Marketers Aren't Listening to the Voice of the Customer?*!

I find this data from today’s Center for Media Research newsletter so stunning that I’ll just quote it verbatim:

A new study by MarketTools revealed that 94% of companies do not yet use social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to gather customer feedback, despite consumers' growing engagement with these mediums. The study found that the most common ways companies gather customer feedback are email/online surveys (51%), formal phone surveys (28%), and informal phone calls (28%).

As someone (and I doubt that I’m unique) who just refused to answer the email survey from the car manufacturer because I had already answered the one from the dealer and who uses ANI to select the phone calls I answer, I’m pretty sure these 94% of companies are missing the mark. While I’m engaging in self-revelation, I’ll also add that I don’t usually respond to emails for reviews of products I’ve just purchased. I do occasionally, and I would have done so for the car, had they asked me because it has one noticeable improvement over the model I previously owned. The car companies really have overdone the satisfaction surveys—especially since the sales and service people have been trained to ask customers not to say anything bad about them!!!—see #3 below and ponder. The rest of the data from the newsletter is also quoted verbatim:

1. 39% of executives surveyed said that their companies increased focus on customer satisfaction in 2010 versus 2009, with 21% stating that they invested more in customer satisfaction-related products and services in 2010 versus 2009
2. Despite the importance given to customer satisfaction, 14% of executives surveyed said their companies don't solicit customer feedback at all
3. 46% of the executives surveyed rate their company's performance on customer satisfaction in the top 10% when compared to their peer companies, and 93% rate themselves in the top 50% of peer companies.
4. Still, 56% of all respondents said their companies do not have, or are not sure if their companies have, a formal voice of the customer (VOC) program
5. Nearly one out of every four executives said that they seldom or never use customer feedback to change a business process.

I also have a personal perspective on #5. I made an online Christmas order for 9 items, none of which showed being out of stock. However, only 5 were shipped and the invoice listed 4 as out of stock (inventory failure). I was, however, billed for the total amount of the order (billing failure). I tried the call center several times to always find a lengthy wait. So I tried email—every day for one week plus some miscellaneous. I got 2 autoresponses for each email (marketing automation failure), but never a real response. My credit card took my word for it and refunded the difference. I wrote the above in considerably more detail to the operations VP. In the meantime, the company started refunding my money, one item at a time (another marketing automation failure)! The VP simply passed my email onto the call center manager, who has no responsibility for any of these things except possibly the wait time, although that’s probably a budget issue. But the VP got it off his desk, apparently happily ignoring the fact that it was business processes at fault, not customer service.

The opposite end of the spectrum is the social media mission control centers recently established by Pepsi’s Gatorade (video here) and by Dell. This 3-minute video is from the opening of Dell’s center with commentary by several industry experts.

Smaller companies/brands should not let the size of these “mission control” operations put them off. It’s a matter of scale and the listening issue of small brands is not the listening issue of Dell. Smaller brands, smaller companies need to think about their own processes, which I’ll lump under the Voice of the Customer rubric.

My recent personal experience says:

1. I would have done a customer review on the car because there was something (in this case favorable, though that’s not the issue) I’d like to point out to potential purchasers. I don’t care to waste my time checking Excellent on a mind-numbing set of Likert scales.
2. Even a VP can take a few seconds to acknowledge a customer email—even better to show that the real nature of the customer problem is recognized. This company is out about $25 in an undeserved refund—more important it permanently lost this customer!

How can you scale Dell’s and Gatorade’s listening activities to your brand? That’s the real issue and it can—and should be—dealt with! While they’re at it, corporate executives should come out of their protected cocoons and actually listen to the voice of the customer!!

What are Branded Community Best Practices?

The eMarketer newsletter (November 10, 2010) called my attention to this study from ComBlu. It is a careful analysis of 241 branded communities. As you might expect, these are leaders by definition, and the report finds 33% of them to be High Performers, but none Stellar Performers (p. 8). That says that most of us are likely on the sidelines or in the very early stages of building a branded community.

Radian6 has a publication for those who are considering or experimenting. It has lots of good ‘how to’ info that is especially strong on the amount and type of resources required. They have 10 good questions that assess whether a branded community is for you. I’ve boiled it down to 4; you might want to read the original (pp. 5,6). Here’s my summary:

• Do you have a business goal and clear marketing objectives that specify what you want to accomplish?
• How will your community add value to the customer experience?
• Do you have the resources and expertise to support a vibrant community?
• What metrics will you use to gauge success?

The ‘resources and expertise’ issue suggests substantial experience in social media—building a Facebook community for example. If that is successful, companies tend to want their own community over which they can have total control, not have to rely on the functionality and rules of the platform. I’ve written about firms that provide community-building services (1, 2) and many other aspects; just search ‘community’


Back to the original subject; community best practices. I found this chart especially interesting. The researchers at ComBlu added 10 best practices to their 2010 list. That certainly suggests how fast the space is changing. It also suggests that there’s a big shake-out to come as we find out which are the 'best of the best' practices!


They, of course, compared adoption of their original set of practices in 2010 vs. 2009. I’ve highlighted the ones that had doubled or more in adoption. If you look at the ordering for 2009 (comments the most widely adopted practice, for example), the adoption of specific best practices has changed hugely over the past year. The suggestion there is a maturing space. Among the greatest changes are fun engagement tools, rich media (which I’d also categorize as engaging) and faceted search (people search on LinkedIn, for example). The ones that warm my heart are integration and site stats! Definitely a maturing space.

How Fiskars Turned Its Fans and Customers into Evangelists, presented by Geno Church from GasPedal on Vimeo.

There’s a lot of detail in the report about best practices by industry that you may find useful. But for those of you who believe it’s only for the large, global brands, here’s a contrary example. I wrote about the Fiskars community in early 2009. It still has much the same structure and is still clearly a customer retention effort. Don’t expect much in the way of acquisition from a community effort although blog posts written for search and tagged will bring in some people who are browsing. Mostly, though, it’s retention, and as the Fiskars example shows, it can be powerful. I ran across the video awhile ago; admittedly it’s long, but the first 18-20 minutes is the presentation and the rest is Q & A. It’s worth listening to; the point being that they’ve been at it—successfully—for awhile in what is definitely a set of niche markets.

The most important point about best practices is that they are still evolving. So don’t run out and try to implement them all. Think about what makes most sense for your customers, your brand. Are emoticons going to remain on the list for years to come? My sense is that items like that are already being replaced with activities with more strategic value!

Guest Post: Customer Experience Gets Trumped

Thanks to Mark Krumm for recounting this experience for us!

I've been interested in the trend of corporations online efforts to fund local community projects as means of attracting attention and building good will and audience. PepsiCo is a great example of a company who does this well – see the Sunchips® and National Geographic “Green Effect” and the “Refresh” project. Both projects allow visitors to vote for ideas that prospective award recipients have submitted for consideration and funding. It’s easy to vote, it’s interesting to see the different ideas. And, most importantly, people tell their friends to vote for their favorite ideas.

Then there’s Liberty Mutual’s “Responsible Sports” project… an example of how not to engage audiences. I have two boys participating in their high school sports programs and recently the boy's coach emailed me along with all parents and urged us to go to Liberty Mutual's site and vote for the school's sports programs to get a grant of $2500. You can click through the steps too (if you are a really patient person!) here's the link: www.ResponsibleSports.com.

The experience and a critique:

Landing on this page, I thought I would find a specially-created page just for first-time visitors, and that it would be simple to it to vote my support. Wrong. I found sixteen navigation choices, two of which were labeled “Community Grants”, several others that were closely related enough to make me wonder exactly where to click. I found my way eventually, but why not create an easy-to-navigate landing page for the first-time visitor?

To vote, I had to first take a test on parenting and sports. There was an online study guide I could have read to prep for the test, but I skipped that. Four clicks to get to the test and ten multiple choice questions later, I scored a 90%. Pretty good? Yes, but not quite good enough. They wanted a perfect score and sent me back to guess again on my missed question. (Is anyone really this desperate for a chance at $2500?) If I had not been just plain curious about how hard I’d have to work to vote, I would have abandoned at the failing grade of 90%. But I continued, just for my own education. Next step? I had to register with name and email. And, as expected, they needed to send a confirmation email to me to insure I’d given a real email address. I started writing this blog post while I waited for their email because it said it could take up to 5 minutes to get my verification. It took just three. Oh, and more required info about me before I could verify my email... just three more survey questions, two of which were “required”, neither had to do with my vote. How many people would have abandoned this by now? I don't even expect that any of you are still reading this account it's so long!

Okay, I got to vote. And then, of course, the kicker: "Share this." Ahh, finally we reach the heart of the promotion. But are there links to Facebook or Twitter or any other social media tools? No. They will however accept my excel spreadsheet of my soon-to-be-former-friend’s email addresses -- or just hop into my various email clients to harvest all addresses for me. Or, I could enter my friend’s email addresses manually. They also interrupted their own mission with a pop-up survey opportunity – just in case I was not diverted enough. To their credit, they did have those social media options for sharing elsewhere on their site -- but not on the page where they asked me to share.

Wow. The “good” news, my vote is sure to count for a lot since it's so hard to cast a vote. But I'll have to give this a failing grade. Old techniques, hard to use, questionable value, and having completed the task, I feel anything except warm and fuzzy about Liberty Mutual! And there was no emotional attachment. Go back to the PepsiCo programs: the rules required contestants offer ideas and they responded with how lives would change for the better if they earned a grant. This was nothing more than a popularity contest. The most votes win money.

Lessons? We all know them -- make it easy (they didn't) make it of value (a random shot at $2500 is not very compelling), make me want to share it – and give me control over who I share it with… and make me care.

More lessons from the editor:

1. Mark's experience was not unique. While he was laboring over this post, his wife asked what he was doing. When he told her, it drew another "rant" about her own experience there--presumably equally satisfactory!
2. When I went to the site to get the screen capture, I got a pop-up survey. I was curious, so I started to fill it out. Look at the instructions for yourself. Isn't it perfectly clear that if you cannot think of any companies, you can leave the boxes blank? Yet, when I did, I got an error message and my progress to the next screen was blocked!

What's going on here??? Two things strike me; one is responsibility run amok. You don't need to give parents a "responsibility test" in order to let them vote for their kids' projects--in fact it strikes me as an insult!

Second, have the designers of this project ever heard of website usability? They clearly didn't do any usability testing of the site itself, nor did they do a careful review of their pop-up survey.

When I wrote about Liberty Mutual earlier, I pointed out that customer experience is the function of satisfaction at all customer touchpoints. Liberty Mutual just blew it with this one!

Guest Post from the 'Crazy Customer on Phone'

It never ceases to amaze me how stupid people in positions of authority can be when it comes to email and customer service. Personally, I like to correspond with both my own customers, and my vendors, via email where possible. Every business talks about its great service, but usually email isn’t the venue where it occurs.

When it comes to banks, this holds true as well. I went through 6 people last Friday when calling about a $148 overdraft fee I didn’t deserve (My corporate account was not negative at any point). If you’ve ever tried to fight a bank over an overdraft fee, you know how unpleasant the whole thing is. I finally ended up speaking to a branch manager at the next branch over, who assured me things would be resolved and he’d get back to me via email. He didn’t. So I called him and got his voicemail. Yesterday morning, I received the email from the attached screenshot. I’ve redacted the bank name and details, but this was a superregional bank, with no branches here in MA. So, I responded asking about the $400 that had since accrued to my account as a result of the first $148.

I got no response so I called the manager this morning at 9am. He claimed to know nothing about calling me crazy, so I told him to check his email. While he was doing that he asked me, “Exactly, what is it that you want?” An intelligent manager apparently…what did he think I wanted? So I told him I wanted my money back. He must’ve found the email at this point because his whole tone changed and he apologized profusely for calling me crazy, and then came up with this thing about submitting my account to customer service to be reviewed. Within 30 seconds of hanging up the phone with him, I checked my account online and every single fee was reversed. Imagine that!

While we all know that customers are not always right (even though I was in this case), we do know that they are the customer and should be treated with respect, no matter how badly they may be treating you. And you never, EVER, write anything negative about them, especially in an email! The manager who sent the email to me was clearly not the person it originated with, nor was the person before him. I suspect it may have come from the customer service manager at the branch who I had spoken with, but I have no proof. Even with the entire contents of the email chain being erased, all it takes is one negative subject line, or a careless “forward” to the client, and a major situation has occurred. And to make matters worse, this was my corporate checking account.

So, for any marketers and executives reading this:
1) Proofread your emails before you send them, and
2) Don’t write negatively about your customers, EVER!

Ed. Note: Some stories just need to be told, so I asked Rob Torte to tell this one. We've taken out the names to protect the guilty, but that doesn't blunt his point. Treat your customers with respect! Or pay the price in poor customer experience!! Thanks for sharing this with us, Rob.

Designing Customer Experience for Social Media

Having recently written a post about the Forrester Customer Experience rankings it’s no surprise that I paid attention when I noticed an article about Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group and her recent presentation on social media experience. It’s embedded below and it’s worth paging through. Her carton from the final slide represents the essence of the message.

There’s not a huge body of writing about customer experience on social networks like there is on designing for good experience on websites. Some of it is transferable, but most of it is not. Website usability is more about the mechanics; social media is about communication and human experience.

With that in mind, I found one recurring piece of advice; social media is about telling your story. For social media marketers that means it’s about telling the story of the brand. Actually, it’s even more about getting your customers to tell their stories; that helps to create a strong emotional tie with the brand.

Writing on the HBS blog, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path has four useful rules. He says:

1. Only hire people who embody your brand. That’s the basic rule for customer service and it applies here. Further, it means you will have to do less policing of what your employees say in social media because they will have the brand story straight.
2. If you do need policies, keep them lightweight and human. Merholz admits that not all companies can be a Zappos and allow employees to participate in social media without restraint. He points to Intel’s social media guidelines as a good example. I also like Fresh Networks guidelines for writing a social media policy.
3. Experiment, prototype, pilot — try stuff out. There aren’t a lot of tactical guidelines when you get right down to the nitty gritty holding a conversation with your own customers. You must experiment, track and understand what works and what does not.
4. It's a conversation, which means you both listen and take part. Amen!

Good customer experience is like the facetious definition of pornography: “you know it when you see it.” That’s important; it’s part of the humanity of social media. Take your own good customer experiences and translate them into interaction with your customers. It’s also the Golden Rule; treat them as you want to be treated.

Understanding good customer experience is important because we certainly don’t know how to measure it. It is more than customer satisfaction, so don’t let that well-understood metric get in the way of trying to understand the experience of your customers at each of your brand touchpoints. That will take qualitative understanding as well as wise choice of metrics.

I’ll fall back on my long-time favorite and suggest you read Bruce Tempkin’s 6 Laws of Customer Experience.The bad news is that designing good customer experience is more art than science. The good news is that each one of us has potential to be an artist—we are, after all—all customers!

It's the People Stupid

View more presentations from deb schultz.

Customer Experience Counts in All Channels

Forrester recently completed its 2010 customer experience ranking. Data was collected from 4,653 US consumers in November 2009. The full report is available only to Forrester clients, but Bruce Tempkin released key summary statistics yesterday.
His summary of the findings, much of which is displayed in this chart, is interesting:

• Retailers take 12 out of the top 20 spots. I’m happy for them, but I also wonder why retailers appear to think that customer experience is more important than do other types of businesses that sell things—B2B or B2C, products or services?
• Healthcare, Internet and TV services dominate the bottom. Quelle surprise! We all have our stories. My most recent one is yesterday. I called a physician’s office for an appointment instead of her competitor whose office’s customer service was dissed on local ratings services. So far, so good—the appointments secretary was nice to me on the phone!
• There was very little excellence. Again, not news to most of us. Excellent customer service, and it’s outcome, excellent customer experience, is a sustainable competitive advantage. Why? Because it’s hard and it requires upfront investment.
• Liberty Mutual improved the most. Interesting. I’ve actually paid attention to their “responsibility matters” TV advertising. I wondered how that fit into their ability to improve customer experience, so I decided to look around.

What I expected to find was some trade buzz that Liberty Mutual had really been working on its customer service. Maybe they have, but that’s not what I found. I found The Responsibility Project. Business Week had an article and video interview with Stephen Sullivan, senior vice-president, communications services at Liberty Mutual. Sullivan talks about the challenges the firm faced in 2008 as it tried to expand market share in the face of competitors who could outspend and customers who didn’t trust. He says:

"It's a wonderful thing to say that we do the right thing, but it's also a more difficult message to get across to consumers because so many people want to say that," says Sullivan. "What we wanted to say is 'We recognize that personal responsibility is one of your core values and if this is true, then you will like doing business with a company like us because we share that value; in fact, we celebrate it on your part.'"

That view is the core of The Responsibility Project. TV is the responsibility of Hill, Holiday. PR comes from Ketchum, which describes the project as follows:

The Responsibility Project, created by Liberty Mutual, uses entertainment content to create a forum for people to discuss personal acts of responsibility. Through short films, online content and television programming, The Responsibility Project is a catalyst for examining the decisions that confront people trying to “do the right thing.”

Take a look at the project website. The entertainment content is obvious with short films from Liberty Mutual and “responsibility partners” including NBC, Slate and BeliefNet. I was interested in the box that describes their outreach to bloggers at the summer BlogHer conference. The site is reasonably interactive with a blog and an opportunity to post stories, vote on issues and make comments.

Individually, the pieces are impressive. More impressive is the degree to which Liberty Mutual integrates the “doing the right thing” into all its messaging—from the blogger outreach this summer to the career pages on its website. In the Business Week interview Sullivan made the point that employees had to believe in the message in order to be able to deliver on the promise. That starts with hiring the right people, as they are obviously trying to do. One assumes that management at Liberty Mutual is behind the program in both word and deed. Otherwise, the results wouldn’t be showing up in customer experience rankings.

Where did this all start? Liberty Mutual, of the 133 organizations in 14 industries that Forrester surveyed, improved its customer experience rankings the most. That means it supported its words with actions in a most impressive way--another best practices example.

Social media is nice. However, marketers have to use all their channels and use them in an integrated way. If the message doesn’t resonate and the experience is not satisfactory, all social media can do is to reflect customer discontent. If social media is to reflect a strong and trusted brand, business actions are going to establish the foundation. Getting the message out is important, but the actions of employees and the everyday experiences of customers are the ultimate test of strategy.

Social Shopping--Another Trend for 2010?

If I had added one more trend to Monday’s list, it would have been social shopping, so I decided to end the week with a summary. I’ve written a lot during the holiday shopping season about good uses of social media by retailers and results from the season confirm the importance of social media to ecommerce. According to Internet Retailer:

Another trend that emerged from the holiday season is the growing importance of online social networks, blogs and forums. Among consumers researching and buying holiday gifts online, 28% said social media influenced a purchase decision, compared with 11% who said they were guided by a customer-generated product review, 7% by an expert review and 6% by a Facebook message, comScore says. Observed comScore’s (chairman Gian) Fulgoni, “We are getting our first real glimpse at the impact social media will play on commerce as we enter the next decade.”


Earlier in the fall the site SheSpeaks asked about brand-related activities and found a lot of it on both social networks and Twitter. Other 2009 data from SheSpeaks found 55% of women they interviewed logging into social networks multiple times each day; 72% log in at least once a day. That’s huge!

The strategic use of social media by retailers is important, but the precise definition (if there is one!) of social shopping (or social commerce) is more narrow. It is an attempt to allow shoppers to bring onto the web some of the “social event” feeling of shopping in the mall with a friend. That may be an important part of the physical retail shopping experience that Internet retailers can provide on the web going forward.

As I’ve looked at the space, there are two basic ways to do that:

• Join one of the shopping sites that supports social experience. There are a lot of them and more being added. ThisNext is a good example of a site where a merchant can get a free tool that allows visitors to post a product to the site, where it joins the pool for online discussion. They have an application called Shopcast that encourages consumers to add ThisNext content widgets to their own personal pages. The common thread in this type of site is that retailers must encourage shoppers to list products on the site. Another set of sites appear to feature the products of partners; Couture Society is one of those.

Actually, it’s rather hard to find out precisely how retailers get products included; maybe that’s intentional, maybe it’s because the space is still new.

• Add social shopping functionality to your site. Clearly, this would be the more expensive option, but it gives retailers control. I wrote about Decision Step earlier in the year. BazaarVoice is another firm that offers a robust set of social applications. These, obviously, work on your own site and the merchant doesn’t have to rely on a third party site.

Be it social media in general, or social shopping in particular, interaction between shoppers seems to be the direction in which ecommerce is moving. Does it create a new type of business model, or is it just value-added to the existing ecommerce model? For now, I think it’s the latter, but that could change. It certainly is a part of Web 3.0 – the open ecosystem that is gradually replacing the walled-garden sites of the early Internet.

Internet marketers should keep an eye on what is going on in this space. It seems to offer merchants a way to reach out—often to the friends of friends (“birds of a feather”) who might also find the offering attractive. That’s cost-effective customer acquisition!

Celebrating Income Tax Day

Ok, I’m being sarcastic; it’s nothing to celebrate—at least it wasn’t for me this year! But it is one of the certainties of life, and it’s interesting to see how firms in the industry are handling it.

I’ve written about Intuit before, so I retained a couple of articles from Peppers and Rogers 1 to 1 Weekly newsletter (not archived on their website as far as I can tell) over the past few months. In November 2008 they wrote about Intuit’s dissatisfaction with the rate of abandonment on their website. Their existing metrics gave no information about why visitors abandoned before they purchased. However, Intuit had a more basic problem, chronicled in the newsletter on February 09, 2009. When Brad Smith took over as CEO in 2006 he realized he didn’t understand the product line and that employees didn’t either. I love what he did:

So Smith put himself in the shoes of the customer and visited a retail store that sells Quickbooks. He stood in front of the shelves for 17 minutes and still chose the wrong version from the dozens offered. How would he ever know how to improve the product if he couldn't grasp how it was supposed to work?
Smith decided to bring in a small business owner and Quickbooks customer to spend a day in his shoes experiencing his pains with the product. The customer, a bike shop owner, volunteered and handed over all his invoices and paperwork to Smith and his team, who then holed themselves up for a day in a boardroom trying to figure out Casey's typical interaction with their product. The outcome was confusing and cumbersome. "At the end of eight hours and close to tears, our leadership team was very clear about what we needed to do," Smith says. (1 to 1 Weekly, 02/09/2009)

Solutions included simplifying the product line. The most sweeping solutions involved a “Quickbooks Challenge” based on the experience above for all new employees and throwing out a lot of the policies in the contact center that made it difficult to resolve customer problems. The most significant action appears to have been a program called True North that focuses on improving customer experience.

Bruce Tempkin recently wrote about the True North program on his customer experience blog with a link to a post on Net Promoter (measuring satisfaction by a single measure of likelihood of recommending the product). Bruce’s posts on a presentation by Brad Smith and the one that includes Net Promoter are highly informative. So is one by a Canadian blogger who got Intuit to admit that they made some mistakes in implementation. They keep working at it, however, and they seem to be getting a lot of things right. According to Tempkin, Brad Smith said in his presentation that 81% of sales are directly attributable to word of mouth. That represents both careful attention to the voice of their customers and really good metrics to be able to say that with assurance!


So it’s tax day; what are they doing with Turbo Tax. They have active customer support and a vibrant community of customers helping other customers. At least I’d call it “vibrant;” over 30 thousand questions on Schedule C for Personal Business (whatever that is!) looks vibrant to me!

On a broader scale, Intuit has employees Tweeting about a variety of topics. Take a look at their page on Twitter for a thoughtful approach to corporate strategy there. They are promoting the basic Intuit community; Intuit Labs, where they are getting customer input into product development; the new Intuit initiative in India; and other strategic corporate initiatives. Each one seems to be drawing its own group of followers, some small but all focused on a particular issue. Good job!

What I don’t see is a Twitter stream for tax preparers. Think about it; taxes are seasonal (thank goodness!). Who wants to follow that all year, as opposed to the Quick Books products, which businesses use for daily operations? The community on the site seems to work for users of Turbo Tax at tax time; I’ll bet it’s pretty quiet the rest of the year. The Twitter streams are ongoing conversations that provide important feedback to Intuit on specific products and issues.

That’s strategic use of social media!

Happy tax day!!

Social Object Theory for Social Network Design

Razorfish publishes incredibly long and incredibly useful reports. Their Digital Outlook report (download here; be patient) came out last week. I want to get back to some other issues in a future post, but the chapter that really caught my attention—because it’s new to me, although not new—is the idea of social objects. This quote from the report is a good introduction for people like me:

Engeström described social object theory as the belief that all successful social media interactions and ventures center on an object — “the reason people connect with each particular other and not something else.” Another way to describe a social object is as the centerpiece in a dialogue between two or morepeople. People don’t just talk — they tend to talk “around” objects. For example, if I’m speaking to my mother about the flowers I sent her, the flowers are the social object. (p. 59)

There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere at the moment about designing social networking sites around social objects. According to Razorfish social objects can take many forms (hence the cutsey clip art) and they aren’t necessarily viral. My corollary is that a good marketing approach makes them viral. Your network can be built around a single object (iPhone, for example) or multiple objects. For example, Flickr is composed of objects that have been made social by making them searchable and sharable.


The advice to marketers includes an early decision on your social object—in advertising terms, it could be your big idea. Figure out what makes the object social or how you can make it social by tagging for search and tracking for measurement. The objects have to be authentic and relevant to your audience. Some social objects retain their sociability for a long time (think Burger King’s subservient chicken) and some go away very quickly (think the same company’s short-lived Whopper Sacrifice program, which drew fire from Facebook).

There’s more; I encourage you to read at least the chapter (pp.58–63) if not the entire report.

Microblogging: Tiny social objects. On the future of participatory media

View more presentations from Jyri Engeström.

One of the most articulate proponents of social object theory is Jyri Engeström, the founder of Jaiku. I encourage you to page through his presentation for an understanding of the theory and its marketing applications.

Then I’d encourage you to think about something else. If we build satisfying experience around the objects (I’m thinking about an incredible whale watch I experienced last spring; you could think about a motorcycle ride or a great glass of wine if you'd rather), that will add to their value and hence their sociability.

The take-away is that people don’t just talk—they talk about something. They don’t just share—they share something they perceive to be of value with others they believe will also value it.

How are you going to identify your key object(s) and ensure they have value for your target audience?

User Satisfaction With Your Social Media Site

In last week's post about objectives for social media marketing programs I argued strongly for program-specific behavioral objectives over marketing/branding objectives. I’ve seen no reason to back off that position; the program-specific metrics provide a direct assessment of customer activity, if not the achievement of overall marketing goals, which are affected by many channels and many programs.

In the discussion, however, one of my students argued for a customer satisfaction measure. I’m accustomed to thinking about customer satisfaction in terms of the more global measures of the ACSI or the annual Accenture survey that recently became available for 2008. It took me awhile to wrap my head around site satisfaction as an important objective, but the more I thought about it the better idea I thought it was—thanks, Ted!

The tip he gave me was to Avinash Kaushik’s free tool. Yes, it’s a pop-up and those are annoying. But it’s free, easy and allows the user to do a reasonable amount of editing within the basic 4-question template. So I set up an account and took the tool for a test drive.

It’s easy to revise the basic 4-question survey template, but you can’t add additional questions DIY. They do offer custom surveys if you need more. The “reasons why I came to the site” question didn’t offer exactly the reason I would have preferred “free content,” but “research” and some of the other options were close. When I was satisfied with it, I submitted it and waited for the code to show up on my results page.

My only real annoyance with the system was that I got a marketing email from 4Q before the survey was even processed and available. They have a clever approach, though. If you’ve had a bad experience with the site, send them the URL and they’ll try to get the site to install the satisfaction tool. Good thinking!

I installed it on my website so you could try it yourself if you’re interested. The installation was easy. Having set the frequency on 100% it should show up whenever you go there. The survey seems to work on both IE and Firefox but to be very sensitive to pop-up blockers, which is good. It also may set a session cookie so it doesn’t show up if you go back to the site. If I’m right about that, that’s good for the visitor, although I found it annoying when I was trying to get this screen capture!

In the process I found an interesting article. Dan Greenfield is arguing for a ranking system that would allow benchmarking of social media efforts. As he notes, we’re pretty far from that sort of a standard for social media metrics, but it’s an interesting concept to watch.

In the meantime, serious thinking about how to measure the success of your social media efforts is in order!

Customer Service Still Rules!

A new customer satisfaction survey report from Accenture just crossed my desk. It’s about customer service generally, not on the Internet specifically, but that’s ok. As the report points out, we live in a multichannel world. That makes excellent customer service at all customer touchpoints essential.

Overall, the report sees three important trends:
• Globally, the perceived quality of customer service declined in 2007, although it is still rated as “good” in many countries, especially developed economies
• Customers say their expectations of quality customer service continue to increase. This is especially true in developing economies.
• Two of three respondents reported they had switched patronage during the year as a result of poor customer service; half had switched patronage in multiple industry segments as a result of poor service?
Is the Internet at least partially responsible for rising service expectations and increasing ease of switching suppliers? I think so.
And customer service does still rule. In most of the countries where data was collected, poor customer service trumped lower price as a reason for switching, often by a large amount. The exceptions were Germany and France. Interesting.
This somewhat complex chart gives more detail. It shows the importance of various factors to respondents who did switch and did not switch. Most of these factors are almost equally important; that’s worth thinking about, especially in light of the satisfaction data. It’s also worth noting that the two most important factors have to do with company representatives—their knowledge and their courtesy.

Equally important—and even less surprising—is that the higher the level of satisfaction, the less likely respondents were to switch. But look carefully. The levels of satisfaction are not that different between respondents who switched and those who did not. That’s not a new finding, but it should be worrisome to marketers.

Besides some general issues about satisfaction that we already knew, what should we take away from this study? First is that satisfaction is really important, but it doesn’t keep people from switching. And it often was not price that caused them to switch. So what did?

Two things are worth thinking about. First, the switching data looks at individual customer service factors; is it the overall customer experience that really makes the difference? Second, “price” may not capture the effects of powerful promotional offers, whether price-based or not.

Accenture’s summary points to the importance of individual customer service factors but relates it to overall customer experience. They say:

Accenture’s high performance business research has found that leading organizations enhance customer loyalty by mastering specific activities. Of these activities, our research shows providing a consistent, differentiated customer experience has the most impact on customer loyalty, which in turn contributes to growth, profitability, and shareholder value.

I’m still betting on overall customer experience as the determinant, but the power of a single really good feature—or even more one really bad aspect of customer service—cannot be denied. I suggest that this research provides a good framework for thinking about customer service and customer experience and there’s more useful data in the full report (download from this page). However, it can’t substitute for research that gets very specific about what causes customers to switch in your product category or for your own brand, as discussed in the recent post on Forrester's customer experience survey. And what if the importance factors still don’t differ a great deal? Then marketers are going to have to set some priorities based on where they are loosing customers or where they have the most chance to exceed customers’ expectations and create real loyalty. No one ever said that exceptional customer service was easy!

Customers Rate Experiences

Forrester has released its 2008 customer experience index report, based on consumer ratings of their experiences at firms covered in the study. Bruce Tempkin has posted some data on his blog and has a link there to the full report.

Forrester has 3 basic experience criteria—usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyability. The report gives a brief overview of their methodology. There are interesting comments on the blog and in response to one, he has given a little more detail on the methodology.
















The results are interesting. Retailers and hotels rank highest of the industries studied. Health insurance and TV service providers are at the bottom. The large range of experience ratings given to ISPs is interesting.

In some ways, I’d say the top-performing firms are the usual suspects. Have you ever sat down in a comfy chair and browsed through some books at Barnes and Noble? The one I go to doesn’t have its own coffee shop; that would add even more to the experience. USAA is always near the top on satisfaction studies; one assumes that their superb customer service is a huge factor in the overall experience rating. When you look at other high-performing firms, they’ve worked hard on customer service, so it seems reasonable to me that the basic blocking and tackling matters. Then if you add a coffee shop or a pizza parlor on top, you can offer great customer experience. But you can’t buy great customer experience with only coffee or pizza, no matter how good they are! If customer service stinks, nothing else really matters.

It’s good to choose one or more of the high-performing firms to study and observe. For instance, there’s not a Cosco near me; I don’t shop there and was surprised by a student analysis of just how good their customer service was a few semesters ago. It also helps to follow one or more firms outside your own industry; that may open up new ideas.

Customer experience is the focus at the moment—on the web and off. It’s worth developing a vision and a strategy and devoting time and effort to offering great customer experience. It pays off, perhaps in sustainable competitive advantage.

Customer Experience on the Social Web

Bruce Temkin at Forrester Research is a tough, thoughtful analyst of Internet strategies, especially as they impact customer experience. Many of us have enjoyed the Customer Experience Rankings he does for Forrester for several years now. Customer experience is critical to success, but in the world of social media marketers no longer control all the elements of experience. Bruce has recently set forth a set of “management laws” to aid in our social media journey. In this podcast, about 9 ½ minutes long, he talks about those management laws. The theme is “weave social media into marketing culture and decision making.” It’s worth listening to.
What lead me to his blog and the podcast was a reference to another set of “laws,” these for customer experience. You can download his white paper from the home page of the blog. I’d like to quickly summarize the laws:

1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction. Individuals have experiences, not segments or markets. How can we make experiences relevant to the individual?

2. People are instinctively self-centered. Whether customers or employees, everyone views the world through their own perceptual filters. They care about meeting their needs, not your business is organized and operates. You have to give them ways to satisfy their needs. See #4.

3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment. Share customer knowledge with your employees so they can be effective in meeting customer needs.

4. Unengaged employees don't create engaged customers. Enough said. The real question is how to engage your employees. See #5.

5. Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated. One of Bruce’s posts led me to a page on Tesco’s website; Tesco is my absolute favorite CRM example. Their “steering wheel” is a powerful summary of what they measure—and they are good at measurement!

6. You can’t fake it. And many of us should take a lesson from discredited politicians and remember that you can’t hide it either.

Openness and transparency rule! And thanks to Bruce for the reminder that building trust with our employees is just as important as building trust with our customers. Building trust in both areas should be Job 1!

Role of Content in Customer Experience

Occasionally an idea or piece of data comes along that says, “Wow, you need to change the way you think about that!” That happened to me a couple of days ago when I read the CMO Council’s new report “Customer Affinity from Optimized Content Delivery.” I like the concept of variation in customer experience a lot more!


Customer experience is an important concept. Trying to provide exceptional customer experience requires integrated marketing program development and consistently superb execution. Customer experience in the retail environment has received considerable, well-deserved attention. Customer experience on the Internet has focused on customer experience on the website; if that goes awry, nothing else matters much.

Forrester has a good framework for evaluating the success of customer experience on a website that they were kind enough to let me use in the website chapter of my Internet marketing text. The complete assessment tool has 25 items. They factor into 4 categories:
• Value
• Navigation
• Presentation
• Trust
The navigation factor deals with elements of site navigation design while presentation focuses on the way content is presented on the site. The trust factor has to do with efficient performance of the site and protection of customer data. The value element is the only one that specifically mentions content with one item, “Is essential content available?” They seem to suggest that it’s not the amount of content, it’s content that meets the visitor’s needs; that makes sense.

It occurs to me that Forrester developed this framework in a Web 1.0 world. The CMO study (download from this page) focuses more on channels and integrating experience across all channels (see graphic). Each category has multiple items. They found Home Depot scoring highest across all categories. The report presents all the assessment items. You could use it to benchmark your own activities against a leader.

What the report makes clear is that the world of Web 2.0 has blown the content issue wide open. It’s not just user-generated content. It’s the expectation that the visitor will find all the content she needs—including customer ratings--to make a decision when she visits a site. It’s the expectation that the visitor will find content to engage and entertain—including videos and games--when he visits a site. Content is more than simple product information; engagement, maybe even entertainment is important.

The CMO study has several key findings. I’m going to excerpt the two that speak most clearly to content and comment on two others.

Finding #3 Immediate Experience with Content Trumps Brand History
The study points out that recent experience—good or bad—tended to overwhelm previous experience with the brand. Take-away: One bad experience can undo all your good work with a customer, either consumer or B2B customer.

Finding #6 In Times of Flux, Content Consistency Cannot Go Untended
Companies that undergo mergers or acquisitions or that rebrand have to pay special attention to the consistency of their messaging in all channels. Take away, in their words: Marketers must implement tools, solutions and stop-gap measures that address content accessibility, consistency and accuracy.” (page 10)

In fact that’s their first finding--something that I hope we all keep in mind on a daily basis--the importance of consistency in our brand promise and messaging, whatever the current situation.

The finding that perplexed me was that corporate events needed to be more than corporate logo holders. I’ll let them try to explain that one in their own words:

"when it comes to corporate events, trade shows or even sports sponsorships, live events become little more than expensive logo placements. The integration of the brand promise and the event is often second to the public stature and visibility of the event."

Ok, the event needs to be something that meshes with our brand promise, not just a Super-Bowl-type visibility exercise. The report points to Red Bull and their Flutag game as an example of supporting the brand promise, the energy drink that “gives you wings.” Both the website and the game site are worth checking out—if you have people nearby, just be sure you have the volume turned down!

We all know that Web2.0 activities have an insatiable demand for content, the good news being that customers can create a lot of it for us. The idea that content is an integral part of excellent Internet customer experience is a little more challenging. What do you think?