What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? (Part 1)
October 1, 2009
At the suggestion of our Executive Editor, today’s entry marks the first in a series of interrelated pieces examining what makes for good corporate investor relations web sites. The intention is to try and lay out a template for companies to think about as they communicate with their investors via the Internet by highlighting good examples from across the web.
It’s always best to start with the basics, and for investors that means giving them a clear understanding of what it is your company does. It is surprising how many companies omit this first step, perhaps working on the assumption that because a person has made it to the investor page, they know what the company does. However, this overlooks several factors. When an investor does a search on a company name, many search engines show a link directly to the investor relations page of the company, bypassing the company’s home page and all of the explanatory information that resides there. Second, people coming to the investor page may be familiar with the brand name of a company, but not fully understand the entire range of products or markets the company serves. Finally, truly savvy investors will peruse a statement to get an understanding of how the company thinks about itself.
What I look for is fairly straightforward: simple declarative sentences, devoid of consultant-speak, which accurately portray the company and its markets. It doesn’t have to be too lengthy or detailed as there is certain to be much information elsewhere on the site, but it should give a clear and concise picture of the company. This is often harder to do than it appears, as many companies have evolved into complex entities in disparate markets, but with careful thought diligence and editing, it can be done.
For example, I found the Compass Group did an effective job on their Investor Centre Homepage:
“Compass Group is the world’s leading foodservice company. Our 388,000 employees specialise in providing food, vending and related services on our clients’ premises and we generate annual revenues of over £11 billion. The company operates across the following core sectors of Business and Industry (B&I), Defence, Offshore & Remote Site, Healthcare, Education, Sports & Leisure and Vending with an established brand portfolio.”
In three short sentences, Compass Group has told us the industry they are in, how large they are in terms of sales and employees, their market position and the industry sectors they serve. Further, you get the impression that they are efficient and direct in the way they think about things. That’s a pretty good introduction to their investors.
Next post in this series: Provide a Roadmap
Ahold’s Website — A Communications Gem
September 4, 2009
Many companies have their “corporate jewels”. In the case of Netherland’s based Ahold, an international group of quality supermarkets based in the United States and Europe, their website is a gem.
First the Homepage is loaded with information –
You have access to news, stock price, corporate responsibility and access to their companies. Note the Interactive Calendar this is a unique tool that permits visitors to view a wide variety of corporate events. When you click on an event, you access more information about it. This is an effective communications tool for stakeholders.
Next a visit to the About Us section indicates that the robust display of information is extended. The use of graphics adds to the friendliness of the site.
Far too much to cover in one post. I will focus on two areas Ahold Structure and Our Strategy.
Click on Ahold Structure and you are taken to a page that describes Ahold’s vast corporate reach. The company provides a well organized array of in formation links and a corporate interactive diagram
Note how Corporate Governance links are integrated with operating units. Click on the Board section and you see images of Board members and a short background. Nice but not unique. Click on any of the operating units to access more information. This is well organized and allows drilling down to more detailed information all the way to the website for each unit. This chart with its integrated navigational structure provides visitors with an effective communications tool.
Click on Strategy and you will see a benchmark display of a company’s strategy–
Many companies either do not disclose their strategy or provide a skeletal outline. Perhaps this is due to a concern about divulging competitive intelligence. However, investors need to understand where the company is headed. Ahold does an admirable job in communicating their strategy. Note the comprehensive navigation menu –
- Refocusing our portfolio
- Building our brands for profitable growth
- Leveraging our organisational structure
- Financial targets
- Value Improvement Program
- Highlights and downloads
- Our core capabilities
- Our business model
- Forward-looking statements notice
Financial targets and Value Improvement Program provide measures related to strategy execution. Highlights and Downloads provide ongoing information about the company’s strategy.
Other companies could consider using Ahold as a model to disclose their strategies and for effective stakeholder communications. What do you think?
Questions: Individual Influencers and Customer Service
September 2, 2009
How should companies deal with the growing power of individuals who use social media?
Specifically, I mean powerful individuals with a complaint about customer service.
Leaving aside the cases where the accumulation of many complaints over time leads to significant corporate change, such as the Dell social media success, and the cases of complaints that go viral because they are entertaining, such as the United Airlines guitar videos, there are an elite group of people with an extraordinary reach. These few have access to potentially millions of other people.
How should companies deal with this?
I became aware of another one of these stories when I followed a link in a blog I regularly read, to another (which I don’t). I didn’t realise who writes the second blog until halfway through the post – and that in itself is interesting, because it shows that the story reached way past the blogger’s usual readers and followers, revealing just how quickly and widely these customer service stories travel.
Essentially, the story is that an expensive washing machine broke a week after delivery. Now, we’ve all been in the repair-loop, haven’t we? Repairman comes, doesn’t have the part, has to order the part and wait for delivery, comes back, still doesn’t have all the right parts, has to reorder and come back, fixes the machine, fix doesn’t work…
Except in this case, there’s a customer service failure.
Failure 1 (at retailer service department): policy says there must be three attempts at a fix before they replace. Not three visits, three fixes.Failure 2 (at manufacturer): schedule says 3-5 days before someone can come to look. Not fix, come to look at the problem.
Failure 3 (at manufacturer): And when customer says ‘I have a lot of followers on Twitter – if I say something on there, will someone help me’, customer service says that doesn’t matter.
So: customer tweets. Customer, it turns out, is @dooce, with over 1,168,000 followers on Twitter. She now has over 2900 comments on her blog about this issue. That’s a lot of reach.
A Twitter storm erupts; customer is eventually contacted by someone senior from Whirlpool (for that is where the MayTag machine came from: @WhirlpoolCorp) who gets a repairman out within the hour, and a fix done within 24.
At the same time, customer is contacted by a competitor (Bosch – @boschappliances) and offered a free machine. Customer isn’t comfortable with this, and negotiates with Bosch that the machine should be donated to a local shelter. Bosch go further and donate a dryer as well.
Hurrah! Customer wins: working machine. Shelter wins: working washing machine and dryer. Bosch wins: lots of great publicity.
What about Whirlpool and the (unnamed) retailer?
Here are my thoughts – or, mostly, questions:
On customer service
This kind of public customer service failure is a clear message to both retailer and manufacturer to re-examine their customer service policies. The common-sense view is that a week-old machine should have been fit for purpose; it clearly wasn’t. So what should the policy have been?
Some companies have a clear focus on providing the best possible customer service; John Lewis and Marriott, for example. Others don’t, and that decision is down to company strategy and positioning. But social media is pushing companies for better customer service all the time. In ‘the old days’ it used to be said that an unhappy customer tells 10 people; now they can tell millions within minutes.
So how should the companies concerned deal with this, and with the impact on customer service? The questions I’d ask include:
- How much flexibility and power do the people at the front line really have to rectify problems? (Could they have behaved any differently within the company constraints?)
- In this case, could the retailer and the manufacturer have communicated direct, cutting down the wait time?
- Could you implement a triage system, either by people paying to be a priority customer, or by having a policy of responding to certain types of calls more urgently (roadside recovery companies going out to women alone with children first, or the utilities companies getting to people with medical needs first)?
- Do you need to reconsider the priority given to customer service, given the potential impact on corporate reputation? Do staff understand the corporate priorities?
Whatever the policy is, it should be clearly explained in advance to customers and to staff. Mismanaging expectations is at the root of the problem.
On social media monitoring and priorities
@WhirlpoolCorp were monitoring what was being said about them and their products; @Boschappliances were monitoring what was being said about their competitors. And it looks as though both reacted fairly quickly to the social media complaints. That’s great, and is exactly what social media experts recommend when facing a Twitter crisis. Companies do need to be alert to the potential of a social media PR crisis.
But would it be possible to escalate complaints made to customer services in the same way? Do social media users get a better response than those in the standard service queue? And what if the customer didn’t have 1m followers, but only 10, or 100? Should they be treated in the same way as the customer with 1m followers, because anyone can be the trigger for a Twitter storm?
Was the Whirlpool customer service agent right to say that Twitter didn’t matter – if she’d been told that all customers should be treated alike? Or wrong, because of the potential impact on the corporate reputation?
What is your policy on this?
And is it wrong for a customer to publicise a problem via social media? Personally, I think it’s OK, as long as they’ve tried going through the company’s own problem solving procedures first. As has been said before, this bad publicity is the symptom of a problem, not the cause of it. It’s going to happen; this time it was Whirlpool; but next time it could be you.
On powerful influencers
How should a company react to ‘don’t you know who I am’? In theory, everyone should receive the same, excellent service; in reality, this is very difficult to achieve.
You may be monitoring what is being said about you, but is it worth identifying who are the powerful influencers in your core market?
“Yes, yes, we do that”, you say, “in order to communicate with their audience in turn, and to fine-tune our marketing messages”
… but have you considered flagging these people up to customer services? Handle with care; VIP.
Is that ethical?
Would it even make a difference? After all, anyone can use social media to publicise their complaints, not just your key influencers. Twitter complaints are high profile, and the crisis can escalate very quickly. It can’t be denied that some people can shout louder; but is it possible to identify those people in advance of the crisis?
Do you provide a better service to those who can shout the loudest (or pay the most), or provide a less good service equally to all? What are your customers’ expectations? What is your brand promise?
On public relations and workload management
While I felt a certain unease at the propriety of Bosch’s interpolation of themselves into the story, others here at Corporate Eye saw this as a PR triumph – with a double gold medal for then donating the equipment to a local charity at the request of the influential blogger.
Bosch have clearly done well out of this, and Whirlpool made a nice recovery once senior management got involved. But is there a PR issue looming? Will there be a backlash against companies providing unbalanced customer service? Will there be a rush to Twitter, as people perceive that those who do get a better deal?
And how will you balance the customer service workload and priorities? Should the priorities for customer service really be based on reputation management?
Social media policies need to include customer service and crisis management
Lots of questions here, but only you can decide the answers. Ultimately, each company will need to decide for themselves how they handle influential individuals, and on the priority they give to problem escalation via social media; and they will need to do this before the crisis hits.
Does your social media policy cover this? How about your corporate ethics?
Carnival: Send the Lawyers on a Long Cruise
August 20, 2009
Having just returned from holiday, I thought I would continue my tour of FTSE 100 investor relations home pages by dropping in on Carnival Corporation. I find it’s always best to ease back into the work world after a holiday, and what better way than by visiting the site of a company that makes its living by providing cruises for people. What I found, while presentable, had one jarring inconsistency that set my teeth on edge.
The investor home page itself is set up in standard fashion, with all the expected links running down the left hand side of the page. It was laid out in such a standard fashion that it caused me to look up at the web address, and sure enough, I was over on a third party provider site. No great sin there, as many companies use third party providers to run their investor web pages these days, but when the site looks just like a lot of other company sites you’ve seen and a number of the links, such as the Event Calendar and the Webcasts/Presentations section, are empty, it causes you to question the commitment the company has to their Investors site.
These were minor indiscretions however, compared to the opening greeting Carnival gives to prospective investors.
You would think that a company that operates in the hospitality industry would know how to give people a friendly greeting. You would be wrong.
Here is the actual verbiage used by Carnival: “Carnival Corporation & plc operates under a dual listed company structure whereby Carnival Corporation and Carnival plc function as a single economic entity through contractual agreements between separate legal entities. Shareholders of both Carnival Corporation and Carnival plc have the same economic and voting interest but their shares are listed on different stock exchanges and not fungible.”
Does that make you feel welcome? Those two sentences were written by lawyers, for lawyers. I will grant you that the information needs to be on the site somewhere, but not as the opening greeting to investors. And what’s with the use of the word fungible? Only lawyers use (or like) that word. My suggestion is that Carnival send the lawyers off on a long cruise somewhere such as the Antarctic and get someone who can write plain English to write a nice warm greeting to investors.
Do Tesco’s Fibs Matter?
August 18, 2009
On 17th July 2009 WRAP (the Waste and Resources Action Programme) published figures showing that the UK’s seven major supermarkets had managed to cut single use carrier bags by 48% over a two year period.
Not bad, you may think. It’s a little disappointing as the target was to cut single use carrier bags by 50%, but in the round it’s better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick.
However when you look behind the figures a slightly different picture emerges. Of the seven who signed up to the commitment:
- Marks and Spencer reduced their carrier bag usage by 83%, Sainsbury by 58%.
- Waitrose, Asda & The Co-operative Group all said they were on course to cut by 50%
- Somerfield’s information is out of date by at least a year
- and Tesco said they had met the 50% target. Then, in The Times, they admitted they hadn’t.
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