Cody's Blog

Richest phone owners use BlackBerrys

2011-09-24T09:13:00.000-06:00

Good information from Suzanne Choney. I wonder if this will still be true in a few years...I would expect that as iPhone becomes more available, that iPhone will be the leader in this demographic.

vizualize.me - Cody 's profile

2011-09-13T10:36:00.002-06:00

vizualize.me - Cody 's profile

This is pretty cool! This is a great way to create visual of your LinkedIn profile. You need to use Chrome to view it, IE will not work.

Brand Loyalty and the Recession: It's All About Passionistas vs. Frugalistas (via brandchannel)

2011-09-12T14:52:00.002-06:00

Brand Loyalty and the Recession: It's All About Passionistas vs. Frugalistas (via brandchannel)

Check out this article ranking firms by brand loyalty. Shockingly BP is at the bottom (sarcasm). I'm honestly a little surprised that Dr. Pepper is that low. It seems that people who like Dr. Pepper really stick with it over the alternatives. I guess Mr. Pibb is gaining ground. It's a great read and only takes a few minutes.

Turn the Sieve into a Bucket: 6 Practices for Loyalty Marketing

2011-08-27T17:27:00.000-06:00

This week our company held an all hands meeting to celebrate the company's 10 year anniversary. During that meeting our CEO said something that struck me as odd. In a nutshell he said "in the past, the industry has been all about signing up a customer and hope you never hear from that custmer again. That can no longer be the case."

Really? "Hope you never hear from that customer customer again?"

Is your customer base a sieve?
Source: paulnoll.com

I believe him when he says that. He's been in the industry a long time and knows that he's talking about. I'm surprised that was the industry paradigm. In some ways I understand. You spend so much new customer acquisition in our industry that there is little leftover to spend on the customer experience. The problem with that model is instead of creating a bucket to fit your customer base in, you create a sieve. With a sieve, you have to keep the faucet turned on full blast in order to keep it full.

Every company needs to invest in their current/recent customers in order to get them to stay. Here are 6 principles customer marketers should consider when design customer loyalty campaigns.

Onboarding
Make it extremely easy for your customers to understand your product. I bought an exercise program recently and the instructions were so easy to understand and follow, that it made me stick with it and now I'll consider buying their line extensions because I know that they'll make it easy for me.
Tools to Use:

Welcome kit or program
Strong online support or education
Online community (which helps with other areas as well)
Easy to get a hold of customer support team

Monitor External Touch Points
You can design the best customer touch point map and optimize to the hilt but you can't control what others say about you. You have to monitor this closely, even if you work for a cable company and customers have no other choice if they want cable TV. They may not have a choice now but a disruptive technology could come along and your customers are just looking for an excuse to adopt it. Don't make your reputation be the reason customers leave, it's lazy! Also, mistakes happen but just don't do the things that cause negative PR.

I'm a believer in responding to negative press or comments. You can control your response. Don't get in an argument but your customers will look past the bad PR if they can see you are aware and you are addressing it.

Regular (but relevant) Communication
Keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis but make sure the information is relevant and timely. You run the risk of customers tuning you out if you over communicate with junk information. Asking customers what they want to hear about and how often is a good thing. Don't be afraid to ask.

A good customer marketing manager with strong analytical skills will survey their customers, monitor website and email activity in order to find patterns in what customers are looking for.

Listen to Your Customers
I touched upon this in the previous section but it is huge. You have to listen to your customers through surveys, email responses, and customer care calls. I've talked about this in a previous posts as well (surveying customers when they leave and Running a VOC meeting) but a good voice of the customer program can drive loyalty marketing campaigns, not to mention process improvement.

Advice: Be best friends with your customer care management. They listen to calls all day long and can give you good feedback.

Create Added Value
Brand development means just as much to current customers as it does for new ones. The obvious answers here are introducing new products or loyalty discounts but can you create non-tangible value?
What about aspirational value or value through pride?
Do your customers brag to their friends that they are a customer?
Do they defend you to the death and think your competition is inferior and anyone who uses the competition is soft-in-the-head?
Does your brand mean something more than what it is?

The best companies can add value in non-tangible ways (and they rarely have to offer discounts which is an added bonus).

Read Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" to learn about Airwalk's mistake of ignoring their core customers.

Get Your Customers Involved
The last leg of the customer lifecycle is "advocacy." Active customers are advocates. Customers who refer friends are advocates. As I mentioned earlier, developing a community of your customers where they can connect with one another is huge in getting your customers involved. You can also leverage that community to get new customers but it seems consomer are relying more on word of mouth as a main vehicle for selecting products and services.

Conclusion
I believe comprehensive plans never work almost everytime. Most plans are abandoned once you realize you didn't account for something you never would've known about in the first place. Having a general strategy is the best approach. Always watch your data, beware of confirmation bias, optimize performance, and constantly tinker. I hope this practices help you when you are organizing your customer loyalty campaigns.

Link: How to Socially Reward Your Customers

2011-07-27T09:39:00.000-06:00

Check out this article by Corina Mackay(@corinamackay) 6 Ways to Socially Reward Your Customers. I've been researching ways to leverage social rewards and this post nicely summarizes the ways to use social rewards to increase loyalty and revenue.

3 Small Steps to Cause a Customer Experience Epidemic

2011-07-18T21:20:00.000-06:00

This post is inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point.

I recently re-read the The Tipping Point by Gladwell and it got me thinking of all kinds of ways to apply the concepts from the book into day-to-day work. Instead of applying the concepts to customer directed activities I thought of ways the concepts can be applied to customer experience and getting an entire organization to be concerned about optimizing the customer experience.

1. Get your unique socializers involved

The Law of the Few
According to Gladwell there are three types of extraordinary people that start epidemics.

Connectors - These people have a knack for meeting people. They have diverse social circles which makes them uniquely qualified to spread information among a wide variety of groups.
Mavens - The information collectors. Mavens become experts on certain subjects and we rely on them to introduce us to new information.
Salesman - These are the pursuaders and promoters. They can take a concept and translate into a message that creates a need.

Most of the time, customer experience managers do have a lot of formal power in organization but managers can use specific people to get their message across to a wide audience. You do not need a large meeting to present your findings a lot people. In fact, it might better to use the unique people in your organization to get your message out.
It probably won't take you too long to figure out who these people are if you just sit down and try to think of people who fit these descriptions. These people can help translate your message to others who may not understand customer experience into something others can use.

2. Fine tune your message to make it stick

Stickiness Factor
This is where it gets a little difficult but crafting the right message to get your point across is important. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell gives examples of Seasame Street and Blues Clues and how they tested their episodes for stickiness. What messages gets people in your organization attention? Fear may not be the answer. An example in the book give an example of getting students to get a flu vaccination. The fear message did not motivate people to get flu shots. Giving a map and hours of when the shots would be available made participation jump. Your goal is to get people to act not just hear your message.
Having everyone listen to ugly call center interactions may not be the way to get people to act. Think direct response advertising. Do you have a call to action? What do you want people to do? Are you being clear enough?

3. Communicate in the right context

The Power of Context
The environment makes a big difference in whether a message or idea becomes an epidemic. People do not act the same in all situations. Gladwell gave the example of the crime epidemic in New York. Does your organization have a problem with nothing ever being accomplished in meetings? Maybe the meeting isn't the right context. Maybe the meeting setting gives people permission to not follow through because "no one else does it."
Consider the right context for geting people to act.

By considering these three small steps on how to influence your organization may get your message to spread like a virus.

I encourage anyone who hasn't read The Tipping Point to do so. If you have read it, read it again. It's a great book for marketing professionals

Are You Asking Your Customers Why They Left?

2011-06-20T21:10:00.002-06:00

It’s tough to ask someone why they left. You may get answers that you don’t really want to hear. Are your prices too high? Is your post-sales service come up short? Is the product you are sell having major malfunctions? Hopefully the answer isn’t yes to all of those questions. Getting answers to why customers leave will help you ATTRACT and KEEP the right customers. There isn’t a product in the world that is universally for everyone. Your product is obviously no different. You want to know what you need to do keep the right customers. Here are a few things to consider when designing a VOC for customers who are no longer your customer.

· Allow customers to rank the reasons for leaving.

· Make the customer drill down on the top issue. If it’s price, what about the price?

· Don’t be afraid to ask if they went with another product and what product they went with. This gives you a better idea of where you competition is coming from. We found we don’t have to worry about firms that are the same size as we are with similar sales channels. It’s the smaller players we have to be wary of.

· Let the customer vent about what you did wrong. The candid feedback is important to hear.

· Be sure that you know what the top reasons are for your KEY customers. Since your product isn’t for everyone, make sure you know your customer profile so you know that you are keeping the right kind of customers. Your overall top reason may be one thing but you may be losing customers who aren’t going to be successful because of price or service expectation and those customers may be diluting your results. I look for what customers from key demographics are saying so that I know how I can fine tune our product offering. On the flip side you could determine that product expansion is key to capture and keep the customers who weren’t the right customers before.

The Power of an Effective Voice of the Customer Meeting

2011-03-17T20:29:00.001-06:00

As the manager of customer experience for the company I currently work for, I am tasked with the voice of the customer program. There was a voice of the customer program started before I arrived six months ago. The program before was modest and primarily consisted of members of other departments listening to particularly nasty calls. The intent was to get people talking about the customer experience and if it made a couple people squirm in their seat all the better.

Over the weeks attendance fell off dramatically. The reason, the calls were too anecdotal and hard for others to understand the context of the call. Those that did still show up would ask "is this just an isolated incident? How many times does this really happen?"

Unfortunately, there were no answers. Customer Care could not quantify what activities were causing a bad customer experience. The management and reps knew what the problems were but communicating and getting others to listen was the challenge. There was no quality assurance team to evaluate calls and quantify issues. The customer survey program was very modest and nothing was being done with the feedback.

At the end of 2010, the company wanted to make significant steps to improve the relationship with our customers in 2011. Fortunately for me, that's where I come in. Of the many initiatives that I wanted to get aggressive in implementing was giving the voice of the customer more prominence in the organization. The biggest way to do that, make the voice of the customer meeting more effective.

Here are a few steps we've done in order to improve our voce of the customer meetings. Hopefully you find them helpful as well. I don't really run into too many best practices for conducting these meetings so we had to learn from mistakes and use common sense to put these together.

Have a theme

Whether it's the hot topic in the organization or simply just the top customer complaint have a theme. Attendees will appreciate if they know they will only be tackling one issue at a time. It makes solving the issue that much easier as well. Don't do consecutive meetings on the same subject. Even if there is one MAJOR problem in your company, break it up into smaller bites so you tackle it bit by bit.

Do not blind side attendees

Send your presentation and the details out a few days in advance. This will do two things. One, attendees can be prepared and do any research in advance of the meeting. Two, no one will be blind-sided if some of the findings hit a little too close to home for attendees. The goal should not be to air out a manager's dirty laundry. The goal is to solve the problem.

Make it meaningful

Accounting does not have time to regularly listen to customer calls. In order to help them see what customers feel about the billing process, you need them to see to how customers rate the billing process and why they rate it the way they do. If customers who are on particular billing program are extremely dissatisfied with it, it's far easier for accounting to see that from survey and quality assurance data. Now that you have their attention, play snippets of calls so they can hear the actual customer going through process they are so dissatisfied with. Now you can have a meaningful conversation about how to improve processes.

50% presenting findings/50% discussing solutions

If you have an hour for your voice of the customer meeting (try not to go longer), make sure that you present your findings in 30 minutes or less. You want to spend half of the meeting resolving the issue rather than trying to hammer your point home. You want to come away with clear action items and takeaways when the meeting ends. When our meeting was just an hour of listening to calls, no one walked out of the meeting having the slightest idea of what they needed to do. It was a quagmire of issues that created more questions than answers.

Set a follow up date and stick to it

If you can, conduct a voice of the customer meeting every two weeks. During the off week, have a follow up meeting on the action items from the previous week's meeting. It's so important to actually take action and resolve issues. It will vastly improve customer experience, make your organization more customer-centric, and make future voice of the customers more effective.

Conclusion

This is the format I am following with my meetings. I'm curious to hear how others do it but organizing them in this way seems to make sense for us.

Job Post - Entry- Level Workforce Coordinator in Utah County

2011-03-09T12:43:00.004-07:00

Position: Workforce Management Coordinator

Pay: $12-$14/hour

Benefits: Yes

Where: Pinnacle Security in Lindon, UT (no relocation available)

Schedule: Must be able to work from 2pm to 10pm Mon - Sat

Description of what I am looking for:
You do not need a lot of experience since this is an entry level position but I do need someone who has a passion for analysis. You must be proactive and enjoy finding ways to improve the performance of the department when you have down time at work. This job is not about being a care taker, it's about finding trends, problems and solutions even in the most minor details. There will be occasions where you will be expected to learn some aspects of the job on your own.

It is an entry-level position but there are opportunities to grow in the future as you gain experience. This is a great way to get your feet wet.

If you are interested, please send me your resume: cbakken@pinnaclesecurity.com

If you aren't interested but know someone who is, send them this post.

Performance Management: Drive the Metrics That Matter

2011-02-27T12:14:00.001-07:00

Start Somewhere

The biggest challenge is identifying the metrics that truly matter and drive profitability. Many managers struggle with finding the metrics that truly matter. Inexperienced managers struggle with this especially if they have no/limited background in statistical analysis. The byproduct of not focusing on the right metrics is confusion and malaise on the part of your employees because they can't be sure that their performance is being measured by the statistics that really matter.

Start with the most logical statistics

The point is to start somewhere, anywhere, and vet for significance. It's ok to be wrong, just realize you're wrong quickly and move on. The way I determine if a statistic is valid is to measure its correlation with controlling expenses or increasing profitability. Be careful that your metrics are not in opposition though.

I think customer service departments that focus on keeping average handle time as low as possible conflicts with metrics that conflict with profitability metrics. You don't want agents wasting time but I want an agent to take an extra minute taking care of the customer instead of worrying about getting off the phone as fast as possible. Do not sacrifice customer service in the name of low handle time.

Your business will evolve and so will the way you measure performance. Don't worry about being perfect right out the gate. Over time you will get better at measuring your business if you put in the time.

Beware of too many stats

As a manager you may look at a dozen or more statistics but your employees shouldn't have to monitor these for you. Boil down employee performance measurements to as few as possible. At a director-level position, I had dozens of performance metrics that I reviewed weekly with my boss but my managers only had 6 or so metrics and their employees had even less metrics to be held accountable to.

Work on what you control

It's easy to fall into the attitude that "if only that other department would get their act together then we can make real improvements." Every company has it. You will always have to deal with how another department's decision affects your department and sometimes it's difficult to get the other department see what impact they are having. Instead of going on the offensive and then in return causing the other department to get defensive, focus on what you can control. You may not be able to control the marketing department to run the ads that your sales reps close the highest but you can maximize the sales conversion even on every ad by focusing on the things you control. If you are doing everything in your power, it makes it easier to communicate your needs to the other department without putting them on the offensive.

Simplify and Automate

Dashboards

It's far easier for you and your team to manage to the numbers if the numbers are easy to access. I highly recommend making dashboards that have just the essentials so you view the state of the department at any moment. Then if you see any metrics out of tolerance you can dig right where you need to fix it instead of constantly aiming at a moving target.

It's ok if your dashboard is in Excel (mine are) just get them started. If your organization has or eventually gets dashboard software, you will have an easy template for your BI team to work from if you already have a working version.

I'd rather have manual reports than none at all. I understand that this can take a lot of your time but it will pay off over time and you will get faster at it every day. It's better to take an hour of your day then to fly blind day in and day out.

Review Daily

I like having a daily morning meeting with my team to discuss what happened yesterday and what we need to do today to make any corrections. It's far easier to make the small adjustments everyday then have to make major overhauls because the department isn't performing. This is how I keep my team on the same page. I get everyone together for 15 to 30 minutes every morning to simply discuss metrics and key tasks to improve on them. You will find that your team will appreciate these meetings even if there are days where it seems like over kill.

Tinker constantly in your free time

The two most important things you can do in your down time is talk with your team and sift through your data for insight. If you got free time, tinker and dive deep into your data. Find the little nuggets that give you more insight. You will more likely than not find something you weren't even looking for. I know my data and my business better than anyone. Sometimes, I know other departments better than they do just because I spend my down time at work analyzing raw data. At a previous job I caught salesman writing fraudulent orders by digging through data and finding suspicious patterns. After finding the suspicious patterns, we were able to create exception reporting to alert us if other sales reps start showing the same suspicious pattern.

Summary

Manage to the key metrics
Watch them and talk about them daily
Tinker in your spare time

Customer Surveys and the Voice of the Customer

2011-02-26T14:39:00.001-07:00

Recently, I launched a customer survey program. This program was started for many different reasons. Some of the reasons were begin listening to the voice of the customer, projecting renewal rates, and attain market intelligence on what was important to our customers and what was not. The results of the surveys were staggering right out the gate. Customers were eager to tell us what we don't do very well and what they wanted to see from us in the future. The interesting thing was what some thought customers wanted were very different than what they actually wanted.

The surveys sparked many strategic conversations throughout the organization. Starting with "what do we really know about our customers?"

It will be exciting to be a part of making the organization more customer centric and being able to quantify the change through customer feedback. Other ways we are using customer surveys:

Rating customer satisfaction for each individual of department in the organization.
Quantifying the biggest pain points for our customers and then ultimately improve them.
Educate our customers on the areas where there are the biggest misunderstandings, therefore reducing inbound call volume into the Customer Care team.
Reach out to customers who leave especially negative feedback about a specific experience in hopes of solving the issue before a customer uses other channels to vent their frustrations (BBB, social media).

We face a lot challenges to improve our customer experience but knowing more about what the customer really thinks is a huge step in the right direction.

Losing the Loyalty Proposition

2011-02-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

Losing the Loyalty Proposition

The Key to Customer Loyalty: Delight (via brandchannel)

2011-02-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

The Key to Customer Loyalty: Delight (via brandchannel)

Your Company Does Not Own Its Brand « Customer Experience Matters

2011-02-16T20:05:00.001-07:00

Your Company Does Not Own Its Brand « Customer Experience Matters

Short article but the message is building a brand is about making and keeping promises. Companies do not own their brand exclusively. Companies share ownership with their customers.

My thoughts:

Often times managers assume too much about what customers think of their brand without looking at the empirical evidence.

Voice of the customer programs can be a real eye opener. In some cases, managers and executives are so entrenched on what they “think” customers think of the company that customer survey feedback can almost turn into an intervention.

Knowing what customers really think of you and acting on the feedback is crucial to long-term success.

Dunkin’ Donuts ranks first in customer loyalty | QSRweb.com

2011-02-16T19:12:00.000-07:00

Dunkin’ Donuts ranks first in customer loyalty QSRweb.com

Applying Predictive Analytics to Achieve Customer Intimacy

2011-01-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

Applying Predictive Analytics to Achieve Customer Intimacy

The Cincinnati Zoo Goes Ape for Customers

2011-01-24T20:10:00.001-07:00

The Cincinnati Zoo Goes Ape for Customers

This article is awesome! This is the kind of customer analytics that I just love. I love how they took the data and drove a strategy for customer experience and acquistion. I try and push this level of analysis to drive customer experience in the company I work for now. I hope I can take it to this level.

5 Ways to Advance Your Customer Experience Effort in 2011

2011-01-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

5 Ways to Advance Your Customer Experience Effort in 2011

You Have Your Demographic Data…So Now What?

2011-01-20T21:48:00.001-07:00

Now that you've had one of the main consumer data aggregators analyze your customer file, what do you actually do with this all this information?

What does all the data really tell you?

Acxiom's data portrait analysis will tell you what demographics elements are over or under represented. This is good to know but if the customers that are the most valuable and stay loyal are the ones who are underrepresented, you could make a catastrophic business decision simply based on what customers you tend to attract over another. Not that this isn't valuable information. It's extremely valuable but you have to dig deeper to find out what it really tells you.

Are sales and marketing efforts skewing your customer profile based on what they think are the best way to get customers?

If that is the case, do you make a drastic change in strategy and try acquiring the customers who are truly the most valuable?

What if your competition has cornered the market on those customers already? If you are in an industry with high switching costs, pursuing market segments that are already being serviced by your competitors can be a battle that you could lose big.

So far this post has been mostly questions with no answers but the lesson I've learned is that you can't just take demographic analysis at face value and base everything you do around it. You need to incorporate the information with customer performance, market intelligence on what your competitors are doing, and the cost to acquire the desired customers.

Once you've done all your homework doing these 5 things will help you stay competitive and adaptable as your industry changes.

Identify your target customer segments
Design sales and market strategies to acquire the customers you want
Get regular customer demographic data and track performance over time to make sure your marketing is being effective
Look for potential segments you are not hitting and be aggressive in finding niche markets
Get feedback from your customers on your marketing message and service and product offering to stay on point with what your customers need

Leveraging Web 2.0 Tools and Social Media to Enhance Customer Experience

2011-01-17T21:09:00.000-07:00

Leveraging Web 2.0 Tools and Social Media to Enhance Customer Experience

Elaborate Phone Trees

2011-01-11T19:48:00.001-07:00

I have never understood why companies design elaborate phone tree menu options for customers to go through. Especially if all of the phone tree options dump the customer into the same pool agents anyway. Customers really just want the fastest ways to get their issue solved and move on with their day. In terms of customer experience, a company needs the customer to remember the fast service and not the elaborate (and slow) phone tree.

Here are my rules for setting up a phone tree:

Get the customer to the right place as fast as possible.
Recorded message needs to be quick and concise.
Only as many options as are necessary.
1. If two or more options end up in the same pool of agents, combine them into one.
Options should be for routing calls to get the customer in the right spot not for reporting purposes.
1. Customers will just press random buttons to get to a live person anyway.
Do not make customers listen to the entire menu before they can choose.
Phone trees should never go more than two deep.

Introduction to My Blog

2011-01-09T13:39:00.001-07:00

Hello all that read this. The purpose of this blog is to share my thoughts on projects and tasks that I am currently working on. This will help me to better organize my thoughts by getting them down "on paper" but also to publish my thoughts so others with more experience or different points of view can provide feedback to me. I'm won't post specific details on what I'm working on because it's important to me to maintain confidentiality with my employer and clients. Along with posting my original thoughts I will share articles and blog posts that I have read and was interested in.

Here is a brief list of subjects that I enjoy and have a passion for. Most of the posts will probably be about one of these topics.

Customer Experience
Consumer Demographic Analysis
Market and Sales Analysis
Marketing Strategy
Process Improvement
Microsoft Excel tricks
Non-verbal Communication
Social Media Applications
Technology and Gadgets

I have a passion for conducting research and analysis and then turning those findings into actionable strategies for a business. The most rewarding work I've ever done almost always included digging into to data or business intelligence, making sense of it, and implementing tactics and strategies around what I find. It takes a lot of hard work and sometimes it's frustrating but the more hours I work at it, the better insights I get.

I'm going to stick to business related topics as often as I can. This blog will (hopefully) not steer into my personal life too often. Obviously my opinions on the subject matter I'm writing on will come out but I want to avoid the posts about vacation trips, what our cats did today (the answer is ate, slept, and destroyed furniture in some order), or my rants on my favorite sports teams.

If you stumble upon this blog and read this post, please give me feedback on what you liked and didn't like. I want your feedback; I only ask that you keep professional. I promise to do that same.

Cody Bakken

Considering Generational Elements in Pursuit of the Outstanding Customer Experience

2011-01-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

Considering Generational Elements in Pursuit of the Outstanding Customer Experience

Five Customer Experience Sins to Avoid in 2011

2011-01-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

Five Customer Experience Sins to Avoid in 2011