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" »
Our 1to1 Customer Champions program recognizes the strategies and successes of the customer evangelists—executives who lead the customer cause at their company—primarily in midsize to large enterprises. But true Customer Champions are not only high-level executives driving an organization’s customer strategy. They can be anyone who inspires you to go back to an establishment again and again—whether B2B or B2C. So to honor these often unsung customer heroes, we created the Everyday Customer Champion program.
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