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Want to talk to Coca-Cola?

I have now managed to get onto Coca-Cola’s new mini-site (launched on Wednesday, apparently). I couldn’t find it before because the link from the press release didn’t seem to work – now there’s something that should always be checked – but Google found it for me. Of course.

Coca-Cola: Lets Get TogetherCoca-Cola

Do you think this site is designed only for the British? It has a UK URL, and the audio clip used of their focus group contains some quite strong northern British dialects, which maybe people coming across this from abroad may struggle with. It reminds me very strongly of the Nick Park adverts for electricity … and if it is UK only, why?
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Getting it right for the best customer experience

A month ago, we heard from Colin Shaw (founder of Beyond Philosophy) on how companies should react to the current climate. Today he’s back, to share his views on one of the secrets of a great customer experience…

A few weeks ago we conducted our annual study tour in London, England. This is where we take delegates to visit a number of leading companies for a behind-the-scenes look at how they approach the task of building a great customer experience.

The companies included Prêt-a-Manger, Virgin Atlantic, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, Dell Computers, T-Mobile, Lexus Cars, AOL and Microsoft. As we travelled around these companies on the luxury coach, I pondered what the common traits are of companies who provide a great customer experience? Undoubtedly one of these traits is “attention to detail”, so let’s give you an insight as to what some of these companies did. Prêt-a-Manger told us about the absolute struggle they go through to make sure that all the ingredients in their sandwiches are additive free so as to enhance the taste of the sandwiches. This involves a great deal of searching to determine the best supplier, as well as extensive tasting. The time and money they spend on this activity is phenomenal and is testament to their customer focus.

But this is just one element of the attention to detail these companies pay. Liam Lambert, Director of the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel told us of his “attention to detail”. He wanted his doorman to stand out as ‘beacons’ to help promote the hotel – as it is on the less busy side of the street and after seeing other hotel doormen who were all dressed in grey overcoats. This colour made them blend into their hotel buildings and act as great camouflage. Liam decided to dress his doorman in red, creating a true beacon. It was clearly effective as more people noticed them than ever before!

Liam told us about how he treats his new arrivals and our group was privileged to attend and witness his ‘Morning Prayers’. This is where all the managers from each department within the hotel get together every morning and talk through each new guest explicitly that is arriving at the hotel that day. They look at who they are and look at where they’re coming from and therefore how likely they are to be tired, for example. They even get on their guests’ web sites to discover more about the person staying so that they can ultimately provide them with a better service. Finally, if available on the web site, they will print a picture of the individual who is staying with them and place it on the ‘Guests Wall’ so the staff can recognise the person by name.

So, do you go into that amount of detail with your customers? When a guest is staying with them they ‘learn their behaviour’. They also take note of the drinks they order, whether they like ice or not, whether they have a cappuccino or a Latte after a meal. This information is then recorded on what is effectively a CRM system, which is them utilised to enhance the customer experience on subsequent visits. This is pure attention to detail!

Our visit to Virgin Atlantic highlighted to us the amount of time they have spent on working out when the optimum time is to deliver hot towels in Upper Class – before or after takeoff, for example. They also have calculated the most pragmatic and attractive layout of a service trolley, and have great new lie down beds situated in Upper class. As someone who spends a lot of time travelling around the world giving conference speeches, I can’t wait to try them.

And Dell Computers have set up a number of ‘Listening Posts’ to ensure they capture customer information and convert this into something that is usable by the customer.

So, attention to detail in building great customer experiences is paramount. The converse is also true, and lack of focus on the customer experience will detract from it. The other night I visited my local cinema. The ‘baby booster chairs’ were left in the aisle so that when we entered the cinema late, we nearly broke our necks falling over them! Not to mention the vast queue to buy a ticket, with only two tills in operation and three people standing at the back chatting whilst dozens customers showed their indignation. We have all had similar experiences, but it takes thought, time and commitment to build a great customer experience.

We recommend you to pay attention to the detail in future – both in ‘real life’ and on the various sites that are part of your company’s web estate.

A classic example of focusing on the details that make the customer experience of corporate web estate better is Amazon’s recommendation system, which gives the customer suggestions as well as providing potential up-sell opportunities. Like the Mandarin Oriental example above, this helps the visitor feel that the company ‘knows’ what they like. And the customer reviews provide reassurance, so the visitor feels they are making the right choice.

At a more mundane level, ensuring that the website is user-friendly, with appropriate help easily available when needed, matters. Visitors need to be able to navigate the site to find what they need (without falling over unnecessary ‘baby buggies’, or being led down navigational dead ends). And ensuring that the site can be found easily, and is distinctive helps. Consider the Mandarin Oriental again: is your site dressed in the appropriate livery, and acting as a beacon for your visitors?

Thanks, Colin!

Signing the web

Is your site truly accessible? Are you providing the best possible service to all your visitors?

I expect you’ve taken the first step, and perhaps your site is accessible to level A (or even AA). But have you considered taking the extra step, and providing accessible charting in your investor section, transcripts for all your video or audio sections on site, or providing a sign language translation for your webcasts and videos?

There are up to 70,000 users of British Sign Language (BSL) in the UK, and up to 500,000 users of American Sign Language (ASL) in the US. This is a big constituency which you should perhaps be considering.
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Who are your business spokespeople?

Who speaks for your business? Who represents you in public?

Is it top level management? The public relations team? Nominated business spokespeople? Or everyone?

Who should it be?

It is standard practice for a corporate website to provide an archive of interviews, speeches and other presentations made by senior staff – some as documents available for download, some as webcasts.

Some of the better corporate websites link to these speeches from the board biographies, so that it is easy to find out, for example, what the Strategy Director thinks about future trends in their business (see Microsoft).

Often, the main contact for journalists on the corporate website will be the public relations team, who have phone numbers, email addresses clearly and easily available (see British Energy for a good example). Sometimes, there will also be contact details for nominated business spokespeople, with some explanation of their area of expertise (see Scottish Widows for an example). This is good – we like to see experts within the company available to speak.

On the other hand, the business conduct guidelines for most major companies play heavily on the idea that all employees are representing the company, and require individual employees to behave in an appropriate fashion. And this is quite right: employees, particularly those dealing day to day with customers, do represent the company, and their actions significantly affect the brand and image of the company.

Yet often, these employees have been taught to refer all requests for comment upwards, or across to the PR department. So are they only representatives in the way they look and behave?

For some companies the nature of the spokesperson for the company has been changing, and has become more devolved. As people within the company embrace social media, and blog, tweet or otherwise engage with people outside the company, these people are increasingly representing the company by what they say (or write), not just by their behaviour or dress. They are becoming ‘accidental spokespeople‘, and as a result, there is potentially a loss of control by the company.

So, how should you deal with that?

One option, of course, would be to ban employees from social networking at work … either completely or partially, leaving the official social media team to do all such activity. Cutter Consortium point to some interesting tactics of permissible hours for such activity. This keeps you safely within the old pattern of ‘refer upwards or call PR’, but may mean that you miss out on some of the benefits of social media.

Another option is the Zappos approach, which seems to work well for them:

For our culture, we just want to make sure that our employees are always exhibiting our core values. As long as that’s happening, we don’t really see the need to “police” what employees are saying, which is why we encourage our employees to Twitter and publicly post what employees are twittering at: http://twitter.zappos.com

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, quoted at Pierce Mattie

And there’s the approach taken by IBM and Intel, of providing clear guidelines on the corporate website, and tying these in with the code of conduct. (I notice that IBM has separate guidelines for behaviour in virtual worlds).

… we believe social computing can help you to build stronger, more successful business relationships. And it’s a way for you to take part in global conversations related to the work we are doing at Intel and the things we care about.

The choice to participate in social media is yours. If you do, please follow these guiding principles:

  • Provide unique, individual perspectives on what’s going on at Intel and in the world.
  • Post meaningful, respectful comments – in other words, no spam and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive.
  • Reply to comments quickly, when a response is appropriate.
  • Respect proprietary information and confidentiality.
  • When disagreeing with others’ opinions, keep it cool.
  • Know and follow the Intel Code of Conduct and the Intel Privacy Policy.

(from Intel – IBM’s available here)

Both these are good summaries of how to behave, and it is commendable that they are published on the corporate website.

Notice how Zappos, IBM and Intel all bring this back to the corporate values, ethics and codes of conduct. This demonstrates the importance of the corporate culture – if the culture of the company is such that you can trust your employees, then you can trust them to represent you in public in all aspects: in what they say or write as well as in how they look and behave.

And if you don’t trust your employees to interact appropriately with people outside the company, then I suspect you may be facing bigger issues.

Using Social Media to Build Online Communities

online-communities
Social media allows businesses to take their products and services to the next level by actively harnessing the power of the crowd. More typically this involves turning users into unknowing promoters, but it can also be an excellent way to target strategic business partners. Incentivized campaigns on major social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus give regular users a sense of ownership and involvement in the company and its products, but there are also emerging technologies which allow businesses to source advice and skills from the crowd.

Let’s talk about some of the ways social media can help attract the best and brightest to help you create the best possible product for your customers.

Crowdsourcing

‘Crowdsourcing’ is, in essence, using savvy members of your social sphere to help shape a product through design input and productive feedback. Think of it as holding a brainstorming session with an unlimited number of planners.

When seeking strategic partnerships in developing your new product, the online community contains countless individuals you might like to use as ‘co-creators’ – (user-groups as a secondary but still important aspect). Desirable co-creators are industry pros who can bring something to your table. Since parallel evolution or conception is a common situation in business today, being able to harness the input of your peers means that you can work together for a greater product.

  • Branch.com is a good example of crowdsourcing on social media. A user expresses an idea, suggestion, or concept to a circle of industry experts using the Twitter interface. One popular conversation was the ‘save symbol’ discussion, started by design technologist P.J. Onori. This discussion swelled to include over twenty people and deconstructed the functionality and design of the existing save symbol. Because of its crowd nature, every person in the discussion became a co-creator for the “concept” save symbol in progress.
  • Chaordix.com is another crowdsourcing platform that breaks its sourcing communities into ever-increasing, broader circles. At the top and hence the smallest are business leaders and producers. In the middle are brand and idea groups, which discuss ways to make the products and services better and get the message out to the maximum number of potential customers. At the bottom, but still hugely important are the user-groups, or the potential customer/regular Internet user. Using a combination of analytic and CMS tools coupled with user incentives and feedback, Chaordix creates strategic dialogues between the top management levels and the consumer to permit more people to take a hands-on approach in shaping new products and services for public consumption.
  • Rounding out this list is Sparked.com, whose integrated rewards system creates passionate “brand evangelists” and co-creators. Its Customer Advisory Board consists of everyday users who are willing to discuss their opinions concerning products and services to analyze the best and worst of any business. Sparked.com also touts its employee empowerment features, which allow employees from all levels of a company to take on co-creator and strategic partnership roles within the company as related to given products.

The common factor in these services is the ability to give the consumer greater ownership and a more direct role in shaping the products and services they use, as well as the businesses they buy them from. The other advantage of crowdsourced intelligence is that for a fraction of the cost of a traditional digital advertising campaign, the crowd can feel involved and consequently more excited about a product. Natural, this will lead to greater social sharing and more traffic and eventually a higher conversion rate. Creating a buzz at the source means that users hear about the product from their friends, family, and their online community—in short, people they trust.

One of the most prominent brands built entirely from a crowd-sourcing perspective is Threadless, a service which encourages artists to design artwork that will eventually be used for t-shirts and other products. The best designs are decided by user-vote, ensuring that the entire process is completely sourced from the crowd. It’s a great way to make partners of both designers and t-shirt fans.

Crowdsourcing is also an excellent way to encourage co-creation and strategic partners through crowdfunding, such as through Kickstarter. By encouraging small investors in new projects, the company’s R&D budget is not tapped as heavily and the investors see a real return on their investment in the form of something new that they helped create, either through conceptual input, cash infusion, or both.

Treating User-Groups as Partners

Clever brands are starting to realize the power of the crowd as a marketing tool. By treating your users as marketing partners, you can create communities which perpetuate your message simply because they enjoy doing it.

  • RadioShack found a way to harness the power of Twitter with its #kindofabigdeal hashtag campaign. The premise was simple: A number of Verizon cell phones were arrayed on a table. As users Tweeted the hashtag, the phones would vibrate. The phones were ultimately awarded to the last person who made each one vibrate. In addition to promoting the RadioShack/Verizon pairing, it also generated a huge amount of online talk, netting over 80,000 mentions on this hashtag alone. Unwittingly, every contestant had become a promoter. By creating an online community, RadioShack had used the crowd as a strategic partner.
  • Google+ has not been absent from this arena, either. Its powerful community based on ‘Circles’ allows people with common interests to connect and share. Notwithstanding the fact that this could be used to create groups of project collaborators (see above), being allowed into someone’s social circle is a huge endorsement of trust. Inspiring people to share your content is then much easier, and can have a lot more impact.
  • Facebook’s ubiquitous ‘like’ button allows users to show preference for companies, entertainers, authors, or products. Kohl’s department store took advantage of this in 2011, creating a Facebook campaign that allowed users to vote for twenty different schools who would each receive $500,000 in donated funds. This $10,000,000 fundraising initiative had the advantage of allowing users to do something altruistic and simultaneously give themselves access to special savings and coupons available only through Kohl’s’ Facebook page. People love to be part of a cause, so harnessing the power of an altruistic community was hugely beneficial in this campaign.

Ultimately, getting the public engaged in your company as co-creators and long-term strategic partners is becoming the best way to ensure profitability and stability. Using social media as a crowdsourcing method allows you to easily draw in discussion, design input, and brand advice from all strata of the business-oriented internet. Your company can polish its image, give customers what they really want and need, and do it all more efficiently with far less expense. In addition, making users feel part of your brand’s community can strengthen their involvement in the project. Used properly, social media has never been more powerful for building and promoting a product.

‘This article was supplied by Joe Shervell, a keen blogger and social marketing enthusiast. He writes for www.datadial.net, a London-based Internet Marketing Agency.