After the first two, of course you need to read this from the bottom up :-)

Mitch

There is an online campaign going on among the netizens of India to hunker for Mr. Ratan Tata as the next President of India, though there are two more years to go for the next Presidential elections in India. The current President, Ms. Pratibha Patil, is the first woman President of India. Before her India had a rocket scientist as its President.

1. All category of employees including those who had completed even 1 day as casuals were treated on duty during the time the hotel was closed. 

2. Relief and assistance to all those who were injured and killed 

3. The relief and assistance was extended to all those who died at the railway station, surroundings including the “Pav- Bha ji” vendor and the pan shop owners.

4. During the time the hotel was closed, the salaries were sent by money order. 

5. A psychiatric cell was established in collaboration with Tata Institute of Social Sciences to counsel those who needed such help. 

6. The thoughts and anxieties going on people’s mind was constantly tracked and where needed psychological help provided. 

7. Employee outreach centers were opened where all help, food, water, sanitation, first aid and counseling was provided. 1600 employees were covered by this facility. 

8. Every employee was assigned to one mentor and it was that person’s responsibility to act as a “single window” clearance for any help that the person required. 

9. Ratan Tata personally visited the families of all the 80 employees who in some manner – either through injury or getting killed – were affected. 

10. The dependents of the employees were flown from outside Mumbai to Mumbai and taken care off in terms of ensuring mental assurance and peace. They were all accommodated in Hotel President for 3 weeks. 

11. Ratan Tata himself asked the families and dependents – as to what they wanted him to do. 

12. In a record time of 20 days, a new trust was created by the Tatas for the purpose of relief of employees. 

13. What is unique is that even the other people, the railway employees, the police staff, the pedestrians who had nothing to do with Tatas were covered by compensation. Each one of them was provided subsistence allowance of Rs. 10K per month for all these people for 6 months. 

14. A 4 year old granddaughter of a vendor got 4 bullets in her and only one was removed in the Government hospital. She was taken to Bombay hospital and several lacs were spent by the Tatas on her to fully recover her. 

15. New hand carts were provided to several vendors who lost their carts. 

16. Tata will take responsibility of life education of 46 children of the victims of the terror. 

17. This was the most trying period in the life of the organization. Senior managers including Ratan Tata were visiting funeral to funeral over the 3 days that were most horrible. 

18. The settlement for every deceased member ranged from Rs. 36 to 85 lacs [One lakh rupees tranlates to approx 2200 US $ ] in addition to the following benefits: 

a. Full last salary for life for the family and dependents;

b. Complete responsibility of education of children and dependents – anywhere in the world.

c. Full Medical facility for the whole family and dependents for rest of their life.

d. All loans and advances were waived off – irrespective of the amount.

e. Counselor for life for each person

1. How was such passion created among the employees? How and why did they behave the way they did? 

2. The organization is clear that it is not something that someone can take credit for. It is not some training and development that created such behaviour. If someone suggests that – everyone laughs 

3. It has to do with the DNA of the organization, with the way Tata culture exists and above all with the situation that prevailed that time. The organization has always been telling that customers and guests are #1 priority 

4. The hotel business was started by Jamshedji Tata when he was insulted in one of the British hotels and not allowed to stay there. 

5. The whole approach was that the organization would spend several hundred crore in re-building the property – why not spend equally on the employees who gave their life?

Graham Hill reminded us in a twitter discussion with Prem Kumar this morning of a 7-step framework for customer collaboration, just yearning for it to be elaborated upon and worked out in a detailed methodology. I'll repeat it below, and let you add your ideas and suggestions in the comments :)

1. Talk to a sample of customers and non-customers to identify the jobs they are doing where they hire your product as a tool
2. Look at the end-to-end customer experience and all the hoops you make customers jump through in doing the jobs
3. Look at the resources you, your partners AND customers must bring to increase the ease with which the customers can do the jobs
4. Look at the capabilities each must develop to provide the resources that make customer jobs easier and more effective
5. Carry out Social Network Analysis inside the company and partners to see who needs to collaborate to develop the capabilities
6. Look at how customers use Social Media to help them get the jobs done. And how to harness their engagement
7. Use Steve Blank's Customer Development Approach to plan improvements that you can trial within one to three months

Jobs > Customer Jobs > Resources > Capabilities > Collaboration > Social Media > Customer Development!

Focus on the Business, not the Social or the Tech - on the sharp end of how the customers and the company co-create value together!

 

Jay Baer hosted a guest post today by Kevin Troy Darling on his blog Convice & Convert that caught my attention because it started off well, but then went and spun out of control by changing the focus from meeting the customer needs to how marketers could meet their own needs through the use of tools. I proferred a rebuttal which I have reproduced below (because it is still in moderation..):

Drop the megaphone and start listening! Do you think everyone is just waiting for your automated email to drop into their inbox? Where do you fit in going about understanding the customer wants, needs and desired outcomes, and adapting your offer accordingly? Is it good enough to just say "here is our product, go buy it?" and hope for a .02 conversion rate - I don't think so! Look here for some clues Advertising and the Social Customer

Do your homework - start here The Ultimate sCRM Resource - social CRM is not Advertising 1.0 through a new channel. The blogpost's title states it "Needs to be More About The Customers" - so take your own advice and focus on understanding and meeting their needs and not meeting your own as a marketer.

You can contribute more to your organisation than only just leads - such as product improvement ideas that you gather through interaction with your customers - and thus keep your company competitive as well as increasing the value you as a marketer bring to your organization.

What is your point of view on this? Please leave a comment on Jay Baer's post or you can leave one here below.

Cheers,

Mark

 

 

Which technology project deployment methodology is most effective?

 

When would you choose to use one over the other?

 

What are positive / negative experiences you've experienced with either

 

 

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending a (fabulous, might I say) presentation (to a packed room, and justifiably so) at the CRM Evolution 2010 Conference by friend and colleague, Esteban Kolsky.  At one point in the presentation, he discusses measuring experiences, and the differences between efficiency and effectiveness.  This got me to thinking about the relationship between these two terms from the customer perspective.  It also reminded me of another great piece of work, the Social Customer Manifesto, by another long-time friend and colleague, Chris Carfi, who Paul Greenberg credits with being the guy who coined the term "social customer...some 6 or 7 years ago.

 

For those of you unfamiliar with the Manifesto, here’s how Chris frames it:

 

The Social Customer Manifesto

If Cluetrain was the shot heard round the world, then this is certainly its echo.

It is clear that customers across all industries are getting really tired of being spun, misled, and lied to…

Customers simply aren't taking it anymore. And if an organization is not opening up to them, and not interacting with them, and not meeting their needs, those customers are going to make sure the organization knows about it. Maybe not today, but soon…and that's if the organization is lucky. More likely, those same customers will just go away and never come back.

On this front, there are a few trends that we've identified from the customer's point of view. They are listed below. And this is known to be an incomplete list…

Chris then lists 11 trends that comprise the Manifesto.  In thinking about the two terms that Esteban used, efficiency versus effectiveness, I attempted to rearrange the 11 trends in the Manifesto into these two categories.

 

EFFICIENCY

•    I want to know when something is wrong and what you’re going to do to fix it.

•    I don’t want to be called by another salesperson.  Ever.  (Unless they have something useful.  Then I want it yesterday).

•    I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours.  I don’t care if it’s the end of your quarter.

•    I want to tell you when you’re crewing up.  Conversely, I’m happy to tell you the things that you are doing well.  I may even tell you what your competitors are doing.

•    I don’t want to do business with idiots.

 

EFFECTIVENESS

•    I want to have a say.

•    I want to help shape things that I’ll find useful.

•    I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.

•    I want to know your selling process.

•    I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.

•    I want to know what’s next.  We’re in a partnership…where should we go?

 

Efficiency deals with how things work – the process, systems, infrastructure, etc, while Effectiveness is about the results – the things I, as a customer, really care about, the things that leave a bigger impression and affect the way I feel.  IMHO, some day, if it hasn’t happened already, from the customer’s perspective, efficiencies will be table stakes – meaning the minimal requirements a company must do to remain on par with expectations.  Effectiveness is the nirvana to strive for, the area that really matters.

 

Just my 2 cents.  What do you think?

Most of us in the business world have been exposed to one of the countless (?) versions of the “brand or loyalty or customer experience or…pyramid”.  Common to all of these versions, the pyramid is a visual representation of the different layers of meaning and involvement on the part of the customer with the business (or, more specifically, its product(s) and service(s).  It’s a map of the journey from awareness (or differentiation) at the lowest level to the highest level, or (business) nirvana, winning the hearts and minds of the customer, the emotional involvement with the product(s)/service(s).

 

Marketers, brand managers, customer experience personnel, etc toil diligently to move their businesses up this pyramid, to differentiate and ingratiate themselves to the customer.  Inherent in this view is that the competitive alternatives lessen as the business moves up the pyramid (in the customer’s view).

 

Since most of us are familiar with some version of this pyramid, I won’t go into detail describing the levels, and a simplistic version is shown below:

 

 

Years ago, I was given (by the author by way of a mutual long-time friend and colleague, Paul Greenberg, and thank you again) a book I truly love, entitled “Secrets of Customer Relationship Management” by Dr. James G. Barnes.  One of the concepts in this book is the “Customer Satisfaction Pyramid” (shown below).

 

 

Source: Secrets of Customer Relationship Management, James G. Barnes, McGraw-Hill, 2001, pg 73

 

A brief summary of the levels in this pyramid is:

 

Level 1: CORE – the essence of what we offer

 

Level 2: PROCESS/SUPPORT – the infrastructure that supports and enhances the core

 

Level 3: TECHNICAL PERFORMANCE – Adherence to standards – how well we perform on product and process promises

 

Level 4: INTERACTION WITH ORGANIZATION – how people are served and treated

 

Level 5: EMOTIONAL ELEMENTS – how we make them feel

 

IMHO, the strength of this inverted pyramid, or la pyramide inversée, comes from the fact that the size of each level is intended to represent the customer’s viewpoint of the importance of each level.  This is how Jim Barnes describes it in the book:

 “Things that the company and its employees provide and do at each level take on progressively more importance in terms of their influence on customer satisfaction…addressing progressively higher-order customer needs, similar to human needs in general as described by Maslow…and adding progressively more value for the customer.”

 

 

 

Maybe it’s my own strange sense of humor, but I think the parallelogram created by combining these two is interesting.  The Brand (or Loyalty or Customer Experience or…) Pyramid on the right represents the company’s viewpoint of the customer and the Customer Satisfaction Pyramid on the left represents the customer’s viewpoint of what the customer cares about.  There are striking similarities - the lowest level representing the core product and awareness by the customer and the highest level involving emotions.  But it’s the differences in the magnitude – the size of the levels that can have an affect on our perceptions (and what we prioritize, as a business) that is the most dramatic.

 

Couple this with some of the more recent thinking about customer behavior, as in these posts:

 

by friend and colleague, Wim Rampen, about what customers value -

“a Customer does not value a relationship with the company, but mostly values the outcome generated from the experience of using your product or service, it should not be difficult to understand that Customers value knowledge or information on how to improve that outcome, over relationships (with the company). Even if the company is involved in providing this knowledge, it is not the interaction or relationship, but the actual knowledge or outcome of the interaction that is of value to your Customer.”

 

or from Beth Synder-Bulik for Advertsing Age, about understanding customers using behavioral economics –

“It (behavioral economics) deviates from traditional economics in that it doesn't assume consumers behave rationally, like a market (in theory) does, making decisions based solely on facts or logic such as price or quality. Rather, emotions and social psychology affect or dictate decisions and create sometimes predictable "irrational" tendencies.”

and maybe you start to think about what’s more important, and how I should prioritize my actions.  As I said in last weeks post, it is human nature to simplify, categorize, clarify, and make things black and white.  This logical, rationale mindset can affect our behavior, and drive us towards prioritizing our work from the bottom up, ever improving the infrastructure, processes, systems, striving towards the nirvana “bond” pinnacle.  IMHO, that’s the easiest path, and the one implied by the brand/loyalty/customer experience/…pyramid, but not the right path.  If you care about the customer, shouldn’t you INVERT your pyramid (or use theirs), and start with how you want them to feel, (not only about your business, product, or service, but the value in use of your product or service), and work your way backwards, to the infrastructure, processes, systems, etc that support that goal?

Friend and colleague Mitch Lieberman wrote a post earlier this week about listening vs. hearing and that got me to thinking.  As a customer advocate and practitioner in Voice of Customer, this is a subject near and dear to my heart.

 

The first step in listening (and any VOC program) involves obtaining customer feedback.  Customer feedback, whether it happens in real-time or later, is the customer’s viewpoint.  A few weeks ago, I read an interesting post by Dorothy Rowe at newscientist.com, and part of that struck me:

 

Take the Stoic Greek philosopher Epictetus. He commented on human behaviour this way: "It is not things in themselves that trouble us, but our opinions of things." In other words, it is not what happens to us that determines our behaviour but how we interpret what happens to us… Thus, when facing a disaster, one person might interpret it as a challenge to be mastered, another as a certain defeat, while a third might see it as the punishment he or she deserves. Crucially, the decisions about what to do follow from the interpretation each person has made.

 

Over the last 20 years or so, neuroscientists have shown that Epictetus was right - and given us important clues about our neuropsychology. They have found that our brain functions in such a way that we cannot see "reality" directly. All we can ever know are the guesses or interpretations our mind creates about what is going on. To create these guesses, we can only draw on basic human neuroanatomy and on our past experience. Since no two people ever have exactly the same neuroanatomy or experience, no two people ever interpret anything in exactly the same way.

 

This particularly struck home, because my wife and I are perfect examples.  Often times, we have come away with two very disparate opinions/realities from the exact same experience – we are subjected to our own filters.

 

This applies to customer feedback too – it is their story (and we love to tell stories), their opinion, their reality – how they interpreted events.  Kind of adds a new twist to the old adage “the customer is always right” doesn’t it?  Instead of just seeing this as a saying about keeping (happy) customers, it should be viewed as an empathetic understanding of (potentially) different interpretations of reality.

 

Customer feedback comes from those whose desire to give feedback exceeds the personal constraints for giving feedback – time, place, personality traits, etc.  Back in 2007, J. Walter Smith from Yankelovich gave a speech at the CRMC Conference in Chicago where he mentioned, from their national survey, the dollar value the average person thought a minute of their time was worth – it came to well over 3 times the national average income.  In other words, we must cherish the feedback customers give us, because it shows how much value it had to them to provide that feedback.

 

I don’t want to debate the “value” of customer feedback though, but the “listening” skills of the person(s) listening.  Let me provide two personal examples that illustrate this point.

 

Some years ago, when I first joined a large toy store chain, the company had just completed a major research study to find out what customers wanted from a toy store. The president of the company had begun an initiative to redesign and re-merchandise the stores to implement as many of the customers' top 10 desires, based on the research, as possible.

 

A number of these were experience- or environment-related desires. For instance, two of the top three were "wider aisles to permit two strollers to pass" and "lower shelf heights for a less claustrophobic feeling and less fear of things falling from the higher shelves." Implementing these particular customer wishes, however, meant reducing the total shelf space in the store, and thus, the total inventory. But this issue was being addressed by the merchants, who were focused on top desire No. 5: "selection of the hottest toys."

Result? Sales dropped by the same amount that the inventory was reduced in all but a few stores.  What the initiative ignored was the No. 1 desire of customers: that stores "have the toy they were looking for."

 

The second example involves a colleague.  This person had an incredible skill at cutting through massive amounts of data, turning it sideways, this way and that way and pulling out “gems of insight”.  However, he/she was also fixated on finding the answer – the silver bullet - to the point of disregarding data that didn’t support that answer, or a classic example of what psychologists call “confirmational bias”.

It is human nature to simplify, categorize, clarify, and make things black and white.  Those of us who practice the art (or science, depending on your bent) of “listening” to customer feedback need to not only understand that “if no two people interpret anything in the exact same way”, this pertains not only to the customers we are “listening to”, but to us too – the listener.  Self-awareness of our own filters is just as critical to a true understanding of the customer. Oscar Wilde once said “the final mystery is oneself”.

This is a personal story of two different interactions with a store (one of those "beloved brands").

 

The first interaction was to purchase a high-ticket item.  The store was very busy and an employee told me they did not have the item in inventory, but I could use their in-store computers to access their website and order the product.  After a short while of attempting to do this, (it was having problems after keying in my credit card info), I asked for help.  The employee tried, had the same problem I did with the computer I was using and offered to do it for me at another computer by the registers.  He was able to fill the order from, entered my credit card info again, and same problem.  So he tries another computer - same problem.  So he calls the company 800 number, gives them the order and credit card information, and - voila - success.  I return to the office (lunch hour excursion), happy with the success of the purchase and the very helpful service, and promptly call my credit card to find out what was the problem, since that seemed to both of us where the process was having problems.  They inform me that they were unaware of any problems from the info on their screen and that the order for four (did I mention high-ticket) items went through on their end.  Four?  I promptly called the store, asked for the employee that helped me, told him that the credit card people told me I had successfully ordered four items, and he assured me that he would immediately call and cancel three.  Again, felt great about the service.  The next night I come home to four fed-ex boxes - all four items arrived.  Without elaborating further, but I managed to successfully return three.

 

A little over a year later (and several small cash transactions at that store later), I went in again to buy another (not quite so) high-ticket item.  This one was in stock, and I got in the queue at the register to pay.  (I need to mention that there were three registers going, with three lines at least four deep at the time).  At my turn, I hand the employee my credit card (the same one as the year before), who swipes the card and tells me the card is declined and do I have another way of paying.  I'm highly embarrassed at this point (sure that many eyes are upon me), hand him a debit (checking account) card and leave with the item.  Again, back at the office, I promptly call the credit card company (knowing the balance was not the issue), and they inform me that they had no record at all of any attempts to use my card that day.  In other words, the store employee told me my card was declined, when, in fact, the issue was that their connection did not go through. 

 

In hindsight, my rational side accepts the fact that it may have been the lack of specificity in the message returned by the credit card machine as interpreted by the employee that was the primary cause of the incident, but I still feel angry and hurt by the service I received.  I have not entered any of that company’s stores since.  (Do they even know that?)

 

What has this got to do with Net Promoter Score?

 

Had I been asked (and interestingly I have not by this "beloved brand") to fill out a customer satisfaction survey after the last transaction, and was asked THE question "Would I recommend this company to a friend?” I would have said an emphatic no!  If the survey went the next step and asked why, I would have said because the store employee was rude.  (I probably would not take the time to tell the entire story of the last transaction, in four-part harmony, despite the fact that I do customer satisfaction surveys, amongst other things, for a living, because I don't think telling them the whole story is worth my time).

 

The Net Promoter Score alone is descriptive, not prescriptive - it does not help the company understand why a customer gave that score.  The follow-up question about why is the prescriptive part - the part that helps the company understand what it needs to do to improve the score.  But how valuable would my comment about a rude employee be to the company?  Would it help them understand what behavior or action was rude?  They would have to decipher what the comment meant.  Was it a quantity of service related issue – after all, the store was (and always seems to be) busy, with more potential customers than employees – was wait time the issue?  Was it a quality issue – one bad apple with a poor attitude or just a bad hair day?  Or was it a combination of both quantity and quality of service – one that requires potentially re-engineering the process or additional training – again, after all, employees do appear to be playing with the company products more than helping customers sometimes?  Would they even suspect a potential sensitivity training issue about systems limitations? 

 

Rude employees are not a good thing, something needs to be done, actions need to be taken to eradicate “rude”, but what action(s) should the company take?  A tremendous amount has been written about how important it is to have a clear understanding of the customer, both the content and context of their viewpoint, in making the right decisions about what levers to pull to move the dial in NPS.  What is equally important is to understand the limitations in the feedback you receive from customers, as well the filters you apply in the process of analyzing and deciphering the feedback, and the decisions you derive from it.

I was reading an interview this morning by Jeremy Mullman on Advertising Age with Trevor Edwards, VP Global Brand and Category Management of NIke, who oversees a $2.35 BILLION budget. 

You can find the entire piece here and watch Nike's latest "Write the Future" here

 

It's a good interview and insight to one of the most successful brands on the planet of creating compelling and viral content. The following exchange stood out and offers a leader's perspective on how they view evaluating ROI on new media.

 

Ad Age: You also approach ROI a lot differently than, say, Procter & Gamble or some of the big, global consumer-products companies. You're a bit more relaxed about it. Why?

Mr. Edwards: If you seek to innovate and you're constantly trying to measure the price of innovation, you are going to struggle. When you're innovating, you're often breaking new ground, so you can't measure that sense of what's yet to come. Our model focuses really on getting the best message to that consumer in the most holistic way. And, within that, we're going to take some things that we know work. And we're going to take some things that we're still trying out. But we don't sit there and try to measure all the different pieces. We try and see how the whole thing works, and what we learn from it. We really pride ourselves on innovating. Consumers expect brands to be smart and creative and fun. And if you try to measure it all the way, you might never get there.

 

There are several emerging models of evaluating ROI related to Social Media and Social CRM, but leaders and innovators aren't typically relying on proven techniques. They're doing things that nobody else is, while learning and adjusting along the way. 

 

What's your approach to evaluating ROI on your digital media and/or Social CRM efforts?

What are your decision criteria on whether to move forward with new initiatives, new spending, or new technologies?

How are you able to capture "First Mover Advantage" in your marketplace while making sure that you are investing time and money well?