Today’s educated and digitally savvy consumers search out online reviews, even from people they do not know; 69% of local consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Less than 10% trust what companies say about themselves, according to an Econsultancy report. Studies by Saurage Research show that 84% of US shoppers rely on reviews before making purchase decisions.

The findings below are based on extensive Voice of Customer (VoC) research conducted by our firm, ERDM regarding the rapidly evolving role of reviews in consumer’s decision making process:

• A large number of reviews with both positive and negative sentiments are an advantage and create trust.
• Apparel and cosmetics customers want to be able to sort reviews by multiple criteria to evaluate the relevance of the reviewer’s comments to their personal situation. Criteria include; part of the country, (some feel that people from other parts of the country don’t share their fashion preferences), age, skin type, and clothing size.
• Pictures and profiles of the reviewers are also important. Per this quote from a recent VoC research effort, “I like to see who is writing the review. It makes a difference as to how much weight I assign it.”

Case Study Intuit Quickbooks:

Adding ratings and reviews greatly increased sales for Intuit Quickbooks ProAdvisors. They are accounting service providers who have completed a comprehensive QuickBooks curriculum and are listed on Intuit’s website, which is searchable by businesses looking for accounting services.

• QuickBooks ProAdvisors® with reviews get 5X more referrals than those with few or none.
• ProAdvisors with reviews get more clicks than higher-ranked ProAdvisors.
• The number of reviews can be more important than the rating.

4 Takeaways to Help You Leverage the Power of Online Reviews:

1. Ask your customers for reviews and do not fear negative reviews: The Quickbooks case study uncovered that for US clients, 80% of reviewers give a 4 or 5 (out of 5) star rating. UK clients’ reviews are 88% positive. A few negative reviews lend credibility to the positive ones.
2. Quantity of the online reviews can outweigh the quality. In the Quickbooks example, ProAdvisors with ten reviews averaging four stars receive more clicks than those who have a five star average, but only two reviews. Therefore encouraging customers to share information with you is imperative.
3. Online reviews are also important for offline businesses, “Nearly 70% of US internet users sometimes compared prices or read reviews before visiting a store.” – eMarketer
4. The more detailed and personalized the reviewers are, the more successful the review will be in converting potential customers. Offer incentives for completely filling out profile details, preferences, and including a photo.
   

If I asked my daughter to get me something, and she didn’t, I would respond,

Oh, wow. Hector would have gotten it for me right away.

If one of my boys got angry and threw a tantrum, I’d say,

Hector never gets angry. He’s perfect.

I have no idea where Hector came from, (or how I chose that name, for that matter). Usually the kids took this in stride and had fun with it, though one of my kids, who shall remain nameless, got very angry. VERY angry. He probably would have slit Hector’s throat in his sleep if he could have. Yes, I’m a bad father. I provoked my children to anger. But, I enjoyed it.

I told the kids that Hector was our perfect child. THE perfect child. He always did everything perfectly. Kinda like a cross between Mother Theresa and Gallant of “Goofus and Gallant” fame. Only…more perfect.

Obviously, Hector wasn’t real. There is no perfect child.

In the same way, there is no perfect customer. In the business and marketing world we often throw around a phrase that is part of the marketing and business process:

Buyer persona

According the Buyer Persona Institute (yes, there is such a thing), a buyer persona is:

Buyer personas are examples of the real buyers who influence or make decisions about the products, services or solutions you market. They are a tool that builds confidence in strategies to persuade buyers to choose you rather than a competitor or the status quo.

It’s the person you want buying your products and services. Read any book on marketing of any sort, and creating your buyer persona is one of the first tasks you’ll always be given. Heck, there are even buyer persona templates you can use to help you with this task.

At it’s core, what this means is knowing your customers. And the only way you can get to know your customers is to do two things: observe their behavior and talk to them. Observing their behavior includes looking at the data. Do your research. How do they behave? What are they purchasing? When are they shopping? Activity on social media outlets, or lack thereof, is a good place to start. What are they saying about you? Listening online is key.

Talking to them allows you to better understand that data, and understand their feelings and opinions about your business. Did they have a good experience? Why or why not? Will they be back? What makes them want to tell others about you?

But remember, there is no perfect customer. Your buyer persona is merely a starting point based on aggregate data. Just because your persona might be a 35-year old mother, doesn’t mean a 75-year old grandfather won’t buy what you’re offering. Be prepared for anomalies. Expect the unexpected, as they say.

About eight or nine years ago I wandered into a Hot Topic store at a our mall, mostly out of curiosity, but also because I knew they sold music, some of which I happen to like (don’t judge!). I was clearly out of place: a 40-something gray hair with no piercings or tattoos, and decidedly not wearing the “uniform.” As I flipped through the CDs one of the employees, dressed all in black, with black hair, and rather large gauges in his ears. He looked at me and said:

“Can I help you sir? Looking for something for one of your kids?”

And though those were his words, all I heard was,

“Hey Pops, you do realize you’re out of your element, right? We don’t sell Michael Bolton here, but I’ll throw you a bone and help you out. You need a clue on what to buy your kids…or grandkids??”

My response:

“Nah, I’m OK. Just checking out your selection, and glad to see you have [rattled off names of a few bands]. I saw these guys play a few months ago. Oh, and the drummer in that band is a friend of mine.”

Crickets. The guy walked away confounded. In fact, I think he literally was scratching his head. He had no idea what to do with me, so he simply retreated.

Don’t be confounded. Be prepared. Understand that a buyer persona is a good thing to have, but is NOT your perfect customer. There is no such thing. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to find even one customer that fits your buyer persona perfectly. All of your customers are different. Understand that there are plenty of exceptions to every rule. Don’t be so tied to your buyer persona that you miss out on other opportunities.

Don’t tell your customers how they should behave. And NEVER compare them to Hector. They won’t appreciate it.

Who is your ideal customer? Have you ever been surprised by the variety of customers who come through your door?

Some companies attempt to use the metric for advertising. The metric is supposed to convince a shopper to join the ranks of the company’s customers because they are supposedly 97% satisfied. These numbers are impossible for a consumer to validate, methodologically or anecdotally. Besides, there may be information floating in Social Media that disputes the company’ customer satisfaction claims, however unfairly. In my opinion, brandishing the customer satisfaction scores, without complete transparency, will more likely lead to erosion of trust than to increase in sales. Social Customers trust each other’s experiences more than they do brand claims.

Many companies use the customer satisfaction metric to judge departmental performance while their customers keep churning, for reasons the measured business unit may have no control over whatsoever. They do well if the last calendar period metric is scored higher than the previous one. If the last score is lower, bonuses are not paid and changes to a status quo are demanded. Sometimes the change is a switch to different methodology of measuring customer satisfaction.

Disconnect from the Customer Satisfaction Score, regardless of methodology, and from specific and systematic action that targets improvement of customer experience, makes the score an ultimate vanity metric.

Richard H. Levey wrote that

“True customer insight requires first knowing (discovering) which attributes matter to the customer and then determining how the firm is performing on those attributes. If a customer’s experience occurs over multiple interactions and various media, then each needs to be measured to drive insight precision. ” Stop Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Start Understanding It. (emphasis mine).

I would add-stop counting the clicks, “likes” and re-tweets, and start understanding WHY customers do what they do. Stop tabulating survey scores and start reading the comments—you may learn something that would help promote an action of positive change.

Hang on, no I’m not smoking anything, I am dreaming a little.

We’ll probably never reach the day of buyer verified forecasts, but we can dramatically improve the forecast by looking at it from the buyer’s point of view.

Sales forecasting is and will be a hot button for all execs. It’s natural, we want to be able to predict as accurately as possible, what sales volumes and revenue flow will be. Accurate sales forecasts are important for all sorts of things–demand planning/forecasts, supply chain management, setting shareholder expectations, and many other things.

There’s a lot of market data showing how inaccurate sales forecasts are. The numbers are frightening–and I think they are overstated (at least in terms of accuracy).

As I’ve written about very often, one of the fundamental flaws we make in forecasting is associating the forecast with where we are in the selling process. “We’re in the proposal phase, so our probability of winning this $ 1M deal in the next 90 days is 75%.” Managers take this–being conservative, they add their “English,” forecasting the deal for $600K and closing in 100 days. As it goes up the food chain, the forecast is tinkered with and by the time it gets to the top of the food chain, the forecast may be for $100K in 120 days—but it’s taken as gospel and everyone counts on it. Even worse, because everyone knows it’s been tinkered with, they say there is some “upside” to the forecast.

So there are all sorts of problems we inflict in the process of forecasting, but the biggest is it’s all based on flawed logic. Just because we are “75% through the selling cycle–and the customer’s buying cycle” doesn’t mean the likelihood of the customer choosing us is 75%. It just means we are 75% through the process and has nothing to do with the propensity to buy.

So how are we to develop an accurate forecast?

What if we shifted our perspectives and “ask the customer to forecast?” What if our forecast was “verified” by the buyer?

Now I’m not talking about literally going to the customer and asking, “What would you forecast this as? Do we have a 50%, 67.563%, or a 72.372% chance of winning this business by this date?” Neither would I go to the buyer and ask, “How certain are you that you will give us this $1M order in 9o days?”

But what if we got information directly from buyers or directly verified by buyers? What if we could assess buyer attitudes toward us and our competitors? What if we could look at buyer behaviors on similar decisions involving us and out competitors? What if we combined these views with an assessment about the buyer’s likelihood for buying—from us—-by a certain date? While it is still an estimate and won’t be perfect, since it is focused on the buyer’s perspectives, it’s more likely to be realistic.

Here are some of the things we can verify with the buyer:

• The sense of urgency or business case for taking action: Does the customer have a compelling sense of urgency, do they have a strong internal business case to take action in solving a problem. Note this is not necessarily the business case we present to them–do they have a strong, defensible business case for taking action?
• Do they have strong internal support for taking action: Have they lined up internal support with executive management, particularly the CFO. Regardless how strongly they feel about a solution, if they don’t have internal management support and the solution is aligned with the top strategies, the project won’t be funded.
• Do they have a deadline where they must have a solution in place? Is there something that is forcing them to have a solution in place by a certain time?
• Are there consequences to the customer for not having a solution in place by a target date? What happens if they don’t make their deadline? What happens if they slip the target date?
• What is their past track record for making decisions and moving forward on projects like this? While not totally predictive, past behavior on similar projects is an indicator of what they might be doing with this project.
• What are their attitudes toward you and the competition? Here’s where it becomes more difficult to make an assessment. Are they embracing you, making you part of the project team? Are they embracing the competitor?
• How is the customer engaging us in their deicsion-making process? Are we collaborating or closely partnering with the customer? Is the customer actively engaging us? Are they seeking our views in helping them address tough business challenges? Or are they holding us off, are they distant, formal, standoff-ish? Are they engaging us more closely than the competition?
• What is our past track record with the customer? Do we have a strong relationship? Have we worked closely in providing solutions that create value? Do they have a strong opinion of us? Do we have a record of performance with the customer?

There are more areas, but these provide a starting framework for how we might develop a forecast based on the customer or buyer’s view. The responses to each of these questions will change as the customer goes through their buying process. The responses to these questions enable us to adapt our sales strategies, better positioning ourselves, influencing more positive responses as the buying cycle continue.

We’ll never get the customer to provide us a forecast, but if we take the customer input and perspective, we can increase the accuracy of our forecasts.

(By the way, we have a small guide on creating Buyer Verified Forecasts. Send me an email if you want a free copy. Be sure to include your name and company name. Send it to dabrock@excellenc.com)

There are many ways to work at making sure your customers are getting your message and many ways to use it to your advantage with marketing and advertising.

Analyze Complaints

Do you get a lot of complaints about the same thing? If so, your customers may have a misconception about something based on lack of clarity by you when you are handling a sale. Look for patterns so you can address problems and eliminate confusion.

Measure Conversion Rates

Various marketing methods can be used to communicate with your customers and likewise, various metrics can tell you how well or how accurately your message is being received. If you are doing email marketing, for example, you can gauge how many of your emails are getting opened to help you understand whether or not your subject lines are effective in piquing curiosity.

In measuring clicks from your email marketing messages back to your site you’ll be able to determine whether or not people are finding the message compelling enough to make them act. And, you can tell how many people you are turning ‘off’ by measuring how many people unsubscribe after a particular message. A high unsubscribe rate, for example, might warn you that a certain approach might be something worth avoiding in the future. This can apply to social media, too. If your followers are dropping like flies, it’s a cue that your message delivery might be annoying or might not be meeting their needs somehow.

Conversion rate can be measured in many other ways, too, such as through website clicks from one page to another and through Google Adwords ads as well as Facebook advertisements and other online ads. How people react will help you understand your efficacy in communicating.

Tip: Segment Customers and Vary Your Message Delivery

Some people respond well to sales letters with long and descriptive copy. Some respond better to a video with a person telling them something or showing them something. Some do well with a combo of photos and text. If you vary your marketing methods you’ll ensure you have an opportunity to reach a wider audience.

Again, you’ll also have the ability to measure success rate, too, to ensure you’re adequately getting your message across. Analyzing your customer and your results as you go along will help you segment your most common target customers and you’ll be able to fine tune your marketing methods. Segmenting customers can help you save money on marketing, too, because you could figure out the (closest thing to perfect) formula for appealing to certain types of customers.

Knowing Me, Knowing You…

Do your customers have expectations? Of course they do. If they do, it’s important to consistently meet them. Relationships can be built and nurtured based on mutual understanding and trust. Knowing how your customers buy, knowing what appeals to them, and knowing the best way to describe your offering so that it appeals to them will equate to a better rate of success for you because you’ll be articulating yourself based on knowing what each customer segment wants.

You may want to try new marketing and communication methods regularly, vary your copywriting techniques, do some split tests to see what works best, and use data to help you continually refine your process. But be careful. Your customers don’t want to feel like guinea pigs and they want to feel like they are dealing with one uniform company at all times. Marketing isn’t stagnant so it’ll be an ongoing process but the more you study your customer’s reactions to your marketing methods and carefully work at boosting your success the better you’ll be at creating new campaigns with wider appeal.

Sometimes, a marketing campaign goes very well and sometimes it flops. Revel in the successes but don’t forget to learn from the flops; they can help you immensely!

Below are excerpts from that chapter.

Impact of Oracle’s CEM Program

Figure 1. Customer Experience Management Program Components

It is one thing to have a customer experience management (CEM) program. It is another thing to track its impact on customers and your business. Oracle monitors and tracks their financial and CEM program metrics to ensure that they are delivering on their promise to help customers succeed. As a result, Oracle reaps the benefits financially: in fiscal year 2012, Oracle’s annual revenue reached US$37.1B, up from US$11.1B in FY05.

During the same time frame, Oracle has seen significant improvements in its CX metrics. First, the Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) has been steadily rising. This increase in customer loyalty is paralleled by improvements in satisfaction in other key metrics like perceived value, quality of relationships and support. Not surprisingly, during this same period, the time to resolve customer-specific issues identified through surveys has declined three fold.

Looking regionally at customer decision makers and influencers, a number of statistically significant increases in satisfaction with relationship-based measures are reported year-over year (book contains graphs of Oracle’s customer loyalty trends).

Strategy and Governance

Oracle’s success rests on having a clear understanding of their customers’ needs and goals. They know that, to deliver an excellent customer experience, they have to provide industry leading solutions that solve customers’ problems and are delivered by experts who are focused on their success. To accomplish this, Oracle uses customer feedback to help senior executives develop long-term strategic plans. The success of Oracle’s CEM program is measured through account-specific relationship surveys. As Oracle President Mark Hurd reinforces,

“We have a sophisticated account planning process that looks at the overall customer relationship across a rolling three-year time horizon. The account plan is a collaboratively developed approach to assuring the customer’s longer-term objectives are met at the same time that Oracle’s objectives are met.”

Mark Hurd, President, Oracle

Deep data governance is of central importance to Oracle. Oracle receives massive amounts of customer feedback annually. In fact, their surveys and panels alone capture over 550,000 responses each year. Consequently, proper program governance is necessary to ensure proper use of this complex web of customer data. Executives demand reliable, valid and useful information when they make their decisions, and data governance can go a long way to ensure they receive high-quality data to help them make the right decisions.

Business Integration

Business integration means a couple of things. First, it means to incorporate customer feedback data into daily business processes. For example, call center agents, at a glance, can understand many different, yet complementary things about the customer: his prior interactions as well as his attitudes about those interactions. By integrating business data, you are able to provide the information your agents need to tailor their interactions with the customer. Knowing a premier caller (based on CRM system) had a recent negative experience (based on transactional survey), your call center agent’s time might be better spent repairing the relationship rather than up-selling. Second, business integration means the process of integrating all business data to allow for a better understanding of large customer segments. Integration of business data is about applying appropriate analytics to these different business metrics (e.g., operational, financial, customer satisfaction/loyalty) to uncover what is responsible for creating happy, loyal customers.

To assist with this, Oracle reports the information using their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI) systems. Customer feedback responses requiring follow-up are automatically distributed to pre-determined employees empowered to take ownership, coordinate resources and outreach to the customer and corrective action steps are tracked in Oracle CRM. Historical survey results are stored in Oracle CRM at the contact and account levels, and rolled up using Oracle BI to provide a single repository of role-based customer information for easy account team access.

Method and Reporting

The first piece of advice from Jeb Dasteel, Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer at Oracle is to

“implement a cohesive customer feedback program before you do anything else. Demonstrating rigor and credibility in collection, analysis, and presentation of both quantitative and qualitative customer feedback creates a foundation of authority on which you can build all other customer programs.”

Jeb Dasteel, Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, Oracle

Vehicles for capturing customer feedback include:

• Relationship Surveys: Oracle uses relationship surveys to evaluate account management and ongoing relationships. Focused on decision makers and influencers within their customer base, these surveys assess and trend experiences with account management, business practices, services and overall product perceptions across the ownership lifecycle. Post-merger surveys are also conducted to establish baselines, ease the on-boarding process and enable future trending.
• Product Panels: Oracle uses product surveys to assess satisfaction covering 15,000-plus products. Focused on end users, implementers and managers, these panels capture detailed and comparative feedback across the full Oracle product stack, and provide direct two-way communication between customers and Oracle Development General Managers.
• Transactional Surveys: Oracle has a set of transactional surveys that measure how well they execute specific business processes and obligations. Focused on customers at all levels, these surveys assess experiences with specific events, engagements and interactions across the customer lifecycle.
• Targeted Surveys: Tailored by job level and function given the objectives of the study, the aim of targeted surveys is to capture more detailed input on Oracle’s top “customer feedback themes”.
• Market Research: Coupled with surveys and panels, market research provides insight into market trends and competitive perspectives across our install base, prospects and partners.

Oracle applies analytics to customer feedback to help identify key themes. They are much more confident with conclusions based on several lines of evidence than a single line of evidence. As such, customer feedback results from different sources are consolidated, including surveys, customer advisory boards and councils, user groups, executive escalations, root cause analysis, operational measures and financial metrics. Using these different sources of customer feedback, Oracle extracts and publicizes the ten “customer feedback themes” that have the greatest impact on CX and business results.

Applied Research

Oracle regularly conducts deep dive research using their customer experience data. They accomplish this research by linking different metrics from disparate data sources together. Operational linkages, for example, help identify clear operational performance metrics (e.g., first call resolution, call handle time) that truly drive the customer experience; financial linkages allow Oracle to estimate the return on investment of different improvement initiatives; and constituency linkages allow Oracle to invest in effective employee experience programs that ultimately also enhance the customer experience.

Additionally, Oracle takes a longitudinal look at customer feedback data. Rather than solely relying on a cross-sectional view (all data from the same period), Oracle uses a time-series approach to identify cause and effect relationships among metrics, allowing them to make stronger predictive claims about the causes of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Oracle combines metrics across a variety of different data silos to research many different types of questions. In one research endeavor, Oracle focused in on the support process. Toward that end, they integrated operational support data and end user experience with support to identify the call center metrics that drove caller satisfaction. Additionally, they integrated different types of survey data to examine whether end user support experience (those who used the applications) was related to their management’s experience (decision makers who purchased the applications).

Over the past 3 years, Oracle has been conducting a number of joint research activities with its user groups worldwide, and sharing the results collaboratively with user group leaders, who in turn provide input into potential action plans and strategies. The results of these studies show that customers who are involved with non-user group peers. It appears that customers who are more engaged (e.g., participate in user groups) receive greater value from their investments and, consequently, are happier with Oracle’s solutions.

Final Thoughts

How Oracle operationalizes best practices will likely be different than many other companies. Like any company-wide initiative, you need to work within your company’s constraints when considering how you will support CEM best practices. For example, while Oracle shares their customer feedback results across a variety of mediums, a smaller company will have fewer mediums to leverage. Yet both companies share the same spirit in communicating results to the company.

Oracle’s CEM program has come a long way in the last decade. As an example, in 2005, Oracle was executing multiple relationship surveys using various tools and methodologies, which made comparability across key customer segments extremely difficult. As mergers and acquisitions activity accelerated, the need to centralize surveys became clear and a requirement to providing stronger insight across their growing product footprint and expanding customer base. An enormous effort went into consolidating tools, standardizing methodologies, and globalizing processes. This in turn created opportunities to integrate processes and technologies, drive efficiencies into day-to-day operations, and create new demand for other business questions. While Oracle’s CEM program scope continues to expand, and operations continue to evolve, one central element remains the same: maintaining a centralized, coordinated approach for listening to, responding to and collaborating with customers.

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Buy TCE: Total Customer Experience at Amazon >>

In TCE: Total Customer Experience, learn more about how Oracle integrates their business data around the customer and applies a customer-centric analytics approach to gaining deeper customer insights.

Columbia Business School (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In today’s emerging digital age, understanding buying behaviors is becoming job one for many B2B organizations. Faced with relentless new demands from customers and buyers, B2B leaders must map out a course of transition. This transition involves being relevant in today’s complex marketplaces by an equally relentless focus on customers and buyers.

End of Sustainable Competitive Advantages

One of the byproducts of the emerging new digital age is the equalizing of competition. One of our brightest thinkers of today is Columbia Business School professor Rita Gunther McGrath. In her just released book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business, she makes the case for rethinking our perspectives on how we define competition. Competition, as we know it, is changing. Changing so much so, making the idea of sustainable obsolete. The introduction of new market and network dynamics are changing the landscape of competition she argues. (I learned of this book through Dorie Clark’s excellent Forbes article Competitive Advantage is Dead. Here’s What To Do About it.)

Strategy, Operations, and Execution

To stay ahead of competition today calls for a shift. A shift towards being customer and buyer focused. However, not just shifts towards thinking customer and buyer focus. This shift must be achieved in three areas: strategy, operations, and execution. Many B2B organizations are falling short in these areas. I have heard this in answering questions as well as in discussions regarding buyer persona and buyer insight development.

Starting Point

The starting point for achieving buyer and customer-centricity is gaining a deeper understanding of your buyers and buying behaviors. Understanding buying behaviors is tied to deeper buyer insights into the goals, drivers, and choices of your target buyer’s purchase decisions. What every Marketing and Sales leader should be striving for, in the face of relentless competitive pressures, is this:

Developing unique buyer insights about their buyers, operationalizing these insights into the fabric of strategy and execution, and mapping B2B customer experiences, which will set them apart from their competition.

The leap here is not just learning about your customers and buyers, but also using unique insights to map out buyer focused strategies, which make a difference.

Making the Leap

A way to make the leap is to model buyer decisions – based upon unique and profound buyer insights. When we undergo an effort to understand buyers through deeper insights, the important next step is modeling uncovered buying behaviors into meaningful archetypes. This is the basic principle behind a buyer persona – creating an archetypal representation, which can be communicated. In this case, we want to model buyer decisions.

There is an important distinction to be made. It has to do with our common vocabulary around buying process, buyer’s journey, buying cycle, and etc. These all should be considered common frameworks. And, in this fast emerging digital age, even these are presumptuous at best. Modeling buyer decisions means going much deeper.

1 + 1 + 1

When modeling buyer decisions today, we are after a deeper understanding of three key buyer dimensions:

Buyer Thinking: what are the goals and mental models affecting purchase decisions?

Buyer Activity: what are the activities performed in making purchase decisions?

Buyer Values: what are the perceived values, which buyers regard as important?

Infused into this approach, is the qualitative aspects of who, what, where, when, how, and the all-important why. The aim here is to achieve the 1 + 1 + 1 equation of getting to why.

While general framework views of buying process, buyer journey, and etc. are helpful, they only provide surface level views. Underneath is where the deep buyer insights live. Thus, the challenge today for many B2B leaders is to breakout from the norm.

The norm today is like your teenage kid saying why they want to do something – “because everybody is doing it.” Since everybody is using generalized buyer’s journey, buying stages, and the likes – in all shapes and sizes – it is tough to achieve the unique separation we want from competitors.

The bottom line for B2B marketing and sales leaders today is to explore deeper buyer insights through buyer decision modeling. Knowing the critical buying paths of your customers and buyers, at a deep distinct level, allows you to tailor your efforts closer to how and why buyers actually buy. And, closer is always better. Would you not agree?

(Two modeling tools, which can help are the Buyer Persona Canvas™ and the Buyer Insight Map™. Look for the Buyer Decision Model™ in the next article. They are available as a resource for you here: Resource Models. I am available to have helpful further discussions on this important topic. Please share widely – I am sure someone is trying to figure this out today.)

Social media and doing business online

If you are doing business online, you can no longer afford to stay away from social media.

Many brands avoid it as much as they can because they believe that there is so much information that it is difficult to distil into anything useful without a lot of effort, and often their resources (human and otherwise) are sorely needed elsewhere. There are tools out there that can make monitoring top social channels and maintaining a functional web presence a possibility for most of the brands that were uncertain of their ability to handle social media because of sheer data volume. If this is not something that you feel like your brand is in the right place for, you should consider seeking out a top level SEO provider company if you can and inquiring about their social media management packages. You might find that they’re more affordable then you think.

How are your listening skills?

Is your brand keeping an ear open for opportunities to engage with your target audience?

Listening to what people are saying about your brand can provide you with a lot of useful data / information. For example, by listening to what people are saying you can get real-life perspectives from the people who are your ideal target audience. You can learn what these people want, need, like, and dislike, and you can take this information and do with it whatever you please. Listening in to top social channels is a great way to identify potential problems and address them before they reach the tipping point and become a social crisis; this happens when a brand ignores a situation because they were unaware of it, or they felt it was too difficult to address, or they made a serious error. Take a look at social media disasters of 2012 and 2013 and you will see plenty of examples of issues that could have been addressed by proactive brands before things got complicated and out of control.

Monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand or related terms is a really smart move because it can help you locate people who are interesting in buying something you offer, alert you to shifts and changes in the trends in your industry, and even identify keywords that you can use to enhance your SEO campaigns now and in the future. Imagine being able to do all of these things and more, all with a little bit of patience, education, and perhaps a tool or two to help you make sense of the endless stream of consciousness that is social media today!

Your takeaway

It is vitally important that brands make an effort to listen. Regardless of how your brand chooses to approach the idea of listening there are likely tools out there that can help you accomplish your goals without impractical allocation of resources. I strongly recommend doing your best to adopt a social listening strategy and see what conversations can do for your brand!

Image Credit: Jeffrey Chen aka royalshot @ sxc.hu

Using research from the Framingham Heart Study, they looked at data from nearly 5,000 individuals spanning a network of over 12,000 people. Their analysis followed participants over two-decades from 1983-2003. Their conclusion is that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.

This impact was even more pronounced at a close distance. When a friend living close by (less than a mile away) had an increase in happiness, the probability that your own happiness would increase goes up by 25%, distant friends didn’t have this same impact. These effects were similar with spouses, siblings, and next-door neighbors.

And they spread. Happiness spreads up to three degrees of separation. This pattern matches what researchers have already found about the spread of obesity and smoking behavior. What we do impacts people we might never even meet. And while the effects do deteriorate as they disperse – meaning one person’s happiness won’t change the whole network – there is no question that they do spread.

This isn’t just about happy people finding other happy people either. The sheer time involved in this study showed that clusters of happiness spread. People who are in contact with happy people that are central in the network, will become happy in the future. So what does this have to do with customer experience work? Everything.

On a business level we know there’s ROI in customer experience improvements, but what we’re doing is dramatically more important than that. Customer experience work is all about people, both employees and customers. When we make it easy for customers we’re also making it easy for employees. And if we can create an experience that makes employees happy this not only spreads to customers, it also spreads to their homes, their neighbors, their communities. And according to Nicholas A. Christakis and James Fowler there’s evidence that regardless of the industry you work in; if you work in the customer experience profession, you just might be in the business of changing the world.

Photo credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

Chat allows today’s hyper-connected customers to stay online, avoid hold times, multitask while they’re seeking customer service, and use the brief messaging bursts of language they’ve become accustomed to on their smartphones and social media, all keys to saving time, which is a huge consideration for today’s consumer.

Forrester data shows that 71% of US online adult consumers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service, and a 2013 LivePerson Connecting with Customers report which surveyed 5,700 global consumers corroborates this.

The data shows that online consumer expectations are rapidly increasing. Eight-three percent (83%) of the more than 5,000 consumers said they consistently need some type of support during their online journey, and the expectations for speed of service should prove intimidating for most brands:

• 71% expect assistance within five minutes.
• If they don’t receive it, 48% will abandon the site (this percentage jumps to 58% for consumers in the UK).

Consumers also ranked the top three elements of a great online experience:

1. Getting my issue resolved quickly (82%)
2. Getting my issue resolved in a single interaction (56%)
3. Dealing with a friendly customer service representative (45%)

This is why chat makes so much sense as a complementary service channel. Not only is service fast and immediately accessible, but it’s personalized, too. In a new Forrester report, Market Overview: Chat Solutions for Customer Service, Forrester analysts Kate Leggett and Art Schoeller offer some key reasons to view chat as a competitive customer service differentiator, including:

• Chat usage rates have risen in the past three years from 30% to 43%.
• All demographics are comfortable with the channel; even one-third of Older Boomers and the Golden Generation use chat for customer service.
• Satisfaction rates for chat are only superseded by those for voice (63% rating for chat, 69% for voice).

As an example of chat’s ability to increase satisfaction, the Forrester report notes that Virgin Atlantic Airways’ use of the channel has helped raise the brand’s CSAT scores to over 80%.

Here are five additional reasons why a growing number of brands are deciding it’s finally time to chat with customers:

1. Cost Efficiency: Live chat is a cost-conscious choice for those organizations that want to provide more personalized service. Customers can get one-on-one assistance from a live customer service representative at their convenience, while companies save because behind the scenes, agents can handle multiple chats simultaneously. Chat is also known to increase first contact resolution rates.
2. Functionality: Companies can utilize live chat in a game, on a form, in an application, as part of their knowledgebase or with an online shopping cart. It can even be deployed on a brand’s Facebook page. Many organizations also monitor their web analytics, deploying chat on the pages of their websites with the highest exit rates.
3. Increased Sales: Chat is known to improve web conversion rates, as it keeps consumers from abandoning online shopping carts and order forms. It is also considered a key upselling and cross-selling tool. Agents can view a customer’s purchase and service history and suggest related products and services, or upgrades.
4. Dual Use: Organizations can use chat solely as a reactive channel, leaving it entirely up to the customers to click on the button for live chat assistance, or brands can use it as a proactive channel, inviting and engaging users to chat based on custom criteria such as if the customer has visited the site often in the past few days, is taking a long time on the checkout page or form, etc.
5. Popularity: Forrester data shows that Generations Z and X have higher satisfaction chatting with a live agent rather than speaking on the telephone with a live agent, as talking by typing is the preferred method of communication for the greater part of the younger audience.

Chat as a primary customer service channel has come of age. Watch for it to have an increasingly prominent role as a preferred method as consumers become increasingly connected and turn to chat so multitask and save time.

Click here to access the new Forrester report Market Overview: Chat Solutions for Customer Service to learn more about chat as a customer service channel and review 20 of the top live chat vendors for customer service, including Parature.

Marketing through direct means may mean for the advertisers to get creative. The foundation for any successful marketing is a good database of contacts for marketing through emails. This database should consist of interested and welcoming recipients who do not antagonize the advertising messages they receive; that means that they do not delete these messages and read it thoroughly. Marketing through emails provides more interaction for recipients.

The database of emails for business also provides an accurate method of looking for the right contacts that truly show interest with the advertised products and wares. This database also compliments one of the key elements of successful email marketing and that is to efficiently manage contacts. The contact managing system should allow to import the current contents and expand the database with fresh contacts developed from the website forms and forward to like programs. Establishing relationships with the contacts require that the database be maintained and that the information should be accurate which contains all the error-free email addresses as well as further information of demography which will soon be essential to formulate further marketing strategies.

A few attributes that contributes a successful online marketing:

1. Fast communication
2. Effective updates with error-free databases
3. More interaction with customers

If you are a home services contractor (plumber, pest control, etc.) or a home improvement or remodeling contractor and you get a negative review on Kudzu, or Angie’s List, or another online review site, what is the best way to handle it?

Let’s face it, if you haven’t gotten a negative review yet… you will (whether you deserve it or not).

There are all sorts of reasons you can get a negative review:

• Sometimes it is because you screw up. Welcome to the human race!
• Sometimes it is because of a misunderstanding and the homeowner thought you would do something that you never promised you would do. Sound familiar?
• Sometimes it is because some people are impossible to please. Can I get an amen?
• Sometimes it is totally bogus. Not even your client, but you get blamed.

When you get a negative review, especially on a review website like Kudzu and Angie’s List, what is the best way to handle it?

The good news is there is a “best” way to handle it… a way that has been verified by scientific tests.

The better news is that a negative review can actually be something that enhances your reputation in the eyes of future prospects.

That’s right. A negative review can be turned into a positive reputation builder. Keep reading… and take advantage of the inevitable bad review.

Good (And Not So Good) Ways To Handle A Negative Review

1. Ignore It- One option is to ignore the negative review. The reasoning here is that by addressing it, you give it more life. Better to just let it just pass away as old news.

This is not an uncommon way things are handled in corporate America. Ignore, stonewall, etc. As United Airlines found out when it tried to ignore the complaints of a passenger whose guitar was damaged in transit (and who posted a bad review), this approach can come back to bit you big time. Negative reviews without a proper response can take on a life of their own.

This approach is NOT recommended.

2. Set the record straight. This approach is the more typical gut reaction we as humans have. We turn into the best trial lawyer and make our case point by point… right below the negative review.

The problem with this approach is that you risk winning the battle but losing the overall war. You may even make some good points, but being combative makes you look really bad (perhaps worse than the original offense).

Most often, this approach is taken with a bit of an attitude… as though YOU were the wronged party. You end up sounding like the screeching voice of protest.

3. Apologize… own what you can… graciously (briefly) set the record straight- This is a hard way to go… but in my opinion the best way to go.

There are 3 parts to this approach… in this precise order:

A. Acknowledge. With this approach, you start not from the vantage point of defending your honor, but from a conciliatory posture. You begin by acknowledging the offense… from the vantage point of the offended party. Whether or not you are to blame for them feeling upset, you can acknowledge that if you were in their shoes, you too would be upset. You’re not saying they are right or wrong. You are just meeting them where they are at.

B. Apologize/Own. Once you have acknowledged their feelings, you own what you can… and apologize. If you screwed up, admit it. Fully. No “but” stuff. If there was a misunderstanding, apologize that you were not as clear as you thought you were. Own anything that could have contributed to the negative result.

Heck, I remember a time that 2nd Mile Marketing screwed up. We ran into delays in getting something done for a client. Part of the problem was due to the client. But, truth be told, we just didn’t operate efficiently on that project. Sure, they contributed to the problem… but if we had our act together, we probably wouldn’t have displeased this client. In the end, I had to apologize. I even gave the guy his money back, which settled him down.

C. Clarify. Only after the above are done, are you allowed to clarify (gently bring new facts to light).

Even here, you want to be careful. No need to refute point by point. Instead, pick one or two points where you want to bring something to light so the outside reader will see that it isn’t as black and white as the negative reviewer made it sound.

Remember, you are writing your response not only for the person who posted the negative response, but for future readers who see the negative review. They don’t need to know your entire perspective, or all 9 points that you insist the other person has distorted. Instead, they just need to know that there are two sides to this story.

In addition, you want the future reader to conclude that you are good to work with—fair, accommodating, not afraid to admit wrong, trying to do what you can to make things right.

An Example Of The Best Way To Handle Negative Reviews

Here is an excellent real-life example of how to respond to a negative review. Notice how the company incorporates all 3 steps in their response:

The negative review—

“I’ve had Peachtree as my termite control for almost 4 years. The technician that used to come out was prompt & clean; then I got a new guy. He would tear up my landscaping looking for the bait traps – even though there were flags placed around by the previous tech as markers; he would make an appt for one day, but not show or call, and the thing that irked me the most
was that I would get a bill before the services were even performed. I’m giving a new company a chance, because Peachtree just isn’t cutting the mustard anymore.”

The company response (actually written by the owner)—

“As a yard person myself I can absolutely appreciate treating your landscaping with care. I sincerely apologize for leaving your property in any condition other than we found it. As owner of Peachtree I take great pride in immediate response to my customers concerns. I realize we won’t always be perfect but we will always care and do everything possible to make things right. Please give me the opportunity to prove it to you. I’ve researched as much as I can and really have no idea who you are. If you’ll call me directly, let’s get your yard and billing concerns corrected. Thanks for the years of business! Corey Arnold; Owner (770) 931-9099.”

Why This Approach Works Best (according to scientific studies)

Social scientist Fiona Lee conducted tests to determine if admitting and owning negative results (not necessarily clear mistakes… just a negative outcome) would have a positive or negative overall result on people’s perceptions of a company or individual.

In other words, if something is perceived to have gone wrong, do observers view more positively an explanation (‘set the record straight why it isn’t our fault’) or owning the negative result?

Well, you know where this is going. Dr. Lee prepared annual reports for fictitious companies—half explaining why certain negative outcomes weren’t their fault (or were someone/something else’s fault beyond their control) and the other half owning the outcome. Those companies that stepped up and owned negative outcomes had a MUCH more favorable view in the eyes of outsiders.

Funny thing is, when you are the one being blamed, it feels counterintuitive to jump on the grenade rather than refute the conclusion. Somehow, we think by simply “setting the record straight” everyone will understand and agree with us.

Nope, it doesn’t work that way. The scientific studies prove this.

Scientific studies prove the best way to handle a negative online review for your home contracting business, but it is counterintuitive

The Silver Lining Of A Negative Review

Many prospective customers I have talked to about how they view reviews tell me they realize no one is perfect (and sometimes certain people are difficult to please). So, getting a negative review in and of itself isn’t the kiss of death. It does depend on the nature of the negative review… and the response to it.

In fact, prospects have reported they are even a bit suspicious of 100% positive reviews. In this day and age when some unscrupulous types pay people to fabricate reviews (or hide negative reviews), having a few negative reviews lends credibility to ALL the reviews.

What is important to prospective customers is the business getting the negative review appears to be going the second mile to make it right. It takes courage and a sense of humility to admit ones mistakes. These are attractive qualities that people admire.

When you properly handle your negative reviews, good things happen… both with your current customer, and future ones.

For additional info go to: http://thesemblog.com/2012/04/negative-online-business-review/, http://www.smbseo.com/negative-rating-reviews-explained, http://www.ehow.com/how_1000326_handle-negative-review-url.html

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Feedback from co-founders, friends, small focus groups, and especially existing customers is very helpful to qualitatively understand your product or service. However, this sample group is too small and biased towards people that will be polite, or who have predispositions toward the product.

Modify Watches sells interchangeable watch straps and faces separately to give customers the option of mixing and matching the accessory.  They decided to use the SurveyMonkey Audience product to gather actionable insights for the company.

So how do you get quality feedback?

Getting started on a survey is most effectively done by working backward. Modify knew plenty about its business anecdotally and through customer data, but less about its potential customer market.

Surveying customers, partners or prospective clients can help resolve a range of different issues facing a business. Instead of launching an all-encompassing survey, companies should take a step back to determine which issue is most vital to its success.

First and foremost, understand the core research question. Take time to walk through these steps before creating a survey.  This will ensure the data being collected will directly address a current pain point for the business.

Using a survey and a targeted audience to make smart decisions

After deciding the information most important to learn from a survey, it’s time to begin creating the survey itself. Keep it respondent-centric. To encourage engagement, respondents need to feel invested in the decision-making process, and the outcome of the survey.

When creating survey questions, remember three things: keep it short enough that respondents won’t get bored, scale responses to determine how much customers actually care about something (a yes/no question doesn’t allow them to fully answer the question), and make sure questions are in a systematic order, so the answer of one question doesn’t influence another.

Like many young companies, Modify had an initial sense of its target market demographics, largely based on founder knowledge, but this was highly anecdotal. This meant the company needed to sample a general population to validate its assumptions.

A few tips when targeting consumers with surveys:

• Give the entire target audience the opportunity to respond.
• Make sure that the number of survey respondents is large enough to provide statistically significant information.
  • Use online references to determine the exact number of respondents to reach a level of statistical confidence (this typically ranges between several hundred and 1,000).

• Frequent, focused surveys help monitor the pulse of customers so when trends change, so can business direction.

Putting results into action

By looking at the age and gender breakdowns of survey respondents who identified they were ‘Extremely likely’ or ‘Very likely’ to purchase a Modify watch, the company found most of its assumptions were correct. However, Modify was surprised to find strong interest in the 60+ female group, as well as the <18 category. With this data, Modify has a leg up over their competition with targeted customer and product outreach.

Too many companies issue research studies that sit in a desk drawer, instead of being used to affect change. Information direct from your company’s potential customers is an asset that should be used to implement improvements, otherwise what was the point of asking questions?

Having product reviews on a website can provide a dramatic boost in sales. Think about these facts for a second:

• According to iPerceptions, 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that has user reviews.
• A study from the online video-review site EXPO found that reviews from consumers are trusted nearly 12 times more than descriptions that come from the manufacturer.
• 50 or more reviews for a product can provide a 4.6% increase in conversion rates according to Reevoo stats.
• Visitors who read consumer reviews have a 6% higher average order value than visitors who did not read reviews according to Bazaarvoice.
• ForeSee Results CEO Larry Freed says if a customer “leaves your site to look for reviews, they most likely won’t come back.”

It should be fairly easy for business owners to put themselves in the customer’s shoes because we’re all consumers too. When making a purchase, potential customers want to know what other consumers think about a business or product, and that’s exactly what makes reviews such a powerful tool. Sites like Yelp and Angie’s List were founded entirely due to the demand of people to find an unbiased review to products or services in which they are interested.

Negative Reviews

The main fear behind allowing reviews seems to revolve around the possibility of receiving negative feedback. However, as the old adage says, nobody’s perfect. Consumers know this! Another study by Reevoo found that the presence of negative reviews helps to boost consumer trust of a site by 68% and shoppers who read negative reviews had a 67% higher conversion. Having a good balance reviews on a site makes you seem more trustworthy. And it’s especially worth your while if you can answer the negative reviews and provide great customer service.

Other benefits

While improving sales and customer confidence should be the main goal of adding user reviews, there is another benefit to having customer reviews on a site—they help with SEO. With search engines putting a greater emphasis on new and original content, having content that is regularly updated is advantageous. Having this type of content can also provide assistance with the long tail keywords searches. People who leave reviews typically use the same types of words that other people would use when actually searching for a product in a search engine. Once you find these new keywords, make sure to use them in future content.

How to get reviews

The vast majority of people will not be proactive with reviews unless there’s something negative to write. So there needs to be a little work on a site’s side to get these positive reviews started. The best way to get reviews is to proactively engage customers post sale. Sending an email after a purchase asking the customer to review the product is an easy first step. Conducting focus groups, offering incentives or even running a comparison chart are great ways to get people to talk about the product.

Overall, having reviews on an e-commerce website is a great way to boost profits. This gives immediate benefits with credibility and trust while also contributing long term with improvements to SEO. What has your experience been with customer reviews? Have you tried any other methods to get reviews? Let us know in the comments section below.

At any given time, you’ve got twitchy customers taking their complaints to the masses.

A quick look at the tweet stream from one of the whipping boys of social floggings, Comcast, brings us “deep” customer interactions such as:

Just in case Comcast questioned the legitimacy of Liz’s complaint, she includes the supporting data (well done).

Marsha Collier, a customer support guru who knows her way around social media, notes that in situations like Comcast, the problem often lies with the limitations of their infrastucture to follow up and take action on customer service issues. “If you don’t have the technology or staff to back up your services, online outreach is a waste of time. It is merely an attempt at PR which will soon be called out.”

Having depended on United for overseas travel as well as studied the United brand, I’ve witnessed my share of behavior that defies logic (though I never experienced my guitar being turned into kindling). Still, those on the front line are dealing with stuff like customers who can’t believe the airline has the audacity to sell all of their seats.

Even with such a zinger, Marsha points out that sometimes a sympathetic tweet in response diffuses the situation. “A nice touch would have been to contact the flight – which they can do – and offer the customers a free cocktail or snack for their troubles.”

I love this idea because social media becomes the door opener to a hand-crafted interaction with the customer and one with the potential to leave a positive impression.

I remember hearing Phil Bienert from AT&T talk at SoCon11 about creating a version of mission control with what sounded like more than 100 people tracking and responding in real time to any utterance of AT&T on Twitter. It all seemed so transactional with none of the human touch called out by Marsha.

More than transactions, social media should take its rightful place as part of the strategy in customer support.

Amazon apparently agrees given this recruitment ad for a social media leader focused on customer support:

• Amazon Customer Service is looking for an experienced leader for our Social Support team. In this role you will develop our global social support strategy, vision and roadmap and work with marketing, public relations, design, engineering, and operational teams to launch new support offerings.

The position reports into the director of support services.

This is where things are headed in companies taking a progressive approach to communications.

Even in companies without the scale to dedicate social resources to customer support, it’s time for social media to get out of its silo.

That last phrase does sound kind of weird.

Note: The narrative portion of the Amazon job description is included in this post below.

Starting with the sales department as the nearly ubiquitous need for every business and starting point for CRM use, the growth in breadth and customizability of CRM systems has begun to cause businesses to expand, or at least explore expanding, CRM to other areas of the organization. As a customer-centric business, field service is often one of these areas. But is using CRM software to manage a field service operation a good idea? We explore the pros and cons.

Pros

Like any business, field service organizations stay afloat by gaining and maintaining customers. CRM systems excel in managing customer relationships (as their name so aptly informs us). They specialize in helping companies market to customers, manage customer opportunities and activity, and sell to customers. They have the ability to manage marketing campaigns and potential leads as well as track opportunities and provide excellent sales service. In customer relations software, CRM is king.

As customer-centric companies, field service organizations make pleasing the customer their number one goal, which is why CRM systems can be useful tools. They provide a host of benefits in areas such as:

• Quoting—most CRM systems have quoting capabilities, which allow companies to lay out what services they recommend and how much those services will cost for the customer
• Opportunities—contrasted with the immediacy of quoting, CRM systems also provide the ability to track stages of customer opportunity from incoming lead to closing the sales deal
• Lead management—practically all CRM systems can handle top of the funnel inquiries and track leads when they are early stage prospects
• All customer information in one place—CRM systems allow field service organizations to contain all customer communications in one location
• Sales access to service history—sales people often use CRM software to track past experiences with customers that might impact sales ability
• Email integration for single source of customer activity tracking
• Integration/ app plug-ins—some CRM systems offer a variety of unique apps that can be installed through their app stores
• Marketing campaign management—some CRM systems allow companies to track marketing campaigns and evaluate their effectiveness in driving sales
• Operational excellence in service sales—because CRM systems are built for sales, they are able to implement best practices for sales departments

In addition to the features outlined above, CRM systems also allow businesses to stay up to date on current trends in customer service. Two of the most recent trends are:

1. Aligning sales and marketing departments so they work together through the entire sales process.

2. Marketing as customer service, meaning the company is so customer-focused that the differentiation between marketing and customer service becomes obsolete.

All of these features are useful for marketing and evaluating sales, but, as we all know, managing a well-run business and achieving customer satisfaction isn’t just about picking up leads and managing sales. As we saw above, CRM systems have come a long way in helping companies market, manage, and sell their products and services, which can lead some companies to try to adapt their CRM system to meet all of their business needs. Basic field services might even manage to run their entire organization through a CRM system. But larger field service organizations need more. Most CRM systems lack the capacity to conform to field service needs, which makes it challenging to manage an entire organization using CRM alone. So, instead of asking whether you can maneuver your CRM system to handle your field service needs, ask yourself whether your CRM system can handle your field service needs well.

Cons

While current CRM software excels in areas like marketing, sales, and customer acquisition, it is unable to perform many of the functions necessary for a best-in-class field service organization. Gaining new customers and maintaining old is important, but, as a field service organization, you must also make sure you save money and retain customers by performing well. Not only do you need an organized sales strategy; you also need to make sure things run smoothly in your office and in the field. Here are some of the problems you may encounter by trying to manage your field service company on a CRM system:

Scheduling/dispatching

Scheduling in the field service world is complicated business. You must consider several factors that other types of industries don’t have to address, like which field workers are nearest the site, who is trained to perform the job, which tools are needed and who has access to those tools, etc. Most CRM systems do not have scheduling systems at all, let alone one specific and complex enough to handle field service scheduling and dispatching needs. Some of the benefits of having a well-run scheduling system include:

• Reduced travel time
• Improved utilization
• Fewer needed resources in the back office and field
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Shorter appointment windows
• Improved customer appointment booking process
• Better matching of technician skill sets with work order requirements
• Reducing overtime

All of these benefits will contribute to the success of your company, taking your company to a level of efficiency that would not be possible by running it on a CRM system alone.

Asset/ Warranty

A 2013 research study conducted by the Aberdeen Group found that nearly one-third of attendees at the Chief Server Officer Summit stated a focus on warranty and contract management. What this means is that more companies are finding value in warranties and using them to increase revenue. What this also means is that field service organizations trying to run their companies on a CRM system without a program to manage warranties will miss out on this lucrative opportunity. In addition to adding to annual revenues, warranties also improve customer relations by nurturing a lasting contact between company and customer: “Service contracts and warranties have become a stream of recurring revenues for the organization while also being an opportunity to gain valuable insight from customers” (Aberdeen Group). If your company is running on a CRM system that doesn’t have the capacity to include warranties, you’re missing out on this opportunity for increased revenue.

Mobile

CRM systems do not provide mobile capabilities for field service workers, which can put companies at a disadvantage in a growing technological market: “Mobile solutions are key enablers of field service processes” (Aberdeen Group). Trends toward integrating mobile devices into every day service work are making workers more efficient, in effect, making companies with mobile capabilities more profitable.

Mobile solutions are increasing productivity by providing field service workers with accurate and timely information, which, in effect, reduces reliance on paperwork and time spent on administrative tasks. According to the Aberdeen Group, organizations that have successfully deployed mobile solutions have experienced near double-digit improvements in field service productivity, utilization, and customer satisfaction. Research confirms that in today’s market, if you don’t have a way to integrate mobile solutions into your field service work, you’re going to get left behind.

Quoting

Yes, quoting was in the “pros” list too. Though they do often have quoting capabilities, CRM systems are sold as “horizontal” software, meaning they’re geared toward general sales processes that are consistent from industry to industry. Unfortunately, because of the time sensitive nature of quoting in the field service industry, the quoting capabilities on most CRM systems don’t meet the needs of field service organizations. In addition, most CRM systems are unable to convert quotes directly to work orders, which field service organizations need in order to accurately and efficiently communicate with customers. 

Maintenance Contracts

Like the problem with quoting, CRM systems are able to create maintenance contracts, but they don’t quite fit with field service needs. Like the lack of Warranty functionality, CRM systems can’t do much to manage long-term maintenance contracts specific to field service needs. For example, when a company signs a contract to perform PMs (preventative maintenance contracts), CRM doesn’t offer programs to manage those contracts as regularly repeating services.

Managing equipment and inventory

A main organizational aspect of field service involves managing equipment and keeping track of inventory. CRM systems do not offer a way to log or update this information, which can make it difficult to track the need for and the cost of tools and parts. For example, if technicians don’t have a system in place to log the parts they’re using as they perform a service, it’s nearly impossible to accurately track inventory. Without the ability to track and manage equipment and inventory in real time, the response to orders will be slower and the success rate will, most likely, be lower.

Completing billing and invoicing

CRM systems don’t usually offer programs for on-site billing and invoicing. Systems that allow technicians to bill customers in real time save time and money while maintaining billing accuracy. CRM systems, which aren’t designed specifically with field service in mind, do not provide features for on-site billing connected to invoicing, and, as a result, make managing billing and invoicing in field service offices more difficult than if the company had an integrated on-site billing and invoicing system. 

Communication with technicians

Communication is a key aspect of running a successful field service organization and CRM systems do not offer any way for communication among office workers, managers and field technicians. Without a smooth and consistent communication system in place the quality of your field service will undoubtedly suffer.

Customization

As mentioned earlier, CRM systems are similar across industries because sales needs from company to company are relatively similar. Field service organizations, however, require a different sort of sales process and CRM systems do now allow them to customize programs to meet their specific needs.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, CRM software has a lot of potential for managing sales and marketing campaigns, improving customer service, and picking up opportunities for leads. However, most CRM systems are unable to perform necessary field service operations. Compared to companies that run on integrated field service management software systems, field service companies that try to run their businesses through CRM alone are less effective and productive. Switching to a system designed specifically for field service and catered to your needs would save time, money, and the hassle of trying to convert a CRM system into something it’s not.

7 Best Practices for Choosing New Field Service Software

There’s plenty of reasons that service organizations review, purchase and implement new field service management software. Regardless of what situations force your service organization to that tipping point, there are several tried and true methods you can use to organize the buying process, eliminate the unexpected and significantly increase your chances of success with your new software.

Truly the most confusing letter.

There are a lot of theories on how to best serve your customers, but in reality there is no one answer on how to provide good customer service. Instead, there are multiple factors that have to built into how a business interacts with its customers.

First, though, it us up to the business owner to determine what their customers expect from them in terms of interaction. After all, what works in a restaurant may not necessarily work for a tire shop. Part of finding your niche is learning what your customers expect, and then working to meet those expectations. After you figure that out, you can begin training your employees on how best to interact with the customers. Do they want to be greeted at the door? Updated on new products? Treated like close friends? Part of running a business is organically zeroing in on answers to those types of questions. While a business book can give a laundry list of recommendations, customer service expectations and policies should be built on your experience with your customers.

Of course, good customer service goes beyond your interactions with your customers. You also need to make sure your employees are happy and treated well by the management – yes, they should always work in the interest of the company and people that pay them, but you can always tell when someone hates working somewhere. A disheartened, unmotivated employee may not treat customers poorly, but they certainly won’t work to make sure they have an excellent experience.

Finally, there are three parts of customer service that advisors and analysts constantly harp about – knowledge, body language, and anticipating needs. Though these three things border on cliché, they can be useful as long as they aren’t the only three parts of customer service focused on. Everyone who works for the business should be knowledgable about what the business sells, should be able to make eye contact and smile, and should be able to anticipate common customer needs so that customers feel that the business went “above and beyond” (if you will pardon another cliché) while helping them.

Xenodochial may be a complicated word, but customer service doesn’t have to be. Honestly, a lot of what creates a good customer experience is common sense. Treat your customers well and know what you are talking about. When you hire people to work for you, make sure they know and do the same. Small businesses have an advantage over giant corporations because they can still inject a bit of that personal touch into how they interact with their customers. And, as long as your employees feel as though they are an important part of your business’s success, they will be willing to work hard to maintain that level of customer service you worked so hard to build.

If, however, you’re a low-cost leader like, say, Spirit Airlines, and you haven’t even developed much less aligned your customer experience strategy, your customers’ likely feel trapped and frustrated.

Recently, The New York Times ran an article about fee-happy, no-frills Spirit Airlines.  Yes, Spirit has clawed its way to profitability in the highly competitive airline industry, which is no small feat. But they’ve done it through bait-and-switch tactics, seemingly arbitrary policies, and a culture that—from the customer’s perspective—seems to take a perverse pride in delivering poor service.

For example, Spirit’s laundry list of “optional” fees makes most domestic airlines look downright transparent, starting with the fact that bringing any luggage is going to cost you $20 or more in fees.

Sustainable Price-Leadership Means Delivering More Than Low Cost. It Means Delivering Value.

The interesting thing is, Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza defends these practices in the name of delivering lower costs. In the article, Baldanza says, “I cringe a little when people say I don’t care about customers. We care about the thing that customers tell us they care the most about, and that’s offering the lowest possible fares.”

He continues with this gem; “We schedule our flights when the gate is available as opposed to when the customers want to fly. It doesn’t matter that no one wants to fly at 9 a.m. or 2 p.m. or in the middle of the night. The reality is that they want to fly when they get the low fare.”

Sure, on a literal level, Spirit Airlines is giving customers the bare minimum of what they want. But one of the points Mr. Baldanza is missing is that it’s always a vulnerable position when customers are choosing you only on price. But a couple changes on pricing policy from the big airlines, and Spirit loses the one advantage it has.

The other point he’s missing is this: Low-cost doesn’t have to feel cheap.  Far from it; among the many companies that compete on price and deliver a great experience, the feeling customers get is value.

A Winning Strategy for Low-Cost Leaders: Value-Driven Self Service

Far from feeling cheap and antagonistic—like Spirit’s offering—cost leaders don’t have to skimp on customer experience at all.  Take Ikea, for example. Low-cost self-service isn’t a detriment to their customer experience, because they’ve optimized it around great design, large selection, and high-value products.

Or look at Costco. In giant warehouses around the globe, customers happily break down palettes of canned goods, clothing, beer, and books, carting flat-bed carts of purchases to the register by the gross.

Both these companies have made self-service a defining characteristic of the customer experience.  Yet their customers embrace it, because the experiences are easy, enjoyable, and align with their expectations.

For these and other low-cost customer experience leaders, self-service creates value for customers and their firms, driving down internal costs and cost to customers. The result is market leadership and a sustainable competitive position that isn’t at risk because low-price is just one of the things their customers expect.

When Self-Service Meets Digital Innovation (Are You Listening, Mr. Baldanza?)

Certainly, Spirit Airlines doesn’t have huge retail stores. But they can learn from these experience leaders. Because what Ikea and Costco have done is embraced and optimized customer self-service as a customer experience strategy, but within the context of their business.

So what can other low-cost leaders learn? The truth is customers self-serve almost as much as they can with every airline, not just Spirit. But what Spirit doesn’t seem to get is the potential to use customer experience as a lens through which to view, plan, and deliver excellent, cost-effective experiences across all channels and touchpoints—from check-in to the front counter, on the web, through apps, phone, and more.

Forrester Research, Inc. notes three components for low-cost leaders who adopt a self-service strategy: simple, automated, and error-free. Here’s my interpretation:

• Simple: Simplifying products and services to make them more efficient reduces complexity and potential problems, making it easier for customers to succeed while benefitting your bottom line.
• Automated: Leveraging digital innovation to automate interactions drives customer convenience at a very low cost across channels and touchpoints; from transactions and information gathering to product and service delivery.
• Error-Free: When things go wrong, customers get frustrated and upset. “Making it right” takes time, money, and effort. A self-service experience that’s prone to error can’t really be considered a self-service experience anymore.

By delivering a self-service experience that works really well, companies can meet customers’ needs without requiring higher-cost human interactions. With this strategy as the lens through which experiences are designed, Customers will perceive self-service as an increase in value.

They’re not going to feel tricked or trapped, because in a well-planned experience, the lower prices they get are well-worth any “work” they’ve had to do themselves. Increasingly, customers prefer to do it themselves anyhow—provided, of course, that the experience is simple, automated, and error-free.

Hopefully, more price leaders will use low-touch, low-cost strategies like this to better serve their customers, instead of just to better gouge them.

Until then, at least one thing is clear. We know which airline to avoid…

Marketing alone is not going to win over affluent consumers. The affluent are extremely marketing savvy, so for financial services companies to be successful building business within this segment, financial products and services need to be aligned with the audience’s expectations.

When it comes to service, affluent consumers expect:

• Convenience. They want their issues handled in one stop, website visit or phone call. They also want information delivered to them in a variety of channels to ensure they have access to information at their fingertips.
• Personable, accessible service.They expect quality, personalized-for-them, live “human” service that is available 24/7.
  

  Chase Private Client provides a team of trained professionals accessible in branches or by phone via “a U.S.-based 24/7 service line, answered by a Chase Private client service professional.”

• A conversation. Affluent consumers don’t want to be sold to or talked down to, and they certainly don’t want to feel like they are being mass marketed to. They want to discuss their needs and be heard… and then be advised.
• Their bank to “get” them. They expect their banks to understand their personal situations, goals and aspirations. They don’t want “cookie cutter” solutions or laundry lists of choices. They want solutions customized for them.
• Special treatment. They want to be recognized for their status and achievements. They want dedicated branch space where they can conduct business in private, separate wait lines, dedicated phone numbers, etc.
• Assistance.They expect help with gift buying. And with travel arrangements. With dining recommendations, reservations and ticket procurement. Anything and everything is fair game.
  

  Amex Platinum Card Concierge has assisted cardmembers with honeymoon arrangements, finding a housepainter and locating a bracelet at a jewelry store in Greece.

When it comes to product benefits, affluent consumers respond well to:

• Access to once-in-a-lifetime experiences that money alone can’t buy;
  

  Chase Sapphire Preferred is a sponsor of Bon Appétit’s Vegas Uncork’d, an annual food and wine event with celebrity chefs. Cardholders get access to events and special pricing.

  

  Amex Platinum Cardholders have access to a U.S. Open Golf VIP hospitality package, a Wimbledon Tennis Championships experience, a Tribeca Film Festival package and more.

• Rich incentives that make taking action – or “switching” – worth their while;
• Benefits that make domestic and international travel experiences easier and smoother (i.e. chip, no foreign exchange fees, airport security clearance, airport lounge access);
• “Perks and privileges” such as free upgrades and waived nuisance fees;
  

  Six out of 10 “privileges” for Citi Gold customers are waived fees.

• Rewards customized based on their individual behavior/spend;
• Promotions and merchant offers (high-end retail, travel, etc.) with high perceived value; and
• Flexibility when it comes to payment options, reward redemption options and information delivery options.

These are just some of the product and service requirements that are quickly becoming “price of entry” in the affluent financial services space. Before you begin your next affluent marketing initiative, consider whether your products and services are affluent-ready.

My one-woman campaign to defeat what I’ve termed “Gilded Fork Syndrome” was borne out of frustration (and no small amount of sarcasm) while wearing my consumer hat at a certain coffee shop chain near my office.

Short story long (bear with me; it ends well), I sat down to eat my just-purchased fruit cup after enduring a long wait to order it in the first place, only to realize I had not been given a fork to enable me to do so. I quickly apologized to the friend I’d met for lunch and excused myself to set off on what would become nothing short of a treasure hunt.

Were the forks on the counter near the register?  No.

Were they somewhere tucked away near the prepared foods in the refrigerated case the fruit came from?  Nope.

Were they over at the condiment stand beside the sugar and cream for doctoring up the coffee?  Nu-uh.

Were they atop ANY flat surface at ALL in the shop where other, clearly less-prized, items like napkins, stirrers and lids were being made readily accessible to paying customers like myself?  No-sir-ee.

Puzzled, I stepped back into line to await my turn for eye-contact – since clearly standing off to the side with an inquisitive look on my face sending “please help me” vibes was getting me nowhere!  And all the while, I was preparing mentally for that imminent cringe-worthy moment when the barista would extend his finger and condescendingly point out, “They’re right over there.” (Duh.)  But even more baffling was the actual reply received, spoken as the employee bent over to reach beneath the cash register on his side of the counter: “We keep them down here.”

Huh??  Speechless, I thanked him and returned outside to the patio table where my patient friend awaited me and had somehow resisted the urge to send out a search party during my prolonged absence in pursuit of this elusive implement.

“Forks of gold, apparently,” was all I could mutter as I apologized for abandoning her.  “Seems they wanted to keep them away from us corporate riff-raff.”

In all seriousness, why on earth would an eatery take something so essential as a FORK and stash it away somewhere completely inaccessible by its clientele?  My purchased product was already in hand; I just couldn’t consume it in an elegant fashion without this tool designed to facilitate its delivery.

Granted, I could have gotten by with a crude workaround such as eating with my fingers like a caveman.  Certainly the caliber of the meal itself would have remained unchanged despite the two methods of intake being markedly different – just as my likelihood to return or recommend would have been despite the identical quality of the purchase in question.

In fact, even though I ultimately got my hands on that figuratively gilded fork just the same as if it were presented to me up front, the difficulty encountered while hunting it down managed to degrade my experience nonetheless.  Just goes to show, sometimes it’s not only the end state that matters, but also the means to that end and how painless it was getting to where X marks the spot.

So, what trove of useful tools is each of our companies making its customers hunt for?  What are we hiding away under lock-and-key that could potentially facilitate a more elegant experience with the products or services that we represent?

Few things are simultaneously more appreciated and resented than being provided with a quick tip, lesson learned, or best practice that immediately simplifies and improves your experience, only to make you wonder why in the world you had to make do for so long without it.  Tracking down such buried treasure in our own organizations and proactively surfacing it to our customers will bring rewards to all!

Image courtesy of nizahbanana

Several years ago, the outlook was a little hazy as to if the public sector would move to the cloud, but with the Office of Management and Budget’s Cloud First initiative, it’s now just a question of who, what and when most agencies will do so, if they haven’t already.

Just as it’s lowered entry barriers for businesses in the private sector, cloud computing is making sophisticated customer engagement technologies available to cost-conscious government entities who have long been barraged by constituent complaints and angry reviews about service quality and speed, but have had no easy or affordable way to improve upon the siloed solutions that had been in place for years.

“The cloud has always been an attractive IT solution for the government because it’s so difficult to get capital expenditures budgeted,” says Ken Landoline, principal analyst at Current Analysis. “If an agency had to deploy an ACD (automatic call distributor) for a call center, it meant spending $2 to $3 million on hardware, software and start-up costs. Now, they can have customer service software up and running in a couple of days in the cloud, with a monthly expense to manage as opposed to a capital investment.”

Such benefits have been driving the U.S. government’s Cloud First strategy, which requires agencies to evaluate secure cloud computing options before making new IT investments. This same strategy identified $20 billion in potential savings from cloud computing, representing about a quarter of federal IT spending.

The private sector was first to successfully test cloud solutions for customization, scale and effectiveness. In a recent Sailpoint survey of more than 400 private sector IT and business leaders, respondents reported that one-third of their mission-critical applications are now in the cloud, a number they expect to grow to half by 2015.

As for the public section, the IDC predicts that federal government cloud services adoption will increase by 50% in 2013 over 2012, comprising more than 7% of government IT spending. Drilling down 25% of IT leaders responding to InformationWeek’s 2013 Federal Government Cloud Computing Survey said they’ve already taking advantage of SaaS solutions, while 56% cited SaaS as their next cloud initiative, even though security does remain a chief concern.

A recent MeriTalk report on migrating mission-critical applications to the cloud reveals that the government could save approximately $16.6 billion annually if all agencies move just three mission-critical applications to the cloud. Of those that have already moved at least one, 91 percent have reported success.

Cloud adoption by the government isn’t just a US phenomenon. The UK and Australia are among many others working to support cloud computing adoption. The public sector’s collective priority is right on track, in line with Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for Smart Government, which includes cloud computing at number 9:

1. Mobile Devices
2. Contextual and Social User Experience
3. Next-Gen Analytics
4. Internet of Things
5. Citizen-Managed Data
6. Business Process Management
7. Big Data Information Management
8. Enterprise App Stores
9. Cloud Computing
10. Cross-Domain Interoperability

The move to the cloud is just a part of a bigger forecast that includes navigating a perfect storm of individually disruptive yet converging technologies known as the nexus of forces which includes mobile, social, cloud and big data.

New Parature Whitepaper Details Additional Government Customer Service Best Practices

For more government customer service best practices and advice from leading analysts, download Parature’s latest whitepaper, Multi-Channel Service: Elect to Serve Your Constituents, covering key topics in government customer service and constituent engagement including:

• Providing ‘no wrong door’ access
• Moving to the cloud
• Capturing voice of the customer feedback
• Using service to drive revenues and compete with the private sector
• Leveraging cloud technology simplicity to attract, retain and maximize IT talent.

Click here to download

The whip smart but irascible founder develops a real-time social media platform restricted to monosyllables like “Wow” and “Epic.” Soon, millions of middle schoolers adopt the service (primarily to comment on Justin Bieber), and not long after normal people who think like middle schoolers are using the service too. The founder has hired a bunch of employees who are only barely out of middle school themselves. Bean bags, Golden Retrievers, and keg parties seem to be major components of the company’s strategy. At the board meeting (which they hold off-site since one of the VCs is allergic to dogs) one of the expensive suits from Sand Hill road brings up the topic:

“So, ah…Eric. It’s been pretty remarkable what you’ve done in growing the company to where it is.”

[Eric smiles weakly and mouths ‘thank you’]

“…However…I think it’s time we think long-term about the company’s prospects and maybe …. You know … consider what we might be able to accomplish if we brought in [these words hit Eric like darts] more experienced leadership.”

Presumably, the experienced CEO will come in and bring order (and money) out of the chaos. He will, of course, “know what to do” in thousands of sticky situations involving people, processes, product, and other things that begin with “p.”

There’s just one problem with the new CEO:

It’s been a long time since he was in middle school.

The One Thing That’s Important

The customer is the company. Not just at first. Customers are irreducible. Unless you have customers, you don’t have a company. You can strip away everything else and the patient is still breathing, but cut out customers and the company ceases to be a company.

As Peter Drucker pointed out half a century ago:

“There are no results within the organization. All the results are on the outside. The only business results, for instance, are produced by a customer […]”(The Effective Executive).

Customer in Chief

The role of the founder is to be the first customer.

When you’re first starting out, you are living in a shadow world isolated from reality by thick clouds of consultant-produced haze. It may be months before you can sell an actual product to an actual customer and cut through the haze (and hopefully the consultants) into objective reality. But until then, what is to guide you?

This is the founder’s great moment. He knows where to go because he is (himself) the customer. He has been living, up until now, with the aching absence (like a phantom limb) of a product that he will give birth.

This product is being built for him. Like Neo, he is the first to feel that there is something wrong with the universe, and until the product is built, the splinter in his mind cannot be removed.

It was like this for Marc Andreessen when he started Netscape. Ben Horowitz writes:

“My friend Marc Andreessen invented the web browser and it is as though he invented it exclusively for his own personal use. Marc absorbs more information than anyone I’ve ever known or even heard about. […]. He had to invent the browser, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been nearly enough information for him to absorb.”

It was like this for Drew Houston starting Dropbox:

“He planned to work during the four-hour ride from Boston but forgot his USB memory stick, leaving him with a laptop and no code to mess with. Frustrated, he immediately started building technology to synch files over the Web.”

It was the same for my company. Bomgar started because my friend Joel Bomgar didn’t want to drive anymore to fix computer problems. Building a remote support product removed the splinter. The fact that thousands of other IT workers wanted it too was an addendum.

And does anyone really believe that Facebook could have been created by an adult?

The founder doesn’t know much about business, but what he does know is the only thing that’s really important. The customer.

What’s Good for the Goose…

People act like a startup and a business are two different things. They are not. Customers are at the heart of both, and forgetting this (as many stuffy multi-product, multi-national corporate dinosaurs do) is a recipe for self-destruction or (worse) mediocrity, with thousands of locked-in, but disgruntled customers.

The problem with bringing in a new hot shot CEO is that he (by virtue of his experience not in spite of it) has an almost impossible time being the customer. He can’t force himself to like Justin Bieber, and “Epic” is a poem by Homer. He may succeed in turning the successful startup into a stodgy corporate eminence . . . but who really wants that?

There are many that say “Engagement is all about the web and social platforms, that’s where all the action is at, that’s where the customers are at.” Well, maybe for them, but it’s certainly not for me. And in my informal polling, it’s not for many others.

Are the social platforms really THE place where we connect and engage our customers and prospects? Are our customers “hanging out on social selling platforms?”

Well, Yes—kind of, and No—kind of…..

Let me explain myself. Many claim the social platforms are THE means of connecting and engaging. If you are reading this blog, you’ve probably drunk the Kool Aid, and you may be starting to leverage social platforms to connect and engage. If you came to this article through Twitter or one of the sites where this post is syndicated, you are probably more biased to engaging people through social platforms.

But is this where your customers are really hanging out and is this where you first or best engage them? Well, Yes—kind of, and No—kind of….

Before I go on, let me make a distinction between using social platforms to research, analyze, gain insight and leveraging them to actually connect and engage one to one. I couldn’t do business without leveraging many of the powerful social platforms and tools to research my and understand prospects or customers. LinkedIn is critical to me. Tools like Insideview accelerate my understanding of enterprises and organizations. SEC.gov is one of my favorite social platforms…….Hmmmmm!

But connecting and engaging with prospects and customers on social technologies….. it depends.

I decided to do a very unscientific study. I started looking at some executives, wondering, do I connect and engage them through the social platforms?

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com is keenly aware of social technologies, he’s always Chattering about it (sorry, I couldn’t restrain myself). So I thought, “Let me reach out to Marc through some key social platforms to connect and engage him. I go to my old standby, LinkedIn, turns out Marc and I have 44 contacts in common. He even publishes his email address, ceo@salesforce.com. But I look at Marc’s profile in LinkedIn, clearly he hasn’t devoted much time to his profile and presence on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably not a good way to connect with him–though I could leverage some of our common connections–but I’d probably phone or email them, developing a strategy to get introduced. (Again, a powerful research tool, but in this case probably not a good engagement tool.)

Not to be deterred, I thought, let me connect with him through Twitter. He’s got over 57K followers (including me) He’s following 697 people–no not me, as of this moment, he’s done 2,547 tweets. Hmm, my guess is a shout out, “Hey @benioff Let’s talk! Have I got a deal for you! ” isn’t bong to be very effective. But I’ve been a salesperson for a long time, I won’t be deterred, I’ll look at another social platform. I went to Klout. Here it gets a little confusing, he has two profiles, one has a Klout score of 82 another has a Klout score of 42. Maybe if I gave him a +K on Salesfoce, or Business, we might connect.

I’ve come to the conclusion that while Marc has great presence on the social platforms, it’s probably not the place he hangs out and not where I really want to connect with him. (Marc, if you’re reading, I’ll accept your invitation to connect on LinkedIn or your follow on Twitter.).

I then set my sights on Larry Ellison, of Oracle…….. Well enough said, just look at his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. Fortunately, I sail and am well connected with people on America’s Cup.

On the other hand, my good friend Vala Afshar of Enterasys, @valaafshar, has a preference for connecting and engaging through social platforms. We first met and engaged on Twitter, and have since developed a deep and rich relationship, leveraging many channels, including the old school F2F. Vala recently made a brilliant hire of a marketing executive, primarily leveraging social platforms and technologies.

More seriously, the vast majority of my customers and prospects are still unaware or uncomfortable with engaging deeply or exclusively through social platforms. While we have generated a lot of business through these platforms, most everyone wants (some of the most tech savvy people in the world) still have a preference for non social platforms.

My point is, each person we want to connect and engage, has different preferences and channels through which we most effectively connect and engage. If we are going to connect with them, it’s our job to figure out where they hang out, where they are most comfortable in connecting and engaging.

Social platforms and tools give us tremendous capabilities in researching, analyzing and understanding. But social selling cannot be limited to the social platforms.

Maybe someday, but it’s not here yet.

Death by design sneaks into culture, into presentations and into the customer experience.

The latest *awesome* example of really poor design is from the U.S. military. Following the leak/whistle-blowing of the PRISM surveillance program, the PowerPoint which explained the program quickly made the rounds. And then something really interesting happened. Instead of just criticizing the design, some designers took the initiative and redesigned the key slides. These slides were transformed from ugly, uninformative and illegible to clear, concise and attractive.

before

after

This points to many issues with poor design. It’s not just what is nice looking and what’s not, it’s about getting information across.

Customer experience death by design is not something to dismiss.

Helping your customers find what they need is a primary objective for ANY customer experience. In some cases, the customers you are serving are other employees or departments within your organization.

It seems presenters of information, whether it’s a PowerPoint agenda or signs in the airport, don’t ask the questions before launching into design.

Key questions to ask before designing anything:

1. What information am I trying to convey?

So simple, but let’s face it, often overlooked. Conferences are really great at selecting speakers who are interested in selling their services. Attendees don’t typically care. They attend the conference to learn, to hear what’s next, to understand. And it’s SO disappointing when the speaker doesn’t really convey anything except “WE WANT YOUR BUSINESS AND I WILL HARASS YOU IF I GET YOUR CARD.” It’s even worse when the presentation is lacking any personality or visually appealing slides. Throw in a monotone and an illegible spreadsheet (I’ve seen it!) and as an audience member, you regret you won’t ever get those 60 minutes back.

2. What is the MOST IMPORTANT piece of information?

Design and communication should be about action. What action would you like someone to take? Financial services companies send out a lot of things that tell us, what, exactly? Overused headers, designed to get attention, scream things in bold like Important Information or We Care and yet readers are trained to gloss right over this. Design, when done well, elevates the entire experience. The important information gets attention because of both what it is and the action being directed. Poor design coupled with poor communication is a recipe in apathy. No matter what is being designed, apathy is not the goal of the experience.

3. What context will the reader/customer see this in?

Context is king and all that, but it’s still not addressed in many parts of the customer experience. Consider mobile. If a mobile user is seeking a train schedule, consider the context of when and how he might be doing this. Don’t create a complex design that means he’ll miss not only the train, but might even walk off the tracks. Context of where, how, and who the user is should be at the forefront of any customer experience design.

Customer experience death by design is avoidable. There are many examples where great design brings the entire experience forward. What are your favorite examples of design? What are your favorite examples of awesomely bad design? My feeling is the NSA PowerPoint example will live in infamy for a very long time.

Photo Credit: Whatsername? via Creative Commons

I’m likely not telling you anything you don’t already know. Reviews are incredibly beneficial, whether you’re looking for a vacation property, a SAAS product for your B2B business, what kind of car to buy, or the best kind of nontoxic sunscreen to buy for your kids (bet you can’t guess what I’ve been working on this past week and the kinds of reviews I’ve been reading).

Smart brands realize that customer service doesn’t end when the product or service has been delivered. In fact, that’s just part of the equation. What happens after the sale can, in many instances, be just as important. Post sale reviews by satisfied customers allow you to produce dynamic, regularly updated and nearly real time content that can be used as a trust builder with your community. Post sale reviews can be used on your website, in your ecommerce store, on your Google+ page (bonus!), or on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or whatever other social media channels you’re using to connect with your customers and prospects.

The kicker? Getting your customers to write reviews or testimonials or leave product or service ratings can be tricky. People are busy, reviews take time and, in many instances, it just doesn’t occur to someone to make time to write a review, even if they love your product. Here are some things you can do:

Start With A Strategy

You’ll need to create a strategy that starts will proactively reaching out to your customers post-sale to entice action following their purchase. And as you craft your ask, think about what’s in it for them. Your request of your customers to do something that’s essentially a huge benefit for you should also include a carefully crafted perk or offer that rewards them for completing the review. Think about it: how often are you compelled to do something that takes time and effort when there’s absolutely no benefit for you? Here are some additional points to consider.

Ask For The Review

Remember to ask. Develop your sales cycle so that within a certain time period after a purchase and delivery of the merchandise or services, you’ve set up an automated response trigger that generates a request for a product. Maybe consider offering a discount for future purchases or consider an extended warranty, which can be confirmed in the ‘your review has gone live’ message.

Reward Top Contributors

Everybody likes feeling like they’re special. Consider giving regular reviewers special treatment with perks such as a sneak preview of upcoming products or a secret sale that’s only available to VIP customers. Not only will you benefit from the continued support of these brand advocates, but you’ll make them feel special and valued—and that will help encourage them to remain loyal to your brand.

Cross-Sell

Don’t assume that people know all the different products that you sell. Tempt them to want to buy more by including a ‘People who bought this item also bought’ snippet with previous reviews to increase cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. This is also an effective way to help market new products or services that align with a customer’s previous purchase habits.

Spread The Word

Be sure to include a call to action for the recipient to share the review with his or her social network by way of sharing buttons that are prominently placed on the review site. Remember: the easier you make it for a customer to do something, the more likely he or she will oblige.

Test, Test, Test

Whatever your strategy, remember to never be satisfied with the results you’ve got. Test, test and test again on a regular basis all aspects of your review program to see what works best for you—and your customers. Which incentives produce the best results? When is the best time to send your post-purchase message? Is one review request enough or should you follow up a non-responder? The secret to success when it comes to the online world is to never quit mining and analyzing your data and fine-tuning your operations based on what your data tells you.

In summary, by paying close attention to your data and regular testing, and by integrating your review platform with your digital marketing platform, you’ll be in a position to include customized recommendations and product ratings in pre-purchase, promotional and transactional emails. These reviews and recommendations, when targeted to a prospect’s interests, are likely to be much more relevant, leading to a greater interest and ultimately increased sales and revenues.

I love data. It’s truly the most important component of your overall marketing strategy and there are so many ways to use your data to drive sales. What about you? Have you put any sort of strategy and promotions in place to encourage customer reviews? What are you finding that works?

Image: HowardLake via Compfight cc