Customer Conversation by Valeria Maltoni

10:10 am | 0 recommendations | 8 comments

Innovation: Customers Have Conversations with Brands that Have Good REPUTATIONS

Fast answer -- which one are you more likely to cut some slack Apple or Microsoft? When you pick up the phone to call the customer care number, what is your state of mind if you know that someone from Apple is on the other end of the phone? Now try Microsoft. Try any wireless operator. That’s what I thought.

Here’s the thing, we do business with people we like. Period. Liking leads to trusting, it’s not the other way around. Jeffrey Gitomer has a nice sound bite on that. You may build credibility and show expertise, be believable, but in the end you don’t marry someone who is credible, you marry someone you like. The same happens when you deal with companies.

Companies spend millions to provide thought leadership, enhance their credibility with tons of proof points, print sell sheets, and glossy brochures -- they would be much better off using those funds building reputation, which leads to respect. You approach and respond to someone you like in a very different way than you do to someone you don’t. In that case, you react.

You dial the 800-number for customer service and in your head you are already preparing for a fight. The thoughts and arguments that pop up are in defense of your argument, one minute longer on hold and you are ready to read them the book on what you think about their poor service.

Now go to a different place. You are calling a company whose brand you like so much that you’ve been telling many friends about it. You wear, or use their products proudly. What goes through your head? My educated guess is that it’s something entirely different. You are already cutting them some slack.

The tough deal Steve Jobs negotiated with AT&T is benefiting the huge (and often disliked) wireless provider. AT&T now looks better -- because of the iPhone and the positive power of the Apple brand. That alone has given AT&T more brand rejuvenation and a better reputation than the acquisition of Cingular, especially after the company decided to throw away all that good brand capital by folding the hip image into the stodgy conglomerate.

A brand with a good reputation on its resume can get more doors open in the hearts and minds of its customers exactly like a person with a good work history. Are you putting your budgets where it counts? Are you building and maintaining a good reputation for your company and products brands?

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

10:52 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Innovation: If Experts Were CUSTOMER CHAMPIONS

“I don’t want to talk to a sales rep, I’m not ready to buy,” he said. This is what happens as a result of compensation tied exclusively to a sale made and not a long-term account or customer relationship. There are experts in an organization we are willing to talk with because we know they will put forth an informed opinion and advice without trying to sell us something we don’t want right now. Ironically, we may end up buying as a result.

Many of these skilled voices are consultants, but many more are technical people who are quite passionate about their field and have the experience to know it inside out. What would happen if those same people answered the customer service phone lines? Not on the tenth ring, not after going around voice activate menus until you get lost -- immediately, as if they were looking forward to speaking with you.

- They would not be afraid of you questions. Used to solving problems as they arise, these professionals would be able to dig deeper, probe, and get to the bottom of the reasons why you called with you.

- As an extension of that point, they would be keen listeners. That means they do not finish your sentence for you - and by extension do not take what is happening to you for granted; you don’t and that is an important point to get across.

- They would speak in a human voice. One thing that amazes me about people with considerable experience, aside from the casual way in which they treat their own expertise as if it were no big deal, is that they are able to articulate complex information is ways that are easy to understand.

- They would use stories and examples to paint a picture for you. No thick user manuals or technical mumbo jumbo. After your call you will not have to digest a multiple step instruction manual. it will be enough to have had the benefit of a real life example.

- They may end up promoting a competitor if they know there is value there for you. The product of intense immersion in a field of expertise is the sense of affiliation to all the professionals that make up that field and see them as colleagues. This also means that in their eyes you, the customer, come first.

This is not fantasy, it’s the product of years of observation while working inside organizations. Customer interactions are a gift, and an opportunity to gain insights in what should make us eager to show up in the morning.

Could we convince customer service reps to be passionate about customers, too? Or do we want to continue hearing: “Calling the 800-number is a waste of time, nobody cares,” before we are even given a chance speak? What would happen if those we trust to be customer champions became experts at being just that?

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

11:15 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Innovation: Best Buy Apologizes for Cease and Desist to Laughing Squid

Scott Beale was having a regular day on Tuesday December 11. His blog, Laughing Squid, was being profiled in a San Francisco publication. Life was good. Then he announced on his Twitter stream that he had just received an early holiday gift from Best Buy. Except for this was not really a welcome one -- a “cease and desist” letter.

Apparently the Best Buy legal department took notice of some coverage Scott was running on another blog at Laughing Squid. Improv Everywhere selling Best Buy blue polo shirts as inspired by a stunt the group ran at a Best Buy store. After talking with his lawyer, Scott decided to publish the cease and desist letter on his blog.

Imagine yourself in his shoes. You were having a perfectly regular day and here pops an official-looking letter filled with legal language. That is enough to send your heart rate up and drain your blood to the extremities. What do you do? I suspect you would not act too differently from Scott. Maybe you pick up the phone and call your most trusted friend or adviser, especially if she happens to be a lawyer. Then you proceed to talk to several other people in your family and community.

Scott decided to blog and Twitter about it. He was reporting on something on his blog, he was not the originator of the stunt, nor the creator of the new polo shirt line and logo. Being a publisher probably taught Scott a thing or two about communications as his next action was to approach the lawyer who sent the letter. Coming up empty handed, he then gave the Best Buy corporate PR department a try.

Good thing that he did. As the cease and desist letter was making its way on top of Digg with more than 100,000 views in less than 24 hours, the corporate PR folks were promising to look into the situation. Five hours after that promise, Scott received a letter of apology from Best Buy. Then a PR person called to follow up and close the loop.

I agree with Scott, they handled the matter really well, and swiftly. Luck was on his side in the selection of a data center as well. If Rackspace is to live up to its reputation of Fanatical SupportTM, Scott should be in good hands. The story is that we were literally following the events live on Scott’s Twitter stream, as you can see at my blog.

Customers today have a wider reach than they ever had:

- global networks -- Scott’s Twitter stream reaches 2,948 people
- publishing tools -- blogs, Twitter, Facebook accounts, etc.
- influencing power -- where before customers were passive leads, today they are active community members who gain credibility and the ear of their peers through participation

All these tools are available to individuals and companies alike. In the end, it’s individuals who make the decisions -- Scott reported the matter fairly, and Best Buy corporate PR lived up to their promises.

It’s tempting to use the power we have as a weapon. Yet, it is much more productive to use it to start real conversations. It is precisely this implied power that customers have to speak out and broadcast that is finally teaching companies to do the right thing.

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

06:46 am | 0 recommendations | 4 comments

Innovation: 5 Things Customer Service Can Learn from SANTA CLAUS

You’ve read me write that before -- customer relationships are conversations, and customer service is the new marketing. One very important part of conversation is the spirit in which we approach it. In many ways, children got it right -- they approach every wish as possible. What do you want to be when you grow up? An astronaut!

The other important part of conversation is listening. What would you like Santa to bring you this year? Is the often unspoken question children begin to think about right about now when it gets chilly outside (well, in my part of the world) and signs of the holidays are starting to be everywhere you turn. Children look clearly into your eyes and tell you they are making their list for Santa.

Let’s take a look at five things that customer service can learn from Santa Claus:

1. Santa exists in the minds of those who believe in him. It’s the same for corporations. No matter what you think you are, you're only what your customers believe you to be.

2. Santa knows what kids want. Customers aren't children (usually!). But think about the last conversation with your best client. Was it about something they wanted -- or you?

3. Santa reads your list. More importantly, he checks it twice. What's worse than missing the opportunity to delight your customer? Letting a sloppy mistake ruin it. Accuracy is the star of your marketing team.

4. Santa rewards good behavior. In these days of increasingly compressed budgets, it's certainly easy to justify skipping the little things: sending a valued client a nice holiday gift, rather than the cheapest thing that will hold a logo. These economies are false savings.

5. Santa delivers -- every single time. Check the history books and you'll find Santa has never sent his regrets due to scheduling difficulties or bad flight weather. Find your Rudolph. Being there isn't half the battle. It's everything.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” Or there should be, when it comes to customer service. And, just like Christmas, the spirit of customer service excellence really should go on long after the wreath is boxed and you've taken the tree to the curb.

Regardless of which holiday you celebrate this month, may your days be filled with success, and your homes with peace.

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

10:15 am | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

Innovation: Starwood Hotels- Lobby vs. Lobby, Does the Customers’ WIN?

The other day I was researching hotels for an upcoming trip to Europe and came across a review on a Starwood property in Venice; it was beautifully written, very balanced, and complete with photographs. A customer wrote it.

It turns out that two avid Starwood fans created a whole site where customers can find unbiased reviews of the chain’s properties uploaded by other customers -- the users themselves. The site was created at the end of 2005 by John H. and John P.

“Researching your hotel should be an easy and uncluttered experience that focuses on the issues you care about most,” they write. A built in community forum allows people to jump in and join the conversation. The photography is pretty compelling as well.

So let’s review:

- Compelling stories about people’s stay at Starwood properties
- Very good photography (they use Flickr)
- Community forum (they use Flyertalk)
- Featured main review and lobby art

All written by customers with the exception of the news section, which is pulled from Yahoo. It would have been nice to have this site organized like a blog, but I can see why it wasn’t done this way -- the write ups are reviews made by customers and not designed to be the launching pad for conversations. Instead, they are already posts complete with opinions and detailed descriptions from diverse points of view. Those of guests who have stayed at a Starwood hotel.

In April 2006, Starwood launched its own blog to “help the properties preferred guests with information written by a core group of travel experts.” The official blog also offers behind-the-scenes looks at exciting opportunities arranged by Starwood Hotels and staff. The blog includes:

- Places, tips, activities
- Foods, drinks, nightlife
- News, secrets, insights
- Oddities, detours, surprises
- Holidays, events, getaway

The articles are short, complemented by videos or images and newsy in style. They read like a travel magazine. The one comment I saw was by someone who was just browsing. It reminded me of when I walk into a store and the staff asks me how they can help me. I haven’t figured it out yet, but when I do you can rest assured that they are all busy doing something else.

This blog is written as if it were a site. The comments function is enabled, yet the posts are so professionally done and complete that they invite no comments -- a long series of commercials for Starwood features. Blogs are not web sites with a comment function enabled. They are something entirely different.

There was an opportunity here to engage with a community of travelers passionate about the hotels, why not join it? What do you think? Lobby vs. Lobby, which one wins your vote?

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

08:20 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

Innovation: 5 Ways to THANK Your Customers

Forget shiny objects, including prospects, for a moment. Forget social media, networks and online opportunities. You have plenty of material to work with as it is -- your customers are already doing business with you. How about showing them some appreciation? Here are 5 things you can do to show them how grateful you are for their business:

1. Send them a thank you card after a major purchase. Better if hand written. Along those same lines, send them a birthday card with a coupon. Raise your hand if you get more than a handful of each. Exactly, you will stand out.

2. Make your rewards program simple. Give people what they want by letting them choose among options. Hilton Honors does that by letting you choose among a combination of either HH basis points per dollar spent or a combination of basis points and miles.

3. Use your data base for them, not against them. Select a loyal customer at random and surprise them with a free gift or a discount. Refrain from congratulating your customers for being loyal with yet another sales pitch. Just send the gift.

4. Put a person with a nice smile and a good attitude in your customer facing roles -- returns, service, support. Pay them well and you get to keep them, and your customers.

5. Tell your customers how you’ve implemented their suggestions. What better way to communicate with a customer than that where you show them you were listening. There is no sweeter gift.

In the end there is no better way to say how important your customers are to you, than just telling them. Do that regularly, and walk the talk.

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

06:55 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Innovation: Customers Miss REVOLUTIONARY Credit Card News

Is it because we do not like to be anonymous? A new kind of credit card launches in September and it’s not all over the news. Founded by AOL’s Steve Case and an impressive team of experienced veterans of the credit card and banking business, Revolution Money has all the hallmarks for success. Where are the success stories?

This may be the greatest customer-friendly product you never heard about. According to an article in inside A.R.M.

Revolution Money offers users an anonymous credit card. With no name or account number on their card, consumers’ identities remain anonymous, drastically reducing the risk of identity theft, fraudulent charges and other consequences of cards being lost or stolen, according to company officials.

Mark at Digital Money World proclaims: Vive La Revolution! as thanks to a Web 2.0 platform, Revolution Money offers an online service similar to PayPal called Money Exchange -- with free account to account holder transactions -- and the Revolution Card, which charges merchants lower fees -- 0.5% vs. the industry average of 1.9%.

In 2006 the fees paid to credit cards in the US totaled $56 billion. Some of those savings may be passed on to you, the customer. With so much fanfare off the gate, such an impressive board of directors, and apparently enough funding, how come I had not heard about them?

This is the next generation credit card -- no names, no numbers, enhanced security, portable, and it would seem to me loved by everyone. Who likes to pay and risk more? A follow up story on St. Petersburg Time last month stated that Revolution Money’s CEO, Jason Hogg has been busy forging partnerships and the card is now accepted by about 100,000 merchants. The goal is to reach 1 M in the next year.

Is Revolution Card the iPhone of credit cards? Will it truly stimulate competition for customers and a friendlier interface? What’s next? A Google card?

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

10:13 pm | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

Innovation: Customer Relationships ARE Conversations

In the past couple of days, Steve Yastrow has been collecting definitions about “what is a customer relationships?” at Tom Peters’ blog. The working definition they’ve come up with is:

A relationship is an ongoing conversation with a customer, in which the customer never thinks of you without thinking of the two of you.

Customer relationships are conversation only and if there is an unwavering commitment on the part of the company to make it so. Let’s not forget that in exchange for providing a product or service, the company gets compensation.

True, if the organization is market-driven and knows what products and services customers want and need, there will be a profit and a value that it will put back into the marketplace in the form of higher stock valuations in the case of a public company and more jobs and benefits for the local economy in the case of a private company. Both things that end up putting value back into circulation for this wonderful mechanism we call economy.

In this sense, there is a relationship -- direct and indirect -- between value and service, which in this column we call conversation. Markets are always self-corrective so if the relationship is not proportional, the company will get into trouble at some point -- its stock will go down as a result of decreased sales or the private equity partners will not be able to realize their projected sales target.

Does it matter to this cycle what the definition is? Not one bit. Does it matter to customers? Probably not, either. As a customer, all I want to know is that someone will take care of me and they will do it efficiently if not happily.

So far, the best reasoning I read about the whole discussion comes from Paul H in the UK:

A customer relationship should be what the customer wants it to be. We want that to be a human relationship.

However - One of the challenges of dealing with corporate customers is that the human relationship happens at many different levels with many different people. Some have buying influence but many don't. Parts of the customer population love you, parts actively don't. All sorts of politics, influence and agendas come in - all based on human emotion, financial and project pressures. Who do you have the relationship with? Clearly everyone - but some are important and some aren't. Some are 3rd party partners etc.

To an extent this is why I am not 100% sold on customer satisfaction surveys - it's not that they are not valuable but they give such a narrow snapshot of the whole relationship and lull people into a false sense of security.

I wanted to raise this because I sense that many of the responses to these types of posts tend to have the customer as a single entity. The corporate world is far more complicated. Having said that if you can get the people right at grass roots level a lot of the other stuff flows well from that.

Thank you, Paul for thinking from many angles. I often like to think that colleagues and peers are also customers. There are many dependencies within organizational processes that if not satisfied will prevent a company from providing good customer experiences.

While it matters how we think about customer relationships and approach the opportunities we have to begin or continue these conversations with a mindset and attitude of service, I think that lofty goals of creating definitions may be just that -- ambitious attempts at reducing the complex mechanism of economics and human relationships to a pithy statement. Which in turn might reduce our ability to think expansively and helpfully. We are talking about relationships and conversation after all, they are quite fluid and personal.

Do we really need a mission statement to know that customers come first? Or is this just another internal exercise that might exonerate us from taking action in the right direction? The human kind.

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

09:25 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Innovation: A Few Things Your Customers Have Learned with the Help of Social Media

Your brands may have shifted radically from top of mind to bottom of the pile in your customers' lives – all thanks to social media. From premier to ordinary just in a few clicks thanks to the dozens forum reviews, blog posts, Twitter bursts, even text messages. These tools and your customers' increasing comfort level with using them are word of mouth on steroids.

The average consumer uses the Internet as an essential product research tool. We may purchase off line, but we surely enjoy the wealth of information we find online, especially any insights from other people who've gone through the same process. And here's where social media comes in.

It may not be enough anymore to have a company web site that is easy to use, displays clearly what you want to highlight with compelling content, and points people in the right direction. Although that is still seen as a priority for many companies, the rest of the organic search results that pop up when people enter key words that describe your business may very well be blog posts or forum boards. People will go visit those sites.

You may think that you don't need to monitor those search results for various reasons. Let me give you two main reasons why it's a good idea to do so – and to decide what you will do about your findings.

The first and most obvious reason is that if someone writes something negative, people will read it, even if it sounds preposterous and untrue. Without mentioning the considerable training we received from main stream media, humans are naturally drawn to negative news. That's why it sells. If you've made someone really unhappy with poor service today they don't only get mad, they tell everyone they can about it.

Social media serves as an amplifier. In some cases the news will spread and collect further testimonials along the way to snowball into this gigantic and unwieldy monster – a case against you. This is different from being a blip on the customer service line, even if recorded. If you discount what people say on blog posts, think again. A well written and balanced post, could lead to a major main stream media story with the research behind it and the distribution of a major corporation.

You will want to have an active role in the conversation to show you care, which is always a gesture of good faith. There is a secondary benefit to participation -- you may actually be able to set the record straight. The reason why people pore over forum boards and exchange tips with each other is probably because they got no help from you in the first place.

The second reason is of a positive nature. Someone may have written something about your product, service or business practice without knowing it has become inaccurate or obsolete over time. You want to correct that perception or it will damage your business. A case in point is from personal experience. I wrote a post that reported information shared at a live event.

My write up about the company was positive, yet one of the data points I used had since been changed into a different business practice. Because when people googled the company name my post came up third in the search results, business prospects demanded that a service include something that was no longer part of the company's business. The owner contacted me and asked me to revise my post, which I was happy to do after understanding the circumstances.

Two reasons, same advice. Pay attention to what your customers write about you online -- other customers, and prospect are.

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com

06:50 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Innovation: Google’s Math PUZZLES Customers

Your site just did the Google Dance — and your partner seems to have stepped on your foot. Today the giant information engine company downgraded several blogs with high PageRanks (PR) – the jury is out on why those sites were demoted. Among them ProBlogger, who has upward of 34,000 RSS subscribers, Copyblogger who has upward of 26,000 RSS subscribers – two among my favorite sources of good content written intelligently.

As Andy Beard wrote in his post on Digg favorites slapped by Google, this might be related to blog network interlinking. A civil discussion ensued in the comments of all those posts, dozens and dozens of them. Or does this mean that Google no longer values blogs as highly as it once did and is scaling back its authority accordingly?

If you remember, about a year ago Google divorced blogs from other news sites in its search results. Does this represent a continuation of that process?

In its corporate information page, Google characterizes its utility and ease of use as two of the reasons that have made it one of the world's best-known brands almost entirely through word of mouth from satisfied users.

Maybe your PR7 site is now a PR4. It remains to be seen exactly why these sites were demoted or how people will now view the authority of toolbar PageRank. But the question begs to be asked: what of it? For that matter, how important to you is Google, really?

As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page. This makes the advertising useful to you as well as to the advertiser placing it. We believe you should know when someone has paid to put a message in front of you, so we always distinguish ads from the search results or other content on a page. We don't sell placement in the search results themselves, or allow people to pay for a higher ranking there.

Google is a machine – a very smart machine, but a machine nonetheless. We are not machines. In practice, Google has been teaching bloggers to think like machines, not people. Most bloggers have no need for Google insofar as traffic goes. Yes, Google search results will bring some traffic to the PR0-PR6 sites, which make up the vast majority of the blogosphere. Whether this traffic is of value to the blogger is another question altogether.

Pro blogs and conventional commercial sites do need Google. Numbers matter in the sale of advertising and in click revenues. These sorts of sites also tend to post frequently on a wide variety of topics, which makes them attractive to Google's spiders. Consider, however, a hypothetical PR4 or PR5 blog. We'll say it’s about marketing and social networking. How much traffic will Google really bring them — 200 visitors a day? Probably less.

Let's go with 200 Google visitors a day, though I think most bloggers would be delighted with this number. Of this 200 visitors, 30-40% will bounce off the site immediately, not finding what it is they are looking for. Up to 50% the remaining 130 or so visitors will look at one page and leave forever. Of the 70 or so who are sufficiently engaged to read more than one page, perhaps 2% will actually comment or subscribe a blog's RSS feed, which is the primary goal of most non-pro bloggers. Thank you, Google, for 1.4 quality visitors per day.

Are you writing for Google or for your readers? If your business plan relies or depends solely on other companies and people for your success, you need to rethink it. You may not understand why they do what they do in their model, but I surely hope you decide why you do what you do in yours.

Valeria Maltoni • Conversation Agent • Philadelphia, PA • www.conversationagent.com