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.
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