Category: social customer

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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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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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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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Ow, That’s My Foot I Just Shot

Another great nugget from Fastlane from the post referenced here:

“My wife and I have had our share of issues with different dealerships. During our last purchase, in 2001, we were ready to close the deal on a Trailblazer. The salesman was great. However, before we could close we had to talk to the warranty salesperson. She would not take no for an answer. Good thing too. She convinced us that the vehicle was of such poor quality that it would require a $1000+ extended warranty. In fact, she was so convincing that we decided against the purchase and walked out of the dealership.” (emphasis added)

Heh. Oops.

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Hierarchy, Subverted

Was reading the recent post by Cynthia Price on the GM Fastlane blog. (hat tip: nevon)

Down in the comments were two items that stood out:

Mary Freund: “Dear Mr.Lutz: I am a G.M. employee. I work in Doraville , GA. Please put a hybrid engine in our product!!!”

Clarence Erickson: “As a GM employee I have noticed that sometimes the dealers don’t treat even me right. My wife also had a few rough visits where I had to intervene…Perhaps we should work on this a little more. They do tend to treat people like sheep at times and there is the leftover perception from the bygone days that the dealer service department will work you over every time.”

Things I’d love to know the answer to:

1) How many (5? 15?) organizational levels exist within GM between the execs doing the blogging (Cynthia Price and Bob Lutz) and the internal GM folks (Mary and Clarence) who are using this public forum to give the execs direct feedback?

2) How long would it take for that feedback to be shared upward using pre-existing internal communications mechanisms?

3) What would be the likelyhood of a response using the internal mechanisms in the pre-blog days? And if there was a response, how long would it take to get to get back to Mary and Clarence?

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Hell Hath No Fury: Irate Customers Begin Laying Googletraps

An interesting trend that seems to be perking up…after exhausting other options, it appears an increasing number of customers are not simply stopping at taking their business elsewhere after being wronged by a vendor. Those wronged customers appear to be increasingly likely to put their stories up on the web, with the express intent of having their misfortunes act as a warning to others who might stumble by their site while searching for information about said vendor. Two I’ve tripped across in the past day or so:

Alan Meckler: FTD.Com For Flowers Ruined My Weekend

“Perhaps I will order flowers online in the future, but I would never use FTD.com…In the meantime I hope Google and other search engines pick up this post so that searchers can be warned about FTD.com.”

Seth Godin: Public Service Announcement

“One day, you might be considering installing Skycasters satellite internet access. It’s possible that a google search as part of your due diligence would bring you to this posting. If so, then it’s worth the space it is taking up. Don’t.”

Cool.

And, I suppose, googletrapping would be the act of placing a googletrap. Heh.

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Internal, External Business Conversations

Hugh writes a great post about why business blogs can help organizations improve customer connections. (Updated to later illustrate that the concept is relevant in intra-organizational discussions as well.) The metaphor is that there is a membrane that surrounds every organization, and that membrane impedes real information flow and, with it, learning. The nugget:

Hugh: “The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform the external conversation, and vice versa.”

In other words, if there is alignment, or “equilibrium,” between what’s happening inside the organization and what’s happening in the customer base, both sets of stakeholders will be better off. Customers will be getting what they want, and organizations will have happy customers. And, presumably, reasonable profits.

This triggered four thoughts:

  • The theory above sounds a lot like this.
  • For this to work, it can’t just be “conversation,” it has be the RIGHT conversation.
  • There is a flow to this. Flow 1 is “out to in.”
  • There is a second flow to this. Flow 2 is “in to out.”

So, first off, this sounds a lot like thermodynamics. I had to go look up the thermo stuff to put this post together, and then it made my head hurt (again, like it did mumblysomethingsomething years ago, the first time I saw it in school), so I closed that page quickly. But, I think a way to characterize this model is through paraphrasing that law into something like this:

“Insight spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out if it is not hindered.”

Insight is good. Knowledge is good. Knowledge of real customer needs can help an organization do the right thing for the market. Knowledge of what a supplier is doing can help a customer make better decisions.

Another way of putting this…communication in this way changes the game from being zero-sum to being collaborative. Things tend toward zero-sum when information is withheld, and power and manipulation come into play. This changes that.

Moving onto the second point above, the idea of “conversation” needs some clarity. We’ve come to use the word “conversation” as shorthand for “folks who ‘get it,’ and want to work collaboratively, and want to share information, etc.” However, all conversations are not the same. More importantly, all conversations are not equal.

For this model to work, some conversational structure may need to be in place. If customers are clamoring for something (let’s say, a fad-ish feature in a product that may have long-term detrimental effects), the company can react in two ways. In the first case, the company can listen to those customers blindly, and deliver exactly what they want. In the second case, the company could try to explain some of the shortcomings of following that approach, and try to reach a middle ground where both parties agree, that results in a longer-term positive outcome for both sides.

Both cases reach equilibrium, but they are certainly not equal conversations.

Which brings us to points three and four above, the flows. There will be an increasingly strong “out-to-in” flow if a company is not meeting the current needs of its customers. If there is a flood of feedback going across that membrane from out-to-in, and nothing is being done about it, there is a sure bet that at some point in the future that organization will be in trouble. However, if that out-to-in flow is moderate and steady and is responded to with an equal in-to-out flow of information about how the company is responding, you can bet the company is marching ahead in step with where its customers are going.

The “in-to-out” flow, on the other hand, is a quite interesting one. Assuming the in-to-out flow is information-rich (and not a flood of the same-ol’-B.S.), the company is providing some insight and novel ideas to the marketplace. This is good. However, similar to the example above, if this flow gets too strong, the company may be outrunning its customers, and providing products or services that require change the market can’t yet absorb or isn’t ready for yet (see the Apple Newton for an example). In this case, the company should take a step back and perhaps slow down a notch and listen to what’s coming back in from the outside.

Food for thought.

Others commenting on this:

Lee LeFever
BlogSpotting (Heather Green)
Fredrik Wackå
Scoble

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Business Podcasting As A Competitive Intelligence Tool

The fine folks over at B2BMarketingTrends were kind enough to ask me to contribute to an article on the business uses of podcasting. In particular, they were interested in an answer to the question “How can podcasting be used to enable customer-facing personnel to stay abreast of what’s going on with competitors and to provide market intelligence?” The full article is here.

The four most salient points:

  • Podcasting delivers the information to users automatically, typically via a combination technology called RSS (for “Really Simple Syndication”). It is a simple program that regularly checks to see if any updated information is available. The user’s device automatically downloads this competitive information when it becomes available. This is in marked contrast to a “competitive intelligent intranet” that you must check regularly and navigate for updates, or a process that requires an individual to locate, print, and organize electronic or paper documents or e-mail messages.
  • The flip side of this is that individual users can choose to “subscribe” to only the particular podcasts within their organization that they deem relevant. So if an individual only wishes to receive information about a particular set of competitors, he/she can easily specify those preferences. With an individual’s attention already stretched thin as a result of e-mail overload (not to mention the problem of unsolicited messages, or spam, and a seemingly endless number of voicemail messages), the ability to receive only relevant, selected podcasts can aid not only in significantly improving productivity but also assist in reducing some of the challenges that information overload causes for sales team members.
  • Competitive intelligence information has an exceedingly short shelf life. Since podcasting ensures updates automatically, a sales team has the assurance of having the “latest and greatest” information that may be available. They can also update their podcasting platform by checking out resources like Agora.io for further information on this as well as see how they can better connect with their audience, customers, clients, etc.
  • Podcasts are, by their very definition, portable. But, more importantly, they allow people to “time-shift” to better fit their own schedules. Similar to audiobooks (which, according to National Public Radio, experienced double-digit growth in 2004), you can access competitive intelligence podcasts during a morning commute, on a subway, or while engaged in other activities such as jogging. So instead of needing to carve out time in an already hectic schedule to review and study the latest competitive information, this information can now be accessed whenever it is most appropriate for the individual (and it can be paused, rewound, and replayed as many times as desired).

Link: Listen To Information About Your Competitors…On Your iPod?

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Tales Of Banking Woe

What’s going on with banks this week? Many stories of banking woe out there. Examples:

Jory Des Jardins has been getting nicked with unknown service fees from BofA. Says Jory:

Bank of America, my bank, a Bay Area ubiquity that has been charging me a $5.50 “Service” fee for the past few months.

I called BofA to investigate.

“Have I gone under my limit?” I asked the customer service rep.

“No,” he said.

“Have I written any bad checks?”

“No,” he said.

“What, then, have I done wrong?”

“You’re not using direct deposit.”

Yvonne DiVita has had customer service issues of her own in bank-land. Yvonne:

“I’m still not able to access my ‘online’ account from anywhere. I need the ‘digital certificate’ which is designed to protect me, I know, but what it does is prevent me from doing my banking, unless I’m at the computer I set the account up on.

Also, I called to transfer money from my business loan to my account, and my rep wasn’t in…so, I was routed all over the U.S. to three different people, who all asked the SAME questions, over and over, till, finally, the last one said, “Your money will be available in the morning.” In the morning? This is the Internet…why wasn’t it available immediately???

I’m headed for a credit union.”

My buddy Pat Mosier has this to say (PJ is a laser-sharp business person, and has one of the most finely-tuned B.S.-detectors I’ve ever encountered). His approach?

“I’ve long believed that the smallest bank that can perform all the financial functions you need is the one to patronize. Nowadays even a tiny locally-owned bank can issue credit cards, transfer funds internationally, participate in chains of free ATMs, write loans bigger than the typical homeowner or small to medium business person will ever need (and, sometimes, the bank isn’t even needed to get secured loans). Decisions are made rapidly; policies aren’t cast in stone and handed down from above. The very owner of the bank is somebody you can meet with. New money transfer methods have meant that money can be easily sent using nothing but your mobile phone. Nowadays, sending money to Australia for example can be an easy, two-minute job, at the very most.

Citicorp, Wells Fargo, Bank of America…as far as I’m concerned they bring nothing to the table that’s to my benefit.”

So, here we are. By driving everyone online, and making their service into a commodity, the giganto-banks may have made themselves less relevant. If every bank pushes you online, and has you interact with them via their website, or via an ATM, where’s the differentiation?

Per PJ’s point…if customers are willing to take the time, will the community bank have a chance to make a comeback, since service and personal relationships do come into the equation? Or has the service of banking become such a utility that it doesn’t matter who the customer chooses, since all providers are the same?

Update:

Need better identification for Royal Bank of Canada? Larry Borsato brings his first born son in as a form of ID. (I’m only exaggerating a little.)