Year: 2005

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Thinking About The Customer

Two great posts from Paul Greenberg at the PGreenblog, relating events during and after last week’s CustomerThink conference in Santa Cruz.

Paul writes, eloquently, about “the need to create the collaborative environment and tools to give the customer control over his own experience with the company.” (He also uses the word “betwixt” in the same post, which is reason enough to read it.) This really is the core, isn’t it? The core of relationships, of blogging, of podcasting, of all the different changes that are afoot with respect to social media, all relate to the fact that “control” by a company over a customer’s experience is an illusion. Ultimately, it’s the customer who is going to make the decisions…and the company that gives that flexibility in control to the customer will have an advantage over the one that doesn’t.

He also writes:

“Each person I meet has a story, a dream, an aspiration or twenty, a life, and just a complex sort of goodness and I don’t know, something very attractive about them as human beings. Sometimes I as well as I’m sure every single person reading this and those not reading it, tend to box them in to whatever they ‘do.’ ‘Paul is a CRM expert with a book,’ for example. That’s fine, but don’t you actually want to know more about many of those people?”

So well put. The “positioning,” the “brand,” the “story,” may pique initial interest. But it’s the messy, complex depth and reality of the individuals involved that builds the relationship.

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Lie La Lie

Asking only workman’s wages
I come looking for a job
But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there
Lie la lie
Lie la lie lie lie la lie, lie la lie
– Simon and Garfunkel, The Boxer

Indulge me in this hypothetical situation. Someone you’ve never met before, with whom you have no prior relationship, comes up to you and says “Hi, I’m going to lie to you, and you should pay me for the privilege.” What would you do? What would you say?

I’m betting you’d put your hand on your wallet (in order to make sure it’s still there), and you’d tell them to take a hike.

That’s the same kind of squicky feeling I get the more I hear about the new Seth Godin book, All Marketers Are Liars. The most troubling quote I’ve seen so far from the book:

“Tell a story that is memorable and remarkable and worth listening to. Seduce your customers, because that’s exactly what they want you to do. That requires ruthless selectivity and creative storytelling—in other words, lying.”

I am continually stunned by this unbelievable disrespect for customers (who, by the way, Godin continues to refer to as consumers). Mindless automatons we must all be, interested only in entertainment, yearning for fanciful yarns that induce us to shell out cash. This assumes all customers are homogeneous with respect to a need and that a great “story” will be the trigger that induces them to buy. I just don’t think this is the situation.

Although Godin seems to find “case studies” (term used loosely) and has retrofit them to fit his needs, the trend is going the other way. Away from homogeneity. Out into the long tail. The trend is toward uniqueness and connections and relationships. It’s not about finding the best common self-deception that consumers (errg, I get the willies just typing that word) have, and trying to mimic it.

Good customers, thinking customers, create their own connections, and their own histories. Customers engaged in a community create their own stories, based on shared experiences.

Say you do follow the “liars” advice, and create a great story to catch a market. When that “story” changes to catch the next fad (as it must), what happens to the customer who bought into the original façade? What is your response? “Screw ’em, time to ship more product, time to come up with a new story and catch the next big thing.” How will that customer feel when the façade is pulled back, when he or she gets to roll around to the back of the lot, and sees that the town was two-dimensional? How long will that relationship last?

I guess I’m not the only one who has a dissenting opinion on this, um, story. Publisher’s Weekly had this to say:

“Readers will likely find the book’s practical advice as rudderless as its ethical principles.”

In the “liars” world, how do you measure success? The “liars” approach forces one to measure success from the seller’s point of view. For focusing on the customer’s actual results immediately breaks the illusion.

Others talking:

Tom Guarriello: “But, am I the only one who thinks that this “lying” business muddies more than it clarifies?”

Johnnie Moore: “An awful lot of storytelling is done after the event. Stories rationalise action.”

Peter Caputa: “…the Marketing Messiah for scribbling oft-borrowed common sense marketing lessons down in story form.”

Ed Brenegar: “So, what then is at the crux of this interaction? It is the relationship between two people. Or one person and a lot of individuals collectively. We are not telling stories in the aether. We are telling them in a specific social, physical, relational, personal context.”

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Sage Words From Cardboard Spaceship

Good stuff here, on how having a conversation with a customer can get to the heart of the matter, quickly. (And, as a bonus, take a competitor out of the game.) Nice.

Feedback in the Market

Talking to a customer over the week, someone who had decided to go with SAP for a big project, starting internationally.

“We looked at Peoplesoft for some of this stuff…”

“Hmm, I would say that they are probably SAP’s most competent competitor in ERP.” I replied. (Never be dismissive of the competition, it just makes you look small-minded.)

“Not since Oracle. We think it is suicide. We’re actually a bit annoyed, because we would have taken them for some elements of the roll-out otherwise.”

Now, this is someone telling me that they will no longer do business with a respected competitor because of an acquisition, and it was not me leading them into saying it. Interesting reaction.

From here.

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In Search Of Failure

“I often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes. In my business, we try to study where people go astray, and why things don’t work…Albert Einstein said ‘Invert, always invert, in mathematics and physics,’ and it’s a very good idea in business, too. Start out with failure, and then engineer its removal.” – Warren Buffett

Just tripped across the above-quoted sentiment and it just resonated. Am (still) reading Reichheld’s The Loyalty Effect, and have just embarked into what is, so far, the best chapter I’ve read in a business book in a long time. It’s entitled “In Search Of Failure.”

Why don’t more folks take Buffett’s approach, and examine failures (both business and personal) more aggressively? Two reasons (says Reichheld):

  • Fear
  • Incapacity

Examining failure is culturally taboo. It means that “something went wrong…and talking about it might make me look bad.”

Get over it. Things happen. (Remember Windows 2.1?) Only by examining where things went wrong, can a business figure out what not to do the next time around.

This is of critical import with respect to customers.

  • Did the customer defect? If you don’t have a process in place to analyze that defection (an indictment of the organization’s inability to meet the customer’s needs), how can you prevent the next defection?
  • Did the prospect choose a competitor over your organization? Talk to them, and find out why. That way, the next time a similar opportunity comes up, you won’t make the same mistakes again.

We’re currently working on a large win/loss analysis project for a client. And…surprise…better conversations are actually taking place with the losses than with the wins. Better insight. More candid conversations (hey, the deal’s already lost…why beat around the bush?).

This approach is applicable not only to the win/loss process, but product development as well. We’re currently working on some new things (watch this space!) and, far and away, we’re learning more from the constructive, critical feedback we’re getting from customers than from the attaboy’s.

The bottom line? Listen to the customer. Embrace the failures when they happen. Learn from them. Make things better.

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Why Is This OK?

Is it surprising that customers have a hard time trusting companies, when executives pull crap like this? Here’s how one exec defines the word “hype”:

“It is how you develop an image for companies. So in other words, you give out false statements to mislead the public so they will then increase in their mind the value of your company” – Russell Simmons

Unbelievable.

The continued focus on the short-term, “transactional” view of the customer still boggles the mind.

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Finding The Conversations

Johnnie Moore’s blog rocks, and it’s one of 100+ that I have read through my aggregator in the past. But I rarely read it anymore. Why? Because there’s something better.

What’s better than his blog? Finding the conversations that he’s hosting.

This is because, although his blog is here, he publishes the feed for just his comments. This is where the good stuff is happening. This is where the conversations are happening. (n.b. have shamelessley stolen this idea, and if’n you’re interested the comments feed for The Social Customer Manifesto is here).

Subscribing to just the comments is a double-edged sword. On one hand, there may be insights that are missed in the “regular” blog posts. But as long as there are a good number of readers/lurkers to a regular blog, and some small number of those folks choose to start a conversation in the comments, there is an almost built-in filtering mechanism that is put in place…the posts that generate the most comments are the “high value” ones that pop up, and are the ones that get read. (By the way, Wilco is amazing. Buy all their records. Now. And Lane‘s too, while you’re at it.)

Here’s a link to how to do this yourself in Moveable Type or Typepad (thanks, Johnnie for pointing this out). It’s pretty straightforward, but you need to be comfortable mucking with the templates. Drop me a note…or a comment…if you’re not able to get it to work.

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Two Fascinating Collaborative Environments

Mind…spinning…with…possibilities.

Just tripped across two flash-based sites that have sent the idea of “collaboration” off into a new direction. The first is a collaborative scratchpad where multiple people can all interact with a drawing that is being created:

Sketch1
As they say, what you see above is a “simulated image” (in this case, what might have been on the napkin before this was created, with kudos to Lee).

My actual experience on the scratchpad site was less-than stellar due to the combination of a troll who chose to scribble out the drawings of others, and the manic sketchings of a wanna-be Larry Flynt. The current scratchpad area appears to be a completely unmoderated, anonymous area. Not suitable for those with an aversion to profanity, etc. You’ve been warned; here’s the link. But, despite the presence of the troglodytes on the site, the possibilities are impressive.

To interact with the scratchpad, there was no loading of anything needed. No installations. No registration. No training. No nothing…just show up, and start collaborating.

The second site, also by the same author, was a collaborative site where one can move the virtual equivalent of alphabetic refrigerator magnets around. Again, no setup was needed; by simply showing up at the site, you are immediately immersed in the environment and collaborating with the others who are there. The same caveats apply as above, here’s the refrigerator magnet link.

The thing that makes these sites revolutionary in my opinion is their ease of use and light-weight nature. The scratchpad site appears to be a 29K shockwave file, and allows up to fifty concurrent participants. Similar specs on the letter game.

What if an organization could point a website visitor at a private site like this and work with that customer or prospect on architecting a solution to their problems, collaboratively and in real time? Or what if you could integrate these capabilities into, say, a wiki-based environment, and document and take snapshots of a solution as it evolves?

There’s something significant here.

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Dear SBC: So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye

Random geek stuff…just found a sweet little device. It sits between the phone (regular or even cordless) and the computer. It hooks up to your regular phone via the normal phone jack (RJ-11), and hooks up to the computer with a USB port.

So what?

So now I can use the same cordless phone I’ve been using for 3 years to make and recieve Skype calls. Free to other Skype folks, and a couple of pennies a minute to call out to landlines and mobiles.

Just trying it out, but it seems to work great, at least on the outbound side. Sweet.

(click on pic to enlarge)
57599754_orig_1

Breakeven period on the cost? About a week.