As we look back at 2008, many of us think of two words: good riddance. And as 2009 looms with even less potential and promise, how are we as businesses expected to stay constructed and hopeful?
Continue reading "8 New Year's Resolutions to Boost Business" »
"Once upon a time..."
That's the way all fairy tales start, and this episode about excellent treatment from an auto dealership sounds almost like a fairy tale -- but it's true.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Ted Myers: Fairy Tale (Service) Can Come True" »
The big story this holiday season has been the economy, and how retailers are really hurting this year. Figures released before and after Christmas reveal low revenues across the board and a dour look at 2009 sales. But in the middle of it all stands Amazon, which boasted its"best year ever."
Continue reading "Amazon Shines Amidst Holiday Retail Woes" »
"What would you do if you knew who would be your best customer next year?" David Macaulay, a corporate vice president for Siemens AG, asked during his presentation at an executive summit. In the case of Siemens, the answer lies in optimizing all of its key customer relationships.
Several months ago we won a very large piece of business from an existing client. It was exciting work for my agency and was a great way to end the year.
This particular client had gone through major restructuring throughout our two-year relationship and we were for the most part working with new leadership. So I was excited when I sat down with them to talk about how this project would run.
You can't get through to the end of the year without reflecting just a little bit on the past 12 months. Even the customer strategy world saw a lot of innovations, improvements, and exciting advances. There were also, of course, some missteps.
The other day I received a large envelope from BackChannelMedia. It contained an 8-page, card-stock, glossy booklet about the company; a 26-page spiral-bound report on the company's Q4 projects printed on high-quality, glossy stock; and a finely printed, 18-page research report that was, ironically, about achieving differentiation in an increasingly competitive TV market.
Why "ironically"?
One result of the Big 3's trip to Washington begging for money is that GM had to reveal its budget plans for the next few years. It emphasized the importance of Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, and GMC to the company's future, which left people wondering what would happen to the other GM brands.
On a recent trip to the Middle East, I had a chance to meet with Gigi Levy, CEO of 888.com, which trades on the London stock market. I've known Gigi since his days at Amdocs, and I believe he's one of the smartest analysts and most insightful customer-value strategists around. A visitor to 888.com will find a popular gaming site where players can play alone or with others, and more importantly, can play for money or just for fun. The majority never bet any cash, and many who do just play for small amounts. But the heavy players keep 888.com cookin' along at a healthy profit margin, despite big payouts to the winners.
With an increased eye on the environment, it should be no surprise that consumers are revaluating their lives with an eye on reducing waste. Why,then, are some companies still leaving a large carbon footprint with direct mail?
The financial markets have been taking a beating, so, unfortunately, many people have been left with no jobs. In the month of November alone nearly 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. Last week a major financial institution announced the slashing of 35,000 jobs, leaving more Americans unemployed, depressed, and afraid. What a way to celebrate the holiday season!
The Bank Bailout plan negotiated by the Bush administration is intended to revive our sagging economy, albeit with little to no success. However, a Texas Congressman is challenging Congress and the White House to develop a plan that will shift the control from the government to decide how the bailout funds should be used to stimulate the economy to the American taxpayers, who are in the best position to use the funds in a way to jumpstart a sagging economy.
When President-Elect Obama takes office January 20, he inherits responsibility for a population of very well-connected Americans (and I don't mean Blogojevich or other politicians). He has embraced technology during his campaign, and I see that focus rapidly expanding as he settles into the Oval Office. The Pew Internet Project has some suggestions for him to think about as he crafts his administration's online policies.
Continue reading "Recommendations for Obama's Online Policies" »
Recently I traveled to another one of the Middle East's thriving economies. This country is experiencing rapid economic development. Its traditional culture is under pressure as it faces change management challenges similar to those found in the corporate world.
Continue reading "Peppers Unplugged: Two Points for Manama" »
One of the most challenging aspects of customer experience is the person-to-person interaction. With all the possible variables of emotions, words, and actions that can potentially create a positive or negative experience there's only so much a manager can control. That's why it's so important to hire right in the first place.
Normally I agree with what Thomas L Friedman writes in the New York Times. Yes, sometimes he can be a bit too liberal, but I think in his analysis of Detroit's problems and his solution to fix it in this week's column he's gone off the deep end.
Given the U.S. credit crunch and news about financial failures everywhere you turn, you probably feel some days like you're living in a pressure cooker. And with news of the absurd like the heads of the auto industry flying private jets to their bailout request meeting, or yesterday when Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain asked for a $10 million bonus (he deserves it--he kept the company's losses to only $11 billion), you may be losing faith that companies have any ounce of integrity, or sanity, left.
Continue reading "Dollar Bank's Everyday Customer Champion" »
I don't know who has designed the payment processes at Target Credit, but it certainly isn't the people putting great designs into the store. Make a payment via the Web on the due date and you'll be hit with a $39 late fee if the payment is processed after 3pm Central time. "Manage my account" registers the payment on the date made, but simply applies it to the next day if made after 3pm. Isn't the Web supposed to be real time? Oh, and if you want to make a payment by phone it costs you $20 via a live person or $15 if paid via the IVR. Pay at the store (likely the most expensive to support and process) and it's free. Hmmm...
Continue reading "Guest blogger Dan Smith: Redefining "Real Time" Service?" »
For kids, it's Bakugan. For teens and young adults, it's a video game system like Wii, Xbox 360 or PS3. But for adults, the hot item this holiday season is the Blackberry Storm. It is a must-have item on many people's lists, and finding one at a store is almost impossible. Following in the footsteps of the iPhone, it's another mobile device that does a million cool things that people are fighting to get. With advanced mobile devices so deeply penetrating the marketplace, will marketers ever figure out a good strategy to interact with customers on them?
Continue reading "Mobile Devices Are Hot Ticket This Holiday Season" »
Ah, the holiday season. Companies scramble to makes their Q4 numbers and fill the next year's pipeline. This year's bonus challenge: a recession.
Every holiday season includes gifts, as well. Mine is to share with you some advice from several of 1to1's colleagues and associates on how to harness customer centricity to stay competitive in 2009. I posed the following question:
What aspect of customer strategy will be the most useful to survive or thrive in this uncertain economy, and why?
Continue reading "How to Thrive in 2009? Love Your Customers" »
Which is the better channel to embrace, mobile or social media? Don't worry, there's no right answer. Each has its pros and cons, just like with any choice marketers have to make. But in this economic downturn, it's important to make the right choice for your customers and your business. I recently wrote a story about Weight Watchers launching a mobile site. In the next issue of 1to1 Magazine, we'll include a story about how Atkins just re-tooled an online site and launched it as a social network. Two similar companies with similar goals (to help people lose weight) but they went about reaching customers very differently.
With all the doom and gloom of the economy, it surprises me that Cyber Monday's customer satisfaction levels remain almost as high as 2007 levels. ForeSee Results reported that satisfaction dropped only less than a point, which may indicate that companies are still investing in service and a quality online shopping experience.
Continue reading "Cyber Monday Scores High With Customers" »
Not a day goes by where I don't read about or hear about how the customer experience is the new frontier...the next competitive advantage...a new differentiator.
I am already a proponent, developing and leading a customer management program at one of Canada's largest company's; one of the believers who know (and can prove) that improving the customer experience will drive bottom-line results.
During these tough economic times, many pundits have recommended keeping a keen focus on the customer, and not to lose sight of how a small gesture can go a long way toward customer loyalty. The Motley Fool recently highlighted some great examples of this, and how they might translate to your business.
Continue reading "Great Examples of Serving the Customer This Holiday Season" »
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it's one of the few that doesn't involve commercialism and religion--just family, friends, and bountiful food, paying a fitting tribute to the American ideals of productivity and prosperity.
Along with eggnog, Christmas sales in October, and layoffs, there's another tradition at this time of the year: the turkey shoot. But at 1to1, the turkey shoot doesn't have much to do with slaughtering birds; instead, it's about taking a fond look back at some of the greatest fiascos, customer service-related and otherwise, of the previous eleven months.
I started the great 1to1 Turkey Shoot tradition a year ago (and had plenty to work with, I might add), but 2008 seems to be shaping up as just about the turkiest yet. So let's get shooting...
It was supposed to be a great marketing idea. Give everyone in America a free Dr. Pepper if the supposed Guns 'n Roses album "Chinese Democracy" ever came out. The album finally was released, so Dr. Pepper had to make good on its promise. Unfortunately, the execution of its plan didn't work out so well, which may harm its brand affinity in the end.
Here's irony for you: A website dedicated to helping businesspeople connect makes it difficult to connect with their staff for support--and, unbelievably, for sales.
In my role as Adjunct Professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, I have the opportunity and the honor to work with talented faculty and exceptional students. It's always a pleasure to me to get to North Carolina.
After a recent session with MBA students, my colleague Professor Christine Moorman and I received the following question from a class participant: What is the value of segmenting customers and devising a profile of customer needs when you are a start-up and have "no customers?"
Continue reading "A Question for Start-Ups: Why Will You Have Customers?" »
Why do people shop online? Convenience? No sales tax? Bigger selection? Discounted prices? Maybe the better question would be why people continue to shop offline. For some, window shopping is like a hobby. I'm sure many of us have visited a mall for no apparent reason other than to kill some time and maybe purchase something as an afterthought. But it's that impulse buy that retailers love. It's the magazine rack at the grocery store checkout, the new video game endcap display in the electronics store, and the rows of candy just about everywhere that stimulates our visual senses and makes us forget about checking the price or asking "do I really need that?" Until now, window shopping and impulse buying were strictly offline activities. But finally the web has found a way for us to forget about what search term brought us to a page, and simply browse.
"The greatest competition you'll ever face is you."
Words of wisdom to live by from Bruce Jenner. The gold medal decathlon winner in the 1976 Summer Olympics keynoted the Sage Summit yesterday in Denver and inspired the audience to turn the current pressures into a new level of commitment to its personal best.
A day hardly passes without news of significant layoffs at some financial, publishing, or automaking concern, which set me to wondering how companies can maintain employee morale in such a climate. There seems to be no end of advice out there.
This is the question facing politicians today. But it also represents a case study in the conflict between short-term costs and long-term benefits - probably the most difficult conflict faced by businesses and governments today.
If we bail them out, then we definitely avoid a lot of pain over the next year, as thousands of workers retain their jobs, as auto assembly lines keep ordering parts from suppliers, and as thousands of car dealers continue to have uninterrupted supplies of inventory. But using taxpayer dollars to save these misfiring corporate giants today will almost certainly cost us a great deal more in the long term. For a variety of reasons, the business models that GM and Ford are operating make them completely uncompetitive with rivals like Toyota, Nissan, and even Mercedes - all of whom also employ thousands of other Americans in their U.S.-based manufacturing facilities and dealerships.
If you want a terrific explanation of some of the fatal and probably irreconcilable flaws in the very structure of the GM and Ford businesses, when compared to their most immediate competitors, see this Wall Street Journal article by NYU Distinguished Research Scholar Michael Levine.
Continue reading "Should GM and Ford Be Bailed Out or Not?" »
Last week I had an opportunity to talk to Don Peppers about the current state of the economy and what businesses can do about it. Granted, we agree that some of the issues are out of businesses' hands, due to the stock market and the dollar's roller coaster ride. But, a lack of customer centricity certainly played a part in where we are today, he says, and he cautions that future moves -- like the potential auto industry bailout -- should be centered around building customer lifetime value, not just green cars, in order to secure long-term success.
Continue reading "Don Peppers Puts Financial Turmoil Into Customer Perspective" »
These days, the Nets basketball organization is looking more like a full-service career management company.
Continue reading "The Nets Score Points With Unemployed Fans" »
I recently came across yet another example of history repeating itself--and not in a good way. We've all heard the stories of CRM failures caused by companies rushing to plug in the technology to fix a problem instead of first understanding and crafting a CRM strategy.
Well, one of the current areas of "Let's just do it" (yes, there are several) is Net Promoter Score (NPS). Now, whether you buy in to the concept of NPS or not isn't the point. The point is, if you're going to use it--or any other customer strategy or supporting tool for that matter--you must first understand how it applies to your business to do it right.
"Now more than ever" is often one of those empty-headed phrases that companies use to engender interest and/or excitement about themselves. It always gets me to wondering just how useful a given product or service actually was in the past, and just why it's so much more relevant "now." (It also unfailingly reminds me of the 1992 movie The Player, whose studio loudly boasted "Movies: Now More Than Ever," with no one ever considering what that actually means.)
But lately I've come to see that the phrase can actually have some value, as in: Now more than ever, you need to engage your customers.
The new issue of 1to1 Magazine features a story by Jeremy Nedelka about how companies can learn more about their prospects and customers by checking out social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. I think these sites are great for networking and connecting with friends, but there is a line that needs to be drawn between personal and professional information. What's the etiquette?
The recipe for customer centricity has a long list of ingredients that companies use to varying degrees. But no matter what mix companies choose, there are two elements that are essential: trust and culture.
Continue reading "The Two Key Elements of Customer Orientation" »
Did you watch CNN's election coverage last night and wonder how the network sent correspondent Jessica Yellin from Obama's Chicago headquarters to the New York broadcasting center, to stand in front of Wolf Blitzer?
Despite various national polls showing double-digit leads for Barack Obama, we awake (and, one hopes, vote) today not really knowing for sure who our next president will be. Part of this is due to the television news media's wanting maximum viewers tonight, of course, but there's also the desire to avoid the unsettling spectre of another "Dewey Defeats Truman" debacle.
While predictive analytics from firms like SPSS -- whose senior vice president, market strategy Colin Shearer told me not long ago was "absolutely" looking at the Obama/McCain question -- are nothing to sneeze at, they don't capture the imagination like Halloween masks and Baskin-Robbins ice cream can.
Yep, as John Mellencamp would put it: this is ourrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr country.
I know, it's way too early. I've still got gobs of Halloween candy leftover, and the skeleton is still on my front door. But now that we're in November many people's thoughts turn to holiday shopping. And with consumers guarding their wallets a lot closer these days, retailers need to think critically about their customer service strategies for the holiday season.
How the current economy is affecting marketing budgets and the customer experience are hot topics right now. So last week I asked readers and LinkedIn members to respond to a brief survey on potential changes to their 2009 marketing budget and strategy. Some results surprised me (I thought that "decreasing our marketing budget" would get the lion's share of votes, but it didn't); while others were expected (a continued shift toward social media marketing).
Continue reading "Changes to Marketing Spending and Strategy Coming in 2009" »
We've covered Meijer, a Midwest-based department and grocery store, in the past because of their mobile campaigns. Recently the company launched Halloween-themed mobile marketing that's unlike anything I've seen before. Take a look at the video of Meijer and SmartReply operatives unveiling their guerilla marketing.
In our book Rules to Break & Laws to Follow, Martha Rogers and I tried to convey our sense that as technology brings more and more "connectedness" to our world, our entire economic and social system is becoming more like a giant network. Whether you are talking about customers who are increasingly connected to each other, or employees and channel partners, or your portfolio of new product innovations, it is vital to understand how networks operate, and why.
Networks form by the rule of "preferential attachment," which means that each participant added to a network is more likely to be added by a connection to another participant who already has more connections. This is why influential customers become more influential at a faster rate than those who aren't influential. It's why the most visited Web sites gain visitors faster than others, and why wealthy people become wealthier at a faster rate than others. One consequence is that a small number of Web users exert an extreme amount of influence at many sites. The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article on this, "The Wizards of Buzz," in 2007.
In my posting a few days ago on this blog, Did Deregulation Cause the Financial Crisis?, one of Graham Hill's comments was that a financial crisis like this is, in reality, the end result of many different networked effects coming together in a kind of perfect storm. And this is a perfect example of the kind of randomness that an increasingly networked world is likely to treat us to.
So, if you really want to understand how networks will impact your business success as we become more and more connected, I'd recommend these books (in addition to ours!), and we've listed them sort of in order of increasing depth and complexity.
Continue reading "A Book List for Understanding How Networks Operate" »
Layoffs are an ugly option. But during volatile periods, it may be a necessary evil for some companies. However, if firms find themselves in the unfortunate position of having to do them, they should do them well.
Are you annoyed with Dr Pepper?
The soda company long ago made a promise that every man, woman, and child would receive a free Dr Pepper if Guns N' Roses' long-delayed Chinese Democracy album ever came out. The pledge was looked at as something of a joke -- a promise made in the relatively secure knowledge that the arrival of the disc (whose recording began in 1994) would be tantamount to the return of Godot.
But then a funny thing happened: GN'R announced Democracy would indeed be coming, on Nov. 23.
And Dr Pepper realized it had a potential mess on its hands.
Confused about how the presidential polling figures can be so variable? Why do some polls have Obama ahead by 8 to 14 points (pick your number) while others still show the margin too close to call? Here's one big reason: Polling bias. When you do research, the wording of the actual questions you ask will bias the answers given. This is just human nature.
Exhibit #1 is a front-page headline in today's Washington Post: Poll Gives Obama 8-Point Va. Lead.
Continue reading "Presidential Polls: Why Do They Vary So Much?" »
In these hard financial times, the temptation to raise prices and customer fees looms large as companies look for quick ways to keep revenue. But resisting that temptation may prove to be much better for your bottom line in the long run.
Continue reading "Don't Let Customers Carry Companies on Their Backs" »
Not surprisingly, the current economy's impact on marketing budgets and the customer experience are hot topics among our colleagues and readers right now. This made me wonder how you, our readers, are rethinking marketing in 2009. So I decided to ask. I created a brief survey on marketing in 2009. Please take a moment to respond. I'll provide the results in my blog post next Friday.
Thanks!
I feel bad for Joe the Plumber. The REAL Joe the Plumber, not the group of low and middle-class Americans he symbolically represents. Well I feel sorry for many of them too, but that's another blog. Joe went from being an anonymous guy to the day's major news story in a matter of hours. Most people say they can't imagine how that feels, but the way they're treated by businesses can make them feel that way sometimes.
I was reading an article on data mining in the financial industry in the New York Times yesterday and it made me think of what happened to Joe, and how easy it is to access information that most people think is private.
Continue reading "What do Joe the Plumber and Customers Have in Common?" »
After speaking to several technology vendors at DMA08 last week about business trends in the current economic downturn, it seems as though either marketers plan to focus more on customers, or the technology vendors that provide their customer relationship tools are just remaining hopeful.
Continue reading "Marketers Set to Strengthen Customer Focus in 2009" »
My friends, we are waist-deep in the silly season.
I refer not to the current television season (though with the likes of "Knight Rider", "My Own Worst Enemy", and "90210", things in Primetime Land are pretty silly) nor the way the baseball season is wrapping up (Phillies vs. Rays could give "Sex Change Hospital" the ratings bump it so desperately, undeservedly needs), but the just-as-mercifully-ending presidential political season.
And, like most things in life, the looming Nov. 4 election comes down to branding--or, more specifically, poor branding.
This woeful economic time can also be an opportunity for companies looking to build real customer loyalty.
We think a lot about taking the customer's point of view, and a few situations beg that issue. What's more maddening than waiting to get the check after a meal in a restaurant? How can the manager not see how waiting 40 years to see the promised land can obliterate the effect of a delicious meal, the delightful ambiance, or the prior great service? The waiter who was so attentive about your drinks and coffee and sauces has suddenly tessered to a foreign land.
"Listening tends to be an underrated marketing strategy," Diane Hessan, president and CEO of Communispace, said when she and I were discussing trends.
But that's changing. Hessan is seeing an increasing in the number of companies cocreating and collaborating with their customers, and that starts with gaining an understanding of their needs, preferences, and expectations.
"We're at the vortex of market research and social media," Hessan said. "Increasingly, companies are using social media to listen to and gather insight from customers."
Mobile customers have long wondered why, when they call another cell phone, both they and the person they called are charged for using minutes. The same with text messages sent from one person to another. At least in those cases there was a somewhat plausible explanation that if people used two different carriers, the message or call had to cross two networks and thus two fees were imposed.
Now that most subscribers have unlimited (or effectively unlimited) minutes, and many buy messaging plans so they don't incur a per-message fee, Verizon is exploring "new revenue streams," including a charge for companies that send text messages to its subscribers.
Continue reading "Verizon Wants to Double-Dip on Text Messages" »
A pretty girl may be like a melody, as Irving Berlin wrote in 1946, but about a year ago Honda decided that the very roads we drive on should be literally melodious. The so-called "melody roads," featuring the carving of intermittent grooves similar to rumble strips on highways, have been something of a success in Japan and South Korea.
But in the city of Lancaster, California - not so much.
This week I had an issue with a web hosting company I use for my soccer team's website. They deleted my account, and I had no idea why. My only way to contact them was to click on the "support" link. My experience left me wishing that they would change the name of the link. It was far from "supportive."
Although many politicians and much of the mainstream media would like you to believe that it was rampant deregulation of the financial industry that "caused" the economic crisis we now face, don't believe it for a minute.
Continue reading "Did Deregulation Cause the Financial Crisis?" »
The actual cause of the current financial crisis is very complex. Everyone points the finger of blame, but so far we have no confessions of guilt.
Continue reading "The Financial Crisis: Short-Termism Coming Home to Roost " »
SEO (search engine optimization) is great right? It gives you high search results, better visibility to the people you want to reach, and ultimately can make a lot of money for your company. All of those things are true, but I have to disagree with the premise.
According to a recent customer experience study by RightNow Technologies and Harris Interactive, consumers seem to be more agitated than ever from poor customer experience...and they're not standing for sub-par service any longer
Continue reading "Wake Up People--Customers Demand Great Service" »
In an increasingly cluttered branding landscape, it can be difficult for a company to get its message out there. And, let's face it, insurance companies have it tougher than most -- hence the squawking ducks, urbane lizards, and giant red umbrellas permeating today's broadcasting.
But Britain's Trident Insurance is trying something a little different. If you thought bikini-clad babes bouncing on pogo sticks had nothing to do with insurance, you'd be wrong.
Given all the upheaval in the financial world these days, it's no surprise that most consumers are feeling jittery. It seems like at any moment we'll hear of another bank or financial institution closing up shop or being sold. I'm surprised, then, that I haven't gotten any communication from my bank about what's going on. I will get 100 offers for credit cards or ID theft protection every month, but when I want to hear from it about if it's staying in business, I get nothing.
Continue reading "When I Want to Hear From My Bank, They're Not There" »
Last weekend I flew to Turkey to give a speech on one-to-one marketing. I was invited by Xerox to speak at the Marketingist Conference and Exhibition. Also speaking at Xerox’s booth/theater was Rafi Albo, managing director of SegMarketing, an Israel-based marketing agency. Albo discussed what he calls data creative: Starting with customer data to generate the creative of one-to-one campaigns.
“You need to think creatively about data,” he said during his presentation. “Data is the language of real customer behavior.”
What do David Blaine and Wall Street have in common? They’re both great at creating illusions. Unfortunately, Wall Street believed the illusion it created (the value of subprime mortgages) was real. Companies do the same thing every day, convincing themselves that if they have more customers and higher revenues then everything will keep going up, even if they don’t spend the time understanding customers and providing great service.
Got a question about customer strategy, loyalty, or just plain business? In our never-ending quest to be customer-focused and live the 1to1 concept, we are looking for questions for our Ask the Expert series. It is part of the new "Strategic Insight" section of 1to1 Weekly, and also lives as part of the content on www.1to1media.com.
As U.S. companies tighten their belts and cut costs, HR personnel have a different concern—how to retain employees in a down economy.
Until recently, companies offered compensation as a means of employee retention. And according to a Pulse on Leaders study released on September 23 by the Personnel Decisions International (PDI), most organizations still focus on compensation as an employee retention tool, despite development opportunities being recognized as the most effective tool.
Well, it's been a fun couple of weeks on Wall Street, no? Was it really just a week ago that I blogged about the AIG fiasco?
There's plenty of blame to go around now for what could turn out to be, to borrow a phrase of Tom Brokaw's, the Greatest Depression. (What was so Great about the 1929 Depression, anyhow?) Depending on who's doing the talking, the fault for yesterday's failure to pass that $700 billion bailout can be attributed to the president's ongoing inability to convince anyone he's doing the right thing in any circumstance; to Nancy Pelosi's promise that new leadership in 2009 will solve these problems (yeesh, what a crackpot); or to the fact that the American public doesn't understand that the "bailout" is not, in fact, a bailout, but is an infusion of liquidity. (There; feel better?)
Personally, I don't think it helped when some Treasury Department spokeswoman told Forbes.com that the computing of the $700 billion sum was "not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number." What was that about new leadership again, Nancy?
Anyway, with all this sturm und drang going on, it's reasonable -- if not downright expected -- for companies to start panicking and burying their heads in the sand. But there's a glimmer of hope on the other side of the world, and it's the home of some 1.3 billion people.
With all sorts of data being collected and people sharing more and more information about themselves online, privacy issues become more important. So which companies stand out when it comes to developing innovative privacy programs? The International Association of Privacy Professionals recently awarded three companies honors at its annual Privacy Academy.
Continue reading "It's Not Just About Firewalls and Passwords Anymore" »
As much as we believe in customer centricity and applying the Golden Rule in business, truth be told, not all customers return the favor. From unrealistic expectations to outright rudeness, customers can sometimes challenge even our most patient service experts.
Web users have short attention spans. Frustrate them with an awkward interface and they'll be gone in seconds.
This is common knowledge, however, according to Tealeaf’s 2008 Online Transactions Survey of more than 2,000 adults, the proportion who experience problems during e-transactions remains high—at nearly 87 percent. And 41 percent of people who experience problems said they would abandon the site or switch to the competitor.
There’s been a fair amount of comedic hay made lately out of AIG’s series of “The Strength To Be There” TV commercials. Still running last week as the insurance giant was imploding, the ads feature precocious kids worrying aloud about such topics as “risk management,” with their parents invoking AIG as a “nuff said” riposte. Each commercial ends with AIG’s tagline: “The strength to be there.”
Of course, AIG as we (and its shareholders) knew it is no longer there. Which got me to wondering: When should a company stop whistling past its own graveyard when problems arise, and address its customers’ concerns?
Yes, we all know that customers want a consistent experience across channels. And we know that the online channel is growing as a key customer touchpoint. But intuition and common sense don't always have a place in the financial statements. So how do you know if your multichannel strategy is affecting the bottom line?
Continue reading "How Do You Measure Multichannel Success?" »
The next competitive battleground is customer experience. So say 95 percent of business leaders, according to Ed Thompson, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst. Additionally, he said during his keynote at the Gartner CRM Summit, 80 percent of executives think customer strategy is more important than it was three years ago.
Continue reading "There’s More Than One Way to Customer Experience Success (In Fact, Here’s 7)" »
In the early days of the United States, you had a choice. You could live in the same town all your life, and everything about you was known by your neighbors, or you could wander from town to town, making you anonymous to everyone you met.
No, this is not a post about a drunken night in Vegas that involved a little white chapel. I’ve never been to the city, and as far as I know I’m still enjoying all the “perks” of single life (read: ordering take-out and playing video games every weekend). So imagine my surprise when my car insurance company congratulated me for getting married.
A new global shopper study, “Shopper Decisions Made In-Store” (SDMIS,) takes a closer look at what’s happening in the world’s retail shopping aisles.
Let's face it: Contact centers have always been comedy gold. English majors of a certain age will fondly remember studying Aristophanes' seminal play What Was That Account Number Again?, while Baby Boomers still trade battered VHS copies of The Honeymooners episode "Let Me Route You to the Moon, Alice." And of course we all enjoyed the recent box-office smash Burn After Listening to An Endless Loop of "The Girl From Ipanema" While Being Regularly Reminded, "Your Call Is Very Important to Us."
Okay, so maybe your own call center experiences have been less Groucho than grouchy. Not Some Like It Hot so much as Some Like It Not. More Drears than Cheers. (Thanks, I'm here all week. Enjoy the veal, and don't forget to tip your waitress.)
But that's not to say there's no laughs to be had in this area, as Genesys has recently demonstrated.
How many loyalty programs are you a part of? How many compete with each other? I know that I join simply for the perks, not to build actual loyalty. However, the good programs end up strengthening my relationship.
We might seem to harp on this topic, but there really is no way to over emphasize the importance of trust - not just in terms of creating the most possible value from customers, but in "lubricating" the interactions and transactions of commerce. Indeed, our entire economic system would come to a crashing halt overnight, if it weren't for the trust that people have for each other.
I’ve attended two CRM conferences in the past two weeks with session after session on everything customer strategy—social media, CRM technology, capturing customer insight, boosting retention, and more. The one common theme: No matter how terrific the strategy or technology, none of them will fly without great people at the controls.
You’ve probably heard it a thousand times, but it still bears repeating: If you want loyal, engaged customers, you first need loyal, engaged employees. As much as we in this “CRM industry” tout the idea of customers first, and as much as the reality is that without customers you have a hobby not a business, it is employees who deliver those loyalty-building customer experiences, whether through delivering great service, designing unique products, creating and participating in two-way communications, or simplifying processes. Thus, to truly succeed over both the short and long term, a customer strategy must includes a comprehensive employee engagement strategy.
Here is some of the advice on employee engagement shared at the two events.
I’ll preface this story by saying that politicians love to hear themselves talk. For those who don’t live in Connecticut, Atty. General Richard Blumenthal certainly falls in that category. He’s gone after student loan lenders, corrupt officials, and now his crusade against injustice has taken him up against AT&T and its near-monopoly on phone service. He recently held a press conference and released a number of statements to the press stating AT&T has “appalling disrespect for consumers and disregard for the law.”
Many companies talk about real-time agent training, instilling a culture of innovation, and employing a customer-first strategy. But few companies actually can document examples of individual employees working to make every customer experience outstanding.
FedEx is one of those rare companies. In the March/April edition of 1to1 Magazine, I covered FedEx’s Purple Promise in the article "Powered by Purple," which vows to make every customer experience outstanding across the entire organization. As one of the FedEx contact center employees told me when researching that article, “The Purple Promise is ingrained in all of us. We just do what we can for the customer.”
Martha Rogers and I have just returned from the Technomarketing Conference in Sao Paulo, where we appeared jointly on stage together, two times over two days during this four-day conference. We don't often get the chance to do that, but it's always fun when we do. Brazil is an up-and-coming economy, with a dynamic business community and an entrepreneurial culture that is likely to make it an increasingly influential country.
Continue reading "Don Peppers Goes Behind the Scenes at Brazil's Technomarketing Conference" »
One of the themes at last month's SpeechTek conference in Manhattan was that, economic downturn or not, the technology keeps making advances -- and, more importantly, companies in the field keep making money.
"We're in a position where companies still need to invest in the advancements being made," Michael Zirngibl, president and CEO of Angel.com, told me. "The industry at large is at a point where it's got all this customer data in hand; now we need to start using it."
This question may seem easier to answer than it actually is. In fact, in some organizations different constituents may see customer strategy completely differently. Some executives may be focusing on cost cutting while others are aiming to boost brand equity. According to Gartner managing vice president Scott Nelson, companies need to select one primary strategy and stick with it. Sure, you may cut costs while deepening customer relationships, but ultimately, if building relationships is your primary aim, it will take you down a different path of strategy, tactics, processes, and even technologies than cost cutting would.
In today’s increasingly customer-empowered economy, a successful organization is a customer-centric one. One that balances customer needs with corporate needs. That engages and empowers employees. That integrates information and operations. And that capitalizes on the technologies that support these efforts.
Today at the Gartner CRM Summit we’ve announced the winners of the 2008 Gartner & 1to1 Customer Awards—organizations that have recently implemented a successful customer strategy with resulting business impact. All of the winners—Gold, Silver, and Bronze—have demonstrated the positive effects their initiatives have had on both the customer experience and the bottom line.
And the winners are:
The current state of U.S. politics reflects an important business lesson. Groups with diverse perspectives tend to make better, more creative and effective decisions than groups made up of people with similar perspectives. So what's the catch?
“CRM is what you wanted. CRM 2.0 is what customers want from you,” customer relationship management guru Paul Greenberg told a rapt audience during his keynote speech at the recent CRM Association’s Return to Customer annual conference.
Internet Explorer 8 hasn't even been released yet, and already Microsoft is facing stiffer competition in the browser market. Tuesday Google offered its web browser, Chrome, for download. Chrome's release has already been widely publicized, so I'll shorten reviewing its features and focus on its ultimate impact. Chrome is very similar to Firefox, but it also employs some of the better features from Opera, Safari, and IE as well. It's a free download, so visit www.google.com/chrome to give it a test run. What's much more interesting than its entry into the browser market is the possibility that eventually Chrome could challenge Windows as a new operating system.
Continue reading "Google's Chrome Polished and Ready for Download" »
In May, São Paulo unveiled a new bridge—the Octavia Frias de Oliveira Bridge—which spans the Pinheiros River that flows through the city. The bridge deck is unusual due to its form, which is similar to an "X" crossing at the tower.
Just like any other brand or company, politicians are trying to market their wares to you. And just like when choosing a particular product or service, your decision will likely come down to two elements of trust: intent and competence.
Continue reading "This Election Season, You Are Being Marketed To" »
More than 200 years ago, someone created a "machine" that could play chess against the best in Europe. It's one of the first examples of automation, but the story brings with it an important lesson about today's self-service strategies.
Continue reading "Do You Know the Story of the Mechanical Turk?" »
Electronic Arts is one of the companies that gets it when it comes to customer relationships. The company's senior director of customer support, Boyd Beasley, is one of our 2008 Champions. But EA isn't just doing service right, it understands social media (which it should, given its young videogame-playing customer base). A few weeks ago the company used YouTube to turn what could have been a negative customer story into something positive.
So last night at 3:30 in the morning, Eastern time, my phone gets a text message, from the Obama campaign: Joe Biden has been chosen. In the fog of sleep, I remember thinking: this just can’t be true. This MUST be some kind of ingenious hoax. Joe Biden makes sense, of course, but no sane presidential candidate would release this kind of news at 3:30 in the morning. What about the news cycle?
Now in the light of day, as the storm clouds of Fay begin to scatter and we actually see patches of blue sky for the first time in several days here on the coast of Georgia, I realize what Obama’s media strategy is. It’s an anti-news-cycle strategy, designed to give the bloggers, emailers, MySpacers and FaceBookers time to get the drop on all the C-suite media companies – CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, etc
Continue reading "And the winner of the presidential election is...(drum roll)...SOCIAL MEDIA!" »
Yesterday I moderated the webcast “Take a Walk in Your Customers` Shoes: Using process thinking to transform the customer experience across the enterprise,” during which we polled attendees about customer experience issues. Their responses were telling, so I wanted to share them with you here.
Continue reading "Customer Experience: Good News and Bad News" »
Yesterday a colleague forwarded a post from The Funnelholic, a blog about B2b lead generation, inside sales, CRM, and online media. The author Craig Rosenberg came across The Marketing Consortium, Unica’s now defunct blog where great minds in marketing used to converge.
A pair of recent branding campaigns have caught my eye, one based around a TV show that ceased production in 1998 and the other involving beaming an ad into outer space. Both might just be silly enough to work.
I've been covering social media a lot lately. July was social media month at 1to1 Media, and we even created a microsite, www.getpastthehype.com, as a resource for our readers. In speaking with social media experts, authors, analysts, and all-around smart people, a few common themes appear when it comes to social media strategy.
What is it about mobile marketing that’s so attractive? It’s “amazingly trackable” because SMS responses are individual, yet it has mass-market reach, said Michael Becker, executive vice president of business development for iLoop Mobile, during his session at DM Days New York. Becker added that mobile is the most versatile platform out there because it brings elements from other media to the customer experience: timeliness, portability, and location awareness.
The most popular application on Facebook isn't surveys, "pieces of flair," or bumper stickers, although they all have tens of thousands of users. Until recently, the biggest source of wasted time on the social network was an application called Scrabulous, which has been getting a lot of press lately. It was invented by two brothers in India, but was so much like Scrabble that Hasbro sued to have the game shut down. Now Hasbro probably wishes it had never found out about Scrabulous.
Today customers have higher expectations and greater choices. It’s no surprise that they expect business with your company to be seamless, tailored, and hassle free.
To remind us of why delivering a superior customer experience is urgent, Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies, has authored a new book “Eight to Great: Eight Steps to Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience.” In the book he lists the eight steps required to deliver a great customer experience.
Have you had any fun experiences lately with automated phone systems? Attempted to use the tried-and-true method of pressing "0" to get a live person, only to be told that "You have made an invalid choice"? Help may be on the way, from a somewhat unlikely source.
Continue reading "Plumbing the Depths of Automated Phone Systems" »
I don't know about you, but I've got Olympic fever. I've been watching swimming, basketball, cycling, rowing, soccer, you name it. I've seen it on TV, and also watched some events on my computer. It's very cool how NBC has set everything up. Powering much of this technology at the Olympics is computer maker Lenovo. The brand name might not be very familiar in the United States, but the maker of the ThinkPad PC has its own Olympic-sized hurdles to jump in its branding strategy.
Keeping up with the speed of change today is no easy task. Neither is combining short-term flexibility with long-term strategic planning. Keeping tabs on trends can help. Richard Feldman, managing partner of Source Marketing, offered 10 trends that may impact marketing in the coming year—and after—during a session at DM Days New York.
They are:
If you have any doubts about social media’s business value, let me dispel them for your now. Although social networks and online communities and the like may not drive immediate sales or help you hit your quarterly earnings targets, they can absolutely help you build customer engagement (thus long-term revenue growth)—through gathering feedback, responding to concerns, sharing educational content, and more. In the case of responding to customers’ concerns, social media is turning out to be a powerful retention tool.
Let me give you an example:
Continue reading "Social Media as a Customer Retention Tool" »
If you walk through the Times Square screaming about how you couldn’t cross the street, would you be surprised if someone walked up and offered to help you? Probably not. Life isn’t like the episode of Friends where Jason Alexander plays an office manager who shouts about wanting to kill himself and no one even looks up from their desk. Prior to social media’s popularity many consumers may have felt most companies worked that way, but today if you have a complaint many businesses are actively listening and willing to resolve the issue.
We wrote about companies using Twitter to help frustrated consumers. JetBlue, Comcast, Home Depot, and other major brands are monitoring what people say about them, and following up in many cases to see if they can make a negative experience into a positive one. When I was on Twitter a few days after the story ran I noticed that one of the sources I had spoken to, Frank Eliason from Comcast (@comcastcares for Twitter users), wrote that he was having a bad day because of a story the New York Times wrote. I looked up the story, and was shocked by how ignorant even social media users can be.
Continue reading "Does Anyone Get the Concept of Social Media?" »
With 40 million subscribers in the U.S. alone, mobile media is quickly becoming part of the consumer media experience, and businesses worldwide are embracing mobile as a viable marketing and communications channel.
Continue reading "Has the Mobile Internet Reached Critical Mass?" »
Every night I debate with myself whether to leave my mobile phone on or not. My wife and I have children and close relatives who live in different time zones all over the world, from Hawaii to London. And as a frequent international traveler, I often sleep in a hotel bed somewhere in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia.
Life is complicated enough, I think, without being awakened in the middle of the night by a business colleague who didn’t know it was 2 am my time when he called. Or what if I get a “wrong number” call at 3 in the morning? Two weeks ago I awakened to the buzzing sound of my phone in “vibrate” mode, only to find that Verizon Wireless had chosen 4 in the morning to send me some text messages regarding two phone numbers I had sought from their “Information” line the previous day! And my wife told me she discontinued her “alerts” from Bank of America for the same reason.
Continue reading "Mobile Phones: Are You Loyal to Your Phone or Your Network?" »
And so it's come to this.
JetBlue yesterday announced that customers looking for blankets and pillows during flights are welcome to such amenities -- for the low, low price of just $7 per set, which passengers can keep and reuse, along with a $5 coupon for Bed Bath & Beyond. This follows the well-publicized initiative by several other airlines to start charging fees for all checked baggage. No handy coupon attached to those rules, probably because there's no such company as Bilked, Bamboozled & Beyond.
Customer centricity, we hardly knew ye.
Senator Phil Gramm was recently quoted as saying we are not in a real recession, but a "mental recession." What does this have to do with your customers and your business reputation?
Continue reading "Mental Recessions and Customer Stampedes" »
Sure, when you're the only game in town, customer service and the experience don't matter much. But how many companies are the only game in town anymore? Even B2B companies need to work on customer loyalty, as tech company EMC recently discovered.
Several colleagues of mine have been using, and enjoying, Twitter for a while now. They suggested that I should, too. Instead, I wondered how they found the time—and if it was as valuable as it could potentially be distracting. With my crazy schedule, I held off joining the fray. Until, that is, an invitation popped up in my inbox—from my boss, VP of 1to1 Media Marji Chimes.
OK, I thought. I give.
:-)
Continue reading "Getting Social (Media, That Is): My first two weeks on Twitter" »
Yesterday in New York, Martha Rogers and I had lunch with one of our favorite people, Phillip Riese. Phillip, an ex-American Express senior executive, is a literal fount of entrepreneurial wisdom. We cited him in our first book, The One to One Future, in 1993. Phillip’s insight is that business books come and go sort of like diet books. Everyone’s always trying to find the right diet in their own personal lives, and business executives seem to be on the same treadmill with their business policies.
Using social media is easy. Anyone with a computer or even mobile phone can set up a blog, social network profile, wiki, or podcast. The trick is building an audience. We were asked by a number of the attendees of our Get Past the Social Media Hype webinar about how to attract the right people. For companies used to paying for advertising where audiences already exist, this is a whole new way of thinking.
Ever shop online and get so frustrated when you can’t find something that you’re looking for? Have you ever had trouble filling out an online registration or billing form? Seems like it happens more often than not these days—even with Forrester Research reporting earlier this year that online customer experience spending was to intensify in 2008 with attention being paid to usability.
One of the subjects that came up at our July 16 webinar, "Get Past the Social Media Hype," was wikis -- what they are and what they're for. Based on the Hawaiian word for "fast," wikis haven't made much of an impact yet (notwithstanding Wikipedia, of course)...but that doesn't mean that they never will.
A week after I heard about local bank IndyMac's abrupt closing, a few more regional banks in the southwest were shuttered by the FDIC for "shady" practices. And even with the big banks the stress of mergers, a weak dollar, and the subprime meltdown are causing lots of strain. What happened to financial services industry? It's quite obvious actually. Banks and other financial services, in many cases, lost site of what is truly important -- customers.
During our editorial webcast “Get Past the Social Media Hype” last week, several attendees expressed concerns about creating an online customer community and potentially opening the door to a barrage of negative—and very public—feedback. To that we say: Customers are already talking about you, good or bad, in other public forums, online and off. An online customer community won’t increase your control of the conversation, but it will make it much easier to communicate with your customers about their concerns.
But that was only one concern.
During last week’s webinar on social media, we received a number of questions about metrics, KPI’s, and other measurements related to social media. The prevailing confusion seemed to be over what to measure. The answer I gave at the time was “well, that depends.” Since then, I’ve developed a more refined answer that will hopefully allay some of the fears with justifying a social media strategy.
The success of an organization largely depends on the motivation of its employees. When it comes to encouraging employees to participate in social media on behalf of their company, it can be like moving mountains.
Last week's 1to1 webinar "Get Past the Social Media Hype" was a solid success, at least according to those I've heard from so far. My part of the presentation revolved around content-sharing, and included a brief discussion about widgets. Now with a bit more space, I thought it worthwhile to expand upon the subject.
Heck yeah it does. Or, at least, it should. I would argue that B2B companies have a lot more to bring to social media -- many high-tech or manufacturing companies deal with very specific products and customers. The community already exists. I would say that all that's needed is to give customers, partners, employees and potential customers an online area to join. The sad reality, however, is that B2B companies in general lag behind the B2C space when it comes to social media.
Continue reading "Does Social Media Work for B2B Companies?" »
Barry Herstein just became the new Chief Marketing Officer at PayPal. The online payment company is taking its strategy beyond its traditional eBay relationship to become a global financial services powerhouse. In the newly created position, Herstein is challenged to build a global brand and advance its unique business model. We recently sat down with him to discuss the details.
Continue reading "PayPal's CMO On Playing Nice With Others" »
With all the stories lately about the airlines, one may have been overlooked earlier this week. Delta announced it was placing ads to its boarding passes, as a way to increase revenue in addition to bag fees, meal and drink fees, and fuel surcharges (not to mention the increased price of tickets). Airlines have experimented with advertising before. Some have placed ads on meal carts, overhead bins, and even the outside of planes. What struck me about the story, however, was a quote from the CEO of the technology company behind creating the ads, Sojern Inc.
Continue reading "What to Do With 250 Million Unused Billboards" »
During 1to1’s editorial webinar today, “Get Past the Social Media Hype?”, we asked attendees a few questions about what types of social media they’re currently using, and what their plans are for the next six months.
During the edit team’s numerous interviews we’ve conducted over the last few months, we discovered that in talking to executives, many are still confused about how to leverage social media to create value for their businesses.
So today in a webinar at 2 p.m. EST, the 1to1 Media edit team will give advice, define social media, offer some examples of companies that are seeing success from using social media, and explain the benefits of leveraging social media tools for your company.
If you’re looking for ideas on how to use social media in your marketing plans, you need look no further than Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, where he synthesizes a list of 50 social media ideas into five broader strategies. Jeremiah is an analyst with Forrester, and the five broad strategies come from Forrester, while the 50 ideas come from Chris Brogan’s blog. Brogan describes himself as a “social media evangelist.” One look around his site will convince you of the veracity of that statement.
However you find this list, it’s a terrific supplement to the social media thinking we’ve already posted on our own microsite, Get Past the Hype.
When does an ad campaign go so far? If you're the state of South Carolina, it's when you're promoting yourself as "So Gay"--at least for some lawmakers.
According to a July 11 article in Columbia, SC newspaper The State, the state's Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism has pulled out of an agreement with London-based travel agency Amro Worldwide for an overseas campaign with the tagline "South Carolina Is So Gay."
A June 27 press release announcing the campaign quoted South Carolina tourism spokesperson Kirsty Dillury as saying, “South Carolina has a lot to offer gay travelers, and we think that people may be surprised to see our destination reaching out to the gay market. We are delighted to be involved with the ‘So Gay’ campaign in particular as it sends a powerful positive message to everyone that there is nothing wrong at all with a destination being described as ’so gay.’”
Not so fast, Kirsty.
I recently returned from an 8 1/2 day trip, during which I had engagements in four continents. I've captured it all in an 8 1/2 minute video. From Brazil to Qatar to Prague to Halifax, I exchanged insights during presentations, workshops, and one-on-one meetings. I met with executives from such industries as financial services, contact centers, and hospitality, and shared information on such issues as customer loyalty and employee engagement. I also learned about their business strategies. You can hear all about my trip in "The Frequent Flier."
A week before school let out at the end of June my 10-year-old daughter, Claudia, announced that she and two of her friends decided that they wanted to go to Sylvan Learning Center in the fall to improve their study habits. After inspecting my daughter for a possible alien possession (think: Invasion of the Body Snatchers), I gleefully said I would call Sylvan and look into it.
Aside from being excited about this for obvious reasons, I was also looking forward to the Sylvan customer experience. Sylvan won a 1to1 Impact Award earlier this year (Sylvan’s Sara Costello, director of direct mail and conversion marketing, talked more about that strategy on a recent webinar), and I love having the opportunity to experience firsthand the customer strategies of the companies we write about.
Continue reading "A Successful Customer Strategy in Action—Really" »
While tools like social networking, blogs, and other new media are the talk of the tech and marketing worlds, many in so-called "traditional" companies may think it wouldn't fit their business model. But for Wells Fargo, a 156-year-old financial services company, it's a major component to interact with customers and prospects.
Continue reading "Even a 156-Year-Old Can Use Social Media " »
Sen. Phil Gramm, an advisor to Sen. John McCain, just stirred a big controversy by maintaining that the economic downturn causing so much angst is largely the result of pessimistic thinking, rather than serious economic problems. Pointing out that we aren’t actually in a recession at all, with real economic growth anemic but still respectable at a 1% positive rate, he called this a “mental recession,” and said the problem is we are becoming a “nation of whiners.” McCain repudiated these comments as the Obama camp gleefully leaped on them as further proof that McCain was out of touch.
Email is a great communications tool; it’s environmentally friendly, costs next to nothing, and reaches the masses instantly. But because it provides instant gratification with little risk, email can very easily be misused. I recently got an email from ACS, the company that handles my student loans. Since I’m blogging about it, you can probably guess that I wasn’t thrilled with what the company had to say.
There is increasing controversy about new personalized ad technologies able to track your every online move. Unlike most personalized online advertising, this new technology, from companies like NebuAds in the United States, and Phorm in the UK, is based on the cable TV or phone company that provides your overall Web access – your Internet-service provider (“ISP”). There’s an article about this in today’s Wall Street Journal.
As the de facto book reviewer at 1to1, I confess that I've been letting the side down of late. Blogging instead about conferences, notable news developments, and the much-beloved Hydrox cookie, I've been remiss in keeping up with the barrage of business books that largely land in my lap. (I have, however, been keeping up with my alliteration assignments.)
So while everyone else is enjoying Child 44 and When You Are Engulfed in Flames and Goodnight Bush, I'm curling up on the 1to1 chaise lounge with Steve Yastrow, David Vinjamuri, and Richard S. Gallagher. It's a little crowded, but we're learning a few things.
When you think of an organization that is effective at building customer loyalty, you think of companies like Starbucks, USAA, and The Ritz-Carlton, right? Well add a new one to the mix. But this one isn’t a business; it’s singer/songwriter Todd Rundgren, of the song “Bang on the Drum All Day” fame.
Continue reading "Todd Rundgren, Rocker or Loyalty Leader?" »
If you feel a sense of deja vu when the topic of social media comes up, don’t be surprised. As with many approaches to building profitable customer relationships (think: CRM), social media marketing is going through its own hype cycle. Some companies have well-planned strategies with goals and metrics, while others are rushing in just to be a part of the action. Still others haven’t quite discerned the best approach to using social media as a customer strategy tool that delivers ROI. We’re here to help make sense of it all.
The role of customer care in the contact center has never been more pivotal to a company’s success. As a result, contact center leaders continuously strive to develop innovative ways to improve service, increase productivity, and integrate the contact center with the rest of the organization.
No sooner had my story on Dimension Data's 10th annual "Call Center Benchmarking Report" appeared in yesterday's 1to1 Weekly than I received another call center survey -- which, as opposed to the Dimension report, seems to indicate that call center-related satisfaction is improving.
The "Contact Center Satisfaction Index 2008: How Call Center Customer Satisfaction Impacts the Bottom Line," by CFI Group North America CEO Sheri Teodoru and coming out today, finds that call center c-sat gained 3 percent over last year, scoring 72 on the index's 100-point scale. A three-point improvement is admittedly not earth-shaking, but in today's climate it certainly does count for something.
But, not to put too fine a point on it, what?
Everyone has a bad call center story. It's as American as baseball and apple pie. In general, it's an industry where competence could be seen as a competitive differentiator. Companies are working to change their efficiency focus to more reflect the call center's impact on the customer relationship, but unfortunately the industry overall still has a long way to go.
I’m sure you’re not surprised to know that here at 1to1 we’re all about customer focus. That focus includes places that some might consider unexpected, like pricing. Oh, sure, things like volume discounts have been around for ages. But what I’m leaning toward here is tying customer value to price in a different way: Customers who value your brand/products/services will often pay a premium.
Even before the IBM commercial where the employees play “buzzword bingo” during a meeting, anyone even tangentially connected to the business world could tell you that corporate America was turning the English language into its personal playground. Similar to the way politicians carefully choose their words to convey the proper emotion and stay on message, businesses have invented terms like “offshoring” to mask the negative effects of losing jobs overseas, and “result-driven” or “value-added” to emphasize positive terms. Sometimes this process goes too far, and someone steps in to say “enough!” In England, that responsibility fell to the Local Government Association, after a local town council began calling brainstorming “thought showers” instead.
The concept of “marketing,” or the murkiness that exists around branding and the rest of the marketing world, is among the things Kevin Zimmerman discussed with author Rob Walker in today’s Marketing Xfactor. Walker also talks about the fleeting happiness that comes with acquiring things, and his belief that branding is as powerful a force in today’s media landscape as ever.
What do you think the future holds for branding? Are consumers really “brand-proof” as some experts say, or is Walker right that with some creative marketing, customer immunity to brands can be overcome?
On Monday, I took JetBlue from JFK to Las Vegas. I hadn’t flown with the airline since prior to the infamous February 15, 2007 debacle where the airline stranded passengers on tarmacs in New York for more than 10 hours because of a snow storm.
Continue reading "What Happened to Neeleman's Beloved JetBlue?" »
Forrester Research's 2008 Financial Services Forum, being held this week in New York City, is in part taking a look at how financial service firms measure the quality of the customer experience they provide, and whether or not their approach has been successful. According to Forrester's vice president, principal analyst Bill Doyle, the answer is: not so much.
When a company like Sony, which makes some of the best and most popular products in the world, refocuses efforts to improve the customer experience, you know we've reached a tipping point.
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve signed up for email notifications from some company I’ve dealt with, only to find myself inundated with messages so that within a few weeks, having read only one or two of them, if that many, I have to go back to the Web site and unsubscribe. I unsubscribe a lot. Just about as much as I subscribe.
The other day my wife reported that she had signed up for the Neiman Marcus email notification of sales, and found the same thing. But when she went back to unsubscribe, in order to un-clutter her in-box, she was offered a very clear choice. The message at the unsubscribe landing page was:
Too many emails? Click here for just once a week…
Which is exactly what she decided to choose - once a week emails.
Now that seems to me to be a very good program for a lot of companies to emulate, but unfortunately most firms don't have once-a-week email options. Most firms only have on-off switches for their email marketing programs, which amounts to either avalanche or zero.
After spending so much time covering such topics as social media and word of mouth, I decided to immerse myself in the social marketing experience. I got the opportunity to do this after a meeting with marketing services company House Party. Its site is a combination social network/party manager, where party hosts and party goers can interact on blogs and post photos and videos, and hosts can manage and track invitations, to-do lists, and more. The parties themselves are hosted by consumers—1,000 of them on the same day (or two), to be exact—for specific sponsors.
We write a lot about privacy when it comes to marketing online and sharing customer lists, but how can outdoor billboard advertising come under fire for violating people’s rights?
The New York Times on Sunday reported that Starbucks is introducing a new loyalty program that will hopefully reignite an emotional connection between the customers and the brand.
Years from now, when our children ask, "What did you do in the mobile revolution, Daddy?" we may find ourselves saying something like: "Uh ... I was waiting for it to actually happen."
That was the somewhat surprising theme at last week's Mobile Marketing Forum in New York. On the one hand we heard outgoing Mobile Marketing Association president Laura Marriott say that about half of the world's population -- 3.3 billion people -- are mobile subscribers, compared with 1 billion worldwide Internet users. On the other hand, we heard Mozes Inc. founder and CEO Dorrian Porter compare the mobile environment to the movie Groundhog Day, noting that each of the past several years has been breathlessly heralded as "The Year of Mobile" -- only to see those hopes dashed. (Amusingly, Porter started giving the same presentation on the Forum's second day.)
So just what is going on?
Last week I attended a conference in NYC that took place across from the United Nations. I walked right past the Kuwaiti consulate building. And sure enough, there was no visible mailbox. The country has no residential mail system, so marketing via direct channels poses a challenge. But one company saw this as an opportunity to connect with customers in unique ways.
If you believe, as I do, that earning the trust of customers is the most direct route to long-term success for a business, then there is a new book you should run out and buy today: The Best Service is No Service, by Bill Price and David Jaffe. If you want, read my comprehensive review of this book on Amazon, and then buy it.
Continue reading "Must-read new book: The Best Service is No Service" »
Yamaha Music UK is connecting its customers through "Yamaha Education Friends," one of a growing number of niche online communities joining the social media sphere. In today's Marketing Xfactor, you can read more about how music educators are connecting, sharing ideas, and providing Yamaha Music with insight into their needs and development ideas.
Online communities are only one way social media is transforming the way customers and companies interact. Has your company considered developing a social network or using existing sites to connect with your customers?
Somehow Steve Jobs manages to whip the media world into a frenzy when he gets up on stage, and it seems like he’s been doing that more often recently. Why? Maybe because the iPhone release last year didn’t quite live up to the publicity surrounding it, and Apple is rushing to introduce version 2.0. Once again this week, a horde of bloggers and overly excited media members are drooling at the prospect of a new Apple product. But is it worth all the attention?
Have you heard? Left for dead, consigned to the dustbin of history, gone and more or less forgotten, a familiar name has suddenly re-emerged, thrilling longtime fans who thought it was all over; that the fat lady had not only sung, but had packed up her sheet music, hailed a cab, and dived headfirst into a vat of chocolate mousse.
No, not Hillary Clinton, who hasn't (and may never) go away. Not the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who after being the feel-good baseball story of the past couple of months are in the midst of a bickering downward spiral (and yes, I know they're technically just "The Rays" now, but I still call that other team the "California Angels," so sue me). And certainly not Big Brown, who answered the Triple Crown question "What can brown do for you?" with a resounding, "Umm, not much" at the Belmont.
I am, in fact, speaking of the long-moribund Hydrox cookie, which Kellogg's recently announced will be returning "for a limited time" in August.
Recently my colleague Kevin Zimmerman wrote about an email campaign incident where his wife's name was wrong and none of the "personalized" information was correct. The company fixed the issue after a few campaigns, but even after more than 10 years of email business, many companies still have a long way to go to create a good customer experience in the inbox.
Last week I had a great conversation with Satmetrix CMO Deborah Eastman about the evolving customer experience. Of course, we also discussed the Net Promoter Score methodology.
To level set, Eastman pointed out that customer strategy success doesn’t come from asking the “would you refer” question in and of itself. What makes an impact is when a company focuses on customer-centric measures that drive employees to change the customer experience. This means that the surveying customers on their propensity to refer cannot live in a vacuum; it needs a management framework, Eastman said. “It has to be a part of the management rhythm,” she said, adding that companies must also link operational and loyalty metrics.
No doubt many of you have read about the controversy surrounding Rachael Ray, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Michelle Malkin over an wardrobe choice with alleged terrorist ties. For those who haven’t, Malkin, a conservative columnist ultra-radical nut, wrote a column comparing the scarf Ray wore in an online coffee ad to that worn by Muslim terrorists. Dunkin’ Donuts, looking to avoid controversy, pulled the ad to ward off further protests. However, the company may have created more problems than it solved by giving in so quickly over what isn’t such a black-and-white issue.
Lately, I’ve been feeling like I have social media fatigue. Every time I open my inbox, there’s another invitation from a friend or colleague to join a community. In the last two weeks alone, I received invitations to Plaxo, Twitter, Reunion.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Chickswhoclick.
This week I was in Ottawa, talking to a whole group of government officials about the importance of customer centricity. But, you say, governments are monopolies, so they don't compete for business. And even if they did, they don't REALLY have customers anyway. But the surprising truth is, the principles around customer centricity are universal, and the government officials I addressed were just as interested in the topic as any business audience.
Watch the Peppers Unplugged video, "Should Governments Be Customer Centric?
The dysfunction -- some would say outright hostility -- that continues to manifest itself between the sales and marketing departments at many organizations can be disheartening, to say the least.
A new global survey of more than 500 sales and marketing professionals by the CMO Council and its Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE) finds that less than 20 percent of respondents regard their sales and marketing organizations as extremely collaborative; while among those who have CRM applications, only 13 percent view the application as highly valued and widely deployed, and 50 percent said they had trouble finding customer account data, did not have enough information, or had none at all.
But there are signs of improvement out there. My feature in the next issue of 1to1 Magazine discusses how one company, Tektronix, has acted to successfully overcome this gap (which, the company's VP, marketing Martyn Etherington says was more like a chasm), and there's additional information indicating that the situation may be improving.
Who is responsible for privacy within your organization? Is it someone tucked away in the legal department or marketing, whose role seems to be more of a roadblock than a help? For most companies, privacy issues are an afterthought with compliance as the priority. But forward-thinking companies use privacy as a tool to build customer trust. Best Buy is one of those companies, and it gets all employees in on the act.
“If agents can’t solve customers’ problems it’s like throwing gas on a fire.”
That truism was told to me by Marchai Bruchey, CMO of Kana, last week when we were discussing trends in the service arena. Bruchey was talking about the challenge contact centers face with retention. “Companies need consistency in that channel, but call centers have the highest turnover.” One main reason, according to Bruchey, is that agents feel they don’t have the information they need to do their jobs. When agents can't resolve customers’ issues, both customers and agents become frustrated—often to the point of leaving.
In the July/August issue of 1to1 Magazine we’re working on a story about search engine optimization (SEO) and how mastering it is more than just knowing which keywords to buy and how to create the most inbound or outbound links. I came across two examples this week of companies that clearly don’t understand what SEO is all about, for two very different reasons. One is looking at a possible ban from Google for undermining the spirit of search engine practices, while the other has its head in the sand trying to pretend the digital age isn’t happening.
One of our avid readers, Miro Slodki, is kind enough to always send me links to information he comes across that he’s thinks I’ll find interesting. He did this just the other day, and as usual, was right on about it being something I couldn’t resist reading. I’m mean, how could I with a title like, “Service Is Not a Strategy.”
The item in question is an entry by Richard Litvack on the Canadian Marketing Association’s blog. It’s a thought provoking read, with equally thought provoking responses from Miro, Don Peppers, and a gentleman listed only as Laurence whose comments I found fascinating—and in line with some ideas Dan Hill recently presented during his interview with 1to1, “The Business of Emotion.”
Litvack’s blog is definitely worth a visit. And if you’re like Miro, Don Peppers, and I, you’re certain to feel compelled to post a response.
Leadership necessitates listening. Today's CEOs expect communications to be a strategic asset and critical link between their corporate vision and the first connection to their customers—customer service.
As companies like Nielsen continue trying various devices to measure viewership in nanoseconds, Internet marketers persistently experiment with different eye-tracking techniques, and the parameters of predictive analytics and focus groups keep evolving, it's intriguing to take another look at a film that effectively predicted many of these trends. (Or, for that matter, to take a look at any film besides Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Diminishing Returns.)
I'm thinking of Le Couple Témoin (The Model Couple), part of The Delirious Fictions of William Klein DVD box set recently released by the Criterion Collection's Eclipse label. Made in 1977, the film not only predicts the likes of EdTV, The Truman Show, and the apparently never-ending tidal wave of reality television, but it does so in a savagely satirical fashion--the kind of satire that, seen again at a remove of thirty-plus years, finds your knowing laughter suddenly turning uneasy.
After months of assessing features and functionality, ISM Inc. recently released the winners of its Top 15 CRM Awards in both the enterprise and SMB categories. What is most interesting to me are the trends ISM noted while judging the applications.
Three in particular stood out to me.
Earlier this week I attended a sliver The CMO Club’s latest event. The focus of my time there was to learn about the results of the Club’s recent survey, “Marketing in a Recession.” Founder Pete Krainik took attendees through the findings; attendees weren’t shy about adding their opinions and commentary.
Hey, I just returned from a week in Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. In Singapore I heard that when a mobile phone company in that region removed the upper limit on what their call center reps were allowed to spend to satisfy a customer, it actually reduced the average amount each rep spent! You can hear about that, and some fascinating facts about Singapore, in my latest "Peppers Unplugged" video diary entry.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a NASCAR race (something I've always wanted to do, but not the easiest feat growing up in Connecticut). I was there to see how ISC, owner of the Richmond International Raceway where the event was held, was developing a social network on RacingOne.com for fans where they could share their raceday experiences. You can read more about my experience (including pictures) in today's Marketing Xfactor.
Do you belong to any social networks besides Facebook or MySpace, like niche sites geared toward one interest? Do you think the information companies like ISC can gather from such a network is more valuable than the general profile information found on the larger sites?
In 1to1 Magazine’s March/April issue, we featured FedEx and how its employees are united under one oath—the Purple Promise, which vows to make every customer experience which touches the organization outstanding.
How much would you pay for a new tagline? If you're Citibank, you're willing to drop $30 million to wind up with the ever-so-catchy "Citi Never Sleeps" ... so much more pithy and cogent than the company's previous slogan, "The Citi Never Sleeps."
Not to get all Dr. Evil on you, but let's roll that sum around the palate again, shall we?
Thirty. Million. Dollars.
And they say there's a recession going on out there.
Continue reading "Killing the "The" ... and Other Marketing Tales of the Weird" »
Someone recently asked me, very seriously, whether I could tell them how much it really cost acquire a customer, relative to the cost of losing a customer. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that this is a nonsensical question. There’s no answer to it. That is, the answer is always going to be “it depends.”
Consider the cost of acquiring a customer -- well, what particular kind of customer are we talking about? Will that be an ice-cream cone buyer, an Amazon book buyer, a Toyota Camry buyer, a construction firm buying a new crane, a computer software consulting business buying janitorial service for twelve months, or a business class air traveler who’s never flown on your airline but frequently flies with your competitor? And who’s doing the acquiring? Are you a monopoly, or a duopoly, or in a highly competitive market, or an international one? Do you have the best product, the worst product, the second best, or something in between? Are we talking about acquiring a very loyal customer, or one who might jump to the competitor in response to the next offer?
I’m sure you see the problem here. Ditto with the cost of "keeping" a customer. Let’s see, will you want to be keeping that customer for another week? Month? Year? Forever? Is this a high-volume customer you want to keep or a low-volume one? Did this customer come in on someone else’s referral, or in response to an advertising promotion of some type, or what? And has the customer generally been satisfied with your service or not? Does anyone else offer a service just as good as yours? Do they price it competitively or not?
All this being said, in any particular business situation you can always calculate the cost of acquiring the last set of customers - simply divide the money you spent on the task by the number of customers you've acquired, and presto!
However, in calculating the cost of keeping a customer, the best way (really the only way) to do this is with control groups. You have a set of policies designed to make your customers more loyal, and these policies cost some fixed amount. You apply the policies to a population of customers, but you hold aside a control group of statistically identical customers who are not exposed to the policies. Then calculate the difference in customer retention rates between the two groups of customers, and that absolute difference - the extra customers who remain in the non-control group, over and above the number you would have expected based on the retention rate in the control - that's the number of extra customers you "kept" with the policies you applied. So again, divide the cost of the policies by that number of extra customers, and there's your answer. For now. For that situation and for those policies, at that time.
One more thing: There is a spurious “fact” that circulates widely alleging that "it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one," although sometimes people say it is seven times as much or ten times as much. This fact originated with a Harvard Business Review article a couple of decades ago, which was the result of a general study of retention policies compared to acquisition policies across a range of businesses in different (consumer) categories. I think it was Earl Sasser, et. al., and the "service quality initiative" or something like that. However, if the academics who did this study had taken a different sample, or applied their calculations to different categories of businesses, then the numbers would obviously be different. This number is valid for the particular set of firms they looked at, in that study, but you can't simply apply same number, as a general principle, across all marketing.
I’d actually be interested in hearing from anyone out there who has their own figures – how much does it cost YOU in YOUR business to acquire different kinds of customers? And do you know how much it costs to retain them, as a general proposition?
We at 1to1 Magazine interviewed all 15 1to1 Customer Champions for this year's cover feature. They had many different stories to tell, but many seemed to approach their corporate and customer challenges in a similar way.
Did you know that a person who regularly buys large dog collars has a higher risk of defaulting on a loan than a person who regularly buys bird seed?
Continue reading "Thoughts From the Toronto 1to1 Customer Champions Roundtable" »
If the television writers hadn’t just gone on strike last year, I’d say they definitely should following this announcement from NBC Universal. NBC’s new Digital Studio, which is creating shows to appear exclusively online on sites like Hulu, has teamed with an advertising company to create two new shows for this summer. Omnicom Group has already signed up companies like Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft to sponsor the show, but they’re not just airing short commercials in between scenes, running pre-roll ads, or even placing banners alongside the rolling video; the marketing is much more subversive than that.
Continue reading "Television show or commercial in disguise?" »
Customers don’t typically seek service when they’re having a good day. They need service when their order is wrong, their shipment is late, or there’s a mistake on their bill.
"Screw it" may not be everyone's first choice for an ad campaign's tagline, but that's what Harley-Davidson is doing these days with the apothegm "Screw It, Let's Ride."
The campaign caught my eye with a full-page ad on the back cover of a recent edition of Sports Illustrated. The full text of the ad?
"Over the last 105 years in the saddle, I’ve seen my share of conflict in the world, but every time this country has come out stronger than before. Because chrome and asphalt put distance between me and whatever the world can throw at me. Freedom and wind outlast hard times. And the rumble of my engine drowns out all the spin on the evening news. If 105 years have proved one thing, it’s that fear sucks and it doesn’t last long. So screw it, let’s ride."
The approach brings to mind any number of possibilities for other products.
“I’m passionate about customers. I always start with, how does that affect the customers?”
Those were the words of Sage Software President and CEO Sue Swenson yesterday during the opening keynote at Sage’s Insights partner conference. Swenson was emphasizing to partners how important customer relationships are to her, and to Sage.
I always love to hear that kind of customer focus, but it especially strikes a chord when someone at the C-level not only talks the talk but walks the walk. Because as we all know, an enterprisewide customer strategy can only succeed if company leaders believe in the power of customer centricity, communicate that to their employees, and deliver on it.
Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of hearing John Maxwell deliver an engaging keynote on leadership at the Sage Software Insights partner conference. Maxwell is the author of several best-selling books on leadership, as well as the just-released Leadership Gold: Lessons I've Learned from a Lifetime of Leading.
I was especially drawn in because of two things Maxwell said that, to me, directly apply to customer strategy: 1) when your ability to lead grows, so does your business; and 2) leadership is all about engaging people—and without engaged employees customer centricity is not much more than big talk. “Your ability to lead will determine your effectiveness,” he said.
Maxwell discussed the five levels of leadership. Here’s an overview.
Many executives see other companies using Web 2.0 tools, customer co-creation, and advanced personalization techniques to build relationships with customers. They think "it's a good idea for them, but it wouldn't work it my business." We think that any business -- B2B or B2C -- can benefit from smart use of new technologies that are readily available to build relationships. Don't let it pass you by.
One element of our weekly staff meeting is to present story ideas, discuss trends and relevant news, and the like. During yesterday’s meeting Managing Editor Mila Antonio mentioned an article she read about Papa John’s surpassing $1 billion in online pizza sales, and noted that part of its appeal is pizza-tracking functionality that allows customers to follow their pie from order to creation to delivery (supposedly taking the stress out of knowing when your pizza will arrive—but that’s another whole conversation…).
I immediately chimed in with my personal tale of how much I love using Papa John’s website to order pizza. The response caught me off guard.
Trust is essential when you decide to move into a motor home with your spouse and three children for the duration of 18 months to explore the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.
What do the cast of "Gypsy" and Chrysler LLC chairman/CEO Bob Nardelli have in common? They can both currently be heard singing the familiar strains of the showtune "You Gotta Have a Gimmick."
The cast's doing it eight times a week in the latest Broadway revival of a show which doesn't get restaged quite as often as "Grease" but comes perilously close. Nardelli's doing it as he tries to reinvigorate his long-hurting brand by offering customers $2.99-a-gallon gasoline for three years. And if the novel plan helps grease Chrysler stock upwards, so much the better.
Who knew that Wal-Mart needed brand advocates? Cathy Halligan, CMO of Walmart.com, says that the company encourages customers to post reviews, and share thoughts on the company and products. If one of the largest companies on the planet works to build word-of-mouth advocates, then you should too.
Continue reading "Word-of-Mouth Is Marketing's Holy Grail" »
We all get direct mail with personalized fields that are supposed to make us think the company marketing to us knows what makes us tick. The same with email, personal URL's, and other messaging that we know deep down is really just mass-produced by a computer. In today's saturated media market where people's attention spans are split in five thousand different directions, companies have to do something really special to capture a customer's attention and make them believe an advertisement was made just for them. And that's exactly what Wilkes University recently did.
At Unica’s Marketing Innovation Summit in New Orleans this week, I sat down with CEO Yuchun Lee to chat about the customer-centric shift he sees in marketing. Excited about the new customer paradigms taking shape, he also opened up about emerging trends like mobile and social media, and even commented on his role as one of the MIT students who took Vegas for millions in the 1980s and made famous in the book Bringing Down the House and most recently in the movie 21.
You said yesterday that there’s a paradigm shift where customers are taking control. Are companies in general prepared for that shift?
I think we’re at a stage where they’re aware of the change. Many are aware in an unpleasant way. It’s a mix in terms of the level of preparation and understanding. CEOs are understanding and making changes from the top down and others are clinging to those old models.
For the ones who are clinging, what does that mean for their futures?
It doesn’t mean that their business will go down the tubes; it means they have to be strong with an alternative strategy…. You can still do well, but it requires a different type of strategy. Customer intimacy is the one that it is affecting. There will be a lot that will be hurt by this.
There are no atheists in foxholes, goes the old saying—and, these days, there aren’t too many brand loyalists there either.
This realization was underscored by an article in Sunday’s New York Times, noting that a Lucky Charms-consuming family is now enjoying something called Millville Marshmallows & Stars for breakfast, while another has substituted Briargate steak sauce for A1.
In an era of $4 a gallon milk, in other words, brand loyalty goes out the window.
I've been a member of eBay since 1998. This was before PayPal, before Buy It Now, and even before most items had photos. I've been both a buyer and seller, and as the company has grown, it has added new policies and features designed to improve the experience for everyone. But with its recent policy changes, does everyone still benefit?
Continue reading "Is One Customer Group More Important Than Another?" »
The current issue of our email newsletter “Inside 1to1: Privacy” includes a thought-provoking piece on the problems and successes of the United States’ privacy laws, entitled “Open Letter to the World: Don’t Copy Our Security-Breach Notification Model.” Published in conjunction with the International Association of Privacy Professionals, or IAPP, Inside 1to1: Privacy is a free monthly e-mail newsletter that reviews privacy, trust and security topics.
I’m calling everyone’s attention to this current issue because it seems to have generated a great deal of interest. I’ve personally received more emails from readers because of this single article than any other since launching the newsletter. If you don't already subscribe to this newsletter, you may want to at least take a look at this informative and provocative article.
The best ideas for a company's product innovation aren't always internal ones. In today's Marketing Xfactor, we share insights from this year's World Innovation Forum, where it was clear customer interaction breeds innovation. Do you engage customers and capture their ideas? Has a customer ever suggested something that made you stop and wonder why no one at your company thought of it first?
“There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.” – Ronald Reagan
I was reminded of this quote yesterday when a colleague relayed an experience she had a few days ago on Priceline.com. In planning her Memorial weekend trip to Puerto Rico, she thoroughly researched the top online travel sites for the best price. She discovered that Priceline.com offered the most competitive rate.
Excited, she started to book her trip through Priceline.com, but every time she neared the end of the multiple steps required to book and was ready to complete her order, the system would pop up a message that read “We cannot confirm your order.” Because the company’s rates change so rapidly, the trip she was trying to book had changed in price while she was going through the process. She tried 20 more times with the exact same results before finally switching to Travelocity where she ended up booking the trip for $150 over the Priceline offer.
Continue reading "Priceline.com Sends Customers to the Competition" »
I was recently in London for the Institute for Direct Marketing’s B2B conference. Great comments and discussion about the kinds of things B2B marketers can do to acquire and retain their customers. One of the issues in B2B, of course, is the fact that while a consumer will make purchase decisions on his own, a business customer will not. Businesses make no decisions on their own at all – because companies are just legal entities designed to sanction the actions of their individual officers and employees. It’s the individuals within the business organization that actually do the thinking, discuss the options, and decide whether their company will or will not buy from you.
Continue reading "Why Not Help Those Inside a Customer Organization Who Want to Help You?" »
In 1970, when Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, proposed the first nationwide environmental protest “to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda,” “It was a gamble,” he said “but it worked.”
Today, most everyone from small businesses to large enterprises are shaking things up and are contributing to the greening of America, leading eco-conscious initiatives and marketing them throughout their enterprises.
With the trend being green, why not make Earth Day a nationally observed holiday where companies and schools are closed? Wouldn’t we make more of an impact, if, instead of spending the day at work and school, we were out in our communities planting trees, collecting trash, and participating in environmental marches? Imagine the greater affect on the environment and in business, if companies led their employees on such day-long local green-keeping initiatives?
Until such a bill would ever pass, here are three steps to contribute to Earth Day while at work:
* Reduce and recycle office products
* Apply green principles to your office building
When the customer-facing staff at a company feels the need to fight publicly with corporate about how they treat customers, it could indicate a major problem. That is what is happening with Verizon's Florida group.
Continue reading "Verizon Faces Customer Service Scrutiny From Its Own Staff" »
Every once in a while an Internet sensation captivates Web surfers, leading workers everywhere to email a video or URL to their colleagues, creating fodder for the comedians on VH1’s Best Week Ever and E’s The Soup, and giving rise to a new Wikipedia article, among other things.
This is often called “going viral,” and it seems like every week there’s something new (usually a video) that we can all sit around and talk about. It seems like viral videos come out of nowhere, and are often obscure clips that somehow gain traction. For an example click here (warning: contains sound). For more on why an obscure music video relates to viral marketing, read the history of the Internet phenomenon here. This was just a fluke, but is it possible to create a viral video as part of a marketing campaign? To understand if it’s possible to predict what will or won’t catch on, you have to define what it means to “go viral.”
Nationwide insurance has a lot to live up to with its slogan, "Nationwide is on your side." Business Solutions Services Officer Doug Stafford says that it's a challenge to live that brand promise. Yesterday at the Frost and Sullivan's Customer Contact Executive MindXhchange, Stafford shared how a simple change toward the customer perspective made a huge impact in the customer experience.
Continue reading "Nationwide Improved the Customer Experience Without Money" »
Delta and Northwest announced the agreement of its long-awaited merger that when combined, will created the country’s largest airline with a combined value of $17.7 billion.
The new airline, operating under the name “Delta,” will provide customers with greater choice, with service to 390 destinations, as well as competitive fares, but how will the merger affect morale among the employees as the two workforces struggle to integrate processes, strategies, and IT?
With an M&A come complex organizational structures. Companies in the midst of partnering need a commander—a point person—who can centralize departments, processes, functional areas, and offer strategic rationale to ensure that service from employees to customers is not interrupted during the period of upheaval.
Very few people 10 years ago predicted that marketing strategy would be as interactive and consumer-controlled as it is now. Advances in technology and communications have allowed consumers to participate more in how they marketed to, and allowed marketers to get deeper understandings of their customers. So what will the next 10 years bring?
One of our readers, Miro Slodki, posed an interesting question in his current Canadian Marketing Association blog. He asks whether customers are brand monogamists or brand polygamists. My answer: It depends.
Continue reading "Is It Really Loyalty--Or Something Else?" »
Think you can’t sell your company’s product online? Maybe it just requires a different way of looking at what you’re selling. Wells Fargo did just that, and is now bringing a new meaning to the term “online banking.”
Today’s Marketing Xfactor story “The Oakland Athletics Score with Mobile Coupons” showed that mobile coupons are an innovative, trackable means of offering promotions. The biggest downside that curbs widespread adoption is a proven method of redemption. The program worked for the A’s because fans could walk up to a ticket window with their phone to prove they received a coupon, but that doesn’t work for every company.
Have you ever received a mobile coupon? If so, how could it be redeemed? Numeric codes, keywords, and scannable bar codes are the more common methods. If a company sends a coupon to your mobile device, are you more likely to use it than one from a newspaper or Web site?
Blog, wikis, podcasts, YouTube, videocasts, Twitter…
Social media present marketers with a new tough reality—traditional marketing channels are under fire and new channels give consumers more control with shaping the brand.
But these new channels bring with them many challenges. At Forrester’s Marketing Forum, the focus has been marketing’s new imperative—engagement through these new frontiers.
The following are some sound bites overheard yesterday in one-on-one interviews and in speeches that capture the sentiment about marketers’ new reality—engaging customers through the labyrinth of social media.
It's been a rough week for British Airways. The opening of its mammoth Terminal 5 operation on March 27 at Heathrow Airport didn't go as smoothly as planned. Due to computer, baggage, and staff issues, the airline has canceled 200 flights and has a backlog of more than 150,000 pieces of luggage. It must be very frustrating for travelers. But British Airways has earned a reputation for top-notch customer care, so I think most of its customers will forgive BA for this and continue to fly with the airline.
Continue reading "Updated: Terminal 5 a Tough Test for British Airways" »
Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time.
Back in February, I wrote about how British soccer team Ebbsfleet United was redefining the term “customer centric,” via its agreement with members of the team’s MyFootballClub.co.uk community fan website that gave supporters the right to vote on all major decisions, including choosing the team's line-up for each game. Some 29,000 people around the globe ponied up the annual £35 ($70) fee, and the world—well, at least the futbol fanatics of the world—watched in breathless anticipation.
Would those 29,000 “owners” fire the manager? Would they demand a line-up change for every half of every game? Would factions arise to debate any and all Ebbsfleet business, resulting in a balkanization of shareholders, ultimately leading to a dizzying blizzard of claimants to club leadership—so many would-be Anastasias to the Ebbsfleet throne?
If you guessed the answer to all of those questions to be “no,” you too may have a future in predictive analytics.
Many customer-focused executives face a challenge when trying to get executive buy-in for new customer-based initiatives. Traditionally it has been hard to track revenue and bottom-line impact to specific customer experiences. But new tools and processes now show that improvements in the customer experience actually do tie back to the bottom line.
Continue reading "Monetizing Customer Experience Improvements" »
When you think of Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy, you likely think of mass marketing at it “mass-est.” In fact, Coca-Cola often thinks instead in terms of large niche markets driven by lifestyle or life stage, according to Michael La Kier, director of My Coke Rewards for Coca-Cola North America, whom I saw present at IQPC’s Customer Feedback Summit.
The question La Kier posed to attendees was, how do you understand these niches and then connect to consumers? He also noted why attendees would want to make that connection: Companies can spend less when talking to the same consumers again.
La Kier didn’t say how much Coca-Cola North America spends on talking to its My Coke Rewards customers, or whether it’s less than would be spent to connect with less-engaged consumers. But he did give some insight into the tremendous benefits Coke has garnered from the program, and offer eight steps brands and companies can use to successfully connect with customers.
If you've played the Kevin Bacon game, you know that he's been in far too many movies. More importantly, you know that it's possible to connect him with almost anyone else in Hollywood within "six degrees." Thanks to Microsoft, we know Kevin Bacon isn't the only person with so many connections. Microsoft research tracked all interactions on MSN over a month and analyzed how far an average user was from every other average user in the world. The results? Like Kevin Bacon and Hollywood stars, MSN users are 6.6 "degrees" away from one another. Aside from being interesting (and cool to someone like me who enjoys useless factoids) why does it matter?
Continue reading "Customers Are More Connected Than you Think" »
Ernest Hemingway said, “Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.”
This weekend, my husband and I will open the doors to our wine store business in our town, but the work that went into opening Off the Vine has been anything but civilized.
Fifteen-hour days spent scrubbing, painting, lifting boxes, and stocking shelves has sent me straight to my chiropractor’s office. And while I’ve learned a lot from my sommelier husband about the different wine growing regions, varietals, and the correct way to taste wine, I’ve also come to understand the inspiration and perspiration involved in opening a business.
A recent trip to the Westin St. John Resort & Villas got off to a pretty slow start, with a three-hour wait for extra towels and a consistently rude water-sports staff, yet by the end of my family’s visit we agreed that it had been a memorable vacation, mostly for the right reasons.
This came as welcome news to David Yamada, who’s been the site’s general manager since February and admits that he’s still getting acclimated to the job. “Our goal is to always keep improving,” he told me. “We want to take the Westin’s reputation and continue to elevate it.”
Continue reading "On the Job in St. John (Hey, Somebody's Got to Do It)" »
As the number of online communities grows, marketers not there yet may be temped to rush into the fray. Be careful. A headlong approach instead of a well-planned strategy can be “disastrous,” warns Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software. Why? A rushed approach can lead to piecemeal, siloed communities that have no integration points. Yes, a company may want to have several communities – for example, for support, feedback, affinity, developers, etc. – that have different goals, but ultimately, those communities should be linked though a holistic strategy (and probably a bit of technology…).
Imagine the potential insight from a set of connected communities that potentially link to an organization’s CRM system as well. Many of today’s online communities are about innovation, Hersh says. The potential for innovation could grow exponentially from a bit of integration.
Most people who are familiar with the term "avatar" know what one is from Second Life or video games. Most require a human to make them move, talk, and interact with others in real time, but not all avatars are representations of actual people. In today's issue of The Marketing Xfactor, we write about Gonzaga University's community ambassador avatar, Spike. Spike has an intimate knowledge of Gonzaga's Web site and internal database, and he can answer visitors' questions by speaking and typing to them, or by directing them to a page within Gonzaga.edu.
What do you think of avatars being used for customer service? Are they a valuable extension of a brand online? After interacting with Spike, what do you think of him?
When Katherine Lee, the 33-year-old red-haired, blue-eye beauty, beat out 82 other Delta flight attendants to star in the airline's new safety video that will be shown on all aircraft next month, she probably didn't realize that she'd become an instant star. And Delta, maybe inadvertently, got itself a vibrant viral marketing campaign as a result.
But that's exactly what has happened since Delta posted the new video on its blog in February. Delta asked passengers to watch the video and "tell us what you think." and they did!
Continue reading "The Star of Delta’s Safety Video Creates Viral Marketing Craze" »
Widget-based viral marketing campaigns are still working on monetization and measuring success, but it’s hard to argue with what RockYou! has done in this space. The San Mateo, CA-based publisher and developer of applications and other social network services is the most successful widget maker for the Facebook platform in terms of total installations.
Now developing widgets for MySpace and Bebo, RockYou! hit something of a motherlode last fall with Sony Pictures' branded RockYou/Facebook game, "Zombies," which featured Resident Evil: Extinction as the theme of a contest within the game. "Zombies" allowed Facebook players to build an army by virtually "biting" their "chump" friends and converting them into zombie slaves. Through RockYou, Sony instantly put its message in front of “Zombies” players, anticipating only 10,000 participants—but actually reaching a million contestants.
Have you ever had your personal information compromised? Most likely no, but the odds grow higher every day. Most of the time it's due to employee error -- a laptop gets left in a car and gets stolen, or personal information inadvertently gets posted to the Internet. From the company perspective, these mistakes can be prevented by teaching employees to think about customer trust.
Many companies have been using inserts in direct mail pieces for years. It may be time to consider using “onserts” instead, according to Sandra Zoratti. (She defines onserts as ad or offers printed directly on a bill or account statement, otherwise known as transpromo.)
Of course she would say that, you say. Zoratti is vice president of strategic development and transformation for InfoPrint—so it’s her job to evangelize transpromo, i.e. the marriage of transactional and promotional documents.
But wait, Zoratti has data to back up her assertions.
I’ve been shopping at Amazon.com for years. I have an Amazon rewards credit card, I send gift certificates as birthday and Christmas gifts, and I’ve placed over two dozen orders in the last year. I’ve always enjoyed great service, fast shipping, and overall an excellent experience buying from the company. For the first time yesterday, I was actually frustrated with Amazon. The reason why might surprise you, since nothing about Amazon or their great customer service suddenly changed.
While the Feds are busy cutting interest rates and deficit spending to quell the current recession (or mild downturn, depending on who you ask)—companies may feel the pressure to start cutting valuable programs such as marketing or customer service, at the detriment to customers. These areas should remain in tact in the coming months because they will not only help companies weather the mounting storm, but will give them the edge they need to emerge on top.
Here are a few suggestions for surviving the recession.
With 74 percent of Americans thinking the economy is in a recession, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released yesterday, and Bear Stearns recently finding out just how bearish the market has become, any company that wasn't already seriously reassessing its strategy is doubtless doing so today. Not everyone's running up the white flag, however, as I found out at last week's Digital Hollywood Media Summit.
CBS Corporation president/CEO Les Moonves wasn't talking bears in the Summit's March 13 opening session. In fact, he was talking bulls, saying that advertisers focusing on 18-to-34-year-old upscale viewers are targeting "a bull[bleep] category."
"There are no upscale 18- to 34-year olds -- except my children," Moonves averred. "And they have to ask me for money."
Back in 2001 I flew to London for vacation. I left my wallet on the counter at the newsstand in Heathrow Airport, and didn't realize it until I was back at Newark airport. I figured it was lost forever, but I called Virgin Atlantic anyway to see if there was anything they could do. Within 24 hours the airline staff had retrieved the wallet from the Heathrow Lost & Found (with all the cash still in it), gave it to a flight attendant to hold on the next flight to the States, and had a Virgin Atlantic employee drive up to my house in Connecticut to return it. Talk about going the extra (thousand) miles for a customer.
I just left Istanbul, after spending two days in that engaging, tumultuous, thriving city. Peppers & Rogers Group’s largest and most successful consulting operation is based in Turkey, and I was there to meet the CEO for one of our larger clients, address his senior staff, and talk to the press. The night before the event, around an outdoor fire on the terrace of a beautiful restaurant overlooking the Bosporus, I chatted with the dozen or so consultants on the PRG team assigned to this client, and we began discussing some of the cultural differences that change how 1to1 marketing is viewed or implemented in different countries.
I’m doing a presentation next week for Gartner’s CRM conference in London on the incompatibility of innovation and operations. That is, the characteristics that make for a highly innovative company – experimentation, trial and error, creativity, diversity of opinions and resilience – are fundamentally at odds with the characteristics of a company that is capable of conducting its operations in a highly efficient manner – fixed routines, process invariability, and attention to detail.
The CEO of LifeLock guarantees that his company will protect consumer’s identities. He’s so sure that he gives out his own social security number on radio ads promoting the company’s monthly service to protect its customers from identity thieves who seek to steal their personal information and ruin their credit. How can he be so sure LifeLock can protect its customers? It uses several controversial methods to ensure its harder for thieves to get hold of personal information, and credit information provider Experian isn’t too happy about it. The company has filed suit against LifeLock for what it alleges are illegal practices that will ultimately hurt Experian’s customers.
Most consumer brands are still struggling with social media and Web 2.0 technology when it comes to customer engagement and building relationships, so what chance does the B2B industry, which typically lags behind its B2C counterpart? It turns out many B2B companies are adapting to social media and starting to grasp how it can help in their market as well. In today’s Marketing Xfactor lead story we discuss the state of B2B as it relates to social media, and how the industry will embrace the new technology over the next year.
Continue reading "Social Media Finally Making its way to B2B?" »
It seems like marketers these days are taking liberties with a data collection method called Voice of the Customer (VOC). While born out of the quality movement in the 80s to improve product development, the process only recently has caught the attention of sales and marketing for data collection methods.
But companies today seem to use the term to refer to almost any type of market research—and it’s a bit of stretch.
Continue reading "Setting the Record Straight on Voice of the Customer" »
We here at 1to1 find ourselves regularly trading stories about customer service. Or the lack thereof. Whether it's how an online store mangled a Christmas order, or how rude and unhelpful a Best Buy manager was when a couple of my colleagues had the gall to ask for a rain check on an advertised deal, we're constantly shaking our heads at how often even the simplest tenets of customer service seem beyond the grasp of so many.
But even we were awestruck when it came to our attention that by phoning up a toll-free Verizon customer service line, people seeking a rebate were instead being routed to a phone sex line.
This year's presidential election will be largely influenced by the online activity of its supporters. In terms of individual participation, email, social networks, and online polls are the most common ways supporters are communicating about a candidate, according to the JupiterResearch report, Political Communication: Mobilizing Online Voters. Like with any customer strategy, the goal is to engender trust and provide a two-way dialog that provides value for all. McCain, Obama, and Clinton are all working online to create such a community.
Or should I say, some things just don’t change, as baffling as it may be to some of us who do.
One of our readers, and a prolific blogger, Eric Karjaluoto, recently pointed me to two of his posts that coincidently have a common thread: bad habits die hard. One talked about his buying experience with an unscrupulous and unfortunately old-time-stereotypical car dealer—the point of the post, "Blogs Can Kill Brands," was actually about the impact blogging can have on a brand. The other, "The Inversion of Advertising," examined the time warp some ad agency execs seem to be stuck in. One exec still equates “interactive” with banner ads and nothing more, Eric said in his post. Hello? This is 2008, Web 2.0, and all that. Both posts are worth a read, as are the many responses to each.
As if those two stories weren’t enough,
Last month specialty retailer Brookstone made a play for its competitors’ customers. It didn’t try to lure them away with lower prices, or create a loyalty program; it didn’t have to.
Couple of days ago in The New York Times (Monday, March 13 in the Business section) I saw an article about Wal-Mart’s new blogs, being authored without Wal-Mart’s corporate interference or editorial control, by the actual individual merchandisers at Wal-Mart. These blogs are full of their honest opinions about various items of merchandise, including quality and price value, along with a lot of purely personal observations. Real blogs, by real people, who just happen to be responsible for the products you find on Wal-Mart’s shelves. You can check these blogs out at http://checkoutblog.com/.
The success of any business can almost always be traced back to motivated employees. And when an organization is implementing a customer-focused strategy, it’s the employees who will collectively work to make it a success.
Unfortunately, motivating people is far from an exact science. Good managers and executives, however, shouldn’t be intimated to implement new and innovative methods to motivate their culture because they think employees might reject the idea or that the organization won’t be able to support and sustain the strategy in the long-term.
While at The Conference Board last week, I spoke to an executive at a well-known company about the challenge of motivating an enterprise to work toward customer-focused goals. She said her organization was stalled in this area. I gave her an example of how to start out small, telling her how The Ritz-Carlton President and COO Simon Cooper holds mandatory daily lineups with all employees around the globe in which he challenges employees to think of innovative ideas for the company. In those meetings he publicly recognizes employees who have gone above and beyond for a customer, and then reads a Service Value of the Day from the company’s credo cards. This standard practice helps to engrain the organization’s customer-focused values into each employee.
Her response was, “We could never do that at our company. The Ritz-Carlton is a world-class organization.”
I disagree. Any organization—small, mid-size, or large—can instill change in their organizations by adapting and implementing world-class innovations. All it takes is top-down commitment.
Continue reading "You Don't Have to be a World-Class Company to Deliver World-Class Strategies" »
Fortune magazine yesterday published its annual list of the 20 most admired companies, and – surprising very few – Apple topped the list.
The survey, asking over 3,700 people from dozens of industries to select the 10 companies they admire most, ranks firms in such areas as innovation, social responsibility, quality of management, and quality of products/services. “It is a tribute to its CEO that Apple, which ten years ago seemed headed for the slag heap, is No. 1,” the magazine noted.
That Apple is buzzed about and admired by those outside the company isn’t exactly breaking news; 1to1’s forthcoming issue spotlighting Customer Champions finds plenty of non-Apple execs enthusing about how Steve Jobs' firm conducts itself.
What was more interesting, to me anyway, was how some other companies fared.
"You're getting all emotional." I've heard people say this to others as a negative, but in business, it can be used as a positive. Forget sales stats, balance sheets, and inventory counts. All customers make decisions with their hearts, so the more you can understand their emotional state, the further you can go to build a strong customer relationship.
We’ve all heard about the black hole that customers assume their feedback ends up in. Many of us may even have that black hole in our organizations. Roger Blumberg makes sure that’s not the case at Ariba.
Blumberg is senior director of customer strategy for the spend management software vendor. He implemented a compelling closed-looped survey process, which he shared with attendees of IQPC’s Customer Feedback Summit earlier this week. Here’s what caught my attention:
The Superbowl isn’t just the pinnacle of the professional football season, it’s one of the most important days of the year for companies selling party food. Americans buy soda, chips, wings, and pizza by the ton, and the companies who make that food spend millions convincing consumers to buy their product. This was the first year all three major pizza delivery companies (Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Papa John’s) offered the choice to place orders online. Comscore recently ranked all three and analyzed how Domino’s could come out so far ahead of the other two on Superbowl Sunday.
Does a CMO have a place in the boardroom next to other executives? Is the title just another of the endless string of Chief Officers companies have been coming up with recently? How can a CMO’s effectiveness be judged alongside a CFO’s or CEO’s? These are just some of the questions today’s Marketing Xfactor lead story and column attempt to answer. Do you think a CMO position is necessary at most companies? Should the role and responsibilities be markedly different from that of other C-suite executives? Why do you think CMO’s have such a short shelf-life?
Thousands of Starbucks devotees went without their mocha fix yesterday, but it was for good reason. Employees were busy getting retrained on how to make the perfect cup of coffee.
The coffee chain closed its 7,100 stores at 5:30 p.m. to coach employees on how to make perfect espressos, which included lessons on giving quality pours of the espresso shots and adjusting the grind on the automatic espresso machines.
The company, known for delivering quality service, has experienced a decline in sales over the past year, closing 100 stores and seeing a decline in stock. So it made sense for Starbucks to return to what founders Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin, and Ziv Siegl set out to do in 1971—to sell the finest-quality ground coffees.
An increasing number of companies, like Starbucks, are focusing more on quality—even measuring employees on delivering quality service. Travelocity, for example, scores agents on quality. If their scores fall below a certain desirable quality level, they receive immediate training.
By closing all of its stores, Starbucks has shown customers its committed to delivering quality products and service. But by taking the pledge across the enterprise, quality begins to transcend the narrow scope of products and services to eventually affect the bottom line.
Tired of the word "blog" yet?
Well, probably not, since you're currently reading one. But the ups and downs of life in the blogosphere (and is it a sphere, after all? I've always envisioned it as more trapezoidal) have been more apparent than usual this week, with headlines screaming about everything from Barack Obama wearing traditional Somalian garb, to what the deal was with Gary Busey on the Oscars red carpet.
If your company doesn't have a blog these days, you're probably being looked at askance by your colleagues, friends and family. Just as beggars in olden times were forced to wear signs reading "Unclean," you might as well be wearing one reading "Unblogged."
This past Christmas I purchased outdoor lights for my new home. I was very excited to deck the halls for the first time. When I got home and opened the package, instead of white lights I had bright blue -- not the look I was going for. I felt embarrassed walking back into the store to explain how I had no idea what I was buying, but could I get a refund anyway? Had someone taken the time to educate me on the different types of lights and what kind of plug I'd need for it, I wouldn't have made the mistake, and my experience would've been better.
This is happening more often as products get more complex. Who's in charge of educating the consumer -- the retailer, the manufacturer, or the consumer himself?
If you ask a dozen marketing and sales professions why these two organizations can’t seem to get along, you’ll get a dozen answers. Those responses will range across a broad spectrum of not only why they can or can’t get along, but also whether they should even bother trying.
In last week’s blog I presented analyst Barry Parr’s description of what Web 2.0 would look like in the near future. This week I offer my own opinion of what will shape Web 2.0 and social media far beyond next year.
With customer service nightmare stories becoming the pastime of many bloggers, I thought it would be refreshing to share a positive experience that I recently had at Progressive.
I’ve been a customer for a few years, but recently called to cancel my policy because I had intended to switch to my new husband’s policy at a competitor. I, having a fairly clean driving record, had little need to call Progressive during my tenure as a customer. So when I called, much to my surprise, I was greeted by the friendliest contact center agent I’ve ever encountered. Of course, the company wanted to retain my business, so she went above and beyond not to lose me. She went over my policy and worked to find additional discounts to apply to reduce my rate. She even chatted conversationally about a personal experience she had. The conversation lasted for several minutes and I hung up feeling connected to the company.
.
Continue reading "The Golden Rule is Alive at Progressive" »
Interesting piece in today's New York Times on how the impending arrival next week of a "branding mash-up" between J.C. Penney and the Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation might confuse each company's brand image in the minds of consumers. The new clothing line, called American Living, will be featured exclusively at Penney's; its ad campaign will work hard to make the Polo/Penney connection via such tried and true Lauren components as photography by Bruce Weber.
While the potential for boosting Penney's cachet and Lauren's bottom line seems obvious, it's left some brand consultants wondering if the deal's really going to be as win/win as it's being presented. “May I remind you that Wal-Mart ran ad pages in Vogue?” the article quotes Robert K. Passikoff, president at brand and consumer loyalty consultancy Brand Keys. "The ads were lovely, but no one would buy the clothing.”
Innovation and creativity go hand in hand. Marketers play a large role in promoting both at their companies. At the recent THE Conference on Marketing, famed author Malcolm Gladwell put marketers to the test: in terms of innovation, are you a Picasso or a Cezanne?
There’s no escaping the dreaded, yet often useful, acronym. CRM, ERP, ASAP, and on and on. There are countless broad acronyms, like the ever-present bank ATM; and there are myriad industry-specific acronyms, like, well, the high-tech ATM (asynchronous transfer mode). But that’s not enough. No, no.
Continue reading "WYFMA: What’s Your Favorite Marketing Acronym?" »
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day (a holiday designed by marketers if there ever was one), mobile and social network application Frengo is helping people celebrate the day in a more high-tech way. Using Facebook or mobile phones, lovebirds can send each other virtual gifts (or real flowers through 1-800-Flowers).
Continue reading "Not Your Parents’ Card, Chocolate, and Flowers" »
What will the technology that we now call Web 2.0 look like in a year? In five years? In today's The Marketing Xfactor we featured a podcast with Jupiter Research media analyst Barry Parr, who attempted to answer that question. Listen to what he has to say and tell us, how do you think Web 2.0 will evolve, redefine itself, and impact businesses in the future?
When we think of customer experience, we think Disney, Apple, Starbucks, Virgin, and the Ritz-Carlton. But one company, Harley-Davidson, is about to surpass all these customer-centric leaders.
This year, the motorcycle company will unveil the Harley-Davidson museum in Milwaukee, WI. The 130,000 square-foot building will be a celebration of the company’s history, the passion of the riders, and customer stories. It will feature a restaurant, café, retail shop, meeting space, and special events space. Also, so that the company’s loyal customers can connect with the museum, they have the opportunity to purchase a stainless steel rivet customized with their name to be mounted along a wall on the 20-acre property.
Now I know that Harley-Davidson boasts a loyal customer base. Its customers are really fans who build their lifestyles around the company’s products. But the museum will only enhance that connection by creating the ultimate experience--a mecca to its customers.
I recently spoke to James Gilmore and Joe Pine about their book Authenticity: What Customers Really Want, and they said that goods and services are no longer enough—people want experiences. As such, companies will shift their focus from just relying on delivering good services to building experiences. As a result, the experience culture will eventually become the predominant economic offering.
But this shift will first require creativity and innovation (you can’t deliver a unique experience without either of them). Harley-Davidson understands that, and I'm certain that its riders will travel from all over the world to pay homage.
A million dollars may not be what it used to be, but a growing base of people with a self-made million bucks or so is making its influence felt as never before. That’s the thesis of The Middle-Class Millionaire: The Rise of the New Rich and How They Are Changing America (Currency/Doubleday) by Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff, out Feb. 26.
Customer strategy is always evolving. And in many cases, the best advice about what to do with your customers comes from your peers, doing similar things at their companies. The 1to1 Impact Awards shines a spotlight on companies doing extraordinary things with customer strategy. And we've got war stories direct from the winners about how they were able to achieve their customer goals. Hear from executives at P&G, Westpac Bank, La Redoute fashion retailer, and Voices.com.
Continue reading "These Giants Are Champions of Customer Strategy" »
I recently saw Barbara Glanz present about customer service. She told a story about “Johnny the bagger” that brought tears to many attendees’ eyes. It’s not only inspiring, it proves that every employee is integral to the customer experience and that little things can make a dramatic impact on customer loyalty—and ultimately, the bottom line. Check out the story at Simple Truths. You’ll be glad you did.
Sometimes I hear stories from friends and relatives about their customer service experiences and I have to wonder what the companies they’re dealing with are thinking. Around Christmas time, what should have been a simple online order turned into a hassle for my mom. She just wanted a plate, but what she encountered was a retailer with disconnected customer service that’s now lost her as a customer.
Love them or hate them, this year’s Super Bowl commercials offered something different—a mechanism to drive viewers online to interact with the companies.
To calculate which companies successfully integrated the offline and the online, SendTec, a multichannel integrated direct marketing agency, conducted an analysis. This year, the company found that 64 percent of Super Bowl advertisers included a website in their ad.
So, who were the big winners and what did they do so differently that made them stand out?
Continue reading "Five Companies Score With Integrated Super Bowl Ads" »
It's no secret that time is at a premium these days, on both sides of the customer/company equation. Most consumers feel they're operating with an ever-lengthening "to-do" list, and companies' patience for new products to establish themselves -- as well as for making quarterly targets -- seems to be growing ever shorter.
A new book, Stopwatch Marketing: Take Charge of the Time When Your Customer Decides to Buy (Portfolio), takes an in-depth look at this phenomenon, delineating what authors John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano say are four basic types of shopping styles and suggesting how best to serve each of them.
I don't know about you, but I have at least 5 gift cards with under $2.00 on them. I also have multiple cards from the same store, which I can't combine. While the gift card industry is thriving, the user experience could certainly be improved. And the experience on the part of the retailer can be improved as well.
Last night, after trying everything I could think of over the course of two days to get my computer to work again, I finally breathed a heavy sigh and picked up the phone to call Apple’s technical support center. Now, I’ve dealt with Apple before and had a great experience. But for many companies, service is so inconsistent that, based on my broader services experiences overall, I didn’t know what to expect.
Last week when the President and Congress announced a plan to stimulate the economy by giving citizens anywhere from $300 to $1200 in rebate checks, it drew hundreds of comments on major media outlets’ message boards. A number of people commented on the story on NewYorkTimes.com, MSNBC.com, and other outlets by suggesting that if the government really wanted people to put more money into the economy, handing out checks wasn’t the way to go. Their idea was much more creative, and could give some businesses an unimaginable opportunity to connect with customers.
We at 1to1 are always looking for the newest trends, best practice examples, and high-level customer processes and strategies to share with our readers to help improve the experiences they create with their own customers. While attending IQPC's Call Center Summit in Coral Gables, FL., yesterday, I noticed another trend. That is that contact center executives across a variety of industries still struggle with balancing employee and customer needs with executive mandates.
I sat at lunch with call center leaders from nine organizations ranging from Putnam Investments, to First Citizens Bank, and AAA. While they convened to discuss ways to drive and measure performance to improve the customer experience, they still all struggle with similar challenges--how to move from being considered a cost center to being recognized by executives as the most valuable resource in the organization.
Continue reading "When Will Contact Centers Be Taken Seriously?" »
Making messages to customers more personalized is one of the drums being beaten loudest these days, as companies large and small have seen the merit (obvious, it would seem) in moving away from the generic “Dear Valued Customer” greetings of yesteryear and moving towards the at least seemingly more intimate “Dear Mr. Doe”—or even “Dear John.”
Studies show that if the communiqué in question includes detailed knowledge about an individual customer’s account—via recommendations of similar products or an in-depth recognition of past buying habits—the customer usually gets a warm and fuzzy feeling. They may not necessarily believe that the CEO of Engulf & Devour Inc. really is taking a personal interest in their lives, but they can rest assured that the company’s at least paying attention to them.
But what happens when a company sends out an email message to thousands of customers, all with the wrong names? Such a thing happened last week with drugstore chain CVS, when it sent an email to my colleague Elizabeth Glagowski calling her “Ruby.”
Continue reading "A Message for Every Tom, Dick, and … Ruby?" »
If the U.S. government is considering handing out checks to the general populace, then there's no denying that an economic downturn is at least on the minds of lawmakers and the public. Interest rate cuts and other measures to stave off a recession make top news these days. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. see this as an opportunity for businesses to work toward building customer value in both the short and long term.
“The only way to succeed in business is to understand what customers are all about.”
So said R. Siisi Adu-Gyamfi, senior vice president of international and marketing for Textron Inc., during his keynote presentation at the recent Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing Executive Mind Xchange. “You can’t squeeze someone out of existence,” he said, referring to such tactics as overcharging for services. “There needs to be a balanced give and take; a value exchange. The key to finding that balance is customer knowledge—understanding what the customer values.”
Adu-Gyamfi discussed three steps needed to create a value exchange:
Just this week Kevin Zimmerman wrote an article in 1to1 Weekly about cable companies trying to redeem their reputations, but I just don’t see it happening thanks to the beating major providers are taking in the press lately.
Continue reading "More Reason to Hate the Cable Companies" »
Right now the Web 2.0 term "widget" defines a vast array of information placeholders. Anyone with a Facebook profile, iGoogle homepage, or desktop application aggregator uses widgets, and many probably don't even realize it. Until recently widgets were used mostly for live weather forecasts and newsfeeds, but a number of companies have developed business uses for the social media gadgets. Today's Marketing Xfactor lead story shows how companies are using widgets for promotion, syndication, and advertising; reaching customers offline and providing better information when they're online. With their use in Apple's iPod and Leopard operating system, and widespread use in social networking and blogs, widgets are the next social media tool businesses will need to embrace. Have you used widgets before (with or without knowing it), or are you just now learning what they are?
The trend toward portability continues to grow. There's no doubt that consumers will demand more mobile applications in the future. But is the system set up to meet customer needs?
Continue reading "Is Privacy a Roadblock to Mobile Personalization?" »
An interesting theme played out at last week’s 2008 CMO Leadership Forum, held in New York City on Jan. 17: He who strikes first, strikes best.
“If your competitor has an A-bomb, you’d better have one too,” said Richard Birt, senior manager, BearingPoint Inc. about the deployment of predictive analytics. “Early adopters will have a huge advantage.”
“Sometimes thinking happens after doing at Google,” Andy Berndt, managing director at that company’s Creative Lab, said separately.
I don't know about you, but I have major customer service issues with my cable company. They call me at least once a week to try to up-sell me on their new cable phone service. Even though I tell them that I don't have a home phone (I'm all mobile) and that I'm not interested, they continue to call. It's just one example of how the companies have some of their priorities mixed up when it comes to serving their customers.
Not surprisingly, considering I work at 1to1 Media, I’m a big proponent of custom communications. Yes, I understand that there are additional costs involved. But I also think that the short-term costs are worth the long-term customer engagement. And besides all the business rhetoric, here’s why I think so…
The biggest reason most observers predict mobile will really take off in the consumer marketing space is people's connection to their phones and the amount of time they spend with the devices. Just how connected are they? Maybe not as much as they will be, looking at a few recent trends.
*Photo from www.w3.org
The psychology of brand preference can be debated for days. There are many factors that contribute to why consumers are devotees to particular brands. There are generational reasons, sensory factors, emotional ties, environmental concerns…but what about the brands that consumers won’t touch?
These consumers are so devoted to a brand that they wouldn’t be caught dead with the competition. My publisher, for example, only drinks Coke and would never dream of reaching for a Pepsi even if he was dying of thirst and it was the only thing to drink. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating...I think.
My brother-in-law is another brand devotee. He is such a die-hard University of Michigan football fan and as most Big Ten fans know, Michigan and Ohio State are old rivals. He hates the “Buckeye” fans so much that when he and my sister were in the market for a house last summer, he refused to look at one of the homes in their price range because there was a Buckeye tree in the back yard.
Target designer Isaac Mizrahi summed it up best when, in a Fortune article last fall, he sparred with critics of his mass market “luxury” brand, calling them “brand racists.”
Maybe that’s too harsh, but Mizrahi brings up a point that's often overlooked by marketers. How much impact do consumers have on the brands that they discriminate against? How much do they detract from the brands they shun?
Maybe you know a die-hard consumer like my publisher or brother-in-law, or maybe you excercise brand bias. If so, share your story. Which brands would you never go near?
Can you give a prosaic website a personality overnight? Coupons.com is betting you can.
Coupons.com is one of those websites that its users probably don’t think of as having much character. You zip over to it a couple times a week, search out any coupons you find attractive, print them out, and move on.
But CMO Jeff Weitzman is trying to make it more of a destination site, via a recent agreement with Kim Danger, founder of Mommysavers.com, to be the company’s consumer-facing spokesperson. As its name implies, mommysavers.com is filled with tips on how to save new mothers time and money as they navigate the strange new world of maternology. The site’s quickly become a favorite, and Coupons.com is hopeful that by using Danger as the face of their own site, they’ll increase retention and instill a sense of loyalty in consumers’ minds.
It might be a silly question, but one that Procter & Gamble takes seriously. The more customers can rely on a brand for product quality and dedication to the customer, the stronger the relationship becomes. Today's issue of 1to1 Weekly delves into P&G's commitment to privacy protection and the online customer experience. It shows that customer trust can have a big impact on reputation and the bottom line.
If you have a daughter between the ages of five and 12, you’re certain to have heard of Webkinz. Otherwise, let me introduce you to the genius behind Toronto-based Ganz’s furry creation.
We always love hearing from readers about articles we’ve written, whether they criticize, praise, or question us. Recently, a reader submitted a letter about the Trendspotting theme in the Nov/Dec issue of 1to1 Magazine. As an editorial staff we’ve decided that the best place to publish the letter is on the blog, where I can respond to what he said about my story and hopefully turn the topic into a constructive discussion. We’re not in the business to debate social issues, but there is certainly a customer-centric question that comes out of the issue he raised: should companies be concerned that by catering to one group of customers, it risks alienating others?
This past holiday season, I managed to conduct about half of my shopping at Amazon. Next season, I hope to increase that. Why so I shop there? Because I know that Amazon delivers the merchandise fast, offers products that I’m interested in buying, and is known for reliable and responsive customer service if I should have a problem or question.
I’m not alone. Amazon reported that last year each of its 72 million returning customers spent $184 million with the online vendor. Such significant spending and the rise in the company’s stock finally got the attention of Wall Street.
Many investors pondered the triumph, listing reasons ranging from success in international markets to healthy margins, but they missed the underlying driver. In a recent New York Times article, author Joe Nocera ponders what really lies behind the company’s success: its unending care of its customers.
Continue reading "Wall Street Should Take Cue from Amazon" »
Communications coach Carmine Gallo, who won winning reviews for his 2006 book 10 Simple Secrets of the Worlds Greatest Business Communicators, is back with Fire Them Up! (Wiley), which promises to unveil seven more simple secrets of influence, designed to inspire others, sell oneself and one’s vision, and “communicate with charisma and confidence.”
As readers of his last tome already know, the “secrets” aren’t so much matters of furtive whispers in hallways, but rather common tenets that are too often overlooked in the workaday world.
Continue reading "The Not-So-Secret Secrets to Inspiration" »
It's customary to begin the New Year with predictions on how things will go over the next 12 months. So of course we took a crack at it. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. discuss social co-creation of the whole customer experience, as well as the evolution of self-service, and how the economy may affect the state of customer relationships.
A while back one of my friends in the industry, Rob Hilsen of Genesys, send me a link to a terrific blog post by Bruce Temkin, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research whose focus—or should I say, mission?—is customer experience. Temkin’s “quest” is to evangelize the benefits of delivering a compelling customer experience.
Continue reading "Customer Experience: More Than the Latest Buzz Words" »
Sometimes interesting stories happening on other continents slip through the cracks and we don’t write about them. In an effort to cover international topics that don’t necessarily fit into one of 1to1 Media’s publications, here are some innovative marketing strategies, branding ideas, and implementation of new technology from around the world:
Wikipedia divides brand type into four categories:
• Being’ brands: emotionally confirms you are somebody
• ‘Becoming’ brands: aspirationally defines what you want to be
• 'Doing’ brands: functionally enables you to do something
• ‘Belonging’ brands: connects you with other people like you.
