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Ideas, tips and techniques for new generation selling and customer support.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
2009
SaaS Success: Bringing enterprise lessons to personal appointments
An article by TimeTrade CEO Ed Mallen appeared today on GigaOm and was cross-posted to Salon.com. We’re only allowed to show you the lead paragraph…
One of the key sales criteria in the enterprise application space — and one of the greatest development challenges — is the ability to scale. At TimeTrade we have met that challenge, creating a successful business selling SaaS-based applications that enable very large organizations and businesses to schedule and manage millions of appointments. …
For the whole story including the six tips, please do visit GigaOm or Salon.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
Tagged: efficiency, ROI, saas
2009
Customer experience is not just post-sale: Social Media gets clearer
Brian Haven is a hotshot who describes himself as a “recovering Forrester analyst.” He was involved with their social media practice. I heard him speak at today’s meeting of the Social Media advisory board of the Mass. Tech Leaders Council. Best session I’ve ever heard, personally, on how to make sense of the practical value of social media. This is the first of two posts I’ll do on it.
When I say “best session I’ve ever heard,” I don’t say it lightly. Aside from being a rather finicky analytical thinker, I’ve got some experience at online conversations: I’ve been doing forum communities for 20 years, I write on four blogs, and I’ve been madly involved in Twitter for four months, with a Twitter grade of 99.1 (at home). But Haven’s talk was the first time this all fit together in the context of the new world of customer relations – for business.
To get it, first understand the conventional marketing funnel. It’s all nice and linear, like this:
A certain number of eyeballs see your message, and some get it (awareness), some consider it, etc., until some buy. You work to tweak the ratios at each step.
In today’s world, not so much. For one thing, it’s not linear. For another, that diagram misses that in reality, important other voices come in – people don’t just hear the message you worked out so carefully in your cube or your conference room:
People can google your competition just as easily as they googled you; they ask friends (the most trusted source); there are often peer-review web sites; and that’s not to mention UGC – user generated content, including blog posts and Twitter. And you can’t control any of it.
The old funnel is pretty much shot, because the conversation goes every whichway, with all kinds of influences along the way. Not only that, but in reality today there’s more than one output: some people emerge as buyers, but everyone else comes out as influencers who’ll be the input to other people’s decisions later.
“What’s the marketing takeaway,” as our buddies at HubSpot TV say? In every bit of social media conversation about you, you can be fertilizing the soil in which your current and future deals will grow, or you can be ignoring it. So:
- Listen. Pay attention to what people are saying.
- Hear. At an event in February, social media was used to collect audience questions, but the questions were largely ignored. Oops: missed opportunity!
- Get in the game. If you’re still giggling or making rude jokes when people say “Twitter,” I’d say you’re in danger. The pundits who say Twitter’s just for idiots are missing the opportunity to set up a Twitter search for their own name, and hear what people are already saying about their brand … not to mention that they’re missing the chance to participate.
In short, the customer experience starts long before people buy. Are you listening? Be good to them as early as you can.
The graphics above were a small part of Brian’s slides. He’ll be posting them online; email him for a copy.
I hope to post next week on what he said about Forrester’s “engagement wheel,” which is the best model I’ve seen, by far, for conceptualizing old and new metrics into an action-worthy framework.
Continued in Part 2
Filed under: online scheduling
Tagged: collaboration, customer experience, social media, web 2.0
2009
Freakonomics blog asks: Is the Waiting Room Necessary? ($5B worth?)
Well! As we like to say here at TimeTrade, it’s about time!
The 2005 book Freakonomics has sold 3 million copies (wikipedia), and has morphed into a successful blog on the New York Times site. And finally, they had the good sense to realize that waiting is a waste of time and money. Why didn’t I think of that?
Characteristically, the Freakers sought backup data. Love that: there’s nothing like taking a gut-level complaint (bad customer service) and quantifying the damage.
Who knew the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has a Time Use Survey?? Using BLS statistics, the post figures that American adults waste $5 billion of time a year in waiting rooms.
And that’s just for medical or dental care. Think about all the other places you wait for service.
I had some things to say… my comment’s here. I only touched briefly on web appointment scheduling, because there are plenty of other things to say about why this kind of waste doesn’t make sense.
Our mission here at No Lines, No Waiting is to have people wake up to the inefficiency and rudeness waiting causes. (That’s what our first post was about.) Glad to have Freakonomics on board.
Filed under: appointment scheduling software, online scheduling
Tagged: customer satisfaction, customer service, economy, waiting
2009
A Key to Customer Service: Listening (and Hearing)
To make a relationship sustainable, vendors and customers need to be decent partners. Customers can’t expect everything to be free, but at the same time, vendors need to hear what customers are saying, and let customers know they’re listening.
Whatever the outcome on any particular incident, you can tell whether someone’s listening or stonewalling. I just ran across a post that illustrates this perfectly. Not surprisingly, it’s Apple.
Advertising / new-media blogger Bhatnaturally (his surname is Bhat – the blog title reads “But naturally”) has been an Apple customer for ten years, and he’s got a problem: the screen on his 2006 MacBook has gone bad. In his post What we can learn from Apple customer service, he writes about the frustration of what it’ll cost him and his experience trying to reach someone who’ll listen to his plea for an exception.
Throughout, he makes clear that he knows it’s out of warranty and that Apple already made an exception for him in the past. What makes all the difference to him is that through persistence he was able to reach a senior level person who listened. And he concludes:
On hard facts, I am not entitled to – I neither have extended warranty nor AppleCare Protection Plan. But simply entertaining a call of this nature speaks volumes about their attitude to customer care. I doubt if other brands in the same category will even bother. I may end up living with a faulty display screen but my image of Apple’s service has not been dented severely.
We at TimeTrade have a live incident underway in which someone had a real problem because a planned feature doesn’t exist yet. More about this in a future post. All I can say is, we believe in listening.
p.s. How not to listen: respond to critics the way Sarah Lacey did at SXSW last year, after her fiasco of an interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. 
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, customer service, retail
2009
Book time with Aliza at SXSW, using TimeDriver
This is about a convergence of several things worth noting: a hot event that’s starting today, a visionary guy I know, and a blogger who’s using TimeDriver and Twitter to solve a real, large-scale appointment scheduling problem in an inventive Web 2.0 way.
South By Southwest (“SXSW” to those in the know) used to be “just” a modest music festival in Austin, but it’s become huge:
- 1,800 bands on 80 stages
- A massive film festival with 150-200 indie films shown at six venues over nine days
- A “new media”/interactive conference that had 10,000 attendees last year. (How could I not have heard about this for all these years?)
Friend and Austin resident Jon Lebkowsky (Wikipedia, Twitter), a colleague in one of my after-hours activities, has been involved with SXSW forever. He’s one of this year’s “panel pickers” and is organizer of Plutopia, one of the hottest parties there. (How could I not have known about this?? Didn’t meet Jon soon enough, I guess.) A long-time visionary and pioneer of social change, Jon explains how the media festival has morphed into interactive: “Hey, it’s all gone digital, man.”
Anyway, this week on Twitter I was tickled to see that prolific WebWorkerDaily blogger Aliza Sherman (her blog, Twitter) is using TimeDriver to book her many many appointments at the festival. Here’s one of her tweets:
Click her TimeDriver link and you get the welcome screen she set up in TimeDriver for this conference:
That takes you to her current list of unused time slots. Here’s what it says as I write this:
(When I checked an hour ago, she had a 5:30 slot, but apparently that’s been taken. )
Now, here’s the cool thing: As busy as she is, she doesn’t even know whether her calendar is full yet. She’s not managing it, it’s filling itself.
Look what she wrote in that tweet: “I think I still have some time slots left.” (Emphasis added.) Doesn’t know; doesn’t need to know. She sets aside certain hours on certain days, she publishes the invite (on Twitter and elsewhere), and the rest takes care of itself.
How cool is that?
See, “no lines, no waiting” doesn’t just apply to “wait-ees” standing in line; inviters can get modern, too. Who knew that a little web link could save a busy blogger a bundle of time?
2009
Sprint boosts customer service via online appointment scheduling
As we noted last week, Sprint picked up on Apple’s Genius Bar idea and has been exploiting convenient web self-service appointment scheduling to improve customer satisfaction.
A new story Extended Coverage Area, just out today in Stores magazine, gives additional details that we didn’t realize were public. Excerpts:
- Sprint’s online appointment platform from TimeTrade Systems is helping to transform the company’s stores from product-oriented to customer-oriented.
- If the call center representative can’t diagnose the defect over the phone, he can use the system to make a store appointment for the customer or recommend the customer go to the website and make an appointment himself.
- The system bases appointments on the availability of store employees and on the consumer’s reason for visiting, which can include making a purchase, having a device repaired or receiving instruction in using a phone or service. The customer’s needs determine which employee to assign — a salesperson or technician — and how much time to allot for the appointment.
- Dixon concurs. “We got it implemented faster…than any system I’ve ever seen implemented at Sprint. We were able to get it up and running pretty flawlessly right out of the gate.” [Kim Dixon, Sprint's senior vice president of consumer sales]
- Customer surveys show that all of these measures have boosted the company’s image, Dixon says. The number of customers categorizing themselves as being “extremely satisfied” rose from 80 percent in early 2008 to 90 percent this year. “We are really moving the needle in the stores, which is what we hoped,” Dixon says.
- These and other improvements have also helped Sprint raise its results 50% between August and February in a J.D. Power satisfaction study.
Congratulations to Sprint for their vigorous approach to customer satisfaction — and especially for the great results they’ve already racked up. There is real value in making it easier for customers to get what you’re offering, and this is a great case in point.
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, customer experience, customer satisfaction, retail
2009
Operational excellence: Simple solution for business improvement
Denis Pombriant is founder and principal of Beagle Research, an insightful analyst firm in the CRM world. He is a leading voice in CRM and on-demand technology such as SaaS (software as a service). In this guest post he shares his perspective on how businesses can improve by leveraging operational excellence.
Most companies take the customer experience very seriously and look for ways to improve it. But in a recession, improving the customer experience may not be enough. Customer purchase patterns slow down and it is harder for many vendors to remain relevant through an experience only approach.
There are two ways to analyze your business with the intent of improving it and in a recession it is important to examine all possibilities. In addition to customer intimacy strategies, which include customer experience, there is the issue of operational excellence.
Improving operations has been thought of as a back office expertise and often the first things we think of are production, shipping, invoicing and the like. But the advent of on-demand technology has brought operations into the front office as well. Smart companies know that their operations — and how well they meet customer expectations — are vital front office responsibilities now. Operations affect the customer experience, big time.
The great thing about an operational excellence strategy is that it lags behind customer intimacy approaches in the front office. There is a world of opportunity in the front office to apply operational excellence techniques to make your company easier to do business with but modifying operations does not have to mean a big expense. It might sound funny, but when your company is easier to do business with, customers remember and they are more likely to come back. Who wouldn’t want to go back to the place where it’s easy to get things done?
Very few application types can help organizations with both front office interpersonal relations and at the same time help to streamline operations. Appointment scheduling is one of them. When you offer customers the choice of being able to make an appointment rather than taking their chances with walking in, many good things happen. Customers are more relaxed because they know they will not wait in a long line for service. They also know that you are expecting them, thinking about their unique requirements and that your session will be focused on them.
There are benefits for vendors too. Making appointments helps you manage your business so that you will be optimally busy. There will be fewer slack times and fewer times when demand exceeds your capacity to deliver. Appointment scheduling is one of those improvements that any business can implement at a very low cost. It helps manage resources, set and exceed customer expectations and it works for a variety of businesses. Making appointments helps improve your customer experience by optimizing operations — a powerful return on a simple solution.
Related content: see our other posts on efficiency
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: efficiency
2009
WebWorkerDaily: 10 Apps You Can’t Do Without, including (of course) scheduling software
I’m loving this post, from Aliza Sherman at WebWorkerDaily today — 10 Apps You Can’t Do Without:
So you’ve been downsized. Or you’ve bailed before being booted because you saw the writing on the wall. Or maybe you skipped the steady paycheck for a go at being a freelancer. Whatever the reason you’re out there on your own now, we’ve compiled a list of apps you’ll need to run your web-working business.
The categories she covers are ALL SaaS, and a lot are Web 2.0, with heavy emphasis on efficiency and collaboration:
Invoice management, time tracking, CRM, RSS readers, email tools, phone (concall and VoiP services), calendars / scheduling, document collaboration, and file storage / backup.
Happily, in the scheduling software category she cites our TimeDriver, which she’s mentioned before.
I’ll be using some of the tools she mentions myself, because although she may write primarily for individuals, the goodies she cites are useful for bigger orgs than that, and for individuals within big orgs. (For instance,TimeDriver is used by people in massive healthcare companies, massive insurance companies, etc. Heck, Microsoft Word is an individual tool too, but it’s used by the thousands.)
I’m especially interested in her post Project Management, Collaboration and How Our Brains Work as we begin porting our web presence to a new platform.
Business takeaway: You don’t have to be solo to value these tools, because you don’t have to be solo to be a Web worker.
(And for anyone who takes appointments, large or small, appointment scheduling software like TimeDriver can save a boatload of time.)
Good post, Aliza. We’re subscribing.
Related content: case study TimeDriver eliminates tedious scheduling time for driven real estate coach (may require free registration)
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, collaboration, efficiency, saas, web 2.0
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