theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

The innovative workout

In our culture today, we tend to leap from problem to solution. We have been rewarded with this approach most of our lives.

But when you are looking for fresh ideas, you will get farther if you change the solution into a lot of questions.

For instance...

I wanted to go to the gym more often. This is a problem many of us have. I had memberships I didn't use. I found it painfully boring. Net result: not working out enough. Common solutions: be more disciplined, book time in my calendar, yada, yada, yada.

What worked

Asking the question,"what would make workouts more fun" took me in a totally different direction.

I got a workout buddy. We've now been going at least once a week for three and a half years.When we miss the workout, I don't just miss the workout, I miss the catch-up.

We could ask a lot more cool questions about workouts that would take us to Catalyzing Questions -- questions that show the way to different solutions.

Such as... how could I make money working out? How could I work out at my desk? How could I make working out as much fun as watching TV? (Hey, I guess that's why there are TV's in the gym now!)

Get unstuck

Asking different questions can get you unstuck in a big way. It's a powerful tool, whether your problem is dirty dishes piling up, or feeding people during space travel.

Don't change it just because you can

Everyone is dealing with a lot of change these days. [Holy state the obvious, Susan]

So if you can save them from making changes that don't fix a problem, you should.

Case in point - the Microwave.

We've owned two microwaves before this week, when we bought the third. The first one was bought about 1985. The second one - a Panasonic - was bought sometime in the mid 90's. [My spouse says February 26, 1996. He keeps excellent records, apparently. And apparently we get the appliance buying impulse at the same time every year!]

It's still going strong, actually, but we are renovating and wanted a smaller one.

Off to our friendly neighbourhood Sears, and Bay department stores, after doing some requisite online searching. [Aside: like many in a small inner city house, we were searching based on size, not features. Even though I was really hoping for stainless...]

We picked up another Panasonic. Pleasant surprise: the controls are almost identical!

How is this possible, when the last one is more than 15 years old?

It's possible, because some unsung genius over at Panasonic has set up some rules. And the rules say you don't change things unless you can make them better. And the better has to be enough better that it offsets the nuisance of learning a new system.

Which means we already know how to set the clock. Which took about a nano-second after we plugged it in. Thank you, Panasonic! You had a simple control panel that worked, and you kept it. [Probably a big money saver, too.]

There are improvements, in fact. It's easier to see through the window. It's smaller. It's a lot quieter. Nothing to learn there, just stuff to enjoy.

Learning new systems is a feature of everyday life now. And not always a welcome feature, let's be honest. I love Office 2010, but it was a little hill to climb. Not a big climb, a hill. But it made me wonder how many iterations I will need to learn before the end of time? [My personal time, that is.]

So hats off to you, whoever is designing control panels at Panasonic. I thank you for making my life a little easier. You spent your time fixing things that needed fixed, not things that didn't.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Hey Paypal, ever hear of the envelope system?

I've been dabbling in a little online selling of late, for a couple of reasons.

One client suggested he pay me with his company credit card so I didn't have to deal with the delays from their payables department.

I've sold a few things online, (such fun!)

Net result, I'm running a balance.

But PayPal isn't relaly integrated into my business accounting system, so I'd really rather make most payments using my credit card. Plus, of course, there's the points involved.

But PayPal won't let me do that until the balance is gone.

Deposit taking institution, or not?

I've been wondering why PayPal is not regulated as a deposit taking institution (aka bank) for a while now, given the balances they must surely be holding.

So I'm guessing PayPal is trying to mitigate this challenge by telling me I have to have NO BALANCE before they will let me use another method.

Big pain in the rear end.

Just one more way in which technology and the ways we want to use it continue to outpace the rate at which we can develop policies to control the whole thing, and even regulate it.

Anybody know the real reason for this policy? I'd love to hear from you.

End the survey torture now - write better surveys.

I decided it was time to stop complaining and invest some time in a solution. There are just so many bad surveys out there.

So I decided to write a nice focused e-book  for the people who need it most. Not research professionals (who do sometimes write terrible surveys, of course, but should know better). I wrote it for all those people who are not in the survey business, but find themselves needing to do a survey anyway.

Consultants, mostly. But also facilitators, coaches, speakers, trainers. Volunteers on association committees and boards. Association executives. Analysts who haven't been sent on training yet. Managers outside the research function who find themselves doing a survey. In short, all those folks who have surveys thrust upon them and would like to do a better job at them.

There's lots more about the book here, including the table of contents. You can buy the e-book for immediate download using any credit card you want, from Gumroad, a nice simple service that just does this one thing very well. No excuses, it's seriously good value.

Research Tools for Consultants: The Survey

Think of it as buying us both a really large latte, and me telling you everything I know for about two or three hours. Well, as much as I could put into 42 pages, anyway, and still keep it readable, fast, and focused.

So please. Be part of the solution. Stop the survey torture. Read the book. Follow the simple rules and checklists. (And don't embarass yourself with any more awful surveys.)

Why it's so hard to build a service culture

Recent forays from my home office have left me shaking my head some days. People cut you off in traffic, they roll through stop signs, they don't make way on the sidewalk. Simple stuff, but the rudeness index seems to be running high these days.

And we wonder why we don't get the polite, responsive, and proactive service we would like. If you are a manager, you probably wonder why your staff can't deliver the helpful proactive service you want.

Well, we live in a culture where there often seems to be little consideration for others. Or is that my imagination? Are we just more sensitized to that problem now?

Related articles

Wishing life could be more like a video game ... wait a sec, it already is.

Are car dealers over-investing in nice facilities?

Apparently car dealers are objecting to the cost of building car merchandising palaces. And who can blame them, with an typical investment reported at $8 million!

Usually, it is the first movers that reap the rewards from this kind of investment, IMHO. They create a better retail experience, and they reap the rewards from image and perceived brand value.

Everyone else has to decide whether or not to keep up. Keeping up does not always generate a big payoff. The problem is, that NOT keeping up can cause your sales to suffer.

Similar situations:

- investing in color printing technology for your office. If other consultants are doing it, you probably have to do it, too. But don't expect some kind of ROI

- offering better coffee in your hotel. When the quality of coffee is going up everywhere, people get ticked if they can't get a decent cup of coffee at meetings and conferences. So you are hurt if you don't keep up, but don't necessarily benefit if you do

- a great many technology gains seem to follow this pattern. Banks are still processing cash, still processing cheques, but also processing debit, credit, online, e-mail, and now Twitter and Facebook transactions! Is the whole revenue pie bigger as a result -- doubtful.

I do feel sorry for the dealers. But thankful.

But I am so thankful for a carpeted showroom. I am so thankful for office designs that don't make me feel trapped in a sales guy's office. I am so thankful for a service area that I'm not afraid to sit down in, or even put my handbag down!  So thank you for the glass palaces.I'm sorry it hasn't been good for you. But it sure has been good for me!

Related articles

You're only as good as your front line staff

Why you need to use all your plugs: innovating with your current capabilities

Do you have a tangle of cables and cords piled all over your desk? I sure do. My desktop now has two screens, but no built-in webcam, so there's a webcam velcro'd to the top of the screen. Which is used mostly for the mic for Skype calls, so is occupying a USB port.

My current desktop does not have a memory card reader, so I have one of those plugged in much of the time, for camera photos, digital audio, and digital video cards. But I frequently use a Flipcam, which also needs a USB slot.

My three iPad/pod/nano devices use two different cables, both needing a USB port.

But the key one is my beloved Plantronics ear-piece, which is in daily use. And of course needs a USB port! I usually have to unplug something else to charge it.

[I'm coming to the innovation thing... hang on a sec.]

So here's the crazy thing. My monitors have four USB ports, but only two of them are conveniently located on the side. So I never use the ones on the bottom. I had capabilities I could have been using, but wasn't.

A behaviorist might say this is due to the availability heuristic -- we are more likely to notice/use things that are easily accessible in memory. In other words, out of sight, out of mind.

My solution: plug the cable in to the inaccessible port, and leave it plugged in. So I notice the end of the cable. [Ed.: Gawd, Susan, that is so simple, surely you are not sharing this with us as an example of innovation?? Feeble indeed.]

Actually we all have -- either personally, or in our organization -- underutilized resources and capabilities. It might be people, or it might be an empty parking lot, or it might be USB ports. 

What resources and capabilities are lying fallow in your organization? How can you solve your problems by using things that are just out of sight?

Gathering customer feedback: the good, the bad, the ugly

I wanted to boost the usefulness of my iPad with a Bluetooth Keyboard, and ultimately got the sleek and delightful Logitech Ultrathin last weekend.

The Good

As it happens, I used BestBuy Canada's online option that allowed me to reserve the item for in-store pickup. You don't have to pay in advance, but you do have to provide basic contact info, including your e-mail address.

The purchase itself was uneventful. Go to store, pick up item, pay for item, head home. Worked well, I would do it again, except...

The Bad

Yesterday, five days after the purchase, I started receiving requests for feedback via e-mail.

On Thursday, I deleted 15 such requests. This morning, I see there are 11 more in my e-mail. EEK!

In self-defense, I decided I should answer the darn thing, provided by ForSee.

The Ugly Deconstruction of the Survey

The e-mail promises a 5 minute survey. This in itself seems crazy to me. It should be more like a 30 second survey, with about 3 questions. But wait till you see it.

There are 34 questions, and 32 of them are marked * meaning you can't finish the questionnaire unless they are answered. This is an odious practice in itself, because it's so one-sided. I might be willing to answer a few questions, but these questions are silly.

They've decided there's a model involving a lot of factors, and they're going to make me answer every question in the model.

Naturally, I am not going to get a thing for investing my time in this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thought perhaps there would be a place for open-ended comments, which there is. However, the survey makes it clear that no one will follow up on my comments.

I love the part that says "If you would like us to contact you about your feedback... visit the contact us part of the web site."

There are several links at the bottom of the page, but none of them go directly to a contact page, or even better, spawn an e-mail or contact form.

Interestingly, as soon as I clicked through to the Forsee site, YET ANOTHER survey opened up!!

Yesterday, I posted a Tweet to @BestBuy about the multiple survey invites arriving. They actually did respond, and copied their response to @BestBuyCanada.

For the record: I am not answering your hideous questionnaire. And if you loved your customers, you wouldn't ask them to do this.It's a hideous process, even if it was working correctly.

How to say thank you, part 2

In yesterday's post, I offered up a little matching quiz. Let's see how you did.

A through D is the list of charitable gifts, and [1] throught [4] is the list of responses

A. I make a generous gift to my business school every year, as part of a five year commitment that I keep renewing. This is the largest individual item on this list.

B. A number of annual donations to worthy causes

C. One of these annual gifts is to the Salvation Army, who gets about the same amount as the others in B above

D. I recently made a campaign contribution to a candidate for leadership of a political party

Here is the list of thank yous:

[1] and [2] Handwritten and personalized thank you card comes from two of these

[3] A tax receipt, followed up by mailing labels and a request for more funds

[4] A form letter

Answers: A-4, B-3, C-1, D-2

I was surprised and pleased to get the personalized card from the candidate. And impressed. This is very memorable. It looks genuine. It has had the effect of making me feel more strongly supportive of the candidate than I already was. I have started deleting and ignoring messages coming from the others.

The annual note from the Salvation Army is also impressive, and it makes them completely stand out from the pack of annual gifts. They are the only ones who don't seem to overly pelt us with additional requests all year. It feels like a tremendous amount of work on their part, but also has really cemented for us that the funds are appreciated.

The university sends me a form letter filled with platitudes. In fairness, they also have a person call me, but that person is trying to cultivate more; it's not really a thank you. The form letter is actually somewhat damaging in my view, because it serves to remind me what a small donor I really am, that I do not warrant a genuine signature from anyone.

The constant requests from other charities is annoying. I don't want the labels. But I guess they must work. It's a bit depersonalizing.

How about you? What are your insights on this topic?

How you say thank you

Occasionally we talk here about marketing not-for-profit organizations. These are the people who sell you the opportunity to feel good, or feel involved, instead of an opportunity to obtain a good or a service. It's still a sale, but it's the sale of an intangible.

Here's a little matching quiz for you. I will post correct answers tomorrow.

A. I make a generous gift to my business school every year, as part of a five year commitment that I keep renewing. This is the largest individual item on this list.

B. A number of annual donations to worthy causes

C. One of these annual gifts is to the Salvation Army, who gets about the same amount as the others in B above

D. I recently made a campaign contribution to a candidate for leadership of a political party

Here's what comes back. See if you can match up the list below with the gifts above:

[1] and [2] Handwritten and personalized thank you card comes from two of these

[3] A tax receipt, followed up by mailing labels and a request for more funds

[4] A form letter

Can you match up correctly?

Find out tomorrow.

Gamification: are you really making it fun?

I'm attending a presentation on Gamification this week -- and another on Big Data. That's a lot of buzzwords for one week!

The Gamification session offered through TPMA (Toronto Product Managers Assoc.) had some "homework" assignments that were supposed to be fun games to provide advance learning and resources in advance of the session.

The first of these was a bit amusing: a diagram that was scrambled and had to be unsorted to read.

Then there was another scrambled picture that had some quiz questions at the bottom.

By the third scrambled picture, I was seriously wondering what the point was, but tried to carry on out of respect for the organizer, who had obviously put some effort into this.

We've now exchanged some e-mails, because I wanted to let him know the web app wasn't working all that well. For me, pretty much the opposite of a fun game now, things weren't uploading correctly. I was sorting out these miserable scramble puzzles two or three times in order to get my tick mark for completion.

I don't know what half of these unscrambled diagrams mean, but I'm guessing I'll be exposed to a bunch ore of that stuff on Wednesday night.

However, I know one thing: Games are supposed to be fun. The point of gamification should be to take a mundane or tedious task and make it more amusing. This is what elementary school teachers have been doing for hundreds of years.

Suddenly, all sorts of people who aren't elementary school teachers (and don't work for Zynga) think they should design games. I hope a few of them consult with some teachers or at least see if their kids think it's fun.

In my house, we're practically addicted to Carcassonne. Compelling, easy to learn, simple rules, addictive to play. That's what games are supposed to be. No diagram required.

 

Posted with Blogsy

How encrusted are our contacts? I just found one for Palm technical support. Last time I had a Palm device ... maybe 2005??

Why no one is reading your killer e-mail

I stumbled on this great article about e-mail subject lines. Which must be very compelling, or no one will read the rest.

It's just more WIFM, right?

There's a great piece on Social Media Today, by Nate Goodman: "What do you mean my email subject line sucks?" that explains a lot of dos and don'ts and how tos. 

Most surprising to me were some of the "don't" items. Such as don't mention a big discount, (smaller discounts work better), don't ask for help of any kind.

FREE, of course, is not a discount. FREE is it's own special thing.

Let's hope some of the people mailing us this year read this post, and make their endless e-mails a little more worth looking at.

 

More on gaming and innovation in social games

This piece on the business of game development has some real gems in it: What Games Are: The Fun Boson Does Not Exist - by Tadhg Kelly - TechCrunch

The gaming industry has the ability to tap into a distribution system that is truly unique, and it is innovating around distribution more than around the games themselves:

The tragedy of social games is that the companies involved discovered the greatest distribution tool in the history of the industry, and yet proved inept at providing great games to go with it. The best things that they’ve come up with so far is Poker, some socialised versions of simple casual games, some super-simple sims and about 100,000 variations of Dungeons and Dragons.

Measurement is a good thing, but can overtake creative in negative ways

Like other industries today, the very ability to measure everything has created a deep bias towards metrics instead of human judgment.

The ultimate fallacy of sticking with “you can only improve what you can measure” is that measurements eventually determine all of your creative decisions. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a designer complain that they need to enact a deep change in their game, but are not allowed to do so by a manager who demands it be proved with numbers first. Both understand that something is not right, but the axiom mandates that the problem must be expressed in numeric terms, or else it does not exist.

Kelly sees electronic games as having the same dynamic that physical games do. So you can explain the rules governing a game, such as tennis, basketball, or croquet, but you don't really get the dynamics until you see the system in motion. Real world games are sensitive to changes, such as changes in the height of the tennis net. Which is no doubt why such changes are contemplated at length by sporting bodies prior to making them.

Fun as emergent property

But in electronic games, he argues, the obsession with measurement can sometimes improve the measured of "fun", without actually making the game more fun.

Games are essentially chaotic systems. In a chaotic system you can look at the initial starting conditions and the topology of a simulation and try to predict the interactions of strange attractors as much as you like, but you generally don’t really get what the hell the simulation is doing until you observe it in motion. The system is too sensitive, the patterns too hard to interpret and the situation too emergent.

Fun is essentially an emergent property of the system, and not subject to the application of process rules in the same way manufacturing is.

Designers of great board games, such as the famous Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber, often test and refine with real players for a long time to get things just right, tweaking minor game elements. Catan is one of those board games that inspires such incredible user engagement that you can find many instructions on line for how to build a better playing board.

Kelly argues that social games have yet to find the fun. What do you think?

Translating consumer insight into product design: take the icemaker

Somewhere between the research insight and the design criteria, there often seems to be a gap.

Case in point: the icemaker in my (and likely your) freezer.

The consumer wish: ice drawer is never empty

The design specs: ice drawer is always full

Annoying reality: ice drawer is overflowing and jams up unless you shut the switch off.

But we're not supposed to need the switch, so it is hidden behind a secret panel that you have to contort to reach.

What can I say, the work continues!

What's up with Pa55word~}s?

There is a list of the top 10,000 passwords in use today, sorted by frequency.  Can you guess what the most popular ones are?

Well, "password" is the top choice, followed by "12345" or a variation thereof. (Followed by many common names, and quite a few profanities and sexual references.)

The top 10,000 passwords are used by 98% of users. Meaning that hackers don't need to hack per se, they just need to try the most common ones on the list.

The future of strong password security

This morning, I was at a Deloitte presentation on near-term technology trends, and learned that the so-called "strong password" authentication system is dead, and will be replaced by password plus something.

The plus might be something like a biometric e.g.fingerprint or iris scan. Or I might swipe a device. Or enter a special code obtained from my smart phone.

I can tell right now that this is going to be a real joy. My password safe is already the program I use most often each day, and not just to get a password. Half the time I am there to figure out what my user ID is.

It surprises me how often I have to do this, actuallly -- cloud services are that pervasive. Such as subscription-only content sites or other services that require a log-in.So we can expect to have more passwords in the future, not fewer.

Technology is one thing, adoption is quite another

The technology piece of this is all well and good, but it's the human change management piece that interests me. I see people and their willingness to change as a major barrier to adoption of stronger password tech. If --- despite the non-stop advice to have a strong password --- most people think a profanity or their pet's name is solid, then we are light years away from widespread adoption of iris scans. Aren't we?

One way to use this information

Download the list, and search for your most common passwords. When you don't find them, pat yourself on the back for how clever you are. And I'm sure readers of this blog are clever people. Am I right or what?

You're only as good as your front line staff

I was recently holidaying at a lodge in the Rocky Mountains. Deer Lodge - it's a charming old place that serves excellent game dishes, and is close to some lucious scenery and skiing.

Unfortunately, they have the challenge of all remote seasonal resorts -- getting and keeping good staff.

This year there was one remarkable incident that illustrates the issue.

Breakfast at the Lodge

We were having breakfast, and had ordered two coffees, which arrived with a refill carafe. "Nice touch!" I thought. Our waiter, a ditzy young man we had seen before, kept coming by to pour refills. I wanted to save my refill to savor after finishing breakfast, so said "No thanks." So did my husband.

Next thing I know, he has grabbed our carafe, still half full of OUR coffee (at $3.75 per serving, I might add), and whisked it away! 

My amazement only grew as I watched him take it to the servers' station, top it up from a pot there, then whisk it over to another table. Probably not the experience the manager had in mind. And lukewarm coffee for the next guys!

Breakfast at the Airport

By contrast, a day later I was having breakfast in the airport in Calgary. The server there seemed to effortlessly handle a very large number of tables, quickly nodding and smiling at people, dropping off menus here, adding coffee there, telling people she would be back shortly to take their orders.

They were out of coffee mugs for some reason, so she had cleverly obtained a pile of large paper cups from the nearby Starbucks, and was giving everyone a generous pour in these explaining as she went.

A fairly pedestrian meal made much more pleasant by the impressive hosting capabilities of the staff.

What's at stake: only your brand

It's a reminder that you can only be as good as your front line staff. You can't always hire the people you wish you could.  Instead, you have to ensure your processes are as easy to deliver as you can make them. Because poor staff will short-cut, they will forget, they will be inefficient, and they will barely be paying attention. After all, they came for the skiing / boarding, not the server job. Or they are trying to get work as an actor or artist. Or just put themselves through school.

But the brand and reputation at stake is yours, not the individual staff person's.

In this case, frankly, I was so astonished that I just laughed.

Seasonal electronic greetings - the sad reality

I just got another one today.

Since there's virtually no cost to send these things out, why not send them to everyone on your list, right? So what if you barely know them?

Here's the impact I think these things actually have:

Wishing life could be more like a video game ... wait a sec, it already is.

I'm not a big time gamer, but over the years I have enjoyed some of the most marvellous video games. Myst and Riven, Syberia, Spore, BioShock and currently Oblivion. [My character, "Wanderer", is an Elf with spiky pink hair who is working on becoming a Mage, or magician, and prefers to sneak past the bad guys instead of trying to bludgeon them.]

Forget for a moment all the stuff you hear in the news about the violence of video games. There's another side of this story. A side I was thinking about as I started processing the post-holiday e-mail mountain. And I KNOW you feel my pain on that one!

I was wishing that processing mounds of marketing messages delivered by e-mail had the kind of satisfying rewards that achieving the next step in a game mission has. I guess I was wishing life was more like a video game. Then I realized, life sort of IS like a video game -- at least the good ones.

In games, you get more do-overs, but we tend to keep making the same dumb mistakes anyway.

Make a stupid mistake, you have to go back and do it again, but you can try something new. I surprise myself by how often I keep trying a failed strategy before I rethink it. Very similar to the real world, where in business we often just think if we push the strategy harder, it will work. 

In games, success comes from effectively utilizing all your tools. We tend to keep using the same tools anyway, instead of exploring new ones.

I'd been wondering what good a calming spell was until I gave it a really good try on an attacking human. I'd been hauling around a mortar and pestle, and did not realize it could be used to create potions! 

Again, there are real world parallels, of course. We have software we don't fully utilize, corporate resources we don't fully utilize, and talented people we don't fully utilize.

Playing to your strengths works well if you actually do it.

Magicians only need to know enough weaponry to defend themselves while they build their skills. But weapons quickly become a habit. And if people are charging at you with a mace, it feels like you should respond in a similar way. Sadly, no magician is going to defeat an armor-clad behemoth charging at you with a mace if you rely on your sword skills. You need to be clever. Sneak around. Poison your sword.  Use their own force against them to let them charge right off the bridge into the flaming inferno below. Better still, use your magic.

Of course, so much like real life. Except in real life it is often other people telling you to use your sword instead of your brain. It takes many of us decades to understand what our real strengths are and to work only in those areas. The most successful businesses also play to their strengths. This is truly the most important lesson of branding.

In games, you need to customize your approach to the challenge facing you.

Charm and persuade innkeepers. Help farmers who have been turned invisible, and they will do good turns for you, too. Bad guys are going to be bad guys, no matter what you say to them. In real life, of course, success comes from using the right approach for the challenge, whether it is creating new positioning statements or crafting an innovation strategy.

Wishing you a great year ahead -- just remember to use all the things you learned in games in your real world job. And if you find a spell that handles e-mail, do let the rest of us know!

Engaging your customers in charitable projects: ishareworks

I heard about an interesting business idea, where a promotional products business decided to let customers give away 10% of their revenue to registered charities. Kind of a nifty idea, and I had a chance to ask the business owner, Esbert Cardenas Jr., a few questions in an e-mail interview.

Esbert, I understand you have a program called iShare where you donate a portion of your profits to charities that customers choose. Can you give me a quick overview – how does it work?

iShare is a way for the customers of my business, Image Outfitters, to support charities that they care about with the money they already pay us. Without changing the cost of their order for custom promotional products, I give all customers the option of donating 10% of the revenue to the nonprofit organization of their choosing. This model allows for funding of hyper-local organizations in my customers’ communities, or donations to larger national charities—it’s not up to me, though. My customers can choose any 501 (c)(3) nonprofit.

I’m really interested in innovation, and this seems like kind of an innovative idea. What made you think of it?

Back in 2008 my wife Kirsten and I noticed that many of the nonprofit organizations that we supported personally were suffering from underfunding tied to the economic recession. The recession also hit small businesses like mine, so we thought of iShare as a way to attract new business while supporting a diverse group of charitable organizations. Our mantra is “Learn, earn, and return.” We spent 14 years learning and earning.  Now it is our turn to return to those in need.  This innovation has helped our business grow in a way that we feel good about, because our customers are helping so many nonprofits along the way. 

I’m curious about the reaction from your customers. Did you ask any of them first, or just launch the program? And how did that work?

We did talk with a few existing customers about the idea and kicked off the iShare program by offering the donation option to them. We wanted to make sure the program ran smoothly before launching on a larger scale.  Before we could make an official announcement, over $7,000 had been donated to charity.

Our customers love that they can give to charity with money they were

already planning to spend, and that they can choose any nonprofit. This option puts their money back into their communities, and that’s very important to a lot of our customers.  

Were there any speedbumps along the way – anything you had to change or rethink?

If I could go back, I think I would have kicked off iShare with a big formal announcement of the program rather than a soft launch. We weren’t entirely sure how our customers would react but with hindsight we would definitely launch iShare nationally from Day 1 if we could go back. 

What tips would you have for another business owner who wanted to do something similar?

I would say to go for it! Our customers love iShare because funding is restored to their charity without altering their budgets, and we feel satisfied knowing we can give back as well. iShare has attracted many new customers to Image Outfitters and the nonprofits at the center of the program are receiving new funding to support their mission. It’s a win-win any way you slice it.

Whether you’re a frugal business owner trying to balance corporate costs with charitable giving or a nonprofit executive director seeking innovative ways to fundraise, iShare can meet that need.

Thanks, Esbert, for a nice story to take into the Christmas season.

 

Customer context: urban versus suburban transportation

I'm continuing the thread from the last couple of posts where I spent a brief period in Manhattan, and was flooded with insights.[Something of a professional problem for people like me, we never shut it off.]

After speaking at an industry event held on a Friday afternoon, there was a wine and cheese reception. An event like this in my city would have people being very cautious about their wine consumption, and many people would not have any, because they were driving.

But at this event, almost everyone had a glass, and some had two or more. I don't think a single person drove themselves to that meeting. (see the earlier post about parking).

Context influences a tremendous number of behavioral decisions your customers make every day of the week. Without a little insight into context, you can make really dumb mistakes. On the other hand, having that nugget of insight can help you find opportunities that no one else has found.

What's your WIFM?

I got an enquiry today from a construction company that needs a new tag line for their business. They specialize in green construction.

The owners have identified that there is little WIFM in just telling someone you specialize in green construction. And that that's a problem for them.

WIFM of course if the What's In It For Me, and your customer communications need to make that clear.

It's not just big marketing behemoths that need to offer benefits, we all do. So I was pretty impressed that a small local home builder would identify this marketing challenge and reach out.

I'm more of a specialist in finding customer insight and using it to create some sort of innovation, but I was happy to pass his enquiry on to a marketing rock star that specializes in small business.

It's a great question to ask yourself. What's your WIFM?

Observing your customers where they live, work and play: urban or suburban?

I was speaking in Manhattan at an industry event, and had a chance to observe a different city up close for a few hours walking around. It reminded me how important it is to marketers to see how their customers really live.

I stayed with a friend, and got to see a Manhattan apartment up close. This one was lovely and much larger than average at about 750 square feet. In fact, apartments in New York City are likely to get smaller, according to planners. There is currently a law requiring new apartments to be at least 400 square feet in size.

It's not just New York that has this challenge -- some other urban areas do, too, such as San Francisco.

Curation of space

Objects in a personal space like this must be carefully curated, and they are. This is not Costco and Walmart country by any means. Not because of the prices, but because of the size and quantity of stuff. You just don't need or want a lot of stuff in a small space.

People who choose to live in this kind of density think differently about how they spend personal time than people who live in a sprawling place in the suburbs. They value their location highly, or they wouldn't pay the price to live there.

It's just a completely different mindset, and one you really need to understand if you want to gain access to one of the world's biggest markets. 

By the same reasoning, if you are a marketer who lives in a small apartment in Manhattan, you'd do well to remind yourself that life in Springville is very different. And it's different in ways that might surprise.

And really, there's no substitute for actually observing these things up close. I was just learning all this on a virtual drive-by, not a deep dive. Imagine what we would learn if we really set out to explore a topic like this.

When we assume that others are "just like us", we are usually wrong.

Context is everything: to understand your market, get out there

If you don't understand how your customers live, work and play, you will make dumb mistakes. It's crucial to get into their environment and into their frame of mind. Because we tend to assume things are the same everywhere, and they just aren't.

I had the pleasure of a short trip to Manhattan to speak at an industry event, and was just overwhelmed with observations. 

Here's one for you -- check out the photos below -- parking:

 

Bicycle parking

I have never seen paid bicycle parking before. In most cities, the bicycles are just chained up here and there. In my own city, we have cleverly designed things to chain them to. But I did not see this on the streets of Manhattan, which made me wonder if the rules are different there.

Segmenting your parking customers - bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, cars and limos

The price segmentation is pretty interesting too. $1 a day or $20 per month for a bicycle is probably what you can charge when the alternative is taking it up to your office. Much more, and people would figure out something else. And the bikes can go on the walls, so it's an easy expansion to make to utilize some wasted space.

Motorcycles take up more room than scooters, so they pay more.

But limos paying more than other cars is interesting. Is it because they can? Because they are a business, not a just someone's personal car? After all, there's only so much you can learn from a sign, and I didn't talk to the parking attendant.

Customer experience in a parking garage

I have never seen a parking special quite like the one in the second photo.All the signage looks great doesn't it?

And just look at how beautiful and bright and nice this place is. Parking in urban centres may come at a premium, but it is still very competitive. In a place like this, you want maximum occupancy all the time, so it makes sense to make the place nice.

• 
• 
• 

 

 

Innovation Strategies: Take what you do well into another environment

The JOI light is a lovely object, and a very cool piece of design and engineering. I saw the light in action recently and had a chance to speak to the company president, Tony Solecki. 

First let me show you the light. It is a set of LED lights powered by the heat of one tea light candle. The heat from the candle is converted to a current that powers the lights, and makes a brighter light than the candle makes. 

• 
• 
• 
• 

 

You can see more photos on their web site, list of retailers, etc.

What fascinates me here, beyond the lovely design of course, is the core innovation strategy. This company has been making a product for some years now that converts heat from wood stoves into electrical current that powers a fan that sits on top of the stove. They were looking for more applications for this technology, and the net result is this cool lantern.

If you are looking for innovation in your organization, taking a strong capability from one place and utilizing it in another environment can be a very useful strategy.

There are challenges to doing this, of course -- one is that you may be entering new markets that have different requirements. But you are using something you know how to do.

In this case, the company already had good retail distribution partners for the fans, so adding a new product wasn't as much of a stretch to their marketing as it might have been.

Humans love to compare: People Like U makes it even easier

In my little neighborhood in a big city, the local talk generally follows the same few topics, which we all love.

A perennial favorite relates to house prices. How much did they get for (or pay for) the house? Did you get your new tax assessment yet and what was the value?

We ask about roof replacements, new driveways and air conditioning units. We'd love to ask about the cost of the addition to your house, but that feels personal, so we mostly try to guess.

There's a feature in my weekend newspaper called Financial Facelift that let's us all look at the financial snapshot of someone else -- while they get advice from a pro about how to save for retirement, or solve their financial problems. I'm sure it's one of the best read columns in the business section.

We all love to peek and compare.

A new service from an Australian bank lets people peek in a more organized way. People Like U let's you compare your spending habits with other Australians.

I particularly loved the easy-peasy 6 questions you use to categorize yourself in thedatabase.

Don't you totally wish you had one of these for your own region?

• 

My take

This interest in comparing applies to pretty much any human endeavor from sports to hobbies. If you are seeking a way to engage people more in your product, service or category, consider the possibilities of letting your consumers compare themselves to others.

Kimpton rises to occasion: Superstorm Sandy discount

Most of the e-mail I'm getting about #Sandy is about why Manhattan-based servers have been down. [Making me wonder why anyone would actually put their servers in Manhattan, among the costliest real estate on the planet, and clearly an at-risk area.]

But one notice gave me a great warm feeling. Kimpton Hotels offered a 20% discount to anyone stuck in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Alexandria & Washington DC for a few days until flights resumed.

The times where real people are suffering are an occasion for brands to show their loyalty program has a heart.

Who earned your loyalty?

 

Bathroom Blogfest: don't forget the hallway

We have a charming little neighborhood restaurant that has been in this location for years -- every 5 years or so, a new owner takes it on.

This time, the new owners have really overhauled the little diner. No more booths, now it's all cute little tables. The whole interior decor was refreshed.

Naturally, I wondered what they had done with the washroom.

As is often the case in my neighborhood, the buildings are old and the washroom is downstairs. The stairs are usually steep and narrow. This one was no different.

 

The bathroom itself had been nicely handled -- all cleaned up, a flower arrangement. But the hallway and the actual door diminished all that good work.

• 
• 
• 

 You can't do a lot with a stairwell, but you can try a few things that help.

 

• Hang some colorful framed posters that coordinate with the decor of the main space
• Put in surfaces you can easily keep clean on doors in particular

I was impressed that the new proprietors had not overlooked the bathroom in their major clean-up.

I know that the other blogfesters include a number of design gurus -- hoping you have better ideas than mine!

For another take on this topic, check out the Cintas contest on best non-residential bathrooms, here.

Bathroom Blogfest 2012: the hotel experience, captured in video

I hope you enjoy this short video, where I a) document the real reason there is water everywhere and b) show you what it's really like being an observer of consumer life -- people think you are seriously wierd.

Bloomberg Businessweek participating in Bathroom Blogfest? redesigning the office bathroom

I opened my Oct 29 to Nov 4 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek and was delighted to see an article on redesigning the office bathroom!  It's about time some attention went to this!  Thanks Businessweek!

The article, Why Do Office Bathrooms Stink, by Christopher Bonanos, notes that the current standard office bathroom design causes stress for a lot of people: there's no privacy, noises and smells can be a source of embarassment, and people feel they are being monitored in their visits.  Plus they are a design wasteland, for the most part, and bring no joy into people's lives.

"Bathroom visits at work are a source of stress for a lot of people"

Nick Haslam, of University of Melbourne and author of the 2012 book Psychology in the Bathroom, told Businessweek that "Bathroom visits are work are a source of stress for a lot of people. Being overheard can be especially troubling for women, to the point that many Japanese women carry little white-noise generators to mask incriminating sounds when they visit the bathroom."

In some cultures these noises are embarassing enough that people flush frequently, (creating unnecessary use of treated water!)

There is now at least one app to use as a substitute for extra flushing, such as the Thirst Flusher app reported in Springwise and illustrated in the video below.

 

The Businessweek article goes on to ask some leading designers to rethink the office bathroom, and they come up with some creative and amazing ideas.

You can find out more about the Thirst global water awareness campaign on their site, here.   

And you can get the app for free on the Itunes App Store.

And of course, Professor Haslam's book is available at any of your friendly neighborhood online bookstores.

 

Bathroom Blogfest: what about the kids?

Since getting the blogfest started way back in 2006 with some blog buddies, there have been a tremendous number of improvements in the state of bathrooms.

One thing I notice a lot -- Moms and even Dads can usually count on a fold-down table to change junior on.

In fact, quite often I see something marked for families, where a parent can scoot in with a handful of toddlers in tow, and look after everyone's needs all in one room.

What I still notice, however, is how scary those giant toilets are for tiny bums. Listening to a Mom say "It's okay honey, I've got you, you're fine, now please just go" over and over made me wonder why there isn't a better option. Apparently there is.

On a recent trip to Munich I saw the better option in a museum bathroom. There, hanging on the wall, was a little person seat, just the thing to make a child feel safe.

It's a funny thing, in our child-oriented culture, that these are not more common.

More tomorrow!

Don't forget to check out the other posts, most easily seen on Twitter at @bathroomblogfes or look for #bathroomEXP

Bathroom Blogfest is back: the 6th annual. And we're still trying to climb out

Consumers everywhere seem to feel they are still climbing out, despite hearing that "the market" has returned to normal, and other reassurances. So this was a natural theme for our 6th annual Bathroom Blogfest. You can see all the participants in the table below.

And of course there is a Twitter feed: @BathroomBlogfes and a hashtag: #BathroomEXP

And a Facebook fan page: Bathroom Blogfest on Facebook

(Hey, Chief Inspiration Officer for the fest is C.B.Whittemore, no slouch when it comes to social media!)

I plan to make a few modest contributions this week, but you will find more -- much more -- on the other blogs and on Twitter. Join us while we do a quick clean up of the state of the bathroom in modern culture.

 

Name	Twitter Username	Blog Name	Blog URL
Susan Abbott	susanabbott	theIdeaStudio	www.theideastudio.ca
Laurence Borel	blogtillyoudrop	blog till you drop	www.laurenceborel.com
Bill Buyok	AventeTile	Avente Tile Talk	http://www.aventetiletalk.com/
Jeanne Byington	jmbyington	The Importance of Earnest Service	blog.jmbyington.com
Nora DePalma	steamtherapy	The Mr. Steam SteamTherapy Blog	http://blog.mrsteam.com/
Mr. Steam	noradepalma	OR-DP POV	www.oreilly-depalma.com/blog
Stacy Garcia	kbtribechat	kbtribe	http://kbtribe.wordpress.com
Diane Kazan	dkazan	Public Bathroom Blog	http://thekazan.blogspot.com
Arpi Nalbandian	Arpi_Nalb	Avente Tile Talk	http://www.aventetiletalk.com/
Victoria & Shelley Redshaw & Pond	scarletopus	Scarlet Opus Trends Blog	www.scarletopus.com
Sandy Renshaw	sandyrenshaw	Purple Wren	purplewren.com
Bruce D. Sanders	rimtailing	RIMtailing	http://rimtailing.blogspot.com/
Paige Smith	none	Tile tips from installation professionals	http://neusetile.wordpress.com/
Todd Vendituoli	TALV58	Thebuildingblox	http://www.thebuildingblox.com/
Shannon Vogel	cyswebsites	From the Floors Up	http://fromthefloorsup.com
CB Whittemore	cbwhittemore	Content Talks Business Blog	http://simplemarketingnow.com/content-talks-business-blog/
Irene Williams	crossvilleinc	Elevate Your Space	http://elevateyourspace.wordpress.com/
Linda Wright	skiptotheloo	Skip to the Loo!	http://lindaloo.com/

Magic, sausages and insightful creation: perhaps best enjoyed from a distance

I've been thinking about cake-baking as a metaphor for the process of report writing. I'm convinced that the process looks fundamentally different from my point of view than it does from the client's.

To read the text that accompanies this picture, you need to bounce over to the new MRIA blog, where you'lI see the full article, called Magic, sausage making, and the baking of insight cakes: or, why I hate providing draft reports

Presenting the curated self: writing your own obituary - are we all in the spin business now?

Thanks to a regular reader for sending me this remarkable link: an accomplished individual who wrote their own obituary.

Obituary of Brian Sawyer, 82 when he died

I see this as a continuation of the desire to control how we present ourselves to the world. We may not choose privacy, but we do choose what we share and how.

Now that we are all in the business of spinning our own identities, does this mean we are less susceptible to the spin efforts of others, such as politicians?

[Extra credit: If you're up for a little self-analysis, try writing your own obituary. It's an interesting exercise in learning what you have actually valued in your life, and what you might like your personal future to hold.]

Yes, Apple does research

There's a myth out there that Apple does not do marketing research. This is nonsense, of course, but seems to have tremendous staying power.

I saw something today that pretty much proves they conduct research -- they might call it product development, or usability, or ergonomic, or whatever, but it's research into what people want, what they like, what is comfortable for them. 

When you test 124 different prototypes on 600 people, that's research. Good companies do it. Including Apple.

46% of your customers want things easier and faster: are you helping them?

Strategy Mag recently published fascinating stats from research firm Fresh Intelligence. One that caught my eye:

Consumers think brands should be better at:

Saving time 46%

Product innovation: 44%

Seamless and transparent communication with consumers: 27%

Making buying easier - apps/sites that help make informed decisions and online ordering: 24%

I got a lovely example from Porter Airlines this week that created genuine surprise and delight, and saved me a step in the process. They notified me by e-mail that I am checked in for the flight, and they attached my boarding pass.

One whole step removed!

Can you remove some steps from your customers' lives that add them no value? Or are even irritating?

Nasty looking trend in RFP technology

I got a request to submit an RFP. Nothing unusual in that, these things show up all the time.

When the business was new, I used to jump up and down and squeal with delight before throwing myself into a proposal writing frenzy. Now I know better. Still, it's always interesting to see what's coming over the transom.

This one required you to participate in a reverse auction scenario, where you always know if you are the lowest bidder, and you can keep going down until you go broke.

You have been invited to submit quotes to xxx Corporation  for Market Research Services.  You need to submit your best price in the SafeSourceIt™ eNegotiation tool to xxx prior to the event conclusion. Pricing must be submitted by 9/20/2012 at 12:00 PM EDT. The auction is scheduled for 15 minutes plus any event extensions. The view you will have during the quoting process is called “Low Quote Indicator” This means that during the process you will know if you are the low quote by a yellow indicator over your quote. You will not have access to any other quotes being offered Parkland.

The reverse auction idea sounds really interesting when you hear about it as something happening in another industry. But all I could think of here is that this is an invitation to have quality go right out the window.  It does satisfy the desire to know how close you are to the pricing of your competitors. And may well be fairer than other methods for this kind of project.

Fortunately, over here in the insight corner, we don't have to bid on this kind of project, which was all about collecting thousands of interviews over the course of a year.

My favorite part is the name of the tool... "eNegotiation."Or is that just my quirky sense of humor?

The reciprocity principle

I was reading this little interview with Jeff Walker on Forbes. He's an internet marketing guru guy that seems to have made a small fortune for himself and for his clients.

I thought it was kind of cool that he is in the same coaching program I'm in. [The platinum version, I'm guessing?]

Here's what I wanted to share with you -- he advises "First give, then receive."

"The days of shoving product and services down the throats of blind customers are over."

I used to hear this advice on personal success and motivational tapes that I played while driving when there were still cassette players in cars. The reciprocity principle, it was called.

I'm a big believer in the reciprocity principle. You want fire? Put in some wood. You want testimonials? Maybe you should start by giving some, instead of asking for some.

What Jeff Walker is on about here is not personal networking advice, however. He is saying this is now true for marketing. It's good advice, for those who will listen.

Top 10 customer experience trends: The future of customer experience

In this post, I talked about where customer experience thinking came from. This one is about where I think we are headed.

1. It's all about the customer. Still

Yes, that seems obvious. But it needs constant repetition. Control is not going to go back into the hands of the marketer. The diversity around us in styles and choices is just mind boggling. Customers are driving that, with the aid of new technology.

Personalization, check. Customization, check. Co-creation, check. None of it is going away.

2. Brands are powerful

Consumers are overwhelmed by choice and information. A brand can help you narrow things down. A brand can help you, as a person, tell your story. Only if the brand HAS a story, of course. See #8 for more on that.

3. Touchpoints will continue to expand

The number of mediums in use just keeps growing. The old stuff is still with us (newspapers, for example), and new channels pop up every day (like apps). As a marketer, you need to try to pull this herd of cats into something that looks like a coherent brand message, customized to deliver what your customer is looking for, and responsive to what they are telling you. Sound difficult? Absolutely.

4. If anything is going to replace consumption of goods as the thing that defines our culture, it will be consumption of experiences

There is evidence all around us that we value experiences as much as, perhaps more than, stuff. Which could be good for the planet. Stuff is not going away, but it might be dropping in importance. What is social media, after all, but an experience? Sponsorship marketing delivers experiences. Digital media delivers experiences. Great packaging even delivers an experience. If you aren't delivering an experience, you are going to have problems competing. [Yes, I feel your pain, wondering how the heck to do that as a consultant.]

5. The service + experience economy is going to produce a lot of tension. Show a little respect

The person serving you your coffee today is getting served by you on an airplane tomorrow, going in to your bank branch during the extended hours, and calling your support centre tonight after dinner. And vice-versa. Despite growing income inequality, the tolerance for being treated like a nobody -- even when you are buffing a toenail -- is low, and I think, decreasing. The 1% didn't get the memo on this. There's a lot of people out there feeling disrespected.

When you design a service experience, don't assume you will be able to find staff who can be trained to be obsequious. They're not growing those folks any more. [Except in those odd environments where people are highly paid to be obsequious.Your barista is not highly paid, regardless of what you think.]

6. We're going to expect better experiences in places that have never had to bother before

The last bastion of the bad experience will be anything that looks like government. Are petty bureaucrats still wielding power over people -- of course they are. We hate it, but we haven't figured out how to change it yet. We're all working on health care first. But when all of the commercial/consumer world is oriented towards creating a better experience, everything that doesn't try too hard is going to really stick out, and not in a good way.

7. The drive to improve experiences is going to improve efficiency

Oddly, most people think better efficiency and greater productivity comes from taking things away from customers. Not necessarily true. You can take away stuff that no one wants anyway, like delays in service, out of stock inventory, difficult check-out procedures.

It's not all about high-touch -- sometimes it's about just letting me get on with it. Consider self-serve gas. For most of us, doing it yourself is just a lot easier and faster, and therefore a better experience. Cheaper is a bonus. The same thing has largely proved to be true in transactional banking. [Now if we can just bring that to public transit!]

8. Faking authenticity is going to get harder.

There's no place to hide. Even for Apple. Instead, why not go for genuine authenticity? It's cheaper and more fun.

9. The perfect targeting solution won't help you if you don't have a story and an experience to offer

Will big data solve your problems? Maybe somewhat. But more likely it will be to the 2010s what CRM was to the 90s and 00s -- a lot of money spent for a lot of disappointment. Your perfect algorithm will only help you if you have a story to tell and an experience to back it up.  [Surely that's a relief, isn't it? Just hollering "buy, buy, buy" won't work better because of big data.]

10. No one will be paying attention

You think it's hard getting attention today? I think it's going to get harder. All that stuff about localization services that will drive traffic into your store. It will just feel like more spam for most. All those apps? Well, how many apps can you really use? Three? Five? Ten? Certainly not 30 or 40, not 100 or 1,000.

The only solution is to insist on relevance. Relevance might not mean utility in the conventional sense, it might mean amusement or charm [just look at Pinterest].

The bright spot here is that local businesses with some savvy will have an easier time of it, I think. People will be walking by your store anyway, right? 

 

This is what I see, at least today. What do you see?

Customer Experience - what it means, where it's going

When I first started in the consulting biz at the turn of the century, I had a passion for creating better customer experiences and wanted to help companies create them.  Building a boutique consultancy, I went looking for tools to help me -- models, mentors, and so forth.

I was really shocked to find almost nothing out there that felt really helpful.

So ultimately, I ended up creating my own model, to give structure and focus to the work I was doing with clients. After a few years of work and experimentation, I came up with the model you see here.

A fuller version, with more explanations, is available as a PDF here.

And my working definition is something I stopped messing with, because I basically think it still works:

Customer Experience Is... the internal response of an individual to their interactions with an organization's products, people, processes and environments.

Internal response includes the thoughts, feelings and emotions experienced and the rational, psychological and sensory benefits of the experience.

Since then, there has been an explosion of books, speakers, consultants and blogs focused on customer experience. Which is a really good thing actually. Because seriously, when I first started talking to executives about this customer experience -- unbelievable as this may now sound -- no one knew what the heck I was talking about.

And there is an enduring truth captured in this simple model: we understand a lot more about what goes on inside the heads and hearts of our customers, but we still cannot affect that directly. As a business manager, you can only work with your own processes, sequences, communications, people, environments.Those are your levers to make change. They are powerful levers, but you can't reach directly inside heads to muck around -- at least not yet.

Customer Insight is still the place to start

It is my strong belief that it all starts with the customer that informs my obsessive commitment to insight research. You have to try to go beyond counting up the things you can count, to experience the mysteries of another human being's experience of the world.

So probably the weakest element of this model for me, after many years in this work, is that I missed culture as an element of individual experience. Psychological factors certainly include understanding the hard wiring that comes from our biology, which we now call behavioral economics. But culture is always software.  And it does matter.

Culture changes and evolves. [My Dad watches Mad Men and sees reminders of the office politics of the "girls" in the "steno pools" of his past work in a major engineering firm. I watch Mad Men and see reminders of how we have indeed changed our ideas about what a woman can do and be in our society. And how glad I am that my career pinnacle was not the "steno pool".]

So when I am looking for customer insights, I now consider culture as well as the other dimensions of the model above.

Models, templates and systems abound

If you go looking for models of customer experience now, you'll find plenty of them. Which means it's all mainstream.

There are also a lot of consultancies offering templates and systems for you to implement to improve your customer experience. And these are very useful if you aren't working with much. [Technical term: you really suck at it today].

But I would argue that -- if you have reasonable systems in place today, if you have been working at things for a while, you need something a lot more than these template approaches offer to move you into the Zone of Goodness -- a place where your business starts to really benefit from the experiences you offer to customers. 

If you look around today, you will find that many people have embraced specific metrics, like Net Promoter Score, as a way to measure and manage customer experience. Voice of the Customer programs are present in all successful consumer companies of any scale.

We must be done, right?

>> More about where customer experience is going in the next post. Because this is long enough for one sitting!

Paper to digital: evolving quickly

There are more and more indications that we still want paper and handwritten things.  You can't beat it for portability. And there are few version compatibility problems with paper -- it pretty much works with all human readers.

At least two methods are now available to synch your actual paper to your digital life.

Livescribe SmartPen is one approach -- a digital pen can link to your computer and upload your notebooks into various forms. (My earlier post on SmartPen here, and a piece I wrote about using a Livescribe as a research tool is here.)

You need the pen, which is actually a small computer. And you need special paper. But you can then hook into a number of other sending and sharing methods.

Moleskine's new smart notebook is another. Image and more about this application here, on PSFK. For this one, you need an app designed to upload pictures you take with your phone into Evernote.

 

I have high hopes for continued developments in this area that will eventually make the paper to digital translation go easily in either direction.

 

Insights on a budget: How to do Marketing Research with no money: Part 2

In the previous post, I talked about how to do a few interviews on your own if you have a need for insights (and who does not need insights?) but no money. It's a common problem for small businesses and start-up businesses.

I do recommend avoiding some kind of high-tech thing in favor of just actually talking to people -- well listening to them mostly.

But, if you want to do this online, there are options. Some are designed for the DIYer, others say they can be used by anyone.

Here are a few that I know about. Not a complete list by any means. (Note that I am talking qualitative here.)

Option 1 -- use a free survey tool but ask only open-ended questions

This is actually a pretty good option. Think in terms of maybe five questions, and give people lots of space to answer. This is not about statistics, this is about using technology to get yourself a mini-qualitative study.(Seriously, forget statistics in this instance, just go for actual insights.)

If you think this sounds feeble, let me tell you that Jackie Huba (yes, that Jackie Huba) used exactly this method to conduct some of the advance planning for the Dell Customer Support Think Tank that I've been telling you about. She had about five questions, all open ended. It was a very effective approach.

Top tips: Be short. Rewrite. Rewrite again. Use plain language. Ask a "big" question. Leave a big space for an answer. 

Option 2 -- consider these other tools and resources

There are a few services out there designed to work for the DIY researcher. Full disclosure: I have not used all of these services, and I am not getting paid for this. (Maybe a drink at the next industry conference, she says hopefully?)

You can find a very good directory of online qualitative platforms on the Greenbook site -- the NewQual Directory, as well as lots of good articles about how this stuff works, written by some online experts, Jay Zaltzman and Betsy Leichliter.

Gut Check is a service designed to help you find respondents and complete -- fairly quickly -- small scale projects on fairly narrow topics, like testing an advertising concept. They will help with recruiting participants from their panel, or you can recruit your own. They provide a library of video tutorials and other forms of help.

ITracks is also a platform that provides leading edge professional grade tools to quallies. But they have a package called Reality Check that gives you the ability to do a quick concept test and get responses quickly. It's stripped down, but looks promising.

2020 Research has a suite of online qualitative tools. These are leading edge professional grade tools, but there's nothing stopping you from renting their platform, reading through their extensive resource base, and running your own project. There are a couple of articles on their site about the pros and cons of running your own projects.(I thought they had a tool specific to DIY, but I'm not seeing it there.)

BlogNog is an online research platform that has a lot of features, but they also promote it as a good tool for DIY research.

QualVu is an online video platform, that also promotes a DIY option. I'm not clear on how the DIY option is priced or handled differently than if someone like me was just to rent their platform.

IdeaScale is a tool that is designed to encourage the submission of ideas from a group of users, and let them vote up, vote down, comment and enhance the ideas. Depending on what you have in mind, it might work well for you.

There are MANY more tools, as you will see from the NewQual directory. Just like going to Home Depot, buying the power tools is actually the easiest part of the project. Just remember that carpentry adage: measure twice, cut once. 

Have you had experience with DIY? I'd love to hear from you on this. Was it a happy experience? Would you do it again?

Guerrilla marketing research: how to find information on a budget Part 1

My regular workout buddy is an outsourced marketing consultant. As we sweat it out in the cardio area we yak it up about many things. A frequent topic is the desire of her small business and start-up clients to get some kind of marketing research insights on essentially no budget.

Recently, she was telling me about a start-up who wants to get 30 interviews done across North America with various types of business owners, and has a budget of $5K for the whole thing. As you can imagine, a range of expressions crossed my face when asked for advice on how to do this!

It's a common problem, and I'm not unsympathetic. In fact, I keep thinking about putting out some kind of e-book on this topic, as I get the question so often. (What do you think about that, dear reader? Is this a good idea? What needs to be in it?)

What advice do I give?

For right now, here's what I usually say, or variations on this theme. (I'm thinking B2B here, because it comes up more in that context for some reason.)

1. A few really good in-depth interviews with the right people are better than a whole lot of interviews.

2. 30 interviews is not some kind of "random sample" or "more representative." The ONLY reason to do that many interviews would be to systematically cover a few people in many different categories. e.g. ensuring you have some people from each of six industries, for example, and subsets of "users" and "non-users" in each group. Or smaller and larger. Or more sophisticated / less sophisticated. Or some other dimension. (These are research design considerations.)

3. For business buyers in North America, regional location is only important because it affects industry, regulation, and access to solutions. Silicon Valley business is different than Chicago business because it's Silicon Valley industries, not because of the warm climate, unless you are talking about landscapers.

4. Research done with friends of the owner is dangerous, because they are anything but disinterested and unbiased. This is the worst kind of convenience sample (Yes, that's a real research term, and it means "people we could easily get hold of.")

5. You can get people to participate in research without a monetary incentive, but there really needs to be something in it for them. Examples of "something" include: a copy of the findings, a chance to network with peers and talk about shared concerns, a free meal in a nice setting, a chance to influence development of a new business concept, free stuff from the sponsor.

The reason professional researchers don't do it this way is that a) it's not fast/efficient enough and b) it's not reliable enough. It's not because it's impossible.

6. Assuming you have the right people to talk to, it's all about the questions you ask, and the environment you create, and how skilled you are at listening. You don't generally hire a carpenter just because they have tools -- they also know how to use the tools. If you decide to build your own deck, at least keep it simple. This leads to point 7 --> how to use the time in the interview.

7. Spend most of your time just learning about them, their business, their interests, what kind of solutions engage them. Do not start with a bunch of direct questions. Soak, soak, soak up the information about who they are and how they go about being successful. What are their pains? How do they deal with those pains today? This is always the key to developing good value propositions.

8. Plan to spend some time going over your notes in detail, and figuring out what the differences between people are, as well as what the similarities are. Going for only similarities is a very common newbie mistake that is made even by trained researchers.

9. Don't go all high tech, that won't substitute for a lack of finesse on 6 and 7. Just phone people up using that good old OLD tech, the telephone. If you are going to record the interview, tell them.

Planning help

I have a short e-book -- it's FREE -- that will help you think about what you are trying to figure out. Check it out. I get a lot of good feedback on it from people who take 30 minutes to work through the questions.

Your challenges

If any of this resonated with you, I would love to hear from you, either in the comments, or send me an e-mail with your thoughts -- susanabbottarc[at]gmail.com.

Dear Mr. Google - please can we have more like Scholar?

On some projects, I need to do a lot of secondary research. You could call it desk research.

The web has made some of this exponentially easier to do -- like figuring out interesting trends around the world. No idea how you would have done that kind of work in 1980, say.   

The web has also made some of it exponentially harder to do -- like finding authoritative information on a topic. You search something like "customer loyalty" and you could spend a year sifting through meaningless dreck. The only alternative was expensive library-type document repositories and searches, which took a lot of time, and weren't always that productive. [For me, a non-librarian, and never any good at that stuff in university]

Then [cue the heavenly sounds and light] I discovered Google Scholar. Where have you been all my life! Google Scholar lets you search for a topic and only gives you academic type publications. And you can sometimes get really good stuff about a single author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where is Google Tech Support?

So Dear Mr. Google, we want -- we need -- Google Tech. It would only give us authoritative answers on questions like "how do I install a new video card" or "what is the meaning of error 404". [I know these are feeble examples, but you get the picture.]

We have all, I think, spent time on the web trying to find an answer to a question that may well be simple, really simple, if you are a computer engineer. And has probably been answered somewhere in some knowledge base. But we can't find it. We get a bunch of *%^&$^%$* and you KNOW what I'm talking about here.

So I think the answer is Google Tech -- a search engine that looks only for authoritative things regarding technology questions and answers.

What do you think? Could you build it? I bet you could, you seem to be able to build almost anything. If you build it, we will all come, I promise.

Thank you Mr. Google.

What's your customer support philosophy? And do your employees know?

I was really impressed with the help I got from Paul O at Tracker Software a few weeks ago, which I wrote about here, in Talking like a person in an age of your-call-is-important-to-us: how to earn social capital

Part of the reason I posted the original article is a guerrilla tactic I hope you will try yourself: instead of putting out blog posts when I am annoyed, I'm going to try to put out posts when brands do a good thing. Rewards are generally more motivating than punishment. So, I wrote Mr. O to tell him about the post.

He was kind enough to tell me a bit about Tracker's customer support philosophy, which he says "was drilled into me by the company founder."

"Support for the software is important."

We believe, as it seems do you, that a positive support experience can take a disgruntled user and make them a loyal return customer.  This translates directly into ongoing sales.  We want you back.

"All users get the same support."

We maintain that 'the little guy' is just as important as the global corporate clients.  We offer free products as well as licensed ones and honestly try not to distinguish between users who have not paid us a cent and those who have paid tens of thousands of dollars.  Again this is simply building good will.

"Users get a punctual support response."

We are frequently told what a surprise it is that users not only get a response when often they expected an email to drop into /dev/null (sorry for the geek speak here)  We have a policy that there should never be an email in the inbox not responded to for more than 30 minutes.  Of course being human this is not always the case but we do try.  I think it is that human element that makes the difference, we all like to feel valued."

This is a very sound approach, and the world would be a better place if there were more people doing things this way. Logical. Sound business thinking. And looks after customers. What could be better?

I was also impressed that they have created a knowledge base article on my problem, and are also going to include a "quick start" document with the next release of their products. There's no substitute for taking action to reduce the need for support.

[BTW, now that I've been using their product for a while, I have to say I really love their PDF tools. And they didn't pay me to say that.]

The challenge of curation: how to stay on top of it all

We are all overloaded. If one thing is clear, it's that the overload situation is not going to change short of a global information disaster (and we don't really want that, do we.)

There are a number of services attempting to help people with the overload.

Curating the world

Twitter, interestingly, has become a curation service for many. It may have replaced the RSS feed.

Paper.li and Scoop.it are services that let you passively or actively curate content.

I'm trying an experiment with paper.li right now. My plan is to take all the newsletter e-mails I get now, and shift them to this delivery mechanism. I thought about putting them all into a different e-mail, but I'm not sure that really solves the problem, as most of the time I do a quick scan and delete.

Scoop.it is similar, but different somehow. The service proposes feeds and sources based on interests you input. You can then select and publish those sources, along with commentary. So it's a more active approach, and I think likely better for sharing with others, but you do need to invest the time.  It might be a good alternative to blogging, actually, if you are not that into writing.

Curating the Self

Services like LinkedIn and Facebook are part of how we present ourselves to the world. Our web sites are out there. We might have a Slideshare page, a blog, a video site. Managing all of these faces is becoming a challenge.

Enter services like Flavors.me, which is kind of a self-curation project. It helps you pull together all the things YOU do online into one place. I find it a little confusing, but essentially, if you go to someone's page (here's mine) you can click on the links and see the content on the same page.

I think the whole role of curation in our lives is going to grow. It's a role traditionally held by major media, but they aren't pushing into this space (for reasons I don't understand, actually -- maybe they haven't figured it out yet).

What's your take on this?

I'm curious what you are doing to manage information overload, and yet still stay current?

Winning at Customer Support: The Future

I was delighted to be Dell's guest at their recent Customer Support Think Tank held in Austin in June 2012. This is the fourth of four posts on the event and themes.

Another amazing graphic from Allison Crow

See the graphic on Flikr

Video of Brent Leary talking about how support is not a cost center.

Jackie Huba gave us a fun challenge to bring our ideas about the future of support to life using objects and pipe-cleaners. The diagram my group came up with is below.

Here's the essence of what was said:

• Technology will be used in smarter ways to help people find what they want more easily. Google does this now of course, offering you improved search based on where you are and what you've done before. These tools will come to your support site, and not a moment too soon for most of us.

• There will be less need for support, because stuff will work better and integrate better. HTML 5 is supposed to help with this. (Way over my head, what do you think?)

• Cloud data will help the company know who you are and how best to help you. Their CRM systems will be able to pull in other useful information about you

• Internal company systems will route information in smarter ways, helping employees integrate across silos more effectively, and reducing the frustration associated with hand-offs

• Smarter diagnostics will help to identify issues -- not just what element is broken, but who you need help from (Was it the router? Was it the mouse in the wiring? Or do you have a software conflict?)

• Social media tools will be used to proactively advise customers what is going on when there is a larger problem. (Yes, our servers are down, but we expect them to be back up by 5 pm EST)

 

If you are a customer, the support future looks bright. (At least we hope so.)

If you are on the company side of things, you need to be thinking about how to get to this future. (Please, we're begging you, make it better.)

HUGE KUDOS to the Dell team for a) hosting the event and treating us all like rock stars and b) sharing so much of the information and learning. Incredibly cool thing to do!

Winning at Customer Support: Four trends to consider

I was delighted to be Dell's guest at their recent Customer Support Think Tank held in Austin in June 2012. This is the third of four posts about that event.

 

Discussing mobile in a breakout group

 

Four top trends were identified, and each was chewed over by a small group who reported back. Here's what's on the minds of the people there (a smart bunch, the discussions were amazingly rich!)

Gamification

Find a consumer somewhere -- or a business person -- who thinks support issues are fun. Good luck. What is more fun is helping people not need support in the first place. And one way to do that is to make the learning experience more fun, to reward the learning, and make the whole process engaging.

It's not about making support like a game, it's about using the principles game designers use to make things simple, easy to learn, and self-reinforcing.

Metrics

Some of these sounded kind of promising to me, like measuring the overall health of a support community. For example, what percentage of questions go unanswered? What percentage of questions are answered by the community versus the company?

Customer LIfetime Value and ye olde Net Promoter Score came up, of course, but generally people were talking about the need to expand and seek new and better metrics.

Tools + Technology

This group saw massive potential for improved systems, by incorporating more information into CRM (and making that available to support systems), by helping the customer help support, by avoiding many of the things that make us all mental (giving your support number over and over, re-identifying yourself, etc.)

Triage was a concept that made sense too. Deliver support appropriate to the nature/ severity / risk of the problem, and the value of the customer.

What about technology that diagnoses the problem for you -- we have a little of that now, and it's lovely.

Mobile

I was in the mobile group.We talked about how growth in mobile technologies is going to make the support challenge more challenging than ever. We'll be trying to re-boot our houses and cars, not just our computers. Our refrigerator will have ordered too many cans of OJ.

All those smart devices talking to each other will add a lot of complexity.

So we won't necessarily know where the problem lies (as is often the case with business system failures -- it could be the server, the router, the software, or a mouse ate the wires)

What is clear is that people will expect the support interaction to cross devices easily, probably to live in the cloud. We talked about how executives might want the kind of mobile access that consumers have to support -- like texted updates or twitter access.

I also think (and said this in the session) that we are collectively going to get tired of having to download an individual app for everything. We will want help to be much more device-agnostic.

We wondered if things like QR codes could be used to good effect, for example by putting them on the hardware we buy, so we can easily capture and send the information needed.

Gamification group discussion led by Dave Gardner @gardner_dave

I hope this is giving you some food for thought as you consider your own organization and what it should perhaps do in the future.

Next up: what else the future holds for #winningservice

Winning at Customer Support: Internal Challenges

I was delighted to be Dell's guest at their recent Customer Support Think Tank held in Austin in June 2012. This is the second of four posts covering topics discussed. 

 

The video above is me talking about how executives keep in touch with front line support issues.

This video is Heath Johnson at Dell talking about the integration of social media into the support organization.

There are several challenges that organizations face in providing support, effectively captured by the octopus image in Allison Crow's graphic, below -- there are a lot of different people that need to coordinate to make support work well.

I see support as an integral part of what people are now buying. We don't want to change our own oil, for the most part, and everything else under the hood is far too complex to tackle on our own. Many consumer services are like this, and virtually all business services.

So support is central to the purchase decision. Even if we don't always articulate that to ourselves, or have a grasp of what we should pay for it. That is not the theory-in-use in many organizations, however.

I also see support as a major adjunct to sales and vice-versa. If I am buying a second monitor (which I recently did), I also want to know what i need to do to make it work on the existing system. If I call support, they should be able to sell me the upgraded video card.

This is rarely the case with a large business -- my phone company Bell is a good example. The people who make sales calls can't help with anything at all! And the support people can't sell you anything. This craziness came about to make things more efficient, but I'm not sure that's working.

From the viewpoint of the corporates in the room, what helps is feedback from customers. Everyone needs to know how the organization is performing for customers. Whatever your metrics are, share them widely. 

And if it's a horrible place to work, well ... don't expect your support area to be a world-beater.
Your staff are going to support customers about as well as you support them. My professional experience suggests most employees will actually work much harder at customer service and support than the company deserves -- they often have internal barriers to overcome, and no one appreciates their heroics.

One more word about heroics -- if you are keeping a lot of stories about heroic service efforts, and celebrating them with all sorts of awards, it's a good sign that you've made it too difficult somehow. A system built on heroics is not worthy of the name system.

Next up: Four trends to consider in support

Winning at Customer Support: Social Service

I was delighted to be Dell's guest at their recent Customer Support Think Tank held in Austin in June 2012. Let me tell you about it.

There are days it is seriously fun to be me, and this was one of them -- with no responsibilities to plan, facilitate or manage the event, I was free to just engage in some thought-busting conversations with a lot of seriously smart folks in a gorgeous setting. My definition of fun!

Being passionate about customer experience

What the Think Tank was all about

If you've ever bought anything from Dell, you know that their front-end experience is impressive. They want their support efforts to be world beaters, too, and have felt for some time that they are not there yet.

Remember, of course, that Dell is massive, and serving consumers, small businesses, and global behemoths. And within that diversity, there are vast differences in customer knowledge and ability to solve their own problems, and of course their actual situation. Consider a trading floor with a server down or my Mom trying to get wi-fi to work -- vastly different support scenarios.

So their challenges are not simple. Same thing with the challenges faced by some of the other corporate participants at the event, such as Wells Fargo, Threadless, Nationwide Insurance, Intuit Demandforce, Salesforce Radian6, Citrix and Symantec.

Multiple communication media have made this even more challenging. There were four big chunks of the day, beautifully captured by Allison Crow, graphic facilitator, and led by Jackie Huba.

Social Service - how to integrate social media in a scalable way

 

One of the biggest challenges I see to social media use by corporations in a operating setting is that access to social media is often shut down in the corporate network. While this might make some sense for some people, managers are not going to become social-media savvy without using it themselves.

Seriously folks -- you want a social media strategy from people who are only supposed to use it in their free time? And the person they are working for has read a few reports on social media, but doesn't even have a Facebook account. Total fail in my view.

It seems that the reason some customers are turning to places like Twitter is because they are unwilling to navigate the complexities of finding someone to help, whether it's the IVR or the website. Future support needs to be a lot more intuitive.

I think most of the people encountering support have already tried self-help. They have looked at the FAQ, they may have phoned a friend. If their problem was that simple, they wouldn't be calling you, or desperately shouting out on Twitter.

There are a lot of things working today, however, and we talked about a few of these.

Among the things that are working well today, IMHO -- a lot of companies are making good use of video, especially YouTube ("Here's how to install a widget").

Support communities are also working, when they are well managed. It's not fair to expect your customers to do the job for you, though. You need to pay attention to the community and USE the information. Buff up your FAQs as a minimum, improve your installation instrucftions, and fix things that are just not working. Then tell the community, "hey, we listened."

Next post: managing the internal challenges.

 

Full disclosure: yes, Dell did pay for my airfare and put me up in the lovely W Hotel, but my opinions came free of charge.