas that are "really hard or really important" and might generate significant revenues over a three-year period, the time that GE usually takes to implement a new idea. "Imagination breakthroughs are a protected class of ideas — safe from the budget slashers because I've blessed each one."

If it takes you a couple of years or more to really get an idea off the ground, then the fuzzy front end you cut now will leave you in even more serious glue in two to three years time. And if you kill the stuff already in the pipeline, you're not going to have anything new to launch in 2009 either.

I really wish clients would say instead: "Can you get me something substantive with less money?" That's a better challenge than dropping the idea creation process.

Caveat

The article this came from is filled with good ideas from the Zaltmans. But like many of their ilk, they firmly believe that no approach other than their technique (individual metaphorical interviews) can get to the good stuff. Not true, in my experience.

"These deeper ideas are not available from survey responses to statements such as "financial planning is difficult" or in focus groups where each participant has on average about 10 minutes of air time." 

OK, you are definitely not going to get these deep meanings from a survey. I agree. But individual interviews are not the gold standard either.

There may still be people running focus groups with 12 bodies in them. However, most of the kids I hang with have shifted to small groups when they are using a group discussion method. Small being five or six. And researchers frequently add advance activities such as blogging / electronic diaries / collage assignments / videos / you name it. And there's no rule about 90 minutes or two hours either -- you can keep people humming along for three hours quite easily. And yes, you can uncover metaphorical meanings in focus groups, in online research methods, and in many other ways.

In truth, the generation of insight has a lot more to do with the skill, knowledge and art inside the researcher's head than the method employed. There's no method going that guarantees insight.

As anthropologist Grant McCracken has said, the proof is in the pudding. If you got insight, you got insight. If you didn't, you didn't.

I have friends in the marketing world who have used Gerry's Zmet technique to great effect. And I believe all of methodological infighting and territory claiming must defer to this. If the method works, the method is good. The proof of the pudding has nothing to do with the theory of the pudding or the method of the pudding. The proof of the pudding is a client who says: "This was illuminating. I understand my consumer and my market in ways that I did not, could not before."

Back to the main point

This is no time to be cutting your future revenue streams by shutting down the insight machine. In fact, if you plan to be standing when things turn around, you should be cranking up the insight machine. Certainly, your customers and consumers brains are grinding away on many things right now. Not a good time to recycle some old insights.

Resources:

How to Foster "Workable Wondering", by Gerald Zaltman and Linday Zaltman. In marketing profs, reprinted from HBS.

The Zaltman Method, by Grant McCracken in his blog, 2006.

How consumers are reacting to the economy

The New Art Gallery of Ontario connects with visitors in meaningful ways

I wandered through the new Art Gallery of Ontario during one of the members' preview days. As you can see, it's not quite done. But it is gorgeous. I was delighted to see so much additional work in well known collections that has come out of hiding in the basement.

The building, while beautiful, does not try to steal anything from the art or the guests. It's a space that entices you further.

Although I found a few weaknesses with signage, and got seriously lost a few times despite the map, these are eminently fixable challenges. There was some crowding in places, which will hopefully resolve once all the curvaceous staircases are open.

On the other hand, I was delighted to see something seriously cool. The Listen Up signs posted throughout the gallery invite you to call a phone number on your cell-phone to listen to your choice of commentaries. WOW! what a great idea, and pretty well executed. Just think what an impact this will have on gallery goers, who used to march around in lock-step with their audio tour devices at their ears. This new approach allows for browsing -- criss-crossing a room, dipping in an out as you wish in a non-linear fashion. If you only want to listen to a few commentaries, you can.

And you have a choice of commentaries. The commentaries might be about the art itself, or about the artist. They might be from another artist, or from a curator. 

This success is not just the result of a star architect (Frank Gehry). It also reflects a commitment to understanding the relationship visitors had with the gallery, and making a conscious effort to reshape that relationship to be more accessible, and less intimidating. A significant amount of research was involved, over a period of several years.

If my first visit to the new space is any indication, they are on the right track to really raising the experience to a new level.

One way to get loyalty behaviors: make it really difficult to cancel.

I was rounding up invoices for the accountant today, and realized that I am still on a couple of premium plans I thought I had cancelled. LinkedIn was one of them. 

I was really sure I had sent them the cancellation request, as I had only upgraded to manage a specific project, which ended more than a month ago.  Unable to find my request, I went looking through their site to figure out how to downgrade.

Here is their amazing list of instructions for downgrading. Draw your own conclusions, but for me, this does nothing for their brand, and will make me even more cautious about upgrading in the future.

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Downgrade your Premium Subscription

How do I cancel or downgrade my current premium subscription account?

A request to cancel your premium subscription switches your account to a free personal account. Cancellation will end billing and remove access to the premium features designed for premium subscriptions.

A request to downgrade your premium subscription changes your account to a lower lever premium subscription while still offering features like InMails and expanded people search. Changes will be made effective with the billing expiration date of your current subscription.

To downgrade to a lower premium subscription level or to cancel your premium account and switch to a free personal account, follow the steps below:

1. Click on 'Account & Settings' found in the upper right hand side of the home page.
2. Click on 'Compare Account Types' and identify the account type that best fits your needs.
3. Click on 'Customer Service' link found at the bottom of the page.
4. Click on 'Ask Customer Service' tab on the 'Customer Service Center' page.
5. Enter your account's primary email address in 'Contact Information'.
6. Select 'Premium Accounts' from the 'Category' dropdown under 'My question is about'.
7. In the 'Subject' type 'Downgrade My Subscription' (if you want a lower level premium subscription) or 'Cancel My Subscription' (if you want to just keep the free personal account).
8. In the 'Question' text box, identify what type of account you want to end up through this request. For example, "I would like to move to change to Business Plus account" or "I only want a free personal account."
9. Click on 'Continue'.

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Nine steps. Remarkable. So I have now sent a new request via their request function. Look at the confirmation screen reproduced below:

 

So the instructions are not quite correct, actually.  You might think this is just a boiler-plate confirmation screen and not read it. But there is one more step. If you are seduced into clicking on a link that has "answers", your response would not be submitted at all, you'd be in an infinite loop of some kind.

After you click "finish submitting question" you finally get this confirmation. And then a confirmation e-mail. That confirmation e-mail was the first positive about this process, in my view.

Quite apart from canceling, you might want to be able to produce an invoice to support the credit card charge. [Accountants, you know, they have their rules. And so does the tax man] See if you can locate the link that shows where you find the invoice for prior charges.

Having trouble? I know I did. But it's tucked up there in small type below the line that tells you what kind of account you have.

Incredibly, the company has already responded to my request to back-date the downgrade and refund one month. So they did really well on the service recovery front. But created some unnecessary work for themselves in the process.

LinkedIn is surely not evil. But this process and the visual design supporting it is awful. And they are not the only ones out there pulling this kind of nonsense.

I just hope there isn't some customer experience expert out there recommending this approach.

Sending messages to yourself: linking your online calendar to your phone, your kids, etc.

While writing a previous post on paper planners and customization, I came across even more planning solutions. Check out My Text/SMS Planner, an online service that sends text messages to your cell phone to remind you of meetings, deadlines, etc. Very cool idea.

The system will let you send messages to any phone number, not just your own phone. So a mom could program in reminders for a kid's doctor appointment or music lesson, for example. You could send your spouse a reminder for your birthday.

This is not a free service, and I had a few problems just figuring out exactly how much it would cost. In fact, there is no price information available until you have signed up and logged in. Kind of ambush marketing, IMHO, and made me a bit suspicious about the whole service.  You can buy credits in small packages (e.g. 5 for $1.49), but it's not clear what a message costs. 1 credit?

Their visuals position them as a business service, but I would guess the natural market is more likely to be students, young adults, and busy families. But who knows?