Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Investing In Customers, Listening, and Loyalty.
Umair (no need for a second name, you know, a bit like Madonna), brings our attention back to the topic of brands, and brand building. The key question, IMHO, is "how can we meaningfully invest in our customers"? This is a very deep question. This question, in turn, is framed by the Purpose question, what are we about as a company? Umair gives the example of Google, and talks about how it is driven to "make the world a better place". I think that this goes fundamentally to the issue of developing products and services that address real substantive societal issues, not corporate ones. A key take away from the posting for me was that Nike was moving from advertising spend, to investing in customers services like work out advice, sports events, local sports competitions, communities etc.
In another post, Bruce Tempkin of Customer Experience Matters points out some metrics relating to customer loyalty and great customer experience. It's worth a look over just to re-iterate that Great experience has a much higher impact on loyalty that Good experience. Perhaps Great Experience will morph into Authentic experience, i.e. a sense that you are interacting with real people, that can be like your best neighbour, you know, the one that offers to cut your lawn when you are on holiday, so your house doesn't look neglected.
At VoiceSage we had our own mantra's that were based on "being fair" and "being different". We wanted to only charge for real, measurable benefits, that you could get quickly, and with no upfront investment. We didn't want integration costs, we didn't want hidden charges. We wanted simplicity, ease of use, flexibility. I think we've demonstrated this capability to our client base now. But I wonder what lessons we could draw from Umair's comments about Apple and Google? Its worth thinking about.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The Plastic Revolution
Paul Kedrosky points us towards an article on the global growth of credit cards. Last week, another newspaper pointed out that UK indebtedness is actually higher than US indebtedness on the level of the individual.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Sometimes you have to take functionality away to get breakthrough ideas....
Take away Garfield from the frames and you get the story of a really disturbed young man. This is going to be a huge hit on the web, but (and without forcing the point), it shows that by focusing on simplicity, and taking functionality, roles, etc. you can make a service that is so easy to use that it is hyper-simple. Also one of the www.springwise.com trends.
Friday, March 14, 2008
bear sterns .
Bear sterns go into receivership ? Need to be bailed out ? Asset backed securities a huge risk factor in overall env. What to do ? No joking , get in control of your credit process, and steamline cash and payments so you don't get credit crunched. Be in no doubt, this is serious stuff.
James Whatley On Customer Expectations of GREAT Customer Service.
Oh dear. Mr. James Whatley, esteemed mobile technology blogger, goes drops his Vodafone Nokia N95, which he loves, dearly, and calls Vodafone to get his fix (literally, the man loves his N95). So rather than replay the incident, why don't you just drop over here and have a read.
Back? I didn't think so, but I will go on with a little Friday Quiz anyway:
- James was transferred to another agent because it was felt that his claim was insurance related: was this good practice? (Yes, I know they are another company, but think about it, was it good practice?)
- James was so infuriated with the Insurance Agent giggling (I jest not) at him when introducting herself and the company, that he hung up, and rang back (Given that the company deals with Insurance claims, I think it's pretty obvious that a lot of people are going to be wound up a bit emotionally when they ring); so, how can an agent "Get Away" with this? (cheat sheet: culture)
- James Rang back to get a different agent. Had to give all his information again. Are their ways around this (cheat sheet: his phone number)Oh and to save time, in other calls, nobody knew what phone he had, his status as a customer, or pretty much anything else about him.
- James said he dropped the phone, and this might have something to do with why its not working now. The Agent asked "Did it stop right after you dropped it"? To which he replied, No, but I think it probably has something to do with it. Stunningly, she says that "If the accident can't be directly linked to the phone not working, there and then, it becomes a warrantee issue". This is it. UNFAIR. You've just told me the expensive insurance I've taken out is useless, and that I have to go back to Telecom service provider, where the "device" warrantee is applicable. WOW. Probably will never take out a financial product with a Telecom provider again, hey James?
- While "transferring him back to the Vodafone customer service", they dropped him.
- So James re-phones the Telecoms company (call 4 or 5 now). They say, great fine. Bring it in to the store. JAMES IS TELEPHONE AND INTERNET GUY he never goes to the store (oops, didn't keep tabs of his channel interaction patterns?) Actually, he hates going to the store, it fills him with feelings of dread.
- James is utterly utterly angry. You've made him feel fraudulent, betrayed, and now very very angry. UNREASONABLY SO. (after all, Vodafone are not the insurer, they didn't expect James to go throwing his phone around, they've been good to him before).
BUT: he Admits that he got great great service from Vodafone before, he LOVES his N95, probably spends a packet on his packets.
SO: one truly awful experience, fuelled by a mixture of bad practice and lack of customer experience focus, leads to one heavy user leaving, and one major online publication carrying the story, and probably hundreds of bloggers commenting. I am not saying "things like this don't happen all the time in companies". What I am saying is that how you deal with them is now part of your customer service because it will be broadcast.
Peak Experience: James remembers the trough of his disappointment and the peak of his anger. It is his overwhelming memory of his entire relationship, over a few years, with Vodafone. Now compare that with yesterday's post about Russell's experience with returning an iPhone.
The Difference is CULTURE in the Service Providers:
The Difference is THE EXPECTATION of GREAT, not Good Service:
The Difference is APPLE Want You To JOIN, Vodafone Wanted You To BUY:
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Thursday, March 13, 2008
Russell Drops iPhone, Then Adopts iPhone !
Russell Beattie has a problem with iPhone, because he dropped it. Goes to the store, the lovely lady says "no problem, I'll replace that". Russell dumb struck. Great Support for what, maximum cost of $200. Russell's impact on the mobile developer community, $2m, I'd say.
I must say I am seriously looking at an iPhone, but 3G is kind of essential to me.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Proactive and Personal
DestinationCRM's Editor has a good post this morning.
The upshot is the assertion that even as people and companies move online, the interaction with the call centre will become even more important in developing your real brand identity. Quoting Genesys (a call centre solution provider), they propose 4 key components of delivering great customer experience in the contact centre:
Convenience, Competency, Personalization, and Proactivity.
He explain that there are nine ways to fulfil these requirements:
* conduct real-time satisfaction surveys;
* implement a customer front door;
* increase first-contact resolution;
* provide a consistent multichannel experience;
* maximize resource availability;
* communicate proactively;
* manage callbacks effectively;
* provide personalized services; and
* apply innovative communication.
The article goes on to say that "While many of these strategies may seem like common sense for the contact centre, two in particular -- communicating proactively and providing personalized services are often overlooked because of poor implementation". Proactivity in the context of the article refers to "popping information" so that the customer doesn't have to volunteer it, or repeat it. But there is no reason at all why it would not also apply to "outbound Interactive Voice Messaging".
The additional wisdom I would look for in this kind of an article is to give practitioners some kind of a "map of concerns" beginning with short sharp interventions, while at the same time, developing a view on how to progress to more strategic approaches such as "building a data strategy", "actionable information", and "customer interaction context". The number one concern of CEO's to IT directors is "fast implementation" of the projects. Hosted players enable you to get quick, sharp projects going, prove the value and then fine tune or integrate.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Stop Mortgage Payment Defaults
From NYTimes Default rates are going up. Interestingly, the rate is higher for those moving from a fixed rate to a variable rate, one would suppose that people are moving from that early "promotional rate", to the "adjusted rate". This is what we call a context trigger. I know your postal code, I know you are on this threshold, you should get a call, and offers should be made to adjust payment schedules to stop defaulting before it begins.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
If Interactions Were Free...
If interactions with, and between customers were free (and frictionless) what effect would this have on the value of brands? Looks like we may find out soon. Umair (now over on the HBS blog), is taking the fact that brands are "heuristics", i.e. short cuts, to evaluation. Brands, and prices, indicate value, belonging and a range of other elements. People can very quickly see, and share, if brands (information) lives up to its promise.
This happily coincides with Conversations over on VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) with Doc Searls around the role of pricing in communicating within markets. In commercial B2B markets, price is also an "indicator of value". But is it a good one?
Customers that buy your product promise, will test it, video it, and publish it to their friends. If your not thinking about how you can build "conversations, and experiences" into your "product or service", you have little chance of giving a customer a brand experience.
A price is just a message around the value encapsulated. Not understanding how the customer got here, by what route, and with what context, is a sure way to lose them on price. By understanding what the customer truly values you have to understand the process by which they come to make a decision, and thus what they are seeking to value. You may actually end up being able to charge more for your service.
Final Point: an old McKinsey paper said that if your marketing guy calls your product a commodity, fire them. No product is a commodity to ALL its customers. Even for rolled steel, some customers will value consistency in product or delivery, others in pricing, others in speed of cycle time. The challenge is to capture more and more data so you can generate the opportunity for insights around what customers actually value in their interaction with your company.
So, if Interaction was free, what would people actually value, what is actually scarce? ah-hum. Yes. Attention.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Micro-Channel: CommuterFeeds
Know someone that takes the same route to work as you do? Try CommuterFeed powered by Twitter. (hat-tip RWW)
This might be a "mirco-channel" with only 10 people in it, and only updated twice a day. But it is a channel, and people are going to create more and more of these things. They will be called "comment channels", "IM Sessions", etc. etc. They will not be launched by your IT department, they will be Enterprise Edge Services (Seriously thinking of patenting that phrase:)
Technology Populism or Enterprise Edge?
Edge Enterprise: ReadWriteWeb has a piece today on the rise of "consumer-employee" adopted software as services and the strategic integrity of in-house IT technology stack.
So you want to find out if anyone knows someone working in Adobe, you check your LinkedIn or Facebook not your internal directory; you want to call long distance to the states and china you use skype, not your inhouse telephony system. Need to find out something in relation to your product, chances are you will consult a wiki not the official FAQ pages.
The RWW article says that maybe people would not feel the need to use these technologies if they had better training and understood the features of enterprise softwares a bit better. Instead of a hosted wiki use sharepoint, from Microsoft. MMmmm.
Perhaps its time to teach people "responsible adoption", or "how to understand potential implications" such as Data Privacy, Application Security, so they can make better decisions at their own level of the business. If circa 14% of your employees are early adopters perhaps you should be thinking more about how to harness the power of these collective experimenters.
VoiceSage has literally Dozens of examples where someone adopted the service to do something relatively simple like stock availability updates and then found a few other things in their immediate environment that could also benefit from pro-active communications. Doing moves you towards knowing. The faster you Get Doing the faster you learn what works and doesn't work. What we have found is that people that understand how to pilot early, and often, inevitably get the better results. The people that can spin a problem on its side, and look at it a different way (i.e. innovators), and then craft a meaningful test of benefits, are a key part of any innovation competence.
And that's the problem with lengthy cycles of adoption, learning, deployment and learning. It just takes too long to see what works.
One final spin of the wheel on this topic: Its called "environmental fit". Where your external environment exhibits constant change and unpredictability the "edges" of your company need to exhibit some "porousness" and "flexibility". This was traditionally termed "organicity".
And that's why inability to adopt, experiment and learn leads to lack of fitness at the edges of your company. I.e. the customer interface.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Google Talkback: Click-Cool :)
When Google bring out a new product, sometimes it sucks. This does not suck. Google Talkback enables you to put your TalkBack button on your blog or website. Since I have Google Talk already, and Google Talk on my Blackberry, it now means that as I change my mobile status, this will be reflected on my blogsite. Suddenly, I have very real mobile-internet presence. Now, before everyone goes APE (API) on me, I know that Twitter and Jaiku badges update my presence from my mobile all the time. Where Google Talk is different is that Talk is Integrated with Mail, and Mail is being sold instead of MS Exchange Server. So, how long before I can have a very low cost domain hosting, email hosting, and click to call service that can give me great stats on where my customers are coming from and who they are talking to? When Grand Central eventually enters the mix, well what can I say: Fred Wilson is already buying stock.
Monday, February 25, 2008
The Future Of Credit Scoring ?
Well, I have to hand it to Jim Bruene over at NetBanker, todays roundup of disruptive credit scoring services is a show stopper. You should stop over and have a look.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Ah, Forget to Pay Your Credit Card Bill?
Paul Kedrosky (PK) posted a link to this study on credit card late payment penalties. The bottom line is that people who forget to pay their credit card bills on time, and become subject to the pain of late payment fees, initially change their behaviour, but over time forget the effects of that late payment fee at a rage of 10% per month!. If you have to pay a late payment fee this month you are not very likely to forget to pay your bill next month. BUT: in 10 months time you will be back to exactly the same behaviour pattern as you were exhibiting a before any fee was applied to you.
Late Fees Do Not Change Inherent Customer Behaviour, but they do adjust it in the short term. It might be a very useful experiment to pattern a series of Reminders to such late paying customers, in two or three month cycles to remind them that they paid a fee before, and to avoid doing so again they might want to take actions x, y, and z. With an interim messaging strategy it might be possible to stretch out the reinforcement effects of the original late fee, without damaging the customer relationship by applying another late payment fee, thus encouraging potential switching behaviour.
Friday, February 08, 2008
Just Three Points on A Friday
Confused of Calcutta has such a nice saying that I thought I'd bring it to you:
" First Law of Benchmarks: If gains are so low that you need benchmarks to prove the existence of the gains, they’re probably not worth having in the first place".
GetSatisfaction guys bring out a Full API (soon!). Marshall from ReadWriteWeb covers them here. I think these guys are going to radically change how customers manage their reputation: think "epinions for companies". These guys will end up with widgets on your home page publishing out to your audience the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Mick Butcher over on Techcrunchuk has a nice piece that points out that not only are advertising only models in serious danger, but that what is needed is better ad targeting, and measures other than click through rates. Mobile phones and social newtworks might be better ways of collecting data at higher levels of granularity.
The take away? Be better at collecting data and know how you can use that data to deliver better interactions with your customer base. How you interact with your customers, and well you manage those interactions, will be published. It will be published on Twitter, Jaiku, blog feeds, it will turn up on Techcunch. So get in front of the problem.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Letting People Innovate with Telecommunications
Helsingin Sanomat via Gizmodo
Finnish public toilet opens when you send it a Text Message. Why? Because then we know your phone number if you vandalise this toilet. Brilliant. Oh but what if I am on pre-paid etc. etc. Yes, but there might be some psychology at work here as well. Would you "mindfully" weigh up the options of the likelihood of being caught vandalising with your pre-paid phone number, or would you just move on? I think you'd just move on.
Leaving Voice Messages
Conversationware makes a great point today about leaving voicemail. Matt makes the point that if you think about it before hand, write a few notes down, you can leave a message that has some real impact. He follows up by saying "I hate it when people leave a message that just says, Call me". Exactly, it says "hey guess what, my time is more valuable than yours, so why don't you waste more of your time ringing me back, trying to find me, and then finding out what I wanted to talk to you about in the first place.
So, I have to agree with you there Matt. Here are a few rules I picked up a while ago about leaving good voicemail:
- Start by saying who you are (no, I don't recognise your voice!)
- Tell me what the message is in relation to (need to organise a meeting time)
- Tell me what I am expected to do (decide, ring someone, suggest)
One of the things VoiceSage does really well is to automatically detect whether you are about to leave a message with a live person or a machine. If you are getting through to a machine, we recommend that you leave a different message, structured as per points above. You don't have to leave a "teaser", leave a valuable message. If you are wondering how you might measure the effectiveness of your message, leave a different contact number or email address for the return enquiry. That way, you can track would called you back. Simple.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Billing, Billed, Bill: You Have To Get It Right.
Only yesterday I was speaking with an Analyst saying you know, Telco billing isn't easy to do. We were talking about how used strategically, the ability to create unique tariff structures, particularised the needs of each company, and person, creates powerful competitive advantages. We were building the metaphor out into Software-as-Service examples, seeing how some providers were emerging to provide this layer to other software-as-services on the Salesforce.com platform. Well, Pat Phelan at MaxRoam bounced me over an email to give me an update on their progress and what was the first thing on the agenda, yip, Live Billing. Being able to see what you are spending, in real time, is a real comfort. In other posts I've talked about the importance of "getting the bill right", and more importantly "the check out". Studies by McKinsey show that its the variability in the telecoms bill that causes customers to look around for other providers, and my guess is that people who made a lot of calls on their Christmas holidays are looking around. Maybe they should check out MAXroam at their nearest Maplin?
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