Anyone know what it means to “delight” customers? Or what it takes to exceed their expectations? Is it even worth the effort? These are some questions raised in the latest Harvard Business Review article, Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers (or read Anne Miner’s synopsis Should you stop trying to “exceed customer expectations”?).

I once served under a VP of Services who wanted to dramatically improve customer service so he made it a benchmark to “delight” our customers. When asked how we’d be improving our service operations, he replied it was in the works. Then when pressed to actually give some idea of what a “delight” benchmark meant and how it was going to be measured, he quickly found a way to change the subject. Before long, delighting customers became just another meaningless buzzword for the Services department.

Don’t let this happen to your organization.

First and foremost, get your basics up to grade. That means committing to excellence at customer service fundamentals – like responsiveness, internal teamwork, accountability, plans and metrics…to name a few – before graduating to delighting your customers. It’s that whole crawl before you can sprint kind of thing. If your basic customer service structures and systems stink, no amount of delightfulness is going to mask the stench.

Service is just one facet of the whole customer experience. Even if the customer service experience goes from baseline to phenomenal, what if your company’s products or services remains blah? What if there are chronic issues with shipping? What if marketing’s promises turn out to be undeliverable half-truths? The point is that investing financial and people resources into creating stellar customer service just through channels like phone, web, Twitter, and self-service is a waste if the rest of the enterprise doesn’t match up.

Finally, I must admit I hate the word delight. Have you, as a customer, been on the receiving end of a customer service rep asking, “Have I delighted you today?” or “What more can I do to delight you?” It’s practically impossible for the use of “delight” to not sound condescending to the customer. And when it comes to building relationships with customers, communication and language matter.

Rather than saying, “Every business must delight (or astonish or thrill or enchant) its customers!” it’s more important to take care of the basics FIRST. Instead of proclaiming fuzzy, high-minded (while no doubt well-intended) initiatives, place initial priority on a steady dedication to practice, reflection, and continuous improvement. Your customers will love you for it.

photo credit: Metro Transportation Library and Archive (via flickr)

There’s an update – and positive resolution – to this saga.

What’s the price of free? It’s not a trick question like “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb” but a dead serious one, particularly if you’re a small business relying on inexpensive business solutions to succeed. You might use Zoho CRM for your customer database, Evernote to take important business notes, and Skype to communicate with your employees or contractors. All of these options are free (though some have paid, upgraded services) but I argue not without cost.

For me, I’ve been a user of Google Voice since back when it was non-Google GrandCentral. It was a great solution for me, providing slews of neat features all for free. There was even a time when I went on a working vacation and accidentally left my cell phone at home. No worries – I went to the online settings and had all my working calls forwarded to the vacation house. How cool is that?

These past couple of years, I’ve been a happy user…until this week when I discovered that the free service came with a high price. It turns out that I haven’t been receiving my calls to my Google Voice number for the better part of a month. When someone calls the GV number, they go to a generic voicemail and can leave a message. Except the message enters a black hole. The individual thinks they’ve successfully left a message for me but I never receive it. So for all intents and purposes, the caller thinks I’m not interested in their business (which couldn’t be further from the truth!).

So what to do when things go wrong? In my case, I have two recourses: 1) I can go to the public forum and log a question. Or 2) I can go to a private troubleshooting form, describe my issue, and wait..and wait…and wait. See, when a service is free there are no SLAs that a company has to worry about. There’s very little we can do when a problem is urgent. We’re at their mercy which is a tough spot to be in when you’re struggling to build a company or consultancy. I’m into day #3 and haven’t heard a peep from Google about this problem that is entirely their fault. Talk about feeling helpless. And personally irritated that I left something so damn important as a communication channel in the hands of a free service.

This is a situation very similar to one my friend, Paul Hudson, at Intersperience talks about in a recent article called Hidden Cost of Self-Service. I would also argue that even though Google Voice is free and that imparts risk for us users, it really doesn’t matter whether the service is paid or not. A failure to provide even an adequate level of service will tarnish your reputation and significantly diminish the customer experience. I’ve learned the hard way to not be so trusting of Google’s entire service suite or the free services from other companies. The cost to me has proved far too high.

A show of hands – are you using Google Voice for something important like your business or job hunting? Are you okay with the consequences when things go wrong? Before you answer, think carefully about your own reliance on free services (you can also take a look at some of the issues listed at the Google Voice Support Forum…it’s a bit scary).

Friends, protect yourself when it comes to the important things like phone numbers, email addresses, websites, etc. Don’t be lured by free when the cost could be lost customers. And business executives, don’t casually walk down the path of free and self-service. When things go wrong, will your customers still trust you to care for them when it really matters?

Anyone else have experiences with free services costing them more than you bargained for?

Update 07.20.10
After a few days of trying to line up a call, I finally spoke to Craig Walker, a Product Manager for Google. Turns out the major issue here was my request to move my GV number from one Google account to another. There’s an account transfer request form available through the GV help forum but it’s not exactly supported (which raises questions about why its still in existence). Associating a current GV number with a new Gmail address presents some hairy technical issues so word of warning: When you sign up for a Google Voice number, make certain its associated with a permanent account because it’s pretty much locked in.

But once I finally nailed Craig down, he was responsive in getting my call history and voicemails transferred to my Bailey WorkPlay gmail account. And he was generous in offering me a few perks including a sparkly new – and rather easy to remember – number: 512-827-9000.

The latest social media meme to roll around is Fast Company’s Influence Project and I’m going to take the role of pissy curmudgeon on this one.

Fast Company wants to find out who the most influential people online are right now. In order to figure this out, they’ve devised the following measurement criteria:

1. The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This is the primary measure of your influence, pure and simple.

2. You will receive partial “credit” for subsequent clicks generated by those who register as a result of your URL. In other words, anyone who comes to the site through your link and registers for their own account will be spreading your influence while they spread theirs. That way, you get some benefit from influencing people who are influential themselves. We will give a diminishing, fractional credit (1/2, ¼, 1/8 etc ) for clicks generated up to six degrees away from your original link.

So let me get this straight. An individual’s measure of influence is how much they can bait their peers, friends, and followers to click a link? Anyone else think this sounds more like a popularity contest rather than a measure of influence?

And when it comes to measurement, here’s yet another dubious claim to measuring something humanistic using only a quantitative scale (and a rather paltry scale at that). Fast Company, if you really want to understand online influence, slick graphics (in Flash!) and linkbaiting isn’t going to cut it. Start asking WHY individuals gain, maintain, and utilize influence and then maybe I’ll take your little parlor trick seriously.

Or am I wrong?

Well, that is, if we ever get around to doing anything with your opinion.

Sadly, that’s often the internal corporate dialogue that happens around customer surveys and feedback mechanisms.

Once upon a time when I was a membership development director of a nonprofit association, I had a long chat with my Board of Directors. They wanted to conduct an extensive member survey to solicit opinions on the state of the professional society. At this point, it was my job to ask questions – a lot of them – in order to fully understand the purpose and objectives of this project. When I asked about the purpose of the survey, most responded that they wanted to know how the membership felt about the state of the industry as well as gain their feedback about the association. “Terrific!” I thought. It had been a while since a survey had been conducted and this would help me and my staff (along with executive management and the Board) to learn about and improve the member experience.

But imagine my utter dismay and horror when I then asked, “So, what will we plan to do with this information once we collect it?”

“Oh nothing. We just want to know how our members feel about their membership, to understand their sentiment.”

So, in essence, we would be collecting opinions for funsies but cloaking it in the disguise that our members’ opinions would be used toward taking some action.

Time for some tough love and honesty: is your organization collecting data but not taking action on what you receive? Are you conducting surveys and gathering opinions with no plan for corresponding actions? Are you mining the web for sentiment data but not committing to doing anything with it?

Here are three simple steps to fix it:

Have a plan. Simple? Yes. Easy? Maybe not. But start to build a plan for how your organization will utilize all the various feedback you receive – both formal (through surveys) and informal (through social media).

Involve everyone. Every single person in your organization is receiving feedback. Your sales folks get it when talking to prospects, your techies get it when they hear about feature requests and bugs, your accountants may even get it when talking to friends at an outdoor barbeque. Now help them share what they learn and integrate it all together.

Err toward action. Don’t wait for the perfect timing to act on feedback, particularly if the feedback is beneficial to enhancing the customer experience. Your customers are giving you a gift in their opinion. Now, say “Thanks a bunch!” and do something remarkable with it.

photo credit: pink_fish13 (via flickr)

A couple days ago, Eric Jacques wrote a post called How to Listen to Your Customers which was an excellent complement to my Listening to What Isn’t Said. In the post, he made one recommendation that really struck home for me:

Everyone in your organization needs to learn how to honestly and completely listen to customers (and remember the internal customers).

In particular, it was his reminder about internal customers. How many times do we focus so intently outside the organization that we forget about the folks we serve inside? And if you don’t think you serve anyone inside your business, take some time to reconsider. We’re not talking about employees serving managers and the execs at the C-Level. We’re talking cross-functional, about departments like IT and HR. We’re also talking about the sales manager who counts on marketing to support his or her efforts. And we’re talking about the engineer who depends on product managers to relay crucial strategic info from and to customers. No matter which department you fall into or what level you’re situated within the organizational hierarchy, there’s a good bet you serve someone else inside your company at least once in a while.

Here’s the million dollar question: Does your organization have a customer experience design that includes both external and internal customers? If not, why not? Making sure your internal customers are not only satisfied but have a remarkable experience is the bedrock of smooth teamwork and operations. Here are a few suggestions for creating a better internal customer experience:

Listen intently for needs and expectations. You can’t underemphasize the importance of listening. Your objective is to listen for understanding which transforms the action into an active process. Ask for clarification when necessary. Listen for what’s not said.

Help them become even better customers. When in the act of listening, don’t be a drone content with just collecting information. You know you have needs and expectations, so reveal them. And you know you have limitations so be clear about your own workload. Constantly ask yourself, “What can I do to help this individual be a better customer?”

Keep the bigger picture firmly in view. This requires an understanding of how the organization operates and your place within it. It also means that your service objectives should be in tight step with those of the whole organizations. They should resemble a bit of the holographic that I discussed a while back.

If you’re thinking that each of these suggestions can easily apply to serving external customers, then you’d be right. Any examples of organizations getting it right in terms of creating remarkable internal customer experiences?

photo credit: wonderlane (via flickr)

I don’t get them everyday, but today I received three emails from assorted PR agencies that kind of struck a nerve. I’m not technically in public relations, but I am heavily involved in communications so I know a thing or two about what works and what really sucks. Don’t worry…this isn’t going to be a “Bash PR” post. Well, at least not totally. Instead, I’m hoping I can offer some feedback to those in the PR profession who might listen and take heed.

Here we go.

First question you need to ask yourself is:
Does this contact actually want to be connected with our agency?
Email #1 was a very brief email from one agency’s Media Researcher (taking a guess that this is a “fresh out of college” type position) who asked:

Could you tell me if this e-mail is still valid as a contact for you at Alchemy of Soulful Work? It keeps bouncing.

chris@baileyworkplay.com

Thanks so much.

Regards,
xxxxx

If you find my email address is bouncing then go to the trouble to visit my site and send an email to my new address, why not invest a wee bit of time to building a relationship? This Media Researcher just missed a golden opportunity to understand what types of communications I’d like to receive. Or even ask if I’d like to continue to receive emails on behalf of their clients. (Ironic sidenote: I no longer use chris@baileyworkplay.com because of all of the PR blast spam I got at this address.)

Just like any other type of email communication (like newsletters), I don’t mind receiving them when the content is fascinating and important to my work. But don’t just assume because you have my email address, that I’m a captive audience who is automatically interested in whatever your client is doing. Apply some permission-based email marketing practices and you might discover better ROI because I’ll be a willing participant in your media outreach.

Relatedly, another question is:
How is my client going to make you look good?
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the awesomeness, amazingness, incredibleness, stupendousness of your client. He or she (or it, if we’re talking about a brand) is paying you to promote their greatness. But no matter how terrific your client is, no blogger or online influential cares if this marvelousness doesn’t rub off on them in some way. So your job is to connect the dots and make the case for why I should take time to read their book or schedule an interview. Deep down, I really don’t care about all the great things your client does if it doesn’t help me achieve my own goals.

And again, remember its not just me you’re pitching. You’re asking me to connect you with my friends, colleagues, readers…in other words, my own social network. Clearly demonstrate what’s in it for me and I’ll be more likely to want to help you.

Finally, the big question you have to ask is:
Why should you want a relationship with me, my agency, and my client?
For the love of all things holy, stop thinking short-term, small ball. That game played out fine ten or twenty years ago but its all changed now. If you’re trying to drive results through cold, impersonal email blasts that don’t address me by name (email works different than fax), include other email addesses in the To: line (yes, unbelievably I know the other email addresses that received the blast), and offer no opt-out provision (which is kind of breaking the law), then have fun on the ride down. I guess that means your client is riding shotgun.

Time to wake up and realize the PR game is now played through relationships.

And it’s not as if these questions are just for PR folks. They’re applicable to customer experience, marketing, and sales folks as well. Just focusing on your side of the action without considering the relationship with the folks on the other side squanders the potential connection. And in this case, everyone suffers.

photo credit: tashland (via Flickr)

How much do you know about your customers…I mean really know? Get beyond the demographics, beyond the statistics, beyond the purchasing numbers. How much do you know about how your customers interact with their everyday world? And more importantly for you, how do your customers interact with their world using your product or service? It’s in understanding this interaction where your brand can go from ordinary to extraordinary.

Enter anthropology and the expertise we anthropologists offer. The way we humans behave is deeply rooted in our everyday culture. It influences how we make sense of our reality. It also explains why we consume what we do and what we’re ultimately trying to communicate to others around us. Because sense-making is largely a symbolic process at a cultural level, anthropology is ideally positioned to help explain the relationships customers have to a brand. In other words, if you want to know more about what your customers really think and actually do, bring in an anthropologist.

As humans, we interact with things in order to make sense of our world (if you’re unsure about this, watch a young child for a few minutes). We’re also trying to make sense of ourselves and our identity in relation to others around us. I’ll even argue that most of us want the businesses and brands we interact with to understand us better and help us in our sensemaking process.

So here’s my question for you: what is your business doing to understand your customers and help them make sense of their world through their interactions with you?

photo credit: courtneybolton (via Flickr)

Peter Drucker once said, “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” Exactly…and I’d also suggest hearing what isn’t said is just as important in building a remarkable customer experience.

But instead, how many times do businesses listen for what they want to hear from their customers? Or maybe get defensive about what is said? Or take what is said at full face value and miss out on so much of the subtext and subtle (but far more powerful) meanings behind the customer’s experience? If you’re only paying attention to what sits at the surface, your business is missing important data that could mean the success or failure of your product, service, or full brand proposition.

We anthropologists are trained to uncover these clues. When we listen, we don’t just use our ears – we use our full set of senses. We detect behaviors that might otherwise pass unnoticed. And we ask questions that attempt to understand how customers interact with their world and give their it meaning.

That may seem like a huge undertaking, but at the heart of our anthropological work is simplicity. Here are five simple ways to listen like an anthropologist:

Shut up.
The hardest thing for a marketer, executive, or consultant is to put away the agenda and stop talking. But do it. It is near impossible to talk and listen at the same time. Even if we don’t come at a customer issue with an agenda, we may still find it difficult to keep quiet. However, if we’re going to understand how to meet the needs of our customers, we’ve got to shut up.

Be naive.
This is the first of two steps toward having a child-like mind. As adults, we think our expertise is built on always knowing the answer (or thinking we probably know the answer). But its this very temptation to appear all-knowing that keeps us from actually knowing anything. Kids learn instinctively because they really don’t know things and they ask a lot of “Why?” questions. Here’s a truth: when it comes to understanding the world our customer lives in, we REALLY don’t know anything.

Get curious.
Step two toward a child-like mind is getting curious. When we approach a customer from a place of UNknowing, we ask better questions. And we don’t make the killer mistake of allowing assumptions to guide us.

Show me.
Having problems understanding what your customer is trying to express? Respond with, “Show me what you mean.” Get creative and help them show you what they’re seeing, hearing, feeling, experiencing. Look for the symbolism and meaning behind what they show you.

Record it.
As anthropologists, we’re trained to record every single detail we possibly can. We don’t edit, we simply record because we never know what will turn out to be vitally important while sharing an experience with a customer. Don’t just rely on electronic monitoring. Practice observing subtleties, seeking meaning behind the surface language and really listening for what’s not being said.

photo credit: niclindh (via Flickr)

Last week, Reuters published an article called Americans more loyal to brands, country than company. For employers, it poses a wake-up call. But what I found most interesting was this statement at the end:

When asked how companies could improve loyalty the top answers included offering cash awards to consumers, replacing automatic answering machines with real people, making good products and not raising prices.

I think this shows why consumer opinion and sentiment shouldn’t always be taken at immediate face value. The way we think about things is complex and requires us to go exploring for more specific answers. This is were doing more qualitative work is an important complement to the quantitative work of surveys and polls.

Thinking about the snippet above from the Reuters article…What does making good products mean? How about not raising prices? Before you go thinking you know exactly what the answers are, take a step back and consider how many different possible answers are possible here. A good product can have a multitude of meanings in the mind of the customer. Now amplify it by hundreds or thousands of customers. And the desire to not raise prices may be contradicted if there is the possibility of adding more value to the product.

As an anthropologist, we’re trained to not just look at what’s said, but also look for what’s not said. Interestingly, what’s omitted here is listening. Well, sort of. We might be able to extract listening from the desire to talk to real people instead of answering machines. But…

What would happen if our companies set up experiences that encouraged customers to talk, to share ideas, to voice frustrations?

What would happen if we genuinely listened to what was said and not said?

What would happen if we took all of those opinions and sentiments and put them to action so our customers would feel heard?

Can you imagine how powerful that might be? Forget short-term buzz. Think long-term customer movements.

photo credit: abrinsky (via Flickr)

I should probably offer Mark Schaefer some sort of kickback since his blog never fails to stimulate new ideas. A couple weeks ago, he wrote a post on measurement in social media. Now you’re probably thinking, “Yet another blogpost talking about measurement? Why in the world is that so special?” It wasn’t just the content that was special…the post sparked some interesting comments around the necessity of measurement and types of measurement to consider for social media.

When most folks talk about metrics and ROI and all the various forms of measurement, they’re usually referring to a quantitative methodology. You know…like measuring number of Twitter retweets, Facebook fans, online WOM mentions, blogpost traffic, generated sales, etc. These are things that can be counted and evaluated fairly easily so long as you know why you’re doing it in the first place. Just measuring for the sake of appearances really isn’t going to help you or your organization get where you want to go. Which leads us to…

Why measure at all?
I’m not going to go into this too deeply because there are so many super-smart folks who’ve already made a compelling case for measuring online activity. I will merely add that measurement is a form of feedback, which is critical to learning what works and what needs to be improved. How will you know if your latest online customer engagement program is succeeding in meeting its objectives (you did establish objectives, right?) if you can’t measure the results.

Why add qualitative?
Because sometimes your quantitative data lies to you. Not deliberately, of course, but all those quantitative metrics you’re racking up may not be telling you the full story. This is particularly true in the area of social media where we’re trying to gauge not only action but more emotionally-charged and nebulous qualities like sentiment and beliefs. For instance, when a fan says they “love” their iPhone, what does that mean? Or when someone else tweets that your company’s sales efforts are old and they suck, what’s happening here? A strictly quantitative measurement approach likely will not dive deep enough here to give you tangible results you can use to connect with your customers and make necessary adjustments.

What kind of qualitative measurement methods can you use? The major knock against qualitative is the perception that it’s time-intensive, which can be true. But you have to weigh that through a cost/benefit analysis: is what I’m learning here worth the investment of resources? Still unsure? Then take a page from the work of social scientists and build a sample. Dont’ try to eat the elephant all at once. Your purpose here is to build bite-sized understanding. The key is to construct a random, representative sample that’s going to give you intelligible feedback on the sentiment of your customers (the whole topic of how to build good, measurable samples for social media probably should get a blogpost of its own).

Interviews: These don’t have to be long. Your objective here is to go deeper than a standard quantitative survey by uncovering the more subtle meanings of what “love” and “suck” mean for your customers.
Observations: The simple truth about us human beings is that we often say one thing only to turn around and do something rather different. There are plenty of reasons for this, but figuring out ways to observe our participants is a good way to get closer to actual action that drives behavior.

Do you still need quantitative?
YES! There’s no either/or proposition here…the best measurements will combine both quantitative and qualitative methods. Once we have a working hypothesis (we have to know why we’re doing this in the first place), it’s a recursive process where we use qualitative research to figure out what questions we need to ask, construct quantitative research to gather data, then another qualitative round to complement our data by delivering further depth of insight.

Okay, so it’s a rather high certainty you don’t have time to do recursive research, but the point here is that it’s important to not overuse quantitative measures. How can you best incorporate qualitative methods into your own plans? Or if you’ve used particular qualitative tactics, how well did they work for you?

photo credit: hutchscout (via Flickr)