Author Archives: Peter Buechler

When Customers Attack

The explosion of social media has given almost everyone access to a digital printing press, soapbox and a potentially very loud virtual megaphone. These folks include your customers, some of whom, may be upset with your products or the way your organization treats them. Others may simply have an ax to grind, and you may just be the first thing they see after sharpening it.

Communications consultant Paul Gillin and tech entrepreneur Greg Gianforte (G&G), have written a valuable book – Attack of the Customers.  It is part history, part survival kit, and part vaccine help you deal with the next customer attack. To quote G&G: “There has never been a better time to be a critic.”

The book explores both the challenge and opportunity that empowered and angry customers afford. The threats are obvious. It used to be that unsatisfied customers would not return or tell a small circle of friends that they didn’t like your offering. Now if you alienate them, they can create a Facebook page or go to Youtube and post a criticism. If their critique get noticed, think of United Breaks Guitars; you’ve not only got mail, you’ve got a problem.

Attacks can also be opportunities. G&G show how engaging unhappy customers can convert them into loyal fans. Responding to criticism can allow you to improve your own procedures, operations, and business models. This can enable you to increase both customer satisfaction and profitability.

The book is no academic treatise. It is a deep compendium of cases categorized and analyzed for lessons learned. Students of social media may be familiar with notorious cases, such as Jet Blue’s stranding passengers on the tarmac for up to nine hours. G&G, dive deeper and present examples and analyses, I had not encountered.

Social media can both amplify and shape responses of small groups of consumers. Often these complaints fail to propagate and so die out, before attaining critical mass. But not always, as the book illustrates extensively. The author’s broad experience is a welcome antidote to simplistic or formulaic responses to bad PR and worse corporate reflexes. G&G offer perspective on when you should engage critics and when it may be safe to ignore them. The latter should be a conscious choice rather than an ostrich-life reflex.

If your organization hasn’t been savaged in social media yet, it may well be tomorrow. Read Attack of the Customers and be prepared.

Note: Attack Of The Customers is currently available only through Amazon.com. You can also read a free sample chapter here.

 

Skewed Sentiment in the Twittersphere

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging and messaging service, has become a big deal – and twitter-bird-blue-on-whitenot just among social media. By its sixth birthday in 2012, it had an estimated 500 million “active” users worldwide, 140 million of whom are in the US. Based on its latest round of financing, its implied market capitalization would be $ 9.9 billion.

Activity on Twitter has become a leading indicator and Twitter sentiment is often reported in newscasts. The very volume of Twitter activity has become newsworthy. For example, the Academy Awards telecast generated 8.9 million Tweets and the Super Bowl garnered 24.1 million. Of course, many minor events are tweeted about – it seems that every conference, meeting, or presentation I attend – begins with announcing its hashtag.

A number of services such as Twitturly, Twitscoop, and Monitter allow you to track Twitter activity about your brand, organization, or cause. This can be interesting, but how relevant is it? Twitter measurement is relatively cheap and easy. Still, should you judge a marketing campaign or prospects for your latest product by reception on Twitter?

The folks at Twitter seem to think so and want to sell you a “promoted account,” which solicits more followers for you. Presumably, more followers will lead to more mentions.  If that won’t prime the pump, you can also pay for Promoted Tweets, which you can send to audiences who don’t follow you.

The question still remains, is Twitter sentiment a good proxy for what the Universe thinks about your organization or product? An interesting study just released from the Pew Research Center points to significant selection bias in  reactions on Twitter, compared to responses in statistically representative surveys. For example, the 2013 State of the Union Address was substantially more positively rated in polls (42%) than by Tweets (21%). According to the Pew researchers ” Twitter users are not representative of the public.”

This may not be shocking, but it should give one pause. How many of your users not only have Twitter accounts, but are actively engaged. Unless you’ve restricted your market to Twitterati, you may be wise to do some of the heavy lifting involved in market research.

Please Tweet me your thoughts @4ourth.

Searching and Sorting isn’t Browsing

Why your more efficient website may loose you customers

If you live near Boston, one of the nice aspects of January is MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP). MIT transforms itself into a free form stage for hundreds of mini-courses and workshops. Participants can study languages (natural or computer), tour laboratories, make music, explore exoplanets, conduct experiments, or build something.

Until a few years ago, IAP featured an engaging comic book style catalog. It was quirky, engaging and fun to browse. It led me to take workshops I didn’t know I wanted and so would not have searched for.

That catalog is no more. In it’s place is an austere website with a search box and tables listing workshops by title, date, and subject. Not only is the life of the catalog drained out of its web successor, it’s much more difficult to use.

The same could be said of numerous sites offering anything from enterprise software to consumer electronics. Print catalogs have declined and been replaced by online promotions ranging from PPC to social media. These bring you to a website or landing page where you can view a product, search for other products, or leave. What you often can’t do is browse.

Yet prospects don’t always know what they want, so they can’t articulate it well enough to type into a search box. If they find your site, they may bounce. In contrast, Pinterest is so popular, because it not only allows, but invites browsing as well as search.

Printed catalogs can be expensive. Send to the wrong target and you’ve made costly junk. This irritates recipients enough that services such as Catalog Choice (catalogchoice.org) have emerged to help prospects avoid catalogs.

This in no way diminishes their value when delivered to the right hands. A good catalog engages by illustrating a narrative and allowing chance connection with a product, an image, or a concept. The browser is involved in ways the searcher is unlikely to be.

Of course, it’s possible to deliver a panoramic experience on the web, tablet, or smartphone. A number of services such as flipsnack, flippingbook, and PageTurnPro make it relatively easy to convert static documents into a literal page turner. As a fallback, have the catalog as a download.

Whatever you do, give your visitors an alternative to rectangular tables or the open mouth of a search box.

Your Opinion is Very Important to Us (really)

Like many businesses and households, I’ve been shopping a lot on line, and not just on CyberMonday. After the checkout or in the confirming email, we’ve also noticed a proliferation of “customer satisfaction” surveys.

The Stones still have this one nailed:

Neither you nor your customers will get satisfaction, if you imitate many of the ham-handed requests for feedback, which increasingly follow online ordering.

It is now very easy, and often free, to create a web, mobile, or email survey or feedback form with tools from bizrate, SurveyMonkey, SurveyTracker, google.docs and many many others. The ease of creation is perhaps part of the problem.

In principle, gaging the quality of your customer’s experience is desirable. But not at the expense of creating a poor experience. The effort to add an extra question or page of questions of nice to know information is negligible. Since you have your attention, you might be tempted to ask you about other suppliers, products they didn’t buy, or try to sell them something else. Don’t.

Incredibly firms, whose web sites enable a customer to find and buy a product in 2 or 3 clicks ask the same customer to spend ten or more extra minutes completing a satisfaction survey.

Four Ways To Irritate Your Customers:

I’ve seen multiple examples of all of these in the last two weeks:

  1. The Long String-Along. Unless you have a deeper relationship with your customer and are compensating them in some way keep it short. Avoid pile on “nice to know” questions. Sending your respondents to a survey with a continue button at the bottom of the page, and the following page, etc. can lead to the customer abandoning the survey or speeding through it and giving unconsidered responses.
  2. Require answers to all questions, regardless of whether they may pertain to a given customer or your offerings. For example a seller of camping equipment included questions about categories it does not and never has sold.
  3. Require identifying information, such as an email address. If you want to identify a respondent, offer to send them some sort of tsatske. You’ll have to mail it to them and hence need contact information. Of course, this does not give you the right to pester them.
  4. Over Quantification. You are an expert on your product and believe you can distinguish nuances such that a 10 point rating scale makes sense. This pseudo-precision not only makes your surveys difficult to read, it also reduces the reliability of your results.

Instead keep your interaction to what fits on a postcard. Or shorter. Ask less upfront and you will learn more as well as keep the goodwill of your customers.

I recently had to call the tech support line of my ISP. I was asked if I would stay on the line to rate the service I had just received. It consisted of a single automated question – rating the service on a five point scale with a single press on the phone keypad.

Now I got satisfaction.

Bull Reaches New Heights

On October 14th, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner set several records including:

  • the highest balloon ascent
  • the longest skydive
  • the first man to break the sound barrier in free fall

Baumgartner didn’t float silently into the Guinness World Records on his logoed parachute. The feat garnered front page mention in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and leading world newspapers. It was featured on major broadcasts, while some 8 million viewed the jump streaming live in some 50 countries. In PR speak, it got a lot of ink.

Don’t try this from home:

Felix Baumartner about to jump

The big jump was more than the work of a stuntman and a few of his buddies going for bragging rights. It was the joint effort of a sizable technical and scientific team, which has been working on the project since 2007.  Who funded this effort? Fellow Austrian company, Red Bull, the maker of the caffeinated and sugared “energy drink,” seen in skinny 8.4 oz. cans.

Privately held Red Bull, won’t disclose the cost of this project, but from the roster of equipment and experts, it would have had to been eight figures. Whatever the budget, it could have bought Red Bull could have bought a lot of traditional advertising and sales promotion.

Red Bull sponsors sports and games such as skate boarding, BMX biking, and surfing. Events it believes will appeal to its aspirational target – young, , cool, active, male. In this case, it both connected with core customers and transcended conventional marketing to creating a phenomenon. The positioning and messaging were as on target as Baumbartner’s flawless landing. No amount of advertising alone could have done so.

We may never have the resources to stage such an event. Instead of being yet another sponsor at yet another show, we can still strive for promotions, which are relevant and remarkable.