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Ideas, tips and techniques for new generation selling and customer support.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
2009
It’s the Cluetrain’s tenth birthday. Are you on board?
Ten years ago this month, Cluetrain.com declared the impact the internet was having on communication among us, and declared the death of corporations’ ability to control conversations. It contained 95 theses. Excerpts from the first few:
- Markets are conversations … Markets consist of human beings. … Conversations among human beings sound human.
- These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
- Markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized.
- People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.
- There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
Think about how visionary that was. (Ten years ago!) In January 2001 it became a book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. The entire text is now available free online. Here’s the elevator speech version, which of course they called the “elevator rap”:
The point of all this is that there’s no longer anywhere to hide if you’re trying to get away with being schlocky or low-rent. If people want to tell on you or “vote you up” on some consumer ratings web site, they no longer need to go through controlled channels.
Thesis #7 has become real: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. You don’t have to go through channels to get anywhere else, like a rat that’s forced to backtrack through tunnels. Hyperlinks let you jump to anywhere else. In social terms, it means you can exchange messages with anyone
you want, presuming they’re interested too. No one can stop us. You just need to be interesting to the other person.
Larry Bohn, then CEO of 
NetGenesis, was one signer of the Cluetrain theses, saying “Beware or be roadkill!” To this day, this image appears on the Cluetrain web site.
Can there be any clearer indication that in a Cluetrain world, good customer service is a really good idea? Some clues:
- Be good to your customers.
- Listen, hear, and get in the game.
- And when someone wants to do business with you, remove all obstacles.
One way to do that is to offer self-service appointment scheduling or reservations on the Web, as restaurants, Sprint, Apple, Best Buy, Target Portraits, JCPenney Portraits, and airlines do. Doctors are finally getting a clue, too.
Waiting in line stinks; “no lines no waiting” rocks. Waiting on hold stinks; self-service rocks.
It’s been ten years. Get on the train: give people plenty of reason to say good things about you.
2009
Customer Experience has “direct link with loyalty”
Good news, bad news:
- In a new report (abstract), Forrester Research now says customer experience has a “direct link with loyalty.” That’s good: today you need all the loyalty you can get, and if your competitor slips up through clumsy cost-cutting, it’s your opening to acquire their frustrated abusees.
- But Forrester also says customer experience is “in its adolescence”: players are awkwardly stumbling around, trying to find their power. And that’s not based on customer complaints: that’s from a self-test!
As we grind into the gritty part of the slowdown, businesses who lack genuine buoyancy are sinking, and only the ones with substantial value are bobbing above water:
- Sinking: Players who, like GM, depended on unsustainable consumer trends (the preference for SUVs)
- Swimming: Players like Best Buy, legendary for its focus on customer experience. Even in the downdraft of Q4 2008, they earned $570 million. Half a billion! And that’s despite a decline in comparable store sales (Best Buy’s version of same store sales).
When somebody tries to do business with you, it’s a precious moment. Give them a good experience. Tips from the “no lines, no waiting” perspective:
- Customer experience matters.
- When someone wants to do business, don’t make them wait.
- When somebody is a customer, keep ‘em. Make ‘em love you.
Food for thought: some real-world case studies of how TimeTrade users in many industries are doing this with appointment scheduling, pre- and post-acquisition, often as part of a larger customer experience strategy.
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, downturn, economy, retail, waiting
2009
“The Bangalore Backlash”: Customer service returning to the fore!
Some folks think a tight economy means things have to get cheaper. No; things have to get worthy.
Our VP/Marketing Cindy Johnson just steered me to Ragsdale’s Eye on Service, the blog of John Ragsdale, formerly of Forrester Research’s Giga Information Group where he focused on customer relationships and customer service. He’s often railed against the concept of free service, arguing that it’s not sustainable.
Trouble is, it’s hard to tell how low people will go to save a buck, even when it’s not in their/our best interest. We want America’s economy strong, including our local economies, but we keep buying Chinese goods from megastores that put local stores out of business. And who can blame the merchants, if consumers keep going for cheap?
That is, until people say “That’s it, you’ve scraped bottom” and vote with their feet.
And perhaps we are hitting bottom. In December Ragsdale wrote about how people are starting to pay for support from people whose voices they can understand, or people nearby — including mighty brands, not known for being the cheapest bidder:
I just read a Washing[ton] Post article The Bangalore Backlash: Call Centers Return to U.S. which hits on enough controversies to keep me blogging for a month. Let’s start with this one: Dell’s new Your Tech Team service, which provides a US-based support engineer and a wait time of 2 minutes or less for $13 a month or $99 a year. Add to that Apple’s successful in-store Genius Bar and Best Buy’s in your face Geek Squad, I suspect that 2009 will be the year Value-Added Support has crossed from enterprise to consumer support. And it is about time.
Personally, I think Dell ended free support a long time ago. Sure, they offer free support, but it’s not support – it can be destructive. Just last month a relative clicked some virus-laden link and crashed his machine. He called Dell’s free line for help, and without any discussion, the rep led him through reformatting his disk, losing all his data.He thought that might be happening, but couldn’t believe it.
My first thought was “How could they possibly do that??” Then I remembered they tried that with me, years ago. I was savvy enough to say “You want me to WHAT??” Not long after, I started using paid support.
I call it “actual support.”
In fact I’m typing this on an older Dell machine that’s out of warranty … and I’m going to go get that $99 annual plan right now.(Last time I tried their free stuff it was via live chat, and when I logged in it said “You are #497 in line.” I’m not making this up.)
I hope we’ve indeed scraped bottom, such that people are willing to pay for competence, rather than take something free that doesn’t work.You won’t get through the downdraft by being cheaper, you’ll make it by genuinely being worthy. Deliver value. Be good to your customers.
Filed under: online scheduling
Tagged: customer service, downturn, economy
2009
72% of patients want online appointment scheduling. 18% would pay more.
Last week the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, the industry council for Boston’s Rt. 128 tech corridor, hosted a terrific morning on The Shift to Patient-Centered Care. The keynote was delivered by Susan Edgman-Levitan of Massachusetts General Hospital. And she didn’t just talk about the medical aspect – she embraced (correctly, in my view) the entire question: “What do patients want?”
One of her first slides quoted a paper released last June by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), “Helping Patient Plug In: Lessons in the Adoption of Online Consumer Tools.” Quoting a 2008 Deloitte survey, it says:
- 72% of consumers surveyed would like to have online appointment scheduling.
- Only 10% have it.
- 18% say they’d pay extra to have it!
Considering that automated appointment scheduling also saves money for the provider, what’s the question?
When almost every industry offers online appointments and reservations, from airlines to restaurants to photo studios, nine out of ten consumers can’t make a doctor’s appointment online?
Case studies of successful TimeTrade users in healthcare:
2009
Customer experience is not just post-sale: Social Media gets clearer, part 2
Recap of part 1:
On March 25 I saw a presentation by Brian Haven, self-described “recovering Forrester analyst,” that answered once and for all any question I had about whether “all this social media stuff” is just buzzwords. It’s not. The fundamental nature of marketing conversations has indeed changed.
But how to make sense of it all?
As Part 1 showed, if you think your “marketing pipeline” is still a linear process it’s time to update your thinking. Prerequisite for this post: please quickly read part 1, which contains foundation thinking for this post, with important illustrations.
The importance of influencers in today’s uncontrollable “funnel”
Part 1 ended with this observation about today’s marketing world:
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.
Speaker Brian Haven then mentioned Forrester’s “Four I’s” model of engagement: Influence, Involvement, Interaction and Intimacy, and how these interlock into the four phases of the “engagement wheel”: Discovery, Evaluation, Use, and Affinity:
Here’s how the wheel works:
- On the left, a future customer’s engagement starts with Discovery: one way or another s/he becomes aware of you, may be influenced by what others have said, and begins to get involved: exploring your web site, visiting stores, etc.
- As the visitor becomes Involved (bottom left), Discovery moves through to Evaluation, then to Use.
- As customer and vendor get to know each other and Intimacy builds, Use leads to Affinity.
The User becomes an influencer – one of those enigmatic, uncontrollable inputs who in today’s world can muck up (or turbocharge) our previously neat view of the pipeline.
All that makes sense, but the mind-pop came when the familiar metrics were overlaid onto the quadrants. Suddenly everything falls into place:
Examples:
- Likelihood to Recommend plays its role in the Influence phase
- Unique Site Visitors is relevant to the Discovery phase, as people are beginning to get Involved
- Someone who actively comments on a blog is at a deeper level of engagement: Interaction
There’s no particular item in the wheel I hadn’t heard of. But that’s the thing about a good mental model: it takes things you already knew, and provides a useful way of looking at them.
Without structure and framework, social media is a blizzard of conversations – as confusing as that contorted “pipeline” we saw last time. But with this framework, when we ask “Why is TimeTrade on Twitter?” we can point to specific conversations and understand: “This time, we were helping with Discovery. This time, we were rescuing loyalty, to build Affinity.” And so on.
At last, social media gets clearer, its value becomes tangible. So thanks, Brian; that was the most valuable breakfast meeting I’ve ever been to.
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