Church of the Customer: Word of mouth archives
June 16, 2010
Why a complaint is really a gift
At first blush, a complaining customer is not something we have on our wish list of awesome things in the world.
But this type of customer contact provides a great opportunity to do something remarkable that will build loyalty and word of mouth. Research shows this to be true. Customer experience research firm TARP finds that customers who complain and are satisfied are up to 8% more loyal than if they had no problem at all (PDF).
My experience with Adagio Teas is a great example of this principle. I recently lost the little plastic disk that sits under its IngenuiTEA pot. (Seriously, this teapot for loose leaf tea is super cool. Check out this video.) I couldn't find a replacement disk on their site and emailed them asking why I couldn't buy one. They said there was no way to buy one and that the disk was a nice to have but optional piece of the teapot. I pressed again saying that I prefer to have the disk and how could I get one of them. They offered to send me one for free. Nice! When I received their package, there were two disks plus a sample set of teas and a nice handwritten note.
This was my first interaction with the company as I had received the teapot as a gift. What started out as a complaint about not being able to buy the disk turned out to be an experience worth blogging about. Adagio went above and beyond sending the one disk, and created a more loyal customer who is impressed with their service. That's worth talking about.
BONUS READING: For more on this topic, see Janelle Barlow and Claus Moller's book "A Complaint is a Gift: Recovering Customer Loyalty When Things Go Wrong"
May 20, 2010
Spreadability
For today's marketer, the real enemy is obscurity.
How do you build attention for your product, company or brand and rise above the marketplace noise?
One way is to make sure your web content is completely spreadable. Adding links for people to share your content on social networks and social media sites is pretty much mandatory. Remove all barriers so that customer evangelists can share your content and messages freely. Nothing new about this except that I found find this archaic message at the start of a B2B company's product video on their website.
Social networks are word of mouth jet streams. Your web content should be designed to ride them.
May 06, 2010
How to humanize your brand
If you travel for business frequently, take this quiz:
Think of the hotels you've stayed at this year. Can you name even one employee by name?
I can. Felix from the San Mateo Marriott. I stayed there a few weeks ago and noticed this poster in all of the elevators:
Curious, I stopped into the Marketplace Cafe and sure enough, there was Felix.
Friendly, approachable and mostly resembling the man on the poster, Felix told me he has worked for the hotel for 12 years. He said he loves his job and loves meeting people. He recounted the story of a man he met from Europe who, on his second stay at hotel, remarked that we was surprised that Felix was still there. Felix asked him when he had visited the hotel the first time. The man said "seven years ago."
A now-departed manager had thought up the idea eight years ago for putting Felix on the posters. Felix said there used to be a life-size cardboard cut-out of him in front of the cafe that was so life-like that it would stop people in their tracks to say hi. That is, until someone stole it.
I travel alot and for the most part, hotels are nameless, faceless places that aren't very memorable. But I won't forget the San Mateo Marriott because of Felix.
School of WOM May 24-26
Other brands presenting include P&G, Best Buy, PEMCO Insurance, Kraft, McDonalds, Google, Kodak, Coca-Cola, AT&T and others.
Details on the event are here. Use the discount code Friend of WOMMA to get $200 off of the registration cost.
See you in Chi-town!
April 08, 2010
A correlation between recommendability and revenue?
Satmetrix has just released its 2010 NPS Industry Benchmark reports. The chart below shows the NPS leaders by industry. (For those not familiar with NPS, it is a recommendability score. More here.)
The more that customers recommend your products, the more revenue you should have, right?
While Satmetrix has not done any recent research into correlating recommendability to revenue growth, a very unscientific look at the leaders shows that:
- Auto insurance, banking, and homeowners insurance leader USAA announced that 2009 was its best year ever amidst the worst financial conditions since the Great Depression.
- Airline leader JetBlue saw a 7.4% increase passenger revenue in 4Q09 and a 2009 profit despite the airline industry suffering the worst drop ever in passenger revenue ever last year (-18%).
- Computer hardware leader Apple recorded nearly half of the U.S. PC desktop retail industry revenue in 2009.
- Cell phone service leader Verizon's 2009 revenue was up 10.7% over 2008, while revenue declined for AT&T (-0.8%), Sprint (-9%) and T-Mobile (-1.6%).
Could it be that the customers of these NPS stars are recommending them at higher rates resulting in increased revenues? Seems reasonable enough.
March 23, 2010
The DEVO method to creating a WOM-worthy panel
The panels at SXSW Interactive sucked.
That's what some of the record 13,000 attendees have been saying about the 2010 techfest. I heard it from many people I talked with at the conference, too.
Why?
Low-level content, lame speakers and bad panel moderators.
Of course, there were good panels, including the always entertaining Guy Kawasaki on Twitter tools and the informative Jaime Punishill on banking and social media.
But one panel really stood out: "DEVO, The Internet and You." Despite being late in the afternoon on the last day of the conference, it was the best panel I saw this year.
DEVO, the 80's avante-garde band, is releasing its first album in 20 years. The ironically brilliant marketing campaign for the album is to paint DEVO, which has always espoused the idea of "de-evolution," as a corporation. DEVO, Inc. plans to use "corporate" marketing strategies to promote itself, including focus groups, hiring an ad agency, crowdsourcing, Twitter, YouTube and even Chatroulette.
Here's DEVO member Gerald Casale explaining why DEVO needs to "rebrand" itself:
Then the panel turned into a brilliant piece of performance art. First, DEVO, Inc.'s COO Greg Scholl (hint: he's not real) shared a recorded communique with the audience.
Next, Bill Moulton, from DEVO's ad agency Mother Los Angeles, delivered a funny, deadpan PowerPoint presentation about the marketing campaign, illustrating the "power of the Internet!" and how DEVO will use it. Here's a snippet:
(Here's a pre-recorded version of the entire PowerPoint.)
Then Moulton showed how the band is using online focus groups for a "color study" to get data on what color people like, as well as in-person focus groups, poking fun at the typical corporate process of gathering feedback.
Finally, Jacob, a "research consultant" to Mother LA with an amorphous European accent, conducted a live focus group with the audience to gather even more data for its study, demonstrating the banality of focus groups.
The audience got the joke. One of the first questions from the crowd was: "You've leveraged a lot of synergies. Are there any synergies you haven't been able to leverage?"
The videos illustrate why this session was a lesson in making a panel interesting and fun. Here are the hints:
- A panel is a performance.
- Prepare, prepare, prepare.
- Involve the audience.
- Don't take yourself too seriously.
Think about the next panel you are organizing. Are you going to invite some experts and just wing it? Or will you think hard about sharing the same information as a performance that gets people thinking and talking?
UPDATE: DEVO Inc. COO Greg Scholl (again, not real) just sent the DEVO fan club email list a SXSW follow-up memo. And the performance continues...
February 04, 2010
A tale of 2 birthday cards
It was my birthday this week, so that usually means birthday-related direct mail from women's retail stores. I have two examples that showcase distinct differences between doing the minimum amount and doing something worth buzz.
Ann Taylor delivered a typical postcard: 15% off a one-time purchase in February. "On your special day, treat yourself with your Birthday Bonus," says. "It's your birthday. May all of your wishes come true."
Anthropologie sent a card in a odd-sized bubble pouch featuring a perforated cupcake with a candle on it. The candle is part of a necklace. It, too, offers 15% for a one-time purchase in February.
"Happy Birthday! Make a wish. And treat yourself to something special...Your candle necklace is for you to keep," it says. "This little gift is for you and only you. And cannot be turned into chocolate, flowers or cash. It's a one-time treat...."
If there's a card that leaves a lasting impression, both of the brand and how I could possibly talk about and show to others, it's easily the Anthropologie card. From the non-standard packaging to a necklace that you can keep to the non-boring copy, it's a winner.
It's easy for anyone to print a postcard. It's a bigger challenge to create something that demonstrates your ability to connect with someone at an emotional level.
January 18, 2010
5 new ways to compete for book PR
(Editor's note: This is a guest post from Barbara Henricks of CaveHenricks, a public relations firm for business books and authors. She's considered by many to be one of the best book publicists in the publishing industry. She can be reached at barbara@cavehenricks.com.)
I’ve been in the PR business nearly 20 years, and there’s been more change the past two years than in the first 18.
That’s created much fear and confusion. Readers are consuming content from more outlets and with a staggering number of devices-- via iPhones, computers, Blackberries, Kindles, Nooks and Sony Readers, to name a handful.
Getting a book published in 2010 is vastly different than in 2007. Advances are lower, editors are more wary of risk, print runs are shrinking, bookstores are ordering fewer copies, marketing dollars are tighter and publicists are chasing coverage in a media world that is undergoing its own transformation. That means authors today must master a new environment, relying on strategy, customization, and increased author participation.
Here are five ways for writers, authors and publishers to market in this new environment:
- A great media campaign will discard many if not all of the old notions, conventional wisdom and template approach of the past. There is no one blueprint for building a best seller. The best campaigns draw on all forms of media, with increased emphasis on digital forms. Campaigns today rely on the author’s participation beyond traditional tours and interviews. The best campaigns draw on an author’s natural strengths.
- There are no longer any magic bullets. No one single media hit can ensure a book’s meteoric rise to the top, with the possible exception of a full hour of “The Oprah Show” that features only one book, its ideas or the author.
- Magazine coverage is coming later and later, but now has the potential to prolong a book’s sales life. Not so long ago, if a magazine did not commit to coverage 3-4 months ahead of a book’s publication date, the process was over. Now, magazine editors will often take a look at finished books and post a review, an article or a bylined piece by the author in their online editions almost immediately. In some cases, if the online piece gets a lot of views, the magazine will run something in the print edition months after the book’s release, which will keep the sales alive well into the campaign.
- Bloggers are jumpstarting many successful media campaigns. For this to work, authors must be willing to become active participants – offering relevant content, contributing comments and connecting directly with bloggers themselves. It’s still the publicist’s job to do the legwork to guide authors through the vast landscape of bloggers, identifying a target group whose readership matches most closely with the book’s intended audience, but the author’s direct participation is required to make this outreach successful.
- Relationships will remain at the heart of good book promotion, but forming them will be more difficult than ever, particularly with the blog world. The best approach is good strategy – taking stories and ideas to a journalist only after very careful consideration of whether that book or message truly meets their needs. Repeatedly delivering only relevant material is the biggest relationship builder of all.
The landscape is different, the challenges new, but as always, big ideas and great books will will always find their way. As someone who cherishes her Kindle for its portability, must have the Sunday New York Times in its reassuringly weighty bundle, reads daily news online and cherishes her big glossy copy of Vogue, I know the industry will figure out how to integrate these formats into a successful mix.
Right now, it’s in flux.
November 18, 2009
New company, new history
When Jackie Huba and I decided eight years ago to start a company, we envisioned it as a consulting firm that would help clients create customer evangelists.
It was March 2001. We'd both just left the web development company we had worked at for three years. Online advertising was king then, but we wanted to explore why some brands experienced strong word of mouth while others didn't. We wanted to understand what fueled the evangelism, how it happened, and how could we help others do the same.
We started with a website and an email newsletter in an era that could only be described as Before Blogs. A few months later, Fast Company did a short write-up on us, which led to a call from a publisher, which led to a book contract, which led to a year's worth of work, which led to the book "Creating Customer Evangelists" and a regular schedule of speaking engagements and workshops. Instead of focusing on building a company, we focused on spreading a philosophy.
Eight years later, there's a wide range of belief systems to choose from: evangelists, influencers, agents, advocates, mavens or sneezers. Social media fuels all of them at remarkable speed; some companies have adapted well while many others do nothing -- not because they're resistant to change, but because they're unsure of what to do. We think it's a good time to help with that.
So today we're announcing that Ant's Eye View, a management consulting company led by our friends Sean O'Driscoll and Jake McKee, is acquiring us and our company that's home to all of our work. We're very excited to be part of a group that helps business get smart about being social. We'll keep blogging here, and we'll continue to speak at conferences like we have for years, but we'll do that while helping grow a management consulting firm.
Ant's Eye View isn't even a year old yet, but it's already growing like some freaky kid prodigy. Sean was the guy behind Microsoft's MVP program, a community that brings knowledgeable Microsoft product users together with others who have questions or problems to solve. Jake was the guy at LEGO who changed the way that company thought about and engaged with loyal fans and customers through community relations (the subject of a Wired cover story in 2006).
Sean and Jake joined forces early in 2009 to launch Ant's Eye View. After that, they brought in Sean McDonald; he'd led the social media efforts at Dell to rebuild the company's image after "Dell Hell" scorched it. That included the company’s first corporate blog and pioneering efforts like Ideastorm.com.
We like Ant's Eye View because its people have led complex, customer-driven projects at big brands. They understand and believe in customer participation -- the fifth P of marketing -- our core marketing philosophy. They're focused, too; in less time than it takes some companies to decide on a name and a logo, Ant's Eye View has built an impressive roster of clients like Cisco, Apple, Intuit and a bunch of others. Word is just beginning to spread.
It's fitting that our announcement happens on the first day of the 2009 WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas. Five years ago, myself, Jackie and a handful of others met with Pete Blackshaw, Dave Balter and Jonathan Carson to hear their idea for an association focused on word of mouth. We're glad they eventually founded the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which promotes the importance of word of mouth among all industries; Jackie was even named a founding board member. A bit rocky at times in its early years, WOMMA has filled its shoes well lately, especially by partnering with smarties like John Moore.
In fact, tonight at 7:30 pm (Wednesday), Ant's Eye View is throwing a celebration party at WOMMA. We'll be at the Risque club inside the Paris hotel, and the drinks are on us.
October 22, 2009
Twitter: the killer app for customer service
"Hello, this is Sam Kaufman from the AT&T Internet Executive Office, and I am calling about your tweets."
That's what I heard yesterday after posting a few tweets about my less-than-stellar customer service experience with an AT&T DSL technical support rep. The rep was trying to diagnose my DSL problems and after telling me to stay on the line for 10 minutes, he never returned after 30 minutes. I hung up. He never called back.
With a few hours of my AT&T tweet, @ATTJohnathon, a customer care rep on Twitter contacted me, asking if he could help. I DM'ed him my account number as he requested and he passed it on to Sam. Turns out Sam is part of the Customer Advocacy Center, where escalated customer complaints are sent. Sam says he has recently started receiving tweets from the AT&T Twitter team for follow-up.
AT&T is on board with social media for customer service. In addition to the five fourteen customer care reps on Twitter, the company has 23 social media channels on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Posterous and blogs.
Comcast may have been the first high-profile company to use Twitter for customer service, but now others are seeing the benefits as well, such as DirectTV, Wells Fargo, Alaska Airlines and FourSquare.
Twitter is the killer app for customer service. Companies can discover aggravating service problems by using a variety of tools to listen on tweets mentioning their name. A response can be nearly immediate.
It's good word of mouth, too. Mediocre service is such a standard that any form of pro-active Twitter customer service is worth talking about.
