ChaosScenario

Love Thy Customers: Advice for the Next Decade

"You know what the first rule of flying is? ... Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as a turn of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' before she keels. Makes her a home." - Malcom Reynolds, Serenity (2005)

There's a scene in the sci-fi classic movie, Serenity, where, after a successful heist perpetrated against the evil Alliance, the crew's captain Mal takes the booty back to the job's sponsors, Fanty and Mingo, to give them their 25% commission and (hopefully) get another job. 

"Well our end is forty, precious," says Fanty. One gets the sense that there was soon going to be a major fight when the dueling parties were distracted by an even more entertaining brawl.

Can you imagine a world without trust?

You're at the checkout counter of the grocery store. You need some ingredients for apple crisp. The clerk, who has been eyeballing you for your entire visit, refuses to put the groceries in the bag until he's seen the money. You refuse to show the money until you're sure he'll let you out of the store with them.

But back up. Because before you get to the checkout, you have to inspect all of the fruit. You want to make sure they're not old, rotten mush. You also need to inspect the bags of sugar to make sure they aren't filled with sawdust. The grocer doesn't want you to open the bags, out of fear that you'll replace his sugar with sawdust. So you'd leave without buying, because you don't trust that beady-eyed grocer.

But back up. Because you can't leave your house anyway to go to the grocery store out of fear that you'll get mugged by the ruffians that patrol the neighborhood. You've never seen them, but you're sure they're there. Anyway, the grocer could never have opened a store in the first place, because no one would trust him with a loan. You get your groceries from a garden out back, which is decimated with insects, because you don't have anyone to sell you pesticides.

Successful, sustained commerce depends on a lot of things. We talk a lot about them in the course of our work. Some of them have value, some of them are hogwash. ROI. CPM. Engagement. Usability engineering. Experience. Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Branding. Income statements, balance sheets, cash flow. Social Media. Customers service.

We go to school, conferences and seminars to understand or execute them better. We send wads of cash to Amazon and Barnes and Noble to gobble up Seth Godin's books. And there's nothing wrong with ANY of that. Why would I begrudge anyone from getting better at the technical aspects of their jobs?

But what if we need something more elemental than all of that?

What if our deepest problem isn't whether we know how to calculate return on investment and successfully predict the future. Specifically, what if our deepest problem is that we don't love our neighbors well? And if that is true, what can we do about it?

What's more, how do we encourage each other to love others better? It seems a little self-serving. For when we say to our neighbors, "Love your neighbor," we're including ourselves in that group. We're saying to them, "Love us better." But as a man in the business of talking to others in business, my advice to all those who wish to be successful is this:

Love your customers better.

Thinking over the last decade, we've seen the likes of Enron, WorldCom, Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers -- the entire banking and investment industry -- industries run by "the best and the brightest," who went to the "best" schools run multi-billion dollar businesses into the ground as they sought to enrich themselves. It isn't a question of whether they knew how to do math. It was that they loved themselves more than they loved their neighbors.

Why is love so important to commerce?

• You don't rob someone you love.
• You don't try to swindle someone you love.
• You don't overcharge someone you love.
• You keep your promises to someone you love.

The apostle Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13 what love is and just how important it is. Let's look at what he says, particularly about knowledge or the ability to tell the future:

"And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing."

He continues.

"Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away… So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

When you look at the last decade through the lens of improving technologies and products that change the way we communicate, it superficially appears to be a much different environment than in decades past. Could you have imagined Facebook and Twitter a decade ago? Could you have predicted its adoption?

What's more, people who are so inclined have more sophisticated methods to take advantage of/steal from others -- through economics or politics -- and that fosters an abiding suspicion of business, whether the suspicion is well founded in any particular instance or not.

But sometimes you have to take a step back from the pounding you're taking and get back to the basics. None of the things we do in business and marketing makes a difference if we have not love. What's most important to you? What do you want to accomplish? You want to see economic recovery? Then love thy customers. When you do that purely, the circumstances that follow apart from that don't even matter.

- Cam Beck

How to Create a Remarkable Experience

About three weeks ago, the inestimable Jay Ehret, AKA "The Marketing Guy" invited me to participate in a webinar about remarkable customer experiences. Jay's always been great to work with, and this project was no exception.

His Customer Experience Map Pack is an impressive piece of work. Very handy.

The funny thing was that I hadn't seen his part, so I had no idea what he was going to talk about specifically. I just know his work overall pretty well, and I was confident that our ideas would align. As it turned out, besides introducing and explaining how to use the Customer Experience Map, his other major theme was "How to break away from industry norms and create a remarkable experience by framing your business with a metaphor."

My part could be summed up thusly: "Your brand is either the parachute or the pavement; your website is the ripcord."

Enjoy! - Cam Beck

Branding is Character. What Does Your Character Show?

Stuff happens.

So does branding. This is true whether you call it "branding" or not. As it turns out, branding has less to do with cutesy creative and clever themes than it has to do with your ability to consistently keep promises of your company -- to build your company's reputation as a firm of good character.

Not all promises are created equal, and all people do not assign equal value to all promises. This is why it is so difficult -- and increasingly useless -- to build a brand that pleases all people, all of the time.

Before all else, know who you are and what you stand for. Only then can you focus on making extraordinary promises to an audience that places a high value on those promises -- and then over-deliver. - Cam Beck

Empower Your Employees to Pleasantly Surprise Your Customers

This morning I walked into a particular suped-up convenience store/gas station for the first time and marveled at what I saw. I hadn't been into one for a long while (about 12 years), but this one was much nicer than I remembered. I had to ask an employee where the coffee was, and he drew me a map on scented paper.

Kidding! Kidding! But he did point me to where I needed to go, being sure to address me as "my friend."

I was lucky enough to have enough time this morning to evaluate my options. There were a lot of them. While making my selection, I made a mental note about which one I would have to try next time.

I went to check out, and the same attendant was there to ring up my order.

"Is this the first time you've been in [one of our stores], my friend?"

"It is," I somewhat regretfully replied, now realizing what I had been missing.

With one graceful movement, he tore a coupon from a book he had at his station, good for one free coffee.

"Please come back soon."

"I will," I assured him, and I left with a smile.

A free coffee is such a small gesture. But this establishment was committed to getting me to return, so they empowered their employees to not only encourage my return, but nearly guarantee that I will.

Some companies would be nervous about letting their front-line employees give away free stuff. Perhaps the opportunities for doing so seem somewhat limited. Whatever they decide to do, I advise them to find a way to, as Drew McLellan recommends, pleasantly surprise their customers -- especially the ones coming in for the first time. - Cam Beck

How to reach your audience without getting in their way

With all the criticism that Facebook received for appreciably changing their terms of service, it's interesting to note the positive way they responded that probably prevented any mass exodus.

Full disclosure: I have to mention that I completely empathize with their predicament. While their membership is growing by leaps and bounds across the world, they've had difficulty implementing an effective means to monetize that takes advantage of their unique data mining methods.

The market is fickle. People don't care that they're getting this awesome platform without any membership fees. When Facebook tried to monetize and launched one of its first initiatives, Beacon, the public revolted. Their 2008 ad revenue, in spite of the vast numbers of people using the platform, is less than that of MySpace.

By the time I got word that Facebook revised their terms of service, people had already started revolting.

Facebook then did two good things well. The first was in direct response to the outcry and threat of lawsuit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and the groundwork from the other was laid long before this was even a blip on the EPICs radar.

1. They recanted the policy and solicited feedback from the audience
2. They communicated directly with the members without the normal lawyer-speak.

(To show how fickle the marketplace really is (and what an itchy trigger finger people have),the executive director of the EPIC, Marc Rotenberg, withheld filing the his complaint with the FCC but promised to keep it in his back pocket.)

As for the other issue, here is the message Facebook sent out to all its members at the top of their member home page:

Notice the "Close" call to action in the upper right hand corner?

If the users don't really care about what's going on behind the scenes, they can just close out the message, and it won't return. I imagine Facebook can use this method to communicate any message they need to communicate to their audience about their service.

They kept it short and to the point, and it speaks directly to the people who were raising the fuss in the first place. In 4 short sentences, the Facebook team was able to explain

• Why they're sending the message.
• What they're going to do about it.
• How to get more information.
• Instructions on how to participate in the conversation.

That's all well and good. But here's the question:

If Facebook can communicate issues before the fact in a manner that provides an easy way to ignore it, if the users wish, can't they just have let their users know, in the same way, that their terms of service were going to change, and have solicited feedback before they pushed it live?

It seems getting feedback from the community before they blow up might be the best way to avoid these sorts of situations in the future.

And in the meantime, they might want to keep Marc Rotenberg's number on speed dial. Especially in a space where privacy is a huge concern, bringing in a privacy advocate (even if he does represent only the most privacy-conscious) for advice just seems smart. - Cam Beck

How to destroy a good brand

Inspired by this post by Lewis Green.

Managing Negative WOM Through Twitter

For Christmas, my wife got me a Polar FT60, a cross-training heart rate monitor and general fitness computing aid. It's the first time I've ever owned anything remotely similar. This thing is a technological marvel. It's worn on the wrist like a watch, but it also has a chest strap and optional GPS aid or a pedometer. With a gazillion features and only 4 buttons to manage them, even while scanning (not reading) the manual, I was immediately perplexed, and I said as much on Twitter.

As you can see, initially I didn't even mention the brand. I wasn't trying to knock the company or the product. I was just pointing out a problem that's inherent with a feature-rich device that has by necessity only a few buttons with which to interact with the features.

Once I figured out how to capture my heart rate, I posted that I figured it out, and that my heart rate was 61. But then I saw the word "elite," and it didn't seem to match my understanding of human biology. A higher resting heart rate SHOULD mean I'm in worse shape, not better.

Because Twitter was on, I decided to solicit an explanation from Twitter, and for good measure I added a hash tag so it would be seen by Jason Falls' Twit2Fit social media fitness group (which I've written about before), even if they weren't following me on Twitter.

I mentioned the brand this time (Polar), but not because I was knocking them, but rather to provide context to what I was seeing so someone could answer my question.

Within a few minutes, I found the page in the manual that explained what I was seeing (that the number wasn't my heart rate, but an index they use to determine fitness).

"Never mind," I posted to Twitter. "HRM told me my 'index' not my heart rate. #twit2fit"

Within an hour, someone called "ChrisPolarUSA," who appears to be an employee of Polar's call center, offered to help me through whatever issue I was having.

I didn't see it that night, but I responded the next morning that I figured it out, and he wrote back to let me know that I could contact him if I needed anything. I really appreciated that his response was:

• Timely
• Useful
• Personal
• Friendly

It hadn't even crossed my mind yet to contact tech support. I wasn't soliciting help from Polar. I also didn't denigrating the brand as someone else in a similar situation may have. But even if I had, ChrisPolarUSA likely would have been right on top of it to help me through my problem.

Not everyone needs to have a presence on Twitter 24/7. I don't know that Polar does this round the clock, but the fact that he responded after 9 p.m. (and again at 7 the next morning) surely indicates that they might.

But even if they don't, they've made a believer out of me by listening. But more than that, they listened where their customers are, not where they wished them to be (such as on their proprietary fitness aid, polarpersonaltrainer.com, which I've been meaning to get around to using but haven't).

So, Polar... If you're listening (and I suspect you are), thank you. Not only for offering to help me solve my problem, but for showing the world that it is possible to deliver great customer service -- even in increments of 140 characters or less. - Cam Beck

P.S. As far as I can tell at this moment, the FT60 rocks!

Nothing is free. Not even this headline.

When David Armano describes the "Gift Economy," he rightly puts the word "free" in quotes. He does so, I suspect, because he realizes, like economist Milton Friedman said, "There is no free lunch." More accurately, nothing finite is free. But what we have in infinite abundance is worthless.

Love is free. Commitment is not.

You could say, for instance, that love may be infinite and therefore can be free.

But if I say, "I love my fellow man," yet do nothing to demonstrate that love with my time, what value is it for me to say "I love my fellow man?"

This website is not free.

You may think that this website is free. It isn't. 

If you've gotten this far, you're voluntarily paying me with your attention, and for that payment you probably expect to see or read something entertaining or enlightening.

If I don't deliver, you may be reluctant to return.

If I do, you may subscribe to this blog's RSS feed.

Your attention is valuable.

And lest you believe I don't value your attention, know that between last night and this morning, I probably spent about 45 minutes thinking about this morning's post. I'll also take another 30 minutes or so to write it, given time for editing and proofing.

This says nothing at all of the time I continuously spend trying to improve the veracity of my thoughts or the manner in which I can deliver them in order to gain and keep your trust.

How to love your customers

When you say you love your customers or clients, do you mean it, or do you simply value the revenue stream they represent?

We value money because it is scarce and because it allows us to buy other things that are scarce, but time is the great equalizer. Some people have more money than others, but each of us has the same number of hours in a day.

And we're all going to die one day.

Therefore, the first way you should show your customers you love them is by respecting their time.

If you're not going to help them make their time more enjoyable (and don't overestimate your ability to do that with marketing fluff), help them use their time more effectively. Stop treating them as if their time -- or their loyalty -- is free.

It isn't. Nothing is. Not even this closing sentence. - Cam Beck

What "Joe the Plumber" Can Teach Us About Internet Marketing

In last night's debate between Senators Barrack Obama and John McCain, the "undecided voters" were introduced to a person some of us political junkies had known about for several days. Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber and hopeful entrepreneur, confronted Obama at a campaign stop in Ohio about the higher taxes he'd pay if the Senator from Illinois had his way.

Joe felt cheated. As if he were being punished for having some success in life.

After all, he'd been working about 15 years to get to the point that he could afford to buy a business and improve his family's quality of life only to have someone come in, under threat of penalty and imprisonment, to take away what he earned through his hard work and effort -- not to mention the capital he put at risk.

Obama responded, (paraphrasing) "Well, you'd be taxed more now, but for the 15 years leading up to this point, you'd have been taxed less under my plan. I just wanna spread the wealth."

(Or, as Joe heard it, Obama wants to spread Joe's wealth.)

Now, before you run away, this isn't about Joe's, Obama's, or McCain's politics.

It's about Joe's desire to be free from someone telling him that they're restricting his freedom for his own good. 

It's about the audacity of anyone to suggest that people perched high in their offices (political or corporate), know better than the Joes of the world how their time or the fruits of their labor should be spent.

Sadly, in spite of a wealth of information that should discourage the practice of such tactics, companies still fall victim to the same, navel-gazing mindset -- particularly on the Internet.

• They hide critical information (such as price) because they're afraid the customer might get "sticker shock."
• They force users to complete a form that requires more information than is really needed.
• They bloat a website with marketing fluff instead of clear, concise content germane to the user's task.

The intent of the marketers is not to "punish" their visitors. Quite to the contrary. They covet and need these people as customers. So why do they insist on getting in their way? Don't they know that damages their brand?

They just don't understand what's required of them with respect to visitors who have plenty of options to get their questions answered.

Hint: It usually starts with a Google or Yahoo search.

But the marketplace doesn't succeed or fail on intentions. Its success rests on the the participants' ability to deliver. Since Web users are absolutely ruthless in pursuit of their goals, companies need to check their egos and their fears long enough to get out of their customers' way -- or else they'll be gone before the company even knows what happened. 

And once gone, it will be terribly expensive to get them back. - Cam Beck

How to Make Political Predictions This Election Season

Trying to woo younger voters, John McCain changed his name to J-Mack and picked as his running mate Sarah Palin, the spunky 44 year-old governor of Alaska. This came as a shock to most members of the media (and those who believe their political analyses), who figured the Republican would pick a liberal, a moderate like himself, or someone who conveniently pretended to be conservative for his own presidential run.

This move didn't surprise everyone, however. The day before the pick, I had to suffer through Barack Obama's acceptance speech in order to provide an analysis for CK and the Daily Fix. While writing editing my contribution, Paul McEnany and I tweeted up a conversation about who the Republican formerly known as McCain would pick on August 29.

A little backstory - Paul, Erin  Middleton and I had lunch at Genghis Grill awhile back... back when Hillary Clinton had a big lead in the polls and fundraising. I said then that Barack Obama would win the Democratic nomination, not Hillary.

This officially makes me 2 for 2 in political predictions this season.*

So how did I guess it? Well, of the names that had been floated, this is the only one that gave J-Mack a shot. The rest were either too boring, too liberal, or both.

J-Mack needed desperately to do three things:

1. Inject energy and hope into his campaign,
2. Reinforce his maverick credentials, but only
3. While shoring up his conservative base 

Why?

J-Mack established his darling "maverick" status among the (90% Democratic) media by voting against his own party. This was evident in a few particular areas that caused his party to be less than thrilled that he ended up being the nominee from a crowded field of less-than-exciting candidates.

Among the issues that angered the Republican Party's base, the Senator from Arizona sponsored, voted for, and/or spoke in favor of:

1. Campaign finance reform that limits free speech.
2. Comprehensive immigration reform that had, at its centerpiece, pardons for those who illegally came into or stayed into the U.S. against the will of the people as expressed in their laws.
3. Shutting down the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to gain favor in world opinion.

Besides voting against President Bush's proposed tax cuts, it also didn't help McCain allegedly considered accepting an offer to be Democrat Sen. John Kerry's running mate in 2004, a move that even Joseph Biden (Obama's current running mate) endorsed at the time.

In addition, in the last 8 years, J-Mack has repeatedly thumbed his nose at conservatives and Christians, the activists who dominate Republican politics.

It was so bad that Focus on the Family founder and leading Christian activist, psychologist James Dobson openly wondered if he would even be able to cast a vote for President, if McCain became the nominee.

The media loved McCain for it, of course, but this put him on shaky footing moving toward the nominating convention.

Now even James Dobson is changing his tune.

I wouldn't have guessed he'd pick Palin had the name not surfaced a few weeks ago. I had heard of a Republican governor trying to weed out corruption in her home state (including among Republicans), and of course I considered this a good thing, but with the exception of former actors, I don't make a habit of memorizing the names of governors of other states.

The base of the Republican Party has been yearning for a young, incorruptible leader. Someone who is not wishy-washy but who could also appeal to the masses.

In Palin, J-Mack selected someone indisputably more conservative than him, but who, like McCain is unafraid to vote against her own party (Though she typically attacks it from the right, while McCain attacks it from the left).

If Palin acquits herself well in this election, and if she has the desire, win or lose in November, she may have the support she needs to become the person to lead the Party well into the future. That is motivating enough for many to get off of their hands and jump into the fight.

But what does this all mean? How do you duplicate this phenomenal success in making political predictions?

Easy.

Candidates of the two major parties will always act in what they believe to be their best interests. Even if they have noble intentions for the country while running, they cannot govern if they lose the election. So it makes no sense for a candidate to sabotage his own chances by doing what the media and other people who have no desire for him to win want him to do.

The candidates need the support and excitement of their party faithful. They know they cannot win an election on the strength of their ideas alone -- or even in their ability to communicate it. They need to motivate someone else to do the grunt work for them, for even though we can read all a candidate has to say about a subject, our friends have more influence over us than the candidates we never met and probably never will meet. 

• These are the same people who work the phone banks until after the sun has set.
• These are the same people who stay up late at night to read and write the planks of their party's platform.
• These people talk to their friends about how excited they are.
• They ensure nobody cheats at the polling places.

Just picking a conservative wouldn't have been enough. Because he didn't just need to placate conservatives, he needed to motivate them and give pause to those who would vote for his opponent on more superficial grounds.

What is true of electioneering is also true of marketing.
Do you want to accurately predict your own success?

Then start by delighting your customers.

They will be better advocates for you than even the snazziest suits or the cleverest of advertising campaigns. They will do for you what a microsite never could, but only if you pay attention to their needs and their worries first.

That way, you, too can pretend you're a prognosticating genius  when all you were doing was following decisions according to their logical paths. - Cam Beck

*Full disclosure: I never predicted who would win the Republican nomination -- I just didn't know -- but I underestimated the confusion the lackluster field would cause. Because of the difficulties I listed earlier, I (unofficially) predicted that McCain would drop out of it. So really, I'm a respectable but unremarkable 2/3 this season.