Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: interaction

Showing posts with label interaction. Show all posts

Friday, January 22, 2016

Knock knock - who's there? Your customer experience

John Lewis is no longer the exemplar in UK customer service. Amazon has stolen its place at the top of the list. It is precisely JL's inability to replicate its in store customer experience online which is costing it so dear.

See the top 50 here

In store they can control. Online, they lose control of the last few yards - the delivery. Tesco, it seems, has understood this - investing in training for its delivery van folk. They seem on the whole a cheery bunch (at least where I live), happy to be doing their job and representing the brand with real concern. They have understood where the human touch of brand interaction actually happens in an online transaction - on the doorstep.

Compare and contrast to a John Lewis delivery. Some great - some not. None controlled by the brand. The click and collect system seem to melt down at Christmas (a camera I went to pick up in store never arrived. Hours spent on the phone resulted in it finally being delivered to me at home. That came with a promise of a £20 goodwill refund. Checked my credit card statement only today (nearly a month later) and the refund never was made. Another phone call today should have remedied that - fingers crossed).

Some fragile deliveries have been slung over garden gates.

JL aren't alone in getting the less-the-perfect service from the delivery outfits they employ. But given the very high value they place on service they have to ask themselves if the gap in control of the customer experience they have opened up is too great.

Consistent customer experience has to drive through the entire journey. The last touch-point you can afford to scrimp on is the one where the customer physically interacts with the brand. Often, and increasingly, that's the delivery person.

Is Amazon perfect? No but more of its deliveries go right than anyone else's I try - and that is my experience of the brand and therefore the one I share with my peers.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

It Was Twitter Wot Won It....

There are many preparing to put TV back on its pedestal thanks to the perceived influence of the Leader's Debates on tomorrow's (May 6, 2010) UK general election.

But just before we get too excited by a resurging all-powerful broadcast medium, let's pause to think about what's going on here.

The leaders debates have acted as social objects. There are many more people who have been influenced by the conversations of their peers in response to the debates than can possibly have been influenced by watching the debates directly themselves. (Image courtesy Dean Terry)

Influence in isolation is a tough ask. We derive our understanding, our opinion of, our view of - our emotional response to, the leaders debates not through our direct individual experience of them, but through our social interactions with those around us.

The value of a social object is in the interactions it inspires - far beyond that first-generation direct encounter between user and object that we had broadcast at us in our lounges.

Don't believe me? Then why does one group see David Cameron 'winning' a debate while another calls it clearly for Gordon Brown? The content was the same for both sets of observers. The qualities of the social object are not intrinsic in it; they are extrinsic in our response to it (recommendation is in the eye of the receiver). The qualities of the social object are generated by our social interactions.

Which is why the biggest impact on the election result is in the interaction between peers - made so rapid and easy by the social tools at our disposal.

It is not TV wot won it - victory, if it derives from anywhere, is overwhelmingly to be found in social media's ability to connect and amplify our social selves. The ubiquity and simplicity of those tools is what has changed since previous elections.

So it was Twitter wot won it, it was Facebook wot won it. It's your friends wot won it.

We're all publishers now, My Sun.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Twitter Follower Optimisation (beware the TFO)

Just as search engine optimisation grew up to secure ever-larger audiences for websites, so it is inevitable that we will see a new Twitter-inspired industry emerge: Twitter Follower Optimisation (TFO... from now on).

Right now 'social media gurus' are analysing the optimum key terms in tweets which lead to an increase in your follower numbers - and also identifying the ones that increase the rate at which you are 'dropped'.

Part of the TFO process may include some sensible stuff about the kinds of things to say about yourself in your bio, what you should call yourself, what kind of avatar picture you can get away with - and which are the appropriate links to display on your profile.

But too much will focus on training yourself to tweet the optimal words - just as SEO strategists will advise on how to sprinkle key terms in your long form content. iPad. (see what I mean?)

I'd like to say this will be a short-lived industry. But such is the growth of Twitter that there will be Twitter virgins for many years to come - many eager to bag a large follower collection rapidly.

Ultimately the approach will fail. TFO focuses on the attraction of an audience toward a specific node. This was a reasonable strategy for the nodal world of websites. But for the interaction-heavy, node-light world of the likes of Twitter, it is a fail.

Three reasons:

One: Optimisation techniques will surface the lowest common denominator key terms for tweets which attract and tweets which repel. Lowest common denomators don't fit the long tail world - and the adhoc self-forming niche community world of Twitter is certainly long tail. One man's Leeds Utd is another man's Manchester Utd.

Two: Humans want to talk to other humans. Adding in follower-optimised terms makes you talk less like a human. Humans want to follow other humans.

Three: Twitter is less about attracting to a node, more about adhoc discovery of interaction between nodes.

This is important. Twitter is interaction heavy and node light. Your profile - effectively the hub of your interaction - is as much of a node as you get to have in Twitter - it is no heavier in content and meaning than the average business card. If you have a presence at all, it is as the sum of your interactions.

'My followers' (and I'm always uncomfortable calling the people listed under 'followers' mine - they are just as much the 'property' of anyone else they follow- and just as little) aren't attracted to me-the-node - to my business card.

They haven''t signed up to the @davidcushman club. They are attracted by my interactions - with them and with others. I can't get them to follow me on my own. It's their choice based on how I interact with others.

If they like the look of enough of those interactions they will follow - to get easier access to those interactions - more opportunities to join in.

To this end the equivalent of 'Site' in SEO is not 'Follower' in TFO - but your profile. You may be able to optimise a tweet but perhaps not a node - and you certainly can't optimise the two-way flow of the interactions - because you offer only one part of it.

No - when the TFO experts come knocking, show them to door. Learn the basics about your profile but, more importantly, deploy the basics of just being human via Twitter.

Perhaps if there's anything to optimise, the focus should be on who you follow, not who you hope to bag to follow you.