Customer Crossroads

Storytelling: Upcoming Webinar

Storytelling long predates our written language. Perhaps we are born with the notion of narrative -- if not, it's something we learn to appreciate as children.

Brands and experiences are stories in a sense -- the promise of a story, then the telling of it. And customers tell the stories of their experiences to others.

I thought this upcoming Q-Cast looked interesting because of the focus on story-telling: Practical Storytelling presented by Tom Neveril. You can find archived Q-Casts on the QRCA web site, here. (Q-Casts are all free presentations related to Qualitative Research offered by the Qualitative Research Consultants Association.)

Communicating: do I blog like a boy?

I came across this gender-writing analyzer this week in Grokdotcom.

So decided to run a few posts through the analyzer.

Personalization Trend: design your own credit card    -- female score 550, male score  887 -- MALE!
So You Want Innovative Thinking -- female score 1777, male score 1353 -- FEMALE!
The Power of a Good Story -- female score 1169, male score 1572 -- MALE!

I tried to choose longer posts, with relatively few quotes, which would likely skew the results, so this feels like a reasonable test of the device.

So, does this mean that the gender-genie is wrong? Or that I am cleverly disguised as a female? 

Personality Type and Communication Style

Actually, I think it means I use a lot of words and constructions that are more commonly used by men.

If you have a background in personality type theory (aka. Myers-Briggs), then you know that there is a gender difference on the thinking/feeling preference. Males are 65% Thinking dominant as a decision-making style preference and females are 65% Feeling dominant as a decision-making style preference.  Although the difference is minor, it is strongly reinforced in socialization.  [As it happens, I have a preference for Thinking as a decision-making style. Women with this preference are often perceived as being somewhat aggressive. Men with a feeling preference are often perceived as wimpy.]

The language choices of those with Feeling dominant tend to emphasize harmony and empathy, whereas the language choices of those with Thinking dominant tend to emphasize logic and fairness.

The online tool is based on an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology. They claim their algorithm can detect the gender of the author. I'm more inclined to agree with Mary Dell on Book Blog, who says,

"you can't tell if a writer is a man or a woman, but it is an interesting study in what kind of writing is perceived as male (i.e. concrete) or female (i.e. connective)."

What does it all mean?

I know I need to make some kind of linkage to customer experience here and it's this: we don't all communicate in the same way. Worth considering when you think about customer experience.

References:

New York Times test formula

One of the many academic articles on the topic, which claims 80% accuracy in identifying gender of author.

Gender Genie's story is on Book Blog

Personality Type Theory overviews can be found in Answers.com or Wikipedia. Numerous free online testing tools are available. David Keirsey's temperament sorter is a good one.

Another version of the gender-tester is here. Another online tool that provides the FOG index, as well as a gender assessment.

Are you scaring away customers with mysterious tech talk, confusing terminology or unknown acronyms?

I was reading David Carlson's design blog this week, and wondered what these gravatars are on his blog. Here's what I found on the Gravatar site. My stream-of-consciousness comments are on the right of the graphic.

As you see from my comments, what started out as really clear communication was quickly taken over by baffling insider-speak. The friendly voice was still there, but suddenly it was just telling me to put the whim-wham on the jim-jam and everything would be fine.

Result: I decided I don't have the time today to learn this stuff, and moved on to other tasks.   

[Like stuffing worms into the hungry baby-bird that is a blog. Fortunately, practically everything is fodder for a customer experience blog, so the time wasn't totally wasted.]

Creating Nuanced Customer Communications

Regular reader and colleague Nick W. sent me some interesting thoughts and reactions to an e-mail he gets from his credit card company.  It show how difficult it is to get the right nuance when you are communicating to a large group of individuals, but why it is really worth the effort. [The headings are mine]

The credit card company reminder e-mail

"The other day my wife’s credit card company notified her that “Your **** card payment is due”. Nice touch.  Attention-getting.  They send this out about a week before the payment is in fact due.  They ALWAYS send a second reminder with the exact same wording on the due date (which of course, means payment WILL be late) regardless of whether the bill was paid or not. Then about a week or two after we make payment we get a “Thanks for paying your bill on time” email. Then a couple days later we get the note on the next month’s bill…

How the customer feels

Nick deconstructs the history of his reaction to this e-mail:

"Is the feeling when I see one of these emails one of fear – 'omg I missed a payment' or a 'thankful for the reminder – so that I don’t miss a payment'. 

"Initially we started in the “fear” category (wife to husband… did you forget something recently?) but is now sometimes in the “thankful” category. ..."

But...

"I really do wish they would get the stream of emails straight, so I don’t get that fear reaction that the ebanking failed us!  Which is exactly what happens when we get the second email. Since we get the second notice regardless of whether we paid or not.

"Of course somewhere along the way there is the “stop begging for my money” feeling, too."

Is this a gentle nudge to e-banking?

"Now that we are used to the notices, it seems to me that this “reminder” notice does help us and does gently stimulate us to move us out of check writing mode and more into electronic banking (which we are resisting because of experiences with ID theft).  The benefits for the bank must be enormous… they are slowly winning us over by the nudges… and it does probably improve their profitability too (since we probably pay a little earlier than the last day)."

I think Nick's analysis is right on. The bank probably is trying to nudge people to e-banking, but they are doing it in a positive way that actually helps the customer manage their money.

Nick tells me that only one of the 4 banks they are dealing with is doing this nudging in a positive way, despite the clumsiness of the second reminder. The rest are "screaming at us about going paperless", instead of "teaching us how to benefit from e-banking".

"Clumsy" is better than "screaming"

Nick wrapped his story with the conclusion that "'clumsy' is somewhat less irritating and maybe more effective than 'screaming'." 

I really like the idea of these e-mails, since I presume it is easy to opt out if you find them more irritating than useful.  The second reminder e-mail would clearly be more helpful if it only went to those customers who had not initiated a payment.  Let's assume this is not currently possible on the bank's systems, for whatever reason.

They could still likely change the wording of the second e-mail to be more effective. Along the lines of, "if you have already paid your bill, please ignore this notice", and a tip as to how to check or confirm the payment online.

Value added alerts

There are a lot of sophisticated alert systems out there being used in banking and telco applications. But this story illustrates for me that you probably don't need a whiz-bang alert technology to get started -- an e-mailer application might do just fine.

And the effort to engage with the customer in a customer-focused way is clearly differentiating this one bank from the other "screamers"

It's shocking to think that some of your customers may think you are shouting at them, isn't it? I doubt that is an isolated sentiment.