Customer Crossroads

Holiday greetings

My new holiday tradition is to go skiing over Christmas. It's based on the belief that you can handle the cold in one of two ways -- run away or embrace it. So we bundle up and go have fun in a resort and try not to think about the cost of lift tickets or the environmental impact.

From a customer perspective, skiing at Christmas everyone is on their best behavior, there are smiles all around, and there's a good chance of seeing Santa on the slopes.

Before I head off for a wee holiday, I want to thank you so much for reading. And special thanks to those who take the time to post a comment! 

I hope to bring you the very best in blog posts in the year ahead.  Plus a hundred or so other resolutions... but I'm sure you have resolutions of your own.

Wishing you the best of the season, whatever you celebrate and wherever you celebrate it.See you in the new decade!

- Susan

[PS - yeah, yeah -- there's no year zero, so the new decade doesn't start for a year. Seriously, like you were there in year 1? I thought so. Now go get an adult beverage and try to have some fun.]

how to be more creative: get out, get some experiences, then get some sleep

I love a weekend when it is not jam-packed with activity. For me, that is a pleasure in itself -- having the space and time for exploration without a pre-set plan. But it also means that there will be a fresh surge of ideas by Sunday morning.

On a recent weekend, I took in The Madonna Painter at Factory Theatre. This warrants comment on it's own, as it is the kind of play you can't honestly say you "enjoyed". It's more of an experience that has value, but the creation of joy is not really part of the value.  Reminded me of ancient Greek philosophers trying to figure out why tragedy works. [You see, already the creative connections were flowing!]

The play prompted conversation into the small hours of the next day. 

Even better, I'm just back from a well-deserved holiday paddling my heart out in the warm waters of Baja. An experience pretty-much guaranteed to clean the cobwebs from the mind.

And then the joy of Sunday morning. Waking up with ideas bubbling. Ideas for client projects. Ideas for blog articles. E-mails I wanted to send. Enquiries to make. Things to read.

This kind of state has a very joyful feeling associated with it. It is the joy of a mind at play.

How to be an idea person

People tell me all the time that I am a good idea person. But whatever you feel your natural talents are, you too can become an idea person. You have to cultivate that space for your subconscious talents to have room to play. And give that subconscious some thing to work with - like a few new ideas and new experiences. 

How do you help free up your creative thinking?

This just in: fun promotions, good cross-selling, and investor genetics

ZenDesk launches clever promotion for their software

ZenDesk, a maker of help desk support software, is running a fun promotion. They are suggesting all customer support people take December 8 off.  

The  promotion is called Love Your  Help Desk, and it's really cute. A hilarious video shows management making a big deal of appreciating the help desk for about 30 seconds then disappearing (too true!). There is a funny top-ten list for why you should give the help desk the day off. Number 4 is my favorite: "the best customer service is crowd-sourced. Customers only need each other." One thing they ARE right about is that a lot of the customer experience is on the support desk now. No question. 

Even better than their promotion is their fun ambient sound generator.

One little bone to pick -- when I go to their site to check out their stuff, they assume I understand the category already. "Professional grade support service" is supposed to tell me all I need to know. Except there's one little problem. When your pricing plans are for 1 agent, 3 agents and 5 agents, it's a safe bet you're not talking to megasoft or megabank or any other megacorp. You're selling to an introductory market, and you're talking to them like they are IT staff.

I feel like I run into this all the time when I am exploring cool new tools. But hey, it's still a fun promotion, and I still love their ambient sound generator. 

TechSmith has devilishly effective cross-selling plan - at least I think so

I recently installed the trial version of Snag-It, a nice little utility to help capture screen shots. Capturing screen shots seems to be a big part of my professional work for some reason, and the cropping and annotating is time consuming. Snag-It makes these things simple. It seemed expensive, but it's starting to become indispensable, and I have the feeling I'll be buying it when the trial runs out.

So that's how they found me. [I think. I do remember filling in a form telling them I work as a marketing researcher.] This week, the trial version of Morae showed up in the mail. Morae appears to be software designed to support usability studies by marketing researchers. This is by far the most relevant piece of direct mail I've received in weeks, maybe months. And I will surely look into the software, and likely run the trial. [Heck, I'm already blogging about it. They're already ahead.]

Imagine if the companies you deal with started this kind of intelligent direct marketing effort? Wouldn't it be nice? We'd all find things that are relevant. We'd look forward to our direct mail. Smart companies would sell more stuff. Everyone would be happy. What a wonderful world it would be...

Dear TechSmith - if you just happened to find me by mailing to a list of researchers, what a shame. Maybe you should launch the program I just described. It would be very cool, and I bet it would work.

You know what's really scary? I've been thinking about Camtasia. I don't really have a business need yet, I just want it. Turns out it's a TechSmith product.

Investor Genetics

There's a new study out that says investor behavior is almost determined by genetic factors. Twins who were raised apart were compared to twins raised together, in terms of their investing preferences.

This suggests to me that personality type preferences, and learning style preferences, which are both rooted in early childhood -- are at work in many forms of human behavior. And that this now includes investing behavior. This totally makes sense to me, however there are few organizations that utilize this kind of information to really help their customers. Sadly, "Know Your Client" is a form, not a philosophy.

The Finextra summary is here.

Barnea, Amir, Cronqvist, Henrik and Siegel, Stephan, Nature or Nurture: What Determines Investor Behavior? (September 15, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1467088

You can download the full study (free) here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1467088 

(A version of the above was also posted on my Finextra Blog)

Something’s happening in travel culture: friendly customs and security people

Now here is a trend that is long overdue. Friendliness among customs and security people at airports.

I know this may be hard to believe but I've seen it with my own eyes. Brief glimmers have been witnessed in other places, but several clear instances of cheery, friendly border people were in evidence on a recent trip through LAX to and from Baja. [Perhaps this group deals more with holiday travelers and business travelers; perhaps we are less snarky; but gosh they were friendly.] One guy made some jokes, I could hardly believe it. He was joking about the length of the lineup, and that yes, we did need to go through this even if we were just connecting to an outbound flight.

One of the security screening people hinted that we could spend less time with them if we followed all the rules. Also laughing.

I'm not sure what's happening, but I suspect that people are cluing in to the fact that none of this stuff is going to go away. How horrible must it be to work in an environment where you are expected to be a sourpuss all day. [To say nothing of all that smelly footwear.] Goodness knows it's horrible for travelers to deal with hostility in every airport. So I think we are witnessing a culture shift among the security staff and among customs and immigration staff, and boy is it ever welcome.

No one is minimizing the security risks or the need for countries to control who comes into their borders. But the vast majority of us are simply tax payers, not threats. It's nice to be treated with some simple humanity.

Related

The US agency responsible for airport security, the TSA, has started a blog. It's actually fairly amusing, and has attracted a number of comments.

I found a surprising number of blogs referencing the who area of security screening. This is one of the common experiences of our time, and is universally hated. Check out a few of these stories.

"We're all porn stars now thanks to airport security", Current.com - wonderful picture of how we will look when the next x-ray tech arrives

What happens when a filmmaker packs prop explosives in his luggage, Home Away From Home blog

Buffalo Blood Donor on how to improve the experience: add some color.

Germs on your feet at airport security. And yes, there's a company selling a solution for that.

Frustration with priority line-hoppers, on Textually Promiscuous blog.

Kiosk retail: RedBox, BestBuy, Sony, etc.

Kiosk retail is starting to really change things. The photos above are of a Sony kiosk in an airport (this one is at LAX). When you buy something, such as the headphones we picked up prior to boarding, a wonderful servo mechanism goes across and down to collect your selection, then drop it into the chute. [It was so cute, I wanted to buy more stuff just to see it whirr and operate!]  Sony launched the first of these in 2006.

Interesting that the same headphones were for sale at a traditional retail outlet right across the hall, for about $10 more. That premium may be sustainable now, while the machines are relatively new. You can't pick up and read the box -- although you can see product information on the touch-screen visible on the machine at the right.

Best Buy also has similar machines at airports. [They could have sold me a Flip video, but there weren't any in the machines I saw. Dang!]

RedBox, the DVD movie rental operation, may have started this trend when they launched circa 2003. They are now reporting rentals of more than 200 million DVDs through their 17,000+ kiosks. They have connections with some 300 different retailers, such as Walgreens and Walmart.

Senior vice-president of marketing and customer experience, Gary Cohen, told Marketing News that RedBox "drives traffic to their stores and we also provide [the retailer] a revenue share."

RedBox is using technology to make things simple for the consumer by giving them fast, easy access to what they want. They use the internet to stay connected to some 12 million loyal users who receive weekly e-mails.

Consultant Michael Krauss, author of the Marketing News article, summed up the value proposition nicely: "Simple, powerful business models that yield value to customers will succeed, whether they are online or off".

My take

Meeting people's wants. Leveraging technology to make it faster, cheaper, better. It doesn't get much better than that.

One of the challenges that service businesses have, constantly and never-ending, is that the cost of human services tends to rise every year. Automation is one answer to this challenge. And the kiosk is one very interesting solution. By leveraging really great back-end systems and computer-powered machines, you can provide local storefronts with a tiny footprint. 

You may remember the cigarette machine, a ubiquitous installation in the bars of my youth. Soft-drink machines have never left.

What's your take?

Have you used these machines? Are there others that you have seen / liked / disliked? 

PS - I thought it was truly brilliant for Sony to have one of their artists - Celine Dion -- singing on the video playing at the top of the machine. Great cross-marketing!

Resources:

How RedBox is changing retail, by Michale Krauss. Marketing News, Nov 15, 2009. (subscription required)

How RedBox is disrupting the movie rental industry, by David Weinfeld, Digital Signage Insights, July 1, 2009.

RedBox expands into video games, by Andre Yoskowitz, afterdawn.com, June 1, 2009.

Airport vending machines dispense bullion at a premium. PSFK June 25, 2009

Pets are people, too: how animals humanize spaces

OK, I know this is going to sound odd, but pets are a humanizing influence in public and commercial spaces.

Here's a good example. Passing through LAX recently, I noticed this lovely little dog park. It has a water bowl with a spigot, a small grassy area [OK, artificial turf], and even a fake fire hydrant. It's a nice little spot where pet parents can take their canine for a bio break during travel.

This space is actually nicer than the space designed for human smokers.

I really loved seeing this, I thought it was a brilliant addition on the part of the airport planners. Not travelling with a dog myself, I have no idea how functional something like this really is for a panicked canine that's been tranquilized for air travel. But it seemed like a real effort in the right direction and it made me smile.