One of our 1to1 Customer Champions, Pete Winemiller, has this great thing his does to motivate his staff to improve their performance for each ensuing basketball season. Winemiller is the vice president of guest relations for the NBA’s Seattle SuperSonics and the WNBA’s Seattle Storm. Here’s what Winemiller asks his staff to do:
For over a month we’ve been hearing about how retail is struggling this holiday season and sales are lower than normal. The reports are still coming out with the numbers to show whether there really was a huge drop-off from last year (I’m sure it’s something we’ll be covering extensively for the next few weeks), but I have my own theory why the outlook has seemed negative when it may not be.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year... or is it?
In an effort to help restore the shortfall in sales projected by The International Council of Shopping Centers that said holiday spending only increased 3.6 percent this season, many retailers opened doors earlier than usual today (before 9 a.m.) and all this week, and are offering deeper price cuts than last year.
But as shoppers rush in to make returns, redeem gift cards, and take advantage of stores' low prices and expanded hours, how is customer service prepared for this post-holiday rush?
Many stores boost staffing levels by hiring seasonal customer service that may not be receiving the deep customer-service training or incentives and bonusus that full-time employees receive throughout the year.
Consider this: According to a poll conducted earlier this month by America's Research Group, a consumer-behavior research firm, one in four shoppers said they walked out of a store because of poor customer service.
By bringing seasonal employees up to respectable customer service levels, retailers may avoid sending shoppers running for their doors this week.
Hopefully retailers this year are learning from holidays' past, applying that insight to the holidays' present, to bring increased profit and customers for the future.
Have any good or bad holiday customer service experiences that you'd like to share here?
Ah, the joys of the holiday season: a bevy of percent-off coupons, free shipping offers, and more sent directly to my inbox at a dizzying pace. And in case I forget about the offers at hand, there are all those handy follow-up emails reminding me that I have a limited time to take advantage of the fabulous offer I just received. Then there’s the ultimate reminder that I only have one day left—or else I’ll miss out. Until the next offer comes along, that is.
Continue reading "How Many Emails Does it Take to Make a Sale?" »
How close are we as a society to needing mobile addict anonymous programs? I’ve heard stories about “phantom vibrations” when people think their phone is ringing in their pocket when it isn’t, and statistics that say more than 1/3 of people are never more than an arm’s length away from their cell phone (even when asleep). I have to admit I fall into both groups, so when I read this story out of Korea it definitely caught my attention.
We all know that these days, friendly and accommodating in-store customer service is often hard to come by. How many times are we left combing the aisles for assistance or encountering rude clerks who can’t be bothered?
At Bed, Bath, & Beyond, though, that isn't the case. My experience there has been anything but exceptional, but lately it’s getting creepy. After getting married in October and registering for gifts there, I’ve spent some quality time in that store. That’s because Bed, Bath & Beyond is known for catering to wedding couples—the company devotes an entire area to wedding registries in its stores, provides a wedding registry consultant, and even offers customers coffee while they roam the stores scanning gift items.
Anyone else getting a lot of e-mails lately from merchants determined to lure you into their stores or onto their websites for BIG BIG HOLIDAY SAVINGS!!!! ? If you’re like me, you may find yourself confronted with an annual greeting from an obscure store you once did business with five years ago. Nobody wants to be inundated with come-ons, of course, but chances are if I haven’t bought anything from you since 2002, I’m not going to suddenly realize a pressing need for your wares.
While I now count on that experience as a bemusing bit of Yuletide tradition, however, there’s another one that I don’t particularly care for: cashing in on an offer, only to immediately be presented with an even better deal once the previous sale has been completed … and finding that I can’t apply the better deal to my just-completed purchase.
You’ve heard of Best Practices. If 1to1 ever starts a “Worst Practices” section, this has got to be near the top of the list.
It's a known fact -- Ford truck drivers hate Chevy people, and Chevy truck drivers hate Ford folks. Some people will only buy a Toyota or Honda, for example, even if other car companies have higher ratings or better prices. And in many cases, once you get a BMW or Mercedes, there's no other car for you.
Why do people love their cars so much? How can other car companies tap into that loyalty to improve their customer relationships?
Selling books is a hotly competitive business these days, with all of the major players and many of the local retailers creatively vying for customers. (Watch for an upcoming article about all the goings on in our January/February issue of 1to1 Magazine). We recently wrote an article in 1to1 Weekly on Borders' updated loyalty program, and then blogged on the topic of whether there's a reward in using reward programs.
Interestingly, the article prompted a note from reader Bob Lang on another one of Borders’ retention strategies: Borders TV.
If you’re in the market for a new computer, are you excited that you’ll get to try out Windows’ Vista operating system? If not, don’t worry you’re hardly alone. Lately those Mac/PC ads that Apple runs on television have focused on the fact that many people who did upgrade to Vista ran into big problems, and that the ones who didn’t upgrade are now scrambling to figure out how they can avoid doing so.
Two of the longest-running, family owned amusement parks in the country announced today that they will be bought by a European hedge fund.
Madrid-based Parques Reunidos, which owns 65 amusement, animal, and water parks in the U.S. and Europe, announced that it intends in March to complete its purchase of Kennywood Entertainment in Pittsburgh, PA, which operates 129-year-old Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh; and 161-year-old Lake Compounce in Bristol, CT.
Although the current owners insist that the sale shouldn’t spur cutbacks or corporate changes, long-time customers worry that the move doesn’t serve customers’ best interests. Companies like the British private equity firm Candover, which operates Parques Reunidos, are notorious for buying up investments, cutting the costs that may affect customers, and then selling at a higher profit.
What is God? Not the kind of question that one usually finds himself addressing in the office, and certainly not with coworkers, but with Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa all in the air at this time of year, thoughts about God are perhaps natural.
Is God an actual entity, or more of an abstraction of varying degrees of hypothetical reality? Is God, as John Lennon once put it, a concept by which we measure our pain? Is God dead, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it? (Nietzsche, of course, is dead. As is Lennon. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.)
According to the title of a forthcoming book by marketing CEO Mark Stevens, God is a Salesman (Center Street). By this, Stevens doesn’t mean God’s shuffling door to door with a samples case, or wearing a Santa Claus hat at the local Try-n-Save attempting to cajole you into buying a new refrigerator.
If your stylist left the salon to go into private practice, would you follow her? If your financial planner called and said he was moving to another company, would you stick with him? If that Ann Taylor employee who always helps you find the right outfit moved to Banana Republic, would you start shopping there? Chances are the answer is yes, and it's a scary proposition for companies who want to build loyalty, but don't want to take it too far.
A little customer acquisition never hurt anybody. Yet, you would think from the recent plethora of warnings (this blog included) about the importance of customer retention and the prohibitive costs of buying customers that acquisition is toxic. It's not.
Every month I get dozens of emails from companies offering sales, exclusive deals, and rewards. At least 90 percent of them I delete immediately, and judging from some of the campaign numbers I’ve seen writing about marketing, the fact that I open even 10 percent of them is high. Why do I ignore so many marketers’ messages? I think the bigger question is, Why do they keep sending me irrelevant information that I’m likely to ignore, rather than communicating to me based on my needs? I tried to address the latter question with “Will the Real Customer Please Stand Up?” in the most recent issue of 1to1 Magazine. To demonstrate how companies should look at customers, I provided a few facts about myself in the story:
Continue reading "Purchase Decisions Don’t Happen in a Vacuum" »
At SAP’s 5th annual Influencer Summit in Boston yesterday, the business software provider announced the launch of its next evolution CRM solution. With new capabilities, such as trade promotions management, business communications management, and pipeline performance management, SAP says the new release will give users easier access to information and the speed to go to market faster.
The release is significant in that the product was co-developed with the company’s customers and partners with a focus to solve real business problems. “It’s been a journey,” said Bill Wohl, vice president of global CRM at SAP.
That’s because, as Bob Stutz, senior vice president CRM global strategy and development, at SAP, explained, until a couple years ago, “Buying SAP CRM was like buying a dump truck full of Legos, dumping it into your front yard, and then needing an army of consultants to put it together.”
Stutz, who came to SAP in 2005 from Siebel, said he was disappointed when he first went through the company’s CRM product. And the customer feedback was brutal. Many told him, “It’s hard to use—it has a lot of good deep functionality—but very difficult to use.” That’s when he set out on a journey to work with the company and its customers to create a dynamic and easy-to-use solution.
Continue reading "SAP is on Track to Elevate CRM. But are Customers Ready?" »
Did you brave the stores this weekend in search of the perfect holiday gift? Did you go online? Chances are you did both. I did. Personally, I've noticed more of an integration between the offline and online experience this year compared to last. For example, Sears will have any online order ready in the store for pick-up within five minutes of placing the order. The customer experience is improving this holiday season, but have retailers gone far enough?
For customers, what’s the value of employees that offer great service? One man in Missouri thought it was $15,000. He left a grocery store employee that amount when he passed away as a thank you for years of helping him shop, and even visiting him when he was ill. As more companies turn to automation and phase out actual people, they could learn a lesson from this story: customers want someone there to help them.
Tonight, viewers who tune in to the annual tree lighting at Rockefeller Center won’t only be treated to performances by Carrie Underwood or High School Musical crooner Ashley Tisdale. Viewers also will be witnessing the first-ever “green” tree lighting.
The Norway Spruce is sharing center stage this year, not just with singing sensations, but with the energy saving environment in which it’s displayed. On the tree will hang 30,000 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) strung on the five miles of wire that officials says will save as much electricity per day as a single family in a 2,000 square-foot home uses in a month.
The tree itself was cut down by a handsaw and its lumber will be used to build homes for Habitat for Humanity. Next year, Rockefeller Center plans to install a green roof for insulation and an ice chiller that makes ice at night when demand for electricity is less. Currently, Rockefeller Center has the largest installation of solar-electric panels in New York City.
Here on Oxygen Tuesday (so named for its falling just after Cyber Monday and Black Friday, allowing frenzied holiday shoppers the opportunity to catch their breath), I’m taking the time to wade through the stack of loyalty cards I now have perched near my computer, as they’ve become too numerous to fit into my wallet.
It seems like practically every company has a loyalty card these days. Barnes & Noble, Borders, Circuit City, Staples, and Virgin Megastore are my own personal top five, listed here in alphabetical order like the cast of an all-star disaster movie.
Most of these cards allow for a discount, either in the way of an advertised sale (“For card-holders only!”) or in a cumulative manner, as in “Once you’ve spent $1,000, you can take another 5 percent off!”
There’s just one problem: I don’t feel particularly loyal to any of these companies.
Next month in The Marketing X-Factor, we’ll be running a story about how wikis can create buzz, drive customer engagement, and encourage online participation. Like most of the other social media technology (blogs, social networks, and the like), interest from businesses in wikis is growing, but many companies don’t see the need for one. To demonstrate how wikis function, we’ve created one for 1to1 Media readers at 1to1media.wetpaint.com. Since our blog readers are already actively participating online, I’d like to give you the opportunity to join before the story is published and help create a working wiki so that X-Factor subscribers who visit the site will see more than a blank slate.
Continue reading "What’s This Wiki Thing I Keep Hearing About?" »
What is today besides the day-before-Thanksgiving day? It’s the 35th annual World Hello Day, which is observed by people in 180 countries and used as an opportunity to express their concern for world peace.
Anyone can participate in World Hello Day simply by greeting 10 people. This demonstrates the importance of personal communication for preserving peace.
Aside from preserving world peace, I think that World Hello Day can serve to remind us about the importance of keeping communications open on a local level. When is the last time you came out of your office to visit people in the contact center? Have you greeted your customers face to face in the stores lately?
Everybody’s thankful for something this time of year: family, friends, health, a couple days off work, the news that there’s still eight episodes of Cavemen in the hopper, strike or no strike.
But the 1to1 crew is particularly thankful for a different kind of turkey: those events of the past few months that revealed companies and/or individuals who forgot/ignored/actively worked against the whole concept of “service”…and sometimes of “customer” as well.
But it’s not all one-sided. Sometimes, it may not surprise anyone to hear, the customer isn’t always right. Presenting the 2007 Turkey Shoot…
I don't know about you, but I get overwhelmed walking into Home Depot. To me it's a necessary evil. If I need a new extension cord or door hinge, I have to take a trip over there. Good luck finding anything that's not as big as your house.
Many times I've gone there, the employees seem overwhelmed too. If you can find someone to help you, they may not know the answer, and usually have trouble finding an answer. Now the company has a new strategy to create an atmosphere that's more helpful and easier for us non-handymen. Will it work? Is it the right strategy?
In a recent email conversation with reader Malcolm Wicks about whether companies can successfully “operationalize” word of mouth, Malcolm made a comment that caught my attention. He said:
“I’ve been getting increasingly pragmatic about the impact of marketing recently as I’ve been doing more work in the area of customer and employee surveys. Discovering what customers and employees really think of you, rather than if they are 'satisfied' or not, can be a very salutary experience. I’ve even been thinking if the name of the department should be 'Understanding' rather than 'Marketing.' Doesn’t seem to have the same ring though.”
That got me thinking.
Last week at the Sage Summit in Chicago, Sage announced they would be offering a service to employers in conjunction with Visa. Companies can now choose to pay their employees through debit cards instead of printing checks, and the PayCards, as they're known, integrates directly with payroll software. It's certainly an interesting idea, especially when you look at the benefits to both employees and the companies they work for.
Mona Shaw, a 75-year-old woman from Bristow, VA, recently did something that many dissatisfied customers only dream of doing: She took a hammer to her local Comcast office and smashed customers service reps’ keyboards, monitors, and phones.
This came after the cable company failed to show up on the appointed day to install its Triple Play service, then came two days later and left with the job half done, and in another two days, cut off all service. After she and her husband went to their local Comcast store to speak to the manager, they waited for two hours on a bench outside before being told that the manager had left for the day.
This prompted “The Hammer,” as The Washington Post has affectionately dubbed her, to go on her now infamous rampage. 1to1 doesn’t excuse this behavior, but we wonder how many people have dreamed of taking out their rage in this age of incompetent service reps.
It’s a pretty good time to be Jack Noonan, president and CEO at predictive analytics software company SPSS.
The company recently reported record third-quarter revenues of $72.3 million, a 12 percent increase from the $64.7 million announced for third-quarter 2006, with new license revenues up 15 percent and operating income up 29 percent. Revenues for the nine months ended September 30, 2007 totaled $211.4 million, an 11 percent increase from $190.4 million in the same period last year.
The financial news was good enough to lead an analyst at Roth Capital Partners to upgrade the stock yesterday from “Hold” to “Buy.” Coming off the by-all-accounts successful SPSS Directions conference in Orlando last month, Noonan’s riding pretty high.
Continue reading "High Noonan: SPSS Paints a Rosy PA Future" »
Much time is spent trying to sell the benefits of a rewards program to consumers. Earn points to get free or discounted products, or get treated to special sales or other events. On the flip side, the benefits to a company can be enormous. Understanding how individual customers shop at a store or experience a brand can completely change an organization's strategy.
In September, Chase Grover wrote about Prince in The Marketing X-Factor because he chose to distribute his newest CD by including it in every copy of a London newspaper for free. Lately “his purpleness,” as he’s sometimes called, has been in the news for an entirely different reason, which may undo some of the good publicity he received for his earlier populist gesture.
Continue reading "The Artist Formerly Known as Customer-Centric" »
Most contact center professionals know and understand that customer satisfaction and customer engagement are critical components of effective customer service. And the way to improve upon them is to continuously anticipate and accommodate customers’ needs.
But if a company’s communications channel is not integrated with the rest of the organization, then customer loyalty is at risk. Without integration, companies cannot deliver an experience to the customer that is tailored and one that they’ve come to expect.
I’m currently attending Frost & Sullivan’s Customer Contact West in Huntington Beach, CA, and have realized, after speaking to a number of contact center executives, that cross-channel integration is a common challenge among many companies across a variety of industries. Challenges are ubiquitous: from unsuccessfully disseminating information and not achieving a holistic view of the customer, to not obtaining cooperation in the culture and having the inability to optimize customer information from outside the organization.
Continue reading "Don't Get Caught on the Tail End of Service" »
“Business intelligence is usually about the past. We need more causal, predictive approaches.”
So said management authority Thomas Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (Harvard Business School Press) during his keynote address last week at SPSS Directions in Orlando. A handy viewpoint, given that SPSS has built its reputation on predictive analytics, but Davenport takes a somewhat wider approach than what most of us think about when talk turns to PA.
I love Frosted Flakes. It's one of the staples of my childhood, and I indulge myself every so often. But does that mean I love every other Kellogg's cereal? No. At the same time, I love what Apple does with all its products, and I'll be interested in just about any product it puts on the market, because it's Apple. For some companies, the idea is to create a loyalty strategy around certain products, while for others, it's about a larger brand umbrella.
I spend probably too much of my spare time thinking about all things customer strategy. In fact, as I strolled home from a trip to the grocery store last weekend I got to thinking about spiffs. What I wondered was, is it possible to make spiffs customer-friendly?
Continue reading "Spiffs: Good for Reps, Bad for Customers?" »
When I was in San Francisco in September, I stayed at the W Hotel (a Starwood brand). I have nothing negative to say about the accommodations, service, and otherwise excellent treatment I received, but that’s not enough to warrant a blog posting. Like too many consumers, I ignored the questionnaire which accompanied my bill and asked me to rate my stay. A few days ago I happened to pick up the survey and take a look at it, and had I opened it when I was in San Francisco I would have been likely to fill it out because of how unique it was.
An increasing number of consumers are becoming bewitched with ghosts and goblins which is leading to greater spending. According to a new survey from the National Retail Federation and BIGresearch, consumers are spending much more on Halloween than they used to just five years ago.
The National Retail Federation’s 2007 Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey revealed that Americans now spend $5 billion on the holiday--up 58 percent since 2002.
Who in their right mind would want to be an airline right now? That's my initial thought when I read about some of the new players entering the airspace race. But while some see the situation as terrible, others see opportunity.
In my post yesterday on the CIM Forum blog I talked about my tribulations on a Halloween costume website. I needed information on what seemed to be erroneous sizing and didn’t want to call the contact center. What I wanted—and what the site lacked—was chat.
Continue reading "Is Cross-Channel Service Ready for Prime Time?" »
The New England Patriots are an undefeated 7-0 on the field and 1-0 so far off the field. The team sued online ticket seller StubHub.com last year, alleging that StubHub encouraged fans to sell tickets on the site at inflated prices, which is against team policy. StubHub lost the case and complied with a judge’s order to turn over information on more than 13,000 users who bought or sold Patriots’ home game tickets. Illegality aside, both the Patriots and StubHub have huge customer bases, and this battle could have adverse effects on loyalty for both parties involved.
Continue reading "StubHub (and the average fan) Defeated in Court" »
One panacea of CRM -- both the strategy and the technology -- is said to be the single view of the customer (though many companies are still working on achieving it...). No longer is there J Smith and Jon Smith and Jonathan Smith. They’re all one person, and you know all about the business he does with your company. The question I’ve come upon recently is, should you?
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