Reward and encourage enthusiasm, not just long service

A recent stay in hospital gave me a first person lesson in the difference between enthusiasm, professionalism and downright hostility.

During the 4 days I was there I and my ward-mates were looked after by a number of nurses of differing skill levels and ages. The student nurses were the most enthusiastic, friendly and generally interested in talking to us patients. They needed guidance from time to time, but hey, that’s why they’re students. The recently qualified were similar, efficient, and very personable. Those who had been in the job more than a few years were professional, thoughtful and helpful, though they’d seen it all before so getting into involved chats with patients wasn’t their thing.

The ones that stuck out like a sore thumb (pun intended) were the ones that must have been pretty close to retirement. It was clear that they viewed patients as an imposition on their TV time, they coughed on patients, ignored requests (from a guy confined to his bed!) for as long as they could, passing the buck onto the other. It was clear that they’d become jaded with the job, so bored that they seem to have turned it into a game with points going to the one who can treat patient the worst.

What does this have to do with marketing? Simple: It’s all about ‘guest experience’. Take a look at the people in your organisation. Have any of them become jaded, phoning in (or worse) their effort? Have customers become an inconvenience to them? Does giving anything more than the bare minimum seem like needless over-achieving?

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Nobody seeks out vague promises

As marketers we all love to promise the earth but you need to be able deliver on what you’re offering. If you need to use weasel words and internal jargon to qualify your promises, you’re doing it wrong.

When you see an advert for flatscreen TVs offering a ‘free Blu-Ray player with selected TVs’ – what’s your thought process? Is it ‘ooh, I’m gonna get a free Blu-Ray player’ or is it ‘I bet the one I want doesn’t come with a free Blu-Ray player’. How about a sale sign that offers ‘Up to 50% off’? I guess it depends on whether you’re a glass half-full or half-empty kind of person. Maybe you get a nice surprise or maybe you’re disappointed. The one thing that word ’selected’ doesn’t do is fill you with confidence because it immediately creates a doubt in your mind.

Customers don’t know what ’selected’ means in that context, they don’t know what a company’s ‘primary service areas’ are. All they know is that the company wants their offer to sound good whilst leaving some wiggle room. Customers don’t care about a company’s ability to squirm out of providing something. They want what they’re promised.

Under-promise, over-deliver
That’s what we should aim for. That’s what gets customers telling their friends about us. The opposite can make people talk about us for all the wrong reasons.

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Banding Together

Is your local retail business going well? Some of your (not ‘really competing’) neighbours doing worse?

I wrote a piece last year about why you might want to help out those who you might consider competitors. I’ve just seen first hand what can happen when a company’s neighbour goes out of business: a much more serious competitor can move in.

My local sandwich shop, a small independently owned business has been serving baguettes, salads and paninis for over 5 years. Later this month a sandwich-shop chain is opening up in place of a cafe, just three doors away. They should have them beaten on price, unless the new shop gets aggressive and goes after their loyal customer base of office workers from around the area. As it stands they’ll attract business just on the basis of curiosity.

Now is the time for the little guy to raise their game, whether they broaden the menu, encourage loyalty (the chain already has a loyalty discount card) and raise their service level: offer delivery, take pre-orders – all the things the chain isn’t willing to do.

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Service with a Snarl

Having just experienced a truly awful customer service experience (not traumatic or damaging and I won’t bore you with it) I was prompted to write this post. What was awful about it is that it exposed just how customer hostile this particular supermarket chain’s processes are.

The customer is always right

Even when they’re not. This has been done to death. You never win an argument with a customer. If you win the argument you’re likely to lose the customer. Of course there are times when you might actively seek to end a relationship with a customer, but there are subtle ways to do it and wantonly destructive customer service is not one of them.

Never ask a customer to do something you wouldn’t do yourself

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So here it is, Merry Christmas!

Almost every one of us will have been inundated with ’season’s greetings’ from companies this holiday season.

This subject was discussed on the latest edition of Media Hacks (#22) and the consensus was summed up as “[it's] time to kill these impersonal Holiday Greetings by email.” To underscore that, sometime Media Hacks co-host Chris Brogan’s newsletter mentioned something similar:

“My gosh. Has your inbox suddenly filled up with holiday messages about how thankful companies are that you’re their customer? I’ve received dozens and dozens of messages today alone from a bunch of software that I’d forgotten I’d even installed. Gushy gushy messages with lots of love and cheer.

And yet, it’s all mostly an effort to sell me something. Every one of those holiday wishes offered me a discount on something else. Wow, now there’s the spirit. Let me hook you with something else to buy while I’m thanking you.”

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Lifetime Value, Caveat Vendor

Seth Godin urges businesses to consider the lifetime value of a customer, not just the value from the first sale (or indeed the latest sale).

Go and read it, it makes sense, but bear in mind his argument is based on a particular kind of product or service, one where lifetime value of a customer can be calculated with some value of reliability, and expending what seems like a disproportionate amount on acquisition or retention is a much safer bet.

If you’re serving a specific geographical area there is a limit to the amount of competition for that customer’s business that you face – a customer is by necessity more likely to be loyal. If your product naturally has some lock-in (like a mobile phone contract) then you can work out how much a customer is worth to you very easily. Barriers to entry (by competitors) or exit (for the customer) create an environment with a relatively low churn rate, a predictable level of repeat business and a limited number of other places for a customer to take their spending.

If however you’re an online merchant, selling a product you don’t have an exclusive on, your competition is almost infinite and made up of players with different agendas. Not everyone is motivated by the need to make a profit, their goal may be market share. If Amazon enter your niche, there’s every chance you’ll get wiped out, just as dedicated greengrocers and butchers shut down all over the UK as supermarkets expanded. Calculating that lifetime value has to be tempered with the likelihood that a lower priced competitor will take their business regardless of how much effort you put in.

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Moving thoughts

I moved flat this week, just across town, so it wasn’t as much of a disruption, and it was to an area I was familiar with anyway, so there wasn’t so much learning ‘how to live here’ to do, but it made me think about what the upheaval of a move can teach us as marketers.

When you go somewhere new, whether it’s a holiday or a more permanent relocation, you need to get your bearings and develop some kind of routine. This presents a huge opportunity for businesses to market themselves at a point where your habits and preferences aren’t yet set. What’s the long term value (or short term, in the case of someone staying for a week) in being the go-to place for whatever it is.

Many customers are in unfamiliar territory, whether geographically or metaphorically in terms of product category. Are we as marketers really doing enough to help people? Isn’t the whole point of marketing to communicate what our products or services will do for the customer rather than it being the customer’s responsibility to work that out based on how great we tell the customer we are?

If your marketing is all about showing off your latest award, you’re doing it wrong.

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Is paid search the height of responsibility?

In response to The Irresponsible Marketer

Having just read Mitch Joel’s latest post, I was going to post this as a comment, then when I got to writing it and it grew to longer than would be polite, or even that readable, as a comment.

To paraphrase, Mitch is saying that marketers should put as much as they can into search marketing, spending “whatever is left over for your more general branding campaigns”. Now I’m sure that Mitch is trying to seed a discussion rather than truly believing that we should give up on all other kinds of marketing efforts to concentrate on the low-hanging fruit and maximising our Adwords spend and hiring SEO experts..

What about cumulative effects?

I think this is a perfect case for ‘with, not instead of’, to quote Mitch again. Paid search, and to almost the same extent, well done SEO/content marketing efforts are eminently trackable. But what drove that search? Reading this post I immediately thought of David Ogilvy’s belief that a consumer needs to see a message multiple times before they act on it (though as he was head of an ad agency, one might question the number of exposures required). Read the rest of this entry »

Good Enough and Chasm Theory

This recent article in Wired, which suggests that now technologies just need to be ‘good enough’ to be a mainstream success. Examples given range from the Flip video camera, Skype and MP3. Another piece in the same issue discusses the Craig’s List phenomenon to which similar logic can be applied.

It reminded me of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm (wikipedia summary) where he analyses the Technology Adoption Lifecycle and propounds the existence of a chasm between the innovators/early adopters and the early majority – where the real money is made by any technology product.

The reasons given for the chasm’s existence is that whilst the innovators and early adopters will be happy with the rough edges of a disruptively innovative product (citing the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule) the rest of the market want something that offers ‘the whole product’. Apple’s iPod is a perfect example of this in fact. The iPod was a disruptive innovation that keen Mac fans flocked to but very few other people – you could make it work with a PC but it wasn’t easy. At launch it was a standalone product. One of the things that made the iPod a mass-market success was the whole product offering – Apple’s own iTunes and the enormous eco-system that exists around it offering cases and all manner of accessories.

That was the early part of this century. Have things changed so much that ‘good enough’ is fine with more than those on the bleeding edge? Or are the examples in the Wired article successes because they get the the very core of what is important to everybody and not bother with the unnecessary parts that cater purely to the aficionado? Perhaps we could even question whether some of these products have even reached the early majority stage of their lifecycle yet. Plenty of people use Skype but the potential market is many times larger.

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Nickel-and-diming – Is it worth it?

Yesterday the UK’s Office of Fair Trading stated that Ryanair had agreed to be clearer about its additional charges, after refusing to co-operate with the self regulatory system administrator, the Advertising Standards Authority.

Just a few days ago they lost a case in Germany over their exorbitant fees for paying by credit or debit card.

Ryanair are not alone amongst the so-called low-cost airlines in perpetuating a culture of nickel-and-diming their customers. Easyjet don’t even publish a chart of their additional fees! There almost seems to be a competition for who can come up with the most ridiculous additional charges. A payment fee that is a compulsory part of buying the ticket because you can ONLY pay by card should just be part of the ticket. The taxes and fees that you have no choice in ought to be included up-front. Various other devious tactics such as default-checking the boxes for the optional, carry-on baggage, priority boarding etc can all bring in additional revenue.

The purpose for making all these fees ‘optional’ is to be able to present unbelievably low headline prices in advertising or on the homepage.

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