Total CX

Offline versus Online: What’s the Best Customer Experience?

Offline versus Online: What’s the Best Customer Experience?
By Ronni Marshak

A friend and former colleague sent me an infographic from Monetate on The Ultimate Customer Experience that I found very interesting.

The infographic demonstrates how to move the offline customer experience online in five categories:

1. Continue the conversation
2. Talk to your customers like you know them
3. Help customers find what they’re looking for
4. Listen to what customers’ actions tell you
5. Surprise and delight

Tips on maintaining consistent branding and messaging, targeting the online experience to the customer, providing excellent search and recommendations, analyzing data and testing, and making it effortless for your customer aren’t earth shattering, but they are practical and presented in an easy to follow manner.

What’s most interesting is to look at the correlation between the offline and online experiences to see how to best use each channel. Since Monetate is in the business of helping its customers develop rich personalized online merchandising experiences, it’s not surprising that they focus and promote the online experience as a complement to the offline experience. But I always recommend combining the experiences into one seamless customer-supporting environment. Sometimes customers want to talk to someone, whether face-to-face or on the phone (or via online chat), especially when they are confused or excited. When you can’t find what you are looking for, sometimes it is because you don’t know what you want, and talking it out with someone can clarify your thoughts. And when you’ve finally decided to buy that cool gizmo you’re all hyped up about, an automated system just doesn’t share in your delight the way a live rep can.

The Infographic actually begins by pointing out the statistics on how a good versus bad online experience can influence loyalty. But never disregard the same considerations for an in-person experience, especially when combined with an online experience. You want to provide the best of both—to the same customers!

Don’t Leave Your Colleagues Unprepared for Customer-Facing Events

For years, we’ve been drilling into you the importance of customers first—making sure they have all the information they need to do business with you, buy and use (and repair) your products, and to co-design your future products, processes, and strategies. We often take internal stakeholders—your colleagues—for granted, assuming they will know what is expected of them when meeting with customer groups. So this time, I want to reinforce how important it is to prepare your co-workers (and bosses) for any customer co-design or Customer Advisory Board session.

In the co-design and CAB sessions that we run for our clients, we have a specific set of rules for how employees (whether they are your top execs or your down-in-the-trenches workers) are to participate. For example, we specifically ask that no one from the hosting organization interrupt the customers during the group interview that we call the issues and vision discussion. Now, we can just tell them not to butt in, but that creates hard feelings (towards us) and, even worse, a lack of engagement during the session. When we fully prepare these internal stakeholders, we explain why we want them to remain silent (to let the customers determine the direction of the discussion and to let them build on each others’ comments and ideas), we offer them the opportunity to take notes while they are actively listening to the conversation, and we assure them that they will be given the opportunity to ask their top questions at the end of the customer discussion.

Customer Loyalty Depends on More than a Great Experience

Recently, I read an interesting blog post by Bob Thompson, CEO of CustomerThink Corp., entitled “What Really Drives Customer Loyalty? It's Not Just About the Experience!” I was excited to read it because, even though I’m a fanatic endorser of providing a great customer experience, you have to have the products and services that make the experience worthwhile. After all, even the most elegant dinner party fails if the food stinks!

Bob Thompson agrees:

“Customer experience hype is losing touch with reality. Now it seems that the customer experience is the only thing that matters. Products are all commodities, so trying to innovate is a waste of time because a competitor will just copy you. You can't compete on price, either, unless you're Wal-Mart.

Improve the customer experience, CEM proponents argue, and your customers will be loyal, a competitive edge is assured, and the profits will roll in!

Really? This doesn't jibe with my personal experience as a consumer, where both product and experience are important.”

Bob goes on to talk about the balance of customer experience with other factors in a variety of industries. And it is very enlightening. But, to me, what it comes down to, and what he is saying, is that your company needs to satisfy your customers’ scenarios—what they want to achieve, their ultimate goals that are the reasons they came to you in the first place.

So, in a scenario of “I want my yard to look great,” you need lawn care products. And the things you care about are the quality of, say, the lawn mower, how easy it is to use, the price as well as the cost of fuel to run it, and, yes, the experience of choosing what to buy, making the purchase, getting it home, using it, and fixing it if it breaks. But if the mower doesn’t make the lawn look fantastic, none of the product features or customer experience will keep you loyal.

In the concluding section of his blog post, Bob asks—and answers, “Is Customer Experience important? Of course! But it's not the only thing that matters. The point of good loyalty research is to understand what really drives customer loyalty in your target market. Then you can build a strategy to decide where to invest, which will depend on your capabilities and the actions of competitors in your market.”

You are so right, Bob! And that good loyalty research to understand what drives your customers’ loyalty is to identify and embrace their scenarios.

How To’s for Emailing Co-Design and CAB Customers

By Patty Seybold

Many of our loyal readers/followers/members/clients are customer experience executives or executives charged with launching and/or evolving new products and services. That means you’re often hip-deep in customer-facing activities—planning customer advisory board meetings, pulling together cross-functional teams and customers to gather requirements and brainstorm new possibilities. Many of you ask us for help and advice when running, planning, or facilitating these activities. You also ask us to provide you with templates, best practices, and what not to do. So, it’s in that spirit that we try to publish and disseminate what we’ve learned over the years in an easy to use and accessible manner. This week, Ronni Marshak offers detailed advice and examples of how and when to use email to build and maintain your relationships with customers in and around planning a customer event.

Tip: When Group Emails Are Welcome. Here’s something that most customer experience or marketing professionals balk at doing that I have found to be amazingly effective: Right after you’ve gotten a group of customers together to co-design and/or to discuss their and your strategies, send them a group email. Include all of their email addresses in the clear so they can see each others’ email addresses and they can reply to all. This might seem counter-intuitive—after all, people value their privacy. They’ve already swapped business cards. And you usually provide them with an official follow-up list of contact information. But the informality of a group email right after the event tends to rekindle the emotion and fun of learning and sharing together. You’ll be surprised at how many people will “reply to all” about how much they enjoyed the event and/or new ideas they’ve had. You can build on that “group email” to continue the dialogue using a simple list/serv type group communication. You don’t HAVE to create a formal “workspace/private community” for every group of customers you interact with. Often a simple email list is all you need to keep the conversation going!

Tips for Email Communications for Customer-Facing Engagements
The New CSM Guidebook: Part 3: Communicating with Customers
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, May 10, 2012

Will Groupon's Loyalty Programs Retain the Right Customers?

By Patty Seybold

Groupon is the US-based company that defined the "daily deals" category in this country and has superimposed its brand on pre-existing group deal buying sites in many countries. After a controversial IPO in early November 2011, Groupon has continued its rapid expansion, both globally [Groupon sells daily deals in 48 countries] and to beef up its high tech talent pool in Palo Alto.

According to Tricia Duryee's tour of Groupon's Palo Alto facility, the company is focusing on developing tools that will be most useful to small local businesses—the merchants who are critical to the company's growth strategy.

There are two kinds of customer loyalty that matter to Groupon:

1. Consumers who are looking for good deals on things and services they need, want to gift, and/or are willing to try.

2. Merchants who are looking for good ways to attract and retain loyal customers.

DEAL-CONSCIOUS CONSUMERS. Many critics have suggested that this group of deal-conscious consumers are not the ones you want to attract. They are fickle, always shopping for the best deal and moving on. Yet there are many cultures around the world in which getting the best deal is the way everyone shops. People expect to bargain and get discounts. They enjoy the process, and they still come back to the same merchants as long as they feel their custom is being rewarded. They aren't necessarily fickle shoppers—just bargain-conscious shoppers.

So the answer to the question: are these the customers you really want to attract in a loyalty program? We say, "yes!" The company that learns how to win the hearts and minds of bargain-conscious shoppers around the world and to deliver those consumers to local merchants who learn how to serve these customers (and their friends and family members) profitably over and over again will be successful. Hunting for bargains is a strong social drive!

LOCAL MERCHANTS. Many big companies have tried to provide valuable services to the hundreds of millions (probably billions) of local businesses around the world. It's an expensive proposition. Microsoft, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook are among the firms that have all had big initiatives designed to provide valuable tools to help local merchants build their businesses through smart use of online and mobile tools. Both Yahoo! and Google reportedly tried to buy Groupon for an amount rumored to be up to $6 billion before its IPO (which valued the company at $12.7 billion).

Ronni Marshak reviews Groupon's newest loyalty programs and provides some recommendations to make them more attractive to both consumers and merchants.

A Holiday Wish List to My Favorite Merchants

As I was holiday shopping on Amazon.com this year, I discovered items that I had put in my wish list over the last several years. Some of these are big ticket items that I’m not yet ready to purchase, but want to remember. But others were things I wanted, but was in too much of a hurry or was feeling too poor to order on the spot. And then I promptly forgot about them. I have since sent out invitations to view my wish list to select friends and family members, but, in each case, I had to send a separate email to each person telling them to whom I had sent the list (they all know each other) so that the gifts wouldn’t be duplicated.

Amazon—and many other etailers—do a good job with wish lists. Looking back at the capabilities, I saw a lot of flexibility. I can create multiple wish lists, give each item a priority, and add comments. But what I really wanted to do was to be able to send out specific items to specific recipients—I’d rather get the frying pans from my brother and the negligee from a girlfriend. I could have set up separate lists, but that was such a bother.

And then I started wondering why Amazon hadn’t ever “pinged” me about the things I wished for. It seems to me that a wish list is a great marketing vehicle for Amazon and a terrific reminder about things I might list to get for the holidays.

This started me on the road to my article this week, “ All I Want for the Holidays: A Wish List to My Favorite Retailers and Etailers.” I started daydreaming about how these merchants could help me give and receive the perfect gifts this season…and make money in the process!

Managing the Web Experience You Offer

Our resident e-marketing and merchandising guru, Sue Aldrich, offers practical advice on how to manage your web experience (which includes mobile, kiosk, or any self-service touchpoint) to achieve a better customer experience, better customer relationships, improved business results, more control over the web experience, and more consistent brand representation. Sue provides three best practices and nine guiding principles that will help you successfully implement these practices:

Her three best practices (and implementation principles):

1. Design a Personalized Experience To Engage Customers and Support Your Business

• Be your customers’ guide
• Help customers get everything they need
• Establish strategy and plans to meet business goals and customer goals

2. Provision Your Organization for Success

• Develop a skills plan
• Develop a tools strategy and plan

3. Monitor and Optimize Your Plan

• Measure what matters to your customers
• Measure what matters to your business
• Measure what matters to your function
• Establish Optimization Programs

Within her report, Sue offers relevant examples from a number of B2C and B2B retailers. She describes what to do and how to measure your results in order to continue to improve the web experience you offer customers and to reap the benefits.

Best Practices for Web Experience Management
How to Identify the Right Strategy, Plans, Tactics, and Metrics to Achieve Business and Customer Goals
By Susan E. Aldrich, SVP and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, December 8, 2011

Using Daily Deals to Encourage Donations

Regular readers know that I am a Groupon/Living Social/Tippr/KGB Deals/Amazon Deals/Boston Deals/etc. groupie. I spend at least a half hour each day looking through the discount offers sent to my email to find the few that will save me money on things I really need and want. Not only do I take my Goddaughter out for dinner at least once a month (almost always discounted at least 50 percent by a deal coupon), but I have gotten great deals on at least five holiday presents, allowing me to be more generous than I can actually afford to be (and making me look like the best relative ever!).

Over the past few weeks, I was surprised, and yet delighted to be offered daily deals that don’t offer me cost savings, but allow me to make charitable contributions quickly and easily by using my stored daily deal account information. It started with Groupon, which offered me a deal where, if I donate $11 to Feeding America, that donation will be matched by Pepsi. Now, I consider myself a generous person, and I give regularly to my chosen charities. However, Feeding America isn’t one of them. But it all seemed so easy—Groupon has my payment info on file and the matching gift made it irresistible. So I made the donation, and I felt great about it. Once I received my confirmation, I did have to go to the Feeding America site and register my donation, but it was pretty darn easy.

Managing My Home Stuff: New Program from Lowes

Last week, after a long day of research and writing my customer experience audit on Mint.com, an independent site for managing all your personal financial “stuff,” I sat back to enjoy a bit of television. A commercial for Lowes was on, and it was talking about the new MyLowes program being offered by the Home Improvement superstore chain. Although pretty tuckered out, I guess I’ve become addicted to researching sites that claim to “manage my stuff,” so it was back to the computer to check it out. According to Lowes.com:

“MyLowe's is a collection of tools designed to revolutionize, customize and simplify home improvement.

• Track purchase history with a MyLowe's card.
• Get organized with Folders & Lists.
• Stay on top of seasonal needs with Reminders.
• Make managing your home easier with Home Profile”

How to Be a Great Customer!

By Patricia Seybold

My brother Andy Seybold is a great customer! It’s not that he buys more than most people (he doesn’t), or that he travels and meets more people than most (he does). But what makes Andy a great customer is that he likes people. He’s naturally outgoing and cheerful. That rubs off on everyone around him. He gets the best service of anyone I know. Not because he’s haughty, but because he’s attentive and personable. He treats the people he deals with in person, on the phone, via email, with respect, humor, and compassion. So does my colleague, Ronni Marshak. Ronni has a knack for making friends, for unruffling ruffled feathers, for smoothing troubled waters, and for coming to the rescue. Both my brother, Andy and my long-time colleague, Ronni, are expert in the art of being a good customer. So when Ronni suggested that she write about what it takes to be a good customer, I loved the idea!

These tips will serve as a great reminder the next time you’re in a less-than-ideal situation and/or as you’re embarking on a new relationship with a client.

What I found interesting in reading Ronni’s description of what makes a good customer is that I can match them up, person-for-person, with the customers that we and our clients have selected to participate in their customer advisory boards. Good customer advisory board members are critics, and they are demanding. But they are articulate, respectful, and have a win/win attitude.

How would YOU rate yourself as a customer? Do you fume silently and tweet your annoyance to the world at large (which is what I do!), or do you reach out and bridge the gap, offering to be helpful in the mutual dance of commerce?

How to Be a Great Customer
Good Customers Have the Best Experiences
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, November 3, 2011