Manhattan Marketing Maven

American Airlines: Another Customer Service Disaster

In customer service ... silence is never golden! Unfortunately this is a lesson the airlines have yet to learn in spite of frequent hiccups that negatively impact on their brands.

American Airlines canceled my flight (AA 45) from Paris to New York Thursday after several hours of silence and lies and delays in the lounge and two more hours of lies and delays on the gate, the tarmac and back again. The good news is that the pilot wouldn't fly a plane with a kluge-y computer system. The bad news was that the airline was totally disingenuous and completely unprepared for what ought to be a regular occurrence.

The true values of a brand and their approach to customers comes out in non-routine situations. You might have imagined that after last year's big disasters with customers trapped on snowed in flights, nasty videos on YouTube and class action suits that American and others would have created a standard drill and a standard way to communicate with passengers when things go south.

From the moment the pilot called it quits, the situation deteriorated. We were told that Passenger Services would help and instructed to get off the plane and claim our bags. We were told there were no other flights available and that, based on class of service, we'd be put up at different hotels and flown home the next day.We weren't told any details No what, when,how or where.

We tromped off the plane, through passport control and into a baggage retrieval hall where a phalanx of American representatives and armed French soldiers knew nothing and said nothing. One woman, frustrated by the number and variety of questions from anxious travelers, admitted she wasn't even trained on the reservations computer system. We waited almost a hour with no official communication. It took almost 90 minutes for the bags to be delivered. At one point airline reps handled out a sheet inaccurately documenting,what had happened. Nobody knew what to do with these sheets, but there was a stampede to get them.

I guess nobody at American ever took psychology 101. Nor do they understand that uncertainty is the greatest anxiety producer in humans which prompts all kinds of unusual behavior. It seemed to me that getting several hundred unanticipated bodies out of the system and off the premises was the airline's top priority rather than dealing fairly and compassionately with its paying customers. Perhaps they figured if they could clear the wreak they could sort it all out later. Unfortunately not a single customer shared this perspective.

If anyone asks, I propose that customer facing brands who experience service delivery hiccups adopt a posture that emphasizes compassion and communication. If if were up to me I'd

1. Draft messages in common parlance that speaks directly to the obvious needs and anxieties of customers. It wouldn't hurt to apologize and empathize with passengers.It also wouldn't hurt to offer several alternatives raher than a single take-it or leave-it offer. 

2. Have a disaster plan handy and leverage all available personnel to manage a crisis. Cue these people in advance. Give them several things they can actually do and say rather than present them as unprogrammed robots capable only of deflecting inquiries and further frustrating customers.

3. Dedicate reaction teams to handle re-routing, re-booking and individual cases. Nobody wants to be stuck. Everybody wanted to be somewhere else, that's why they chose American. The brand has an obligation to try to make good on that premise even when the equipment doesn't cooperate. I'm not operations wizard, but when things initially got funky (long before initial check-in and boarding) why didn't somebody fly a new plane into CDG in anticipation of a problem?

4. Tell more rather than less. The natural bureaucratic instinct is to CYA and sidestep blame. This ignores the fact that customers chose your brand in the first place and have a fair amount of elastic tolerance for performance issues if you are straight with them. In fact when you ignore, bullshit or lie to them this tolerance creates an inverse effect --- your brand advocates turn their energy into enmity against you and become anti-brand advocates.

Nobody thinks the airline business is easy. Everyone understands mechanical failure. Tell us what is really going on and tell us what you are doing to help us and to fix things and we'll go along with you, even without food or free drinks. Ignore us, herd us through an airport and leave us to our own imaginations and rumors and you destroy any brand equity or loyalty you've built up.

Tip for travelers -- always travel with somebody else so they can find a way home and negotiate with the booking agents while you fight with the customer service agents.

Getting the Message Right: Return to the Obvious

Every marketer gets carried away by a big idea. Unfortunately most of those ideas aren't articulated clearly enough to make a selling difference.They ignore the obvious basics.

In a world where prospects have limitless options, endless choices for information and countless proffered deals, he who crafts the differentiated message that is clear, stands apart from the crowd and resonates wins.

But how do you get to the message? You walk back the cat starting with your customer's problem. Every product or service solves a problem. Every campaign, every great slogan, every persuasive pitch begins by understanding the genuine problem and mapping whatever you are or whatever you have to it. If you skip this part, nothing can save you.

Doubt me? Read "Optimizing Sales Messaging: the Impact of What You Say on Sales Performance" a white paper by CSO Insights. This benchmark survey documents that he who frames the message properly sells better.

The first and monumental thinking task is to quickly identify that problem you are solving and then convince yourself that you can solve the problem; hopefully better than anyone else. Then you have to explain it in a way that your prospect will understand, relate to and desire. It helps if they desire it sooner rather than later and are willing to pay the asking price.

I know -- its basic and obvious. But if I had a nickel for everyone I work with that skips this step and starts blathering about features and benefits, starts imagining dancing bananas or animated monkeys singing or the funniest jokes or the wackiest sight gags, I'd be rich already.

Bottom line: If you don't clearly stand out from the crowd, you don't get noticed. You can't get there by sounding, acting or talking like everybody else in your segment. Customers need a clear, concise reason why to pick you and why to act now. It all goes back to how you can solve their problem or relieve their pain.

Pretty Good Personalization

The CMO Council got Xerox, Pitney Bowes and a bunch of IT vendors to pony up cash to produce a report that documents the obvious -- personalization is good enough for those who need it and nobody has made the business case for more widespread adoption.

The reality is that businesses concerned with churn, serial or continuity sales and consumer fraud have bought and use CRM and IT tools sufficient to separate good customers from bad ones and to prevent losses. The vast majority of companies, even those who accept the premise  -- that using personal data to craft offers and messages will yield faster, bigger orders over time -- have not been convinced that the cash costs and the disruptive costs of buying and installing complex CRM tools will pay off or pay out. In fact, even many advocates of greater personalization believe that the benefits of personalization in some business sectors plateau before the technology gets paid back.

When we discuss personalization we are way beyond addressing individuals by name (e.g "Dear Danny"), although that's the most common use of personalization technology. We are talking about using purchase histories, preferences, web behavior and inferred data to make pointed, customized or time sensitive offers and to allow individual behavior to trigger outbound messaging and offers designed to increase volume and/.or maintain brand or product loyalty. And while 53% of those surveyed in the report entitled "The Impact + Influence of Individualized Content Delivery"  think personalization beats traditional mass market delivery, there has only been anecdotal evidence that this works and customers love it.

There has not been enough data or enough companies willing to come forward with case studies of sustained personalization tests and results to reach a critical persuasive mass. Add to that, the suspicion that even when it works, it peters out after a few shots rather than drives a compounding effect on volume, profits or loyalty. So its no real surprise that less than 10 percent of marketing budgets go to personalization or that marketers "appear fearful and intimidated by the investments required for personalized communications." 

The key gating factors to widespread adoption are:

1. Management Sensibilities. Most don't get it. Those who do; don't think its worth it. And even those who think it might be worth it won't give it priority among all the other competing IT investments an enterprise might consider.

2. Cost. It costs a lot to buy and implement. It costs a lot of time, money and patience to install, train and use. It is never an easy transition and few CEOs or CFOs are willing to bear the disruption, hassle and employee pain.

3. Can't Compete for IT Priority. 47 percent of those surveyed say they can't gather or properly integrate the data needed to pull personalization off. Add to that that CRM is always last place on the CI Os hit list since he/she rarely owns it, rarely understands it and rarely is willing to take direction from the monkeys in marketing. As an IT function it doesn't excite the geeks and as business function, its ROI is unclear.

4. Not Data Ready. Most companies don't know much about their customers or can't aggregate data gathered in different business silos. The systems don't talk to each other and neither do the people running them. Layer on top of this the usual bureaucratic politics where different departments own different tools (web, direct marketing, customer service) or different customer segments (industry verticals, regions, national or global accounts) and you get a United Nations-like quagmire.

The real question is  -- How do I get a bunch of high powered firms to pay me to author and shill for something that everybody already knows?.    

The Rich Are Just Like You and Me ... Online

Guess what? Millionaires are online doing the same stuff you and I do. That's the conclusion of the 2008 HNW Wealth & New Media Study produced by my friend and former Digitant Stacey Haefele.

The significance of this data is aimed at busting up the notion that the really rich are clubby old white farts sipping tea or swigging bourbon or sniffing cocaine in private clubs or huddling unobtrusively nose-to-nose with their accountants and advisers in the privacy of their estates, yachts or Gulfstreams. The top end of the financial services market have been reluctant to embrace any kind of digital marketing tools but this data should give them reason not only to reconsider but to act. This is especially true for the younger generation of heirs and heiresses who never made the money but are eager to preserve it so they can squander it at will. This target audience includes Paris Hilton and those wacky and wonderful Johnson & Johnson heirs. 

The big news is that 31% of the 44-54 set, the boomers who might have actually earned their boodle,  visit social networking sites and almost half (48%) of those 45-64 use instant messaging. Fifty-two percent read blogs and 20% say they actually posted a comment or a response. So much for the old foggy money image. As you can imagine the numbers skyrocket as you move down the age scale.

The average respondent is online 13 hours per week and has been so for more than a decade. Who said rich people aren't early adopters? And while you're thinking, okay they're online searching for love and buying socks, the survey also found that 93% say they get investment and financial information online.

The implications for everybody from the Bessemer Trust to lawyers, financial advisers and insurance agents in high net worth zip codes are:

1. Supplement your face-to-face pitches with online and digital marketing.

2. Provide rich guys with relevant digital tools and data to help them test drive your products or services.

3. Acquire leads on line by using social networks, blogs and other emerging digital formats to intercept or to meet and greet the financial elite.

7 Reasons Why Marketers Fail

Marketing success has much more to do with political and organizational factors than an individual's skills at the dark arts of strategy, research, positioning, messaging, advertising or sales.

That was theme of my three hour stand-up act in Professor Neil Lichtman's Strategic Marketing course for master degree students at NYU. Here, in abbreviated form, are the seven deadly sins that doom marketers and marketing initiatives.

1. BLINDNESS. Marketers and their bosses frequently have too much faith in marketing, as if clever words and images can overcome badly designed products or unwanted services. Similarly marketers overestimate the appeal and impact of their brands on customers and prospects because they don't accurately understand how their brands are perceived, sorted and filed or utilized by those most likely to respond to brand messages.

In some cases marketers get a full head of steam for a big idea and blindly ignore the reality around them or the prime motivation of most customers -- inertia. And some marketers fueled by hubris and fancy graduate degrees actually ignore the facts to serve pet theories or because they never really understand what drives awareness and how those drivers are the same or different from the factors that motivate purchases.

VISION. Too many marketers don't see the world through the eyes of the people who determine their fates; bosses and customers. They fall into fantasy traps of assuming that all-in-one appeals or goofy brand-centric notions have broad or universal appeal when they are really barely understood by those who thought them up. Too often the vision is not clearly articulated and differentiated so customers have no reason to embrace or respond to the brand.

DATA DEFICIENCIES. Campaigns and careers fail because marketers don't read the situation right, don't understand the players, the politics or the plumbing of the organizations they serve. It's easy to discard those annoying numbers when you have a brainstorm. Unfortunately often buried within those nasty numbers is the answer to the mystery; the reasons and the methods people find their way to the brand or to a purchase. Too many times the big idea or the wacky creative execution ignores the patterns of customer behavior, the organic connections between product sets, natural product cognates or the obvious reasons people want and need individual goods and services.

MISMANAGING MONEY. Loads of marketers blow the budget on flashy stuff and crap that never pays off or pays out. Some squander it on high profile sponsorships, celebrity endorsers or vacuous Superbowl spots and then wonder why they get fired. Anyone marketing today wants to see a tangible, measurable return on marketing dollars spent. The more you can connect marketing spend to purchases and profits; the better. Those marketers who ignore ROI do so at their own peril.

IGNORING SILOS. In every organization nobody owns all the key tools or key instruments. Power is diffused and competed for. If you ignore the silos and don't figure out how to make friends, allies and parry enemies you are dead. Just like understanding your target customer, understanding your colleagues and your adversaries, their power bases and their career or CYA motivations is critical to successful marketing .

ONE TRICK PONIES. There is a cadre of successful senior marketers who have one trick and bicycle it along with their personal mafias from job to job. Innocent or unobservant marketers that don't recognize this phenomena before or soon after it strikes are toast since one trick ponies quickly eliminate anyone who can see that the emperor has no clothes.

IGNORE MARKETING FUNDAMENTALS. Sometimes politically savvy marketers actually blow the craft of marketing by ignoring their customers, failing to create sharp competitive differentiation or underestimating the need for segmentation and segmented marketing tactics. Others fail to understand the necessity for framing integrated brand strategies, speaking with one voice and focusing on frequency to hammer the brand into the brains of its most likely adherents.