Customer Crossroads

Co-creation and customization: here to stay and growing

The ability to customize your own designs, using the base of a major brand, has a real appeal for me personally. I've wondered how widespread the uptake would be, because many people don't see themselves as either a) creative or b) an arbiter of style and taste. But the great thing about so many things web, is that they don't have to be mass markets to be big enough markets.

These customized product creation opportunities are expanding rapidly, with new players in the mix all the time.

Zazzle and Keds were among the first to come to my attention. [In fact, I own a pair of custom Keds that have one of my abstract paintings on the canvas. Ridiculously expensive, as I took the expedited shipping to ensure they'd be here in time for a presentation.]

Now MilkorSugar.com provides a directory of all things customizable, including reviews of the various sites, and a ratings grid that provides useful information e.g. can you upload an image on the site. I had no idea I could have had customized leather Adidas for about the same price as my canvas Keds -- no image upload, however. 

"In 2008 we noticed a stream of ‘customize-your-own’, ‘build your own’ and ‘design your own’ sites coming to the market. So we built a database of online customization. Initially to serve our curiosity, that became this website. You could call it the the web‘s first Customization Portal."  ~ Milk or Sugar founders

When we can get EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT for a little more money, and a little more time, we seem to be quite willing to pay up. This has been an important driver in the catalog business for years, a la LL Bean, J Crew, Lands End, etc. And these sites have expanded their own customization options for many items, such as backpacks. 

On MilkorSugar I learned of some other quite interesting sites. One example: Colorware offers custom external parts for phones, computers, and other electronic stuff, so you can really make it your own. This development is an extension of the skins we've been seeing everywhere, and the jewelry that people add to their cell-phones.

We can expect to see a continued expansion of custom manufacturing, in part because the cost of custom manufacturing tools is also dropping. Things like 3D printers and laser cutters are in the price-range of the home aficionado, no more costly than laser printers and desktop publishing when they first arrived.

Personally, I love it. It's a good thing, and I'm happy to see someone like Milk or Sugar helping me find the goodies.

Resources:

Thanks to Springwise for letting the world know about MilkorSugar. Crucial reading for trend-watchers.

Delightful postcards from hotel web site charm road warrior: Holiday Inn nails the insight

As hotels continue the march up the sustainable innovation curve, they just get better and better, don't they? My current hotel started out as a motel on a strip development, but looks more like an oasis for road warriors now.

In-room amenities include a two-tiered desk suitable for a laptop as well as the piles of paper we all still seem to need. A giant Philips flat screen TV looks almost like art. [I'm here working at a trade-show type of event, and looking forward to the design innovations I'll get to see later on.]

Such pedestrian items as a blow-dryer, in-room coffee maker, and luxurious bed are now pretty much mandatory to stay in the game. Free parking and free in-room internet are among the distinctions between this kind of a place and a major downtown hotel.  Even the quality of the restaurant food has improved, no longer smacking of diner-with-a-garnish entrees.

But I had a genuine surprise when I logged in to the internet this morning. Charming post-cards you can customize and send! [I suggested just such an application to a business a couple of years ago. Too bad they didn't try it to support their hair care product line. But I digress...]

These postcards could charm the kids you are traveling with, or the road warrior keeping in touch.

The insight: when you are traveling, you are either having an adventure with family and friends, or you are lonely and missing them - or perhaps just knowing that they are missing you.  The postcards neatly nail this insight and speak to it. So they win on two counts: they show that the hotel 'gets it', and they give you something nice to do with those emotions.

I was also pleased to see a truly useful web site, with things like 'check your flight' and 'local dining'. Best I have seen in quite a while. Good on you, Holiday Inn. Or should I start calling you Holly, to reflect your new sensibility?

Leveraging e-mail to extend and improve the experience: managing before, during and after

In October, I'll be attending the Qualitative Research Consultants Association annual conference in Palm Springs. It's a fun conference, because it is only practitioners who attend, and the schmoozing-for-business-development factor is pretty low. We learn from presentations, try out the local restaurants, and even have a costume party. [I have described my colleagues as people who wear flowy clothes. Not all of us, but there are a lot of F-feeling personality types in the profession.]

Okay, so this is a few weeks away -- but this morning, the hotel sent me an advance welcome e-mail, and invited me to use their electronic concierge to set things up for myself.

This really made me smile. It was a good reminder of my reservation code, now tucked away in the trip file. It made me look forward to a bunch of things like swimming in the pool [that I probably won't have time for. I only wish they had an on-site costume service...]

From a business angle, this totally makes sense. I can order and book spa treatments, restaurant reservations, even room service items to be ready on my arrival.

Something to think about: before, during, after

Services are always anchored in time. There is time before the experience, the experience itself, and time after. You can think about ways to do a number of things in advance of the experience, whatever it is:

• simple reminders of an appointment, from a hair appointment to a doctor's appointment
• what to bring with you, for example, to a meeting with a mortgage officer
• an opportunity to book additional services -- while you're here, would you like to add an eyebrow waxing?
• a simple welcome message -- telling people you know they are coming to your organization, and that you value them

Your interaction before the experience can be designed to heighten anticipation, reduce anxiety, help people prepare, or help you prepare for them. And new information technologies makes this so easy.

What can you add to YOUR experience?

Mindcamp 09: Fun with Triz + Pecha Kucha; rethinking the value proposition; consultant heal thyself

I was at Mindcamp09 a few days ago. It's an unusual event in many ways. It really is a camp, for one thing -- it's held at a YMCA camp location in the countryside. Even though the urban sprawl is alarmingly close, you can stand in the main dining hall and look west to a fabulous vista of rolling hills and see only trees and sunsets in the distance.

My Pecha Kucha on TRIZ

I did a Pecha Kucha session this year, which was very interesting. Talk about a high-energy way to spend time after dinner at a conference! Fast-paced sessions 6:40 minutes in length, on a wide variety of topics.

I've been working on ways to modify the structured approach of TRIZ to the kinds of projects I usually work on -- things related to people, brands, customer experiences, employees, organization design, and so on. So this is what I presented. I posted my slides on Slideshare. [This presentation is downloadable, if you want to see the speaking notes. Please note the images are from iStockPhoto.]

Seeking Triz For Services

View more presentations from Susan Abbott.

Rethinking the value proposition: Consultant heal thyself

Mindcamp was a chance to clarify a few things I've been working on in the business -- kind of revisiting the value proposition. When you are at a conference devoted to creativity, you are naturally tapped into your inner voices in a lot of the sessions, so a lot of people find they gain new insights into their own problems or challenges.

The value proposition for any organization is never finished of course, and we all have to constantly work on our brands.

One of the trickiest things for an organization -- including my boutique firm -- is to decide how to handle things you are a) good at, and b) make money on but c) don't fit that well with the strategy or future direction. Because brand and value proposition are as much about what you leave out as they are about what you put in.

But you can't just drop things and leave people behind. We always need a transition strategy, no matter how large or small your business is. Example: I had once subcontracted some analysis to a freelancer, who called me mid-project to tell me he could only work on my stuff on the weekends because he had taken a full-time job. Clearly, no transition strategy.

One of my big Ah-ha's was the realization that I haven't done a very good job of informing my own customers (aka clients) what our value proposition is. Too funny right? It's a consultant heal thyself situation if I ever saw one. Like somehow our customers can figure this out without us telling them. D'oh.

Repersonalizing the blog

The other big realization was that I had let this blog become far too dry and depersonalized. It was starting to feel like corporate-speak to me, and was less fun to write as a result. I've given a lot of people advice about how to blog, and I always emphasize the importance of a personal voice. [Yup, we should all take our own advice.]

As blogging has become known as a business strategy, a lot of the fun has been sucked out of it. Many bloggers don't have a blogroll [no link love sharing]. Lots of blogs don't permit trackbacks, another way the conversation has been built.

My considered opinion is that it is not better for blogging, more interesting for readers, or even better for business to take those approaches.

The blogs I actually enjoy reading are the ones where there is real serious opinion (not what someone ate for lunch), but it feels like we are having a coffee talking, not like someone's brochure.

The human voice, the personal voice, is what the new information era is all about. It's Cluetrain Manifesto all over again. But it's easy to forget, even for someone [me] who should know better. 

What do you think?

And this is a picture of Jim Ridge, who did a wonderful   session on graphic facilitation that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Why are we waiting?

In this age of magical IT applications, one has to wonder why it is so difficult to schedule home service calls and deliveries. It's as if this part of the experience is frozen in time somewhere in the pre-computer age. [I wrote about this not long ago, here].

From the company side, I suspect scheduling software IS being used, but it's being used to optimize the distance and costs to the company, not to deliver a better customer experience.

TOA Technologies, a company in the scheduling tech business, just released a survey they have done on this issue. 

• Nearly 1 of every 5 consumers (18%) have taken unpaid time off to wait for a service or delivery in their home in the first 6 months of 2009
• One third (32%) of consumers have taken a vacation day or sick • time to wait for the cable guy or some other service in their home in the first 6 months of 2009
• 18% have refused or cancelled a product/service because the • service/delivery person was late or didn’t show
• 29% have left their home in frustration (costing their service provider • more money in rescheduling, customer service and operations costs) because the cable guy or delivery person was late

Most customers blame the company for this problem -- another example of operating decisions that affect the brand.

And guess who thinks they are waiting more, and are more annoyed about it? Well that would be higher income households, no doubt your most valued / targeted customers.

It's a nice little study, and it just might help you make the case to revisit your organization's approach to in-home delivery and service calls.

Speaking as a customer, we're just begging you -- please, don't make us waste time this way.

Resources:

Here's the link to the PDF report on the study.

Expressing your brand DNA: don't be a Frankenbrand or a Frankenxperience

'How can I be so clear and so compelling about who I am and what I offer, that those people who want it will be attracted ...' 

                                            ~ Michel Neray

Michel Neray is a marketing specialist for professional speakers, and he sends out a nice newsletter. I really liked what he said in a recent one, because it applies very broadly.

Your current customers found you for a reason. They stayed for a reason, even if the reason was sheer force of habit. [And if habit is your most compelling loyalty proposition, you need to be very cautious about what you change.]

In my work with clients, what I am often doing is looking for common ground between what customers want, and what an organization is good at, or can be good at. I think of it as drilling for core samples of the organization's brand DNA.

DNA is the stuff in our bodies that underlies the expression of our genes. We can't become something that our DNA can't support. I can grow my hair longer, but I can't grow a mink coat -- only a mink can do that.

Whether you want to grow business, improve loyalty, penetrate new markets, or meet other challenges -- you need to stay true to your DNA.

If you try to be too many things, you won't do any of them well, and it will be very hard to communicate. It would be like looking at an animal that had some mink fur, some long hair, and a couple of duck feet. That's what I call a Frankenbrand. 

No-one knows where a Frankenbrand belongs in the zoo. It's not an attractive marketing position. It's not a magnetic customer experience. It's just a horror show.

Resources:

The photos I morphed came from iStockPhoto.

BYOB: bring your own bag, and how to manage it

In the fruit market on the weekend, as the cashier carefully packed our luscious-looking peaches, tomatoes, green and yellow beans, we talked about the BYOB* situation. 

Like other places, our city has decided that plastic shopping bags will carry a $.05 charge to discourage their use, and encourage people to BYOB**.

Our greengrocer clerk had recently been shopping for clothes, provided her own bag, and was very dismayed that "they didn't even wrap it". She was missing the careful wrapping in tissue paper, and then packing of her recent purchases. Purchases which cost a lot more than peaches. 

"They basically just handed me the clothes to pack myself", she said. She also pointed out that the major chain grocer just up the street does a much better job of using the BYO bags than this, and that "Clothes are really expensive; they should be treated special".

As we come to grips with reducing our impact on the planet, many strange things will happen under the green banner. As you and your organization figure out how to comply, don't forget to look after the details of the customer experience.

*Bring Your Own Bag

** Thereby reducing the use of something that is multi-use -- a plastic shopping bag -- and replacing it with single-use plastic, such as kitchen catchers garbage bags and the like. But it played well to the public. Now we are learning that re-usable grocery bags are a potential source of toxic germs and need to be regularly washed or otherwise cleaned.

Is self-service better, or just cheaper?

There's a terrific article at the BAI Banking Strategies website about the dangers of using self-service technology only to reduce costs, without any benefits to customers.

The Conundrum of Self-Service: Cost Savings or Customer Service? by Nicole Sturgill.

You don't have to trade off improved experience for improved cost -- the best self-serve deployments achieve both. Ms. Sturgill provides one example I really liked for this -- Dexia Bank based in Brussels. They created a self-service zone for cash transactions, and then removed the barrier that the wickets had set up between customers and staff. This is the kind of reciprocity that is very appealing to customers.

As Ms. Sturgill says,

The bank must be asking, “Is this faster for customers?” rather than “How much money can I save?” Another useful question: “Is this easy for customers to figure out?” rather than, “How much can I reduce staff?” While those latter benefits will exist, deploying from a perspective of saving money and reducing staff will look like exactly that and customers will be able to spot it easily.

When scoping out new systems and approaches, you need to set up design criteria that make sense for the customers and the company. Company criteria may relate to efficiency, quality, reduced staff, etc. Customer criteria need to include a requirement that the experience be at least as good, and preferably better. It could be better by reducing an irritant of some kind, for example. Or better because it's faster, more convenient, easier, 

The grudge factor: how expectations color customer experience

It's the first day of September, and I had to bundle up to walk to the gym this morning. Yesterday I thought about turning on the furnace.

I wasn't too thrilled about that, and neither is anyone else around here. Because this is the summer that never seemed to happen in my neighborhood. If you live in a northern climate, you had weird weather this year.  Whether too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry, it was way outside our allowable variances. And none of us seem to be able to just deal with it and move on. [I realize my complaints are trivial by comparison with the problems many areas have had. I'm still grumpy, ok? Even if our backyard isn't on fire.]

We feel ripped off. We had expectations. We scaled them back, And even our scaled back expectations were disappointed.

Sadly, there is no Weather Company to complain to, and we can't switch providers to FedEx Weather or Mozilla Open Source Weather. But we'd like to. We want the undo button to restore the last couple of deleted weeks of summer. We want a mulligan.

Expectations and customer experience

Very often when I am doing research into customer experience, people will have a story about how their expectations were disappointed. That in itself might not come as a big surprise to you. I bet you've got a few stories of your own.

What is incredible is how long people carry these negative feelings. They carry them for years. Especially if they didn't get some closure on the situation, like an apology or some redress for their disappointment. Not only that, but the damage might seem almost trivial or irrational to another person.

The whole point of branding is to create a set of expectations. It's the brand promise, right?

In service delivery, often the expectations were never made explicit, they were implied by the nature of the interaction. Expectations like: being treated with respect. Not getting ripped off. Not being lied to.

Satisfaction research has shown clearly that it is delivery against expectations that largely determines whether your customers are unhappy, just okay, or advocates for your organization.

The metric that counts is customer expectations, and they're formed not just by your organization, but by every organization. Unless you happen to be the leader in your category, in which case you have only yourselves to blame for rising expectations. [That's a good thing, by the way.]

The bottom line

Customers have expectations. When you disappoint those expectations, you've delivered unsatisfactory service, regardless of how your internal metrics look.

Disappointed people carry the negative thoughts around for a long time, no matter how trivial or irrational the situation may look like from the company side of things. So it's a good idea to try to understand what the expectations are, and either meet them, try to modify them, or suck it up when you've blown it. Because nobody just forgets about it. 

A change to our publishing schedule

Expectations segues nicely into something else I thought I should mention.

My standard for this blog has been to publish Tuesday and Thursday, with a "This just in" Friday when there was something cool to tell you about.

I haven't been doing a great job of delivering on this lately. But you're probably inundated with information [as I am], and would prefer quality to quantity, if you can't have both. So I'm going to aim for one post a week. [A brilliant, glittering, insightful thing with tremendous value added that will trigger equally glittering and insightful comments from you, our brilliant, beautiful and valued subscribers]. 

Your feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated. Thank you. We now resume our regular programming.