Monthly Archive for June, 2005

Innovating your business - Experience Innovation

An interesting article from CIO magazine which talks about different kinds of innovation that can contribute to a businesses competitive advantage. They talk about, and give examples of various innovation, like business model, process and product innovation; all pretty well known by most b-school students. But they also describe something called Experience Innovation… sounds rather innovative.

One of the most overlooked opportunities for innovation is in how your customers experience doing business with your company. Today, a lot of that experience is based on what happens when a customer touches your technology — from the way a question is answered on a customer help desk call to information and services available on your Web site.

Champy: Get proactive about innovation

Content - still getting what we pay for

Scott Mc Cloud, of Understanding Comics fame, has posted an online essay about, amongst other things, micro payments, piracy, collaborative filtering and paying artists in general.
I Can’t Stop Thinking! #6

If you havn’t read understanding comics then run, don’t walk to check it out, I consider it to be one of the most important scholarly books on visual communication… and it’s in the form of a comic.

Seth Godin has commented on this as well: where’s the money. Essentially the creation of good content increases when there is some kind of compensation.

Thoughts on Customer Experience Strategy

It is only recently that I started using customer experience strategy as they title for this blog so i thought it appropriate to write a little bit about that. The term for me describes an intersection between customer experience and business strategy that I find fascinating, and think will become increasingly important to businesses.

Strategy is often interpreted in many different ways, but in the end a strategy is a high level plan, in many cases a plan to win or succeed. For me Customer Experience Strategy is how companies leverage the Customer Experience to succeed and grow.

The Customer Experience is essentially the life-cycle a customer goes through when interacting with a company, it is the cumulative experience that a customer has with a company. I like to think of it as a life-cycle because a customer builds a relationship over time with an organization, it’s not a binary equation, it is something that both the company and the customer build equity in, relationship equity or loyalty. IMHO every interaction a customer has with an organization is either making a deposit in the relationship account or its making a withdrawal, and what happens when the account is overdrawn? The customer exits stage left, never to be seen again.

So for me Customer Experience Strategy is about two things, building relationships with customers, and leveraging those relationships to build more value in the company, or Customer Acquisition and Customer Loyalty.

Customer Acquisition
What are the touch points a customer interacts with before they become a customer? Google? Your web site? Registering for a news letter? Your IVR? Now how do those touch points help the potential customer become an actual customer?

Customer Loyalty
What are the touch points a customer interacts with while they are an active customer? Your web site? A blog about your product? A community site about your product/service? Customer service? Now how do those touch points help an existing customer be an even more valuable asset to your company?

Why now? The days of dealing with a multitude of individual customers has gone, period. Almost every company nowadays and more so in the future is dealing with a network of customers, and networks of customers provide opportunities and threats like never before. Networks of customers can make or break your company, but if you pay attention and provide the tools and the right experience they will grow your company.

revenge of the customer - when IVR stikes back

Fabulous story from the Guardian about a taxi driver that was on hold so long for help with his broad band internet, he figured out the key combinations to change the on hold message. The companies IVR then went out with this message:

Hello, you are through to NTL customer services,” they were told. “We don’t give a fuck about you, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just fuck off and leave us alone. Get a life.

That’s generally what I think there saying anyway, when I hear “your call is important to us” and “we’re experiencing high call volume”

Here’s a link to the guardian story

Message that was less than grossly offensive

Originator:
boingboing.net

the customer value network

I found an absolute gem buried at the end of that long CIO article and I wanted to highlight it separately, basically it’s a little story about a brand that was brought back to life after going out of business due to the fact that there was a “network” of customers ready to support it. This quote is absolute gold :

If you create a network of customers then the customers buy into the brand and become increasingly loyal to the brand. When that happens you arm them with tools to spread that and evangelize the brand,”
The bricks and mortar store had already generated a loyal customer base addicted to Remo products. When Giuffre raised enough angel seed money to create a Web site it was to offer a non-transactional site for the “orphan customers” to register interest and say which of the Remo products they wanted back first. He started off with 90 e-mail addresses.

Again, here’s the full article:
CIO | As You Like it

customer experience article from the aussy CIO magazine

I came across this interesting article in the Australian version of CIO magazine. Lot’s of good stuff about the need to manage the customer experience across the multitude of customer interfaces that proliferate as a customer grows.

“The kind of changes we recommend to the way companies manage the customer experience requires an overall alignment of strategy and execution that touches all faces of the organization,” Rayport says. “It’s because it’s so major that our sense is that it must be driven from the C-level across the entire firm not relegated to particular silos in the marketing and sales organization as is often the case in many organizations. Indeed considering all interfaces with customers as important empowers the entire organization to deliver at the highest quality and helps bring the culture together.”
Managing the web of interfaces and reviewing how customers and staff use them must be a cross-discipline task requiring cooperation of marketing, technology and human resources just for starters. It is not an issue that can be quarantined as something fixed either in the back office or in the front office. It requires a more holistic management approach.

I agree with Rayports sentiments here, that the issue of customer experience needs to come from the C-level initially. It is a horizontal problem essentially that must cut across the vertical silo’s that companies generally form into.

Francis Buttle is professor of marketing and CRM at Macquarie Graduate School of Management and he believes that as companies get larger and more remote from the markets they serve then the role of technology at all the touch points becomes much more important. “Technology is a function of size and remoteness,” he says. Yet Buttle says not many traditional company marketing departments understand these things. “The notion of customer experience has only been around for four or five years.”

This is a very interesting perspective, and on the whole I would agree, that as most companies grow, and they more they use technology to facilitate the customer relationship the more remote they become from the market. But this is only the case if the technology create’s distance from the market, interactive voice response systems, bad CRM script driven interaction, irrelevant FAQ’s all drive a wedge between the customer and the company. But what about the companies that get bigger and put technology in place that makes the customer part of the companies value network? Social software, blogs, wiki’s, open source content that customers can manipulate and make more useful, where customers are part of the value network, it seems as the companies grow, the more important the customer becomes and the more intimate the company becomes with the customer.

While companies such as Bunnings, Myer and Taxis Combined believe there is competitive edge in being one of the first to adopt this customer-focused approach, Brown is not sure that alone is enough or, perhaps, even too much of a supposedly good thing. Long term he wondered whether customers might actually get sick of being too close to their vendors. “The traditional marketing approach advocates servility, pandering, abasement, oily obsequiousness and what have you. We’re creeps basically,” he stated.

And for a little balance I love this little bit here, it speaks wonderfully to the fact that the customer interaction needs to be “appropriate”. I’ve never been that keen on blockbuster folks saying “enjoy your movie Karl”, it always felt fake, forced. And am I the only one that just wants to get off the phone when I’m finished with customer service, I really don’t need dissertation of how much you enjoyed helping and asking me if there is anything else I can do for me…. just saying thanks and bye would save me having to politely listen to the pitch when all I want to do is hang up.

“We peddle an unattractive mix of pseudo empathy, pretend intimacy and fake friendship. I suspect most customers yearn for the days when purchasing a bar of soap didn’t mean entering into a lifetime value relationship.”

Here’s the full article:
CIO | As You Like it

BBC backstage encourages customer innovation and creativity

The BBC has decided to open up it’s content so customers can take it and do what they want with it, the tag line says it all really “take our stuff to build your stuff”.

The bbc backstage initiative is another example of an organization taking advantage of its customers, in a good way, taking advantage of their customers creativity, innovation and intellectual capital. For the majority of organizations there are a lot of customers out there who are just waiting to be creative and make your organization more valuable if you just put the tools/framework out there for them.

It may have originally been put in place for the uber-geek or developer, but look at this language on the backstage homepage:

Can’t code, won’t code? Well, you can share your ideas on new ways to use BBC content. This is your BBC. We want to help you play.

And what has the BBC got out of this so far, well here are some useful projects that remix BBC content with google maps:

Here’s some interesting work from a company called Headshift that has done a social tagging prototype:
From Headshift - BBC Backstage prototype: social tagging

making the RSS user experience better

I just implemented a tool called feedburner that, IMHO, could really help change the user experience of RSS. It helps with three important things:

  • Presents a user friendly web page when my rss feed is hit by a web browser, take a look: feeds.feedburner.com/experiencecurve
  • Smart feeds: delivers the right RSS format depending on what tool is requesting the feed, and of course I don’t have to worry about maintaining a bunch of formats
  • Provides me a unified view of who’s reading my RSS

The user experience of RSS is still somewhat at the fringe of the mainstream, it’s kind of like one of those exclusive clubs where if you don’t know about it you can’t come in. Basically, the vast majority of people don’t know what RSS is, or what do do with obscure little clicklets that have obtuse labels like “XML” or “RSS”. Additionally the web browsers don’t all know what to do with an RSS feed when it’s passed via http either, and just presents an XML file to the user. Well most of the population is going to think it’s an error and move on. Add to that all the formats, rss .92, 2.0, atom make it a pain in the ass when I’m trying to figure out what’s being read on my blog, my log file is full of RSS requests.

Feedburner has totally relieved the headache (for me and users) of multiple feeds in multiple formats. Basically feedburner takes my RSS and handles all the RSS requests on my blog, so instead of me pointing to a bunch of disparrant XML files I just point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/experiencecurve and it produces a nice browser friendly file that explains how to subscribe and what RSS is etc. It also gives me decent statistics about RSS activity that is hard to track when everyone is accessing RSS using different tools and different formats. Oh, and it’s free, with some options to subscribe for tracking and advertising tools.

Here’s a couple of interesting articles about why RSS adoption is low:
Why is RSS/Atom adoption so low?
Why is RSS adoption so low? Here’s why.

here’s the tool:
http://www.feedburner.com

feedburner wordpress plugin (redirects all feed requests to the
feedburner link):
http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/

spam free comments

I’ve implemented some new spamoflage measures that will assure a spam free, less filling blog. It also means I’ve removed the password protection from my comment file so the “comment” user experience will be a lot smoother. Some people made it past the barbed wire and guard dogs to post comments in the past and I thank them from the bottom of my heart for their herculean effort.

I’m now using a tool called hashcash which basically requires the web browser to do some pretty deep javascript calculations when the submit button is hit to post a comment. This is transparent to the user as long as they have a javascript enabled web browser. I think that’s a pretty good trade off, i’m glad of any feature that can make it easier for the person who’s trying to make a comment.

Here’s a link to the tool:
http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2005/05/11/wordpress-hashcash-20/

I’m currently using 2.o version of this plugin, as 2.2 was conflicting with my RSS feeds for some reason, I would be glad to hear from any experiences from other wordpress users.

much to my chagrin: a good article from destinationCRM on Customer Experience Management

This is an excellent article that successfully talks about customer experience management and customer experience strategy. The authors do a good job of connecting the, sometimes ephemeral topic of customer experience, with some practical business issues.

Where many current marketing strategies are channel-specific and siloed, customer experience strategy is holistic and integrated. Where the majority of current advertising is loud and fleeting, rich customer experiences and interactions are personal and immersive. Where brand communication is designed today to speak about the benefits of a product or service, customer experience design improves the offering itself.

destinationCRM.com: Customer Experience Management: From Utility to Delight