Tag Archives: marketing

Hassle Mapping The Customer Experience

by on August 3, 2011 in Customer Experience

A benefit of working at Journyx is our CEO, Curt Finch, has an uncanny knack for having wonderful conversations with some of the smartest business thinkers out there. A few weeks ago, Curt talked with Adrian Slywotzky who wrote The Art of Profitability and just penned the upcoming Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It. I’d highly recommend you add it to your reading list (or just go ahead and preorder it now).

One of the key points in their conversation – which can be found in Curt’s Inc blogpost – centers around generating greater market demand and improving a customer’s experience through the creation of hassle maps. Slywotsky defines a hassle map:

Whether you’re talking about a consumer or a corporation, a hassle map defines all of the actual steps that characterize the negative experiences of the customer. Think about these questions: Where are the emotional hot spots, the irritations, the frustrations, the time wasted, the delay? Where are the economic hot spots? And then think about this: What are the ways that businesses can radically improve the hassle map for both the customer and themselves?

Many companies face a problem when it comes to the user or customer experience. It’s rarely one huge catastrophe that sinks them. Rather, it’s more akin to death by a thousand cuts. Our customers or users experience a hassle here, another hassle there…eventually, the hassles build up to a point where the negatives outweigh any positives. And another otherwise satisfied customer leaves for something better.

Let’s get a better handle on these hassles – understand what they are and ruthlessly rip them from our customers’ lives. At Journyx, we’ve started developing a Hassle Map Program to collect and catalog how customers interact with our software. I thought I’d share a bit of how we’ve set it up.

Step One: Collect feedback through conversations and observation.
We’ve piloted the program using local customers, which gives us the advantage of getting some face time with them. It’s always a benefit when you can put names with faces…and let the customer do the same.

For these in-person sessions, I record use a Kodak Zi8 video camera and tripod. I love this camera because it’s unobtrusive and still provides pretty good picture and sound quality. And since I also want to ensure I’m capturing every move and mouse click, I set up a recordable GoToMeeting session. I find the combination of video camera and G2M give me several angles in which to understand the hassles our customers experience when using our software.

Step Two: Build the Hassle Map
When it comes to developing the hassle map, I’m a big fan of the mind mapping technique. While it can be done on paper, I much prefer electronic because we’re going to want to build a database of hassle maps. Of all the mind mapping software out there, I highly recommend Mindjet MindManager. It’s pricy but it does something that few others will do: it allows me to conduct searches across maps. So if I want to look for patterns of frustrations across customers, I type a keyword and let the program perform its magic.

Step Three: Put the Maps into Action
It’s not enough to gather the data, right? For the whole Hassle Mapping program to be productive, the data needs to be put to use in your market strategy and product planning. Factor it into your roadmap. Start sharing the outcomes throughout your organization. More than likely, you’ll uncover some hassles not just around your products and services…you’ll learn about hassles with support and sales. If so, make sure that gets to the right folks in your organization.

If you want to know more about our Hassle Mapping program, come to ProductCamp Austin this weekend. I’m proposing a session called Hassle Mapping Your Way to a Better Product Experience. If you can’t make it and would like to know more (or if my session isn’t chosen), reach out to me and I’ll make sure you get the PowerPoint and session collateral I’m preparing for the event.

2011: The Year of Leadership at Bailey WorkPlay

by on January 3, 2011 in Work

I love the “end of year” time, particularly the week wedged between Christmas and New Years. Everything sort of slows down and encourages the traditional opportunities for reflection that come at year’s end. This year, I threw myself headlong into some heavy reflection about the purpose of Bailey WorkPlay and its relationship to my current work. I don’t know about you, but a lot changed for me in 2010. Among other things, I made a transition from start-up business owner to job seeker to my present position as a corporate marketing manager. And with all these changes, I – perhaps inevitably – had a rather scattershot focus throughout the year.

Let’s do something different this year. I’ve always had a passion for leadership and the work it takes to be a better leader in both attitude and action. That’s why I’ve decided the theme for 2011 will be Leadership. Don’t worry…the main topics of marketing, customer experience, and organizational culture will still be the primary focus of this blog and Bailey WorkPlay. We’ll just look at them primarily through the lens of leadership. What does this mean? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure yet, and that’s okay. We’ll explore this together. Here are some of the issues and questions I have in mind:

Marketing
The practice of marketing has changed significantly over the past few years. How can a leadership-focused marketing approach change how we communicate with customers and prospects?

Customer Experience
If a terrific customer experience is so vital to business health, why do so many businesses still struggle to make it happen? How would a leadership-focused effort improve the relationship between customer and business? And are there parallels between customer experience and an improved employee experience?

Organizational Culture
As an anthropologist, I believe culture is a wonderfully complex thing. It’s not something that can be controlled or engineered; rather, it can be merely guided. What role does leadership play in guiding the cultures within our organizations?

You have a part to play here, too. What questions do you have related to leadership? What problems do you face in executing marketing strategy or creating a better customer experience that would be improved with a stronger leadership focus? I hope that we have the opportunity to co-create something here together that makes our selves and our organizations even more successful in 2011. If you’re on Twitter, we’ll be using the hashtag #Leadership2011.

I can’t wait to get this year started. Let’s make it a great one together.

Want To Increase Your Email Subscribers? Easy Does It

by on December 3, 2010 in Communication

Growing your email newsletter subscriber list or prospect housefile takes patience and planning. In addition to some of the usual good advice about subscription form placement (every webpage), email delivery (send consistently around the same time every day, week, month, etc.), and strategy (have goals for goodness sake), I have a couple of others:

Suggestion #1: Make it as easy as possible for someone to subscribe. Don’t ask for oodles of information from them at the outset. All you really need is a name and email address. I’ve seen far too many clients ask for fields of personal data only to get a high bounce rate. If you want to glean more demographic data from your subscribers, ask for a little to get them through the door and then gradually ask for more data over time.

Suggestion #2: Create enewsletters that are as personalized as possible. Sometimes what *you* believe is of value may not be valuable to your whole subscriber base. If you find that your content is starting to cover lots of different topics, consider either creating multiple newsletters that are more topic-focused. Or, find an email delivery platform that allows you to serve up blocks of content that’s personalized based on what your subscriber tells you what they want to read.

What other ways have you found success in building your email subscriber list?

Join the conversation at Forum Q&A

Best Consumer Intel Found In The Wild

by on September 13, 2010 in Customer Experience

My regular readers know how much I love talking about market research where consumer intelligence is gathered “out in the wild” rather than through artificially contrived environments and methods (e.g., focus groups). I argue strongly that it yields far more reliable information about interests, needs, and desires.

All of which is why Joshua Black’s post, 5 Sneaky Ways to Find Out What Customers Really Want… Without Asking Them, over at Men with Pens is a real keeper.

See item #2:

Go to Wal-Mart: This expression means you should get out there and eavesdrop on your customers in their natural environment. Hang around the lions while they’re kicking back in their den complaining about their biggest problems to other lions (like who left their dirty undies lying around the cave).

Customers will never really tell you their problems if you ask directly. They often don’t exactly know what their problems are.

Listen to what customers say. Are they complaining? About what? Are they sighing over something they wish they had? What is it? What problems keep them from getting the results they want?

Don’t say a word. Take copious amounts of notes and quietly leave the scene like an entrepreneurial ninja. I like to hang out at coffee shops and use my Blackberry for this kind of covert operation, because it just looks like I’m texting someone and being oblivious to people at other tables.

And as a smart commenter responded, another method for gathering similar intel is to run Twitter searches for keywords and themes related to your product or business.

What other ways of uncovering consumer intelligence out in the wild have you found most beneficial to your business?

Listening To What Isn’t Said

by on June 3, 2010 in Communication, Customer Experience

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)