Total CX

What to Do When Sh*t Happens that Adversely Impacts Customers

By Patty Seybold

Nobody’s perfect. Stuff happens. Systems go down. Things break. Information is lost or stolen. This month, Bank of America’s retail banking website has had some issues with customers’ passwords. According to the beleaguered customer service associates we’ve spoken with, there was a July, 2012 system upgrade that did not go well at all. Maybe the upgrade was really necessary. Checking online at sitedown.com reveals that there have been 85 downtime reports by consumers on BofA.com since July 5, 2012 and 3,350 downtime reports on BofA since sitedown.com started reporting in 2010. The 3,350 “all time” number of downtime reports compares to many other banks with totals of downtime reports in the low hundreds for the same period. We don’t know who frequents sitedown.com. Maybe it’s skewed towards BofA customers?

Two weeks ago, Ronni Marshak tried to log into her bank account at BofA and discovered that it didn’t remember her password. Having trouble with your password doesn’t count as the system being down, but it IS really annoying. As Ronni and the BofA customer service associate dealt with her problem, she discovered that she was not alone. There had apparently been lots of customers who were suddenly unable to log into their bank accounts. Since most of us now rely heavily on online banking, this lack of access can be paralyzing and hugely frustrating.

What should a company do when there are unexpected glitches that disrupt customers’ lives, cause them to take extra steps, and sow doubt in customers’ minds about the viability of your brand? You need to do more than fix the problem, apologize, and offer an appeasement.

Privacy and the Future of Personalization

By Sue Aldrich

Person Focus
The first steps in personalizing an interaction are often based on segmentation, then progress to true personalization. This evolution is underway now, and it will gain speed. By 2016, we’ll expect personalized experiences to be as common as “most popular” lists are today.

Our preferences will be collected even more diligently because they are more useful than ever before. Technologies will automate the collection, analysis, and application of preferences and other personal data to make marketers more effective and to make our customer experiences better. If more effective marketing seems creepy, remember that effective marketing delivers only offers and suggestions that are attractive. Ineffective marketing delivers offers and suggestions that distract, annoy, or even disgust you.

Privacy Lost (Again)
And personalization will be accomplished not just with profile data and current activity, but also with a broad range of data that we have explicitly published about ourselves. Despite privacy regulations, our ratings, reviews, likes, and comments will be part of the personalization equation. And the ratings, reviews, likes and comments of our friends will be included as well. Creepy as this may seem, I am looking forward to the day that Netflix tells me that my circle of close friends have watched these three movies. I gave up my privacy years ago. I am tracked online and off, via my cookie, my credit card, my social security number, my street address, and my driver’s license. (Yes, it’s creepy. So is my cellar. I try to focus on happier thoughts.)

Privacy Regained
Marketers are aware of the creepiness factor and are alert to changes in privacy regulations. New mechanisms will emerge to enable people to control their information and its use in a more granular and also more global way. For example, one will be able to allow tracking of shopping activity for use in improving shopping experiences across the web, not just a specific site, or allow tracking of shopping, research, and reading on music, but not other topics. Or allow tracking of everything, but control which companies can use the information.

Cross Touchpoint
Technologies will make it easier for designers and marketers to automatically collect relevant information and personalize every aspect of interactions across the customer life cycle, across touchpoints and devices. As customer experience is increasingly personalized, this becomes increasingly important. If the pages I see are personalized based on my web activity, I need to see the same content from my mobile. Otherwise, the experience could be very frustrating. How do I find that interesting thing that was front and center on my desktop now that I’m sitting on the train with my iPad?

Roadmap for Your Personalization Strategy

By Sue Aldrich

We define personalization as the delivery of the most relevant and engaging content (such as products, images, or articles) for the visitor’s current task. There are different approaches to adapting customer interactions to the audience, including targeting, tailoring, customizing, segmenting, and personalizing. Personalization is the only approach that requires identifying and responding to a person. This identification might be anonymous or by name and might be performed via cookie or by log in.

Which Customer Scenarios? In order to personalize your customer experience, you need to consider the most important customer experiences your business supports. We find it useful to think in terms of specific customer scenarios. A customer scenario comprises a customer, a customer goal, and the ideal path to achieving that goal. For example, a new mother wants to feel confident that her child will get the education he deserves. She wants to quell her anxiety about the child’s future. From the business’s point of view, this is a person who should sign up for an education savings and investment product. Mother and business have congruent but different goals. Understanding the parent’s situation and perceptions will enable the business to be more successful in both marketing to her and serving her.

Do You Have the Data You Need? Do you have access to the data required to support the personalization you want? Data supporting personalization is wide ranging and frequently big. It includes environment data, such as time zone, device, country, and browser type; site behavior data, such as past visit patterns, purchases, and campaign exposure; referrer data such as domain, campaign, social graph, and affiliate; transitory data such as time, weekday, and recency of visits; and data from other sites and systems, such as call center and third-party data.

How much will it cost to get and use the data? How difficult will it be to be granted access to the data? What customer data will be useful, and where is it? What product data will be needed? What information about content will be useful, and, if we don’t have that information, how will we create it? Data accessibility will determine what personalization approaches are possible. The value of achieving various personalization features will determine how much the data is worth to your business and encourage initiatives to acquire and improve data.

These and many other issues are raised in our Roadmap to Personalization.

Socialized, Mobilized, and Personalized: Bakers Shoes

By Sue Aldrich

Bakers Shoes is a chain of retail stores with extensive online properties for engaging its customers. Importantly for Bakers Shoes’ future, it has established successful mechanisms to increase intimacy with customers – and collects masses of data about those customers. Using Facebook and its own Shoeternity site and blog, Bakers Shoes collects implicit data about customer preferences.

Bakers Shoes’ strategy for its online and mobile resources is based on analysis of interaction data and unceasing testing of designs, paths, and offers. For example, traffic analysis revealed that customers were using its mobile site to read reviews and check inventory before going to a store. This analysis convinced Bakers Shoes to abandon the mobile app tactic and invest in ongoing improvement of its mobile site. Bakers Shoes personalizes product recommendations automatically, leading to an increase in average order value of 40 percent for orders where the customer has clicked on one of these recommendations. Tactics for recommendations and offers are constantly tested and optimized to continually improve sales results.

Bakers Shoes’ Facebook page presents style suggestions, collects likes and customer comments, and, of course, clickthroughs to the commerce site. Shoeternity takes friendship further: this is the site where customers post photos of their “looks” and post comments and likes about the posts of others. Posts are extensively tagged with words describing the shoes, the effect, and the environment for wearing the look. I can search these tags to find out if animal prints (tiger, zebra, etc.) are out of fashion. Only five posts use the words “animal print,” and none this year. OK, forget the giraffe-print booties; they are so last year.

Bakers Shoes can use this trove of data in automatically select products to recommend to shoppers, in making stocking decisions, in choosing images for banners and other ads, and in choosing topics for Facebook and Shoeternity blog posts.

Bakers Shoes Mobile Pages

(Click on image to enlarge.)

© 2012 Patricia Seybold Group Inc. and Bakers Footwear Group.

Bakers Shoes has created a mobile site that is consistent with the web site, but with simplified navigation and displays. The shoes selected in response to a navigation choice are those most likely to interest the customer. In a click, the customer can like it, order it, or find a store that carries it.

~ Sue

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.

Local Motors: Forging a Customer Ecosystem to Transform the Automobile Industry

Patty Seybold poses a question: Can you transform an industry from the outside? That’s what Local Motors has been doing since 2007 with its mission of creating game-changing cars with an unprecedented standard of customer service. And the way the company is doing it is by creating a true customer ecosystem that embodies the six characteristics of a successful ecosystem:

1. Help customers achieve and/or manage something they care about.
2. Design for specific target audiences.
3. Provide a “secret sauce” that transforms customers’ ability to get things done.
4. Attract partners & suppliers who can contribute to these customers’ success.
5. Align the entire ecosystem to meet customers’ success metrics.
6. Embed, co-brand, and be ubiquitous so customers will encounter and use your secret sauce no matter what their starting point is.

There are a number of take-aways for you and your company that Patty presents, but the one that really resonated to me is you can spawn a vibrant ecosystem of partners and suppliers once you have a core and sustainable community of passionate customers who want to create their own designs and to appreciate and learn from others. It’s amazing what a community of passionate customers can do for a business.

Here is a short sample of Patty's Case Study.

Local Motors: Open Source Car Design and Local Manufacturing
Forging a Customer Ecosystem to Transform the Automobile Industry
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, January 26, 2012

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

Creating Brand Loyalty

By Patricia Seybold

We are all mourning the Steve Jobs’ death. Although not unexpected, it is a very sad turning point for many industries. Steve is being remembered and revered by musicians and music labels, by retailers, by radio, movie and TV executives, by educators, by marketers, by phone users and computer users and podcast creators. It seems that there’s not a single industry that Steve Jobs’ magic touch didn’t reinvent! That reinvention invariably revolved around transforming the customer experience in ways that simplify our lives and delight us.

We all know what it means to have an “Apple” or an “i-experience”—whether we’re discussing user interfaces, physical device design, business models, physical shopping, customer service, software design, or any other aspect of design and execution. Steve Jobs raised the bar forever and took us into new territory. He also proved beyond a doubt that designing and delivering customer-centric products and experiences is hugely profitable!

We can’t all be Steve Jobs. In fact, no one will be able to replace him or come close. But as we consider his legacy, think about what he has done to and for the Apple brand. Most of us have a really strong attraction to the brand. We see ourselves in it. It fits our self-image of who we want to be seen as, and what we want to surround ourselves with. We don’t see ourselves as Steve Jobs’ clones. We DO see ourselves as people who appreciate and deserve well-designed products, seductive experiences, and great relationships with the people who represent the brand. That’s because we know we can trust them to embody the brand values and to provide a level of personal service that respects our needs and context.

As you think about Steve Jobs’ legacy today. Think about how well your organization delivers both products and experiences that customers love to love!

Brand Loyalty
The Direct Path to Customer Satisfaction, Referrals, and Revenue
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, October 6, 2011

Why Customer & Partner Advocates Should Be Joined at the Hip

By Patricia Seybold

 Most truly customer-centric companies have people whose jobs it is to deeply understand one or more customer segments and to advocate for that group of customers within the firm. The customer segment might be high net worth customers, enterprise CIOs, inner city teens, first-time home buyers, breast cancer patients, or any target audience(s) that are important to your firm.

Customer advocates typically reside in a customer experience group. Customer segment managers often live in marketing.

If your firm does business through channel partners: financial advisors, real estate brokers, insurance agents, value-added resellers, and so on, you probably also have the equivalent of partner segment managers.

Partner segment managers usually report to the channel sales organization and/or marketing organization.

We recommend that you think about this important set of roles differently: Customer segment advocates should have operational responsibility to improve the customer experience for their target customers. Partner segment advocates should make it as easy as possible for a particular group of partners to support the customers they serve. When you get these two groups together—end customers in a given segment and the partners who serve them—you discover that they have common needs.

How Well Does Amazon.com Let Customers Manage Their Stuff?

By Patricia Seybold

Since we feel strongly that excelling in helping customers “manage their stuff” is important, we’re embarking on a series of customer experience audits of some of the best exemplars. We begin our series with the etailer that has continually set the bar for customer self-service—not only in making it easy for customers to purchase online, but also in making it easy for customers to manage their relationships and their stuff: Amazon.com.

As you read through Ronni Marshak’s customer experience audit of a typical “manage my stuff” scenario on Amazon.com, think about which of these features your company currently offers. Some of these are consumer-related (like managing the gift-giving experience), but others pertain equally to business and consumer customers.

Note that there are many areas in which Amazon excels, in particular:

• Amazon provides access to the order details for EVERY transaction you’ve ever done with Amazon.

• Amazon now provides order summary reports.

• Amazon lets you manage the list of addressees to whom you send stuff AND associate different payment mechanisms for each.

• Best of all, Amazon tells you WHY they recommended something to you and lets you tune the assumptions on which it bases its recommendations.

But, perhaps surprisingly, there are other areas in which Amazon falls short. For example:

• You can’t get a complete list of your digital and physical orders in one place.
• You can’t easily see how much you’ve spent in total in a given time period.
• You can’t select and sort and organize your purchases.
• You can’t see how much money you saved by signing up for Amazon Prime (which costs $79 and provides free shipping).

How Well Does Amazon.com Let Me “Manage My Stuff?”

Customer Experience Audit of Amazon.com’s Capabilities to Let Customers Manage Their Relationship
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, July 7, 2011