Happy Halloween from 1to1 Media! Every year we celebrate by dressing up as part of a theme. This year we are dressed as 1970s and 1980s TV characters (link to pictures below).
I see from our 1to1 Weekly story that AOL has stepped up its privacy efforts. Hey, I can be as cynical as the next former AOL customer, but it’s more than hot air as far as I can see. I think AOL CEO Jon Miller is a good man who understands the value of a brand. He’s taken AOL much farther than it really had any business going by leaning on the brand. It has had its business model taken away more times than I’ve taken away my six-year old’s Pokemon cards. That’s at least ten times over the past seven days. AOL’s brand can not afford any further erosion through security breaches. But one thing I will never give Miller or AOL any credit for is the negative option/free dial up offers that it still has out there. While it’s still doing that, AOL can never be customer-centric.
Earlier this week I attended Oracle’s Open World conference, along with about 41,000 customers and partners. The keynote speakers were a heady group of high-tech players, including Oracle President Charles Phillips, Dell Chairman Michael Dell, Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, and Cisco President and CEO John Chambers. And, of course, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison – but I was off to Vegas for Better Management Live, so missed his presentation. Each took a different approach to their presentations.
Company executives have gathered customer intelligence from multiple sources for ages: demographic data, survey feedback, and the like have long been mainstays for marketers. But today it is becoming increasingly important to not only look at that data holistically, but also to look further for that insight. Blogs, online communities, contact center interactions, and more reveal information on customers' feelings -- good and bad -- about your products, service, customer experience, staff, and brand image. Mining those channels is a start, but are not enough.
The staff at 1to1 Magazine has been hearing a lot of buzz from readers about Crutchfield’s http://www.crutchfield.com/S-nKhQJuStEw7/ excellent customer service. Last week, J.D. Power and Associates recognized the audio and car accessory call center operation for customer satisfaction excellence under its Certified Call Center Program.
To attain certification, a contact center must meet J.D. Power and Associate’s cross-industry customer satisfaction criteria. This includes evaluation of courtesy, knowledge, concern for the customer, usefulness of the information provided, convenience of operating hours, ease of reaching a representative, and timely resolution.
Email is entering into a renaissance as a business tool, but with new opportunities bring new challenges. It's not all about deliverability and the volume of the email list anymore. Creative and qualitative issues now run the show. Bill Nussey, Silverpop CEO, explained that click rates and retention success come down to a creative message presented in a way customers want to receive it.
I have to admit when you see Business Week, Harvard Business Review, Knowledge @ Wharton and a slew of other respected business publications devoting entire issues to China and Chinese consumers, you start to ask yourself: "When do we get a shot at this?"
This week's 1to1 Weekly provides that shot, finally. It's a bit of an underrated facet of the Chinese consumer tiger. That facet is customer loyalty. In the US and EU we tend to think we've invented loyalty and we do all the cool thinking about it. Turns out we don't. The authors of the study we highlight this week are from Peking University and the National University of Singapore. That sound you just heard was the sigh from every CEO that has considered the fact that the millions of consumers in the Pacific Rim and China could ever be loyal. Can you imagine that? In China, the thought leaders are on the case. Their conclusion is that delayed reward is the key to effective loyalty programs. This is a very Eastern concept. In the Western economies we want immediate gratification. But maybe what we want in the West is not as universal as we thought.
In the October issue of “Treasury & Risk” (before you ask - my UBS broker sent it to me, thinking I would be interested in it, and she was right) the cover article urges CFO’s to pay more attention to customer satisfaction and service, because customer satisfaction is a key to long-term success. One metric the article considers at length is Reichheld’s NPS, or “Net Promoter Score,” which most of you already know boils down to the difference between the percentage of customers likely to recommend you to a friend or colleague, and the percentage likely to denigrate you. The advantage of NPS is also its disadvantage – it is a single number, based a single survey question ("On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us..."). As Reichheld says in the article, everyone knows “customer satisfaction is a key component of value. They just don’t have a good way of measuring it.” Until NPS, of course, which he maintains, with good reason, is an excellent and well-documented leading indicator of competitive marketing success.
Continue reading "CFOs and CMOs - Maybe we can help each other?" »
I've been blogging sporadically about the information I gathered at the Gartner CRM Summit over the course of the past few weeks because there was so much meat at the event. I filled nearly an entire notepad with data, predictions, and insight gathered at the event that I've been dutifully transcribing since my return from Chicago. Here are some of the highlights of the sessions and one-on-one meetings I enjoyed while at the conference.
During the DMA 2006 conference in San Francisco, John Greco, president and CEO, of the Direct Marketing Association, called for widespread use of something he’s coined the Three R’s: Results, Responsibility, and Relevance. He said they represent a delicate balance in the power of direct marketing. “Our goal is to build a bridge of trust with consumers,” he told the crowd.
But building that trust may be more challenging than we think. Some marketers at the DMA told me about the pressures and barriers that they and their clients face every day.
In some ways the recent news that Tower Records was finally shutting its doors was not surprising. The record and video businesses have undergone such radical disruptions over the past two years that its survival as a brick-and-mortar operation was dicey at best. I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of entertainment retailing, but I do see some interesting customer strategy trends that have been put in the spotlight by the news at Tower.
The first is the disturbing lack of difference that employee expertise and customer experience played in Tower’s business. Yes, it’s true that digital distribution made any physical music store a different experience. But at Tower employees were known for knowledge. They were hired for their expertise in a certain area of music or video. The guy who worked the jazz department at Tower Records on Broadway in New York actually knew a lot about jazz. The woman who worked the classical department in Lincoln Center could recommend the best of new releases or a primer for new opera fans. Tower was far ahead of any other retailer in the entertainment business. WalMart, Circuit City and Best Buy still sell CDs. But they compete on price, not selection or employee skills. Could Tower have made it if it approached the business through smaller stores? Could it have tied its online and offline operations together? Or did it simply not see the truck called iTunes that was speeding down the street?
Virgin Records was originally going to be called Slipped Disc Records. "Can you imagine Slipped Disc Airlines?" CEO Sir Richard Branson joked during yesterday's keynote at the DMA Conference. No one doubts that he has transformed the company into a blockbuster superbrand, but many had their doubts as he entered new and completely different markets. What was he thinking?
Continue reading "Branson Ties Employees to Virgin's Success" »
Saying you’re not in favor of protecting customer data and it’s a bit like saying you don’t like mom, apple pie or ROI. Everybody loves these things, but the question as raised in our 1to1 Weekly story, is how far is a company willing to go to protect it? I think there’s more to the technology end here than most executives want to know about. Personally, I don’t get too excited about encryption and kill pills. I do look at data protection and overall enterprise security as one of those fundamental practices that a company has to learn and spread throughout its culture. In football terms, it's the blocking and tackling a team needs to master before it can score touchdowns. If you don't you end up in the headlines for the wrong reasons.
Some people who can’t get their digital camera to work solve their problem by throwing it away rather than even going back to the store or calling the 800 number, according to research firm TARP Worldwide. TARP calls this trained hopelessness.
In recent conversations with Purdue University’s Mike Trotter and NetBank’s Art Hall, both used the term business karaoke -- referring to companies that talk about being customer centric but don’t actually follow through with customer-focused actions.
I thought these were fairly cutting yet descriptive terms, and thought readers of our 1to1 Weekly e-newsletter might have their own “favorites.” So I asked. Here are a few; some serious, some with a hint of, shall we say, sarcastic humor.
It's a bit of a dangerous time for marketers. Jim Schroer points that out in our debut issue of The Marketing Xfactor. Fact-based management, the science of marketing, has progressed to a point at which we can know almost anything about customers, if we want to. We can even try to predict customer reaction to a marketing campaign. But where risky business is concerned, we need some gray area. Art needs to be reintroduced into the art + science = marketing equation. Needs and values for important customer groups must be explored. But the best ideas just might come from tapping into the emotions that can't be measured. I'm not a big fan of shocking consumers with creative executions. But I am a big fan of using branding to get customers to aspire to more. And that's risky. But it can work. Coach does it without TV ads. BMW does it through the customer experience. Tesco does it through a loyalty program. These things may seem safe and obvious, but to take a risk on strategies that break from tradition is the sweet spot for marketing.
Customer-centric strategy will grow a company's bottom line, but maybe not as fast as Wall Street wants it to. I see a clear dichotomy developing in profit taking. The old school thinking says develop customer leverage, not customer centricity. Go no further than the gas station for examples. Anybody thinking about the customer as an asset at ExxonMobil? New school thinking says a company needs to develop new products and profit opportunities that grow organically. The ideas are formed with the long-term customer experience in mind. Say what you want about the facist tendencies of Google, but they grow with customers at the center. Same thing goes for Microsoft, UPS, Apple, GE and Nissan, among others. The only factor working against new school profits is the old school "seize the quarter" attitude that Wall Street analysts continue to pressure businesses with.
Taking care of customers takes care of the bottom line. That's the takeaway from this year's Gartner CRM Excellence Awards. BNSF Railway took top honors in the Excellence in Enterprise CRM category with a customer strategy that contributed to 41 percent revenue growth. Uniprise won the Excellence in Sales, Marketing or Customer Service category for its customer care initiative, which resulted in a reduction in average handle time in the range of 18 to 21 percent and an increase customer retention and satisfaction that have boosted the bottom line.
From the “technology so cool it’s scary” department comes this news: Google researchers have worked out a kind of software application that will allow the company to synchronize what a Web user is seeing on the computer screen with what he or she is watching simultaneously on television!
It's National Customer Service Week and companies everywhere are saying "thanks" to their contact center agents for all their hard work throughout the year. But based on the findings of a online recent survey conducted by Witness Systems in celebration of National Customer Service Week, thanks may not be enough. It seems that what's also needed is giving agents the tools, training, information, and authority to resolve issues during the first call and deliver a better customer experience.
“The 4 Ps don’t mean anything anymore when it comes to creating a business model,” Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, said during his keynote at the recent Gartner CRM Summit. He cited Threadless T-shirts (threadless.com) as an example: People submit T-shirt designs, site visitors vote on them, the winners go on sales on the site.
“We no longer live in the business ecosystem, we live in a customer ecosystem,” Greenberg said. “So you have to provide value and values to customers.”
Workforce optimization provider Witness Systems announced yesterday that it acquired Demos Solutions Consulting and Exametric, two resource planning solutions providers to the financial services industry. I spoke on the phone to Ryan Hollenbeck, Witness Systems’ vice president of corporate marketing, who said this move represents a shift to relationship banking for all banks.
A new academic field called neuroeconomics involves the study of how people make economic decisions in ways that are not always rational. It is a field that combines neuroscience, psychology, and economics. I just came across a bit of learning from this field that has important implications for how people make trade-offs between short-term and long-term benefits, and I want to share it with you. I warn you now, however, that I’m sharing this because I think it’s interesting, not because there’s much we can do about it, at least not yet. If anyone has any ideas about how this bit of learning might change your policy or your perspective on business, I’d be interested in hearing that, too.
Continue reading "Short-Term and Long-Term Decisions and Your Brain" »
Lots of companies try to learn about their customers. That's a great idea, but there are many missed opportunities if companies focus on the wrong customer groups or ask the wrong kinds of questions. Taddy Hall, chief strategy officer of the Advertising Research Foundation, says many marketers are "following the herd off the cliff" by segmenting customers into worthless groups.
I find this whole intrigue about CMO tenure a bit irrelevant. Our story in 1to1 Weekly points out some reasons that the short shelf life of this relatively new C-level position is important, but I hear too much at conferences and in talking to marketing executives about the length of that tenure. CMOs will be effective and employed as long as they create customer value. That’s the bottom line.
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