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.

Brands can't live on a promise

Performance is essential in social media. Nothing moves in a peer-to-peer environment unless a behaviour is impacted.

No matter what you may say your brand is - through deeply-thought positioning, emotionally charged TV advertising or carefully crafted copy, what your brand actually is, is what other people say it is.

And what other people say it is, is what people experience it is: How it performs and how they say it performs.

Image via cuddlycomments.com

That's the message you'll find in Chapter 10 - Trust, in my forthcoming book (Palgrave-Macmillan, January 2014) -The 10 Principles of Open Business.

It's the same position arrived at by Google and Brian Solis in their work on The Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) and - more recently - Brian's Ultimate Moment of Truth (UMOT).

ZMOT asserts we start our path to purchase in our perception of the expression of experience of others in our social circle. We hear good things. We hear bad things. We act accordingly.

Our own research (at The Social Partners) supports the idea that social media (which can almost wholly be defined as the expression of shared experience by our peers and people like us, as viewed from a variety of individual perspectives ) is THE place we turn to for evidence of performance: Advertising makes the promise, social delivers the truth.

Brian's UMOT is a neat expression of a concept I have been applying to my own work in social media strategy:  Building trust through performance at the level of the one-to-one relationship.

Since the brand is what people say it is, having experienced it, how do we encourage people to express their joy? What we do know is that people don't express their meh! So-so performance, mediocrity, blandness - of these we have nothing to report to our peers through social. The technical barrier remains that little bit too high. We don't tweet 'coffee in Starbucks was, you know, ok '. We do tweet 'awesome service in Starbucks today' or 'Starbucks was super sucky this morning'.

We go to the effort to report the out-of-the-ordinary, not (yet) the ordinary.

Brian's response is to encourage expression (reporting the out-of-the-ordinary) we must engage them - by which he means do something to make them love you (and that is most assuredly NOT clicking the Like button or browsing over your centre-out messaging content).

My own work in relationship marketing suggests similar (indeed the whole concept of Open Business shared in The 10 Principles of Open Business is about taking customer engagement to a whole new level by making partners of customers in everything you do).

Engagement, Brian argues, is about emotion.

Again, agreed. And here's the thing to guard against: Social Media is not good at broadcasting emotion - just as it can't broadcast trust.

Emotion resides in the individual and in their interaction with their peers.  Winding up a John Lewis Christmas TV ad and setting it off among your targets won't do the job.

You have to provide the out-of-the-ordinary. You have to build trust in your performance, You have to build the relationships, one person at a time.

This may sound expensive but we are already finding methodologies to track the effectiveness of this over-

delivery, of how far and for how long the emotional impact of feeling a little bit of love resonates.

My belief - one for which I am busy gathering evidence (and there are many anecdotal examples) is that being 'insanely great', as Steve Jobs put it, pays massive dividends.

At the end of the day since the aggregate output of what other people say is what your brand is, then this is where you should be focusing your  brand budget.

All the rest is just a promise.

Big Data: 98 per cent as good as gut feel

The Human Face of Big Data.Via Brian's Books

Not so long ago I was given a demonstration of a very clever bit of kit to analyse big data. By gathering evidence about your expressed preferences shared through social media it could make predictions about the preferences you don't articulate.

Scary clever.

The person presenting proudly told us how their analysis had identified the right kind of music to attract the target market to a new energy drink.
Let's say they picked Artist X as the ideal brand amabassador.

Funnily enough, Artist X was exactly the person the product's brand manager had come up with from their own 'analysis'. I'm sure they had some evidence. Some charts with brand positions. Some brand truths. All that malarky. But they had much more. They had stuff no one had written down, no one could easily define. They had what they felt.

And where was all this processed? In the 'gut' of the brand manager - someone living and breathing and believing the brand.

The vendors of the clever big data cruncher marvelled at how Artist X could be proven to be a 98% fit with the requirements of the brand.

I fear they may be wrong.

I suspect the brand manager was 100% right and that the dimensions of data captured by the tool has gaps - gaps that only guts can currently fill.

You process big data every day - with staggering accuracy. When you drive a car or walk along a crowded street you are processing huge amounts of information and making decisions on it. In real time. If only big data could do that? It's getting better. Our weather forecasts are one example. But it's not 100%. There's still room for your gut - and it's important room.

One final example. When I started out as a local newspaper man, my first sub-editing job was to go through what were called the village columns. We'd call it user generated content today. Reports from local correspondents of village fetes, whist-drives, bowls matches, bring and buys, church services - that kind of micro-local news. It was mostly hand-written (semi-scrawled) and often on unlined paper. And it was my task to correct, amend, headline, and guestimate. I'd mark it all up with instructions for the guys who would set the pages (using ems and picas, font names and point sizes).

And then I'd have to estimate how much I needed to cut or add, what depth I should set images to (for example) to fill the number of pages I had been allocated, accounting for the adverts booked on them. It was a task that was not unlike estimating the number of individual straws in a decent sized haystack.
Yet, within a few weeks, I could mark up all that separate, different-looking, miscellaneous copy and have the output fit within 5 or 6cms of the final column each week. All done without the aid of any big data analysis.

Big data has a hugely important role for organisations (and for governments) moving forward. Who controls it and to what ends it is used will occupy us for years to come. But throughout that process let's not forget the extra value that something human adds.

Tesco must trust us if they want us to trust them

Tesco is right to start the communications rolling in the aftermath of Britain's horsemeat-in-beef-products scandal. Emails to every customer (that they have emails for - which is a lot, thanks to Clubcard) about the value of trust, promises made about rigorous testing (the stuff we had trusted they were doing anyway) and a commitment to a new website to share progress and outcomes is all great.

But the more exciting, and both business changing and business winning, idea contained in Tesco's new commitments is in the pledge to 'open up our supply chain'.

This not only brings them the benefits of applying some of the 10 Principles of Open Business, it also goes some way to enabling customers to get closer to the wizard, rather than the curtain - in other words, the source of the brand.

And IF they are wise and consistent in the application of Open Business, if they truly wish to become customer-led, then co-creating the fix to this problem with those for whom it is intended will become second nature.

That's the part I see missing from the Tesco plan right now. It feels like the customer is being treated as a receiver of outcome rather than a key stakeholder in the decision making process. CEO Phillip Clarke has told us what he is doing for us, but he hasn't asked us what we think the solutions are, what we think will rebuild trust.

Getting closer to the source is a critical part of that. Being part of steering how that is done is another.

Tesco must first learn to trust us if it wants us to trust it.

Black hats and libellous foolishness

Little pieces of my thinking, loosely connected, can be found scattered around the web in the last few days. To note and point those who may otherwise have missed:
First, my lead column for Marketing Week (the UK-based weekly published for the marketing industry) 'Wear The Right Hat for Brand Advocacy' - my appeal for a recognition of what is bad about social by giving a name to it (Black Hat peer-to-peer).

Second, a blog post I wrote in response to the plans by 400 hotels to sue user-powered review site TripAdvisor - which I chose to publish on the Ninety10group.com company blog. It's titled Sue TripAdvisor? You may as well sue the internet.


I'd welcome your comments of course, in the usual manner.

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20 per cent of tweets are brand-related

Brands play a huge part in our everyday conversations, we are always querying each other about the products and services we buy or should consider buying.

So it should come as little surprise that 20% of tweets are brand-related. That's what the academics at PennState discovered and reveal in this report.

Twenty per cent of the tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State.

"Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services," adds Jansen.

So true. And my best bet is that both the volume and percentage of this will only rise and rise.

Send an email to a company and it's usually a long wait before you get a response. Shout out load on twitter and wise brands get back to you real fast.

It's because it's an open network. The fact that no email comes back for hours is between you and the company. When you follow up the email, when your expressions of angst deepen and colour, it all remains between you and the company.

But when no one answers your cries on twitter, all your followers (and anyone else who conducts a relevant search) gets to see your increasing anger and frustration - the negative customer experience transmits so much faster.

The wisest people always were the best listeners...
 

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No one is fooled. Nobody. Talk human to me.

Great post from Chris at the Long Tail that everyone trying to sell subscriptions to magazines this Christmas should read.
Repeats the message of the 'Trust me I'm a brand' post below.

Trust me - I'm a brand

What you say. What they hear.
Acting like a huckster fools no one any more.

An updated definition of media brands

Drawing a few threads together I'm proposing an updated definition of what a media brand is - and offering a suggestion about what a media brand should do:

• A media brand is a platform for a community with shared interests.
• Focused on the interests of this community, we should aggregate content and offer services.
• Services are best delivered at the point they are needed – and that is always, always mobile!

Note the reference to the 'aggregation' of content, rather than the 'creation of'. I'm not suggesting media companies should not bother with the creation of content. I am suggesting it's no longer our primary function.

Our legacy of content creation can get in the way of putting the community first. We can't resist the urge to broadcast - to select what the audience is offered and spin it to our tastes.

This often reveals itself in the way we display content. Media brands put the content they create first, tip their hats at some user-generated content (always given second billing) and actively prevent the sharing of other sources of content the community might actually prefer.

A blank sheet of paper approach would open our eyes to simple facts such as:

• The best content for the community is welcome - be it our own, rival media brand owners', or user generated content.
• The community should judge what content gets highest prominence - and which gets booted into touch.
• Groups should be allowed to form which set their own parameters for what equals interesting and 'good'.
  

This requires some bravery on the part of the media brand owner. It means that only if our own content is good enough/a good enough fit with the community will it score the highest ratings and get top billing.

What lessons are there in this that you aren't prepared to learn?

l