Customer Crossroads

Software is where cars were 20 years ago

Cars used to break down all the time.  People would call to reschedule meetings because "my car is in the shop".  Cars hardly ever break any more, unless it's something BIG.  Superior quality control was basically forced on the industry by Toyota, who was looking for a differentiating advantage.   

I reminded a buddy of those bad old days when things went wrong with cars, and he said "Oh yeah, back when the car makers didn't care about quality".

Software is pretty much like that still.  Complicated.  Regular, routine tech support is required. Mechanics are on every corner.  It's a lot better than it was in the bad old days of DOS, but we're still  a long way from the day when our moms will never need to call to ask what to do now.   

While Microsoft has brought tremendous benefits to users over the years, there is also relatively little pressure on them from external competitors.  So here's to Firefox and Linux and the other David's out there hurling pebbles at Goliath.   We all benefit.

Crossing the Chasm - mystified by RSS

Some of my friends think I'm an early adopter of technology.  Not really.  Not by the standards of Geoffrey Moore, anyway, author of Crossing the Chasm. (Wikipedia brief summary)

I do have this blog, but so do 8 million or so other people.   

I was thinking about this as I wondered again how to get organized around RSS.

Missed Sales Opportunities: Quickbooks and the cliff

The cliff is what customers are staring at when they are on your web site, motivated to buy, ready to buy, but you don't give them any kind of "buy now" or "next step" button or link.  Here's an example of exactly what I'm talking about.

Building a Customer Advisory Panel

In the last couple of days I've been getting great updates about customer research methodology.  I heard Mike Rodenburgh, SVP of Partnerships & VAR's at Vision Critical talk at AIMS about new tech tools that simplify running customer panels online. 

Customer panels in the marketing research context are all about having a group of people who agree in advance to answer questions about specific topics.  They have been pre-screened so they represent a known sample based on demographic,  geographic and other dimensions.   Mike's amazing example was of a baby food panel with many thousands of participants, that fielded a total of 175 studies in the course of a year.  (Just in case you were wondering, these are people who buy baby food for their young children. And everyone didn't complete ALL the surveys.)

I'm actually more interested in the concept of smaller panels, that would look and feel more like an advisory board for one organization.  Well, I attended an online webinar about those this week as well.

PC Financial & CIBC Service Recovery Opp

The Globe and Mail reported a story January 27 (CIBC glitch results in tax mix-up) about another "glitch" at CIBC resulting in the feds erroneously being notified that 3000 customers cashed in their RSPs.  You would have thought they were double-checking everything after the fax fiasco.  Pretty soon people will be attaching negative adjectives like "error prone", and that can't be good.

A technological blunder at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce resulted in headaches for more than 3,000 of its President's Choice Financial Customers, after the bank erroneously sent information to the federal government suggesting they had cashed out part of their retirement savings plans. The mix-up prompted the Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency to begin sending out tax reassessment notices to these customers in the mail. CIBC, which was recently engulfed in a fax snafu involving confidential client information, apologized for what a spokesman described as an "unfortunate incident," and said the problem is being fixed. The federal tax authorities will begin contacting each of these 3,061 PC Financial clients today, and hopes to resolve the issue by the end of next week. CIBC said the error occurred when it switched from a paper-based information delivery system to an automated process.

However, what counts in customer experience is not the glitch, it's the recovery. 

Vioxx vs Tylenol

Brilliant direct mail piece arrived at my home yesterday from some smart marketers looking to capitalize on a market opportunity created by the recent Vioxx studies. 

• Told me about an arthritis remedy that has few side effects or drug interactions
• Showed me the logo of The Arthritis Society, who has commended (note the choice of word there) their easy-to-open cap
• Provided me a meaningful coupon to try the product:  $5.00 off (that's practically free)

Of course this was the clever people at Tylenol, who know how to act on a market opportunity when they see it.

When signage goes bad

Downtown to be part of a breakfast panel discussion at AIMS yesterday, one of the snowiest days of the year.  Good thing I left early -- the roads were empty, but I got lost in the underground parkade of a major office building. 

I had a heavy box of handouts to carry, and knew I wanted to be at the East end of the lot ... but my plan quickly became stalled by the ridiculous signage.   Arrows were directing me to letters of the alphabet, like "J" and "K", instead of something useful, like "East Tower".  Naturally, I emerged at the wrong end, and had to haul my stuff the better part of a city block.

Okay, what the heck does this have to do with customer experience, you may ask?  Well, it's all about directional signage.

Online qualitative grows up

Chat didn't work that well for doing online focus groups.  Fortunately, that wasn't the end of online qualitative.  The Bulletin Board Focus Group has grown up, and is truly a viable option now.  It offers some unique advantages over face-to-face, and the barriers to key insights aren't as big as you might expect.

I set up a demo site for clients a few months ago, with the help of a friendly vendor, and promised them a report if they tried out the demo.  Let's just say that few of them were brave enough to post anything ... or more likely, my topic wasn't really very engaging, i.e. what do you think about this technology?

So I had to wait until I had a real project finished to produce some insights into this methodology. 

Let me tell you a bit about the project.  The project was a coast-to-coast study of financial planners.  So they are entrepreneurial, independent, well read and opinionated, and busy, busy, busy.  We wondered how they would react to the online concept.

To ensure we got the insights needed, we did half the project using telephone interviews, and half the project using bulletin board groups.  I found results were quite comparable overall, but the two techniques together made a great combination. 

Here's what we learned about using a BBFG for a group discussion:

What's a BBFG?

It's not online chat, and it's not instant messaging...

Here's a quick overview of what a Bulletin Board Focus Group is, and links to a couple of the better known facilities that are available for rent on a subscription basis. 

Blink Reaction

Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink , is a good read -- it reads like a story, and has lots of good vignettes in it.  Gladwell is a popularizer, which is not a bad thing to be, and he does it well.  He scans widely for information, and assembles it in a way that makes it accessible and memorable.  And even if you are pretty well read in the area of psychology, you're likely to pick up some new ideas. 

Mr. Gladwell doesn't really say a lot about what to do with the insights he has gathered.  Brace yourselves for lots of misinterpretations and strange justifications based on this book.

There are lessons and implications to be drawn from Blink for the customer experience manager -- people like us.

Selling to small enterprise reprise

I had coffee this morning with Waheeda, a bright lady who organizes the global branding of a large bank's Internet presence.   I was telling her about the sales calls mentioned in my earlier post about selling to small enterprises and WIFM.  Waheeda thinks the sales people are trying to be customer focused, and want to respond to my needs, whatever they may be.  She's right -- that's exactly what they are doing. 

Selling to Small Business: The WIFM Rule or What You Need to Know Before You Pick up the Phone

My buddy Nick tells me I really should be using Firefox to browse instead of IE.  However, like many small business owners, I place a massive premium on my time, and learning any new software is always a giant time-suck.  (You should have been around the week I installed the last big Windows update.) 

Just due to client needs and projects, I seem to wind up learning one or two new applications a year anyway and there needs to be a compelling reason to add another one. 

This point was nicely documented by Jay Zaltzman, also a qualitative researcher, in his article "Straight Talk About the Small-Business Market", in QRCA Views (Winter 2005):

Metaphors for Organization #1

Check out this nifty little bit of flash art called ZoomQuilt.  It's much better if you load the flash version. 

What we have here is a collaborative creation, where there is an organizing principle (the red ribbon and some rules about zooming in and out), but each artist has built unique parts of the whole.  I imagine that no one got into micro-managing the placement of doors on buildings, or the colors of the flying lizards, which is the sort of thing people like to do in corporate life. (Haven't we all been guilty at some point?)

However, there is also clearly a coordinator of the project, an artistic vision that links the whole, and other features of organization.  I imagine this individual said something like "the viewer should experience worlds inside worlds, in a kind of moebius loop, following the red ribbon.  Beyond that, you can do anything you want.  Just get it in by Friday". 

Role clarity, context, objectives -- all good things to have.

Marriott does it again!

Looks like good organizations are just good all over, not in isolated places. I sent my Marriott service-recovery story to my friend Bernie, who had recommended them to me in the first place. His take:

WOW! I am impressed! That is a GREAT story and I hadn't heard it before. I think that Marriott is wonderful and this simply proves it. Just going on all my memories of terrible service and inconsiderate, incompetent treatment at other hotel chains, Marriott nearly always come through, but this tops them all. You got the royal treatment.

Since I was busy avoiding real work this morning, I located a Marriott spokesperson and sent them the link. And what a delightful response I got back from them!

Golden Parachutes and Elliot Jaques

I have a love-hate relationship with Elliot Jaques -- well not him, really (an older fellow when he died in 2003, and reputed to be fairly crotchety) -- more like some of his ideas.  The problem is, some of his ideas tend to stick in your head, like them or not, like red wine stains on a white tablecloth.

One of his ideas that I kind of liked, for it's sheer simplicity and apparent rationality, is his notion of fair pay. And it was Franklin D Raines, recently dismissed from Fannie Mae, who received a compensation package worth approximately $140 Million for his six years of service (as reported by BusinessWeek, January 10), that got me thinking about fair pay.

RH Phillips, Corks and Change Management with Customers

I bought my first screw-top wine in years from RH Phillips, and there was a cork dangling from the neck of the bottle.  It got me thinking about change management challenges when the people whose ideas or attitudes you want to change aren't part of your organization. 

If ever there was a tangible product with loads of intangibles, it has to be wine.  No two batches totally the same, you can't even sniff the product before you buy it, standards of quality are highly subjective,  and it has it's own tasting lingo that separates the literati from the rest of us.

I remember a friend saying to me at university, "If it's worth drinking, it's worth corking".  (We stopped dating not long after this moment.)  So the first distinction you learned in the world-o-wine was this most basic one, cork vs screw-top.   But cork is responsible for up to 10% of poor quality wine from "tainted" or "corked" wine, and artificial cork has not proven to be a totally satisfactory replacement.  So large parts of the wine industry are moving to screw tops.

Yes, this is a change management story.  Because replacing a cork with a screw-top isn't clearly an improvement in the minds of many consumers.

Ignore This

I had to post this link to get statistics tracking in Feedster.  There's got to be an easier way, surely.  I feel like I'm washing my frillies in public, but honestly, these are the instructions on the Feedster site.  (Well - almost.  I modified the link wording a  tiny bit form their recommended wording) .

Useless link I had to post to get my feed claimed

The rise of the intrablog -- is this the new collaboration software?

An explosion in new communications technologies continues to challenge organizational structures and norms:  the intrablog is the latest. 

Amazing Handoff and Service Recovery at Marriott

Your customers only find out how good you are when things go wrong.  This has been shown many times in research -- a customer who has had a problem fixed WELL will likely be more loyal than one who never had a problem. 

My buddy Bernie swears Marriott are the best for business travel.  I have stayed in them once or twice, not particularly memorable.  But after hearing Bernie's reco, I booked Marriott in Las Vegas for a recent conference.  Here's the story of their amazing service recovery and incredible flawless handoff: