take 5
thinking about digital customer experience
Jerry Madden was one of the first strangers I ever met through the Internet. At the time he was working for NASA at the Goddard Space Center in Alabama as Associate Director – Flight Projects, which meant that he was the senior project manager at the Center.
Jerry Madden
He was also something of a folk anthropologist. Sometime in the 1980s he began collecting bits of wisdom about project management in the space industry, which he eventually edited into “100 Rules For NASA Project Managers.” He handed it out to his direct reports and new hires at the Goddard Center, and it quickly became a popular piece of aerospace engineering folklore.
I found the list in 1995 on a server at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. I was surfing the Net with one of the early Netscape browsers. I discovered that many servers across the country—government, university, corporate—were just sitting out on the Internet unguarded. This situation quickly changed, but for awhile a person could cruise into any number of interesting crannies of the World Wide Web unchallenged.
At the time I was a partner in a young interactive agency in San Francisco called Ikonic. We were growing exponentially at that time, doubling in size every year until eventually we had 125 people and offices in San Francisco and New York. My partner, Robert May, was “Mr. Outside,” and I was the COO “Mr. Inside,” and responsible for how everything ran. So I was learning the value of great project management—fast.
Jerry’s list, as you will see, is filled with great career advice all within a simple and very valid framework of rules. One of my favorite jewels is this definition of a project manager:
“Vicious, disliked and thoroughly despicable persons, gentlemen and ladies can be project managers. Lost souls, procrastinators and wishy-washys cannot.”
As soon as I found the list I distributed around the office at Ikonic, and we actually began each weekly project manager’s meeting by reading aloud one of the rules and discussing its wisdom.
I wrote an e-mail to Jerry Madden to thank him and tell him how I found his list. A day later I received an e-mail reply:
“What an amazing time we live in,” Jerry wrote. “I’m sitting on my bed in a hotel in Mississippi writing to someone in San Francisco who found something I wrote on a server in Pasadena that someone passed along from a computer in Huntsville, Alabama. Incredible!”
That was back in 1995, fifteen years ago. It’s hard to describe the primitive networks we were operating with and more important, the lack of any common understanding about how even simple e-communications like websites and e-mail should work.
Today I’m writing this in an office in Minneapolis and I know that for certain it will be read today by at least three colleagues in Europe—two I met through Twitter, and one through a conference. What an amazing time we live in.
I’ve made many mistakes in my career as a manager—sometimes it seems like more mistakes than not. But eventually through these years I’ve latched on to the idea of “career capital,” that is, the collective good reputation and momentum one builds over time that opens new opportunities and gives one credibility.
I believe this list is a terrific framework to use in building your “career capital.”
Here’s a great example:
“Integrity means your subordinates trust you,” is rule #85. I think I’ve passed that along to other people dozens of times, and I know I’ve thought about it a million times. I think about it now as I work with new people and organizations and see how important trust is to successful projects and for personal respect.
And that’s just one example. Here’s the entire list of 100 Rules For NASA Project Managers, a present to you from Jerry Madden, one of the great citizen scholars of project management—and perhaps more important, personal integrity.
Thanks again, Jerry.
UnSummit: The 25 Minute MBA
26 Jun 2010This is a presentation I made today at a terrific un-conference, the UnSummit, hosted at the CoCo co-working space in St. Paul (Thanks, Don Ball and parnters!)
I spend some time with nearly every client and engagement team I work with reviewing strategic business principles and the methods of building business models.
These days, with businesses battered by the biggest depression since the Great Depression, as well as commoditizattion and disruption, believe me “nobody knows nothing about nothing.” Businesses are searching everywhere for innovation and traction.
At many conferences I attend the focus is on user experience and the “digital channel.” I wanted to provide some simple frameworks–and some confidence–for teams to go ahead and begin asking strategic business questions and providing real business strategy backed up by clear, simple business modelling.
This is a link to my presentation on SlideShare.
I’ve added a brief bibliography of key business books that are specifically focussed on the central ideas of business planning in the 20th century and providing real, usable and simple frameworks for organizing and presenting work.
Please let me know if you have any other ideas or books to add to this:
Public Relations Agencies As Strategic Partners
In: business strategy|change management|social media|social trends|user experience
22 Jun 2010Friends of mine who work in public relations might read the headline of this post and think, “Of course. What else?”
Public relations agencies of late have been laying claim to agency of record for social media. I’ve written earlier about this and my argument for why (my $.02) this is very short-sighted.
My argument is that at best public relations agenciesare but a temporary home for the “control center” of social media. Smart people in PR understand the social communications tsunami is so broad and profound that will soon make every department, every agency and every person in a company a director of social media.
Leadership of a corporation will require executives to become much more visible and accountable to the crowds that are their companies and their markets. Leadership will not come from “command and control,” but from clear, authentic direction that is so good and true that it aligns people inside the enterprise and compels customers to do business with the enterprise. At least that’s how it should work.
The opportunity public relations agencies may have is to become the primary strategic partner for a client—I mean, as in replacing McKinsey and Bain. Those old line strategic consulting firms are built on problem definition and problem solving. The problem is that they aren’t at all adept at communications. And here’s where the opportunity lies for the best of the public relations agencies.
Communication itself is not only the means to change management in a corporation, it’s what 75% of the people in a corporation do 75% of the time for a living–communicate. Some of that communication is internal or with suppliers, and some is with customers and potential customers. But what most of us do for a living is not drill for oil in the ground or make cars on an assembly line or arrest criminals. Most of us are information workers–we communicate for a living.
A true strategic partner needs to help define the taxonomy, language and message structure for a client. This partner needs to understand and advise on communications strategy—aligning people internally and externally with the themes and messages that represent what the company does. That used to be done by brand consultancies and advertising agencies but they were good at creating brand frameworks that only generally related to the products and services that a corporation actually delivered. Now that role is up for grabs, and a smart public relations practice would embrace the broad social communications transformation and place themselves as the single central strategic communications and business consulting partner for the corporation of the 21st century.
This would require people with new skills to join the PR agency. One type is who you might expect–people currently learning and practicing social media communications.
The second is MBA strategic planners who might otherwise join Deloitte & Touche or Accenture. These are the people who bring the business problem solving skills that now need to be applied across the corporation on communications challenges.
I mean, why would these bright and shiny MBAs work for a smokestack consulting firm when you can leapfrog your career into a 21st century strategic communications firm? And the bones of that strategic communications firm lie with the public relations agency. That agency can claim a working relationship with boards and senior management about what the business strategies of corporations are and how they should be communicated internally and externally. And this work is often done especially in crisis. Do you think BP is talking to McKinsey right now or their PR agency?
There are firms that are experimenting when this new role, such as Stone Yamashita, Continuum, and Zeus Jones. Among the traditional PR agencies Edelman seems to have done the best job of experimenting and integrating this new strategic social thinking into their practice. And my friend Paul Isaakson is a leading example of someone working at the intersection of strategy, technology and branding.
The traditional agencies all have to look at blowing up serious parts of their practice that will soon be not only unprofitable but fighting at odds with the new social communications developments. The problem ad agencies have is that many of the people they employ grew up either wanting to make television commercials or wanting to take clients golfing. PR agencies have to understand that half of what they do now–like the focus on “gatekeepers”–is wrong and the other half still needs to be invented.
The competition won’t be agencies, it’s going to be strategic consulting firms. Almost every new innovation on the Internet has found a source of budget or income from an older business to feed on while it grows and develops. Monster and Craig’s List ate newspaper classifies, for example.
And there’s a lot of budget going to those old school consulting firms to feed on–for the right kind of new agency.
The risk? That those old school consulting firms are going there first.
Just look at what McKinsey and Neilsen did last week….
But what McKinsey sells is clear strategic business diagnosis and expert help to innovate. If most of the work and the result of that work is communications, aren’t people who understand both business strategy and how to create communications better skilled to diagnose and innovate? It leads public relations agencies into their own transformation, but as most people in communications are saying today, “what’s the alternative?”
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Skype: The Killer iPhone App
In: mobile|user experience|ux
26 May 2010Skype has turned into one of the most essential apps on my iPhone–and it should be on yours, especially if you do any travelling.
Here’s why:
Whenever you’re somewhere in America that has poor AT&T coverage (okay, let’s put aside the notion that would be “everywhere”) Skype offers an alternative phone service. It works well with the 3G service, and even better if you’re within WiFi range.
I was visiting my family in Brookings, South Dakota last week. Brookings is a good-sized college town (20,000 pop) home to South Dakota State. While inside the city limits the AT&T coverage was fine. However, once we drove to the family home in nearby Volga, South Dakota–zippo. No signal.
My brother uses Skype as his regular phone service, and we have video calls between us several times a week. On a whim, I installed the Skype iPhone app on my phone. Sitting in the living room of the house in Volga I logged into Skype, and called my wife who was visiting in Brookings. Since the house in Volga has a WiFi network, the Skype connection was superb.
You have to set up a Skype account on your computer and buy a minimal amount of Skype points (like $10). Then go to the iTunes store, download the free Skype app, and set up the app with your Skype credentials.
A great back up phone service to have. You even get the Skype advantage of international phone calls!
And if you’re in a WiFi network, you can even use Skype’s video conferencing.
Why We Need Duct Tape To Run Our Systems
In: b2c|business strategy|change management|cloud computing|customer service|design|e-service|in-store|integration|retail|user experience|ux
7 Mar 2010
I took this photo on my last visit to Home Depot. I like to use the “self-checkout” terminal that allows you to scan the bar codes on your items and pay through a credit card pad.
The system works fine—much better than the insanely complicated one in my local grocery store. You buy some light bulbs, a jug of windshield fluid, the new doorknob for the guest room—all you have to do is scan the barcodes.
The problem the photo illustrates is that there is a fatal flaw in the system. If you scan your debit card (or like me, a bank card which is both debit and credit card) and enter your debit card PIN number, the system stops. It seems that the software to handle debit cards was never implemented.
There’s a single clerk who handles six lanes of self-service, stepping in when someone is confused, or does something out of step—or, just following the instructions on the screen, enters a PIN number.
How many times have you seen a work-around like this in a store? The system works to a point, but some function was never implemented, and it’s left to Larry the Assistant Store Manager to walk around with some duct tape and a Sharpie and tape over a button or put some over-riding message like this one on a $800 terminal running $1 million worth of POS software.
I offer this piece of customer experience to you this morning for four reasons:
- We’ve all seen this kind of work-around. It’s endemic in implementations of large software / hardware systems. The systems work, but only up to a point. We need to learn to think and communicate internally to build systems that don’t need duct tape and Sharpies.
- The lost productivity and increased customer frustration probably isn’t figured into the ROI, even though they are very real effects of the system.
- By implication this photo says that the real solution—implementing debit cards or at least removing debit PIN commands from the terminals—is just such a big problem that no one can solve it. It’s hopeless.
- Big software systems that are implemented across enterprises are still misunderstood by most senior management. General managers in large corporations are grocery people, or paint people or hotel people—not software managers.
We will live with these goofball work-arounds forevermore. I’d like to see the business schools and other graduate programs begin training managers in technology as one of the two or three fundamental skills they learn in school.
With the advent of cloud computing, Web services, and service-oriented architecture, we’re into a new era of systems development. If the Home Depot point of sale system for self-checkout were implemented today the Debit card problem might not have occurred.
Think of all the duct tape and Sharpies that would have saved.
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The Death of Branding and The Rise of Design and Reputation
In: b2b|b2c|business strategy|change management|design|e-service|integration|research|social media|social trends|user experience
12 Feb 2010So take a moment and think of the best work your company does.
When your company does its best work who does it? How do they do it?
Now hold a picture of that group of people and the work they do, and ask “wha
t qualities or values do they bring to the table that makes this our best work?” Tenacity? Brutal honesty? Synthetic creativity with others? The ability to connect everything to the business goal?
I think if you answer these two questions—who and how you do your best work– you have the core values of your company. And if you connect these values to how you do your work—your processes—you have essentially outlined the design of your company, and from that the design of your products and services.
The business of branding products and services is slowly being commoditized as a result of the disruptive technology of social networks. What is moving in to replace branding is strategic consulting about the design of companies and their products.
I’m pulling together a couple of different threads of notes as I write this:
Paul Isakson is a friend and colleague I check in with regularly, and a few weeks ago we met over coffee at The Spyhouse in Minneapolis. We talked through the idea that what we as consumers truly fall in love with in a product or a company is the design—and not so much of what is called “branding.” By design I mean: the structure that governs functioning, developing, and delivery of a product or service.
Think of this: if you draw a line from the Macintosh, through the Applebook, the iPod, the iPhone and now the iPad you clearly see the power of Apple’s design, how it wins the allegiance of people, and builds an emotional loyalty to Apple. These are very different products—computers, audio players, telephones, tablets. But the share the same design philosophy—sculpturally beautiful, incredibly functional and usable, and delightful to use. They all share a common design structure.
We love Apple because everything they try to do is beautifully designed—so we can clearly see how design is central to Apple’s reputation, and why we therefore (a lot of us, anyway) love Apple, are loyal to it, and are willing to try new products from them.
Take a minute and think about Microsoft’s medicore design philosophy: how Windows works, the GUI of the Office applications, how hard it is to install and operate new applications, the “me too” quality of Bing.
I call the emotional autonomous opinion in the consumer’s mind “reputation” rather than “brand.” There are elements of what many people call branding—package design, trade dress, logos, naming, sexy television commercials—which may appear to be separate from the product in the design, but these are just another component of the over all user experience that creates a reputation in the customer’s mind about the product and the company.
But “design” and “reputation” are more valuable terms to use today. If you consider the design of buying groceries at Cub Foods vs. Whole Foods, you can see how the design of each—store locations, store design, food choices, newspaper advertising, Websites—is the soul of the reputation each one has. And we have different degrees of love and loyalty to these two reputations depending on who we are, where we live, and how we communicate with other people.
I learn I can have faith in some companies because I can trust that what they sell to me is great. That’s a great reputation. (I also trust that some companies build crap, and that those products will likely be crap in the future–hence a bad reputation.)
I’m working on a strategic design of a company, working with one of my strategic partners, helping them think through what their products and services should be and how they “position” themselves in the marketplace. They are an IT firm, which is a field clearly threatened by the two biggest dangers most American businesses face:
- Commoditization – being forced to compete largely on price
- Disruptive technology—having the marketplace for products and services disrupted by a new technology that makes the company’s offerings less valuable and then obsolete.
Here are two quick examples of how these forces destroyed a company and an entire industry:
Kodak back in the 1980s thought they were in the film emulsion business. Management tried to make better film for less money. Then digital cameras came into the market. Kodak figured people would print their digital photos, so they still made money on the photo paper the drug stores used to print photographs. But even that business slowly eroded. Kodak’s mistake was not realizing that in fact they were in the visual memories business. While Kodak’s commercials relentlessly played on this idea of “visual memories,” inside the company they were trying to figure out how to make film emulsion cheaper. What if the price of chemicals went up? They weren’t focused on the customer, they were focused on what they thought was the business of Kodak. There was a total disconnect between the brand and the reputation of Kodak when digital cameras and video cameras showed up. If they hadn’t relied on phony branding we might all be using $150 Kodak Flip video cameras today.
Newspapers were disrupted the Internet—Monster.com and Craig’s List pillaged the classified advertising monopoly that had provided 30% of the revenue and 80% of the net profit to the newspaper industry. They can never get that back. Newspapers weren’t in the news business; they were in the convenient news and advertising business. When the Internet came along, both of those things could be done much cheaper (and in the case of classifieds, much better).
I’m working with my friends at this IT firm checking in on the design of their company. They have done a much better job of identifying what truly makes them unique in the IT marketplace. Many IT firms—as well as interactive and advertising agencies—are just lumps of people doing the best work they can, but losing the battle of why their people working in with their process produce anything more than a commodity. This firm is thinking through how they can evolve the design of their services so that they are outstanding and distinctive. If they focus on that—rather than on the snappy slogan or “brand positioning”—they will have changed the company on the inside and planning the communications of this will be much easier because, well, because it will be true.
The advertising agency business is slowly imploding from a Stalinist refusal let go of “branding.” Marketing is not about awareness, brand positioning, and brand preference. Put another way, only a small part of what marketing has become is about that–and for that broadcast media can be very useful. But marketing is now in the sales and customer service businesses as well. And ad agencies still think it’s about messaging and branding.
Instead, they should focus on strategic business consulting that works with clients to evolve the design of their products and services, and then also focuses on using their creative skills as communicators to invent language to communicate this design both inside and outside the organization—and then focuses on collaborating with clients to professionally manage the communications process. Ad agencies already do some of these last two tasks, but they only do it through traditional broadcasting channels (and I include most online advertising as “broadcasting.”)
There’s a lot of people at ad agencies who grew up wanting to make television commercials, and the problem is there are fewer commercials and they are worth less as the communications landscape expands and becomes more social. Who wants to give up shooting car commercials in Marin County to planning search engine optimization strategy (that will drive actually real business leads?)
And how people communicate inside a company with each other should be the first responsibility of a communications partner. That has to be based on the truth that is the design of the company. Communications internally can help evolve the company so that it and its product are better designed.
A communications partner can be the critical ally in helping think through the businesses choices, the language used to frame and discuss those choices, helping communicating that internally and yes, communicate it to the outside world.
That’s not an ad agency. That’s not a strategic consulting firm. That’s not a public relations firm.
I think that’s a strategic communications agency.
Here are some books I’m reading that are affecting my thinking about this:
Change By Design by Tim Brown
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens
The McKinsey Mind by Ethan A. Rasiel and Paul N. Friga
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My Favorite Television Commercial
In: b2c|business strategy|media|social media|social trends|user experience
10 Feb 2010All this talk about the Super Bowl television commercials has gotten me thinking about the role of television in the new social landscape. I confess to being an NFL junkie this year, as a result of the Minnesota Vikings run at the title and my shiny new widescreen HDTV. Our 9 year-old daughter is absorbed in this season’s American Idol (and btw, Ellen DeGeneres is absolutely a smash as the judge who replaced the wobbly Paula Abdul)
I was at a meeting last night at my church with a group that works on social justice issues. Almost immediately someone brought up the new CBS show “Undercover Boss” which debuted on CBS right after the Super Bowl. As manipulative as this new “reality”television show might be, I gotta tell you it’s really striking a chord in this time of recession—-with all the talk about lost jobs, health insurance, home prices below water.
On this first episode of Underwover Boss we saw the public spectacle of a CEO finding out his workers have to pee into coffee cans in their cars to keep on schedule. As we talked about this last night people nodded and murmured—they were cranked. There’s a chord in there for sure.
So my point here? TV still works.
Just how does it work in the new social landscape? I can tell you that “Ellen” (she was making her debut as a judge on the show) was a top ten term trending on Twitter while American Idol was on the air last night.
Clearly there are social waves of discussion to be launched by television. the problem is more and more TV has to rely on big “tent pole” events like the NFL playoffs and American Idol to garner the mass audience.
An interesting effect is on local advertisers who appear because local television stations get some air time as part of the deal for carrying the show on its channel. I’ve noticed more and more local advertisers working to get people to come to Websites to find out more. Local stations also reap the harvest every Fall when there’s serious political races going on. I’d very much like to own a local television station in the US the last two weeks of October in an even numbered year.
Tivos and DVRs of all types help spread the event out of its real-time experience, but that’s a very, very small minority of people time shifting the big shows. (Who recorded the Vikings-New Orleans game to watch it later?)
My point is that we need these big gatherings from television. There’s always been some special joy in watching the final episode of Seinfeld (or any episode of Seinfeld, for that matter) Where TV can gather up enough talent and drama to make it worth our while, we’ll watch in droves.
What’s the opportunity for advertisers on television? I think to continue to win they need to succeed at two things: they’ve got to entertain or somehow truly engage us with the quality of the content of the commercial, and second, provide a call to take the easiest, most rewarding next step.
I remember a few years back one of the car companies didn’t even both announcing it’s URL. They just said, “Go to Google and type in ___” For all advertisers that means asking people to go to the Web. And then following them there, whereever they are. For local advertisers that engagement has to come from real, attractive local opportunities–events, new products, special deals–but all within a driving distance.
The “value add” for television advertising is going to quickly move into participating and being available in social networks. Word came today of research on people who visit brand Facebook pages. First, lots of people are coming to store Facebook pages, and they don’t want to engage with a store clerk or buyer online. They want deals! Discounts! Tell me about your new products!
At the heart of these Facebook fans lie a cadre of truly loyal customers who get their jones by coming to the store’s page several times a week. They just love the products. (I’ll note for the record that one of the major brands cited is Victoria’s Secret, which you might think would have a big crowd of fans. But according to Internet Retailer, Victoria’s Secret sells more online than Target.)
Television can still do a great job of providing high quality shows and advertising–it’s just less of it. The powerful irony is the giants among television who remain standing—Ellen, Oprah, Dave, Jay, Simon–are more powerful than before because these events are scarce now. Reality television fits this emotional mood by delivering “real” experiences that get us excited about the design and soul of products, rather than the brand blather.
Show us what you’re building and selling, and do it in an entertaining way. We’ll find a way to make the next connection, if we’re inspired. But it’s about the design of whatr you sell, not the branding you wrap around it.
So, okay—here it is: my all-time favorite commercial. It’s hysterical. It was a winner in the 2006 Cannes Festival, from the great talents at the UK’s Bartle Bogle Hegarty.
Funny, real, beautifuly imagined—and hey, it’s for an underarm deoderant!
Axe body spray commercial
Da vid | MySpace Video
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The lesson of clamshell packaging and real company values
In: b2c|business strategy|customer service|design|retail|user experience
15 Jan 2010Tara Hunt, the author of “The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business,” spoke this week at Best Buy. As she delivered her prescriptions for companies opening up to the new social Internet, she offered this discussion point:
“Identify the values that are part of communities that businesses don’t share. Does your business share these values? If no, why not?”
This is a central question—and fear—organizations have about “opening up” do direct dialogues with customers across the enterprise. One problem in discussing the issue is defining what precisely do we mean by a “value?”
Here’s the example I use in presentations, and I offer here as way of explaining how companies can be disconnected by a mismatch of values with customers. It has to do with packaging.
About 20 years ago companies began to ship products—especially electronics, toys, and office supplies—in “clamshell” plastic. We’ve all seen it—clear, sealed plastic shells of thick, durable plastic. There were many advantages for companies to use clamshell packaging. Conveyor belts can be used to pack boxes instead of human beings. It results in much less breakage in shipping. The UPC code can be located in a standardized location not on the product itself, still allowing for easy scanning. Employee theft can be minimized. Product returns can be sharply reduced because products could be refused as returns since “the packaging was opened.”
All of these are virtues for the company. None of them benefit the consumer, except possibly for some lower prices on commodities.
And we all know the big problem—the personal danger—of opening clamshell packaging. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC, plastic packaging has caused more than 25,000 injuries since 2004.
Most of the injuries come not from the plastic itself, they come from the devices we use to pierce the clamshell to get to the product—knives, scissors, teeth.
Amazon got hip to the issue and starting last year all of their products ship with “free-opening clamshell” packaging. This new form of clamshell has a hinge at the bottom with flanges at the top. You grip the two sides at the top and the package pops open easily. No more frustration, no more injuries.
Amazon is aligned with my values of not wanting to injure myself to get to my new stapler or television cables.
Mark Cuban, the founder of Buy.com and flamboyant owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, flamed a company over this issue in a very funny blog post.
The lesson is for companies to think through the customer experience and refuse to accept the left-brained answers only. Real ROI is lost when the customer experience is so unintentionally bad. And as Amazon has proved, there is real brand equity to be captured by going against the prevailing practices in order to provide a great customer experience.
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Intercomm: how internal + external communications integration will become the new frontier
In: business strategy|change management|customer service|high technology|integration|marketingasservice|social media|social trends|user experience|ux
4 Jan 2010
You’ve seen a lot of posts and articles recently foretelling the trends and technology that will be winners in 2010.
I thought I’d put out a prediction–or two–for the year 2011.
By the time the next New Year’s rolls around those of us in marketing and consulting will be talking all about how external and internal communications have to integrate with each other—and both have to align with business strategy. And the first part of this new trend we should consider is the internal.
Everyone talks about marketing and social media affecting the enterprise—but it’s all about how companies talk to their customers. But we don’t talk much about internal communications—I mean, like not at all. If you look at most corporate organization charts there isn’t even a person responsible for internal communications.
Doesn’t that seem weird? We rely on managers in divisions, newsletters and intranets to communicate internally. Maybe some company meetings and training. But mostly it’s And now that the era of the Social Internet is upon us, social media will effect internal communications in two very powerful ways:
- More and more people inside companies will be in contact with customers. We will see tens of thousands of employees talking to customers instead of hundreds. A lot of this will happen in what we refer to as real time– in-stores, online. This means all those employees need to be on the same page with each other. How does this happen?
- Communications inside companies will organically rely on more and more on social media frameworks for communicating within the enterprise—peer to peer, one to many, many to one. So the CEO may still send out a quarterly message, but it’s going to be in a much, much larger mass of social communications. This is also going to dramaticaly increase between companies that are strategic partners. How does this evolve?
So, one prediction is that internal communications will be the great frontier for business communications in 2011. And companies will be scrambling to outperform each other in building effective internal communications in order to better service customers and to become more nimble.
“Walking the walk” is going to become more and more transparent, and the only cure to get on your feet is internal communications. It’s the new frontier.
My second prediction is that how internal communication is integrated with external communication—will be the second new discipline we’ll be talking about in 2011.
I call this integration intercomm—integrated communications from business strategy throughout the enterprise and then to customers. Intercomm is the future art of creating and managing communications through the enterprise. This includes business strategy, branding, messaging, language and communications throughout the enterprise, strategic partners, and clients and customers.
It will be delivered in a new social world where transparency—and the resulting demand for authenticity–make this a critical problem for companies to solve.
Intercomm has to be planned and executed holistically because successes and mistakes will be amplified in real-time. Without Intercomm companies may preserve the tidy divisions of marketing, stores, and corporate communications but at their peril. Customers, starting with high ticket B2B markets, will demand greater access and response from the companies they might do business with. Strategic partnerships will have to operate more seamlessly. Switching costs for clients and customers will be pushed downward and any company’s strategy for differentiation will depend on how the walk and the talk align in real-time.
(BTW, I have one more 2011 prediction: that the word brand will slowly be replaced by the word reputation—but that’s another post)
The Social Enterprise began to emerge in glimmers first among Internet based businesses like Amazon and Dell and emerging social networks like My Space, Facebook and now Twitter. But almost at the same time brick and mortar businesses like banks, airlines and phone companies began moving big chunks of their commerce and customer service to the Internet.
Marketing has been stretched across all of the other disciplines of the enterprise, including supply chain management and vendor relationships. Communications has become so pervasive inside and outside the enterprise that no one discipline can coordinate the communications of the entire organization.
Among corporations, IBM is a leader in internal communications and the move to the Social Enterprise. Here’s Jon Iwata, SVP of Marketing and Communications at IBM, talking about how social communications are become integrated into the backbone of the company:
Now we are seeing the “atomization” of communications between the enterprises and customers. I wrote last week about Texas Instruments community for developers called E2E (translation: engineer to engineer) that allows 9,000 members to talk in forums and peer to peer with engineers throughout Texas Instruments. The result has been a 6X increase in requests by E2E members for chip samples for prototypes. In addition, TI gets ideas for improvements to chips from members of the E2E community.
Is this marketing? Sales? Customer service? Research and development?
You might say it’s that it’s all of those types of communication. This kind of B2B community does contain marketing and product messaging, and yes it’s transactional, and yes TI now has a specific service relationship with the individual engineer requesting a chip sample for a product prototype.
But it’s more accurate to say that this is social communication that accomplishes many of the goals of marketing, branding, sales, customer service and so on.
It’s important to acknowledge that this kind of social relationship is both old and new. We have to admit it is an amalgamation of the traditional organization of corporations because these organizations are comprised of people who have been trained and are experienced in these disciplines. There’s really no one in most corporations who has specific skills in social networks and social relationships. Some marketing people are skilled in “loyalty” marketing. Some sales people work in businesses with high customer service requirements like computers or food service.
In enterprise software companies its common for someone to hold the title of SVP-Product & Marketing—there’s a direct link between their clients and the product feature development process. These software companies have also sponsored or worked with user groups of customers, both in listening for ideas and for providing support. These kinds of organizational structures offer some bridge to the new social future
But it’s important to acknowledge that this is a new form of relationship between customer and corporation.
And it’s going to require an evolution in how companies communicate internally to deal best with the customer, and then deliver to the customer. Intercomm is the discipline to make that real and internal communications is the new frontier where it will be built.
I want to post more on how Intercomm can be conceived, planned and executed in the next few days. Please, I look forward to your comments.
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Customer Satisfaction in E-Commerce Strongly Effects Future Loyalty
In: b2c|business strategy|customer service|e-commerce|e-service|integration|retail|user experience
31 Dec 2009
- Image via Wikipedia
ForeSee Results has just released a research study on customer satisfaction with the top 40 Internet e-commerce Website and for mainstream retailers like Target and Best Buy it’s not great news.
The two retailing giants scored just below the average for the 40 sites, and showed little improvement in their customer satisfaction scores for the last four years.
Amazon continues to set the gold standard, achieving a score of 87 on a scale of 100 this year, the highest score ever achieved in the four years of the study.
So what? How does this matter if e-commerce is just a small fraction of total revenue for a mainstream retailer like Target? The study provides startling connections between customer satisfaction on the e-commerce channel and consumer likelihood to shop at stores, stay loyal to in future purchases, or recommend a retailer to others:
from: “Online Retailers Find a Reason to Celebrate in Dismal Economy,” 12/30/2009 ForeSee Results
Studies like this one point out successful strategies for understanding the inter-play between channels for the multi-channel retailer. As mobile and search play an even more important role in our consideration and buying processes, how can retailers build strong relationships and real loyalty?
“Customer satisfaction” is the answer, but what does that mean, other than the best value combined with best service? And if that’s all that means, how does a retailer get out of an “arms race” of features, price cuts, and whiz-bang promotions?
The answer may lie in a long-term strategy of what some call “delight.” Delight comes from being significantly and plesantly surprised–something that Amazon has been able to do by pioneering e-commerce experience and infrastructure on a massive scale. The key is the long-term committment to integrating bricks and clicks and mobile. This isn’t something that can be done by a cross-functional special committee. This has to be led from the top of the organization and made the central priority of a retailer.
That’s what Amazon does, doesn’t it?
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About this blog
I'm Rohn Jay Miller. I'm a principal in a start-up called AlphaBeta. We work with clients to evolve their business + communications strategies so they become more open, interactive and valuable in the marketplace. This means looking at how marketing, sales and customer service holistically engage customers. I write here about our challenges and opportunities.
I used to be Senior Vice President - Product + Technology, Knight Ridder Newspapers You can reach me at rmiller@alphabetadesign.com
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