The Quisenblog

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: Seven ways to doom a Social Media program.
Tuesday: Co-Creating with Social Media.
Wednesday: Building Brand Evangelism through Social Media.
Thursday: Social Media and Reputation Management.
Friday: Now that you’ve engaged, it’s time to re-engage.

(This is the 21st in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

Remember when your grade school principal used to threaten you with the idea that your transgressions would go on your “permanent record?” As school kids, we all envisioned this “permanent record” as a granite slab that duly recorded every spit wad, hair pull and rubber band gun for all mankind to see.

Thanks to the Internet, there is another form of a “permanent record” that we have to come to grips with. Once something is said online or some news article or blog post goes out, it’s being indexed by the major search engines. And when you Google or otherwise search for a company, what you get is a long list of relevant postings regarding that company or individual.

The much-dreaded permanent record.

One of the core tenets of Social Media is that the user is in control of the communication. The organization has a voice, but it is only one of many. Communities are about the members, not about the organization.

Too often, companies don’t like to even admit that negative things are being said about their brand. Their attitude seems to be, “If I ignore it, maybe everybody else will, too.” The problem with that kind of thinking is that customers today have a lot of ways they can express their displeasure.

And while you can’t control what people are saying about you, you can organize that speech by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word.

So when some dissatisfied customer or vitriolic ranter decides to go off on your organization or its products, what do you do? First off, accept that negative things are going to be said about you online…if not in the forum you set up and enable, then somewhere else just out of your sight. The web allows for a “comfortable anonymity” of its users, which makes them less inhibited, in both a good and bad way. You think less about moderating your comments when you’re sitting behind a computer screen hiding behind an email address, avatar or IP address.

Welcome to the art of Reputation Management.

The key to Reputation Management is to accept that knowledge is power. If you don’t know what is being said, you won’t be able to address it. Make it a best practice to survey major social networks and blogs for comments about your company, products or competitors. Free tools such as Google Blog Search or icerocket.com can help you get started. Here is a sample search results page for a marketer who gets lots of attention from bloggers, both good and bad—Walmart.

Negative commenters can be broken down into a few groups. The first (and the one that scares marketers the most) can be referred to as “trolls.” These are contributors who have a chip on their shoulder and who just want to complain, if not about you then something else. Most of the time, their complaints are baseless and often over the line (as an example, check out the comments on YouTube videos). Generally, it is best to just ignore this group, as their comments will be seen for what they are.

The second kind of negative comment generally comes from people who have an ax to grind against your company. They had a negative encounter with you at some point in the recent (or distant) past, and just aren’t willing to let it go. Acknowledging that you “hear” these folks will generally appease them to the point where they back off.

The third group of complainers can be very valuable to listen to. These are folks who have encountered some sort of legitimate problem or hiccup with you and are looking for a solution. These are customers who are “winnable,” and by listening to them and facilitating some sort of solution, you can often turn these negative customers into satisfied customers and in some cases into brand evangelists.

The advantage of knowing what’s being said about you, good and bad, is that it gives you an opportunity to respond immediately. And by “respond,” we’re not talking about arguing, justifying or trying to bribe commentators into pacification. It is more of an acknowledgment that you’ve heard the person, and you are open to helping them work through their issues.

You have a lot invested in your good name. It’s worth taking a little pro-action to protect it online.

If you’ve enjoyed the series so far, and are interested in what’s going on here at QMD/IQ, I invite you to visit our Facebook page and become a fan, or just comment on what you see. It’s all good.

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Mickey Social Media audience engagement, community, customer service, online reputation, permanent record, Qwest Communications, user control

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: Using Social Media to address your pain points.
Tuesday: Use Social Media to give your customers a seat at the table.
Wednesday: Picking a face for the organization.
Thursday: Picking a face, part 2.
Friday: Give away your expertise.

(This is the thirteenth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

Studies show the biggest sources of customer dissatisfaction are unmet needs and expectations (59%), product/service usability and complexity complaints (43%), billing errors (40%), and lack of quality or relevancy of service/product offerings (32%). Often times, when a customer experiences some sort of hiccup with a product/service/customer service, or has a question that isn’t readily answered, she is a bit annoyed. Over time, that “annoyance” can grow to become the feeling that “it’s obvious the company just doesn’t care about me.”

Social Media gives you the opportunity to intervene during customer pain points to provide solutions or someone who will listen to customers or others who have questions.

With upwards of 70% of customers considering themselves “web first,” it goes to reason that the web (or at least cyberspace) is the first place they would hope to resolve customer service concerns. It’s a lot easier to log on to Facebook or Live Chat with a customer service rep than it is to dial an 800-number, get stuck in a phone tree and hope you eventually get someone on the line who can help you.

Comcast, JetBlue, Odwalla and Starbucks are some of the companies who are actively using social media for customer service. Comcast, for example, monitors Twitter, blogs and social sites to find messages from customers who have complaints about Comcast service, customer service issues, missed appointments, etc., and then they respond to them via Twitter in hopes of resolving as many issues as possible. Comcast’s Twitter customer service rep is a guy named Frank Eliasson, and his Twitter feed is called Comcast Cares. You can see some of his direct responses to customers here:

Just having Frank tweeting with customers in need has helped increase Comcast’s customer satisfaction index tremendously (every time Frank is able to help someone, he helps create a positive story for Comcast. And this story gets passed along). One of the qualities of Comcast Cares that makes it so effective is its real time component. When you are having issues hooking your DVR up, you want help right now. Not three hours or a day from now. Frank’s able to get back to most people within 10 minutes.

Listening to customers and followers is great. But key is understanding what you’re hearing. The content of responses will give you clues as to where your organization excels and where it falls short in the eyes of your customers. If 70% of complaints are based around price, consider pricing or tier alternatives (or ways you can add value or help customers realize more value). If they are around ease-of-use issues, consider producing a micro site with a live chat function that can help customers at critical phases.

Because Social Media allows such wonderful opportunities to hear what customers are saying, it can provide a powerful platform for resolving customer service issues in real time.

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Mickey Social Media Comcast Cares, customer service, real-time responses, Twitter

As a marketer, you can go along and live by the same “marketing rules” as your competitors. Or you can pull a Merce Cunningham.

Cunningham, the avant-garde dancer and choreographer, revolutionized modern dance by creating works of pure movement divorced from storytelling and even music. He died Monday at age 90.

Until Cunningham and Martha Graham came onto the scene, the paradigm for dance was pretty much the Balanchine model—tightly choreographed neo-classical pieces set in tight rhythm to the music with interchangeable dancers serving as visual storytellers. Cunningham changed everything: his focus was on the raw emotion of dance, and his choreography shattered dance’s unwritten rules, such as having dancers always facing the audience or moving in syncopated rhythms. It is said he would toss a coin to determine steps, and even had his dancers perform to music they had never even heard before.

As unnerving as his choreography was at the time, it forced audiences to rethink their definitions of dance. It polarized people. It repulsed some people. And it inspired some people.

It was visceral. It made people feel something.

And in the end, Cunningham inspired several generations of choreographers and made modern dance as approachable in Harlem as it was in upper crust Manhattan.

The point here is to emphasize that, while it’s never “acceptable” to break the rules, sometimes you have no choice but to break the rules. Don’t let a paradigm come between you and your Brand Vision. Don’t let your category define customer service, find a way to define it for yourself.

Here’s an excellent two-minute example of how Cunningham used movement to create form. It ain’t your little sister’s ballet class.

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Mickey On Customers brand vision, customer service, marketing rules, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, modern dance

In days gone by, you could irritate customers, lie to them or otherwise treat them like crap, and there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it. Oh, yeah, they could write threatening letters, tell all their friends and promise to never do business with you again. One nattily-dressed gentlemen I would pass everyday when I worked in San Francisco even protested in front of Bank of America wearing a sandwich board. But for the most part, that dissatisfaction stayed between you and the customer.

My how things have changed.

Today, when a customer feels he’s been wronged, he probably won’t keep it to himself. In addition to feedback sites (like yelp.com) and others, where one can express an opinion on anything from the freshness of a flower arrangement to the food at a restaurant to the customer service of a web site, there are more creative avenues he may take. Like create a Facebook page for unhappy customers. Launch a website named “yourcompanysucks.com”. Contribute to blogs or message boards. Or, he may choose to do what Dave Carroll of the alt/country band Sons of Maxwell did: create a music video and post it on YouTube.

Carroll’s video, named “United Breaks Guitars,” chronicles his exasperation at being treated indignantly by United Airlines customer service folks after the carrier severely damaged his $3500 Taylor acoustic guitar (in plain view) on the tarmac of O’Hare International.

While I’m sure everyone involved at United would claim they were “just doing their jobs,” the bottom line is that Dave Carroll wasn’t taken care of at a very critical touchpoint. No one at United felt his pain or became his advocate. And the video he created has gone viral and been viewed by more than 3.5 million people.

The result for United: not just more bad stories about the airline being circulated, but a finger to the eye of its position of “Fly the Friendly Skies.” Who’s going to believe the airline’s paid messages when you have real customers telling and forwarding stories like this?

While this case represents how the web’s transparency can create huge customer service problems, it’s also a case of how it also creates one-of-a-kind opportunities. When, Bob Taylor, co-founder of Taylor Guitars, found out about it, he made a video response supporting Dave, and launched a series of videos on his web site about how to safely travel with a guitar. Then he did what United should have done—replaced Dave’s beloved guitar.

Great PR for Taylor. A nightmare for United. And in this case, a bit of instant celebrity for one guitar-totin’ hero. All wrapped up in one.

As a bit of a diversion, I present another video, of one of my favorite artists, John Hiatt, performing a song on Letterman he wrote a few years back about broken guitars (of the celeb variety). Enjoy.

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Mickey On Customers Bob Taylor, customer service, Dave Carroll, Facebook, Sons of Maxwell, Taylor Guitars, United Airlines

You’re not in the business of selling a product or service. You’re in the business of creating stories. The stories of customers who do business with you. Stories they can take with them and remember the next time your name is mentioned.

Long after the purchase is over and the reason they decided to buy your product, use your service or shop your establishment is long forgotten, one thing won’t be forgotten: the story. How did they feel when they did business with you? Was it an experience that stood out for them? Was there something there that made them feel special? That made them feel like you got them?

The thing is, stories happen whether you intend them to or not (we can all recall disappointing stories, right?). So why not think ahead and see if there’s something you can do to create a story that is not only unique, but will have the customer talking about it in her circle for days, months or years afterward.

Here’s an example of helping to create a memorable story:

It is a video of a flight attendant named David who works for Southwest Airlines. He was able to take that boiler-plate boarding announcement we all try to ignore on every flight, and turn it into an opportunity for engagement with the airline, and a story that will be remembered by passengers and passed on to others.

If you want confirmation that this created a memorable story, just check how often this video was viewed on YouTube. Or, simply just check out the burned out businessmen in the front rows joyfully participating in the rhythm section.

Southwest didn’t script David. Nor did they tell him he had to do this. But here’s what the airline’s execs did do: they understood that their real business wasn’t the airline business. It was the hospitality business. They might not be able to control departure and landing times, weather delays, FAA requirements and the surly TSA folks who make you take off your shoes and dump out your shampoo. About the only control the airline does have is what it does to engage passengers while they’re held captive in a metal tube 35,000 feet in the air. As such, they hire the most outgoing, entertaining, people-loving folks they can find, teach them a little about running an airliner, then set them loose to surprise and delight.

And create stories.

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Mickey On Customers, Ramblings advertising, customer service, marketing, selling, Southwest, Spokane

Hey, every business has customers they would like to churn out. Sometimes these customers cost too much to maintain. Other times, they just don’t purchase. Either way, you’d prefer it if they just went away. But what do you do about them?

Usually, you have two choices. You can do nothing, in which case the customer will keep bleeding you unless by some miracle he drops off on his own. Or, you can show her the exit, usually by adding some sort of “pain point” that makes it too expensive or too much of a hassle to continue. In either case, you’re not exactly creating a good “story” for the customer to tell later.

American Express, though, is trying something all together different. The company is actually paying some customers to cancel their credit cards. No kidding. The company announced plans to pay some cardholders $300 to leave (these are their least profitable customers). The company could have canceled the cards on its own. Or it could have raised its fees to the point where these customers would scream foul and take off. But execs at American Express figured those options didn’t really jibe with the company’s core values and its Brand Vision.

Paying customers to leave may cost the company money in the short run, but it is creating good will and upholding an image American Express has spent several decades crafting. Coldly firing customers with no thought or consolation was a story American Express didn’t want told about itself.

To me, this is an example of extending a Brand Vision into areas you wouldn’t originally think of. The most optimal use of a Brand Vision is to use it as a “filter” through which to pass not only marketing and communication issues, but operational concerns as well. This ensures you “walk the talk.” And American Express is walking it in style.

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Mickey On Customers advertising, American Express, brand vision, customer service, marketing, Spokane

Many of you may be familiar with this scene from the 1970’s flick “Five Easy Pieces” with Jack Nicholson. I post it here to serve as an example of a missed customer service opportunity.

While it definitely borders on the ridiculous, how many times in our days do we suffer the same kind of feelings of indignation when our requests aren’t heard or don’t seem to matter or what we want can’t be done because it would be against the “rules”? Or worse, how many times do we inadvertently send this message to our customers?

Rules, procedure and protocol are important in any organization. The last thing you want is for your team members to make up the rules on a case-by-case basis. But customers are more important. Without customers (I’ll go a step further and say that without Loyal Customers), there is no business, period. If every customer in that diner had as much problem as Jack getting what they wanted, that place would have emptied faster than a PBR keg at a frat party.

The message you want to send to customers in any encounter they have with you is that they are important. The best way to achieve that is to find out what is important to them in the moment, and find a way to provide it. And if by some chance you can’t “make the toast,” find a way for the customer to get it as thoughtfully and efficiently as possible.

You could save a fortune on dinnerware.

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Mickey Media, On Customers customer service, marketing, Spokane

Just as all the women in Lake Wobegon are good looking and all the children are above average, every company these days considers itself “customer-centric.”

But does “customer centricity” mean the same thing to customers as it does for marketers? Is it a set of initiatives you undertake to raise customer satisfaction scores? Is it a system of metrics that measure behaviors (complaints, repeat purchases, etc.)?

There are at least two problems with trying to impose customer-centric initiatives or measurement on your business. In the first place, customer-centricity is a company wide platform. Most every company is successful at being customer-centric in some ways. But then there are breakdowns in other areas. So measuring the performance of one aspect of customer-centricity does little to give you an idea of how well you’re doing organization-wide.

A second issue is that customer-centricity means different things to different people. For some, all you need to do is show up on time and offer a decent value. Others may define it as answering the customer service line with a live body. Or offering a generous return policy. Or following up with a service call after the sale. Trying to approach customer- centricity on a touchpoint-by-touchpoint basis is akin to playing a game of whack-a-mole.

What is it, then, that tends to separate truly customer-centric organizations from the rest of the businesses we deal with? Basically, they know their customers and anticipate their needs. Not necessarily what they want (or rather think they want), but more what they are trying to accomplish, and why they are buying the product or service in the first place.

In other words, these companies understand customer context. As the old adage goes, the customer is not buying a drill, he’s buying a hole. Understanding the context the customer operates in frees you to view your offerings from beyond their functional components.

One other characteristic truly customer-centric organizations have in common is that they are as genuinely interested in the transactional outcome as the customer is. And not necessarily in the “how-much-profit-was-in-this-sale” kind of way, but rather, “was the transaction rewarding to the customer?”

Customer satisfaction scores may give you an indication of how well you meet your customers’ expectations, but that kind of “satisfaction” is really no more than table stakes.

Customer-centricity, as seen by the customer, is about how the company conducts itself, how it “behaves” toward its customers, how those customers are treated, what its values are and how they feel as a result. The customer’s view of customer-centricity is much more about the experience of dealing with the firm than it is about even what that firm sells or the price it charges.

And as far as making a public declaration of one’s customer-centricity? That’s a dangerous ploy. You are setting yourself up for a fall — as soon as there is any sort of breakdown anywhere in your organization, the customer will view your proclamation of customer-centricity as nothing more than empty marketing pap.

True customer-centricity is not something you do, it is something you are.

On a personal note, because of the upcoming holidays and some personal time off, this will likely be the last Quisenblog post for the year. We will return in 2009 bigger and badder than ever. Happy Holidays to all!

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admin On Customers customer service, marketing, Spokane

One of the things we continually preach to our clients is to discover the inner meaning of your product or service. This has little to do with its functionality or serviceability. It is more about the emotional need you answer for your customer.

The AMC television series Mad Men gave us a perfect example of this during its season one finale. Part of the story arc involves the ad agency’s new business pitch to Kodak. The client has just introduced a new technology that will revolutionize the age-old slide projector. And the client, who is predictably seduced by this new technology, wants to lead with it, and explain to the consumer how this new system will make showing slides so much easier and convenient for them.

Don Draper, the agency’s creative director, has a different take on how to sell the product. You can see it here in this clip:

Technologies change. Features are added. Product lines evolve. Competition changes. But the core reason for doing business with you—the emotional need you are satisfying—need never change. Honda came out with a campaign in the early 70’s (via Chiat/Day) around practicality. The tag line was “We keep it simple.” While Hondas have changed quite a bit over the last 35+ years (you probably wouldn’t even recognize a ’76 Civic), if you ask, “Quick, name a car that stands for practicality,” Honda will likely be one of the first few responses from most people.

Customers do business with people (and companies) that “get” them. And there’s no better way to demonstrate that than to understand and answer that deeper psychological need.

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Mickey Uncategorized advertising, AMC, customer service, customer value, Don Draper, Honda, Kodak, Mad Men, marketing, product package, Spokane, technology