Social networks

Customer value proposition model

Customer value proposition model

  • Wednesday, 1 July, 2009
  • By:

There may be a niche in the market, but is there a market for the niche?

How do you create a successful proposition?  If the answer was obvious there wouldn’t be so many failures out there in the market place.

It is easy to commence on a journey of product development with a hunch and clearly there is no substitute for validating ideas in the flesh.  That something at ThoughtWorks we do; helping clients test and learn, rapidly building ideas into tangibles that can be piloted at low cost and low risk before investing in significant build and spend.  However, sometimes a little more rigour is required before you commit to commencing a project in earnest.

That rigour needs to be focused.  What often happens is this rigour turns into a research phase that turns into a project itself.  It need not be this way.  There are certain things you can do, certain questions to ask as you set out on the journey of creating a new, compelling customer proposition.  What follows then is a strawman customer value proposition model to help test potential propositions before moving forward with them.  There are three components to the value proposition model; the customer, the environmental context and the organisation or company.

All too often propositions are rooted in the organisation.  They make assumptions about the demand or usage. This model attempts to broaden the analysis and focus upon the customer and the why the proposition will be attractive to them.  The model supports questions that may be asked to help shape thinking, test hypotheses and validate thinking.

I do not propose that this should become a major research exercise  (for example market sizing is a huge effort in itself), rather a tool for asking the right questions, and if the answers are hard to come by, maybe that suggests more thought is required in refining the proposition.

So here goes, a model that provides a framework for considering new customer value propositions.  It’s just an initial idea and I’d welcome feedback and suggestions.

Customer

Before you get too carried away with the proposition, a good starting point would be the customer.  Who are they and what do they do.  Let’s remember that your customer is not everybody.  Your proposition in unlikely to be appealing 24/7.  The challenge is to segment your target market and identify the triggers for action.

The persona: Who do?

Personas are a useful tool for bringing the customer to life.  Much has been written about them, but they are a useful tool for extracting broad data into specific stories that describe individuals. Realise that it is unlikely you will design for everybody. Start with the market that you are targeting, how large is it and what is its propensity to spend? Then within that target market segment the target customer base into different profile customers (personas). You need to understand which persona, which customer profile is most important – prioritise them and focus on the highest value.  This may mean deciding between high volume, low margin mass market and low volume, high margin niche appeal.  This decision needs to be made as early as possible to ensure the proposition remains focused and doesn’t try to be all things to all people, satisfying none.

Values, needs, wants and desires

People are not empty vessels waiting to consume and be filled with your proposition.  Their behaviour is driven by their values, needs, wants and desire.  These may be fundamentally rational (to satisfy a basic human goal) or emotional (to demonstrate status). They are cultural and time based.  Thinking in these terms helps you understand how the proposition will appeal to the customer at different levels.  Let’s take an example of this; a new mobile phone.

Before we think about what the product must do, what are the values that the persona associates with the phone. Is our target market a technophile or a technophobe? Jan Chipchase who works for Nokia includes ethnography in his research to understand how people use their phones; women carry them in their handbags, men in their pockets or their belts.

The basic need that the phone must meet to satisfy the customer, she must be able to make and receive calls.  If the product is unable to meet these needs it is not fit for purpose and the phone proposition will inevitably fail.

Just making phone calls meets the need but there are additional wants that should be satisfied for the product to be more compelling.  It’s a hassle to remember the number of every person she rings, the customer wants to be able to store numbers and see the number of the person who is calling.

Having the ability to see a photograph of her daughter as a screen saver on her phone is neither a need not a want.  The phone is useful and usable without that.  But the customer desires to personalise her phone by having a picture of her daughter on it.  Desirability is the key differentiator of the iPhone.  It doesn’t need to compete on features, it is a cool device that people talk about.  And here is a key decision you need to make on your proposition journey.  Are you looking to compete on parity or whether you want to make a difference.

Questions

  • What is the basic need that the proposition is trying to fulfil?
  • What counts as hygiene?
  • What does the customer need to be satisfied?
  • What does the customer want in addition to being just satisfied
  • What do other competive products do to maintain feature parity (if you feel you really need to compete on features alone – bad move!)
  • Few people would argue they don’t want simplicity and clarity in their interactions with products.  How could your product to make life easier for the customer?
  • What will make the customer feel good in themselves about owning the product?
  • What other products are “cool” or desirable to your target market.  How can you leverage the essence of those products?

Context

So now we are beginning to understand who the customer is, it is time to nest the proposition in terms of their context.  The old maxim that a half drunk bottle of water in a desert is worth its weight in gold, but on the streets of a city is worthless trash, should be remembered.  Even the best of propositions will deliver little value if they not only consider the customer, but also the context in which they apply: time, demand and usage.

Trigger

So the next step in the model is to ask why, when and how will the customer be attracted to the proposition. What is the trigger that drives the customer to move from awareness (assuming you have that) to action?  There is no point in a financial services company trying to sell me a car loan if I am wealthy enough to own my own car, or I do not drive.  Understand what triggers the customer to be interested in the proposition, when and why this happens.  How can your proposition be at front of mind when the trigger is set.

Questions

  • What lifestyle / lifestage events will trigger?
  • Internal events personal to the customer; leaving school, getting a first job, getting married, moving house, retiring etc
  • External events that they have no control over (think about sports sponsorship and tying a proposition to that sport, or tying a proposition to a celebrity e.g. Michael Jackson..)

Environment

It is very unlikely that the proposition will be wholly unique.  What is the competitive landscape, what noise will it need to be heard above to capture the consumers attention.  Whilst you may review the immediate competitors to see where threats and opportunities lie, what can you learn from other, unrelated products or domains?  How can you fuse together concepts from outside your immediate focus to bring new innovation to your product?  Scenario planning may come in useful, playing out different outcomes for different timelines other than that which you plan for.

Questions

  • What is the competitive landscape?
  • What can you learn about similar but unrelated propositions?
  • Have you considered the political, environmental social and technical influences using the old PEST analysis?
  • Have you considered different scenarios and how your proposition would play out under them; what unplanned disruptors could get in the way, or how could your proposition done differently disrupt the market?

The experience engine

Enough of the customer and externalities, what will the proposition look like and why will the target customer go with it? There are three engines within the organisation that drive the proposition, the experience, delivery and value engines.  So…

Utility

To be any good, the product has got to offer basic utility.  It has to do what it says it is going to do.  Sadly, too many products and customer propositions end there.  A utility product will match the consumers needs.  This is where most enterprise software sits…

  • What are the key customer needs that the proposition must fulfil?
  • What is the basic core functionality that must be met, what are the features that must be offered to gain traction in the market place?
  • What features that are typical on competitor products that we could do without?

Quality

I could call this next box usability (as this follows the UXD model) but I think it goes beyond just usability.  What is the quality of not only the immediate interface, but also with the supporting functions?  For example, if you have a call centre to back up the proposition, how many layers of IVR are you forced through?

  • Have you considered usability?
  • Is the packaging aesthetically pleasing?
  • The “happy path” customer journey may be well framed, but what about the “sad path”?  What about when things go wrong, what about when customers don’t act in the way you expect of predict them to act?

Brand

It is easy to get carried away with a new idea before thinking about what it means to the brand.  Typically there will be a strategic roadmap and whilst the proposition may be attractive it may not fit into where the brand is going.

  • Is the proposition complementary to the overall brand direction or does it require a new brand and identity?
  • Does the proposition support / leverage the brand?
  • Does the brand already ‘do it’ under another guise (are you reinventing a wheel that has already been tried somewhere, sometime in the organisation’s history?)
  • How will it be marketed?

Community

Finally, what is the ‘buzz’ that the proposition will create, what will get people talking and sharing it and how will you create this buzz.

  • Is there a social network component built in that gets people talking and connected?  How will it get people talking in external networks?
  • What will cause people to recommend it to others?
  • How can customers become part of its evolution?
  • What of the proposition will get people passionate, what will drive them away?

Delivery engine

People

A successful proposition needs not only a talented, passionate and committed team to deliver it to market, it also needs a similar team to run it and support it when it is live.  It is a common failing for a rogue “skunkworks” team to emerge in an organisation and develop what appears a compelling proposition, only to have it knocked back and closed down by the “Business as Usual” processes inherent in the organisation

  • Who do you need to make the proposition successful?  What is the team?
  • Who will create the proposition and who will lead it?  Is it IT led or business led?
  • What are the cross-organisational boundaries that the proposition crosses and how will these be eliminated?
  • Who will take ownership of the proposition once it crosses over into the market?

Process

  • What are the processes that will be required to sustain the proposition?
  • If the proposition will require changes to the organisation, how will they be managed, communicated and rolled out?
  • How will the proposition be supported once it is let loose in the market?
  • How will it be communicated to customers?
  • How will you create new sales – sales force.

Technology

  • What is the technology that will underpin the proposition?
  • Is it possible to test the ideas using rapid languages such as Ruby on Rails before committing it to the enterprise Java stack?
  • What integration is really necessary and what can be worked around?
  • How can you deliver a beta version in the shortest period of time?
  • How will you avoid heavyweight frameworks and develop incrementally to deliver value early and often?
  • How performant and scalable must the innovation be?

Value Engine

At its most simplistic, how much will the proposition cost and how much revenue will it generate?  Does it offer cost saving opportunities?  Are there intangible benefits that will be accrued?  Ultimately is it a viable proposition that is worth pursuing, or will the cost to develop and run outweigh the value it will add?  Building out a financial model can take time, in the first instance this should be a napkin analysis, a wake-up call to make sure there is value in the proposition before too much time is invested in it.

Cost

Every day someone is working on the proposition it is costing you money.  The quicker you can get something to market the faster you will start seeing a return on your investment, similarly the sooner you can “get something out there”, “test and learn” the sooner you can kill a proposition that does not fulfill its promise.

  • How quickly can you get a beta to market?
  • How many people, how many days?
  • What will the cost be to develop the infrastructure?
  • Do you have the skills in house or will you need to go external?

Benefit / Revenue

At its most crude, how will the proposition make money, but there may be more to what we wish to achieve.  Is the proposition actually going to cut costs, a result of regulatory pressures or a CSR initiative?
What are the benefits that will be accrued – both tangible (e.g. financial) and intangible (e.g. social, environmental etc)

  • If you are selling units are you going for high volume low margin or low volume high margin?
  • If it an on-line proposition “advertising” is often seen as the source of revenue.

There are two additional components to the model…

Implementation

Having a compelling proposition is one thing, it is another to successfully communicate it and roll it out to target customers.

  • In a crowded market place, how will the proposition stand out?
  • What are the brand values it will communicate?
  • What is the story that customers will hear and how will they hear that story?
  • How will customers interact with the proposition, what channels will you use to take it to market?
  • What is the roll out strategy?

Retain and grow

Winning customers is only the first step.  A successful proposition will maintain a long-term relationship with its profitable customers, maintaining the warmth they have to the original proposition and cross-selling and up-selling new ones.

  • How will you retain them and turn them into repeat customers and passionate advocates of the proposition?
  • How will the proposition grow lifetime customer value?
  • What can be cross-sold or up-sold?
  • What can you bundle?
  • How will the proposition deal with churn?

OK, so it’s not a perfect model and by no means complete.  There’s some duplication in the thinking and many questions missing, but as any model it can be used to guide and prompt thinking and ensure there are no elephants left in the room when the first line of code gets cut.  I’d welcome any comments on its usefulness, utility and direction.

Innovation through the recession

  • Thursday, 30 April, 2009
  • By:

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.

Personal branding is more than stoking your ego

  • Thursday, 26 March, 2009
  • By:

It is easy to knock social media and building a prescence and profile on the web as little more than stoking the ego.  “I’ve got more Twitter followers than you”, “I’ve got more facebook friends, more subscribers to my blog, more linkedin contacts…”  But there is more to it than that.  The way you use social media should be about building you as a brand.

Take a look at David Armano’s excellent presentation on Brand U.0.  Celebrities have brand, and with that comes influence.  Similalry people like you or me who develop their brand start to have influence.  And that influence gets you places.  At ThoughtWorks we are recruiting for a new Information Architect role.  Rather than describing the role in terms of skills and competencies, the starting point has been ‘we need a person “like that”‘, pointing to to both particular people within ThoughtWorks, and also on the broader web, looking at LinkedIn profiles, blogs etc.  If you have a brand you have already made yourself stand out.  In these challenging times your profile is not about your ego, it is about your future.

Experience let down by a jobsworth

  • Monday, 9 March, 2009
  • By:

I flew back into London early on Monday morning from Singapore on a Qantas codeshare with British Airways.  The in-flight BA experience was flawless, after thirteen and a half hours in the air we touched down fifteen minutes early.  No problems with passport control and then I hit baggage collection.

The baggage carousels weren’t turning.  A number of arrived long haul flights were listed with an ‘awaiting carousel’ message.  Frustration was in the air.  I wandered towards the British Airways service counter interested to see how BA were handling this customer experience issue.  Not very well was what I saw.

“Look! just stop complaining and let us do our job” shouted the ‘Team Supervisor’ at an irate customer who had been waiting for almost an hour.  Rather than providing information, transparency and honesty, the face of BA was shouting at customers with a ‘jobsworth‘ attitude.  All that good work on the plane was lost.  A dozen or so customers witnessed the rude abuse that the employee was ranting.  This maybe acceptable if you are Ryanair and your brand is not built upon customer experience, but for BA it most certainly is not.

Stories of bad customer experiences are like viruses.  Ian McKee describes a study that suggests that “overall, if 100 people have a bad experience, a retailer stands to lose between 32 and 36 current or potential customers”.

Unfortunatly my phone battery was dead, otherwise I would have recorded the interaction for your viewing pleasure.  Then it would not have been a dozen people who witnessed the terrible customer service.  More than 366,000 people have viewed South West airlines seven hours on the tarmac (and google returns almost 19,000 results for “south west airlines 7 hours on plane tarmac“).  Employees need to understand that they are brand ambassadors, in a world where video cameras are ubiquitous poor customer service goes beyond the word of mouth, it now becomes viral.

Bruce Temkin shows the below ‘experience wheel’ that lego use for designing customer experiences.  It is relevant as it touches the airline experience, mapping all the customer touchpoints, and what the make or break moments are.  This is a useful exercise that BA could learn from.  Delivering a compelling customer experience with your core services is no longer enough, anywhere that your brand touches customers must be excellent.

The application is irrelvent

  • Monday, 23 February, 2009
  • By:

We get confused when building applications; the technology should be incidental to delivering the experience, it should be the means rather than the end. Sadly both IT and marketeers usually don’t see it this way.

I was recently working with a telco who were running a campaign for a single application that sits on a Symbian phone and gives the user access to all their mobile services (rather than having to access them individually via the mobile web). This is not unusual, organisations marketing the technology rather than the benefit or the experience. The technology should be incidental to what you are selling.

It is hard to put it better than what Duncan Cragg writes

“What most people want on their mobiles is not the applications, but the stuff they animate.

People only accept the concept of applications (whether a native app or a Web app) because that’s all they’ve been offered, and it’s largely good enough. But no-one actually wants to download and launch and register and log in to a local find-your-friends application – they just want to find their friends in the area – now! And they shouldn’t then have to flip between the find-your-friends map owned by that application and the restaurant review map owned by another.

They don’t want Facebook videos and YouTube videos and phone videos. They just want to share videos. They shouldn’t have to think about whether to send a picture by MMS or to use an upload app, after remembering the login. They don’t want multiple ways of sending messages: IM, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. They shouldn’t have to think about how to tell their friends about some news item – whether to post a TinyURL link on Twitter or copy the text manually into Facebook.

They only want one shared calendar, not the phone calendar and a Google calendar and events on Upcoming.org, that need two more logins. They shouldn’t have to think about how to synchronise music or contacts lists on the phone, the iPod, the PC, some memory card and online. “

He goes on to introduce the ‘U-Web’ Mobile 2.0 platform. This is exciting stuff and well worth a read. The challenge is not just about the IT industry getting excited about U-Web, the drive needs to also come from marketeers focussing upon “what” experience they want the customer to enjoy rather than “how” it will be delivered. They shouldn’t be distracted by the application that the experience will be delivered through, they should focus on delighting the customer and driving value to the organisation.

Web 2.0 is far from dead

  • Tuesday, 17 February, 2009
  • By:

Web 2.0 is anything but dead. The term is no longer necessary as its concepts become ubiquitous.

So Web 2.0 is in terminal decline according to this TechCrunch article. The basis of this statement is anecdotal and from Google Trends which show a declining use of the term ‘Web 2.0’ in google searches. This tells us nothing, indeed I’d almost suggest that it is an indication of the health of Web 2.0. As it becomes ubiquitous people no-longer need to use the term. Do a similar trend search for ‘eCommerce’ and you will see a similar decline in that term and no-one is suggesting that business on the internet is in decline.

Web 2.0 was always a catch-all term for a number of concepts. If you look at ‘social media‘ in Google Insights you will see that term on an upward trajectory (interestingly the area that is driving the greatest worldwide search traffic for that term is Singapore – anything to do with the Power of Influence?) Web2.0 as a term may be in decline, but everything it stands for – community, rich interactivity, new business models – I don’t see these things dying.

Are you listening to your customers?

  • Monday, 16 February, 2009
  • By:

Dear CxO,

Looking for free market research and customer intelligence? Look no further than Twitter.

You may not care about social networking, you may think that Web 2.0 is not relevant to your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care what your customers are saying. You may choose to ignore it, but people are out there talking about you; praising you, foul-mouthing you. Go to Twitter Search, type in your company name and see what your customers really think of you.

Twitter will be bigger than porn

  • Sunday, 8 February, 2009
  • By:

I started using the internet in 1991, I returned home from my first term at university buzzing about this thing that allowed me to talk to people the other side of the world in open conversations and to send ‘electronic’ mail to folk who were also connected. And it was all free. My friends back home weren’t convinced or impressed, “Yeah but someone’s got to pay for it… I don’t see the point of it… whatever”. So I buzzed on Usenet news and ELM and Gopher in my university bubble and the nascent growth of the internet largely passed these guys by. Until 1998 when I returned home from Ghana and a particular friend had got a computer, and the internet, and he was hooked. The internet had finally reached him. And for him the internet was porn.

If the internet was briefly kidnapped by ‘eCommerce’, it is finally reclaiming it’s roots as tool for connecting people. This is the social age and this is where I return to the above mentioned friend. Email and mySpace and Facebook have largely passed him by. He recently connected with me, but not by any of the more established social networking tools, but by Twitter. And I think that is significant. People who have “not seen the point” will start to get it, the traditional media right now is full of Twitter. Facebook have realised this and have opened up their status as a challenge. Maybe not bigger than porn, but this year will certainly be the year of Twitter.

Persecute or communicate

  • Friday, 30 January, 2009
  • By:

Yesterday I twittered “Industrial Age, Atomic Age, Jet Age, Space Age, Information Age… What’s next?” Andre Martin replied “social age?”  If the world around us is moving to the social age, far too many corporations are stuck in the industrial age, the stone age even.

With growing economic uncertainty, inter-office rumors, gossiping and eavesdropping in the workplace are inevitable.  More than 20 per cent of respondents to an HR survey said their employees had been disciplined for such behaviour.  And so the solution is to invest in technology to prevent it.  But you are never going to be able to stop it, indeed taking such measures is more likely to give oxygen to fear, mistrust and dissent.  The investment would be better spent opening up channels of communication, getting the gossip out in the open and developing a culture of trust and understanding.  How?  Introducing a corporate FaceBook to replace the moribund intranet would be a start.

What’s your social strategy?

  • Wednesday, 28 January, 2009
  • By:

Last year Twitter grew by an incredible 752%. That is something too large to ignore. It’s not just individuals who are twittering, corporates are getting in on the act. But do they think before taking the plunge?

The tools for getting a social presence on the web are easy. Twitter is free, there’s little effort to setting up a blog, it is simple to plug in reviews and ratings with BazaarVoice. But with the tools comes commitment; you need to start listening and have a strategy for responding.

Listening

You can start listening by setting up Google News Alerts. You will be alerted whenever someone is talking about you (or your competitors, or anyone or anything you like). It can deliver alerts as a digest or as they happen. This gives you a fundamental tool to find out who is talking about you and where they are doing it.

Responding

Knowing people are talking about you is one thing, knowing what to do about it is another. Making a decision to start engaging in social media is the right thing to do, but with that decision comes responsibilities. This is where having a clearly thought-out strategy is essential.

The strategy starts with a role, someone responsible for the conversation. Jeremiah Owyang lists a number of oganisations who have a dedicated role for social computing and community management – Dell has a VP Communities & Conversations. This is not a PR role, it is not something that will have messages crafted by committee with formal sign-off before speaking. It is about having an authentic voice, speaking with honesty and personality. Using Twitter to broadcast your traditional press releases is more likely to alienate than win you friends and lovers (you want people to love your brand right?).

Your customers want to help

“But why?” is a question I’ve often heard asked when talking about social media. “Why would anyone want to comment, or write advice, or be bothered to ‘get social’ with us?” Good experiences and (especially) bad experiences bring out the passion in people. And then there are the people who just like to have their voice heard. There’s an often used ratio, 1:9:90 – for every one regular contributer there are 9 occasional contributers (commenter’s) and 90 ‘lurkers’ – see Jakob Neilsen’s post on this.

Even if they don’t engage in the conversation themselves, most people listen to the contributer – it is (usually) an authentic voice, and that authenticity is priceless. Word of mouth is more valuable than any advertising, it is by far the most trusted source for purchase ideas and information (funny how so many organisations when they ask that question, “how did you hear about us, they list their channels- TV, Radio, Press, but often leave out recommendation from a friend, or heard about you from an acquaintances, or even “I just know you”). The challenge is to harness the conversation that others are having and where appropriate engage in it in a natural and honest way.

Rather than questioning why someone wants to talk about your brand, or offer support to the community on your products for free, build a relationship with that person. They will feel all the better for being listened to. Invite them to customer panels, tell them about your ideas, and let them generate buzz about your product.

Some listening anecdotes

Here are three brief anecdotes of organisations who have started by listening and then engaged in conversation. To be contrasted with doing it the other way round.

A client we’ve been working with had been ignoring the conversation in technical forums. There was a wealth of discussion about issues with their hardware, fixes and work-arounds. Much of the comment, whilst positive about the brand overall, was negative about certain aspects of the product and customer service. They took the plunge and engaged in the conversation. A regular poster who was being particularly vocal (and getting a lot of response) was directly connected. His issue was simply addressed. He then posted to the forum how he had been listened to, and the negative experience was transformed into a positive experience. Inviting him to customer panels makes him feel even more valued.

A while back I posted about a negative experience with Norwich Union. I blogged about the experience – a few days later I had a comment from their Head of Customer Experience. I was listened to. NU had a face, we spoke and I will now sing the praises of Norwich Union (I’m still a customer). I’ve forgotten what the problem I has was all about.

Another blog was about a poor experience with the Fedex website. Their Application Development Team left a comment thanking me for the feedback, again I was listened to. This has erased the memory of the bad experience I had.

Speaking, not listening

I don’t know anything about confused.com internal operations, but my experience suggests the following. Someone suggested they get a Twitter account and they started tweeting. Only their tweets were for PR messages. They were not ready for inbound Tweets from customers about them.

I heard about confused.com from a friend as a good site to get a home insurance quote from. I tried it and had a far from satisfactory experience. I persevered (because of the personal recommendations) but after a bunch of techinical problems with the site I gave up.

I then actively sought out confused.com on Twitter, my thinking if they have an account I can give them my feedback direct (I am one of the 1 of the 1:9:90 who so many business people don’t understand. I also have almost 17 years of usability experience behind me which I would be happy to share with them – as a customer, not professionally). So I did a search for confused.com on Twitter and found them. I was pleased to see they had an account and wrote a tweet to @confused_com. But it seems twitter was just a mouth piece for their PR and all I was greeted with was silence. I heard nothing back.

I returned back to their website a few days later and tried again to get a quote, this time I had an even worse experience, the site failed to return any results to me. Again, I Twittered about it. I was creating some negative feedback, and feeling doubly annoyed. Not only was I having a crappy experience but they weren’t listening to me on a channel I expect to be heard. Now I am a small fish in the big ocean and easily ignored, but look at Motrin and you can see the consequences of not engaging in the Twitter conversation.

To their credit, Confused.com have recently sent me a private message on Twitter informing me they are going to start “more interactive twittering soon”. I look forward to that. If there is a lesson in this it is when getting onto Twitter you have to be ready to engage in the conversation that is likely to ensue.  Have a strategy before playing with the tools.

2 of 4
1234