Marketing

Pillars of a compelling experience

Pillars of a compelling experience

  • Monday, 7 December, 2009
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This is a model I often see in organisations when it comes to their web presence.  A product owner comes up with a commercial proposition, marketing work up the content, IT build the functionality and it is goes live.  With this model, no-one actually owns the customer experience.

Worse, this little temple model is repeated across different commercial propositions so you end up with something that is not very joined up.  I’ve blogged about this lack of joined up thinking before.

Now let’s construct a model where the roof of the temple is a compelling customer experience.

What are the ingredients of this new temple model?  It is still going to be founded upon commercial propositions, but they are going to be overlaid by a culture of test and learn.  That is a willingness and ability to experiment; to realise that what you have developed is never final and is always evolving.  It is about taking the learnings of experiments to inform and improve the experience, or to rapidly refine or kill propositions that just do not work.

Then we have the five pillars.  I describe these in a paper I wrote ages back (pdf here, google books here).

Unfortunately these pillars tend to sit within organisational silos; content and personality are ‘owned’ by  marketing, functionality by IT, and operational excellence (that’s all about fulfilling on the customer promise and beyond) is a mixture of IT and operations.  Usability is a ‘funny one’ in that might sit alone, sit in marketing or sit in IT.  But ultimately it is best placed to direct the horizonal filter of Quality Control.  Quality control is not an additional layer of bureaucracy, rather a cultural component that all the pillars feed into.  It is about ensuring consistency and meaningfulness of the experience.  It is about balancing the commercial needs of the product, with the marketing needs of the message and the delivery capability of IT.

Photo credit: K. Dafalias

Just ignore what they say

  • Thursday, 3 December, 2009
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What customers say they like and how they behave are not the same thing. Don’t always trust what you are told, use data and real insights to drive decisions that have major commercial implications.

So there was a skyscraper, banner and numerous MPUs across the website.  A survey panel was set up and the results came back.  The agency briefed the team, “Your customers really don’t like all the ads you have on the page”.  The message was reiterated in focus groups.  Ditch the ads.  This would be a painful decision, despite customer’s not liking them they were still delivering reasonable revenue.

The organisation was striving to be more customer-centric; if the advertisements were degrading the customer experience then removing them would be a price worth paying.  And so they were switched off.

The result?  Nothing.  Except lost revenue.  Analysing the data, customer volumes remained the same.  There was no difference in the successful completion of customer goals.  Switching the ads off had no impact on customer behaviour on the site; when asked customers said they didn’t like them, but what they said and what they did were different things.

The moral: if you are going to use emotion and what customers say to make commercial decisions, consider A/B testing with real data before making wholesale changes.

Who do you beleive?

  • Wednesday, 18 November, 2009
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Only Five Percent Of Readers Would Pay For Online News. (Sep 20, 2009)

16 November two new reports come out simultaneously.

Research from Boston Consulting Group suggests that as many as 48% of British and American consumers would be willing to pay a few pounds a month for online news.

According to a new Forrester survey, almost 80% of Internet users in the US and Canada would not be willing to pay for access to newspaper and magazine websites (via readwriteweb).

So 5%, 20% or 52% of people will pay for online newspaper content.  Or maybe 12%. And Murdoch is going to “rewrite the economics of newspapers” based upon that kind of customer insight?  It is going to be interesting to watch.

Do customers want to customise your site?

  • Monday, 28 September, 2009
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Have you ever added a custom tool bar on your office set up?  Have your non-techy friends and family changed the background image on their desktop or changed their screen saver.  Is there a demand for customisation?

So here’s the question.  Do people really want to make your homepage look the way they want it to?  Is there a demand for iGoogle and netvibes customisation?  They look cool and are attractive to the geeks in us, but do they have mass market appeal? Is there any research out there on the take up of user customisation?

“…back when Windows 95 was released, users could easily change My computer to something more personal. Apple users had been able to do this for many years, and many of them did name their computers. But few Windows users took the opportunity to do this, suggesting that they saw the computer as more of a tool than something with which they wanted to have a personalized relationship.” (David Malouf)

Just because we can doesn’t mean that we should.  When you log into your bank account it could look like netvibes, complete with BBC news feeds and YouTube videos (you decide what you want).  But should it?

Why should your customers see your website as something to have a personalized relationship with, especially if you don’t engage them with a personal relationship throguh your other channels?

How do you answer the phone?

  • Friday, 14 August, 2009
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IVR, (that’s the automated routing of phone calls) is an unpleasant reality of multi-channel service.  Let’s assume that you are committed to using it, how much time have you spent in creating the messaging.  Two examples of trying to put a more human touch to something that is inherently not human and machine driven.

Firstly the Halifax.  Listen carefully to what happens after you key in an option.  You here a key click.  You are then prompted to enter your account number.  “thanks” the voice says, “I’ll just enter that”.  And you hear a clackerty clack of data being entered into a keyboard.  BUT YOU ARE A MACHINE!!!  It is a nice touch, but it is trying to make an interaction that is clearly not human more personable.

Second example is the Financial Obudsman.  “Thank you for calling” says the voice.  Not a stock, model voice, but a real voice, “I hope we’ll be able to help you. My name is Walter Merricks and I am the Chief Ombudsman…”   The message is clearly a recording.  There is no attempt to be anything but a recording, but giving the voice a name and explaining the nature of IVR is a real human touch.  Even better, the narrative about recording the call- it is not scripted from the IVR manual.  It talks to the customer in language they understand.

If you must be mechanical in your communications with customers, be human, be transparent, but don’t try and pretend to be what you are not.

Links
Halifax | Financial Obudsman

It’s bad said the doc, case of business locked in, customer locked out.

  • Wednesday, 15 July, 2009
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The customer is the oxygen that keeps a business alive.  No. The customer is more than just the oxygen that keeps the business alive, (my mother was recently on a life support machine with Guillian Barre Syndrome; she was getting oxygen but paralysed, unable to move.  With that condition you see that life is more than just about breathing oxygen).  The customer is more than just corporate oxygen, it is the reason a business lives for.

Shareholder value means nothing if the organisation doesn’t provide value to the customer.  Yet  I see far too many organisations who fail to grasp  the importance of their customers.  They prioritise their internal processes and policies to the detriment of customer satisfaction.  They focus upon narrow propositions that represent organisational silos rather than meeting the broad needs of the customer.  Innovation is morphed into ‘requirements’ that are performed by ‘actors’ in multiple volumes of ‘use cases’.  To my mind, too many organisations are struck down by corporate Guillian Barre Syndrome.  The brain knows what is going on but is powerless to act.  It feels pain, it senses something is wrong but is paralysed, it cannot move.  Prisoner in its own body.

If that is the diagnosis, what is the cure?  There are many, but a starting point would be to place the customer at the heart of your design.  Don’t start any proposition without the customer experience at the core.  Create personas and walk through customer journeys.  Use scenarios to develop your thinking.  Broaden the scenarios to introduce what-if models.  If it is an internet offering, sketch out the screens, if it is a service, sketch out the touch-points with your people, processes and technology.  Don’t allow the proposition to be talked of in the abstract, work with the concrete.  Would a persona accept the experience your proposing? Would she accept that pricing model? Does that journey make sense? You do not need to spend weeks and months documenting the exercise.  A couple of days with the right people in the right room with white boards, post-it notes and business-speak banished from the proceedings should deliver far more fruitful insights than playing document-tennis with revision after revision after revision. You may even kill the proposition before you invest too much time on it. Or better still identify a better, customer-centric proposition waiting in the wings.

Fear of focus groups

  • Tuesday, 7 July, 2009
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I was recently talking to some IT professionals.  We were talking about customer journeys and understanding the customer needs.  They were second guessing these, making assumptions about what is important to the customer how how the customer would best interact with the application.

“How about running a focus group with customers?” I suggested.  Blank expressions.  “Not sure” came the response, “we’ve never done those before”.

But you have done that before.  Every time you run a workshop with the business, that is a focus group.  The listening skills are the same.  Effective facilitation, and using stimuli to promote debate, elicit opinions and test ideas- they are the same.   You just have a different audience and call focus groups something different.

IT should have no fear of talking to real customers, end users.  Getting them together in workshops is something that should come as naturally to IT as it does to the marketeers.  Let’s get focus groups into the vocabulary of any IT project.

Innovation through the recession

  • Thursday, 30 April, 2009
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Two men were running through the jungle chased by a lion.  One of them stopped, took off his backpack and took his trainers out.  The other man turned around. “Why are you putting your trainers on?” he asked, “They won’t make you run faster than the lion”. To which the man replied “I don’t need to run faster than the lion…”

In the current market conditions just blindly running won’t get you ahead of your competitors.  And standing still is not a sustainable option.  Those that succeed won’t be the ones that batten down the hatches and retreat to the trenches, history shows it will be those that continue to innovate and cultivate ideas.  During the 1990-91 recession, according to a Bain & Company study, twice as many companies leaped from the bottom of their industries to the top as did so in the years before and after.

“Even though we’re in an economic downturn, we’re in an innovation upturn” said Bill Gates at the time.

In the 1920’s Post and Kellogg’s went into the recession head to head. Post cut back, it reined in expenses and slashed advertising budget.  Kelloggs meanwhile maintained their marketing spend and pushed their newly launched product, Rice Krispies.  Today Kellogg’s are a household name.  Where are Post?

IT organisations are retreating to core, keeping the lights on and holding off any “non-essential’ projects, innovation included.  This is a shortsighted viewpoint, but not entirely unexpected.  With project life cycles taking so long, innovation traditionally takes significant investment and time to see results.  Modern lean and agile approaches to IT are a challenge to this entrenched view.  It is possible to innovate at speed.  It is possible to take an idea and turn it into something tangible in weeks rather than years.  Let’s start with the idea.  Where does it come from?  You could get the brightest minds from expensive management consultancy firms, but they take time. And in uncertain times, what do they really know? (I speak with experience having once been a customer strategy management consultant).  Alternatively you could harvest ideas from your customers.  That’s what IdeaStorm does for Dell.  And Mix does for Oracle (built by ThoughtWorks by the way). Don’t restrict this to your customers, building an internal ideas engine in the enterprise yields great results.

So once you’ve got the idea, how do you nurture it from a vision into a proposition that has legs?

Product innovation is all very well, but do you have the capability and the attitude to really do it?  In the current ecomomic climate, unless product innovation is in your DNA, chances are it will need to be accompanied by process innovation.  Why? Because most organisational processes are slow, cumbersome and hinder the agility required to really innovate.

In 2009, if there’s one thing that organizations need, it’s agility. Our economy and the business environment are a steady stream of ups, downs and rapid change; in such an environment, the ability to sense, respond and react are true survival skills!

At ThoughtWorks we do both these things for our clients all the time, helping them introduce aligity into the whole product development lifecycle; product innovation through process innovation.  It starts with helping them rapidly distill their vision into something concrete, then prirotising and estimating what is important before building it at speed with quality to get innovation to market; fail fast or succeed sooner.

Recession doesn’t make the market need disappear. Andrew Rezeghi in this great paper (which is abound with stories of companies who have innovated through recession) argues you should invest in your customers, now they need you most, loyalty hangs in the balance.  Whilst the market may be driving down prices, now is the time to focus on experience based differentiation.  How can you use digital channels to engage with your customers in new and compelling ways?  How can you harness social media and new interaction paradigms to delight and engage your customers?  Ho can you innovate at speed? Go beyond your product and grow roots for lifetime value when the good times return.

Using stories to sell products

  • Tuesday, 28 April, 2009
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Dolls are girls stuff.   I don’t count Action Man (Which I had a few of as a youngster) dolls.  But being a Daddy of two girls, dolls start to be part of my world.  Wandering down Michigan avenue in Chicago on Saturday I stumbled across American Girl. Not only have they have elevated the doll beyond a product and into an experience, they have created an experience around the buying and owning of their dolls.  The product, the doll, is almost secondary to the narrative.  Every doll has a back story,  indeed they come with a paperback to describe this story.  Books build on this story, as do DVDs computer games as well as the dolls clothes, furniture and accessories all extending the product experience.

Wandering around the store I passed the doll hair salon (dolls sitting on doll-sized hairdressers chairs with their hair being plaited, braided, styled, blow dried…), the hospital (fixing broken dolls, returned to the owner wearing a hospital gown and discharge certificate), the historical doll museum (dolls representing children from different eras)… Walking into the American Girl I had no intention of spending any money there.  I ended up buying two dolls and clothes, I bought into the experience and took home to my girls not just presents from Daddy’s worldwide travels but also a story to tell.

Dolls are a product that it is (arguably) easy to create stories, narrative and experience around.  It is easy to provide this as a case study, but harder for a completely unrelated industry (such as financial services) to learn anything from it.  Harder, but not impossible.  Look at comparethemarket and the way they are building a story with Aleksandr around what is a pretty dull product.  As you develop a new product or application, can you build a narrative that supports the product?  Once you start telling a story, what new insights come to mind? How can you build an experience beyond the immediate product?

Thinking about value in terms of advantage and benefit

  • Tuesday, 10 March, 2009
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A product rarely sells itself.  What sells a product is the advantage it brings and the benefits it delivers to the customer.  It is the benefit of the product that sells rather than the product itself. What is the advantage of the requirement you are stating, and what is the benefit it will bring the customer?

Let’s start with a product.  Think broadband.  It’s dull.  Put 10MB in front of it and it is still dull.

Now think about the advantage that 10MB broadband brings.  The advantage is that it is fast.  Lightning fast.

Now think about the benefit which that advantage brings.  The benefit is that you can download an MP3 tune in seconds rather than minutes with your old dial up connection.  You are no longer selling broadband, but the experience that it brings.

Let’s consider IT requirements to be products.  A dull list, a thick document gathering dust. How do you prioritise one requirement over another?  What is more important?

Agile introduces ‘stories’ as the requirement product.  They are written in the format ‘As a <role>, I want <a feature>, so that <some benefit is achieved>’.  It is the ‘So that’ which is usually the hardest part to articulate, yet it is the most important part of the story.

Liz Keogh describes how prompted by Chris Matts her preferred narative reads:

In order to <achieve some value>
As a <role>
I want <some feature>.

Applying the marketing thinking to how the story will “achieve some value”, don’t just define that value in the advantage it will bring, rather also consider the benefit it will deliver to the user.  The two are different.  There maybe a business advantage to delivering some feature, but if the benefit to the end user can’t be articulated, it’s real value must be questioned.

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