Through the Eyes of the Customer

Lesson from the Internet Piracy legislation: Don't mess with the Customer Experience!

There are a lot of legitimately bad guys out on the Internet that are selling stolen goods, and they should be stopped.  So legislation was drafted to restrict the travel of you and me - Customers of the Internet - to make sure that we couldn't drive on the roads that lead to the places that sell the stolen goods.     Customers of the Internet sensed this inconvenience, so they revolted.

Here’s the issue:

When you attempt to fix a problem, particularly a problem that lies in the "back office," that fix must be invisible to the customer.  If the customer might feel the fix in some negative way, you'll be hurting the customer experience. In attempt to fix one problem, you'll be creating a new one - resistance from a customer base, or worse, defection.  That's essentially why the anti-piracy  legislation has suddenly hit a roadblock.

There's a legitimate problem with piracy on the Internet, but the bill, as written, was attempting to stop the sale of pirated content by preventing the "customer" of the Internet from accessing sites that are involved with the selling of the illegal content.  The real problem has been that the people have been selling material that they have no legal right to sell.  The problem was in the "back office" - sellers had illegally acquired inventory. 

The legislation should act first or foremost if not exclusively on the seller.  Instead, as designed, the bill was attacking the customer and their beloved experience of going anywhere they chose to go on the Internet. 

Wikipedia, Google  and a host of other organizations were able to clearly see the issue; the issue of an indirect, rather than a direct root-cause solution an indirect solultion that potentially had a big negative impact on the billions of "customers" of the Internet.  They rallied the customer base, and the voice of the customers removed the momentum of the bills.

There's a big lesson here for any business:   If you're trying to solve a problem, particularly a "back office" problem, be sure that the solution you're proposing will be invisible to the customer; the customer should not feel the effects, unless those effects are positive. 

If the solution will impact their experience in any negative way, expect a backlash, either through vocal objection, or worse, the dreaded defection objection.

2 Core Principals that Drive more Customers to Self Service Support Channels and Lower the Cost of Support!

Companies love when customers go to the Self Service Portal for support. 

Companies love it because resolving an incident through self service may cost $1, compared to $7 via email, compared to $15 or more, with a live agent over the phone.  There's money in self service, if you can just get your customers to go there. 

So what’s the secret?  How do companies who are successful at coaxing customer away from the phones, and into self service, make it happen?

There are essentially two factors to consider:

1. Make it easy for the customer.

2. Make it valuable for the customer.

Easy begins by making the self service portal easy to find.
Don’t bury access to the portal deep on your website.  In fact, treat it like a marketing “call to action.”  Make the link to the portal as clear as day to see; and place it in more than one place on your website, so that the customer can’t miss it!  Obvious, right?  But too many companies get it wrong!

Make it easy to navigate.
A site that’s hard to navigate is a sight that won’t get much traffic.  When designing your self-service sight, design with the theme of making the customer’s life easy.  Finding your way around the self-service portal can be a big part of the customer experience, so do it right!

Make it easy for the customer to find their answer.
This means putting the right content in the portal; Identify those 20% of the solutions that solve 80% of the problems, and make them very findable.  Employing a “recommendation engine” can also help.   If the customer has to manually search for the answer, you'll lose too many at hello - too many won’t invest the time or effort, and the'll go straight for the phone.  But if the search can be automated – by interpreting some key words from the customer’s question, or using other search algorithms to find and present precisely relevant content, you’ll have made life a lot easier for the customers, by saving them the hassle of searching.

OK, so you’ve made the Self Service Portal easy to use.  But remember that line from the movie “Field of Dreams?”   Just because you build an easy Portal with easy access to the right answers, doesn’t mean that the customers will come running.  They won’t.  Customers want value, and customers want convenience.  The more reasons you can give your customers to go to the portal, the more they’ll go there first.

That leads us to the second factor – Make it valuable for the customer.

 

Making it valuable means making the Self Service Portal the "go-to" place for the customer - the default source for anything and everything that they might get from your company.

Example:
A particular software company (real story, by the way) wanted to increase the percentage of customers utilizing their Self Service Portal.  So, in addition to Knowledge Base content and other support tools, they relocated other resource to the portal: software downloads, sales chat, and their customer forum to the portal.  Weekly reports were previously delivered through email, but clients now could access their reports anytime, through the Portal (which was easier for the clients to manage).

Within six months, the percentage of support requests initiated in the Portal increased from 12% to 69%, and the customers loved it!

So, by making Self Service easy to use, and by focusing it on more of the customers' interests (beyond simply support), more customers to come to your on-line support party.

  

 

Five Steps to a Positive Return on Your CRM Investment

To some people, particularly those who were alive during the 90's and the dot.com days, CRM is a three-letter-word that means the opposite of ROI.  Sources reported a higher  than 50% CRM failure rate.  Back in those days, a lot of ships were sunk.  

The good news is that many expensive lessons were learned, and CRM is enjoying a higher success rate than ever.  CRM success needn't be rocket science, if some sound practices are followed:  

1. Establish clear executive sponsorship.
There must be a high-level executive with a clear presence, supporting the project; someone with authority.  And this can't be simply a Vice President who says a few words, or sends and email of endoresement, and then disappears.  The executive sponsor must be actively and visibly involved with the project.  If CRM is a priority for the executive sponsor, it will become a priority throughout the organization.  With no executive sponsorship, there's no priority.  And if there's no priority, there will be no results that matter.

2. Motivate the end user community.
This is highly-contingent on #1, and is enhanced by tying rewards to proper CRM utilization, with a "What's in it for the end-user" approach.  Telling people they have to use it won't get the job done.  Instead, show the end users how the system will make their jobs and lives easier, more productive, and more beneficial.  Taking a "What's in it for me?" approach is the most successful (with "me" being the end user; the person you're relying up to enter data, information and call notes into the system on a regular basis.  The success of CRM is highly dependent on the commitment of the end-users.

3. Clearly define your business outcomes (aka goals!)
Steven Covey said, "Begin with the end in mind."  In other words, define your outcome at the start.
For example, "We want to increase our lead generation by 50%, and reduce our cost per lead by 30%."  ROI means that you're receiving new business value, that exceeds the cost of the CRM solution.  In order  to determine "how much" return you're getting, you must first know what that return is.   Increased revenue from closing more opportunities?  Reduced costs through more efficient lead generation?  Know exactly what business value you expect to generate, before you begin.

4. Draw a clear roadmap, connecting the business goals with the system functionality/utilization.
Yogi Berra said it best: "If you don't know where you're going, you probably won't get there."  The sagacious hall-of-famer knew what he was talking about.  With CRM, if you expect the system to deliver results, you better know exactly how it's going to do that.  In other words, be able to trace your business goals all  the way back to specific functionalities in the CRM system.  For example:

Q: "What do we need to do in/with CRM in order to increase our lead generation, and reduce cost per lead?"

A: "We need to connect each new lead to its source campaign in the CRM system, so that we can precisely measure campaign effectiveness. Then we will re-allocate our marketing dollars to those campaigns which are most effective. This will increase the number of leads, and reduce the cost of each lead."

5. Continually measure your results, and refine your processes.
Peter Drucker said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."  Now, Drucker was no Yogi Berra, but he held some credibility in business management circles.  Remember those business outcomes that we defined in step 3?  Well, make sure you know exactly how you'll measure your progress.  Have reports defined, and run them on a regular basis.  If you're not on track to hit your goals, drill down into the process to figure out the root cause of the shortfall.  Then adjust the factors to put you back on track.  Measure and adjust until you find yourself on track to achieve the goals.

Customer Relationship Management  projects can be highly risky.  But they can also be highly successful, if you approach them methodically, by following the five steps outlined here.  Now, there are other ways, and other approaches that can bring about a positive ROI.  If you have other ideas, please share them in the comments section.

 
 A clear captain, committed crew, a well-plotted course,  frequent wind measurements and well-trimmed sails leads to a high ROI on any Sea R M.
 

What happens when you combine Twitter and a Referral during the sales process?

An interesting thing happened during  Thursday's Focus Roundtable on Email Marketing.  

Chester Bullock, Andrew Kordek and Lara Conn combined for a fast-moving and informative 45 minutes.  A couple times during the session, Andrew and Chester referenced the book "The Now Revolution."

Chester sent a Tweet containing a link to the book's website.  I read the tweet, clicked through to the book on Amazon, and two clicks later, had it coming to my home for delivery by Monday.

So, what's the big deal? What happened here, that's worth blogging about?

Two dynamics came together to make business happen very quickly and seamlesslessy.  Two dynamics; one old, and one new:

1. The Credibility of a Referral. 
Referrals have been used by savvy sellers for centuries.  As I listened to Chester explain how he uses email marketing, I liked what I heard him saying.  It made sense to me, and I felt that he knew his stuff.  He had credibility. I wanted to learn more.  He recommended a book.    So I decided to buy the book.

2. The Immediacy of Twitter.
Compared to most sales and marketing tools, Twitter is very new. Many of us, including me, are just learning about it.  Normally, when Chester recommended the book, I'd have written down the name, and ordered it at a later date.  But I saw the Tweet show up on my screen as I was listening to him, and I was immediately engaged in the buying process.  The Tweet brought me to the site, where I could order the book.  So I did.  Transaction done.

Here's the process, as I experienced it:

The new tool combined with the old technique shortened the sales process dramatically.

How can you put this same dynamic to work in your business, to drive faster results?

  
 Thanks to the TechITEasy Blog for this leapord in a Speedo to depict "Speed of Business."

The time suck of social media: temporary or permanent?

Is the time suck here to stay, or is it temporary?

Michael Moaz of the Garnter Group raised an interesting point in his recent blog post “Lost and Drowning in the Social Swamp.”

Are the business users of social media spending so much time using these tools, and trying to integrate them into their larger CRM platforms, that the actual benefits aren’t nearly as good as the social media evangelists might have us think?  Or worse yet, are they doing some businesses more harm than good by pulling resources away from other proven initiatives?

I've gotta believe that much of the time invested into the use of  social media today is a necessary cost of just learning how to use this stuff; that this "learning curve cost" will go away over the next few years, as businesses get better and more efficient at doing social media.

 

And I suspect that we're likely to see more technologies that allow us to gain the benefits of social media, without investing nearly as much time. 
 

So, to Michael Moaz’ point, yes - the time we spend using social media may be sucking the daylights out of its potential return. 

But, is this “time suck” just a temporary cost along the longer-term technology learning curve? 

A cost that will eventually go away, as the customers and profits come rolling in?

Or is it a more serious issue that must be addressed, before it gets way out of hand?