Manhattan Marketing Maven

Managing the Customer Experience

Every so often you have an encounter with a brand that reminds you how little marketers think about customer touch points and how difficult it is to control and shape the customer experience.

And while every agency blabs about their skill at brand stewardship, integrating channels and carefully crafting customer experiences, all it takes is several sequential interactions with a brand to discredit this claim.

CRM  or no CRM, very few brands think through and map the range of customers’ interactions with the brand and the result of these interactions on brand awareness, preference, purchase or loyalty. Branding experts talk about the essence and the expression of the brand but very little of their philosophizing gets built into the plumbing of service delivery and what happens where the rubber meets the road.

Consider my experiences with Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield of New York, administrator of

New York

State

’s Child Health Plus program, over a 5 day period:

1. I get an officious form letter from Nora D. Vitolins-Roullier announcing that my daughter’s health care coverage has been dropped for non-payment. It comes out of the blue as a surprise.
2. I grab my bill file and checkbook and investigate.
3. I call Empire and fight my way through an excruciating phone tree
4. I talk to Mary who tells me that the letter was in error and that everything is fine. “The computer” screwed up the billing. She promised immediate re-instatement and a confirmation letter in 48 hours. She almost apologized.
5. I try to fill my daughter’s a prescription. The system shows us as “disqualified”.
6. I call Empire and fight my way through an excruciating phone tree
7. I talk to Karen who tells me that while the billing error was rectified and we are re-instated, the computer misread my income and I owe $758 for service from January through April 2009. So I now have to pay up to be really re-instated.
8. I carry on.
9. Then I ask if I can the bill. I’m told that I can’t pay the bill till the computer issues me a new bill and that I could call back and pay by phone in 36 hours.
10. I carry on some more.
11. 36 hours pass.
12.  I call Empire and fight my way through an excruciating phone tree
13. I punch in countless numbers, get disconnected twice and finally pay the bill by talking to a human at JPMorgan Chase by phone.
14. She says the payment will post in 24 hours.
15. I get the reinstatement letter by mail.
16. Take 2 at the pharmacy. I get one of three scripts. The other two are disallowed, even though they are the same meds she’s been taking for 5 years.
17. . I call Empire from the pharmacy counter and fight my way through an excruciating phone tree
18.   I talk to Aaron at  8p ETon Friday night. He tells me that the authorization for these meds didn’t transfer when Empire changed PBM providers on January 1. And while he didn’t know why, he would investigate and call me back, but I could not get the medication till at least 48 hours later on Monday and I probably had to have the doctor re-prescribe the meds and get a new prior authorization since the meds were not on the Empire formulary.
19. The bills I paid by phone arrive by mail. I can’t make any sense of them.
20. I mobilize the doctor who calls Empire
21. He fights through an excruciating phone tree and calls me with an OK.
22. I call the pharmacy to see if the problem was resolved. It wasn’t, they tell me.
23. An hour later, Aaron, who I spoke with on Friday night, calls me and says the situation is fixed. He explains he doesn’t know how it got broke or how it got fixed but it is. He volunteers to call the pharmacy and square things up. He does.
24. I call the pharmacy to double check. They say everything is copasetic.
25. We walk two blocks and actually pick up the 2 remaining scripts.
26. New billing arrives by mail saying I owe $843 not the $758 I paid.

Now think about the arc of emotions and feelings that this action sequence might provoke. You pay for a decent service and you count on it. You are surprised that your service is interrupted unexpectedly. You seek service and you are disappointed. You are confronted by annoying technology that frustrates you. When you finally make contact you are treated politely by robots that don’t really know and don’t really help you.  Then somebody surprisingly helps you. You get what you were initially after. They send you a bill. This is not exactly the formula for brand intimacy or loyalty.

Brands need to execute on the brand promise not only in ads but downstream – where transactions take place and where the battle for brand purchase and loyalty is joined. It starts with an attitude. Either you are a brand that understands me, helps me, meets me where I need things or you are not. This can’t be faked or masked by snappy graphics or punchy lines.

I refuse to believe that since everyone hates insurance companies my bruising brand experience was inevitable. Marketers, especially those endangered CMOs, need to assert quality control over all touch points and anticipate the likely service needs and emotional results of day-to-day business. Infusing the delivery system and the customer service system with a genuine brand ethos will pay off much faster and much better than accumulating thousands of online “friends.”

Online PR Tactics Are Changing the Game

The Internet prompts tectonic shifts in the way PR and media relations will be done now and in the future. Technology, economics and changing public sensibilities have changed the PR game forever, though you’d never know it from talking to agency publicists.

 

Start with the basic PR assumptions:

 

1. PR influences mass media to put ideas, products and brands into the public consciousness and conversation
2. PR works through editorial decision-makers who set the national or global news agenda
3. PR targets large audiences to accelerate and optimize brand impact and buzz
4. The value of the implied third-party endorsement combined with the speed and reach of influence-able media makes PR worth the effort

 

Now consider the current media and editorial landscape:

• Mass media audiences have significantly declined and fragmented. Niche media rules.

• Famous vehicles like daily newspapers, Time, Newsweek and the national nightly TV news have much smaller audiences and cannot keep up with the news cycle.

• The number of journalists and name columnists and their relative influence is declining.

• The power of editors to shape the national or news agenda is much less than ever before.

• Almost anyone with a blog, a camera phone or a video recorder can gather, edit and transmit news, potentially influencing public debate or potentially initiating a viral sensation. John Q. Public can still claim his 15 minutes in the spotlight.

• Reaction to and analysis of events takes place in real time and is influenced by a growing number of voices and sectors empowered by widely and cheaply accessible technology

The recession has reduced the number of working journalists and forced leading news organizations to eliminate or consolidate foreign and specialty reporting, question the value of subscribing to wire services and find ways to share resources or rely on freelancers to fill the shrinking news hole. If you work with publicists you know that the remaining few writers, editors and producers are hard to reach, even harder to persuade and usually unwilling to take a flyer on an off-beat story. Brands, topics and ideas that don’t neatly fit the few remaining beats or synch up with spread-too-thin coverage strategies die of loneliness.

 

Because the basics of news gathering are changing online PR tactics are becoming more important to access to and attention from the media. It also requires you to think of PR much more like advertising where the message can be directly transmitted to customers and prospects without an editorial filter. Here’s how and why.

 

Everyone Searches. Google is the universal go-to-resource. Those same reporters who won’t take your call, use Google and other search engines for ideas, sources, data and color commentary. If your press materials aren’t online and aren’t searchable you have no chance of either influencing the media or of going direct with your message to people interested in your brand, your category or your subject matter.

  

This mandates understanding and using different tools. You have to consider the means of distribution; e-mail directly to press lists and online distribution to insure searchability and to capitalize on those sites that import PR feeds as content. You also must build SEO tactics into the language and construction of press releases.

 

Video is Vital. In the old days a black-and-white glossy would do the trick. Today you need a video. Why? Three reasons; YouTube is the second most searched site on the web. If you want to be found, huge numbers of the public and the media search there. Video is expected. We live in a sound and motion universe and your customers and prospects as well as the media who cover you expect brands to present themselves and their key actors on video. Video gives you the option to more carefully control the explicit and the implied message and has the potential for significant consumer or media pass-along.

 

Everything is a Conversation. One-way media is dead. Everyone talks back to, edits, reviews, and comments, adds to, shapes and criticizes everything. Every story is fluid and many more people develop the angles or the extensions. If you doubt me, think about Britney Spears. How many different sources, from the credentialed press corps to people down the block weighed in on her circumstances, revealed new behaviors, surfaced photos or offered insight and opinions? How impossible was it for her or her people to manage, control or spin the story?

 

In a world where everybody finds out what is happening at lightening speed on a growing range of devices, the game is about interpreting and analyzing the experience rather than presenting new information. Zillions of bloggers are becoming reporters, reviewers, photographers, interpreters and commentators. There are fewer authoritative voices but many more voices that can advance or sidetrack your cause.

 

So PR pros need to monitor mentions and reputations, transmit and receive RSS feeds and keep track of advocates, enemies and the forums they participate in. They also need to understand how to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media to follow and to influence the on-going conversation, which is often monitored, catalyzed and promoted by leading websites and TV or cable networks.

 

Three Imperatives for Online Communities

The intense growth and the intense hype about social networking is driving interest in online communities. And while its easy to imagine how great it might be to focus your customer's attention on your site, to connect your brand advocates and to observe and mine the rich dialog among the faithful, it's much harder to pull off than it seems.

Marketers seduced by the 93 percent growth in social networking since 2006 and the estimated 40 million active social network users, according to Netpop Research should think carefully about what kind of unique customer experience an online community can offer and what kind of business result is likely to come about as a direct consequence of an investment of time, technology and resources necessary to bring a community to life. 

And while Jeremiah Owang has gone to the trouble of assessing the 9 leading community software vendors in a Forrester Wave Report, the availability of tools plus the desire to integrate a community  into an existing website  doesn't necessarily make the prima fascia business case.  After all with all the existing communities and social network options, its unlikely that even your best customers are desperately waiting for you to create a platform for them to interact with. And don't forget, even if you build it; they might not come.

But if you are dead set on creating a community and you can convince management to invest, bear in mind these three critical factors for success:

1. Have a Solid Business Plan. Its easy to think you are in the content and make-everybody-happy business. But a community has to drive brand loyalty, stimulate purchases and re-purchases and develop referrals. If it doesn't its not worth the effort or the cash. And even though its hard to accurately forecast revenues produced by online communities, plan to make money and set up measurements to gauge the fiscal impact on your business.

2. Run it like a Cable TV Channel. An online community lives or dies on programming, usually narrow, niche programming that speaks directly to specialists and helps them connect the dots. Picture your users and super-serve them. Everything you do and every feature you add has to provoke tune-in and time spent with you. If it doesn't drive this level of engagement; don't do it.

Assume your community members have a small amount of precious time to spend with. And assume  they are mercenary in allocating it. If they don't get value every time they tune-in, they stop viewing. Give them what they want. Reward them for taking the actions you want them to take. Keep a tight focus on content. Police comments. Provide expert advice and interventions. Expose the brand's insights, expertise and point of view. Tell the community the kind of voice-over information you'd share with a trusted client during a quarterly business review or with a high value prospect on the third sales call. Give them a sneak peak at future products or services and/or an offer to get early access or better pricing.  

3. Have One Person Run it. Nothing says its real than the allocation of one fully loaded full-time employee. Find the programmer on your team and make customer engagement and business results their reason for being. Make revenues and time spent online KPIs for their review or their bonus. When authority and responsibility are shared, there's no one to blame and too many shoulders get shrugged. And unless you are a very small shop, coordinating all the moving parts that go into an effective online community and keeping the lawyers at bay is easily a full time gig for an up-and-coming marketer.

The Dark Side of Data Mining

James Bamford’s The Shadow Factory looks inside the National Security Agency and warns us of the dark side of data mining. The pre-eminent historian/reporter of the NSA and Sigint (signals intelligence) documents the Bush Administration’s total disregard for individual privacy and their machinations to finesse the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to spy on more people more often.

 

According to Bamford, former NSA Chief (now

CIA

chief) Michael Hayden dramatically expanded the interception and processing of phone calls, signals, e-mail, Internet transmissions and satellite feeds and made a critical transition from snooping over the airwaves to snooping on every major fiber optics cable. In doing so he amassed vast amounts of data that are difficult to store and process. So he outsourced the processing of the take and spawned a specialized new industry of software and hardware developers dedicated to mining vast amounts of data and connecting disparate databases to identify likely terrorist threats and map networks of potential terrorists and anyone they know or communicate with.

 

There’s plenty of secrecy but no subtlety in this game. Privacy advocates will be apoplectic by use of a lame blanket anti-terrorism justification for this activity and for the fluid exchange of key players and the likely conflict of interests between the secret agencies and the highly paid, often no-bid, contractors that service them. Almost as scary as the civil liberties implications are the secret bureaucratic machinations, usually rubber stamped by Congressional overseers, that loosed zillions for countless spying programs that have yielded damn little warning, insight or actionable intelligence. Evidently our spying is much less effective or impressive that it is in the movies.

 

However in spite of countless revelations, the tough issues are never resolved. We need to know what the bad guys are thinking and doing. And we need to keep the government from spying on us -- its citizens. We need to understand, anticipate and prevent terrorism without selling out the Constitution and becoming worse that the terrorists we seek to defeat. Bamford notes Obama’s flip-flop and capitulation on the issue but offers no concrete way to thread the needle moving forward.

 

As a data miner and data marketer, I understand how powerful these tools can be to reveal patterns, connections and behaviors. Connecting disparate databases and marrying them to secret intercepts, a program started, stopped and morphed under the direction of former Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter, has the potential to institutionalize a malevolent and voracious Big Brother.

 

Bamford’s right. We need much more light and my much scrutiny on this topic so that we get the data we need without suffering the down side of data mining.          

Living Out Loud: Thoughts on Social Network Marketing

Participating in social networks means living out loud. Posting and sharing information, ideas and images that heretofore wasn’t public has become the new favorite past time for hundreds of millions of people. Facebook, MySpace and others have taken every-so-often relationships and brought them to the forefront.

 

Large numbers of people play around on these sites as a daily goof-off default mechanism. So now rather than hearing from that college buddy, a guy you worked with 5 years ago or your third cousin one or twice a year, you get daily updates on their mood, their activities or their opinions often illustrated with photos or videos. It redefines the notion of friendship and often produces way too much information.

 

 Depending on your demographic and how you were raised, telling all can be as natural as breathing or can require a massive change in mindset or sensibility. If you take the daily postings seriously you might get the idea that our millennial generation has become Star Trek’s - Borg – a single, global, all-encompassing organism composed of individual units connected to and controlled by a central brain.

 

The combination of active participation and bemused voyeurism is fuelling continued growth not only among established networks, but is driving the development of new networks and new applications. Facebook has 200 million users and MySpace has 126 million. Blogging sites (Wordpress and Blogger) each attract more than 100 million users and Windows Live, Flickr, Yahoo Geocities and Hi5 all attract more than 50 million users each in the November 2008 ComScore analysis..

 

Membership in social networks has more than doubled in just three years according to the The 2008 Digital Future Project at the

Annenberg

School

for Communication at

USC

.  Fifty-four percent of members log in daily and 55% say they feel as strongly about online communities as they do about physical communities. Seven out of ten claim membership is “important” to them and is a vehicle for participating in social causes.

 

The explosive growth of social networks has put social media on marketers’ 2009 agenda. Not only do social networks offer a new and potentially efficient media, they also offer the prospect for reaching consumers when they are in the mood for information, sharing, new ideas and interaction. Ideally social network marketing is not intrusive. Messages can be targeted to discrete opt-in audiences in ways that stimulate interaction, two-way communication, loyalty and purchase. So it’s not surprising that more than half of marketers in a survey of the Junta42 community plan to create more content and use more social media this year.

 

All kinds of gurus are offering tips, guides and insights into these emerging channels.

For a basic primer, check out Mark Dykeman’s Social Destinations of the Web.

 

Here are a few things to help you separate the fantasy surrounding social networks from the reality evolving in front of our eyes.    

 

Be Where You Are Expected to Be. Customers expect the brands they care about to have an 800 number, a branded URL, a website and a page on their favorite network. If you aspire to customer intimacy, you need to be where your customers and prospects are and where they expect to find you. Louis Gray says to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and YuTube are essential starting places.  

 

Think About Segmentation. It’s a fair bet that the 15-year-old nephew who “friended” me experiences Facebook much differently than I do. He and his pals have an entirely different sensibility about posting personal information and about what feels right in terms of sharing. Similarly there are probably few marketers that want to simultaneously reach me and him and even those few who might probably don’t want to speak to us in the same voice. It’s not yet clear what data is being collected or used to cue creative executions or suggest targeting, but one size will NOT fit all.

 

Pictures Matter. Social networks have empowered everyone to become a photographer, director and editor. The traffic in images is incredible. Every amateur shutterbug now has an audience. Many of the most successful viral elements have been visuals so as you contemplate a branded message or a lead generation campaign or a product promotion ask yourself if you can communicate the message visually.

 

Consider Context. If you understand how and why people use social media, your positioning and messaging will be much more effective. Social networks are not appointment media. They are frequently used either as default or escapist media that fill time and divert attention from work, school, chores or other imperatives. There is a huge curiosity factor that drives use which is energized by the knowledge that something new is always happening. Many of us are surprised at just how many friends are online at any given time, especially during the height of the business day.

 

Social networks are entertainment and diversion choices. And while there’s been reporting on Obama’s skillful use of the Internet, remember that games, videos and even fart sounds are the leading downloads. Brands entering this arena need to take this mind set and use patterns into account.  

 

Participants post things but probably get equal or great entertainment from passively reading what others post or exploring the countless number of games, new applications, etc. some people are quick and eager to tell you what books they’ve read, what cities they’ve visited or what drinks they prefer. But my hunch is that social networks are like talk radio where huge numbers listen to the minority who call in. All of this argues for a gentle, phased approach geared to the sensibilities and usage habits of target customers rather than a typical in-your-face advertising approach.

 

Privacy is Primary. Social networks are schizophrenic. There is probably more personal information available in public than ever before. People seem to be very willing to bare their souls and their skin online. And yet the very same people are highly sensitive about how this information is accessed or used. The same person who will bare all can instantly turn on you asking “How did you know that?”  

 

The idea that individuals will have to manage their online images and define the rules for access and use is just beginning to take hold. An etiquette about friending and un-friending people seems to be evolving. We expect the sites to offer users ways to filter posted information and create criteria to limit access. Plaxo sorts contacts as “friend”, “family” and “business” connections, each with a different level of information access.

 

This tactic will spread and will naturally redefine or stratify the notion of friendship. Ultimately online social networks will mirror real life where your BFFs know the whole deal, your family knows what you want them to know and the general public gets whatever information you choose to share or forget to protect.

 

Privacy and friendship will also determine how much sharing and virility marketers can count on.  We all fantasize about creating compelling campaigns driven by pass-along messages from credible friends that cume up to millions of impressions. But there are no rules or best practices we can count on. We assume that people with more friends are more likely to share messages with others. But at this stage, it’s not a proven fact.    

 

We are clearly in the early adopter phase where mainstream marketers watch the early experimenters and try to gauge value and effectiveness. Advocates of social media need to help marketers to assess audience sensibilities, target and buy these emerging media channels. We need new ways to help established and insurgent brands make new friends.