Customer Crossroads

How to say thank you, part 2

In yesterday's post, I offered up a little matching quiz. Let's see how you did.

A through D is the list of charitable gifts, and [1] throught [4] is the list of responses

A. I make a generous gift to my business school every year, as part of a five year commitment that I keep renewing. This is the largest individual item on this list.

B. A number of annual donations to worthy causes

C. One of these annual gifts is to the Salvation Army, who gets about the same amount as the others in B above

D. I recently made a campaign contribution to a candidate for leadership of a political party

Here is the list of thank yous:

[1] and [2] Handwritten and personalized thank you card comes from two of these

[3] A tax receipt, followed up by mailing labels and a request for more funds

[4] A form letter

Answers: A-4, B-3, C-1, D-2

I was surprised and pleased to get the personalized card from the candidate. And impressed. This is very memorable. It looks genuine. It has had the effect of making me feel more strongly supportive of the candidate than I already was. I have started deleting and ignoring messages coming from the others.

The annual note from the Salvation Army is also impressive, and it makes them completely stand out from the pack of annual gifts. They are the only ones who don't seem to overly pelt us with additional requests all year. It feels like a tremendous amount of work on their part, but also has really cemented for us that the funds are appreciated.

The university sends me a form letter filled with platitudes. In fairness, they also have a person call me, but that person is trying to cultivate more; it's not really a thank you. The form letter is actually somewhat damaging in my view, because it serves to remind me what a small donor I really am, that I do not warrant a genuine signature from anyone.

The constant requests from other charities is annoying. I don't want the labels. But I guess they must work. It's a bit depersonalizing.

How about you? What are your insights on this topic?

How you say thank you

Occasionally we talk here about marketing not-for-profit organizations. These are the people who sell you the opportunity to feel good, or feel involved, instead of an opportunity to obtain a good or a service. It's still a sale, but it's the sale of an intangible.

Here's a little matching quiz for you. I will post correct answers tomorrow.

A. I make a generous gift to my business school every year, as part of a five year commitment that I keep renewing. This is the largest individual item on this list.

B. A number of annual donations to worthy causes

C. One of these annual gifts is to the Salvation Army, who gets about the same amount as the others in B above

D. I recently made a campaign contribution to a candidate for leadership of a political party

Here's what comes back. See if you can match up the list below with the gifts above:

[1] and [2] Handwritten and personalized thank you card comes from two of these

[3] A tax receipt, followed up by mailing labels and a request for more funds

[4] A form letter

Can you match up correctly?

Find out tomorrow.

Gamification: are you really making it fun?

I'm attending a presentation on Gamification this week -- and another on Big Data. That's a lot of buzzwords for one week!

The Gamification session offered through TPMA (Toronto Product Managers Assoc.) had some "homework" assignments that were supposed to be fun games to provide advance learning and resources in advance of the session.

The first of these was a bit amusing: a diagram that was scrambled and had to be unsorted to read.

Then there was another scrambled picture that had some quiz questions at the bottom.

By the third scrambled picture, I was seriously wondering what the point was, but tried to carry on out of respect for the organizer, who had obviously put some effort into this.

We've now exchanged some e-mails, because I wanted to let him know the web app wasn't working all that well. For me, pretty much the opposite of a fun game now, things weren't uploading correctly. I was sorting out these miserable scramble puzzles two or three times in order to get my tick mark for completion.

I don't know what half of these unscrambled diagrams mean, but I'm guessing I'll be exposed to a bunch ore of that stuff on Wednesday night.

However, I know one thing: Games are supposed to be fun. The point of gamification should be to take a mundane or tedious task and make it more amusing. This is what elementary school teachers have been doing for hundreds of years.

Suddenly, all sorts of people who aren't elementary school teachers (and don't work for Zynga) think they should design games. I hope a few of them consult with some teachers or at least see if their kids think it's fun.

In my house, we're practically addicted to Carcassonne. Compelling, easy to learn, simple rules, addictive to play. That's what games are supposed to be. No diagram required.

 

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How encrusted are our contacts? I just found one for Palm technical support. Last time I had a Palm device ... maybe 2005??

Why no one is reading your killer e-mail

I stumbled on this great article about e-mail subject lines. Which must be very compelling, or no one will read the rest.

It's just more WIFM, right?

There's a great piece on Social Media Today, by Nate Goodman: "What do you mean my email subject line sucks?" that explains a lot of dos and don'ts and how tos. 

Most surprising to me were some of the "don't" items. Such as don't mention a big discount, (smaller discounts work better), don't ask for help of any kind.

FREE, of course, is not a discount. FREE is it's own special thing.

Let's hope some of the people mailing us this year read this post, and make their endless e-mails a little more worth looking at.

 

More on gaming and innovation in social games

This piece on the business of game development has some real gems in it: What Games Are: The Fun Boson Does Not Exist - by Tadhg Kelly - TechCrunch

The gaming industry has the ability to tap into a distribution system that is truly unique, and it is innovating around distribution more than around the games themselves:

The tragedy of social games is that the companies involved discovered the greatest distribution tool in the history of the industry, and yet proved inept at providing great games to go with it. The best things that they’ve come up with so far is Poker, some socialised versions of simple casual games, some super-simple sims and about 100,000 variations of Dungeons and Dragons.

Measurement is a good thing, but can overtake creative in negative ways

Like other industries today, the very ability to measure everything has created a deep bias towards metrics instead of human judgment.

The ultimate fallacy of sticking with “you can only improve what you can measure” is that measurements eventually determine all of your creative decisions. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a designer complain that they need to enact a deep change in their game, but are not allowed to do so by a manager who demands it be proved with numbers first. Both understand that something is not right, but the axiom mandates that the problem must be expressed in numeric terms, or else it does not exist.

Kelly sees electronic games as having the same dynamic that physical games do. So you can explain the rules governing a game, such as tennis, basketball, or croquet, but you don't really get the dynamics until you see the system in motion. Real world games are sensitive to changes, such as changes in the height of the tennis net. Which is no doubt why such changes are contemplated at length by sporting bodies prior to making them.

Fun as emergent property

But in electronic games, he argues, the obsession with measurement can sometimes improve the measured of "fun", without actually making the game more fun.

Games are essentially chaotic systems. In a chaotic system you can look at the initial starting conditions and the topology of a simulation and try to predict the interactions of strange attractors as much as you like, but you generally don’t really get what the hell the simulation is doing until you observe it in motion. The system is too sensitive, the patterns too hard to interpret and the situation too emergent.

Fun is essentially an emergent property of the system, and not subject to the application of process rules in the same way manufacturing is.

Designers of great board games, such as the famous Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber, often test and refine with real players for a long time to get things just right, tweaking minor game elements. Catan is one of those board games that inspires such incredible user engagement that you can find many instructions on line for how to build a better playing board.

Kelly argues that social games have yet to find the fun. What do you think?

Translating consumer insight into product design: take the icemaker

Somewhere between the research insight and the design criteria, there often seems to be a gap.

Case in point: the icemaker in my (and likely your) freezer.

The consumer wish: ice drawer is never empty

The design specs: ice drawer is always full

Annoying reality: ice drawer is overflowing and jams up unless you shut the switch off.

But we're not supposed to need the switch, so it is hidden behind a secret panel that you have to contort to reach.

What can I say, the work continues!

What's up with Pa55word~}s?

There is a list of the top 10,000 passwords in use today, sorted by frequency.  Can you guess what the most popular ones are?

Well, "password" is the top choice, followed by "12345" or a variation thereof. (Followed by many common names, and quite a few profanities and sexual references.)

The top 10,000 passwords are used by 98% of users. Meaning that hackers don't need to hack per se, they just need to try the most common ones on the list.

The future of strong password security

This morning, I was at a Deloitte presentation on near-term technology trends, and learned that the so-called "strong password" authentication system is dead, and will be replaced by password plus something.

The plus might be something like a biometric e.g.fingerprint or iris scan. Or I might swipe a device. Or enter a special code obtained from my smart phone.

I can tell right now that this is going to be a real joy. My password safe is already the program I use most often each day, and not just to get a password. Half the time I am there to figure out what my user ID is.

It surprises me how often I have to do this, actuallly -- cloud services are that pervasive. Such as subscription-only content sites or other services that require a log-in.So we can expect to have more passwords in the future, not fewer.

Technology is one thing, adoption is quite another

The technology piece of this is all well and good, but it's the human change management piece that interests me. I see people and their willingness to change as a major barrier to adoption of stronger password tech. If --- despite the non-stop advice to have a strong password --- most people think a profanity or their pet's name is solid, then we are light years away from widespread adoption of iris scans. Aren't we?

One way to use this information

Download the list, and search for your most common passwords. When you don't find them, pat yourself on the back for how clever you are. And I'm sure readers of this blog are clever people. Am I right or what?

You're only as good as your front line staff

I was recently holidaying at a lodge in the Rocky Mountains. Deer Lodge - it's a charming old place that serves excellent game dishes, and is close to some lucious scenery and skiing.

Unfortunately, they have the challenge of all remote seasonal resorts -- getting and keeping good staff.

This year there was one remarkable incident that illustrates the issue.

Breakfast at the Lodge

We were having breakfast, and had ordered two coffees, which arrived with a refill carafe. "Nice touch!" I thought. Our waiter, a ditzy young man we had seen before, kept coming by to pour refills. I wanted to save my refill to savor after finishing breakfast, so said "No thanks." So did my husband.

Next thing I know, he has grabbed our carafe, still half full of OUR coffee (at $3.75 per serving, I might add), and whisked it away! 

My amazement only grew as I watched him take it to the servers' station, top it up from a pot there, then whisk it over to another table. Probably not the experience the manager had in mind. And lukewarm coffee for the next guys!

Breakfast at the Airport

By contrast, a day later I was having breakfast in the airport in Calgary. The server there seemed to effortlessly handle a very large number of tables, quickly nodding and smiling at people, dropping off menus here, adding coffee there, telling people she would be back shortly to take their orders.

They were out of coffee mugs for some reason, so she had cleverly obtained a pile of large paper cups from the nearby Starbucks, and was giving everyone a generous pour in these explaining as she went.

A fairly pedestrian meal made much more pleasant by the impressive hosting capabilities of the staff.

What's at stake: only your brand

It's a reminder that you can only be as good as your front line staff. You can't always hire the people you wish you could.  Instead, you have to ensure your processes are as easy to deliver as you can make them. Because poor staff will short-cut, they will forget, they will be inefficient, and they will barely be paying attention. After all, they came for the skiing / boarding, not the server job. Or they are trying to get work as an actor or artist. Or just put themselves through school.

But the brand and reputation at stake is yours, not the individual staff person's.

In this case, frankly, I was so astonished that I just laughed.

Seasonal electronic greetings - the sad reality

I just got another one today.

Since there's virtually no cost to send these things out, why not send them to everyone on your list, right? So what if you barely know them?

Here's the impact I think these things actually have:

Wishing life could be more like a video game ... wait a sec, it already is.

I'm not a big time gamer, but over the years I have enjoyed some of the most marvellous video games. Myst and Riven, Syberia, Spore, BioShock and currently Oblivion. [My character, "Wanderer", is an Elf with spiky pink hair who is working on becoming a Mage, or magician, and prefers to sneak past the bad guys instead of trying to bludgeon them.]

Forget for a moment all the stuff you hear in the news about the violence of video games. There's another side of this story. A side I was thinking about as I started processing the post-holiday e-mail mountain. And I KNOW you feel my pain on that one!

I was wishing that processing mounds of marketing messages delivered by e-mail had the kind of satisfying rewards that achieving the next step in a game mission has. I guess I was wishing life was more like a video game. Then I realized, life sort of IS like a video game -- at least the good ones.

In games, you get more do-overs, but we tend to keep making the same dumb mistakes anyway.

Make a stupid mistake, you have to go back and do it again, but you can try something new. I surprise myself by how often I keep trying a failed strategy before I rethink it. Very similar to the real world, where in business we often just think if we push the strategy harder, it will work. 

In games, success comes from effectively utilizing all your tools. We tend to keep using the same tools anyway, instead of exploring new ones.

I'd been wondering what good a calming spell was until I gave it a really good try on an attacking human. I'd been hauling around a mortar and pestle, and did not realize it could be used to create potions! 

Again, there are real world parallels, of course. We have software we don't fully utilize, corporate resources we don't fully utilize, and talented people we don't fully utilize.

Playing to your strengths works well if you actually do it.

Magicians only need to know enough weaponry to defend themselves while they build their skills. But weapons quickly become a habit. And if people are charging at you with a mace, it feels like you should respond in a similar way. Sadly, no magician is going to defeat an armor-clad behemoth charging at you with a mace if you rely on your sword skills. You need to be clever. Sneak around. Poison your sword.  Use their own force against them to let them charge right off the bridge into the flaming inferno below. Better still, use your magic.

Of course, so much like real life. Except in real life it is often other people telling you to use your sword instead of your brain. It takes many of us decades to understand what our real strengths are and to work only in those areas. The most successful businesses also play to their strengths. This is truly the most important lesson of branding.

In games, you need to customize your approach to the challenge facing you.

Charm and persuade innkeepers. Help farmers who have been turned invisible, and they will do good turns for you, too. Bad guys are going to be bad guys, no matter what you say to them. In real life, of course, success comes from using the right approach for the challenge, whether it is creating new positioning statements or crafting an innovation strategy.

Wishing you a great year ahead -- just remember to use all the things you learned in games in your real world job. And if you find a spell that handles e-mail, do let the rest of us know!