I was reminded today that it was my Twitter birthday. Five years ago today I signed up and created my first Twitter account.
It took me a few months to work out what was going on and what all the fuss was about. Now I tend to drift in and out of intense usage as my work schedule permits.
I love Twitter, but I’ve probably fallen out of lust with it.
Don’t get me wrong it still holds a place in my heart, the love is still there but it’s a familar, comfortable love – and I like it that way. It’s not quite become a utility, something I only notice when broken, but it’s certainly not the first thing I ‘plug into’ when I get up in the morning.
Nowadays my lust is often focused on the younger networks like Instagram or Thisismyjam (I flirted with Path and despite it’s beauty it didn’t give me enough back). However today given it’s my birthday I’m going to spend it just with Twitter, for old time sake.
I’ve consulted for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) for well over 10 years and back in early 2006 I was involved in developing a proposition around podcasting.
The CIPD podcasts have gone from strength to strength and recently I was invited to participate in an episode on HR and Social Media.
We launched our Multichannel Customer Experience Report today. Created in partnership with Econsultancy, the report contains some great insights into the current state of Customer Experience Management.
However it’s important to understand that multichannel customer experience is not a popular subject. There aren’t many boardrooms that host endless discussions on the subject.
The number of regularly published research and white papers on multichannel customer experience management are few and far between. Globally less than 130,000 English searches are undertaken on Google for ‘multichannel’ each month, for ‘multichannel customer experience’ it is less than 150 a month.
Multichannel customer experience is not a popular subject.
However it is an important subject. There have never been more channels through which our customers can potentially experience us. There are now more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes. Of the UK total population of 61,800,000 Facebook appears to have accounts for 30,481,3002. Over the last 10 years this explosion of channels has dramatically changed our customers’ behaviour.
While mobile and social are just two of the more recent and high profile channels that our customers are using they are possibly the most important in setting customer expectations and establishing new customer behaviours.
At the start of the century the Internet had the effect of disintermediation – allowing customers to relate directly to many brands for the first time. Now our customers’ adoption of social media has had similar effects on customer-to-customer interactions. Much of this customer-to-customer exchange happens digitally but the subject of those exchanges cover every, and all, customer touch-points; on and offline, managed and unmanaged.
Online is now the place to share. The net effect is an amplification of the impact of both positive and negative customer experiences.
Talk, watch, test, survey and listen
At my company Foviance we spend a great deal of time with customers. We talk to them, we watch them, we test them, we survey them and we listen to them. Time and again we see their frustrations when they experience disruptions in their engagement with brands, but equally their awe and wonder when their journeys are frictionless and occasionally even enjoyable.
There aren’t many people out there focused on what is required to make customer experience management truly multichannel. That is a shame but also an opportunity for those that are. If you’re reading this consider yourself one of the elite and recognise that despite the challenges ahead the benefits of our journey are worth the effort.
The report comes in two parts:
a business focused report, which explores allows companies to benchmark themselves against their peers, and
a consumer survey report that provides five key industry sectors – travel, mobile, financial services, retail and gaming – an overview of the experiences they are providing for their customer (and allows them benchmark across industries.
The reports can be accessed from the Foviance website. I hope you find the report valuable. If you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised just drop me a line or give me a bell on 08450 546 500 (International +448450 546 500)
As part of my ongoing series of customer engagement examples I’m highlighting the file hosting service Dropbox and their use of gamification to encourage participation in their service. Gamification, the integration of game mechanics into a website, service, community, campaign or application in order to drive engagement is a hot subject right now and this is a great example of how to get it right. (Stay tuned for a few examples of how to get it wrong.)
If you’ve seen any great examples of engagement I could feature in this series of posts please drop me a line.
Dropbox ‘Get Started’ page – gamification
Dropbox is one of those utilities I now find I can’t live without and I noticed this use of game mechanics (gamification) on their ‘Get Started’ page.
To encourage you to learn more about the product, use it and share with friends Dropbox have set a ‘quest’ to complete seven tasks. Your reward should you become a ‘Dropbox Guru’ is extra storage space. Motivating, fun and rewarding.
Other nice elements on the page include:
1. The tool tips describing what is necessary to complete each task that pop-up as you mouse over each line 2.The ‘Hide the Get Started tab’ option in the bottom left corner, allowing you to control the interface. This is a recognition that not everyone likes to play and that control itself creates engagement. 3. The ‘Upgrade’ option in to top right implies it is a positive thing to do and that it will be rewarding through the simple use of the star icon.
If you have seen any other great examples of gamification please share them below.
Nothing makes an idea or concept come to life better than a story or an example. So I’ve decided to create an ongoing series of posts simply showing some of the best examples of engagement I’ve seen.
If you know of anything I should feature please drop me a line.
Pizza Express – from QR code to iPhone App payment
Over the last six months the rise of QR codes for multichannel customer engagement and marketing has reached a tipping-point. Providing an easy way to use a smartphone to scan a small code in the real world and immediately access information or a service online means QR codes have started to crop up on posters, newspapers and even TV ads.
All too frequently these QR codes are simply used to link to an existing page on a website, however Pizza Express’ use recently caught my eye as an excellent example.
Like many parents I love the UK based restaurant chain. The food is a cut above the norm, they’re one of the most child-friendly outlets on the high street and their service is usually exemplary. On a recent visit I noticed a paper wrapper on the glass flower vase at the centre of the table featuring a QR code and promoting their new iPhone app.
Pizza Express provides free WiFi so scanning the image using an iPhone and installing their app takes a matter of 30 seconds. Once installed the app offers the menu, find-a-restaurant, table booking, news and special offers. However most impressive is the mobile bill payment once linked to an existing PayPal account (again less than a minute).
After your meal enter the number at the bottom of the bill into the app, choose how much service charge you wish to add and pay. Confirmation is made on screen, via an email and more impressively in our case, via the waitress who thanked us almost immediately – a great joined up service.
This experience provides value for both the restaurant and the customer. For me, the customer, I feel in control. Lack of control is one of the most important triggers for undermining engagement. I can imagine for time-pressed business lunches this control might make the difference in me choosing Pizza Express over another establishment. While I’ve never had a service problem at Pizza Express what the iPhone app provides is a reinforcement of that service brand value that is central to the food chain’s appeal.
For Pizza Express, they now have a direct route to market to me on a device I spend more time with than anything else in the world. They can capture data on my in-restaurant purchases and begin to understand that I’m not a regular visitor to any one store but instead a regular visitor to the chain – something thaat would previously have been difficult if not impossible.
Finally, Pizza Express has created a short-term talking point at the centre of the table that can travel beyond the restaurant to allow the brand to be talked about online – as witnessed here.
Apple are making a big deal out of the multi-touch gestures that allow you to manipulate the interface in their new desktop OS (Lion). Lessons they’ve learnt from the iPad are rapidly impacting their other devices and software. Something Microsoft has perhaps been a bit slow doing following the success of their Xbox Kinect. Still I suspect it won’t be too much longer before a motion sensor approach to interaction is established for the desktop.
All these steps towards more ‘natural’, less mediated, methods of control and experience got me thinking. How do we develop this physicality further? Can we capture taste, weight and texture in the digital environment?
Clearly these things are physically impossible on the simple web pages or App. But that never stopped novelists or musicians striving in other mediums that seemingly didn’t lend themselves to the physical. In many ways the more abstract one is forced to be in creating these things, because of a lack of practical concreteness, the more effective and emotionally resonant something can become.
Poetry is perhaps the best example of a seemingly simple medium that can carry the heaviest weight of texture and tone.
They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
(Excerpt from Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney)
As the web changes and becomes a more fluid experience – moving from the old pageview-to-pageview approach, to a richer more dynamic set of interactions across multiple devices – surely there is the opportunity for the evocation of physical experiences. Perhaps we might even find a little poetry and emotional connectedness in even the harshest, commercially driven websites.
Following a question from my son on the issue of real super‑heroes, I got to considering my own heroes. There are plenty of people I admire, but heroes? That’s a different category altogether. Only two eventually came to mind.
Initially, to help sort my thoughts, I started mapping my life against people who had inspired and influenced me, and to whom I owe a debt. Family aside my list included:
Frank Furedi: sociologist and author – taught me the meaning of politics Tony Chisholm: School art teacher – helped me understand passion Rob Killick: CEO of my previous company cScape – business learnings by osmosis Dave Chaffey: marketeer and author – made me grasp the value in marketing BJ Fogg: father of Captology – reawakened my fascination in psychology Karl Marx: political economist – gave me the structure of analysis to interpret the world.
However the only people I’d place in my hero group are:
Hero 1: Norman Borlaug
Nobel prize winning Borlaug was a proponent of genetically engineered crops. He designed a dwarf wheat that combined the larger, heavier heads of the tall wheats, with the shorter, sturdier stems of the dwarf wheats to produce a strain that gave high yields but wasn’t susceptible to damage in strong rain and wind.
Subsequent developments allowed two crops per year. Borlaug wheats made a significant move towards ending world hunger.
Hero 2: Virginia Apgar
Apgar, a US doctor specialising in research on newborns and anaesthesiology, created a simple five criteria score card to rate newborn babies at one minute and five minutes after birth.
(The criteria were: 1. heart, 2. respiratory effort, 3. muscle tone, 4. reflex irritability, 5. colour)
The test is now known as the Apgar test. Each criteria can score a maximum of two points. A total score below five immediately flags up that something needs further investigation or the baby needs immediate treatment. The test is used internationally and has probably saved millions of lives.
If you fancy sharing your heroes or simply your thoughts on heroism don’t hold back.
[This post is an updated and adapted version of my first ever blog post. It was initially a response to the birth of my son and my concern that I was bringing him into a world lacking leadership and inspiration.]
A few months back I was interviewed by the CIM following my presentation at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising – TFMA2011 – event.
The interview was part of the CIM’s project to identify the best marketing model. I chose SOSTAC.
7 Ps – marketing mix
Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical evidence – these elements of the marketing mix form core tactical components of a marketing plan.
USP
Unique Selling Proposition is the concept that brands should make it clear to potential buyers why they are different and better than the competition.
Boston Consulting Group Matrix
This model categorises products in a portfolio as Stars, Cash Cows, Dogs and Question Marks, by looking at market growth and market share.
Brand positioning map
This model allows marketers to visualise a brand’s relative position in the market place by plotting consumer perceptions of the brand and competitor brands against the attributes that drive purchase.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value is the concept used to assess what a customer is worth, based on the present value of future revenue attributed to a customer’s relationship with a product.
Growth strategy matrix
Ansoff’s matrix identifies alternative growth strategies by looking at present and potential products in current and future markets. The four growth strategies are market penetration, market development, product development and diversification.
Loyalty ladder
This model shows the steps a person takes before becoming loyal to a brand as they move through the stages of prospect, customer, client, supporter and advocate.
PESTLE
As an extension of the traditional PEST model, this analysis framework is used to assess the impact of macro-environmental factors on a product or brand – political, economical, social, technological, legal and economic.
Porter’s Five Forces
The five forces are Rivalry, Supplier power, Threat of substitutes, Buyer power and Barriers to entry and are used to analyse the industry context in which the organisation operates.
Product Life Cycle
This model plots the natural path of a product as it moves through the stages of Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Saturation and Decline.
Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
This three stage process involves analysing which distinct customer groups exist and which segment the product best suits before implementing the communications strategy tailored for the chosen target group.
SOSTAC
This acronym stands for Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, Control and is a framework used when creating marketing plans.
11. March 2012
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