Archive for the ‘customer service’ Category

Embrace Benefits for Loyal Customers

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

On my way back from the Cannes Advertising Festival a few weeks ago a couple of work buddies and I decided to take a break and take advantage of our European travel to stop in London for a day at Wimbledon. I’m not a giant tennis fan, but I love any opportunity to experience a remarkable event. So it was a no-brainer to cross the channel and splurge on a day at Court 1 in this historic facility. But my “Marketing with Meaning” hat never comes off, dear readers. While enjoying the matches and sipping my new favorite summer drink, Pimm’s, I noticed something that sparked this blog post…

In the program for the event I noticed a full-page ad for HSBC—captured by my iPhone in the photo above. As you can see, HSBC offered free strawberries and cream for its cardholders at the matches. It struck me as a terrific example of Marketing with Meaning, and perhaps a new trend that other brands are picking up on.

Another great example of a brand that is providing added value for its loyal customers is Lexus. I recently had a chance to prepare a presentation for a group of Lexus dealers, and through the process of researching their work discovered how many of these independent businesses are similarly doing special things for their owners. For example, in several major cities around the U.S. local Lexus dealers have arranged for free, private parking for its car owners. You can find this benefit at the BankAtlantic Center in Tampa, at the Texas Rangers ballpark and AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, and at the U.S. Open tennis championship.

All too often in banking, automotive, or other businesses, current customers get little care and feeding once the bank account is open or the car drives off the lot. In these and many other industries (e.g., phone service, credit cards, cable TV) a vast majority of marketing dollars are put against acquiring new customers. Marketing managers become completely focused on cost-per-acquisition and churn rate, but rarely think about how the easiest sell is the one they’ve already made.

There is tremendous opportunity for brands to win by moving more of their marketing budgets to the benefit of current, loyal customers. Broadly speaking, there are two main benefits of this approach. First, there is almost always an opportunity to sell more products and services to those who are already buying from you. Car makers can convince you to put another one of their vehicles in the garage or upgrade to a new model faster. Banks have an opportunity to cross-sell countless other financial services.

But the second, often-ignored benefit of marketing to your current customers is that it can be a way to impress and win over new prospects. This ad for HSBC naturally advises current cardholders of a special treat, but in doing so it also shows all non-HSBC customers how well this bank treats its own. Similarly, Lexus understands that free, premium parking means that friends will want to ride in the Lexus owner’s car and thus get a free sample of the riding and service experience. And in both examples, the brand has chosen special, high-end events where the prized, highest-income customers attend.

How might you use marketing dollars to benefit your best customers while attracting prized prospects to your side? Or if you are already providing valuable services to current customers, how might you better show prospects what they are missing?

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Posted in customer service | 2 Comments »

Two Start-ups That Highlight Customer Service

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Most of our encounters with start-up companies in the digital world have been less than desirable. Because they are new and often overwhelmed by their growth, service often takes a backseat. But that happens less and less today, as the growth of social media means that not only do service gaffes hurt new companies’ prospects, but also that incredible service can itself drive word-of-mouth. Some companies, such as Zappos, have made customer service their main marketing tool. Lately I’ve encountered two newer companies’ customer service efforts–one good, and one poor–that offer tips on the right way to run your own company and another way to deliver Marketing with Meaning.

The Good: Poll Everywhere

This is a relatively new service that we’ve been using to create live SMS-based polls during powerpoint presentations.  Think of Poll Everywhere as a version of those devices that are sometimes handed out in big events and used to get immediately feedback and answers from the audience.  Except that this is much cheaper to create (even free versions are available) and can be done with nothing more than a basic mobile phone.  Within seconds you can create a poll and add a live, updating PowerPoint slide to your presentation. There are a variety of monthly service plans for the tool.

In terms of customer service, what I really loved about Poll Everywhere is that it sends you an email reminder two days before you are charged again for the service.  This worked well for me, as I recently traded up to the more expensive plan in order to use the service for a very large presentation I was giving. But in the month ahead I do not have a similar need. So this warning email allowed me to trade back down at a significant cost savings.

This simple step comes at some cost for Poll Everywhere, of course. I likely would have forgotten about my monthly fee for a month or more, giving the company additional revenue.  Further, I would have blamed myself for being dumb, not the company for continuing to charge me a rate that I chose to accept. By helping me spend my money wisely, Poll Everywhere earned my trust and my positive word-of-mouth.

I wish more companies would earn my trust and loyalty this way. Why doesn’t Netflix proactively offer me the opportunity to trade down to one movie per month when I go a long time between rentals? What if your gym or country club offered to reduce your monthly fee when it notices that you’re not going as often as your plan allows?  “Crazy,” I know, but in reality such moves engender enormous trust, and in most cases help retain customers who would be much more likely to opt out entirely after a few months of overspending.

The Bad: iStockphoto

iStockphoto has actually been around for more than four years, but it is still seems to be a small online start-up to me. It is one of a handful of low-cost stock photography sellers. I first learned about the service from Guy Kawasaki and used it when I began blogging a few years ago.  The price of $1 per image was right for my modest needs, and the company offered discounts when you bought credits in bulk.  It has been a good service that I recommend to others and we use the service from time to time at our agency.

But I was unpleasantly surprised a few months ago to receive an email from iStockphoto, explaining that my 100 credits would be expiring this week.  I was mystified by this message and policy. Maybe somewhere in the fine print the company explained that there was an expiration date for these credits, but this was certainly not obvious, and is completely inconsistent with just about any other service I have come across. As a regular user of iStockphoto, it’s not like I was some lapsed customer with a liability they needed to phase out.  I had about $100 that I was in danger of leaving on the table because the company arbitrarily decided to take these electronic bits away.

Although it was at least smart to warn me months in advance that my credits would expire, the act of stealing my money this way is outrageous. Remember, the company already got my money, and keeping record of my credits costs nothing. I believe this is incredibly shortsighted and bad for business. After all, there are many other places to secure stock photography, and the Internet makes it easier to set this up every day. By screwing over its customers for no real gain, iStockphoto ends up generating continuous waves of negative word-of-mouth. I did a quick Google search for “istockphoto credit expiration” and found several negative reviews. Count me as one person who will never use iStockphoto again, and who will look for ways to use my influence to weaken the company wherever possible.

Customer service is not an afterthought or something to “be managed.”  Rather, in the connected world of social media it is at the front lines of building trust and earning word-of-mouth–it’s Marketing with Meaning.

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Posted in customer service | No Comments »

Hotel Seeds TripAdvisor Reviews

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

intercontinental trip advis

When checking out of an InterContinental Hotel in Toronto a few weeks ago, I encountered a new tactic in the sphere of social-media marketing. The woman at reception inquired about my stay, and I replied that it was pleasant (especially after she let me delay my checkout so I could get some work done in the room). Then she handed me the document above and explained that if I left a review on TripAdvisor, the hotel would provide me with a complimentary upgrade the next time I stayed there. I thought it was a very interesting approach to seeding reviews, and something I’m sure we will all see a lot more of in the years ahead.

Obviously, when a hotel rewards a customer just for leaving a review, it’s got to be Marketing with Meaning. The first, obvious benefit is that the customer has a chance to get a free upgrade at the hotel just for leaving a review and printing it out. A nice freebie such as this is always appreciated, and the hotel benefits by potentially locking in future stays by a recurring business traveler. The cost of an upgrade is likely very small as long as there are rooms available.

But the other great thing about asking for customer feedback is that this request itself makes people feel better about how they choose to spend their money at a key moment of truth. When we sign the bill at a restaurant or check out of a hotel, we are making both conscious and unconscious decisions about whether we would come back again. By visibly showing she cared with a physical card and direct offer, the hotel receptionist was planting a positive seed in my mind.

Flash forward to when someone such as me logs on to TripAdvisor to leave a review, and one is predisposed to want to say something positive. After all, the hotel cared so much that it was encouraging me to offer my opinion in a positive place. Even if things were not great, people will be more likely to give a company the benefit of the doubt in such circumstances. This reminds me of a study I read about how doctors who are nicer to their patients are significantly less likely to be sued for malpractice. And if all else fails, the fact that you have to print off your feedback and show it to the receptionist when you return means that you would be embarrassed to be too negative in a review.

I am a firm believer that the act of leaving a review is one of the strongest ways for “marketing” to make an impact on customers’ brand loyalty. Reviews take time, conscious thought, and a realization that what you say will be read by other people—forever. This combination of factors builds strong, positive neural links in the mind. A traditional advertising “impression,” which leaves the short-term memory bank quickly, pales in comparison to this kind of connection.

And, of course, the final and possibly most important marketing benefit of this review program is that the InterContinental Yorkville has a much higher chance of receiving multiple, positive reviews on TripAdvisor, a leading online resource for trip planning. Reviews are rapidly becoming the main way that customers discover and decide on hotel choices. And if you really think about it, maybe the InterContinental should be putting 100% of its marketing budget into seeking more and better reviews. Millions of dollars of print ads in Sky magazine and billboards in airports can’t touch the power of landing “above the fold” on a review website where people are in buying mode. How would you allocate your dollars to ensure better reviews? Easy, you just hire the best people you can find and ensure that guests love their experience. In other words, you put your marketing dollars into the service itself.

I don’t know how long this program has been in use by the hotel, but it has a nice spot on the site as of this blog post. It is rated #6 out of more than 100 hotels in Toronto, and it has 167 total reviews.

If there’s anything negative here, it is that the users of TripAdvisor might not be getting the true, impartial reviews that they are expecting when people are biased by positive seeding such as this example. Interestingly, a growing body of examples shows that the average rating on product- and service-review sites is 4.0 out of 5.0 stars. In other words, everyone is above average when it comes to ratings. (We call this the Lake Wobegon effect.) But at the end of the day people are smart, and we all learn to seek multiple opinions and assume that people are predisposed to be either overly enthusiastic or negative in their reviews.

Kudos to the InterContinental Hotel in Yorkville/Toronto. I plan on staying there the next time I’m in town and encourage you to do the same.

(For more on the power of product reviews, check out this post on an email follow-up we did on a Healthy Choice coupon offer.)

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Posted in customer service, Reviews | 13 Comments »

How Meaningful Marketing Can Help a Non-innovative Brand

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

dove_logo

Over the holiday break I got a very interesting email question from Al Samuelian, VP Group Media Director at media agency MPG. He was in the middle of reading my book and paused to ask, in summary: “Can you implement a Marketing with Meaning strategy if your product or service stinks?” I thought it was a great question—and one of the reasons that I love opening up this entire concept to public discussion—so I choose to share our back-and-forth thinking here.

When Your Product Is Poor

My first response was fairly short and simple: No, you cannot win if your base product or service is sub-par. Brilliant marketing can never overcome a product that fails to live up to customers’ expectations. You can look to the movie industry for many examples of big ad budget films that petered out once the pixels hit the screen. And with digital and social media, negative word of mouth travels so many times faster and farther.

Al Samuelian replied with a great story about when a car marketer visited Google recently and asked, “What should I do when I get negative online reviews or social-media chatter about service at my dealerships?” The simple reply by the panel of Google experts: “You should improve service at the dealerships.”

This point is also a good reminder for all marketers that our jobs are not just to make advertising (meaningful or otherwise), but to start with guiding the features and functions of the ultimate product that you have to sell. Marketers should have a say—preferably the final say—when it comes to product benefits, features, retail placement, pricing, customer service, and any other decision that is relevant to how it is presented to the end customer. Al suggested that it might be time for us to redefine the classic “4Ps” for the new world of digital, social, and extreme word of mouth. Not a bad idea!

But I know from my own experience that organizational structures are the biggest barrier to marketing making a difference. I remember my own meeting with a major car company when I was marketing Mr. Clean Car Care at P&G. We wanted to do a joint promotion at the car manufacturer’s national chain of dealerships and repair centers, but the marketer from Big Car, Inc. admitted that she couldn’t even get them to run a national “Buy 3 Tires, Get 1 Free” promotion. The decentralized structure of the network prevented her from managing her business. Now this error, and many others, is part of the reason that the company is tanking.

When You Don’t Have Much Innovation

The other half of our discussion revolved around brands that do not have much innovation to stand on. Sure, it’s easy to do meaningful marketing when you have a breakthrough product such as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser or Nike+, but what about the 95% of brands we work on that do not have much word-of-mouth merit?

In thinking about this question I brought up the model presented by Laura and Al Ries in their book, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR. The central hypothesis of the book is that brands are first built on innovation—they bring some new news to the marketplace of existing players—and the best way to win is by making the news as big as possible. Hence, the book’s belief on making PR the lead focus of early marketing efforts. Then, after years in market, the strategy becomes simply reminding people that you exist and what you stand for. This is where the authors find that advertising is more effective. For example, Coke and Pepsi haven’t changed their formulas in years, so the cola war is a battle to remind people through advertising.

My belief is that Marketing with Meaning can work well for non-innovative products and brands in two ways. First, the marketing can itself bring innovation and PR news to the brand in ways that the product itself cannot. Charmin creating a mobile app that helps you find public restrooms is an incredible new way to innovate, and has earned the brand more than 500 million free news media impressions. This idea of using marketing as a way to apply innovation could open up entirely new ways of thinking for brand managers who have struggled for years with doing something new with product development. Making changes to a product formula and assembly line can take millions of dollars and thousands of hours. But cranking out an iPhone app can be done by a small team in a matter of weeks.

The second way that Marketing with Meaning can help non-innovative brands is by serving as the “memory jogger” as described by Laura and Al Ries, but in a format that has a much higher chance of earning customer attention and loyalty. My favorite example is the story of Unilever’s Dove brand. You know by now that the brand was struggling to find a new positioning in the marketplace until it seized the high, unoccupied ground of standing for “Real Beauty.” What you might not have thought about was how this happened with virtually no product news or innovation. By using its marketing to create a cause, Dove reminded people that it existed in a meaningful way.

This second point is where I believe many, many companies should be moving their marketing dollars quickly. As I wrote in this Adweek article a few months ago, the old model of ordering up a new ad campaign is not enough, and as I wrote in this post a year ago, the brands that are able to be remembered and relevant are those that actually do something rather than just saying that they stand for something.

I recently read that Pepsi has chosen not to advertise in this year’s Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years. Instead, the brand is planning a $20 million marketing effort to “refresh” society in real ways. Not much is known yet, but this could be a big step in moving the marketing world away from interruptive reminders and further toward meaningful connections. Stay tuned for more…

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Posted in customer service, innovation, Organizational Behavior | 3 Comments »

Turning the Call Center Into a Meaningful Marketing Platform

Monday, December 21st, 2009

customeriq article

I was recently asked to provide some perspective on Marketing with Meaning to Customer Management IQ, an organization that focuses on providing information and services to the call center industry. A little more than a week ago the article here was published by the site, as well as a podcast interview with host Blake Landau.

The overall point of the article is that call center managers have an enormous opportunity, nay responsibility to turn what is normally considered a “cost center” into a platform for connecting with customers. Take a read and let me know what you think!

Posted in customer service, Organizational Behavior | 1 Comment »

Starbucks Stores Sharing Improvement Plans

Monday, December 14th, 2009

starbucks service photo

Here at Bridge Worldwide, all 260 (and growing) employees are preparing to go through our annual evaluation process and work-plan development for the year ahead. Our belief is that it is important to regularly review how each employee is doing and assess individuals’ strengths and opportunity areas. On the latter, we’re big believers in having open and honest conversations about what people need to improve on, and managers help direct reports create action plans to tackle them. While it can sometimes be a tough conversation to have, we strongly believe this is a reason we have such great employees and have been named one of the Best Small Businesses to Work For in America four years in a row. So I found it interesting to see that Starbucks stores seem to be taking the same approach.

Our President, Jay, sent me this photograph he took during a recent trip to a local Starbucks here in Cincinnati. As you can see, the store is proudly sharing what opportunity areas it is working on this month. It seems to be based on feedback that they have gotten from store visitors, and alternates every month.

There are several things I love about this big idea. First, it shows visitors that the store is listening and actually thankful for the feedback. Second, because it is handwritten and changes every month, visitors can tell that this is not just some big corporate B.S., but rather that the specific store cares and is listening. Third, by writing its opportunity area publicly, Starbucks effectively opens up the dialogue with its customers. I believe people will start giving more open and honest feedback to store employees, which in turn will make them even better.

Finally, this is a tremendous tool for educating and reminding store employees what is important for them to focus on. When they walk in to start working at 5:30 a.m., they are greeted with this same sign—a very vivid reminder of what each individual should focus on.

When he shared this photo, Jay suggested that this goes even further by allowing customers to feel like they are shaping the brand and experience—and that this helps reinforce Starbucks strategy as “the third place” people spend significant time in. After all, if it’s really your space, then you need to have a say in how it appears and functions, just like home and the office.

My buddy Pete Blackshaw recently pointed out that Starbucks claims it has implemented 50 customer suggestions that have come from its MyStarbucksIdea site. Pete literally wrote the book on how to turn great customer service into marketing, and Starbucks hits it out of the park here.

This is a great reminder that Marketing with Meaning works best when you make it personal, in-store, and face to face with the customers who hand you their money every day.

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Posted in customer service, Retailers | No Comments »

How the Starwood iPhone App Pressures Delta

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Over the weekend I somehow discovered that the Starwood Preferred Guest program was now offering a free iPhone app. In less than five minutes I had Googled it for a review, downloaded the app, input my membership number, and was checking out this cool new marketing service from one of my favorite hotel chains. My next thought: Why does my regular airline, Delta, not have an iPhone app yet? A great service by Starwood also made me feel worse about my airline, a company not even in the same business category! This reaction is an example of how great customer service and meaningful marketing in one category puts pressure on every business to improve.

My friend and colleague, Jonathan Richman, recently referenced this idea on his blog, Dose of Digital. It’s an idea that I share often with clients as we try to help them navigate the sea of digital choices and choose which services to offer and competitors to benchmark. This idea that customer-service expectations are rising across categories first sprung up in my mind when I read an Accenture survey from November 2008 of the customer-service attitudes of 4,000 respondents. It found that 31% said their customer-service expectations are higher than a year ago, and 52% said their expectations are up from five years ago. That’s an incredible increase in a short period of time, and it shows the path of the economy of today and tomorrow: As competition increases, service and value will increase, and people will expect these improvements to continue across every industry. The more we give them, the more they expect.

I believe this idea manifests itself in several divergent categories. My favorite example comes from Domino’s Pizza. In January 2008 it launched an online Pizza Tracker that shows an estimate of the step-by-step process of making the pizza you order online. Some laughed at the idea, but Domino’s felt it was necessary because a significant number of people call back to ask how their orders are progressing (before the 30 minutes, mind you). While others laughed, Domino’s racked up its millionth user of the tool before six months. Why? Well, I believe that people have become used to viewing the progress of their online orders from services such as UPS and FedEx. These two companies have great package tracking systems that millions of people have used. So the consumer’s expectation is that if these orders can be tracked, why can’t my pizza?

Other examples abound. A few years ago Facebook and Twitter started allowing mobile updates on information as trivial as when a friend updated his status or uploaded a photo, but banks and airlines were much slower to provide mobile updates for important information such as low balances and canceled flights. Another example is the increase in self-checkout lanes at retail stores. I firmly believe that they have rapidly expanded because customers are used to self-checkout online at e-commerce stores, and expect similar freedom in the offline world.

Our agency has seen this recently with our work on the Vicks brand. Just weeks before we launched our first online cold-and-flu tracking tool, Google came out with its own flu-trends tool, which grabbed the media spotlight before we did. So now CPG brands are competing with Google? That’s a pretty huge challenge!

But that’s reality. And on my other personal blog, The Challenge Dividend, you can read many, many stories of how Challenge Drives Improvement. (Warning: It’s not been updated in a few months as I’m focused on this blog and book.)

I believe that the many increasing examples of Marketing with Meaning will start setting a very high bar for businesses across every industry. Consumers will gravitate quickly toward those brands that provide value through marketing, and increasingly punish the brands that continue to interrupt and annoy them.

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Posted in Applications, customer service | 3 Comments »

Time Warner Cable Dictates Bill Pay

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

My friend Pete Blackshaw has been saying for years that “customer service is the new marketing,” meaning that more and more companies are discovering that the people on the front lines of direct customer contact are having a growing potential to turn customers into brand fans or outraged detractors. Unfortunately, many big, slow, monopolistic companies refuse to see this shift. And it’s time for this customer of Time Warner Cable to put up some meaningful marketing against its poor practices.

Over the weekend, my wife shared the story of her recent frustration with Time Warner Cable. On Friday, May 29, she received an email that stated the company would no longer be accepting payments from our bank’s online bill payment provider. As you might be able to see in the actual email above, this change came with no explanation, no customer service contact to reply to, and only the general website URL for further information. Her reaction: WTF?

And so my lovely wife started to track down what was going on with our cable service. After more than an hour of digging through the website and the back and forth with an IM bot that spit back the same formulaic answers to her questions over and over, she discovered that Time Warner Cable was migrating customers to its own preferred bill-payment system. We had the “opportunity” to sign up for this, of course handing over more personal information and changing our entire bill-paying habits.

This is a horrible example of customer service from start to finish. First, the decision to disallow our preferred method of bill payment, which we use for every other service, is blatantly bad for its customers. Nearly every other company on the planet is embracing NEW options to allow bill payments, from PayPal to mobile phone, in order to provide better service and close the sale. Second, the fact that this significant change in habit came with no explanation and nothing more than a terse email is unfathomable. Only a company with a complete disregard for the customer would do such a thing. A simple email written by an actual human being with some explanation and remorse would have done wonders.

Of course, cable companies are not new to completely screwing over customers in very visible ways. My favorite example is Bob Garfield’s “Comcast Must Die” campaign. A search of any cable company and the words “sucks” or “protest” land on thousands of horror stories from people who have been treated horribly by companies that cling to one of the last market pockets of low competitiveness.

Fortunately some alternatives are starting to break into the market and break up cable companies’ hold on our lives. New competitors are entering the TV market, such as Verizon with its all-fiber FiOS system, and AT&T’s U-verse system. They are bringing down rates in the market and bringing up service levels wherever they go. Meanwhile, some local governments are getting in on the act; in Wilson, N.C., residents organized to create a city-owned broadband network with lower rates and higher speeds than Time Warner. And now a growing number of households are cutting their cable cords altogether and using broadband to download video directly. More than 900,000 people now rely on Web video alone, dealing a significant revenue blow each time it happens.

My family and I are getting ready to move to a new home in a few months. The current owners have been using DirecTV. I think it’s time to give Time Warner the boot and let a new company vie for my business. And while I’m not a heavy commercial watcher, this ad for DirecTV certainly attracts my attention…

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Posted in customer service, Marketing Without Meaning, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Social Media for Auto Sales

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Last week I drove the 90 miles from Cincinnati to Lexington, Kentucky, to present Marketing with Meaning to the local Ad Club. The lunch-and-learn session drew about 60 people in all.

During the Q&A session after my speech, one of the people in the audience asked me how her company, a local BMW dealer, might better use social media. I answered her on the fly but wanted to explore the question here as a way to show how to start strategically, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of what’s hot today.

For the exercise I’ll use a simplified version of the step-by-step model that comprises Part Two of my upcoming book. Let’s assume that the BMW dealer has a gut instinct and interest in social media but is looking to test the rationale and do it the right way. Also let me make it clear that I have never had a car dealership as a client and did not conduct extensive research solely for this blog post. So please take this as a guts-and-opinions strategy.

Step 1: Setting Business Objectives

A local BMW dealership could choose from many key business drivers across the purchase funnel, from Awareness to Consideration to Purchase to Repeat business. Let’s leave Awareness and Consideration out of the picture, as I believe most people who arrive at the dealership already have narrowed down their choices based on national marketing from BMW and word of mouth from friends. I also believe it’s difficult to focus on the point of purchase at the dealer level, as people increasingly come armed with facts and look at the dealer conversation as if they are entering a battle. I believe improving Repeat is probably the single biggest business opportunity for a BMW car dealership. People are increasingly drawn to lease deals, which means they are shopping for a new car in less than three years after purchase. For buyers, there is also a large opportunity to benefit from revenue through maintenance and aftermarket add-ons. Let’s classify all of this as Repeat revenue and focus our efforts here.

Step 2: Uncovering the Insight

Here we work to understand the question of why people do or do not return to their previous dealership when it is time to buy a new car. In theory, people should almost always go back to their last salesperson; after all, each car brand increasingly has a wide variety of models and prices, and many dealerships sell multiple car brands. I believe one of the reasons this is more rare than expected is that car buyers often suffer from buyer’s remorse. In such a large purchase, which is intense and stressful, they tend to feel like they didn’t get the best deal after the sale was done. High-pressure tactics by sales and finance people don’t help, of course.

Based on my personal experience, this could be solved if salespeople could develop personal relationships with their customers. Salespeople of big-ticket items such as luxury cars should treat each completed sale like the start of the next sale, and work to cultivate a personal connection that will last for years. There is nothing as powerful as relationships in life. They create trust, loyalty, and mutual benefit. In the agency business, we have a saying: “Clients don’t fire their friends.” What that means is that if you have a good relationship with your client, they will feel more comfortable giving you the feedback you need to improve when they are unhappy, rather than picking up the phone and ending the relationship. The same goes for cars, thus our key insight: Personal relationships with the salesperson are the key to Repeat.

Step 3: Developing Meaningful Ideas

It is certainly not a new approach for salespeople to try to build personal relationships with their customers. I remember a salesperson at Macy’s who used to call me when there was a sale on suits at her store, for example. But developing relationships can be difficult. They are long-term investments at a time when short-term sales pressure is always high. Writing letters and making phone calls to each individual contact also can be extremely time-consuming, and when done tend to be focused on making the next sale. Personal relationships need some space to talk weather, sports, and family.

But new technology is allowing people to build stronger relationships with more people. This is where Facebook can play a huge role. The tool helps people create, maintain, and strengthen personal relationships. We can log in at any time and see what our broad network of connections is doing, and with a few clicks and words we can “touch” them and strengthen the bonds. And in the business world, Facebook is helping people share a little bit about who they are and how they tick. By understanding who we are as people, versus just clients or sales guys, we become closer.

So my suggestion is for car dealerships to encourage their salespeople to become active on Facebook and use it to build personal relationships with their customers. At the close of each sale, the salesperson should ask the customer to connect on Facebook. The pitch should be that it is a great way to keep in contact and allow for follow-up service questions. Once connected, the salesperson should use the service to “touch” the customer every few weeks. This doesn’t mean continually pitching the weekly oil-change special, but rather even adding things such as a quick comment on an uploaded photo, or a line that reads, “Did you get to drive your 5 Series in the great weather this weekend?” Not every customer will be on the service yet, which is actually a good thing to allow for some time to become comfortable and efficient.

Step 4: Measuring Meaning and Business Results

I believe that marketing should be measured both for its impact on customers’ lives as well as the bottom line. In terms of measuring meaning, this idea would be successful if customers are accepting salespeople as Facebook friends and responding positively to the “touches” that are made. Any outreach from customer to salesperson is a big win, as are referrals from customers’ friends. These are all numbers that can be clearly observed, tracked, and compared across individuals.

Business impact is simple to measure because we focused on a single core score, Repeat revenue, and because individual customer names are known and tracked. The dealership owner can track the specific number of maintenance appointments, follow-up sale rates, number of cars per household, and the overall price of each car.

Conclusion

I believe social media is an incredible tool that marketers are just now barely understanding and applying. One of the biggest barriers is the pressure to “go do something on Facebook or Twitter.” My hope for this post and the upcoming book is that you see how a strong business objective and insight can help your brand understand the opportunities for social media, and the right way to execute ideas and measure results.

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Posted in Connection, customer service, small business, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Nice Follow-up By Netflix

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

I hope everyone is having a great start to 2009. I spent much of the past two weeks finishing the first draft of our Marketing with Meaning book. It took a ton of time and we still have some work to do in editing, of course, but it’s a huge step and I’m extremely excited about how it reads so far!

Aside from working on the book over the holidays, I got a chance to play around with a few grown-up toys.  I spent a little time with the new Xbox 360 interface and specifically with the new Netflix viewing service that it added. I have been interested in testing the Netflix service since I heard it was coming several months ago. I have been an active Netflix user, and it seemed smart to allow members to download movies direct rather than waiting a few days for a DVD to arrive in the mail.

I tried out the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, At World’s End, which I have been waiting to see for some time. Unfortunately, the experience was way below par. The movie started easily enough, and it was nice to play it immediately like a pay-per-view movie. But as the movie began to play, the quality was horrible. On my 50″ HDTV it looked like a low-quality YouTube video. I turned it off after a few minutes, highly disappointed.

The next day, however, I got an email from Netflix that specifically asked my opinion of the quality of the picture (see screen grab above). I was very pleasantly surprised to see the company notice that I had tried the service for the first time, and that it followed up proactively on an issue that obviously was experienced by other customers. As a Netflix member, I’m disappointed with the service and likely won’t try it again for some time, but I actually feel more positive about the brand itself.

On another level, it is remarkable to me that this kind of service quality is so remarkable. It is routine for restaurant servers to come back and ask how your meal tastes, so why doesn’t every other service brand do the same? It is even easier in digital businesses, where a quick email like this can be programmed to go to millions automatically.

It reminds me of my friend Pete Blackshaw’s quote that “customer service is the new marketing department.”  If that is the case, proactively asking for feedback is another great example of Marketing with Meaning.

(P.S. Check out this investor presentation by Netflix a few months ago. It is one of the best company strategy decks I have seen in years-and also adds to my confidence in the company.)

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Posted in customer service, Solution | 4 Comments »