Customer Trust

Drop the Persona. Market to a Person.

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Nearly all the marketers I meet seem, in some way, obsessed with personas. Personas are convenient little tools that describe some set of attribute of a hypothetical — and supposedly typical — customer that are intended to allow everyone in the company to understand this customer and what they want.

If you’ve spent time talking with me about personas, you know exactly how I feel about them: I hate them.

No, I don’t hate the idea that there should be an understanding of the customer, and everyone should be able to see what it is. That’s necessary for getting teams aligned and driving market growth (see my discussion on this in my previous post).

I hate the idea because most of the marketers I meet use them as crutches — and not very useful crutches at that. I hate that most marketers try so hard to be specific and complete in their description of “Finance Francine” that their list of things “Francine” cares about are either redundant or useless in creating messaging that will convince the hypothetical “Francine” to spend non-hypothetical money.

Have you ever seen a list like this:

“CEO Chuck” cares about:

  • Increasing revenue
  • Increasing profit margin
  • Meeting set revenue and profit goals
  • Not losing revenue
  • Not losing profit margins
  • Increasing net income

OK, I’m going a little overboard, but you’ve seen that list. The problem you see with it is that it’s redundant. I see that and something far more dangerous to your marketing:

The list is meaningless.

If the person working on personas in your organization makes lists like this one, you probably don’t ever look at them for anything you do. If you do look at them, I’d ask you whether they help you target content, create advertising or email campaigns or even inform sales scripts.

A good test for whether you have a useful persona is whether your average sales rep can use the language in the persona document to describe how you help your customer and the prospects on the other side of that table (or other end of that call) respond with “Yes!! That’s exactly what I need!” How often does that happen to you?

So what do we do about this? How do we get a useful understanding of the people to whom we are selling? (And yes, if you’re selling to businesses, you’re still selling to people)

Focus on the person.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, it is, but then again, it isn’t. They say understanding other people and building relationships is hard. When you are selling any kind of offering, you are building a relationship with another person (or people), and it’s exactly as easy and hard as with anyone.

What’s the key to getting this right?

In an earlier post, I wrote about the importance of knowing how you and your offering make a difference in the lives of your customers. There are three steps to making this an integral part of your marketing:

  1. Understanding your customer’ needs and aspirations — most importantly, the ones they don’t articulate
  2. Understanding what needs and aspirations you can enable
  3. Understanding how you help your customer meet those needs and achieve those aspirations

Revisiting “CEO Chuck,” here’s how this might work:

Chuck runs a small software company. Chuck is trying to solve the disconnects within his organization. He knows that if product, sales and marketing could stop arguing and get on the same page, it would be easier and smoother to generate leads and grow the sales pipeline. His demand generation leader says the biggest obstacle to getting prospects into the pipeline is knowing how to effectively find the right kind of person to whom to deliver messages. His investors are breathing down his neck about meeting sales targets and showing some eye-popping PR stories. His engineers are bugging him about prioritizing new features and bug fixes, and claim they can’t understand what they should be doing first — it all seems important.

Now let’s say you are selling some kind of marketing product to Chuck. You could tell Chuck your offering increases revenue, and you’d think that would be important enough for him to buy it. But let’s say your offering could help get the pipeline process unified between sales and marketing, and make sure they both have at least common numbers, account information and the like. You could then offer Chuck a solution to at least part of the sales and marketing friction problem, making his pipeline move more smoothly to help grow revenue.

Some marketers will see that as a more specific and, therefore, smaller offer. It’s not. It helps solve the problem your prototypical customer thinks they have. It makes sure you can deliver something they think is valuable to them and that makes a difference in their lives. And if you do it successfully, I am pretty sure they will tell their friends and colleagues you made a whole set of challenges go away.

This illustration is an over-simplification for the purposes of keeping this post readable. But the point of doing this exercise — and doing it well — is you get to understand your customer as a person, not as a hypothetical profile.

And when you stop making claims to personas and start making promises to people, you can start delivering real value and changing their lives.

Customer Success

Want to Avoid Customer Rejection? Here’s How NOT To

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Here’s a lesson on how to create customer rejection in 30 minutes or less.

I heard a story from a friend today.  She bought what she hoped would be a useful and productive accessory for one of her tech devices.  Nothing fancy, just one of those things that makes your device go from “pretty useful” to “part of my everyday work.”

I can safely say she will avoid doing business in the future with the company that made the device.  And I’ll bet she’ll happily tell all her friends (as she told me) about how well they knew the art of customer rejection.  I can’t tell you how many potential customers this company lost today, but I know of two, and based on her influence circle, I’ll bet that’s a few orders of magnitude off.

It turned out this effort by the company to lose customers was pretty simple.  They spent a total of half an hour of work on it.  The customer rejection professional involved (maybe in charge of this particular effort?) was efficient, effective, and, I’d bet, well-rewarded for his or her efforts.

In fact, if your company is looking to lose some customers fast, I’d try to hire this customer rejection expert ASAP.

The whole thing was pretty simple.  When my friend received the product, it was broken and did not work.  She wanted it replaced; I’m pretty sure I would have, as well.  She emailed them. They asked for pictures.  She sent them.  They asked her to call.  She spent half an hour on the phone with the very competent customer-rejection professional who told her the replacement was out of stock and could not be sent.  Going above and beyond their duty, the same customer rejection professional added that no advance order could be placed for the item to ensure it would be sent when it was back in stock.  The apology acting, I’m told, was extraordinary (maybe the customer rejection professional also is an aspiring actor?).

My friend tried to respond to the company’s email, but the email message bounced. In the bounce message, she was directed to a web page to file a complaint, but the web page produced errors that could not be deciphered (Note to web professionals: If you want to contact the company to help resolve this, remember that is at cross-purposes with the responsibilities of the customer-rejection team).

My friend now has a broken product.  The company that sold it to her thinks this is as it should be.

I’d call this an example to follow of how to lose customers in half an hour or less. Customer-rejection professionals: are you listening?

Chasms of Failure

Five Critical Steps to Knowing Your Customers

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It’s a trap into which marketers of all kinds fall:  assuming your customers are just like you in their preferences, desires, and buying characteristics.  It can happen because we lack information to figure out what customers are really like or because our own inherent biases cause us to ignore information that would contradict our assumptions.

In a series of studies (published in the AMA Journals), Hattula, Herzog, Dahl and Reinecke found that marketers putting themselves in their “customers’ shoes” were more likely to assume their customer is just like them rather than the generally expected outcome that they would understand their customer’s needs and desires even better.

In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Hattula noted, “That tendency [toward egocentrism] is so strong that we’re willing to ignore objective data when we make predictions about others.”

You Are Not Your Customers

Yes, he is saying that in our data-driven world, the more empathetic (and maybe more expert) we become, the more likely we are to just ignore the data and use our own intuition to make assumptions about our customers.  If you’ve been in a marketing organization for any length of time, this should not surprise you (though it may be hard to admit).

Simply put:  The more you assume your customer is just like you, the farther you get from building a relationship with and serving that customer.

In our daily lives, we develop relationships fully realizing that the people with whom we become friends or partners or any other form of relationship are not exactly like us.  Success in each relationship requires that we develop an understanding of what drives the other person and how we fit into their lives—and how they fit into ours.

Consider this:  You walk into a room, and a man approaches you.  He tells you why he is in that room (at that event or party) and then proceeds to tell you he knows you must be there for the same reason.  Maybe he harangues you to engage in ways that suit him well or to help him meet the people he wants to meet.  You can tell pretty quickly this person had no interest in you or your needs.

When you make the assumption that your customer is just like you, you start off your relationship with that customer on the footing I described in the previous paragraph:  you alienate your customer and make them feel like you have no real interest in meeting their needs.

This can be exacerbated by the common marketing practice of developing customer personas.  Personas are just descriptions of prototypical customer types.  If the egocentricity bias that Hattula describes enters your persona development process, the personas can start to look an awful lot like the people who are developing them (One way to check this is to ask someone who knows you but was not involved in the process to look at the persona and describe how much like you it is—as long as you can trust that person to give an honest answer.).

The Importance of Data

Marketing has become, for the most part, a data-driven endeavor.  Marketers work hard to gather and analyze data on the actions of those who engage with the company, on how those actions lead to (or don’t lead to) sales, on the costs and ROI of specific marketing activities, on how customer usage leads to repeat sales, and on so many more things in your everyday activities.  One of the things on which marketers have relied for a very long time is market research.  Assuming it uses well-designed research, the data gathered can inform many marketing decisions and challenge many assumptions.

But challenging assumptions, especially within an organization, is very hard.  When the data clearly contradicts any assumption we make about our customers—from buying habits to feature preferences—Hattula’s study shows we tend to just ignore the data—even when we know the best course of action is to adjust our own assumptions to match the data.

Where Does This Lead?

Hattula’s study suggests that employees who are disengaged from customers are in the best position to understand objectively what the data they receive is telling them.

My own experience says that getting a direct, personal understanding of your customer, including developing empathy (maybe by putting yourself in your customer’s proverbial shoes), gives you insights that data just can’t.

The irony is that in order to truly understand your customer well, you need to do a good job of both getting closer to them and distancing yourself from them.  You need to:

  1. Gain direct exposure, understanding and empathy with your typical customer’s needs, preferences and desires.
  2. Ensure you are gathering good, unbiased data on customers’ needs, preferences, and desires
  3. Pay close attention to even the smallest hint of contradiction between your empathetic understanding and what the data is telling you.
  4. Get objective viewpoints that can tell you when your assumptions about your customers are really just a projection of your own needs, preferences, and desires.
  5. Have the courage to challenge organizational assumptions about your customers.

Did I promise this would be easy?  It’s not.

But if you want to stay close to your customers and continue to succeed in delivering what they want and need, in the way they want and need it, you will have to make sure you are meeting their needs.

Not yours.

Customer Trust

Are You Really Customer-Centric? Or Is It Just Talk?

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It seems every company wants to show just how customer-centric it is these days.  It’s increasingly common to hear PR machines toss around phrases such as, “We value our customers,” or “We put our customers at the center of our business.”

But it’s easier said than done.  When it comes time to make a decision that pits customer interests against a chosen corporate strategy, do you really make decisions that put your customers first?

A.P. Giannini, founder of Bank of America, said, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”  If, in the process of evolving your business, you choose to forsake some (or all) of your customers, you not only have no longer put customers at the center of your business but also have given up the business those customers represent.

A recent stark example of the conflict between a chosen corporate strategy and a customer-centric one is the recent decision by Starbucks to close a number of its brands, including San Francisco icon La Boulange.

La Boulange is a chain of bakery cafes in San Francisco that has a reputation for quality food at reasonable prices and has earned the trust and devotion of San Francisco Bay Area locals. This is important to this story, as earning the trust of San Franciscans, as a whole, is not easy, and locals tend to fiercely defend local brands, often at the expense of national brands.

When Starbucks acquired La Boulange in April 2013, there was a local uproar.  Would they keep the beloved cafes open?  Would we be deprived of La Boulange baked goods?  What would happen to the people working at them?

Starbucks is one of those companies that claims to employ a customer-centric business strategy.  Putting customers first means making a promise to those customers, then keeping that promise.  And, of course, not breaking it.  Starbucks made a promise. They kept that promise—until they broke that promise by making a decision that clearly put their chosen corporate strategy ahead of their customers’ wishes.

Make a promise:  At the time of the acquisition, Starbucks stated it would keep the cafes open and even offer La Boulange baked goods in its Starbucks coffee shops.

Keep a promise:  It held to this promise.  It even opened more locations of La Boulange during the two years since the acquisition.

I cannot overemphasize this point:  Starbucks made and kept a promise to the segment of consumers who value and frequent La Boulange.  San Franciscans breathed a collective sigh of baked-good-induced relief.

Break a promise:  Last week, Starbucks announced it would close all La Boulange locations by the end of September 2015.

The justification for the decision was, in Starbucks’ words, “Starbucks has determined La Boulange stores are not sustainable for the company’s long-term growth” and that the decision was made because “Starbucks continually evaluates all components of its business to confirm they are aligned with key priorities and strategies for growth, which includes the continued analysis of the store portfolio.”  Notably, the decision was not made based on profitability, as the company claims the La Boulange brand achieved 16% year-over-year growth, and industry reports show that the newly opened stores far exceeded expectations.

In a company that claims to put its customers first, what is missing from this decision is any consideration of the promise to the customers.

Which brings me to the difficult question Starbucks faced:  Do we follow our chosen corporate strategy or do we make our strategic decisions by putting our customers first?  I wonder how you or I would make the same decision.

Traditional corporate strategy says a company should choose its competencies, market, and customer segment, pursue them to the exclusion of other options, re-evaluate those choices periodically (or continually), and make adjustments.

Customer-centric strategy demands a different approach.  If the customer is truly at the center of your business, then your business must choose its competencies, approach, and services to focus on the needs (known, unknown, or even unanticipated) of the customer. This is true whether your customer is an individual consumer or another business.

Making the choice between a chosen strategy and customer-centricity is not always as stark or obvious as it is in this case.  Companies face decisions every day that pit delivering value to customers against the chosen strategy of the business.  If your company chooses the chosen strategy and moves away from the customer it created, it must either create a new customer or face the fact that it no longer has a business (at least in that segment).

Starbucks’ mission statement is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”  The core Starbucks brand will continue to do that. But the La Boulange brand did that exact same thing for a different customer in a different way (appropriate to that different customer).  Despite Starbucks’ statement that this decision was one that keeps their mission intact, it seems that the other decision (to keep La Boulange open) would have done that as well.

So, while the decision does not directly conflict with the mission statement, it does conflict with any claim of customer-centricity.

All of which presents us with a stark example of how even the best companies make difficult strategic decisions when customer interests collide with a chosen strategy.

Have you faced such a decision?  How have you handled it?

Customer Success

How Do You Define Customer Success?

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Customer success is a very hot topic (rightfully so).  With the rise of the subscription economy, companies are more obligated than ever to make sure their customers are happy with their products and services.  Companies from salesforce.com to Dollar Shave Club are adding “customer success’ departments (or the like), appointing chief customer officers and finally paying attention to what happens after the initial sale.

But what constitutes “customer success?”  Regardless of your business, it’s a hard question to answer.  For a company such as salesforce.com, one customer might be successful if they use the software to track and report on sales reps, but another might be successful if they can establish and enforce a sales process.  For a company such as Dollar Shave Club, a customer might be successful if they get a close shave from the razor blades, while a different customer might be very happy as long as the blades are delivered on time.

Not My Definition of Customer Success

Here’s a personal story of how a large subscription economy company failed to understand customer success:

A few weeks ago, I was watching television one evening.  The picture became pixilated and then disappeared, leaving me staring at a blank screen (Have you guessed that I’m going to pick on my favorite target:  my cable television provider?). After ruling out all the other equipment in my home, I determined the CableCARD device that my cable company provides was malfunctioning (A CableCARD allows a third-party device to decode the encrypted signal sent by the cable company, meaning you don’t need extra boxes in your house…sometimes.).

When I called the cable company’s “customer success” line, they walked through it with me again and agreed with my conclusion:  the problem was with the CableCARD.  They said they would send a technician to install a new one in three days.

Three days (!) seemed a long time to wait just to be able to watch television again.  When I challenged this, I was told:

This is not a priority issue.  We are successfully delivering a signal to your home, and a malfunctioning CableCARD is not important enough for us to send someone tonight or tomorrow.

I reiterated that I felt they were leaving me without their service for three days, and that this is a failure to deliver the service promised.  They reiterated:

We are successfully delivering signal to your home, so we are successfully providing service.”

Our definitions of “success” did not match.  Theirs was “signal on the cable wire,” while mine was “seeing a picture on my television” (I’ll spare you the rest of the argument; it didn’t go well from my perspective.).  Maybe there are other customers who use their signal differently and who consider “signal on the wire” to be success, regardless of whether their TV is watchable.  Not I.

As I reflected on this discussion, I thought about all the other companies that fail to make sure I am using their service successfully, and only focus on the limited set of issues they choose to define as success.

recent study showed that 53% of Americans would choose to switch cable providers if they had the choice (cable television service is a monopoly in many parts of the country).  If the monopoly is broken, it does not bode well for these providers.  Not only does it mean customers will be looking to leave and take their recurring revenue elsewhere, but it opens the market for disruptive competitors who may be more than happy to meet the needs that the current providers are not meeting.

The important question for your business is this:

Do you know how your customers define “success”?

If you don’t know that, you can’t help your customers be successful. And their definition is the only one that matters (cable companies, be damned).

An Approach to Customer Success

One company that is making a good effort at answering this question is Contactually (a social CRM product I use in my own work).  Susan Watkins, their newly appointed head of customer success, tells me that when a customer shows up, Contactually contacts the customer and offers to help them get started, including personal tutorials on how to do the things the customer hopes to do with the product.

In that process, they discover how the customer intends to use Contactually—and how the customer defines success.  When renewal time comes, they can then contact the customer and, instead of just asking for a renewal, ask how they are doing against that definition of success and how Contactually can help them be more successful.

Their data is not in yet, but I’ve seen this approach reduce churn by 5% to 10% in other companies.

In the subscription economy, if you don’t help make your customers successful—by their definition—you won’t be in business for long.

Post a comment and tell us how you figure out how your customers define success.

 

Community

Choosing the Right Way to be Transparent

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We hear about transparency every day. We are told that, in a world where everything is exposed in media (mostly social media), it’s far better to be transparent than to try to hide blemishes, problems and defects in the hope that they’ll go away or, at least, not be discovered until we fix them. Marketing blogs and publications are filled with disaster stories about companies that have chosen not to be transparent, and success stories of companies that have chosen transparency.

But just like in our personal lives, we have to choose the right level of transparency, and we have to choose the topics on which we will be transparent.

Here’s a great example:

In November, I wrote about Buffer, a tech start-up that put transparency on top of their values list. Not only do they talk about nearly everything internally (including personal goals, such as education and weight-loss), but they publish many of their results, such as their customer success metrics, externally for the world to see.

Since then, they have become even more transparent, releasing more and more information publicly. Two of the ways they have done this have produced very different outcomes. Let’s take a closer look.

A Transparency Tempest in a Teapot

In December, Buffer decided to make public all the salaries of all their employees, including the formulas they use to determine these salaries.

This produced a small tempest in social media: Some praised their transparency, and others chided them for releasing personal information about their employees, or for creating potential envy and dissatisfaction in their ranks.

The question I asked was this: How does this disclosure benefit the customer (or any other constituent)? The answer is simple: It doesn’t. Granted, it does no harm, but it adds no benefit either.

This is a case of transparency for transparency’s sake. Some have made the argument that disclosing this information is consistent with Buffer’s culture, so it enhances their reputation and brand. I disagree. Disclosure is a choice, and we can always find something they are not telling us (they can’t possibly think of everything!), and this choice does not add value to the most important audience of all: their customers.

A Slippery Slope

Buffer’s chief happiness officer, Carolyn Kopprasch, also publishes a monthly report on their customer success efforts. One element of this report shows how quickly Buffer responds to customer inquiries, tech-support requests and the like (they state that 85% of requests are answered in less than six hours, though they’re not quite there yet).

This does add some value to their customers (including me) in that it shows what I can expect in terms of response to my requests, as well as how well they are doing with all the issues brought to them.

To be clear, I think this disclosure is useful and valuable. But it also creates a potentially slippery slope.

Not long ago, I sent in a tech-support request and waited four days for a response. This is not typical of Buffer support nor of my experience. It left me asking about the distribution of response times. Specifically, Buffer publishes the percentage of responses in one and six hours, but how often does it take a day? Two day? Four days? Was my response in the bottom 10%? 1%? 0.001%?

Which then led to the logical next question: Since we know not all requests are of equal importance or urgency, and Buffer’s resources are limited, how do they make the triage decisions as to which requests get one-hour response times and which get four-day response times?

You can keep going, asking more and more logical questions until their entire operational plan is public.

Let’s say that Buffer chose to disclose the entire response-time distribution and the triage criteria. Where would that lead?

In our interview, Carolyn noted that most customer service and support organizations train customers to get angry. Customers learn that getting angry leads either to faster resolution or to a supervisor who has the power to resolve an issue. This is a version of gaming the system.

Buffer’s disclosure of the triage criteria most likely would cause its customers to game the system. If I knew the criteria, I would certainly try to adjust my request to get a higher position in the queue and get a faster response.

Clearly this doesn’t help Buffer or its customers; it only adds to animosity and frustration.

Let’s say they only disclosed the distribution of response times. That would create frustration on the part of customers who were in the bottom 10%, or worse, the bottom 1%. My assuming my request fell at the bottom is not nearly as bad for my relationship with Buffer as having them tell me exactly how unimportant they deemed me. We are all better off if I don’t know.

This is, then, a choice Buffer has made about how much information to disclose and where to stop disclosure. I think they have made a good choice, in that what they disclose helps customers understand their efforts better without taking away from the relationship and adding to frustration.

Is this two-faced? Yes. But not in a detrimental way.

Buffer values transparency on one hand and says it will keep increasing transparency. But it also makes choices about just how much disclosure meets their transparency value. Being transparent is an aspiration. We have yet to find out how far Buffer will go.

We expect transparency from companies. But we also expect there are boundaries, just like there are in our personal lives.

How do You Decide?

You make decisions every day on what to disclose to whom. Do we tell our customers this fact? Do we tell the world that policy?

How should you decide?

I propose there is one simple standard, embodied in these two questions: Does the disclosure add value? And if so, to whom? If it adds value for your customer, disclose.

Tell us how you’ve made your difficult disclosure decisions in the comments.

customers

Evolution: Demographics, Personas and the Relationship Graph

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for Nimble.)

Evolution: Demographics, Personas and the Relationship Graph

The “Social Graph” is all the rage in the social world. Ever since Facebook launched Graph Search in 2013 and the launch of OpenSocial in 2010, we’ve been talking about interesting and useful ways to use this new form of search and the data it can provide. We’re not there yet, but with the growing popularity of graph databases, the ideas behind the Social Graph are about to become very useful to sales and marketing teams.

I worked with a client last year to develop a series of marketing campaigns based on events their customers experienced. They had learned that companies bought their type of marketing automation systems soon after certain events occurred. In their case, companies tended to buy soon after receiving B-round funding. The campaigns we developed were triggered by news that some company had received B-round funding.

This was far more effective for them than the traditional demographic- or persona-based marketing, and it tells us a lot about how to look at prospects beyond fitting them into a particular description.

It also leaves out a very important part of any sales or marketing effort: relationship building. While the company was able to offer the right solution at the right time, the hard work of building a trusted relationship never happened.

So how did we get to the point where relationship-building got left out? Let’s look at the evolution for the answer:

Demographics:

Rewind half a century(!) to Don Draper’s office, circa 1965. He’s just landed a luxury car account and is recommending a targeted direct mail (state of the art!) campaign. He needs to know where to send his brilliant mail pieces, and the best tool at his disposal is demographics. So he goes to the U.S. Census Bureau and pulls personal income data by ZIP code. He sends that mail piece to everyone in every ZIP code with an average personal income above a defined threshold.

Let’s say I am lucky enough to live in that ZIP code. Am I in the market for a new luxury car? Would I consider buying one if it met certain preferences? The answer is more likely “no” than “yes.” While the effectiveness of direct mail relied on a very low percentage of success, it also wasted the vast majority of the invested resources. No marketer or salesperson really knew if I was ready to buy a new car until I showed up at a dealer.

Personas:

Fast forward 30 years to the same agency with yet another new luxury car account. Now they have lots of data at their disposal. They can create a picture of the type of person who might buy the car. It might look like this: A well-educated home-owner who travels for pleasure two or more times per year and shops at other luxury stores. Combine that with income and credit data, and you have a much-improved chance of reaching the type of person who would buy this car.

Again, let’s say I’m that person, and I receive the advertising message by mail and maybe by email or online. But I just bought a competitor’s model last year, and it’s going to be a few years until I’m ready to buy another new car.

The point of this is we can know quite a lot about out prospective buyer but still miss the two most important things:

  1. Is the prospect ready to buy?
  2. Have we established a trusting relationship that will result in the prospect buying from us?

Solution: The Relationship Graph

The timing-based marketing programs I mentioned above are a good first step toward answering the first question. As you get to know your prospects, you can get to know their buying triggers. This allows you to focus your sales and marketing efforts on those prospects who are truly ready to buy (not necessarily the same ones who said they were on your registration form).

But what about building a relationship? Just pursuing everyone who matches your target persona will not work.

We are very good at some parts of relationship-building. We know how to find common connections on social networks such as LinkedIn and how to scour social media streams to find more information about a company or individual.

Let’s go back to the Social Graph. In my personal life, I can look at Facebook and ask  interesting and useful questions. Let’s say I were looking for someone to join me at the movies this weekend. I can go to Facebook and ask, “Which of my friends lives near me and likes newly released movies?” Questions like that can help me connect with people with whom I have established relationships (or even with those I don’t) who might be willing to engage in the way I seek engagement.

What if we did this for our customers? What if I, in my consulting practice, could ask questions such as, “At what companies do I have connections who enjoy reading white papers about customer relationship management?” Then, when I write a white paper, I’d reach out to those people. And maybe I’d ask for their feedback. And maybe, if they like it, I’d ask them to tell their friends.

What if I could go further and ask, “Which connections enjoy reading CRM white papers and have recently expressed concern about their churn rates?” That’s someone I can help, and I’d want to reach out to them.

Unfortunately, much of this capability is not yet built. But the technology exists. The data exists. And, probably most importantly, your relationships exist.

And you can put the information in your organization together in a way that mirrors the Social Graph and starts to answer this kind of question. I mean the kind of question that will help you better understand your prospect and help you to add value to their business.

This is, I believe, the next step in sales and marketing evolution.

Tell me what you think it would take to put those together and start asking questions that lead to you adding value for your prospects.

Customer Success

Four Ways for Your Customer Service Team to Make Your Customers Less Angry

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When your customers contact your customer service team, are they already angry?

Last month, I interviewed Carolyn Kopprasch, chief happiness officer at Buffer. She said:

“We live in a culture that has trained customers to start on the offensive just to get good service…Often, you don’t get to talk to a manager or someone with authority to solve your problem unless you say a curse word.”

This is, sadly, the case for many organizations.  Consider companies with which you do business in your personal or business life.  If something goes wrong and you need help, what happens?  How do you find that help?  And how do you feel by the time you call or send them an email?  I’m going to venture a guess that by the time you make that contact, you’ve tried a number of things—to no avail—and are pretty angry.

In fact, a recent report (“Duck and Cover:  More Customers Are Experiencing Rage”) on customer rage shows “customer satisfaction over a company’s ability to solve a complaint is no higher today than it was in the 1970s” and “customer dissatisfaction over complaint resolution has increased eight points in the past two years.”

This culture of anger is the result of a widely practiced approach to helping customers that is designed to lower costs for the company.  This approach is also thought to improve the speed of resolution, but it often just creates bad experiences.

The practice is one of self-help or community driven help (the latter being very common in the technology business).  Companies will try to figure out what most customers need help with and then post those issues on their websites in some form of FAQ.  The assumption is that most people will go there, find the answer, and solve their problem.  The advantage for the company is there is zero marginal cost to help each customer.

The second step of this practice is a community driven approach. The company will form some sort of online forum and allow customers to post questions and answer each other’s questions.  The underlying assumption is that someone else has had the problem before and can help solve it.

This is not a zero cost approach, as many companies also have customer service team members watching the forums, adding comments and solutions and, sometimes, looking for common problems or requests that can point to product improvements.  But it is a very low-cost approach to helping customers.  And it puts a big onus on customers to seek and provide their own support.

The next step is to contact someone at the company on a customer service team.  While a few companies don’t provide any direct contact capability, most do, either by telephone or email.

But by the time the customer reaches that point, they have probably tried to solve it through the other two methods, maybe had some unpleasant exchanges with forum members or employees, and have probably been forced to search the FAQs repeatedly to try to solve the problem on their own.

In other words, they’re angry.

Four things you can do to avoid this:

1.   Stop making it us vs. them.

When your customer contacts you and is frustrated, angry or worse, it’s your customer service team’s job to take the company’s side. However, your rep should take away the need to take sides at all. The conversation should never be about what the customer wants vs. what the company will do.

The only conversation your customer service team should have with your customer is about the result they need to achieve and how they can help the customer get there. If every interaction is not designed around that idea, your customers will see your customer service team and your company as “against” them, and they will get even angrier.

2.   Know why your customers are getting angry.

Don’t just ask. Measure. Don’t be biased by the loudest and angriest customers (perpetuating your contribution to the anger culture), but look at all your customer interactions and know why escalations happen.

Once you identify points of frustration, you can act to intervene. Depending on the issue, you can post simple solutions on your help pages or accelerate personal contact when a particular issue is raised. The better you get at directing more of your customers to their desired outcome, the happier your customers will be.

3.  Learn your customers’ interaction preferences.

Some of us like to talk through our issues with someone. Others like to do research and solve it themselves.

Do you know what your customers prefer? Are you providing it? Or are you making assumptions that result in more escalations than needed?

Talk to your colleagues in marketing, and steal one idea. Ask who is good at developing what marketing people call “personas,” and create the ones you need. Figure out how to identify what type of problem solver each customer is and what you need to deliver to have them walk away happy.

4.  Be honest.

If your customer has a problem, you have a problem. It doesn’t matter if it might be their fault. If you don’t eliminate your rep’s need to take sides and help your customer get the outcome they need, it’s going to be your problem, one way or another.

When you have a problem, admit it (“yes, I can see how the instructions are not that clear about that”). Show understanding. If it’s not your fault, help your customer get past it. If it is, be direct and just fix it.

When your customer service reps get to the point of quoting warranty limits, user agreements and company policy, you have lost — not just the conversation, but the customer — and you can kiss repeat business goodbye.

Are you already doing some of these?  Are they working?  Tell us what you think!

Customer Success

Building an Exceptional Customer Success Culture: How Buffer Does It

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If you’re like most recurring-revenue companies, you’re not just looking for skills when you hire customer success people, you’re looking for cultural fit and that intangible-but-oh-so-important natural customer-happiness focus. If that’s the case, the person you’d want to hire is Carolyn Kopprasch (@carokopp). Sorry, she’s not available.

Carolyn is chief happiness officer at Buffer (full disclosure: I am a user of their service), a social media posting service that schedules or meters your posts (for me, it keeps me from inundating my followers). I quoted her in my previous post on customer success culture as a great example of how to get customer success right.

I had the pleasure recently of interviewing Carolyn to find out why she is so good at customer success and how she hires and trains Buffer’s people to make sure they are, as well.

If you are leading or part of a customer success team, or you want to be, there’s a lot you can learn from her.

Making empathy a part of the culture

“One aspect of Buffer’s mission is to set the bar for customer service,” Carolyn says. She adds that the definition of customer success is evolving as the company grows — and as the Happiness team doubles in size from three to six people.

I’ve had a number of interactions with Buffer, most with Carolyn herself. Her direct honesty and ability to make me feel cared for impressed me. Why is she so good at this? She points to two things:

First, she was a user of Buffer before joining the company. Having “been in [customers’] shoes and experienced their frustrations” gives her the ability not only to understand the situation, but also to know what will help this particular user get what they need.

Second, she cites empathy as critical to great customer service. “We have to be able to understand not just what the customer means, but their frustration, obstacles and needs.”

To even be considered for a job at Buffer, you have to be an established customer and be familiar with the product. When hiring, Buffer is looking for “someone who has used [Buffer], run into the little frustrations, been confused by this or that, who generally has experience using technology for a purpose and knows how joyous it can be when it’s successful and how frustrating it can be when it’s not.”

Carolyn says this ensures there is some basis for empathy in everyone they hire. This is true not only in the Happiness team, but throughout the company. The people on her team feel “privileged to be doing what we are doing and to have customers who give us the opportunity to do what we are doing.”

Buffer also puts prospective hires through what sounds like a practical exam. Candidates are given a series of actual requests from customers and asked to respond. How they approach the response is a key factor in the hiring decision.

But the culture of empathy extends beyond the walls of the company. “If you are not practicing [these values] in your everyday life, then it’s really challenging to put away your habits and just start it when you show up for work. So we do it in every area of our lives,” she says.

[Note: If this sounds like you, Carolyn is hiring. Just remember they only hire Buffer users.]

Creating a new kind of customer success culture

Buffer handles customer success differently from most organizations. “We don’t assign cases,” Carolyn explains. The team is still small enough that everyone can see all the open cases, and everyone is tasked with taking whatever action they can to help. With a team that now spans the globe, cases are often resolved overnight while the U.S.-based team is sleeping.

This makes communication important. “We have weekly meetings and an ongoing exchange of ideas” to keep that going, she says. The email threads among the Happiness team at Buffer include everything from making sure a response actually meets a customer’s need to discussing the most understandable tone and words to use in email.

Buffer does not try to scale its customer support with technology. They have made the decision not to try to push customers toward helping themselves, but rather to focus on hiring more people to respond to and support their growing customer base. They will add online help (“some people just like to figure things out for themselves” Carolyn says), but they will continue to make email support the primary way customers get the help they need.

Buffer also publishes — yes, publicly — a monthly happiness report on their blog and on Facebook. Here’s the October report (note the summary graphic at the bottom of the post). They let the entire world know just how well (or not) they are doing. It’s a manifestation of their transparency value, and it lets all their customers know they are a part of Buffer’s ongoing improvement.

Measuring customer success can be challenging. Unlike many companies, Buffer does not count the number of replies or exchanges it takes to close an issue. “We disregard replies per conversation. Most customer success teams look at this as speed to resolution, but we know that happy customers reply back and forth a few times,” Carolyn says.

Carolyn has two measures of success for her team: “First we work on the hypothesis that a faster answer leads to a happier customer. So, we track how fast we respond to the first email and get the solution started. Second, we track self-declared happiness. Every email to a customer has emoticon ratings (provided by Hively). We track how many customers are happy with our solutions. Or not.

“Customers can also add comments to their rating, which only go to the support individual who responded, not for review or to management.” This, she explains, allows the “Happiness Heroes” to learn what they have done well and what they have not.

The best possible response to being hacked

Buffer was hacked recently. Their response was impressive, fast and very revealing, and customers responded with astonishing support. I asked Carolyn how they put together an effective customer communication plan so quickly.

“There was no plan. There was no one person defining the voice. It was a natural reflex for us to tell everyone,” Carolyn says. “That was the extent of the plan. We could not have imagined it going any differently.”

Buffer posted several times per day on their blog and social media on their progress and about the resolution. Instead of one “please change your password” email, customers knew every detail of the issue and resolution, and exactly what to do about it. Look at the overwhelmingly positive and supportive response. It’s the kind of response of which most companies dream.

Changing customers’ expectations

Carolyn sees Buffer’s approach of quick and direct responses as starting to overcome a culture in which customers expect to be angry and frustrated before they even get the help they need.

“We live in a culture that has trained customers to start on the offensive just to get good service, and it’s really easy for the customer service rep to react to that,” Carolyn says. “Often, you don’t get to talk to a manager or someone with authority to solve your problem unless you say a curse word.”

Carolyn and her team are working to get better and better at providing help that takes away the customer’s frustration and, she hopes, changes the starting expectation of her customers.

It’s working

Buffer’s and Carolyn’s ideas on how to create a customer focus in the business are groundbreaking. Even for those of us who are working to disrupt the customer relationship models that have done so much damage to the tech industry over the years are moved by companies such as Buffer to rethink our assumptions. Buffer is an example of what can be done when you throw out your experience and start with a customer-focused set of assumptions.

Buffer is a young, growing company, but it’s experiencing very low churn rates (5-6% at last count). Only 2% of customers are paying for the service, but they see conversion rates increasing month-to-month (note that the Happiness team is not compensated for conversion).

I say it’s working.

What do you think?

Customer Success

Customer Service Culture Keeps Customers Coming Back

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Here are  examples  of two very different customer service cultures.  Which would you prefer?

Let’s say you have to bring your car in for repair.  The mechanic diagnoses the problem. Would you choose:

A)  The shop where the mechanic tells you:  “This is a simple issue.  We fix these all the time.  It’s not going to be any problem at all.  Your car will be good as new in a few hours.  Just go about your business, and I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

or

B)  The shop where the mechanic tells you, “Your car’s coolant system has three leaks in different hoses.  The hoses are easy to access, and I have replacements in stock.  It will take me two or three hours to replace the hoses and test them to be sure they are working.  I’ll call you as soon as I’m done.”

If you’re like me, not only do you prefer option (B), but if you run into the mechanic in option (A), you’re likely not to come back (and maybe not even leave your car in the first place).

The reason is we don’t like to be dismissed, and we don’t like condescension.  The mechanic in option (A) was condescending and a bit insulting. She assumed we not only have no idea how our car works but that we don’t care to know and will trust her implicitly. The mechanic in option (B) showed respect for our knowledge, ownership of the car, and likely, our time.

Is your company’s customer service  insulting your customers without even knowing it?

I’ll give you another example of good and bad customer service.  Recently, I contacted technical support for two different software products.  Both are websites that run SaaS products.  Both issues were simple ones that required little explanation and should have been easy to identify as issues (I can’t say how hard they would be to fix).

Company 1 responded like this:

We really appreciate you bringing us this kind of issue affecting our software’s performance.  Rest assured our developers are fully aware of the changes and the glitches that occurred after the software update.  They have made these adjustments their top priority to ensure our software is as stable as possible.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.

Company 2 responded like this:

Thanks so much for writing in!  This is a great question, not too odd at all!   I’m afraid there isn’t a great solution for this at the moment.  Sorry about that.   We haven’t figured out a great way for it to know to re-look for the image and description if nothing shows up at first.  Great idea though, and we definitely see the value of it.

Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you on that one.  Is there anything else I can do to help or any questions I can answer?

I’m guessing you know which one I thought was well-done and which I thought was disingenuous

Company 1’s response is more troubling than just a dismissive response.  It points to a customer service culture that assumes customers want reassurance and kind words above all else.  It suggests that the company’s customer service protocol has guidelines or even templates that advance the idea that customers are to be dealt with and dismissed as quickly as possible.

This was reinforced after my follow-up question asking if they knew about the specific issue and might be working on it.  I was told there are many issues on which the developers are working and that I could be certain they would be informed of this one.  Further reinforcing the dismissive approach, five days later the company announced an update that resolved the specific issue.  I have to assume someone there knew that this update was coming yet failed to communicate that to me.

Company 2’s response points to a customer service culture of openness and honesty.  Telling me that there is “no great solution” admits the software has shortcomings and just can’t do everything all the time.  This is true of all products of all kinds.  Being direct about the limitations and aspirations of your product shows both honesty and confidence in your ability to deliver value to your customer.

My cultural assumptions were reinforced on follow-up exchanges, where I offered an idea for a solution, and an interesting discussion on how to best get the specific value I needed from the product ensued.

Evaluating customer service

Far too many companies evaluate the performance of technical support or customer service success on how quickly issues can be resolved and how friendly the language of the company’s representative is.  Both of these measures lead the customer service teams to shorten their responses, use more reassuring and friendly (not honest and direct) language, and to be dismissive of customer issues in the hope they will accept answers such as those above from Company 1 and go away.

But customers are evolving the other way.  Customers demand more details and honestly from companies, as well as more and more transparency.

In order to meet the needs of this evolving customer, companies must also change their customer service culture and the metrics that support it.  For example, rather than measuring duration of interactions, you might measure how many interactions it takes for the customer to consider the issue resolved.  You might also want to measure how much progress each interaction made toward resolving the issue (if it makes no progress, you are wasting time and angering your customer).  Your metrics should always focus on what the customer perceives as progress and what your customer perceives as a resolution.

Is your company’s customer service  culture dismissing and alienating your customers?

Try acting like a customer with a problem for a day, and go find out.  Then tell us your story in the comments.