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.
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