thinking about digital customer experience
In: b2c| business strategy| customer service| e-commerce| e-service| integration| retail| user experience
31 Dec 2009ForeSee 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?
For six years Jake McKee led social media strategy at Lego in the US. You probably now know what a terrific job Jake and the people at Legos have done at building and bonding with a community of fans and fanatics. (McKee is currently CEO of his own agency, Ant’s Eye View)
What’s surprising is that before McKee started his social media initiatives at Legos the company’s strategy towards customers was, in his words, “Don’t. As in, don’t communicate with customers—at all!”
McKee related his experiences at the recent Supergenius Conference in Chicago held by the GasPedal folks. He described a company that in 2000 was so afraid of frivolous lawsuits over ideas that they forbade anyone in the company except the corporate communications department from communicating with customers directly.
One point he made in particular stuck with me—there was no “bell curve” of adoption of this new culture of openness. To the contrary—it was an “inverse bell curve.” And that’s got me thinking a lot about how new ideas and the new social communications environment are adopted by companies. It’s changing my thinking about change management.
In “Crossing the Chasm” Geoffrey Moore developed the theory that technology adoption in any population followed the classic bell curve—innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Moore said that in between the early adopters and the early majority there was a chasm, an unwillingness to “jump on the band wagon” which innovators and early adopters were willing to do.
Moore believed that every organization has innovators and early adopters who love new things, new ideas. They either have the smarts or the chutzpa—or both– to welcome new ideas intuitively. Their downfall is that sometimes even the smart ones fail spectacularly with new ideas. Anyone who has worked on the “bleeding edge” of technology will agree.
The early majority, according to Moore, is the key—that’s where the really smart managers are in most organizations. They’re forward thinking enough to jump on ideas they know will work, and they’re conservative enough not to stick their nose to close to fire until a new idea has proven it will likely be successful. In fact what makes these people good managers is their ability to evaluate and take action on risk—moving fast when it’s smart, and moving slow when it’s not.
So the key to the success of any new initiative in an organization, said Moore, was to “cross the chasm” by identifying, cultivating and proving to the smart managers in the early majority that the initiative is actually a great idea.
To summarize the last half of Moore’s book in a paragraph, he said there were three strategies to successfully cross the chasm: 1) Get top management to sponsor the initiative in meaningful ways, 2) build a structured process of research and development that allows the innovation to iterate and evolve and 3) build increasingly successful pilot programs that prove the real value (often ROI) to the early majority and use that success to build real enthusiasm in the company, centered on the early majority whose opinion counts the most.
What blew me away about McKee’s experience at Lego is that it was almost the opposite. He didn’t encounter a bell curve, he met with an inverse bell curve.
“You had a bunch of people who were very enthusiastic about these ideas—they got it right away,” said McKee in his presentation. “And in the middle you had a bunch of people who just didn’t care—they would sit in meetings looking at their e-mail on their Blackberries under the table. And then there was a huge group of people who couldn’t stand the ideas, they actively hated them and worked against them.”
“I got tired of giving the same meeting over and over and getting the same adversarial response” he went on. “So I just stopped. I just didn’t deal with the negative people at all. I worked with the enthusiastic people, and we started building success. The lesson was: work with people who want to work with you, and build real success.”
“I was lucky in that I had a boss who have me air cover. About the tenth time I went into his office and said “Are you really sure it’s okay that I’m doing this?” he told me to stop it. He said, ‘just go do what you think you should do and I’ll get your back.’ As long as you don’t get arrested, it’s okay.”
So what are the learnings from McKee’s experience at Lego?
I think it clearly emphasizes the importance of senior management buy in. McKee needed permission from a boss who said “I’ve got your back” and meant it, and had the ability to provide that support.
I think it also means that the most important part of organizational change is getting the first steps right and building success stories that are real and meaningful for the organization. It’s okay to fail, but do it on a really small scale, then learn and iterate fast.
And probably most important is be sure you’ve got the right ideas. Know why this particular version of the change is important and in the best interests of the organization.
And regardless of the bell curve—inverse or mountain-like—you’ll be able to build successful change.

I read a great article by Pete Caputa on HubSpot, “ When Two Worlds Collide: Social Media Marketing & SEO
which explains the evolution of social media as an influence on organic search engine results. This creates a somewhat virtuous circle of social media feeding better search engine results, resulting in people finding content within social media and then creating more, etc. As Pete explains, it began earlier in the decade and is now beginning to take a more mature shape as social media becomes more defined and ubiquitous.
I’m working with a client who has a consulting firm that works with other businesses to improve business results. This client clearly needs to establish itself as one of the leaders in their area of specialty. Two large initiatives we’re undertaking are 1) reaching out to other appropriate, quality resources across the Web, connecting with them and inviting them to connect with us if they find our content and dialogue valuable; and 2) diving into the social conversation in it’s area of expertise, again to offer value where it can. This process of creating value, outreach, dialogue serves the purpose of establishing this firm on search engines and popular online resources within its area of expertise.
Far more important is that it helps this firm push towards quality in everything they do. It’s as if Adam Smith, looking down from heaven, engineered a business marketing process to produce better companies.
While we’re focused on an extensive and ambitious social media strategy with this firm, we’re also helping with organizational definition and internal alignment of people to make their business the best kind of business they can be.
Focused, authentic, selfless, and trustworthy.
Here’s the deck that goes with Peter’s terrific (short) read:
Broadly, I believe that planning cannot go forward with a client or client project without a strong framework of primary and secondary research. Along with two of my peers, I’ve worked very hard over the past few years to bring structured, focused research to all the work we do with our clients.
A couple of points about this:
Some people have questioned the role of academic-trained researchers, particularly those who drive research programs within corporations. I find that having a trained MS or PhD research director collaborating on the research is great, and I’ve been blessed to work with several great ones.
But one challenge today it’s hard to find clients willing to put up with $300,000 “discovery” phases, so it’s critical that these research skills are developed in the strategic planning group and that we know how to get the best possible insights, language and creative concepts for smaller budgets. I think the biggest single improvement we can make is this idea of tying creative immediately into the strategic planning process, and getting them sketching and writing memos, shooting ideas and questions and paper prototypes, card exercise ideas, right into the research process itself.
I also believe the client needs to be an equal partner in this. I’ve worked with clients where we’ve pulled appropriate people from their marketing department and trained them to do hall interviews—anything to drive more engagement.
The central purposes of research are to discover understandings about the customer to drive business strategy, and working iteratively with that, sketch, inspire, test, discard, create, question, edit and deliver brilliant creative thinking.
My $.02 Thoughts?
I'm Rohn Jay Miller. I'm a princpal in a start-up called AlphaBeta. We work with clients to plan and execute communications strategy, messaging, and content--internal, social and media. A lot of what I write here is about how are trying to do this.
I used to be Senior Vice President - Product + Technology, Knight Ridder Newspapers You can reach me at rmiller@alphabetadesign.com