Category: CRM Best Practices
November 16th, 2009
CRM Association-Netherlands Rocks Het Huis!
I’m in love with Amsterdam….no wait, I love it but I’m not in love….no, hold on, I like it a lot, but I’m not in love, nor do I love it.
The Theory….
Interestingly enough (to me at least and who else am I really writing this for anyway?), while this may seem to be nothing more than the ramblings of an emotional confused sensitive male, during my speech at the CRM Association NL spectacular conference a couple of days ago I spoke about those very emotions as a way of looking at how granular the knowledge of emotional states are for each individual human being when it comes to truly knowing how you feel. Humans actually operate a.k.a. live with this incredibly complex knowledge of their range of individual emotions. This is not how many loyalty marketers look at it, though. While by no means am I opposed to the science of loyalty marketing, what I find as often as not is that traditional loyalty marketers tend to reduce their view the universe of human connections and relationships in scales - often from 1-5. Without any disrespect to those who don’t, a scary number of them see a “granular understanding” as a scale of 1-10 instead of 1-5. Metaphorically of course. Maybe.
(The problem is that loyalty (and advocacy) are the results of emotional connections to someone or something which can’t be truly measured on a scale of 1 to anything. For example, what can you tell me of the loyalty of a person who measures 4.2 on a scale of 5 versus the commitment of another person who measures 4.5 on that same scale? Nothing. Broadly, does it matter to me or you whether or not the demographic segment that this person represents scales at 3.8 rather than 3.6? If it does, please see someone. Really.
Again, putting my edgy New York sarcastic blade aside for a moment, the way customers actually work is to get involved with a company in a way that satisfies the emotional (and buyers) needs of some aspect of our personal agenda at some time and over some time. We don’t scale things. We say “they’re really cool!” Not “they’re just so 4.6.”
Chris Brogan, one of the social media mavens that I thoroughly respect and actually like too, told a story on Callie Lewis’s Geekbrief TV the other day about how a car service that that was supposed to pick him up to get him to Microsoft headquarters didn’t show. He tweeted his anger/anguish and a CEO of a national car service sent him a tweet with “here’s my cell.” Call it whenever you need a car and I’ll take care of it for you.” Car came, Brogan happy, loyal customer. As Chris rightfully said, “Yes, you may say its opportunistic, but he listened (to the tweet) and he solved my problem and now I’m loyal to him.”
That’s what I’m talkin’ about!
While this might be a long aside, a version of it was part of my speech and at the same time, I’m in love with Amsterdam and the Dutch and love the incredibly high caliber the CRM Association NL works at and I like the food a lot.
Amsterdam is So 5.0…err…Romantic and Amazing
I flew to Amsterdam as the second to last leg of “PG’s 41K Flyabout” I had committed to speaking there, which I felt I should as the EVP of the CRM Association of the United States. It was a fellow association, after all though 3700 air miles away. I was in touch with the man who has been its face for several years, Wil Wurtz, who also runs Metrics and More, a company that designs the measures for companies so that they have some idea of how they have to perform to make their customers - and shareholders - happy.
But I had never been to Amsterdam, nor had I known that much about the CRMA-NL except that they were expecting around 200 people at the event, pretty much 100% from the Netherlands.
The Practice
In Love
One of the reasons that I loved this trip was that I had the opportunity to meet both Mark Tamis, who came in from Paris for the event and Wim Rampen - who lives in the area. If you don’t know these guys, shame on you. Both are becoming key Social CRM/Social Business (call it what you will) thinkers in Europe and thanks to blogs and Twitter, internationally. You can find Mark’s blog here and Mark on Twitter here. You can find Wim’s blog here and Wim on Twitter here. This was my first opportunity to meet them. Mark got in early after a 6 hour drive from Paris and we met about 1 hour after I got to the Savoy Amsterdam Hotel (more on that later).
Mark graciously gave me a 5 mile walking tour of Amsterdam (he is a Dutch native living in Paris) that was not only great in terms of realizing the history of Holland and the remarkable nature of the the city but also a great chance to get to know this very fine human being.
Amsterdam is without a doubt a city that combines a remarkable history with a culture that might be unmatched anywhere in the world. Stunning churches with remarkably ornate rectories and ceilings that reached some point in the universe that was unviewable from the church floor - now museums. A culture that treated bicyclists as more significant than auto drivers. Thousands of cafes, restaurants, and bars, cobblestoned or bricked streets that saw human and bicycle traffic with the occasional car up on what you would think was a sidewalk. A people who are the tallest I’ve ever seen who drive cars half the size of what you see in the U.S. And are perhaps the most relaxed and funniest with, let’s say, a lusty sense of humor, I’ve ever met.
At one point, yesterday morning, I looked out the window of my room at the Savoy Hotel and I saw a light rain falling that had coated the streets - made them damp with a little glistening, rather than really wet. Across the narrow street were these homes/buildings with courtyard like wide alleys - most of them built out of brick in the 17th century - also damp. There were two bicyclists - one riding slowly and steadily up the street; the other walking her bike. I started thinking “Van Gogh could have seen this exact scene” - which was entirely true until the BMW drove by. But the charm and romance of the thought really nailed me. I just simply “got” the city and the people at that exact moment.
I am in love with Amsterdam.
Love
The CRM Association of the Netherlands (CRMA- NL hereafter), I would have to say, is the best organized, most substantial CRMA I’ve ever run across. Led by Wil Wurtz and Gerard Struijf, it has 200 member companies who support it wholeheartedly and in return it provides a range of services that any CRMA worldwide should be envious including this conference. This was a CRM Awards conference with awards for CRM Accelerator (went to UBS) and CRM Excellence (went to CarGlass) that are taken seriously. In fact, the only awards I ever saw taken as seriously were those that GreaterChinaCEM jefe Sampson Lee gave out at his conferences in Shanghai over the past few years to Chinese companies.
What also makes the CRMA-NL a gem is the way that they related to vendors. Unlike the incredibly ambiguous approach that U.S enterprise institutions have with the vendors - which is to treat them something like lepers with money - they treat vendors the same way as they treat practitioner companies - as companies who have something to sell because that’s what companies do. Meaning the vendor sponsors are as integral to the growth of the CRMA-NL as the practitioners and are treated as equals - they co-mingle. They can talk with each other about anything they want. Sponsorships can be from Microsoft and Accenture as well as ING or DSM International. It kind of simplies what I alwasy see in the U.S. with conferences - contortions on the policy toward vendor sponsors. Our Dutch compadres have practitioner sponsors too - because of the way the vendors are perceived - as a company rather than a predator.
Lest you think I’m going soft, I’m not. Any company will still continue to be the public subject of my ridicule if they deserve to be. But other than that, they are on equal footing to me too.
OK. Now that I’ve protected my manhood, I’ll continue on.
The conference was attended by both vendors and practitioner companies - mostly practitioners. I gave the keynote with a somewhat new version of the Era of the Social Customer (see below) -not the same as the one I did for the Lithium Social CRM Virtual Conference. I was told Dutch audiences are shy as an audience and direct as individuals. All true.
Here’s the presentation. (Note: There this is a slidecast with creative commons licensed music. Maria Daines “Rollin’” Get it here.
When it was done, I spent the next several hours (except for an incredible interview with Sales Exactly correspondent Marielle Dellemijn that became so interesting a conversation, I was interviewing her as much as she interviewed me) fielding questions from individuals - being challenged (a little) on ideas, and having amazing discussions with the practitioners.
I was truly impressed by the commitment to CRM that these attendees had - meaning they were spending money implementing social CRM and traditional CRM.
- DSM (which is an international company) is carrying out a significant series of social initiatives that they are linking to CRM systems - particularly in e-commerce run by the Director, Corporate E-Business, Marc God. They are as good as or better than any I’ve heard of anywhere.
- Financial services giant, Robeco has a department, led by an industry veteran, Gerard Wolfs, who’s sole purpose is to develop customer insight. Hear that? Not manage customer data, not use analytics per se - but to develop customer insight. An entire department. A whole department. Insight.
- The MC was a brilliant host named Rens de Jong. He is a radio personality and managing editor at BNR Nieuws Radio. Let me tell you, as a host, the man knows how to move a crowd. But more germane to Social CRM, he led an initiative at BNR, which is not a small entity, to develop a community of known listeners - and they are 4000 strong within a few months. Think about it. Radio listeners don’t usually have names and lives associated with them listening. They just listen. The only data that normally is gathered is transactional such as the data that Sirius/XM has for those who subscribe or the names of donors to National Public Radio (NPR) in the U.S. But with the BNR community we are talking about living, breathing humans.
- Carglass Nederland (which does car glass repair and is international) won the CRM Award 2009 for their company wide B2B and B2C implementation of an integrated customer centric strategy aiming at 100% satisfaction of customers. This involved all levels of the business and creative thinking around it. For example, if your windshield breaks while driving, they send someone to you to replace it on the spot. Customer experience indeed. UPC Nederland, a cable company won the CRM Acceleration award for their progress in their customer-centric implementation and strategy. Meaning they don’t allow it to bog down in the bureaucracy we often see when it comes to CRM programs.
Those are only a few examples. On the vendor side, Microsoft and Accenture along with BrixSoftware, a Dutch SugarCRM partner were particularly prominent. Martin Hermsen, who runs the Benelux CRM Practice at Accenture, was so astute and good natured that he got me a little closer to the “let bygones be bygones” stage with Accenture, with whom I’ve had a long standing animosity.
Okay, I know that this isn’t some big “how to” piece on Social CRM or related to the ongoing discussion in social CRM practice that needs to continue. Honestly, if you have a jones for that right now, you should be reading Graham Hill’s very important “A Manifesto for Social Business” over at CustomerThink, and (note I didn’t say “or) read Esteban Kolsky’s absolutely extraordinary and groundbreaking series of five posts on “The SCRM Roadmap” (it starts with #1 here). They are groundbreaking. Any one or all of them will take care of that for you - and I’m sure that I’ll have something to say to each of them because I never know how to keep my mouth shut.
But if there’s anything I think characterizes Social CRM or the whole science of CRM in general its that it is a science of business that attempts to reproduce the art of life. That means what actual people are doing to improve how we contact each other is what really is exciting. So when I am blessed (in a secular way, of course) with the opportunity to meet those who are doing it in the business world - who are real humans, and not personas or avatars, once in awhile I’m taken so much by the experience that I feel compelled to deal with it one of the ways I know how - which is to write about it. Because the human part of it, not the processes, measures, or technology, is electrifying.
Like a Lot
I have to say that the overall hospitality was pretty amazing too. The Euro-style hotel, the Savoy Amsterdam (which makes all the sense in the world in Europe), had the requisite small room,
Savoy Amsterdam - See how charming it is?
but unlike the Hudson Hotel in NY, of Margin of Utility infamy, the room was well laid out - i.e. I could get out of bed without smacking my head into a wall; and the amenities were meaningful - a free, full Dutch breakfast;extraordinary but low key service from the front desk; a free mini-bar. Even though the mini-bar was just a variety of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, the idea was amazing. ”Free” and “mini-bar” are not a phrase you see strung together frequently. Additionally,
The Room - Smaller than it looks, but great
there was a free bar - a help yourself kind of bar in the lobby - though I didn’t partake. What was astonishing to me in the “like a lot” was the hotel exceeded my expectations, which had been tempered by the Hudson Hotel in NY, because it was supposed “euro-style.” Here not only were the accessories high end, but the value adds were wonderful and the service excellent - and most important, the room just big enough and comfortable enough to make its purpose successful - sleeping in it. Thus, the additional stuff went from being an ineffective mask like the Hudson, to a delightful set of additional benefits.
Enough No More
So, thank you to the CRM Association - NL. This was the best leg of the 41K so far.
The lesson on the Social CRM side, since I’m not supposed to be writing travelogues for ZDNet?
Loyalty doesn’t lie in stats or data, it lies in humans being human and how you apply your business principles to that simple understanding.
October 20th, 2009
Finally! A Three-Cornered Consulting Service for Enterprise 2.0
Its not too often I endorse a new service - in fact, I never have without a lot of due diligence and at least some production history. So, for the first…and potentially only….time ever, I’m telling you that I’m truly excited about the launch of Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0. I’m not only telling you as readers at larger enterprises to bring these guys to the table but I’m also going to tell you why its easy for me to support this new entity despite the fact that its only been launched today.
What in g-d’s name is Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0?
Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 is a triangular consulting service that fits into the “its about time someone did this” category of consulting services. For a really good comprehensive blog posting on PE2 check out Sameer Patel’s, “The E 2.0 Service Appliance” here.
Okay, back to this station.
Triangular?
The First Triangle: The Players
Yep, for two reasons. One, it’s a trinity of three major heavy hitters in varying spaces that cover the enterprise and contemporary business thinking. They are, in no particular order:
Dion Hinchcliffe - perhaps the godfather of Enterprise 2.0 - and the boss of Hinchcliffe Associates, He is the most knowledgeable guy in the space that covers the strategies and practices for the contemporary enterprise - especially when it comes to real world applications of internal collaboration and strategies for co-creation within the enterprise that return a genuine ROI. The guy is also a fellow ZDNet blogger who I think writes some of the best posts that ZDNet produces in his Enterprise 2.0 blog Dion is so well known and so successful in his realm that he has a customer list to drool over.
Michael Krigsman - Michael is the CEO of Asuret and a revolutionary in his own right. He has developed a methodology and an application to go with it that actually is able to ferret out the problems that are likely to arise during a project implementation at an enterprise. What he and it shows is uncanny and he and it work like a charm. Michael is also a popular ZDNet blogger who writes the well read (including me) “IT Project Failures” blog - which, incidentally, is now covering CRM, thenks got.
Ross Mayfield - Chairman and President of Socialtext, pioneer in Enterprise 2.0 and especially the world of corporate wikis - and a rockstar too - one of the most visible luminaries in the Enterprise 2.0 firmament. Ross’s Socialtext platform won my “SuperStah!” designation in the upcoming CRM at the Speed of Light’s 4th edition for the chapter on wikis because it is the best in its class without a doubt (at least without a doubt of mine) - as is Ross as a thinker. Ross did a blog entry on Social CRM a few months ago, called “The Social C.R.M. Iceberg” that sparked a major discussion in the industry - well worth reading - again.
While its cool that there are such notables tied into this venture, that isn’t, by itself, the thing that gets me going frankly. What I do like and will be anxious to see in action is the other triangle that they are providing, not the star power. I know and trust them for what they are able to do.
The Second Triangle: Framework, Platform, Application
The more powerful triangle is the offering itself - a trio consisting of a framework, a platform and an application - all tied to services that the joint effort will provide. What makes it important is that this is a close to a practical package of strategies and tools as I have ever seen in the world of co-creation and collaboration. There are some Social CRM implications for this too as we’ll see.
Let’s treat this simply. They’ve got an offering that is for the first time that I can see, based on the best practices at the IT, process and strategic levels, complete. Here’s the framework (See Figure 1):
Figure 1: The Pragmatic Enterprise Framework
If you look carefully at the framework, something stands out -its nearly complete. The only thing that I would say I don’t see is a way to allow the customer to collaborate with the company - the inbound communications and interactions “layer”. I suppose you could make the case for Community Management being that component, but I don’t. I would want to see a customer interaction channel as part of the framework. While not piddling, that doesn’t in any way denigrate the power of this particular framework - especially as an internal collaboration strategy and implementation. With Socialtext being the platform that this framework is built on and Michael K’s Asuret application (see Figure 2) a foundational app for implementation, this framework, Socialtext platform and application (FPA) is the first of its kind to make the way to market.
Figure 2: Asuret Anonymous Participant Analysis
What gets me excited is the possibilities. I would say is that, rather than the ridiculous noise about nomenclature that goes on all the time around enterprise software and strategy, especially when it is a nascent area, these guys are providing something that is eminently practicable for business. That indicates that the market is starting to mature.
Why (before you jump all over my butt for making that statement)? Because the framework, software and platform all have sufficient best practices, sufficient application to the market, sufficient histories of success and sufficient strategic relevance to indicate that there a body of knowledge ready to be applied. THAT’S why I say starting to mature.
So, congrats to you, Pragmatic Enterprise. Its exciting to see your two triangles out there. Your launch is a good sign for a growing business approach. Hopefully your future success will be a better sign.
September 4th, 2009
Now I Know Why I Can't Stand the Washington Redskins
About 15 minutes ago I saw this story in the online version of the Sporting News: “Redskins suing fans who can’t keep their season’s tickets.”
I now know why I can’t stand the Redskins and their ownership.
The story is clear enough: The Redskins are suing 125 seasons ticket holders who they say wouldn’t work out financial arrangements with them to pay their multi-year seasons ticket contracts. The Washington Post, publishers of the original story, had interviewed 20 of the season ticket holders most of who claimed that they had lost a job or had some sort of financial hardship. The Redskins claimed they attempted to work something out but the ticket holders said in response that the payments were too hefty for them to afford anymore.
Okay, its bad enough that the Redskins, who are wildly popular in D.C., would probably have not all that much trouble reselling the seats, though admittedly that’s a presumption, but it was the following comment that just reminded me why I am no fan of this club.
“The Post reviewed lawsuits in which the Daniel M. Snyder-controlled entity WFI Stadium Inc. sued 125 Redskin ticket holders for a total of $3.6 million. The team won judgments totaling $2 million from 34 season ticket holders, most of whom did not hire an attorney and defaulted by not making an appearance in court.
(Redskins attorny David) Donovan said other teams sue their fans. “I don’t know of any pro football team that doesn’t,” he said.
The Post, being intrepid, went and asked other teams if they sue their fans since they clearly weren’t going to take the word of David Donovan. They found that the Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Green Bay Packers, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, New York Giants, New York Jets, Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans, don’t. So much for Donovan’s blanket statement. The Patriots said they sued and the Chicago Bears said “yes, rarely.” The rest of teams either declined to comment or didn’t respond. So of the 11 responses, 9 said they didn’t sue. Hardly an overwhelming statement of support for Attorney Donovan’s “they all do” comment.
Does that mean that others do? I imagine so. But apparently Redskins management don’t talk to the 9 teams that understand that hardship actually is hardship and their fans can undergo it. Reality is that even in hard economic times, there are enough people out there spending oodles of money to cover the lost ticket contracts.
From the standpoint of the customer, what should a team say when these situations arise?
We love our fans but are perfectly willing to destroy their lives because they are unable to pay for something we are likely to resell?
OR do you think that they should do what the Giants (disclaimer: I love the Giants) and others did and simply reclaim and resell?
The question is how the fan experience is impacted by a team that you love and root for enough to purchase a multi-year very expensive package so that you can attend games - a discretionary expenditure to say the least. But if you lose your job, should the team be compassionate and let you slide and just repossess the tickets or should they sue because you’ve signed a contract?
Technically, they can sue and likely win judgments. But from my standpoint, they aren’t going to have a problem selling the multi-year seasons tickets to another Redskins fan. So suing and winning and then reselling they get twice the (ill-gotten in part) revenue.
Way to go Redskins. That’s why, even though I live in D.C. I will NEVER root for you. You don’t understand your own incredibly devoted fans. Which, given present management, is no surprise.
This is a true FAIL for customer relationship management.
August 20th, 2009
Deconstructing United Airlines: Where Customers are Transactions
United Airlines: Customers are Merely Transactions
If you’re a loyalty marketer and look at my United profile, you find something that would make you 4.5 on a scale of 5.0 when it comes to warm and fuzzy. You’d see hundreds of thousands of United Airlines frequent flier (FF) miles; a pattern that suggests that I fly exclusively, including client bookings by their travel agencies on United for me; you’d see signing up for dozens of promotions; you’d see using hotel loyalty cards to get United FF miles in the place of hotel points; you’d see me flying United partners Star Alliance airlines whenever I can’t fly United. You’d also see about 50-75,000 miles per year over the past few years. I’d look like a very loyal United flyer.
I’ve been Premier Executive for a few years, which means that I flew 50,000 miles or more each year. But in 2008, I had a horrible auto accident in August that limited my flying to virtually none for the rest of the year. As a result I flew 36,000 miles which brought me down a notch to Premier. But by November 2008, I was okay and I had booked and paid for 26,000 more miles of flying from January 4 though Feb 15, 2009.
That sets the stage. Oh, one other thing. United’s timeframe for determining FF status is from January 1 through December 31. Status privileges run from March 1 through February 28.
In any case, as late November 2008 rolled around, I received a letter in the mail from United Airlines. In effect, it said:
“Hey, we see that you only have 36,000 miles this year which will make you a Premier rather than a Premier Executive flyer. Tell you what, you give us $2300.00 and we will give you the additional 14,000 miles that you need to be Premier Executive. How about that?”
I swear. They wanted me to pay $2300. I was….incensed…and I’m only saying “incensed” because of my PG-13 rated worldview. I mean, can this approach be much more disgusting….and, for that matter, out of touch with the reality of a customer?
But, then the real question is what should have happened?
If I were United’s Vice President of Customer Experience (I believe that they’ve had four of those in five years though don’t hold me to that exact number), I would have an algorithm or two that would pretty much spit out the same info as they had. But then I would have had a plan to address the issue that wasn’t “send us $2300.” It would go something like this:
“Hey, we see that you only have 36,000 miles this year which will make you a Premier rather than a Premier Executive flyer. We’re concerned. What happened that caused you to fly so much less?“
Let’s assume I made the choice to respond to United and told them what happened. At the point I understood that Paul’s Acura had stood in the way of his flying in 2008, if I were United, I would also check to see what Paul’s history is and future bookings are. Then, as United, I probably would notice that Paul Greenberg had paid for 26,000 more miles for January and February. In other words, traveling that much before his 2008 official Premier Executive privileges ran out. Then I, United, would send another note in this spirit:
“Hey again. Since you’ve been a Premier Executive flyer for a few years and you couldn’t help your circumstances and you’ve already paid for 26,000 more miles which would total 62,000 miles by the time your privileges run out, we’ll take a chance on you not canceling those bookings (PG note: I didn’t cancel) and extend your Premier Executive flyer privileges another year. We’re very sorry about your accident.”
They didn’t do that but instead insulted me with their “offer” to let me pay. Rather than me moving a bit closer to being an advocate, the result I truly dislike United. Though my loyalty numbers don’t show that, do they?
Lesson #1 For United: What Should Have Transpired
The key to this isn’t the offer to keep me Premier Executive for another year. That isn’t that significantly different than Premier when it comes to rewards. It’s the note to me asking “what happened?” Rather than the:
“Hey, we don’t really care that something might have happened to you to break your recent historic patterns, we are only interested in getting something from you in return for letting you ‘keep’ the privilege of your status.”
Contemporary customers demand some sort of human or at least seemingly human interaction with the companies that they frequent for more than a utility purchase. United still sees customers as transactions. Thus, I look entirely loyal because of my “transaction numbers” e.g. amount of miles etc. But my behavior is driven by inertia - the cost of my investment and the cost of change outweighs the effort I can afford to give it now. My emotions are driven by disgust for the very company I look loyal to. AND, because I have a wide number of venues to write for and speak at etc. every year, I get to use United as a lesson in what not to do when it comes to engaging customers in front of what amounts to hundreds of thousands of people. Not exactly good but you wouldn’t know from the numbers.
Yet Another United “Customers are Transactions” Story……
A dear friend of mine is a Senior VP at a major government contractor here in Washington D.C. She passed on this United story - in fact the trigger for writing this piece.
“Hi Paul….If you recall…last year there was a problem with one of the so called “customer vouchers” for my son. It was issued to my son when they had delayed his flight (their errors) for about 10 hours. When I called about the voucher being basically impossible to use (required to physically go to an airport and present it versus use it online), United gave me the run-around, I asked to speak to a supervisor….and UNITED transferred me to American Airlines.
Well…now they have changed their frequently flyer program and cancelled his points. Now cancelled in 18 months vs 2 years. I spoke to a manager…and got the run-around again. Bottom line zero points. Oh yes….for $350 they will re-instate his 25,000 points.
The United Customer Service Supervisor said they changed the rules for frequent flyer points in January 2007…reducing from 2 years to 18 months. In January 2007, (The boy) was a Junior in high school. He was not keeping track of United’s frequent flyer changes. I don’t keep track, because unfortunately - I fly them. He lost a round-trip on United that he could have used to visit his Grandmother. Verbally they said we could buy the points back for .0125 per frequent mile PLUS an administrative fee - but we can only do this online. My head is spinning. Gee - maybe I could use the $150 voucher that I can only use at the airport toward this - ha ha ha.
United gets a grade of F for customer satisfaction. They really don’t care - I say….let’s all go fly Southwest. They care about their customers.”
United Lesson #2: What Should Have Transpired
There’s so much wrong with what United did here.
First, transferring the customer, out of pique one can only presume, to American Airlines, is problem #1. Second making the use of a voucher difficult rather than easy is problem #2. Then cancelling a kid’s points and then saying, “oh, we’ll reinstate for $350,” is problem #3.
Wow.
Its easy to make the case - at least easy for United - of “well, them’s the rules, boys and girls. You gotsta follow the rules. The timeframe for use of FF points was over.” And, if customers are transactions they may be right. But sometimes, the human circumstances and reality (a reality that of course United banks on), merit an interaction rather than a transaction - meaning, you find out that most people aren’t that aware of rules changes and there had been a lot of grief and angst associated with the chain of activity on this particular situation, calls for a bending of the rules.
What the problem is here is not necessarily just a bad set of circumstances with a customer. There was a bit of this that was just outright stupid - the transfer to American Airlines instead of a supervisor. But most of this is due to a rigid set of broken procedures.
First things first - there needs to be a way to use the voucher online. United makes a point of encouraging the use of online reservations as a cost savings measure for them and a benefit to the customer - and online Easy Check-in is one of the few good things about United. However, making it impossible to use the voucher online goes against what they want to begin with and only makes it more difficult for the customer to use a benefit that they got in return for something that was a discomfort to the passenger to begin with.
Second - Given the particular circumstances, someone should have been made available to the customer who was empowered to restore the points. No one is saying do it uniformly, but, United, you need to remember that customers are looking for personalized treatment and when a circumstance that allows it arises, be smart enough to be flexible - rather than looking like an organization that, once again, sees the customer as a transaction. The answer here should have been, “okay, this once, we can restore the points, given everything else that happened, but it is an 18 month limit now and please be aware of that for the future.” Rather than “it’ll cost you $350.00″ - apparently a familiar theme.
And Yet Again: United’s Broken Guitar - The One We All Watched
I think we’re all familiar now with “gone-viral-on-YouTube” video “United Breaks Guitars” which has gotten over (there is no past tense on YouTube only past perfect) 4.8 million hits since it went up. Here it is if you haven’t seen it. I don’t like country, but I did like this.
It was amazing enough that it took United more than a year after the guitars had been broken and numerous complaints and a refusal to pain as their final answer originally to finally agree to pay for the broken instruments. Which Dave Carroll of the Sons of Maxwell (the Nova Scotia based country group that had the guitars broken) didn’t want and had donated to charity. But that wasn’t enough. Listen to this incredibly lame response from United:
“‘While we mutually agree this should have been fixed much sooner, Dave’s excellent video provides us with something we can use for training purposes to ensure that all customers receive better service for us,’ spokeswoman Robin Urbanski told the (Chicago Sun Times).”
Not the response you wanted to hear.
United Lesson #3
The only thing I could call this “official” response is cowboy bootlicking contrition - it sounds insincere and actually doesn’t address the problem. While its great they are going to use the video to train, what about the processes and the hiring policies that led to this happening in the first place. A humorous video that gained a lot of attention isn’t the training I want to be giving. It may be funny to watch and a nice little public relations ploy, but as a customer, I’d rather hear about how they were overhauling their customer service policies given the number of complaints they get on a daily basis. And the massive mistrust that they continually engender. But then, that’s just me.
What United should have done here is pretty obvious. Pay for the f—ing guitar when it broke, not when it became the subject of a clever viral video. The damage was done by that time. Additionally, they should announce significant changes to their customer service training and policy and be transparent about them.
What United seems to be overlooking in their training mea culpa is that not only was it broken due to gross mishandling by some employees apparently, but they refused to pay for it - a management decision. This video being used in training doesn’t change their policy. Which simply should be if they break it they should pay for it.
And Another…..
This one is short and sweet. Last fall, their Chief Customer Officer, Graham Atkinson, left United and Dennis Cary became the Chief Customer Officer.
United Lesson #4
Unfortunately, for United, Dennis Cary is already their Chief Marketing Officer. The fact that they are combining the two positions is another egregious example of their incredible lack of understanding of customers. CCO and CMO are NOT positions that live in a single human body. They have vastly different purposes and can even be at odds. This is nothing disparaging to Mr. Cary. I don’t know him so I’m not speaking to his qualifications for either job. But he shouldn’t have both. A Chief Customer Officer is, when appropriately tasked, to engage customers in the kinds of interactions that make them advocates of the company at a programmatic and policy level. Those policy decisions and “rule bending” that we’re talking about are a CCO’s responsibility - and should be as far away from marketing as possible. The irony is that the message that the combined positions sends is that to United customers are nothing more than objects of marketing. Transactions again. You’d think marketing would figure that out…..
Finally….One of the Worst
What makes this final United story totally ironic in addition to being a serious problem is that it happened to my wife and mother in law yesterday as they were heading to St. John’s Newfoundland via Montreal beginning at Dulles. In other words, while I was writing this.
To put it simply. My mother-in-law is 86 and needs a wheelchair to travel. United is required to have a wheelchair, if requested, available to her at the gate when she leaves the plane. We requested the wheelchair at Dulles airport, they called it ahead. According to Air Canada, United should have finished the request so that she was covered when she got to Montreal and then St. Johns.
Well, there were delays due to mechanical issues on the flight to Montreal and they got in but were unable to make their connection (they had a 15 minute window after they landed). One of the reasons, aside from the incredibly short time was that there was no wheelchair waiting for my mother-in-law and ultimately they didn’t really have one for her. My mother in law of course was discomfited by this whole fiasco. My wife managed to commandeer a wheelchair later without United’s help. An Air Canada representative was good enough to help them and told them that the flight attendants on United are aware of special needs passengers as are the ground personnel and since it was going to be delayed obviously, the United ground personnel should have made sure that a wheelchair was waiting despite the delay. There wasn’t one and not much interest in helping them either.
United Lesson #5
Aside from don’t mess with my family, United should have done what they should always do. Accommodate change. If there is a special needs passenger known to them and a problem that they cause one way or the other, then they need to make sure that there is a smooth and seamless transition so that the customers aren’t discomfited. Not that big a game plan for that. It would have taken a phone call to say, “hey, there is this special needs passenger on the flight to Montreal. The fight is 2.5 hours delayed. Can you makes sure that we still have a wheelchair waiting?” Not that tough to figure out.
In Sum
The heading of this final section is ironic. Because “a sum” is exactly how United views its customers. Its why United is continually one of the lowest in customer satisfaction surveys and is beaten up continually in the cybersphere. They are going to need a fundamental culture shift to recognize that the customer - the social customer - is looking to have them provide the kind of experience that excites them to be associated with United rather than repulses them. So Dennis Cary, stop looking at the numbers that your loyalty people throw at you and instead talk to your customers in a serious concerted way and then, listen to them.
I’d love to lay out a few of them here, but why should I? Hmmm, maybe for $2300 I’ll do it so I can afford to be Premier Executive again…..
August 3rd, 2009
Inside Curve: Lane Bryant Scores Plus Plus
Who doesn’t love style and fashion? Well, I suppose I don’t love fashion, judging from my incredibly poor clothing selection skills (I rely 100% on my wife, who has mad skills when it comes to picking out good looking clothes) but I am in love with style. I love to feel cool. In my case this translates to gadget head stuff, but in the case of many, its clothes that make the hip man or woman.
But oddly, despite the fact that clothes and styles are a primo topic of discussion both at schools, on the street, while watching makeover shows, or “Who Wants to be the Next Supermodel,” there have been no social networks or communities built around the retail apparel world. I’m not saying there isn’t innovation or there aren’t Facebook pages. Retail apparel companies galore have Facebook fan pages and they tweet. J.C. Penny’s has a Facebook page targeted at teens that links back to an ecommerce site for back-to-school clothes. American Eagle has Mike Dupuis, a VP of Digital Marketing who works their Twitter, Facebook etc. strategy. Bebe’s, Candie’s and other apparel - especially younger apparel stores/chains have some presence on social networks of others creation.
But I gotta tell you, its taken a visionary dude that I met when both he and I spoke at the Global Retail Marketing Association (GRMA) - an rather astonishingly interesting association run by Stephanie Fischer - national conference in April to take the retail apparel world where it’s supposed to go with social networks. That would be Jay Dunn, VP of Marketing at Lane Bryant, who, today, is hard launching Inside Curve - a social network, sponsored by Lane Bryant, for plus sized woman.
What makes this important is several fold (please see my article later this month on vertical communities at SearchCRM for more conceptual detail):
- Apparel of any size are an emotional buy - totally tied into style, look and feel, and even identity and self-worth. Studies have been done that show how emotional this actually is. One 2008 Fitness magazine study of woman who were trying on clothes in stores found that 64% (80% among those who thought they had to lose 30 pounds or more) of the women felt that shopping for clothes was bad for their self-confidence; 10% admitted to crying in the dressing room. Even trite expressions are tied to this intensely emotional activity and product - “clothes make the man.” Of course, if that’s true then I’m in real trouble. Sniff.
- Buying clothes is something that is important for socialization. Multiple studies since the 1980s and through today, have shown two things - 1. What kids wear is important for a child’s socialization into the world of other children; 2. Buying clothes without their parents, with their own money is one of the more important acts of growing up as an independent person for a kid when they reach a certain age.
In other words, clothes - how you wear them and what you wear are a deeply personal part of a person’s life, and, unless you’re a nudist, skinny dipping or having sex (at least most of the time), a necessity of ordinary life along the lines of food and shelter.
So what’s the Inside Curve story with all this?
A Really Good Inside Curve
Let’s face it. Plus sized women don’t fit the stereotypical view of the perfect body. The fashion industry to give you a number, says a plus sized woman is size 14 and weighs 162.9 pounds. Let’s hear what Jay has to say which will give you an idea of the beauty of Inside Curve as a community.
“The plus-size woman has been excluded from mainstream media, fashion, and advertising for 4 decades. If you think back to the 1950s and early 1960s, the icons of femininity were voluptuous women such as Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren. In 1966, Twiggy hit the scene and the “thin is in” movement started and continues to this day. Kate Moss is Twiggy reimagined.
“The psychology of the plus-size woman has been altered by the fashion industry’s insistence on “beauty” as “thin.” As you look at the blogs and social networks you see those women have an immediate bonding, a commonality, a shared experience of exclusion that becomes the foundation of community. A “community by exclusion,” if you will.
“An interesting aspect of exclusion: when enough of the “excluded” bands together, their identity can change from “exclusion” to “exclusive.” Suddenly, a new tribe develops, with a language, rules, desires, and needs based on shared experience. And if you’re not one of them, if you are not a size 14+ woman, you do not belong. It is the power of the tribe, and the psychology changes from one of weakness to one of authority.”
What Jay and Lane Bryant had to consider was how do you turn what organically was a community of exclusion and institutionally make the membership a powerful organized voice.
Lane Bryant
Keep in mind, Lane Bryant is hardly a stranger to the world of the plus size woman. They actually invented both the concept and the clothes. They have over 800 stores located throughout the U.S. that deal exclusively with this group of people. As Jay says, “Lane Bryant never deviated from the plus-size category. we invented it….For over a hundred years we’ve done only one thing and that’s plus-size apparel for the American woman.”
But that didn’t mean that Lane Bryant was ready for the development of this ambitious social network project. Their focus and culture, like most apparel retailers, had been sales and product focused. It wasn’t easy to go from a “plus-size retailer who sold women’s apparel” to a “fashion-retailer who sells plus-size.” While that might sound like marketing, its actually a culture change that takes the social customer’s emotional experiences with not just Lane Bryant but why they buy clothes and want to feel good about how they dress and what they buy. That culture change took well over a year to evolve, but it did and Inside Curve was born.
Inside Curve
So what does Inside Curve provide to plus-size women that makes it something Social CRMers like us can be glad to see?
First, take a look at this image of the site: So you can think about it and feel it a little at the same time.
Inside Curve is focused on customer engagement. While Lane Bryant does advertise some of their wares, which is something which will test as good or bad over time, they also involve the customers in finding out what they think and how they think. Customer driven product reviews, design tips and style advice in the Buzz section not just from the experts but also from the customers themselves, discussions on fashion trends, behind-the-scenes exclusive stuff, and even promotions and savings for members of the network are part of the experience designed to reinforce the development of what Jay Dunn unashamedly calls “a sisterhood.” Blogs are an integral part of Inside Curve, too. Blogs, articles, etc. are written by Jay’s staff, with some forthcoming expert commentary from the Lane Bryant trend group and other fashion experts in the brand.
They aren’t ignoring the glam either - which, regardless of how you view the fashionista world and the catwalk, is something that zillions of “ordinary” humans pay attention to. They are involving the Lane Bryant models “behind the scenes” content that would show what goes on in a photo or video shoot; content from the TV show More to Love with clips that will be for the site and other glitz of interest to the members.
While Lane Bryant plays a major role in the blogging and the content exclusive site, they are playing much more hands off when it comes to forums and groups. Not only are they allowing them to grow organically in Inside Curve, but also are encouraging external growth too. They are fully aware that their customers are using social media to communicate. Consequently, Lane Bryant sees its role as providing brand content.
Jay again:
“We want to allow ‘inside’ access to the brand, thus the name. If ever there were a brand with whom its customers feel a “lovemark” connection, it’s this one.”
As of this morning, Inside Curve had 3642 members - prior to launch - an auspicious start.
Thoughts? Of Course!
A couple of things.
Notes to Lane Bryant
First, would I do anything different, add anything, or at least monitor some of the more touchy areas? Yes, of course. What would this be posting be without me being opinionated? Here are a couple of iniitial thoughts on that.
- I think that I’d minimize the advertising and clearly differentiate it from the brand content. Until the community is substantially large enough and has the confidence of its members, the advertising can be detrimental. I’d tread lightly.
- I think too that I would make a serious effort to encourage and support a blog or two from members of the community, not just experts.
Community Building Notes
There is one exceptionally important pioneering lesson in the Lane Bryant community that I want to make emphatic.
With the creation and launch of Inside Curve, Lane Bryant is institutionalizing an already existing community of people who have no organization and loose ties. The plus size women are as he called them “a community by exclusion” that grew organically - almost protectively. They’ve had a presence but no organization. Now they do have that presence under the umbrella of a trusted brand.
There are many groups like this out there that have grown organically and are loosely tied. You can point to the PC gamers community for example. If I were a business, I’d take the Lane Bryant lesson and find those that are there, identify who the influencers are and engage the influencers - who are the glue of the loosely tied - in helping me build my institution so that these loosely tied, organically created groups are supported by your brand. There is mutual value to be derived in that - more on that in an article I’m preparing for SearchCRM today.
What Lane Bryant has done is important - for plus size women and for Social CRM community practices. For the plus size women - they have a place to go to converse and benefit and in return, Lane Bryant benefits too. For Social CRM community practices - providing a model that recognizes that the community doesn’t have to always be built - it can be captured.
That works too.
July 15th, 2009
Coca-Cola Teaches The World To....
“Participating in the community of the consumer.”
I love that phrase. That’s the way Jim Keyes, Blockbuster CEO described their Facebook group - which is for the most part, despite all our conversations to the contrary, is what most people think of when you say “community” or “social network” now. As I’m sure you can guess, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of businesses who are using the most popular social networks to create groups, or pages, or fan sites to develop an external - beyond their own firewall community. They are going to where the customer lives, but not necessarily where they shop. Ecommerce is not Facebook’s strong suit.
But these fan pages on Facebook are nothing more than a segment of a strategy for customer engagement when a company does it right though there are incredible Facebook groups that function as powerful engagement engines for some companies.
For the sake of developing the evolving Social CRM models, I’m going to discuss and deconstruct some of the pieces of the Coca-Cola social CRM strategy - though I doubt they call it that. This won’t be complete. Its just to indicate two things that they’ve done that are just right and how they’ve utilized existing resources in combination with the new ones to do that.
BTW, I’m hoping assuming that I’m going to get a geographical uptick in page views from Atlanta. :-)
Coca-Cola Loves Its Fans
On the simplest level, In creating a Facebook group for your organization, you’re banking on a number of things:
- That your customers actually use Facebook.
- That they can be informed via the Facebook tools provided of the existence of your group - in addition to your own normal communications channels
- That they will find what you are providing to be enough interest to make your community a regular stop when they are logged in to Facebook.
- That the customers will opt in to being updated about the continuing activities of your community.
- That they have no objection to Facebook owning the knowledge of their activities in your group as an asset and as part of their Facebook “customer record” also known as their profile.
The benefits of these external community pages can be well worth it if you are willing to accept that you don’t control the source - in this case, Facebook. Marketing and loyalty are one of the areas that profit from this kind of external community. Customer service can be served by these kinds of communities though Facebook pages are not necessarily the best vehicle for that. There are sites like GetSatisfaction that provide external customer service communities created by either the customer or employees of the company, that serve this function. Additionally, companies like TiVo have seen the value in Facebook as a supplementary site for garnering and capturing customer service issues and data.
But Coca Cola, oh, baby, oh baby, oh baby. Check it out.
Things Go Better with Facebook - Coca-Cola’s Fan Club
Coca-Cola established their Facebook “fan page” in September 2008 and from then to June 2009 recruited 3.4 million fans. (As of today, it had 3,497,642). Actually, this isn’t entirely accurate. What they did was find a page that had been created by a couple of 29 year old Coca-Cola fans and, rather than sue them which is what one of the youngsters feared, instead worked with the two fans to build the page up. But this wasn’t a case of buying the page. The creators became an intimate part of the continued development of the page. Coca-Cola had a savvy understanding of the benefits and the limitations of a Facebook group. They understood that Facebook was a site that their customers used, not one that the company owned. Coke wanted to be unobtrusive and leave it a “fan club.” While I’d say that they aren’t unobtrusive any longer, they have been entirely successful because of their understanding of how Facebook works and their intelligence when it comes to collaborating with their fans.
While the founding fans still use the pages, Coca-Cola has a wide range of interactions on the page. They use it for promotions. They track the conversations of their customers through the postings to the Facebook wall and to the discussion groups. They give fans “exclusive sneak peeks” at things like the Coca-Cola iPhone Facebook app which makes those fans feel like they are on the inside of something.
When it comes to the visual arts, they don’t just have generic or random photo uploads. They wield photos like artists use brushes. One album will be an archive of historic Coke photos evoking nostalgia. Another will be a birthday album of Coca-Cola employees celebrating a birthday - Coca-Cola’s - but as informal shots at a beach. They also allow fans to upload their own Coke related photos to the site.
Think of what kind of brand image is projected in just the way the photo archives are used. “We are a company with an immensely proud tradition that not only can stay up with the contemporary but are also personable and intimate with you, our customers. We want you to know us and we want to know you.”
The brilliance of the fan page doesn’t stop with photos. If you look at the Wall updates, they are in Italian, French, English, Spanish; two or three languages I can’t figure out and even when in English, reference Coke in Macedonia, Thailand, Romania, and France. “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony….” (I know you know that one).
What the brand leaders at Coca-Cola, particularly the Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing Michael Donnelly, realized is that if you let the fans control their own conversation and support it, you can build something substantial and engender advocacy in ways that weren’t even a glimmer several years ago. What that translates to is 3.4 million fans, the second largest fan “club” on Facebook, second only to President Obama with over 5 million (by June 2009). According to PageData, Coca-Cola recruits between 0 and 3500 per day with the median numbers somewhere in the 1500 range. That’s per day.
It would be nice enough to see this fan page which actually lets the members guide it, though with input from Coca-Cola, if that were all there were to how Coke views the social customer. But they have a much more comprehensive engagement strategy. They understand that the customer doesn’t just want engagement. They want personal engagement. Hence the brilliantly conceived and so far so good executed Coca-Cola Free Style - their new vending machine. fountain dispenser Yeah, vending machine fountain dispenser. (Update: Thanks for the correction goes to Ray Crockett, Director, Communications, Coca-Cola, NA)
Coca-Cola Freestyle
If nothing else, Coca-Cola is innovative - and the aptly named Freestyle gives you a hint of that.
Freestyle is Coke’s new vending machine fountain dispenser. Its not innovative because it takes your quarters a.k.a. dollars to get soda (or as those from the Midwest keep trying to call it “pop”) or “healthy” drinks from it. It’s innovative because it actually allows you to customize your drinks - with up to 100 combinations including, for example, if you really, really want it, raspberry orange Diet Sprite.
First things first. Here’s how it looks - very cool - though a bit too much like a contemporary Maytag washing machine -but an undeniably trendy one.
But what it does has nothing to do with cleaning clothes. This thing is remarkable for three reasons.
First, it gives the customer the choice of over 100 selections of drink combinations customized (modularly) that include soda, diet soda, sparkling water, tea, health drinks etc. - several of which have never been sold in the U.S.
Second - it is tied into an IT backbone that allows it to wirelessly send information to an SAP system that not only tracks the personalized drink preferences of the customers using the machine but also manages the inventory - “oh, Freestyle is almost out of Coke Zero, needs refill.” All of this data is tied back to the SAP supply chain and CRM systems in the back.
Third - it is an incredibly innovative use of RFID and one of the first that really indicates how valuable RFID can be.
For some discussion on this, I got Mickey Brazeal, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Roosevelt University and author of the 2009 book, RFID: Improving the Customer Experience, to opine on how RFID and Freestyle work together:
“It’s easy to add wireless communication and data processing to a vending machine. Such a machine could respond intelligently to individual customers and to changing situations.
“It could know what it’s running out of and arrange to be replenished efficiently, the way an RFID smart-shelf can. Tags on individual products or ingredients talk to a reader that orders replacements as necessary. The replenisher doesn’t have to carry in everything - only the stuff that needs replacement. And the system isn’t perpetually running out of the most popular items. People who use vending machines are very often in a situation where there is no alternative, and an out-of-stock is a bad customer experience - much worse than in a store where you can usually just choose a different brand.
“It could figure out which combination of products generates the fastest sales or the largest profits in a particular location. It could offer products (drinks) in different sizes and create the package mechanically immediately after its button is pushed. It could offer different products in the morning than it does in the afternoon. It could authenticate the items loaded into it, and make sure that no counterfeit or unauthorized product is sold. This is a level of control over remote vending machine servicers that marketers have not always been able to assert in the past,
“It could accept payment cards and, through the payment card, offer loyalty points that are recorded automatically, and that generate an occasional free vend. It could use a group of ingredients to customize the product for each individual customer. Why should a machine offer six flavors instead of sixty, or six hundred? It could recognize a customer by his payment card, and serve up “my usual”, like a neighborhood bartender.
“The Coca-Cola initiative is a big first step. It will use ingredient cartridges to create, on the spot, the beverage ordered by the customer. Because it doesn’t have to contain the finished product, it can offer a huge range of flavors - about 100 in this case. It will authenticate the ingredient cartridges and prevent the use of counterfeits or competitors. It will track inventory and summon the service person with specifics about what is needed. It will shine a light on the item that is to be replaced so that no mistakes are made. The customer uses a touch screen to select the right item.
“When you can choose from a hundred flavors, it’s hard to see the process as mass marketing. It starts to be less about the product brand (Diet Coke vs. Coke Zero), and more about the retailer brand (all these flavored waters from the Coca-Cola company.)
“It might create more use-occasions: breakfast-at-your-desk beverages, bubbly waters with lunch, a Coke at the afternoon break. People who are stuck with a “vending room” in a remote location start to see it as less of a sacrifice. Suddenly it’s not so much the low end of the foodchain. Maybe it replaces some of the pilgrimages to Starbucks.
“Right now, if you hate the stuff in the vending machines, tough luck. In this new world, the vending machine will try very hard to find out what you like, and when and where you want it, and make certain it never runs out.
“Down the road, there are potential environmental advantages as well. If such a machine could be attached to a local water source, then the fuel-guzzling business of trucking around products that are mostly water would be unnecessary.
“Vending machine soft drinks from Coca-Cola have a loyalty program where the purchaser can find the number inside the cap, go to a website, record the number, and collect a micro-microcredit toward premiums. But it’s an awful lot of work to earn one two-hundredth of a baseball cap, and therefore has limited participation. A payment card could make the points process automatic.
“The next step is a store-sized vending machine - an entire convenience store without employees. If you only have to restock the items that have sold out, you can do it with a single daily replenishment trip. Services will be sold automatically as well. Imagine an unattended car wash. The door opens in response to an RFID tag on the customer’s windshield. Soap and water are dispensed automatically. Brushes and buffers whirl as the car reaches the right spot. And the tag on the windshield picks up the check. Frequent users get big discounts. Almost all the car wash business is frequent users. And it’s sold as a relationship. Transaction customers can’t even get in.”
….Customers Go Better With Coke
Okay, so think about this. Coca-Cola is working with a strategy that has as parts of it, social networking use and the use of technology tied tightly into CRM and SCM. They tie these pieces into a matrix that interweaves with their loyalty/advocacy programs (I’ll talk about those in a future post). But what frames all of these seemingly disparate pieces is their interest in providing an optimal and personalized customer experience - in whatever venue the customer is. So the customer can socialize with other customers around the coolness of Coke or the nostalgia around Coke on the Facebook page. Then they can go take a break (at least in Atlanta, Coca-Cola HQ where Free Style is being tested) and go to Free Style touchscreen, punch in their customized quaff and then return to Facebook to talk about the coolness of Free Style. Wow.
What are two apparently disparate parts are actually tied together by Coca-Cola’s corporate commitment to its customers to making them advocates, not merely committed Coke gurglers. The experience is built around “fan” engagement in all facets - Facebook to Free Style. Smart move, from a very smart company.
June 18th, 2009
Outcome Based Social Networks: Yet Another CRM at the Speed of Light Excerpt
I’m going to finish the book today. CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th edition will be done by the time that the day ends - though I suspect a lot sooner. It’s going to be a 750 page tome - mostly print, some supplemented electronically, on CRM 2.0 - I hope a definitive work. In honor of me being able to devote much more time and effort to this blog and the rest of my life than I’ve been able to in the last few weeks, even months, I’m doing one last chapter excerpt from the upcoming book, pre-edited. Let me know what you think of the idea - This is on Outcome Based Social Networks. Again, this is unedited so it will be improved in final form. I have to edit it once before I send in, as I always do and then I send it in to be edited by my copy editor.
Enjoy!! Read the rest of this entry »
June 11th, 2009
Guest Post: Steve Wylie on The Enterprise 2.0 Conference
I’m heading over to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston on June 22. If you’re interested in the social customer and how businesses should respond to them - and how workplace performance can be improved - this is the one conference you shouldn’t miss all year. I mean that. Go. I’ll hook up with you if you’re there. Contact me via Twitter to set up some time.
I asked Steve Wylie, the GM and Conference Director for this knockout of a conference and all around good guy, to write a guest post because I don’t think I’m persuasive enough and this guy has those needed mesmerizing powers to get you there - using rational thought as his hypnotic tool of choice. He is also the editor of the Enterprise 2.0 Blog, which means he can write a pretty mean posting to begin with. He’ll give you an idea of why an Enterprise 2.0 event is even more cogent than ever.
SF-based Steve is an events industry veteran, having handled some of the biggest conferences around including the Interop mega-events in Las Vegas and New York. He is an IT industry veteran too, as the former program director for InteropNet, which ran a multi-vendor test lab geared to evaluate, improve and showcase early implementations of open-standard IT infrastructure technology.
I’m always amazed at what it takes to run an event. I think event planning is a magnificent and difficult venture. But Enterprise 2.0 is not just an event, but one with actual content - and plenty of networking. Oh, if you want to hang around with the rock stars of the social web, they hang there too. Here’s where you can get more info on the conference.
I’d truly take advantage of this and make the effort to get there.
Take it away, Steve
The Next Phase of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
Paul kindly invited me to share my thoughts on the Enterprise 2.0 market and provide some highlights for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. As the conference chair, I’ve got a fairly unique perspective on the state of Enterprise 2.0 and some ideas on where we’re headed. We’re roughly three years along since Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee first described this new category of enterprise software and organizational strategy that he dubbed “Enterprise 2.0”. Someone recently asked me what’s changed in the Enterprise 2.0 market from that point to present day.
For starters, we really didn’t have much of “a market” to speak of three years ago. At that first Enterprise 2.0 Conference we described a new vision for business applications that included some truly ground-breaking concepts. Attendees were largely business users and managers, frustrated with the disparity between fast-paced, consumer technology innovation and the dated applications being supported by corporate IT. At that first conference we were embarking on a radical journey to turn these business applications and the corporate culture around them upside down. We were ready to take on the world.
Fast forward three years and those early aspirations are now grounded in reality. Momentum is building for what is now truly an Enterprise 2.0 “market” and we’re seeing many early signs of success. But while we’ve made tremendous progress in three years, Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications are still striving to reach more wide-spread, enterprise-scale adoption. There is an abundance of use cases around small or department-level successes but far fewer examples of large-scale deployments – examples of Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications that form part of an organization-wide fabric for productivity and communication. Why is that?
While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board. Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers. They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed. They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT. With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.
Three years later and I see that posture changing for many IT leaders. We’re entering a new era where forward-looking IT leaders embrace Enterprise 2.0 as a strategic advantage and as part of a cohesive, company-wide system. This change is an important ingredient to the next phase of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.
So what should you expect from this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference? Expect to network with nearly 1500 people from over 40 countries. Expect our most comprehensive program to date with deep coverage of new topics like Social Media and Cloud Computing. Expect even more innovation from industry veterans and start-up vendors preparing for the next big thing. And expect to hear some really compelling case studies and speakers from organizations like the Obama Campaign, the US Army, Booz Allen Hamilton, Volvo and Jet Blue, all ready to share their experiences on how Enterprise 2.0 is transforming business – changing the world.
June 4th, 2009
Excerpt #2: Customer Experience - Chap 21 from CRM @ The Speed of Light, 4th ed.
I have to be straight with you. I’m entering the head down, grind it, drive to the goal line when it comes to CRM at the Speed of Light’s 4th edition. Which means that in other areas that I’m writing, I’m treading water. So there is a dual purpose to these excerpts. One is I’m treading water. The other is to give you a peek at what’s coming. Its going to be around 750 pages all in all - a definitive work, according to me at least, on CRM 2.0/Social CRM covering everything - some in depth, some touching on it. In a way, it has a companion relationship to the 3rd edition which is far more technology focused than this edition, though there is a healthy dose of technology in the 4th edition. But if you want details on, say, how analytics works, get the 3rd edition. If you’re more interested in the business value and contemporary usage of analytics for customer insight, get this one.
In any case, I’ve got a new excerpt for you from another chapter. Once again, its unedited and unexpurgated a.k.a. raw. Let me know what you think and what changes I might make. I’m stubborn. So convince me, please. All used input in the editing will be attributed.
The excerpt:
Why Customer Experience Mapping?
How many of your employees directly interact with your customers? How many of your senior management ever interact with customers by anything but accident? How many of your customers have demands that you think are probably outside what the company can do or ever has done? How many of you use the incredible amount of intelligence that customers provide even in normal conversations? How many of you presume you know your customer? By the way, “presume” is a precisely chosen word.
The answers. Many. Almost none. Several, but what can you do? Not too many. All of us, especially marketing people.
Here’s how little you really know your customers. EMarketer reported on a 2008 study done by QCI International:
- 41% of the companies surveyed do not record customer contact channel preferences.
- In more than 90% of companies, the staffs who are responsible for talking to customers could not articulate why customers should buy from them.
- Only 13% of senior management has regular contact with customers.
Truthfully, we don’t know our customers all that well, despite their often easy willingness to be known. Put on your customer hat for a minute. How many companies are you willing to say, “Damn. They seem to know just want I want!” A few…maybe. But what about this next statement, “They not only know what I want, but how I want it?”
Back in Chapter 4, I spoke a lot of American Girl. I mentioned the varying options that they had that each cost something. How each young girl dresses their doll, which services they choose (haircut, hot dog) and which associated media they see or buy, affects the revenue of Mattel. It’s rarely a matter of price except as a consideration in a granular look at the customer experience.
The reason for all this variation is that each of us is self-interested. Note, I didn’t say selfish. Self-interested. Mother Theresa was self-interested. Doing Good with a capital G was a way of satisfying her internal emotional “benchmarks.” Self-interest. Not selfish. That individual interest can be a benefit to a company that understands what it is that drives that customer but a major headache when it doesn’t. The biggest “FAIL” is when someone at the company presumes that they know what the customer’s self-interest is - and they don’t. Believe me, they don’t.
There is a simple answer to that presumption failure though which I mentioned way back in Chapter 4. It’s worth repeating. ASK THE CUSTOMER WHAT IT IS THEY THINK AND WANT!
Mapping will be your first set of brushstrokes for your freshly painted customer portrait.
The Preparation
Customer mapping isn’t merely a questionnaire that you get to ask a customer - via Survey Monkey or your internal email system. However preparation for customer mapping can be done using the traditional instruments for customer queries.
But it doesn’t start with that.
Before there is a single question even discussed there are several strategic CRM elements that have to be in place.
Consistent Perception of CRM Mission and Vision
I established the importance of the mission and vision statements last chapter. NOTHING proceeds without a clear mission and vision statement that provides the customer-facing cues that the company needs to define how it will approach its interactions with the customers and what the future holds for that. This is a prerequisite for any sort of customer experience mapping that you are preparing to do.
The full evolution and development of a strategy isn’t.
The reason that it isn’t is pretty straightforward. If successful, the mapping will help you define the strategy - helping you execute on your mission. As time goes on and you redo the mapping - yes, redo - this isn’t a one-time-whew-we’re done- wipe across the forehead - it will provide you with the insight to tweak the elements of the strategy going forward. That means that your vision can be realized.
However, before you get to that, you have to make sure that the perception of the mission and vision are consistent across the company also.
What do I mean by that?
Let me get literary.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Titinius returns home to find Cassius of the lean and hungry look, dead. He says, “Alas, thou has misconstrued every thing.” That is a state that you have to make sure that you avoid.
The only way to avoid that is to make sure that the mission and vision that are the fundamental statements for the CRM 2.0 strategy are not only clearly defined but clearly understood across the entire value chain. By having that mission and vision clear, the direction that the strategy has to be pointed will be obvious to all concerned - and that doesn’t need the entire strategy done.
The entire value chain, includes the accounting department, your logistics organization, the warehouse managers, the human resources department and all others in the back of the company. The reason this encompasses the entire value chain is that with the increased customer demands and the heightened emotional sensitivity due to extreme economic fluctuations, among others, how every part of the company performs will have an impact on the customer experience.
For example, several years ago, a client of mine called up with an odd dilemma. Their accounting department, a few years before the call, had developed a technique that they used in accounting entries that saved their rather large department around $40,000 per year. However, they had added ecommerce to their portfolio of sales pipes. As a result, this accounting technique created an online “glitch” which made the customer purchasing whatever they did online enter some of the same data twice. Never mind how it got there - it’s not germane to this.
They wanted to know what to do.
My recommendation, since it wasn’t technically fixable was to jettison the technique - despite its improved efficiency, because it was degrading the customer experience - and thus irritating customers, who expected their online shopping to be seamless and easy.
They did just that. Which is great, but the true moral of this story is to note how even the back office can affect a customer experience that is expected to be something it turns out not to be - in other words, there is a failure to meet expectations.
So what can you do to prevent that - and, hopefully, even exceed expectations?
The Traditional Approaches
There is nothing wrong with traditional approaches - though they work less and less. When I say “traditional” approaches that includes focus groups, standard surveys, customer interviews that have directed questions and attempts at customer segmentation. Each of them has a strength or two, but there is an underlying flaw that they tend to have - the results tend to reflect the prejudices of the company - rather than the raw honesty of the individual customer. Even with analytics-driven customer segmentation for example, your result is the assessment of people who are similar to you but not of “you” as an individual. While “someone like him” might be your customer’s most trusted source, companies should remember that it isn’t a good demographic in the eyes of that same individual customer. They may trust someone like them but they want you to know them personally.
To do that, you need to start by mapping the customer experience.
Now We Map
Mapping the customer experience is a granular process - and one that encompasses all channels that a customer uses to interact with you or vice versa. If you are a retail store, it encompasses every interaction starting with the moment that the customer walks through the door and notices something to the moment that they leave the store and go home; to the time they call up customer service or the sales rep that has to do follow-up on the purchase. It encompasses their web experience and how they interacted with you on the web - ranging from how comfortable the site was when they were navigating to the effect that the 11 seconds of latency that you uncovered in your customer interview affected that customer behavior or marred their experience - or not.
But as important as the specific interaction is the expectation of the result of that interaction the customer brings to the table - and what kind of importance the customer assigns to it.
I’m going to start by breaking out the fundamental elements.
Interactions
An interaction, for the purposes of the customer experience, is any time that a customer communicates with the company - regardless of the communications channel - and regardless of the whether it is a cyber-communication or a physical conversation.
Examples of good and bad interactions are in Table 21-2.
|
Communications Medium |
Good Interaction |
Bad Interaction |
|
Retail Store |
Clean, well lit, friendly service from a store representative, and well-stocked |
All the other good but a surly store representative |
|
Web-based |
Easy to navigate, no latency when ordering |
Ten second or more wait for order to complete when submit is clicked |
|
Telephone Based |
Immediate access to the right human being |
Multiple IVR menus |
|
|
Rapid customer service turnaround in answering a support question |
More than 24 hours wait time for answering a support question |
|
Customer Service |
Solving a problem - and adding a bonus as a “we’re sorry.” |
Lack of knowledge or unsupportive CSR |
|
Fax |
Completion of a transaction |
Unsolicited offer from a company you know |
Table 21-2: Examples of good and bad interactions via different channels
These are simply examples. What I’m sure is that as you read them, you were able to attach a real life experience either specifically or that more generic, slightly ethereal feeling that you know what I mean, but you can’t pinpoint it specifically.
But “good” or “bad” can be attached to interactions only if there was an expectation of how that interaction was going to turn out. If it met or exceeded the expectation - voilà - good. If it fell below the expectation - oi vey - bad.
Expectations
Then what is a customer “expectation?” One definition (Olson and Dover, 1979) says, “Customer expectations are pretrial beliefs about a product that serve as standards or reference points against which product performance is judged.” I don’t know about you, but that’s good enough for me.
There are at least six significant factors that customers incorporate when it comes to determining their expectations. What kind of result do I expect:
- Given my past history with this company - especially my last interaction
- Given what I’ve heard about this company - especially from my peers
- Given what I expect of the industry this company is in (e.g. airlines)
- Given what that kind of interaction, in my experience, typically results in.
- Given ordinary standards of human behavior when it comes to interactions
- Given anything that might have happened to me the day (or so) that I’m interacting with you that could affect how I’m thinking about things (random and uncontrollable)
Each of them, and, usually, all of them, has an effect on what the customer thinks the outcome is going to be.
Weight
But not all expected outcomes and their actual results are the same. What makes understanding the customer’s thinking even more difficult is that each expectation and how well or poorly it is met has a different importance in the eye of the particular customer.
But you already know that, don’t you?
For example, I have to assume that most of you reading this have used review sites like Yelp to find a restaurant that you might want to eat at or Epinions to see about a camera or Amazon for the book reviews. When you go to the review, you use the ratings - say, 1 to 5 stars to filter how you want to read the reviews. Maybe you want to only read the bad reviews, not the good ones, so you can see how bad the negatives are on something that you really want to buy. Or maybe you read all of them. What I think most of you don’t do is to aggregate the stars and make your decisions based on the number of stars that a product has. Instead, you actually read the reviews. What you then do is to say, as you read them, “oh, that reviewer says the delivery was a bad issue, but that doesn’t matter to me, but they loved the look of the product, which matters to me a lot” OR “that reviewer says that they think the duck at the restaurant is too dry but that the tilapia is to die for.” If you like duck, you tend to not go, if you like fish you tend to go - because you are weighing what is important to you - and not. But note something, “if” is a key word here. Fish or duck? That will determine something based on a review that might be 4/5 stars.
Want to check how you weigh further? Go back to the beginning of the chapter and read the descriptions from the review sites. What’s important to you in each of the reviews? Was it what was important to one of the reviewers and not the other - or a compilation of both - or neither met your standard for importance?
You get the picture now?
This is a major facet of what can be uncovered when you do customer experience mapping.
May 29th, 2009
Excerpt: Marketing 2.0 From CRM at the Speed of Light 4th Edition
I’m going to try something out here. I am ready to cringe as the tomatoes and old iPods are thrown at me, or the praise is showered on me…oh, wait, that’s someone dumping buckets of tar over my head. I’m providing an advance excerpt of Chapter 13 of CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th Edition, my new book coming out with McGraw-Hill in late October 2009. The chapter name is “Sales & Marketing: The Customer is the Right Subject.” I’m down to writing the last three chapters as of today and should be done with a bullocks to the wall effort by mid June.
But I want feedback and discussion on the ideas that I’m putting forth. That said, there are some caveats.
- This is completely raw. Unedited. Its a submitted chapter untouched by other than my human hands (and there is some question on whether or not I fit the category)
- This is a small part of what is the largest chapter in the book on sales and marketing 2.0 so there is some context issues here - though don’t let that stop you.
- This is a new area. But I think I’m right about the synthesizing of the material and the concepts I’m putting forth - though I’m not claiming tons of originality in the concepts. A couple of pounds maybe.
Have at me. Let me know what you think of the ideas, the writing, the works. For those of you unfamiliar with CRM at the Speed of Light, I’ll toot my own horn for a sec. It’s called the “Bible of the Industry” (though I insist on Old Testament because I’m Jewish). Its gone through 3 editions, sold quite a few copies, and is in 8 languages. This will be the 4th edition and it will be a combination of print (600 pages) and electronic content (another roughly 150 pages or so) and is a completely (from scratch) rewritten book. The foreword to this edition is written by Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com. It is due out in late October and is meant to be a reference for Social CRM/CRM 2.0 - I think the first of its kind. I hope the first of its kind. I pray the first of its kind. I am down on hands and knees the first of its kind.
In any case, that’s the background. Without further ado: the excerpt. PLEASE GIVE ME THE BENEFIT OF YOUR INSIGHTS AND ARGUMENTS. This chapter still can be edited and changed. If I use something you give me, you’ll get attribution in the book.
Have at it.
*******************************************************************************************************
Marketing uh, 2.0: New Mindset, New Tools
What I’m about to say may be obvious, but doing what I’m about to say just isn’t easy. In order for you to sell to someone, they have to care enough to know who you are, what you sell and see some reason to buy what you sell. They also have to see the reason that they should buy what you sell from you since they can probably get something similar from someone else.
That’s the essence of marketing - but to achieve that customer advocacy nirvana takes a lot . That “a lot” means a strategy, the use of tools and systems, and a completely new view of what marketing today is.
Listen Up! The New Competition is Attention
When you go to Whole Foods, you see heirloom tomatoes, regular red tomatoes, plum tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, locally grown tomatoes from a variety of different local farms, and organic versions of all of them. Which do you buy? Oh, you don’t shop at Whole Foods? Oh. Well, the point is that there are some twenty or thirty different varieties and types and sizes and farm-specific versions to choose from. If you’re confused about which to buy, you tend to the familiar. You buy regular or organic regular tomatoes. If you’re decorating a salad with something other than slices or chunks, you buy grape or cherry tomatoes. But if you’re making a sauce, you know it most likely calls for plum tomatoes - sometimes in another section of the store where you can get canned versions of the same. If you’re someone who supports local farmers as a principle - you get a locally grown version. If you’re decorating a salad you might buy heirloom tomatoes due to their riot of color.
In other words, your choices are specific to you and the person next to you buying the exact same tomatoes might be buying them for different reasons entirely.
Now, multiply that by some number that reflects the all the other vegetables calling out to you from the produce department - and then the fruits in the same area. If you’re not planning on buying tomatoes the rest of the produce might make you skip them entirely. There is so much to see and choose from, that the choices become bewildering.
The tendency when confronted with too much is inertia - to simply not make a choice. This creates a major problem for marketers, as we’ll see in just a moment.
The Attention “Economy”
If ten or eleven choices for tomatoes (or something) are blindingly difficult to decide about, imagine what it takes to do something when you’re being besieged by 3000 messages per day or roughly one million per year. That means via the Web, direct mail, on television, when you see a billboard or an ad in a store or in a newspaper or magazine and in a video game.
Think that you’re immune to it as a consumer? Here’s test that I do when I speak and the subject of capturing just the attention of someone comes up. I ask the crowd (and you can ask yourself):
- How many of you get direct mail? (Of course, everyone raises his or her hands)
- How many of you read all the direct mail you get? (Almost no one raises his or her hands)
- How many just throw out most of or all of the ads? (Almost everyone raises his or her hands)
I have no doubt that the vast majority of you follow the crowd when it comes to answering those three questions. If you don’t, you win a prize. Let me know your address and I’ll put it in the mail. Just remember, don’t throw it out when you get it.
As marketing guru Seth Godin put it in an interview with William C. Taylor of Fast Company as far back as 1998:
“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention. Thirty years ago, people gave you their attention if you simply asked for it. You’d interrupt their TV program, and they’d listen to what you had to say. You’d put a billboard on the highway, and they’d look at it. That’s not true anymore. This year, the average consumer will see or hear 1 million marketing messages - that’s almost 3,000 per day. No human being can pay attention to 3,000 messages every day.”
This is called, as you might be able to guess, interruption marketing - your attention is captured because your routine activity is interrupted. But with 1 million messages a year, this doesn’t work the way it did in the 1960s. You do what I said above - you just zone out.
This isn’t just some construct that is there to move things in this book forward a bit. While you might think that your business competes with other companies who put out like products and provide like services, the stark reality is that you compete with every single message being thrown at your prospective customers. You can’t even start a smart legitimate marketing campaign aimed at lead generation without capturing the attention of your prospects first.
This is a recognized problem. Howard Handler, the Chief Marketing Officer of Virgin Mobile USA, in 2008, understood it: “To cut through with a message or a brand or a piece of content is more challenging than ever.”
The underlying idea in Handler’s comment is that because the amount of attention a consumer can give a product or service or company or idea is finite and increasingly more difficult due to both bad information like spam and rich information sources available everywhere, the competition for that attention is increasing and attention is becoming a commodity.
Customers are so tired of being bombarded (aren’t you?) with this constant barrage of messages that they simply zone out and don’t want to give companies that they might otherwise be interested in their time or consideration. What they actually want and are beginning to accomplish is control over what messages they consider “taking” and what brands they allow into their homes. Attention is given so little at this time that it’s been commoditized by its scarcity.
Evidence of this commoditization of attention is pretty easy to find. It shows in the compensation that is often given if you’ll just watch something. For example, when you watch a TV show that you’ve had queued in Hulu, the Web based service that’s either owned by NBC, Disney and News Corp. or aliens who look like Alec Baldwin and Dennis Leary, you will often get a choice of commercials that run at regular interludes through the web broadcast or seeing a single one minute commercial at the top of the show. For your attention to the commercial in the form that you want, you are being compensated by being allowed to watch the show for free. This is a very different model than Apple’s iTunes which sells the content commercial free for between $1.99 and $2.99 per episode. What the Hulu model is doing is buying your attention. They know your name through the registration on the site, but they recognize that having your name and you watching a commercial doesn’t mean that you’re a qualified lead. It means you gave them consideration. Period.
Compensation for attention is something that is not only being considered, but has to be considered. The rather old-fashioned idea of “pay them for their time” is becoming “pay them for their attention.” So there are companies who will give you free things e.g. cell phone minutes, ad free music, etc. if you view their ads for x time frame. There is a model for online revenue sharing that even Microsoft is looking into. There is a service called “ScooptTM Words” that operates as a “blogger agent” that will get companies to buy what bloggers are saying for commercial use and then split the revenue stream, which sounds kind of nice for bloggers, but not exactly in the spirit of the blogosphere.
The music industry has had an ongoing discussion which very well may go nowhere that is also around attention compensation but was driven by music piracy. The idea would be that rather than trying to prosecute or scare or harass someone who downloads a music file, usually MP3, illegally, give them the music in return for them viewing a 30 or 60 second ad. Once the ad has been completely viewed, they get the music.
While that may never go anywhere, it points to how serious the competition for attention really is.
There are nascent metrics to measure the attention too. They’re called engagement ratings and they’re primarily focused around TV at the moment. Not exactly a big surprise. They’re being used to figure out what programs to advertise on. Also not a big surprise - and sadly typical of the TV world - new metrics, old reasons.
Engagement ratings are the equivalent of “stickiness” on a website. It’s not just whether you have a large audience; it’s whether that audience is willing to continue to lavish its attention on you and your advertisers
Myers’ Emotional Connections© research in 2007 showed that Fox News Channel topped the “viewer engagement ratings” with positive engagement ratings in four categories by 80 percent of its viewers. But it dropped to 21st place and 30 percent (for two categories) when it came to advertising engagement. What this can be interpreted to mean is that the audience was riveted to Bill O’Reilly and made a sandwich during the ads. I’d be the other way around.
Despite the particulars here, what’s important about the Myers work is that they’re doing some of the first research and measurement of level of attention and what it takes to gain that attention - which precedes even lead generation.
But attention-getting can go overboard and does especially when devotees of what is called the “attention economy” actually call attention capture the new currency - and they mean that literally. Meaning, somehow, providing attention will substitute for your national currency.
Lead generation from the marketing side comes when you have gained and kept the attention of your potential customers - but I wouldn’t go overboard with this either.
Hard Times for Tradition
Marketing never gets respect (We miss you, Rodney Dangerfield). Never ever. Never ever ever. Know why? Because marketing is viewed by the company as an expenditure that has immediate tangible return. Marketers are by the customer as a nuisance. They are viewed by people like me as a department that presumes for the customer and doesn’t really know what the customer is actually thinking, which to add to their problems, is often true.
It’s even truer now because the stakes are higher, the expectations and demands of the customer have increased and their hunger for being contacted in multiple ways - the ones of their own choosing - is greater than ever.
But that doesn’t negate the value of traditional marketing - especially when it’s used in combination with new marketing approaches. For example, the conversation rates in email marketing are still between 2 and 5 percent. Good numbers there. A study in May 2009 done by internet marketing small business legend, Hubspot, took a look at the effectiveness of traditional press releases as opposed to social media press releases found that the traditional media releases were considerably more effective in syndicating. The typical ratio was about 5:4 in favor of the traditional press release when it came to the number of places it was syndicated. The only time the ratio was favorable to the social media releases were with online properties. Not exactly a surprise. But what that indicates is that you shouldn’t stick with a single kind of release or a single approach. Do what makes sense for the location, channel and people you’re trying to reach. Social media marketing, search engine marketing and the like are becoming the centerpiece of many organizations marketing efforts.
If I had to speculate (or maybe pontificate is the right word here), marketing is up for the most comprehensive and dramatic overhaul of any of the three traditional pillars of CRM. Marketing professionals are aware of this and, those that aren’t panicking are remodeling the way they do what they do
I’m only here to help. I come to praise Caesar not to bury him.
If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe this statement from someone with a lot of street cred on what constitutes successful contemporary marketing:
“Ultimately, successful marketing results,” Anil Dash, SixApart’s Chief Evangelist who you met in Chapter 10 says, “Lead to “people relating to brands as culture. They will be part of a cultural, emotional and entertainment bubble.”
You KNOW he’s right, don’t you? So remember, traditional isn’t dead, but the old marketing logic is.
In addition to being the author of the best-selling "CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century," Paul Greenberg is President of The 56 Group, LLC, a customer strategy consulting firm, focused on cutting edge CRM strategic services and a founding partner of the CRM training company, BPT Partners, LLC. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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