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Ideas, tips and techniques for new generation selling and customer support.
Monthly Archives: May 2009
2009
A sign of the times? In the downturn, a clever startup CHARGES MONEY!
Kevin Kosh of our PR firm CHEN PR spotted an item by Scott Blitstein on Web Worker Daily about Clixpy, a clever new thing for website managers that will give you a “screencast” playback of everything a user did.
This could be useful for Customer Experience professionals, but what smacked me in the face was that these people are charging money right from the outset!
Good heavens, is the downturn forcing a return to old-style economics, where one’s income is tied directly to the value one delivers? If this keeps up, I’ll start to believe that maybe we are starting to pull out of the downdraft.
I agree with Blitstein that these folks should absolutely put their pricing up front, rather than requiring registration. (It’s 1000 captures for $30, or smaller batches for less, through PayPal – undeniably a good deal for someone who needs this kind of info.) Good luck to these folks.
(p.s. I did the Clixpy demo and was embarrassed at how screwily my mouse pointer wanders around between clicks when I’m exploring a page. Interesting, and it illustrates the value of recording people’s actual actions vs what we (or even they) think they’re doing.)
Filed under: online scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, downturn, economy
2009
The Software-as-a-Service Conversation – and Conversion – is Alive and Going Strong
I participated as a panelist in a Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council event this morning focused on the marketing and sales opportunities and challenges with moving to and supporting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. TimeTrade’s personal appointment scheduler TimeDriver and many of our enterprise solution customers leverage our technology through a SaaS-based model.
The major benefit of SaaS – and something we obviously feel strongly about – is driving better customer service and delivering a great customer experience. We as service providers get to know our customers almost on a first-name basis through offering on-demand solutions and understand real-time how they are using our services/applications. We’re able to leverage our customers’ great ideas and feedback quickly to enable new capabilities that helps them improve their business. If something needs to be addressed, we know it right away and can respond. Not possible with licensed or packaged applications.
One of the many companies speaking this morning was Constant Contact – a company who has leveraged SaaS and the customer experience to be the leader in email marketing and online surveys.
On-demand has reshaped how companies, like ours, do business. Marketing has moved from traditional methods such as print advertising to leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and analysis tools, creating vertically-focused promotions and offering free trials to virally drive adoption. Results are measured real-time rather than quarterly enabling our marketing programs to be much more effective and focused.
Being reported constantly in the news is the trend that the companies who will succeed in this challenging economic environment are those that define themselves by delivering the ultimate in customer service. SaaS certainly is a platform to help drive customer satisfaction and create customer promoters.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
Tagged: customer experience, customer service, saas
2009
Fortune interview on customer service in the downturn
Taking an ecosystem view of your world can help understand the nasty lasting impact of cutbacks in customer experience. Case in point: during a downturn sales decline because buyers aren’t buying; the ecosystem’s not flush with nutrients. By definition that aspect of your ecosystem will improve when the downturn ends. But if you soil yourself when times are tough, your position can be a lot harder to clean up later.
Voices from high places continue to warn about this. Yesterday’s online edition of Fortune, on CNNMoney.com, has an interview with author Emily Yellin (newly on Twitter as @EYellin) about how broken our customer service thinking has become. The title of her book shows the unspoken message that people get when service is crummy: “Your call is [not that] important to us.”
In the Fortune interview she raises two points we’ve discussed here:
- “As companies start to compete about price, service is going to be the one differentiator.”
I don’t know that I’d agree it’s the only differentiator, but it’s certainly a conspicuous one with big ties to customer satisfaction. (See Customer Experience has “direct link with loyalty” (4/28) and Customer Service Matters, 5/14.)
- “It’s not as easy to get away with giving bad service these days with the rise of the big megaphone that the Internet has given customers.”
Yep: that’s our series on the new post-Cluetrain world of “Customer Experience is not just post-sale.”
Look, it’s like any other relationship: you find out who somebody is when the chips are down. Prove your mettle. If you plan to survive this thing, plan for then. Think ecosystem, not just today’s balance sheet.
In the coming weeks I’ll be looking for real-world examples from past downturns to illustrate this. If you have any, send ‘em in!
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, downturn, waiting
2009
Appointment scheduling issues keep children from getting vaccinated
We believe in the value of appointment scheduling, but we never thought it would turn into a public health issue. But apparently it has.
In a talk last week at the Pediatric Academic Societies’ annual meeting in Baltimore, Dr. Melissa Stockwell of Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons reported on findings about vaccination appointments. A key finding:
Difficulty with scheduling appointments was a BIGGER factor in no-shows than whether parents even think the vaccines are worthwhile.
Specifically, for parents who doubt the value of vaccines, no-shows were 3.3x more likely than normal, but parents who had difficulty scheduling were 3.8x more likely to no-show.
Irwin Grossman, an eagle-eyed member of our sales team, spotted this assessment on the American Academy of Nurse Practioners site SmartBrief:
Health care providers need to pay attention to communication and ease of scheduling, as children whose parents rescheduled appointments were 3.8 times more likely to miss a visit for a vaccination, according to New York City researchers.
The full article, from Reuters, is here.
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, efficiency, healthcare
2009
Making it through the downdraft, part 3: customer service matters.
Got an email today from MITSloan Management Review, and a great item caught my attention as I browsed through their site. It’s a video interview with Prof. Martin Roth, of the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business, by the Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Merritt.
Roth reviews strategies companies use in a downturn, including cutting quality and customer service, and observes:
“They backfire because they’re really, in the end, not meeting customer expectations. Companies have to remember that although times are tough, and customers are concerned about their wallets, and companies are concerned about their budgets, markets continue to be competitive, and customers continue to have lots of choices of different products and services in the market.
“So … when companies decide to cut back on customer service, what may once have been a key differentiator for them brings them down to a parity level, or perhaps even worse. … It becomes much more difficult to re-convince customers that they should pay a premium.”
I found myself thinking “I hope he brings it home with a real-world example.” He did:
“Circuit City… fell drastically behind Best Buy in customer service while Best Buy was making important investments, putting support systems in place for staff…”
I know it’s a tough call for management, balancing cost controls against long-term impact. We face it too: we’re being prudent, but we’re not cutting back on keeping our customers happy. There will be an end to this downdraft, and we’re not letting anyone steal a march on us.
This is a time for companies to demonstrate that they know what their value is, not gasp for air – and certainly not make their customers gasp for air.
p.s. This is the coolest video platform I’ve ever seen: it includes subtitles so you can mute it and “listen” without disturbing your neighbors. In English or Spanish.
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