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)
