An ounce of prevention in customer experience!

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(This blog post is predicated on the understanding that you or your business will fail at delivering a product or customer service occasionally. If you do not think this statement is applicable to your business, then this post will not be helpful! Here is a link that will help.).

[bctt tweet=”Let’s start by saying that sometimes you cant recover from a bad customer experience.”] Sometimes people will not like you enough to give you a second chance. That is their right and you probably shouldn’t hold it against them.

With that in mind we have two areas of work in dealing with a bad customer expereince. Preventative Care and the Aftermath. This blog post is about the preventative steps to take to help prevent a bad customer experience. Next week we will look at dealing with the aftermath of a bad customer experience.

The wise Benjamin Franklin once said, ” An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This is absolutely true in the case of customer experience. What does that ounce of prevention look like for customer experiences?

Culture:

Culture is the way of life in your organization. How you should handle customers is part of the culture. It is something observed by employees everyday and it is up to the leaders in the organization to set the tone and the expectations. If the owner has the habit of taking criticism personally it will pour over into the other employees and hurt their customer service.

The culture of your organization needs to value the customer. I am reminded of a small family owned grocery I used to work at in Illinois. Customer service was one of the primary values of the store even though it was not on the wall. Everyone know that it was important to the organization because the owner exhibited it daily. What example are you setting for your organization?

Are you reward those who take care of their customers well? Are you encouraging good customer service behavior?

Training:

Are you setting up your employees to win with the right training? If you are having regular customer service failings or bad quality products then probably not. Evaluate your training regularly. Think about the goals you have for an employee and then consider how your training can bring out those qualities. Training is more than knowing how to put the widget in the box! Training should help us to know why we put the widget in the box and how to treat the person buying the widget.

Do not assume that your employees know how to treat the customers. Spell it out explicitly so there is not miscommunication. A Failure to Communicate helps no one. It is your responsibility as the owner to communicate clearly to the employees.

Expectations:

Think through the expectations you are setting as the business, not for your employees but for the customer. What tone are you setting when they come in? Are you accurately portraying your business in your marketing? Setting the tone for a expensive steakhouse when you serve cheap fried chicken is setting your customer up to have a bad experience.

Are you properly branding yourself?

Have your customers been confused on a regular basis about your pricing or where to go when they enter the business? Do not expect the public to learn over time! Remove as many roadblocks to a great customer experience as possible! Put in new signage, re-due the pricing structure, move the customer check-in to make their experience easier. Failure to change is not their fault but yours!

 

Let us all work to give our customers the best experience. A small cost in time and money now will pay off huge in the long run!

 

People love free shipping emails and other tips!

Marketing Charts recently released a great chart documenting what types of communicates lead to customer purchases. This is extremely helpful if you offer a product. Of course each businesses’s audience is different and will respond to things differently. One restaurant I work with responds well to amazing text deals but email can sometimes be a struggle.

Here is the chart:

Marketing Chart's Research

 

Some interesting notes from this research:

1. Retargeting is at the bottom of the list. I wonder if people artificially lowered this number because it creeps them out. But it is interesting that direct mail ranks higher on the list. I suppose it has a lot to do with the quality of the direct mail list you buy.

2. What is interesting is that the top three items are all emails! I love email marketing.  Email is a great form of permission marketing and its something businesses should always be thinking about, “How do we increase our permission base?”.

3. The Staggering drop off between two and three. Free shipping and discounts reign supreme here. I suspect this tactic will become more and more prominent as we increasingly stop buying things in brick and mortar locations and instead switch to online stores. Free shipping will be the gold standard and is already used by things like Amazon prime to attract consumers.

Making Health Insurance Marketing Fun

While pursuing Faceboook I began to see these great pictures with little captions on them. They caught my attention. These United Healthcare has been running a great campaign called #CodeoftheDay. Health Insurance ads are very rarely funny or entertaining. United Healthcare has found a way to overcome this by finding some of the best official medical codes and combining them with a funny picture.

 

This campaign allows them to add some humor to the serious business of health insurance. It also allows them to have a post for just about every holiday and national trend. I would think the combination of codes and pictures could almost lead to an unlimited supply of pictures to meet every need. I could see uses for things like: MLB’s Opening Day, Halloween, Election Day, and various other things that social media brings to our attention, (Like Llama Drama)

 

This campaign goes to show that you can make almost any subject matter light hearted if it meets your brand image. I think similarly you could look at the Farmers “University of Farmers” campaign, though it is not as funny. Humor is great to inject into your ads if it fits your brand. Restaurants and Insurance can pull it off. Funeral homes can maybe pull it off, but therapists and mental health facilities should probably pass on humor.

 

Here are a few examples of the UHC Campaign (you can see more on their twitter @myuhc): Screen Shot 2015-04-15 at 10.37.28 AM Screen Shot 2015-04-15 at 10.37.42 AM Screen Shot 2015-04-15 at 10.38.00 AM Screen Shot 2015-04-15 at 10.38.27 AM

 

 

A Reckoning is Coming: Digital Data is better than Traditional Media

The post is a part of a series of blogs about traditional media’s data quality versus digital data. 
Subscribe to my email list to make sure you see the other parts of this series.
You can read part 1 here and part 3 here. 

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I believe a reckoning is coming about the quality of data that traditional media is able to give us. As I mentioned in my last post, the metrics that traditional media (newspapers, tv, radio) gives us is not of good quality.

Digital media offers a quality of data that traditional media cannot touch. This is something I have become more aware of as I have become part owner of a digital media journalism group called: “Our Jackson Home“. While preparing to sell advertising on the website and podcast I realized that I had something that other companies could not offer: I can bring amazing data to the table. This data also reminds me that privacy is dead in the internet age. In fact there is beginning to be a market of companies that sell privacy through apps or devices (see Mark Cuban’s CyberDust). With free tools like Google Analytics I can tell exactly how many people visited my website, how long they were on there, where they are from (down to the city), approximate demographics, what operating system their device was running and how they navigated through my site. Also and most importantly for Our Jackson Home, I can tell an advertiser how many people saw their ads and how many clicked on their ads. 

Podcasts offer a similar set of data. We can tell exactly how many people started listening to the podcast and what device they listened to it on. Unlike radio which I propose works from a assumption of its listeners not paying full attention, podcasts are intentionally downloaded and listened to. Generally ads on a podcast are designed to be more engaging and are written for the target demographic of the listening audience of the podcast instead of a ad targeted to a demographic of the listening audience of the radio station. This sounds like a slight semantic difference but it is a huge real difference.

Email Marketing is a great way to communicate with customers. It is one of my favorite ways to reach out to customers for my clients. With good email clients like Mailchimp, you can get pretty in depth data on each of your email subscribers. You can see who has and has not read your campaigns and then using filters communicate with your best and worst customers. With the proper integrations of software you can track someone from email to website to online purchase. Its an amazing world we live in.

Ad targeting and cost: One of the best things about digital advertising for business is that on some platforms like Facebook and Google Ads you can spend as little or as much as you want. You can literally spend $5 or $5000 on Facebook or Google Ad Campaigns. In addition to this you target your ads to the groups of people you want to and know that they are really getting your message. You can also engage people who are already looking for your product with Google Ads.

I think one of the reasons that the NFL just announced its first completely online game. (Other reasons being: 1. Its being played in England 2. Bills and Jags have smaller fan bases and 3. People are moving off of cable.)  Why is there a correlation? I think the large national advertisers are already feeling the need to start getting better data. Once a tv show or sporting event has moved online they can collect the same quality of data that I can on my website here in Jackson. They will be attractive to powerful marketing firms and companies.

I still feel there is a place for local traditional marketing in your planning but I willl write about that in my next post.

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Gallup takes on Holistic Marketing

When speaking about holistic marketing I usually use the line, “if you have a great ad but your service is bad, the ad will backfire.” Gallup released an article about companies and Super Bowl ads. Read it here. This article points to the truth that if advertise before you are ready to handle the traffic that you ad will cost you a whole lost more than the cost of the ad.

Gallup uses a great term to describe employees, “Brand Ambassadors”. What a great term! Imagine what it would be like if your employees could be called “Brand Ambassadors” because of the quality and the care they show while they work. But according to Gallup:

  • 42% of employees overall strongly agree that they know what their organization stands for and what makes it different from its competition.
  • 33% of employees overall strongly agree that they encourage family members and friends to purchase or use their organization’s products and services.
  • 27% of employees overall strongly agree that they work for an organization that always delivers on the promise it makes to customers.

How do you improve this? The article gives some ideas. I think a key concept is clear communication and expectations. How are you communicating to your employees what you expect out of them? Are you giving them all the tools they need to succeed? How do you know how customers are perceiving your employee interactions?

Be challenged to look at every customer interaction as an opportunity to make a start raving fan of your business. Every customer complaint is a chance to make a fan.

TV is changing

 

TV is going to change dramatically in the next few years and this week it took a big step that way.
Streaming services are growing!

The chart above from Marketing Charts shows a stat that we probably already knew: On Demand video services are growing significantly. 76% of all households in America use some sort of media on demand. This statistic could be artificially high because it contains DVR’s which is become more standard with modern telecommunications. I think it would be safe to say 50% of households in America have a streaming service.

The number of cord cutters (aka people who do not have cable in the home) is growing. initially some thought it might be a victim of the recession but as the economy returns to full strength the number of families without cable has not wavered much. Premium tv is becoming aware of this increasingly large group of people. ESPN decided to do something about it and in doing so might have placed the first nail in the coffin of cable/satellite tv.

ESPN has announced that it is joining a completely cable free streaming program with a few other channels offered through DISH Network for $20 per month. ESPN is one of the reasons most people stay on a cable subscriptions! Why would ESPN do this? Ad revenue. As cord cutters continue to grow the value of ads on channels exclusively on cable and Atlanta networks will begin to drop.

Imagine a future where you will be able to buy small packages of the channels you actually want to watch. This is great for consumers and for local advertisers. Local advertisers frequently get mixed in with all the channels a media company has access to. Advertisers will be able to better target their ads to specific packages of channels that their customers will be watching.

This maybe the first nail in the coffin of cable/satellite tv but do not clear your schedules for their funerals anytime soon. This transformation will be years in the making and will be restricted by fast broadband access. Not everywhere is as lucky Jackson with our 1 GIG fiber network. Thanks JEA!

 

 

 

 

Spotlight: Our Jackson Home

Our Jackson Home Logo

This month’s customer spot light is on Our Jackson Home a project recently launched by Luke Pruett and Jim Wilhelm. Our Jackson Home is here to help tell the story of Jackson and let everyone know about the cool things happening in our city everyday. I reached out to Luke and Jim after hearing a few of their podcasts and we agreed that I could be an asset to the team. I set out to design a logo that would make this new organization look like it has been around a while but that also focused on its primary story telling medium: podcasts.

Our Jackson Home Logo

 

We also launched a website recently to hold all of the stories that the writers for OJH are finding. You can check it out here: www.ourjacksonhome.com You can sign up for their weekly email newsletter on the website to get all their latest stories to your inbox. They also interviewed me and my wife for a podcast, you can listen to it here: 

Play along with Shark Tank (game version)

If you are an entrepreneur at heart, or just a red blooded American, you probably like Shark Tank on ABC. If you are unfamiliar, Shark Tank brings entrepreneurs from all across America together and gives them an opportunity to pitch to a group of high powered venture capitalists. Being on the show can take you from a few hundred dollars in sales to a few million in no time flat, even if you do not get an investment.

Why do I love watching this show? Because Shark Tank shows that the American Dream of working hard and succeeding is still possible. I also like watching it to see how entrepreneurs represent themselves and how they market their products.

Last week Renae and I invited several people over to watch the 2 hour premier of Shark Tank. While preparing to host I thought wouldn’t it be fun if we had a game to go along with the show? So we busted out one of our favorite board games: Wits and Wagers. Buy your copy of Wits and Wagers here A wits and wagers board looks like this:

Wits and Wagers Board

So without further ado:

Here is how you play Shark Tank the board game!

Setup:
1. Set up your Wits and Wagers game board(or make your own). Write on the answer cards the name of each shark on the show that night. With the two remaining cards write: ‘2 or more sharks’ and ‘You’re dead to me’. Randomly distribute the cards on the game board slots.
2. Give each person or team two wager chips and five red chips.
3. Designate one person as the announcer(preferably someone who is familiar with the show) and one person as the banker.

Game play:
1. Watch while a prospect pitches a product. When the prospect finishes his/her pitch the announcer must call out ‘That’s the pitch’. After the announcement the players have 10 seconds to place their bets. Timing can be very important as Sharks sometimes back out quickly.
2. Wait till the sharks have made a deal or all have backed out. Then:
A. Multiply the amount bet by the amount listed on the board (ex: Pays 3 to 1).
B. If a shark goes in with one or more sharks the player receives half of the amount that would have been gained normally. For example: Player bets 3 on the Shark who is on the ‘4 to 1’ would normally receive 12 but since the Shark split the deal the Player only receives 6. Player would receive full amount of their bet if they put his/her wager on the ‘2 or more sharks’ card.
C. Distribute chips earned. Players cannot lose wager chips but can lose his/her other chips wagered.
3. After each pitch shuffle all the cards randomly on game board.

4. Winner is player or team with the most chips at the end of the game.

Remember their are only a few rounds for each game so bet big ad bet early!

Let me know if you come up with any variations of the game or make your own board!

Buy your copy of Wits and Wagers here

The difficulty of Color

I have seen many articles on how color effects marketing over the last couple of years. This one night be the best yet. Short version: color is subjective. However you can use color effectively but don’t over think it.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233843