Customer Experience « The Mountaintop

February 16, 2010

The Relationship Revolution – Online Human Behavior Series – Part 2 of 3

Filed under: Customer Experience,Customer Loyalty,Human Behavior,Social Media — Jeff @ 12:35 pm

I have been thinking for a long time that we have missed something. I feel like we are looking at the tail end of the horse as its walking into the distance. Here’s what is bothering me.

As human beings our strongest motivator in life is to build relationships that help us achieve our goals – personal, political and business included. No king ever gained power without the help of an army or political allies, no president ever took office without the help of millions of voters and no one ever married without first building a relationship with their betrothed; unless you include arranged marriages and even those allow the bride and groom to get to know each other. All this to say that relationships are very, very important to us. Two points really hit me:

This transcends our personal and business relationships to affect brands as well and the people that represent those brands.
Communication is the most important ingredient in every relationship – it is the enabler and without it relationships wither and die on the vine like fruit left to rot.

Sacrifice Communication in the Interest of Efficiency and Profit

Here is where I start to see some problems… In the mid to late 90s companies started changing the way they communicated with their customers. Companies began to think about how to improve efficiency (read: cut costs/head count) of communication between them and their customers introducing some wonderful web technology (such as e-commerce, online accounts, etc) and complex phone systems able to handle almost any customer issue. These system improvements had some wonderful upside to help manage customers but what was the cost? I am a firm believer in balance and that in this case the negatives of efficiency improvements were gradual, unseen and severe.

What Exactly did We Sacrifice?

Let’s start with relationships. When we eliminated the people connection from one end of the relationship, we eliminated communication. Simple. Now we can reach people (eventually) but companies have made it difficult, often complex to navigate these (both web and phone alike). This process increases frustration in just about everyone using these systems and frustration leads to? An indifferent or negative experience.

The other big one we sacrifice when we replace people with technology is loyalty. Think about it. Who are you most loyal to and why? What is the relationship you have with that brand that makes you so loyal? It’s a powerful connection of some kind that is based on a relationship.Now, granted this is a sliding scale depending on the industry with service, financial and retail industries ranking high in human connection and consumer packaged goods ranking lower.

Lastly, we may be sacrificing brand positioning. Why’s that? Well, if we leave it to customers to shop online without human intervention potential (like live help chat), we risk comparison based on the lowest competitive facts – price and features. When it reaches that level, we lose a lot of the hard work that marketing has done and combined with the above, we risk losing the loyalty of our current customers and minimize loyalty we can build in new customers.

In the end it is the relationships we have with companies that determine loyalty. These are built on trust and comfort with the people we deal with in B-to-B and B-to-C models equally. It is all about the answering the question: Do i feel good about doing business with this person?

The Cough

So what was a consumer to do? It was difficult to connect with anybody in a company, and even discouraged at times. Where do we go for our relationships? Well, let’s start with places like Yahoo groups and push onto heirs like MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube and Twitter. This is where consumers found the relationships where they could talk about the brands they liked, didn’t like and everything in between. Was it born solely of consumer frustration at not being able to develop relationships with companies? Certainly that wasn’t the only contributor, as Social Media channels provide all sorts of personal gratification, but it was a key contributor. Behind all of this is the evolving human relationship with companies. Gone are the days of keeping the customer in the dark and isolated; now the tables have turned.

Where is the Consumer (and B-to-B) Relationship Going?

Well, its very liquid and companies need to be looking forward instead of trying to catch up with today which could also be yesterday by now. Were I leading a large enterprise I would be investing heavily in ways (both new and old) to connect my employees with my customers to do two things:

Enable ease of access to my products and services, including fast and friendly resolution of customer issues. This includes looking at mobile-enabled service, stream lining of customer engagement processes, and greater empowerment of front line staff to deal with critical issues. In fact, front line employees should be rewarded based on this.
Build relationships with customers at the ground level. It is so critical to build personal relationships that can withstand the corporate bullshit that most customers have to deal with. Everyone needs a go-to person; someone who is their advocate with that brand. Is it so hard? Not really.

How Does Social Media Fit In?

Well, most consumers are now fairly comfortable with developing relationships online and have been doing so for a long time. Social Media provides a brilliant foundation for developing “one-to-one” or “one-to-many” relationships with customers. But here is the catch, I don’t think that Twitter or FaceBook are good alternatives. The best solution is something that is semi-private and based on your brand. A place where a customer can invite anyone they want to be a part of the community. And it should be focused on service. In an ideal world, the private environment would enable the customer to pass back and forth between the public (Twitter, YouTube, and FaceBook) and private branded communities.

Hell, I can even see a future where the internal employee social environment of a company is integrated closely with the customer environment. This is a shift that is on the way as we look at new engagement models like C-to-B and C-to-C.

The Secret to Mastering Customer Relationships via Social Media

It is one as old as human civilization; use it to build great relationships. But Social Media needs an unconventional approach – not the tired old ways of the Advertising and Communications industries. This a channel that is about being a part of the whole, not commanding an empire. It is about discussion and being part of ideas, not preaching rhetoric to the masses. It is about an evening of the playing field where a single consumer wields a voice as great as yours; sometimes greater.

My current projects are all about helping my clients be part of developing community around some great ideas. They are enablers and contributors, taking no glory and appreciating everyone equally. Is it a formula for success? Too early to tell. But it is heads and tails better than the current thinking of most companies. We believe it will lead to the brand being connected to some great and noble ideas and that when customers think of this idea, our work comes top of mind, not through us, but through the community.

The Diminishing Returns of CRM

The CRM industry is completely infatuated with data that looks at understanding the patterns of customer behavior for the dual purpose of expanding share of wallet and improving loyalty. These are selfish goals and customer know it. CRM needs to change direction to focus on customer relationships as defined by the customer. A probable future is a convergence of Social Media, CRM and front line service delivery into one super service channel. Now that’s a sexy future to me as a customer.

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February 11, 2010

We are all Connected – The Great Ecosystem

Filed under: Customer Experience,Human Behavior,Social Experience Design,Social Media — Jeff @ 3:27 pm

I have just started reading a book that has me tremendously excited. The book is Connected and is a visionary achievement in explaining how we are all connected emotionally to each other and the complex cause-affect relationships between people in social networks. In essence the book explains how emotions are contagious and that emotions of people we don’t even know are affecting us; a friend of a friend for example.

So far, it is a fascinating exploration of the human experience from such a fresh perspective.

Super Organisms or Ecosystems

One interesting analogy they use is that social networks are much like super organisms with each individual affecting the whole while being affected by all of the other “parts” or individuals. I think that the analogy of an ecosystem works better for my work on Social Media networks rather than the thought of one organism, albeit super. When you shift perspectives to look at Social Media environments to that of, say Charles Darwin, you begin to see the intricate patterns of an ecosystem and all of the species struggling to exist; a species could be anything from a person, group of people, a corporation or even an idea. All of these species are vying for dominance and trying to increase their numbers (read followers, fans or members). In the end, i think it’s a case of “po-tay-to” versus “po-tah-to”.

How Does this Impact the Social or Customer Experience?

Think about it. If one person has a positive experience or negative experience with your brand or even an indifferent experience, it can affect a broad spectrum of people you don’t even know about. The emotions you create in the customer are contagious and will directly and indirectly affect your brand and the perception of your brand in the social networks they inhabit. The danger is the subtlety of this kind of contagion; it works on the subconscious level for the most part. A silent agent of change if you will.

Where to next?

Is this a stepping stone or high level validation for group consciousness? Perhaps not but it makes you wonder if there is much more to be unearthed about how we are connected in ways that cannot be seen or heard. It certainly gives credibility to the notion of an unconscious group empathy buried just under our conscious perceptions but affecting us in real ways. I know what you’re feeling, i feel it to – it has suddenly become even more important to focus on being a positive emotional force with your customers. Telcos beware!

Net Promoter Scores are Passe; Try Net Feeling Scores on for Size!

The big measure of customer experience could switch from ‘Would you tell your friends about us” to “How can we make you feel fantastic” knowing that positive emotional virus will spread to everyone they are connected to in their social networks, both physical and digital. I never really liked net promoter scoring anyways, always too obvious. I mean how can you quantify emotions?? I always felt the answers for net promoter, much like boxing matches, were fixed from the beginning.

On the Book and the Authors

If you are in the communications or marketing business, this book is definitely worth the time. Even if you retain just a bit, the way you perceive customer experience or Social Media could shift dramatically. And it should.

The author, Dr. Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD is a highly accomplished Harvard Sociology Professor and Doctor who was recently named to the Times 100 most influential people. Co-author is James Fowler PhD noted Social scientist also at Harvard. You can follow them on Twitter here.

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February 9, 2010

People Behaving Badly- Online Human Behavior 101 Series – Part 1 of 3

Filed under: Customer Loyalty,Human Behavior,Social Experience Design,Social Media — Jeff @ 11:28 pm

I figured I would start out looking into the basics of human behavior online as it forms the basis of understanding for all of the other areas (social experience, customer experience, and demand gen).

The big question is: Do people act differently online than they do in real life?

The answer is yes. Sometimes dramatically different. But why?

The 3 A’s

Since the net began it has offered all people the same thing without prejudice. That thing is Access. Access to content, access to applications (of all varieties) and access to people (like minded or otherwise). Access has broken all of the boundaries people, society and governments have understood for hundreds of years. With it came all sorts of behavior new behavior and not many rules to manage conduct or behavior.

The second A is Acceptance. People could easily find like-minded individuals and whole groups who shared their interests no mater how normal, bizarre, and immoral those interests are. Social sites like FaceBook and Twitter by natural design encourage and support this characteristic. If you love nude marathons, there is a group for that. If you are a cross-eyed knitter, there is probably a group for that too. Acceptance is the glue in social networks and real life relationships alike.

The last, and probably most contentious characteristic is Anonymity. Anonymity allows anyone to do or say something without accountability. And when we remove accountability, we get radical changes in behavior. Suddenly without the typical boundaries we have in the real world where accountability is all around us and governing our behavior, we have the capability to be completely anonymous. And with anonymity, we are also stripped of many emotions that keep us from behaving badly; fear and shame to name just a few of the more powerful ones.

So where is the point at which people can potentially take a turn for the worse? It’s all about situation and the people involved in that situation at that specific time.

The Power of the Mob

I recently read a story of a speaker who took the stage at Web 2.0 Expo 2009. You can read the full story here, but it is shining example of how easily a mob forms out of what one can only assume to be decent people any other time. The problem came from a Twitter back channel and a rough start to a speaking engagement. This was no novice speaker either as she is a woman of wonderful talent and excellent insight; a great speaker by all accounts. But here we have a situation where a speaker stumbles and shows weakness. With the Twitter back channel going on behind her, the crowd begins to comment on her performance and it quickly spirals out of control right down to sexual remarks. Remember, this is a business conference filled with professionals…

But what would have happened had all of these people in the crowd used their real names and company information as part of their Twitter IDs for this conference? It certainly would have changed the situation because it would have potentially allowed for accountability for socially unacceptable behavior. Maybe this is where we have to go in the future? But that kind of control is very uncomfortable for anyone.

The Plight of the Corporation

Now enter the corporation, a powerful entity in the real world and masters of their domains. But online, they do not get the benefit of anonymity and are accountable for everything they do or say. This is the conundrum all companies face. How can we deal with people online who can easily hide behind a veil of anonymity while we have to expose ourselves completely.
In Social Media channels in particular where the conversation is happening about your company in hundreds of different conversations, most of them without you knowing, you are constantly exposing your brand to risk. So how do we deal with this imbalance? We can’t force people to be accountable.

Think Strategically

A solid strategy that encompasses rules of engagement for employees goes a long way. Don’t just send them in willy-nilly. Arm them with a plan and the tools to make it work. This includes an understanding of the environment you are getting into, how to resolve almost any problem (or escalate it quickly to someone who can), how to keep people engaged, and most importantly how to listen and appreciate what someone is saying. Listening to and appreciating people will help to keep behavior civil almost every time.

Know Your Audience

A little knowledge goes a long way. Research should always be the basis for any communications program, including Social Media. Next to this, understand why they are in this Social community and why/how they would interact with your brand. Again many times bad behavior is because of negative situations and negative situations arise when we lose sight of customer need in some way.

Find out who they respect or trust and why.
Find out who the leaders are and what their values are.
Understand that people are in Social Media environments to build relationships with like-minded people. If you are not there to build relationships, then why are you there?

Be Careful What You Ask For

If you go into Social Media channels asking for feedback expect you will get it. In fact, expect you will get it regardless of whether you ask for it or not. The last thing you want to try and do is control what people are saying by suppression of opinion (deleting posts, banning members, etc.). Just take Honda’s recent experience with the introduction of the CrossTour as an example of what happens when you ask for feedback and then start deleting all the negative comments. You can still see some of the comments here, but they deleted most of them, much to the joy of the blogoshpere who took that naughty behavior and told the world.

If you want to create a bad situation, start suppressing people’s opinions. It works every time.

Manage the Situations

The most important thing we can do is always been on the lookout for potentially harmful situations. What do these look like? Well, here’s where you need a practiced eye/ear to be involved in your Social Media program. Someone capable of spotting trouble before it happens and being able to defuse almost any situation by either dealing with it effectively or taking it offline and dealing with it effectively. The key is to do it swiftly and fairly; not heavy handed. If you deal with people harshly or unfairly you stand a very high chance of fanning the flames even higher.

Behavior can be Influenced

In the end, we can influence behavior once we understand what drives it. This is a learned experience and one that each company is going to go through as they explore Social Media channels. As each situation arises, always remember that the proper approach will win you relationships, many times create champions and the respect of many, many people. If you can always do the right thing for your customer, you stand a good chance of avoiding the mob and building a great and vibrant community around your brand.

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February 8, 2010

Setting Expectations – The inaugural first post

Filed under: Customer Experience,Demand Generation,Editorial Schedule,Overview,Social Experience Design,Social Media — Jeff @ 9:25 am

I must admit I dithered just a bit about what to put in my first post. After some thought and discussion with some colleagues, I settled on something simple – set some expectations by creating common understanding. If you are going to invest your time coming here, I want you to have some type of expectation for what you will receive.

What is the Mountain Top?

Think perspective. Depending on where you were in relation to the mountain, it looks and feels dramatically different. If you are at the top, you feel triumphant and exhilarated. If you are clinging to the side you feel determined and cautious. If you are looking at from the base you feel overwhelmed and in awe. Now change from a person to a bird or animal and the perspective changes yet again as do the feelings.
Perspective is the combination of three things:

Situation (what has brought me here)
Vantage point (who and where am i)
Experience (how have my experiences and the experiences of others affected my beliefs)

Take a simple garbage dumpster. A wealthy person looks at is as a disgusting place meant for trash. A homeless person looks at it as shelter from the elements and a source of food. That is the power of being able to understand and change perspective.

What The Mountain Top will deliver is a unique perspective on some very specific areas of online marketing and communications:

Social Media: A term I personally dislike and feel it misrepresents what we are looking for which is to “be social” with our customers. I much prefer Social Experience Design.
Demand Generation: The art of creating demand in customer’s minds for your products, services, and solutions.
Customer Experience Design: The foundation stones of any marketing and communication program. We will explore the soft, dark underbelly of emotional experience design and the human behavior that drives it.

What is Social (Media) Experience Design?

Lets establish a common understanding of the terminology.

Social Media: It is a distribution channel for User Generated Content (UGC). That’s it. Most marketers only focus on Twitter, FaceBook and You Tube, but it includes all sorts of various specialty channels, the blogoshpere, and customer communities. Social Media is not new; it has been around since the web began and has always been social. Marketers just took notice because of the sheer number of consumers on the top channels. These top channels are consumer wastelands and at best indifferent to most companies and at worst hostile.
Social Media Experts: It is truly frightening to witness what passes for an expert these days. 2000 followers on Twitter does not a Social Media Expert make. We will look at what core skills an “expert” needs and how to spot a gong show before it happens. If the advice has been to use Social Media channels as just another PR outlet, then you should hear the banging of gongs in the background.
Social Experience Design: Is the art of creating a positive experience in social channels and the art of creating favorable social environments. It combines a deep understanding of the environment and the customers. It is also about understanding your role as a company in social media environments – that role is the enabler. We will dig deep into human behavior, identify best practices, and examine all sorts of current examples.
Favorable Social Environments: Think of these as customer communities, but also places where your brand can flourish rather than struggle to survive. How do you identify external communities and how do you design private ones.
Social Experience Strategy: A Social Media strategy is impotent without understanding audience need and the experience you need to create in order to meet that need. How are you going to anchor your appraoch to what the customer holds dear? Who do they trust already? How can our current customers become brand champions for us? Is there such a thing as targeted social (media) experience?
Strategic Rationale: I seriously question why many companies even get involved in Social Media. Many times, the compelling reason has been “everyone is doing it, so I don’t want to be left behind”. We are going to look at who is best positioned to be “social” and which companies should save their time, money and brands. What you should really be asking is how can I develop better relationships with my customers?

The end result of Social Experience Design is an evolved, very different and very personal relationship with potential and current customers. It is full of risk because it exposes us to the unknown in an environment we cannot control. Those who master this environment stand to gain significant advantage over their competitors. Those who go in without a sound, well researched strategy introduce high risk to their brands.

What is Customer Experience Design?

While the field is fairly mature, I tend to take a different approach to CE than most. It is based on several fundamental approaches to people, even in a B-to-B model.

Emotional Experience: As companies, we have analyzed the bejesus out of our customers spending habits, demographics, psychographics, etc… We understand the rational mind of the customer. The problem is that the customer, often times, is not rational at all (at least to us). We will focus on the dark half of customer experience design, that being the emotional experience. The emotional experience is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. It is the one place, that if we understand, we can make tremendous progress to acquiring and keeping customers. It is the feeling we all have that answers the question “do i feel good doing business with this person?”
Human Behavior: Behind our emotional experience is the behavior that drives us. Why do we do the things we do? How can different situations or experiences influence action? Can we create those specific situations or experiences by better understanding primal drivers and embedded human perceptions? We will explore all sorts of edgy ideas on human behavior and the art of influence.
Customer Centric: This is based on 3 areas of commitment.

Customer Enablement: Focus on clearing obstacles from the customer relationship, enabling ease of access to knowledge, understanding and service. Share power with the customer.
Customer Advocacy: Deep understanding of the customer and the customer’s customers. Investing in the relationship. Being there through thick and thin. Putting their needs ahead of our own by paying it forward.
Customer Relevancy: Ensuring everything is relevant to the customer and their needs; that value is delivered at every step.

Balance: Everything is about balance. Everything. We will look at how to identify what a balanced customer experience is and how we can achieve it. This includes looking at Employee Experience Design (how can we deliver a positive customer experience with disenfranchised employees?)

The Mountain Top will explore new perspectives and challenge norms around customer experience design. We will look at current examples and identify emerging best practices to dramatically improve the customer (emotional) experience.

What is Demand Generation?

In my experience, this is a practice area that many confuse with lead generation; the two are very different. A lead is something any chuckle-head can get because usually the definition is so broad. “They downloaded a whitepaper, therefore they are a lead!” or “we had 100 people register for this event!”. These are not leads, but they are often precursors to leads or prospects depending where that individual is in their decision-making process.

I have always defined a lead as: An expression of interest to do business with you from someone who is not currently a customer.

What does it mean to have demand?

This is where we start. Demand is simply that; when a person thinks of a business problem or a consumer thinks of fulfilling some kind of need, they seek the solution that is top of mind and has the most positive experiences attached to it. It is about positioning within the minds of specific targeted customer groups. It is about creating groundswell.

How do we generate demand?

Demand generation is a very strategic process. It all starts with knowing your customers (emotional/psychological needs, preferences, and decision making processes being the most important). Contrary to many people’s opinions, I believe this is always an integrated approach combining marketing tactics (both direct and indirect) that have been identified through research as being high potential.

There are a couple factors to my approach that stand out as different and perhaps can help you identify ways to improve your demand generation programs.

Behavioral Profiling. We use this as the basis of everything we do. It gives deep understanding of customer language, behavior and emotional patterns above and beyond what standard segmentation research can provide. It takes a little digging to find a company that can do this, but they are out there.
Customer Experience Design. You are designing a customer experience, not a demand generation campaign. If you change your thinking to this way, the results can be dramatically different.
Think baby steps not giant leaps. I have always carefully managed expectations around Demand Generation to focus on the incremental steps to building a relationship with a net new prospect rather than getting a sale. A sale is the result of the process of building rapport, comfort, and trust with a person and is the essence of long term, profitable customer relationships. If we focus on a sale, we are often disappointed. A sale is timing. Demand is being top of mind when the timing is right.
Continual engagement. I have seen so many demand generation programs planned without any consideration to ongoing engagement once the “official” campaign has ended. This goes back to timing and that often the timing just isn’t right for the majority of people we connect with, but they still express high interest in our brand. Continual engagement is how we effectively and efficiently continue to foster a positive relationship that will eventually lead to sales. This is a process best addresses by web and social media.
Don’t neglect the website. Most demand generation focuses on getting people to the website, 800 number or retail location. But that is only half the battle, in fact many people who are potential customers already know about you. In my experience embedding a custom new customer engagement process in the corporate website is fundamental to fulfillment. To use a simple metaphor, it is the difference between telling a person to climb a mountain and giving them a sherpa to help them along the way.

These are the kinds of topics I am going to cover off as well as looking at practical applications of these elements in demand generation, case studies, and insights into best practices you can easily integrate into your demand generation programs. These are principles that equally apply to B-to-B and B-to-C models.

Strategic Crossovers

Lastly, we are going to look often at how each of these areas supports and crosses over into the other. For example, I firmly believe that customer experience design is the basis for every success in marketing including social media and demand generation. I also believe you can integrate Social Media into Demand Generation programs very effectively to close the loop between the two and justify entry into Social Media.

It’s all about you.

This blog is about paying it forward and sharing all of the knowledge and experiences I have gained. I won’t be able to cover everything myself and often, I will bring experts in specific fields into The Mountain Top to delve deeper into these subjects.

Many times you will have questions or issues that I haven’t covered, I want you to feel comfortable asking questions via comments or this question form. I will respond on the blog within several days to answer your questions as best I can.

I am not promising enlightenment, but hopefully we can travel that path together and uncover the answers for the betterment of all.

Cheers!

Jeff – Sensei