Under Promise, Over Deliver

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Scott Gould

When I started working at my Church in 2003 I quickly learnt that the largest part of my work, both in the office and on Sundays (game day), was one of managing expectations.

Thus when I repeatedly failed in delivering expectations, I learnt the further lesson that expectation is closely linked with communication – or the lack thereof.

Yesterday, out of the blue, I received the package pictured here. When I opened it was I both surprised and excited by the gift of Thorntons chocolates sent to me by Optix Solutions. I was surpised because, of course, I wasn’t expecting it – it hadn’t been communicated to me. So therefore when I received the chocolates, my expectations (which were nil) were delightfully over-delivered on. Continue reading →

Sucker For A Story. A Bigger Sucker For A Mystery

Posted on November 25, 2009 by Scott Gould

This image enthrals me. Why? Because it doesn’t just tell a story. It also doesn’t tell the story: are these two people talking, or have they just met? What are they meeting for? What is that moon-like thing? What does this image mean and stand for? By mentally filling in the gaps, I look at this longer than I would at an image that told the whole story.

I’m sucker for a story. I’m the type of guy who watches the trailer, and wants to watch the film just to find out what happens. Hence I often save myself money by jumping on Wikipedia. I just have to find out what happens, to the point that I almost don’t care about the acting and special effects.

But I’m a bigger sucker for a mystery – and I think that really, that’s just what a good story is full of – continual mysteries, twists and nuances that when you discover and work out what they are, provide an incredible sense of satisfaction. No wonder that Lost is so engaging – it’s so full of mysteries that you just have to know the answers too – and it keeps you hooked week in, week out. Continue reading →

10 Tips For Creating Spreadable Service

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Scott Gould

Delivering a great customer experience is equally about sales and service. Great sales gets you market share, but great service gets you both wallet share and makes your customer a brand advocate. Pretty much every business / church / charity / individual, right now, is offering fist-clenchingly bad service – so when you serve them like they are royalty, hey presto!, you are being unique.

Another thought: when you deliver great service, it is often issolated – in other words, between the customer and you. By following the few tips (well, 10) below, you can also begin making your customer service spreadable, in other words, so that people can see how well you are serving. FYI, I define spreadbility as easy of access, ease of use, and ease of share.

Provide multi-touch support. Become more accessible by also taking service issues over Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in addition to your website and/or blog.
Clearly illustrate, that if out of your operating hours, how your customer and get emergency service. Perhaps points them to the social media above. Perhaps, get an emergency phone and sleep with it. In other words, lift the restriction of time.
Provide a non 0845/0870/0871 number, i.e. give them your local office phone number. This creates reassurance. When they call, give your name. Make sure the same person handles the service all the way through, or clearly give the name of the person you handing the issue to.
Remove your ugly call queuing systems and other such nonsense – or if not, reduce them to the simplest thing possible. Insider hint: people get angry waiting on call queuing systems. Also, remove voice activated stuff. It doesn’t work.
When you engage with your customer, tell them exactly how things are going to progress, and keep communicating this. This makes them feel safe, and everyone wants to feel safe when something is broken.
Give your employees who handle customer service more room to offer compensation, and to offer it more quickly. It may cost you, but you will create an advocate. If they want to escalate, let them, and have a great attitude about it, like it is you who is inconveniencing them – because as far as they care, you are!
Exceed expectation. If they are looking for one thing, give them something better – preferable something that they can share. Scale the pyramid of expectation.
When you resolve an issue through a social media enquiry, if the info is not sensitive, publicly answer it so others can see. This way you are both marketing and serving at the same time.
If they provided their social media details, or contacted you through social media, then do this: when you have resolved the issue, publicly Tweet / Facebook them two days later to see how it’s going. If they called or emailed, then call or email them instead. This extra touch shows that you care, and also helps with ease of share because others will see it.
Go to the nth degree for every customer. Turn a bad experience into a compelling experience. Relish the opportunity to turn an average customer into an advocate, and do whatever you can to succeed in this task.

Have fun serving.

Thanks to Conductive for the photo.

Delivering Multi Touch And Multi Sense Strategies

Posted on October 6, 2009 by Scott Gould

I wrote a while ago that you should cast your bread on the social media waters – in other words, get your message out there without too much prescription over where your message is placed – the reason being that more often than not you get growth from areas you did not expect. Today I’m going to address a way to do that through two strategies. But first of all, we need to define a few things:

A strategy is a set of projected outcomes that move your desired ‘thing’ from one place to another, be it a market position, car journey, a blog rank, increased wallet-share – whatever.
We fulfil these outcomes by employing tactics. In the case of driving from A to B, we require the tactics of driving a car. Note that tactics not are equal to the strategy, they are part of the strategy.
Therefore, in the realm of social media, for example, the tactic of creating a Facebook page and setting up a Twitter account are not a social media strategy. And creating posters and flyers is not a marketing strategy.

I say this because a lot of ‘social media gurus‘ and dodgy marketers across all boards equate hooking one free service up to another a strategy – but it is not – this is just a tactic. We must have strategies that plot where these tactics lead to other than paying through the nose for SEO, PPC, etc. There is more to marketing success than hits and eyes.

Now that we have that out of the way, you may be wondering why I have a picture of our recent Exeter Tweetup above, and thinking to yourself “why is that there?” – Well, I’m so glad you asked! Here’s the answer: every person in that photo is part of a multi-touch and multi-sense strategy that I have employed.

Shock, horror?!?! “You mean they are a part of a strategy?” Well, yes and no. If you mean whether I’m treating them all as a marketing project, then no. But if you mean, am I treating them all differently because of who they are and what we have in common, then the answer is yes.

See the reality is that we are all using multi-touch and multi-sense strategies. Some people that we know are more visual than others, and in order to communicate more effectively to them, it’s all about painting pictures and metaphor. You might not even realise it, but guaranteed there are people in your life that you act differently towards that have different dominate senses, and your relationship works because you are ‘translating’ from one sense to the other.

Making Multi-Sense

We all learn and think differently. Some people see a film and remember the lines. Others remember the car chase scene, where others still remember how they felt about the characters. Any event you hold, any website you have, any interaction you make, anything, is all being perceived differently by people with different dominate senses.

So the question is, are you making sense to all the senses? I look at this a few ways. First, out of the 5 senses, we rarely engage taste and smell in the normal course of marketing (when I run events, I make sure I engage them both.) So that means hearing, seeing and touching. Do you provide content in text, in audio and in video? Do you provide tactile workable examples, and do you provide inspiration testimonials? These are relate to these three senses. If you are missing one out, you are missing out some of your audience (don’t feel guilty, I’m missing out some of mine too – it takes time to build it up.)

Next up is people’s motivational sense. It is considered that people are motivated in two basic directions – either towards success, or away from pain. Given this, do you make sense to both? If you marketing is all about success, then what motivation do you provide for those moving away from pain? And if your products are all about alleviating stress, then what about those who want to move towards something?

Being Multi-Touch

Our second strategy involves how people can interact with you and find you. Last week, when I published my PR 2010 framework, I updated my LinkedIn status to say that I have just published it, and provided a link. It just so happened that someone I’m connected with on LinkedIn saw that, read it, and contacted me. If I have just stuck to my usual Twitter stream, I would’ve completely missed it.

Likewise, I became friends with someone on Facebook the other day whose business I have helped through some of these principles (and a few others too – there’s more where this came from.) As I accepted his friend invite, I look on his profile to see that he was having whole conversations with people on his profile where he had posted links to my articles. There was a whole conversation going on about me but I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t been multi-touch.

Multi-touch, for many, means thinking outside of the goldfish bowl. Don’t just use your preferred channels and methods of communication – experiment with other forms and see how you get on. At the least, as far as social media goes, you should keep your LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles active, and I suggest using Flickr to store all your photos, while using Posterous to link a lot of this together. I regularly get people finding me through all 5 of these services.

Multi-touch really worked for me when Aaron+Gould marketed Touch 09 – an annual Christian woman’s conference with a lot of style. Over the course of a year, but concentrated over a 3 month period, we marketed the conference through multi-touch, across multiple social networks, digital channels, and traditional marketing. Of course, every touch was integrated and holistic, and linked back to the hub – the website where all the information, communication, and bookings existed. This approach increased by registrations by 100% – in a recession.

You also need to escalate multi-touch. Don’t leave your interactions at just tweets. Sending an email is still more personal than a tweet or facebook, because it requires more effort and is kept private. Set up Skype calls with the people that you connect with, and if you are able to, meet new contacts face to face. By escalating the level of touch you have, your relationship becomes stronger, more personal and more unique.

I can quite honestly say that I feel closer to people who I have met face to face and shared only a few tweets than those I have shared many tweets with. When I worked on a fashion start up, I sourced our designers by finding them on forums and emailing hundreds of potentials. After hundreds of emails, I developed the expression that a phone call is worth a thousand emails. It’s true.

And Finally…

In a shameless act of self promotion, and in the spirit of experimentation, I want to let you know that I actually consult with companies and individuals on these frameworks, and believe it or not, it even works. And if you want to see how this stuff looks in real life, check out Like Minds, and run a search on it too. It ticks most of the boxes.

Lift The Restrictions

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Scott Gould

Last week I attended the launch night of Carluccio’s in Exeter. I got to talking with the PR guys who had handled the event about my freshly released New PR in 2010 framework, and to illustrate the point, I conducted a little test. I quickly tweeted if anyone had anything to ask the people at Carluccio’s, and within seconds I had responses that kept coming for ten minutes or so. I was able to show to the PR guys that there had firstly already been a conversation about Carluccio’s taking place earlier that day, and that I was able to obtain instant reviews and carry out realtime customer service, with very little effort. You can see the tweets here.

Today I want to show why real time micro media is so important, using my framework from last week.

The model above illustrates the link between spreadability and relevance, measured from static to dynamic. My point is that as technology advances, existing technologies become more static. This means that the difference between static and dynamic is comparative between old and new technology.

As I did last week, let’s take TV as our example. Initially, TV was exceptionally dynamic in comparison to radio and/or theatre. Theatre was fixed to a location, and radio was fixed to a single sense. Television lifted these restrictions by providing entertainment and information without the need to be at the source and instead allowing access from the comfort of your own home, and without the need to supplement what was heard with images produced in their own imagination. Previously, location was governed; now location was guided because individuals could be entertained and informed wherever the user desired (to a certain degree.)

As tapes, and later DVDs, were introduced, this newer technology made TV in its existing form more less dynamic and more static. The medium of tape allowed people to record programmes and play them when they desired to, as well as hiring or purchasing other recorded videos. This lifted the restriction of time, because the viewer no longer had to watch when the programme was aired. Time had previously been governed, but now it was only guided. And so it continues:

Cable and satellite increased the number and therefore lifted the restriction of channels, and increased variety. At this point, terrestrial television became, like, so last season. And again, the number of channels means that the choice is less governed and more guided.
Built in DVD, VCR, Freeview, etc, lift the restriction of dependencies, because they are built into the device.
Hard drive recording on satellite and cable devices lift storage restrictions.
IP TV lifts device restrictions, as you now watch the programmes on your laptop, mobile phone, etc.
YouTube lifts even further time, device and channel restrictions.

Track back over each of these iterations of television and you will also note that each advancement increases the spreadability (ease of access, ease of use, ease to share) of television by becoming more dynamic, more customised, and therefore, more personal. And with each restriction that is lifted by the enabling of new technology, the less governed and more guided it becomes.

The more dynamic and therefore personal a technology is, the more spreadable it becomes.

Applying This To Small Business

I’ve said it again, and again, and again, that mobile technology will merge offline and online together. Recently the User Experience consultant Darren Smith wrote about Foursquare and the ubiquitous world of the future, and how social media technology is enabling real life interaction. I totally agree.

As in Darren’s article, as per my test at Carluccio’s, as well as the recent Exeter Tweetup, and in running Like Minds, real time micro media is a shinning example of guidance over governance, and the resulted spreadability, and the convergence of two opposites of on- and off-line becoming one.

This isn’t for everyone. But for the innovative few out there: by customising your offering through being more personal and more dynamic, by lifting the restrictions that your static competitors fix their customers to, you gain market differentiation and offering a far more compelling experience by creating an alternate, dynamic reality from the existing static one.

Phew! Quite a statement. To illustrate, consider the following restrictions pertaining to micro media and how they can be lifted:

Location. How can you provide high level of support wherever your customer is? Your static competitors require a phone or website – they haven’t even considered a tweet or facebook from a mobile phone.
Time. What happens when your customer is frustrated and it’s out of hours? Your static competitors are sleeping, not tweeting.
Device. Do you have mobile friendly portals for all devices? Your static competitors, if not friendly to none, are friendly only to the device they use.
Channel. Can you be found on whatever social network and micro media your customer prefers? Your static competitors, if they don’t just snub social media right out, probably only have a dead Facebook group at best.
Dependencies. Do you offer a simple and complete service, from start to finish? Do you have procedures to get the info you need in a few 140 messages? Your static competitors require signups, feedback forms, and long processes – all of which just frustrate an already frustrated customer.

By lifting static restrictions, you increase your ease of access, ease of use, and importantly, ease of shareability. As in the Carluccio’s test, realtime reviews come hard and fast, and a dynamic, personal experience will produce positive reviews that will be instantly shared.

Making It Personal

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Scott Gould

Last month, as part of Aaron+Gould’s first birthday, we gave away 3 experience consultancy sessions. On Monday, I had the opportunity of spending one of those sessions with Rick Timmis, and hear all about what he’s doing with making Customer Relationship Management (CRM) more personal and more friendly.

Other than the Exeter Tweetup I held in August, this is the only other time I’ve met Rick, but thanks to social media, we were able to build upon the conversation that we’d been having online for months and get straight into things. I don’t want to divulge the details of the consultation, as in short, we built a plan for Rick to take over the world, but I do want to harp on the one thing that we kept coming back round to: making it personal.

A shift is upon us, as we as enter the two-thousand-and-teenies, from the brand machine to people. In other words, people are despising the great awe and wonder and distance that big companies have, that once upon a time were considered the marks of success. This old school thinking went along the lines of “The more people between the CEO and the customer, the bigger, and therefore better, the company is.”

Not anymore.

Now, the more people between the CEO and the customer, the more bureaucratic and out-of-touch the company is. CEOs are tweeting and brands are becoming ‘Olivia at Coca-Cola’, ‘Rick at Abazander’ and ‘Michael Hyatt at Thomas Nelson’. Personal doesn’t just mean you give me your name – it means I can contact you personally. Hear that? I can contact you personally. In other words, the relationship is no longer you telling me what do to. It is about you and me having a conversation. You listen to what I have to say, take it on board, and I in turn listen to you, and when you are unable to deliver on something I’m fine with it – because we have a relationship.

Relationship. The beginning of business. Adam Stone was telling me yesterday about a keynote he had attended by behavioural economist Roger Martin-Fagg, who was boiling business down from economic grandeur to the level where it began: relationship, tribes, identity, and felt need.

When you begin to talk about getting personal, many businesses step away. They are afraid of personal, either because the people in their organisation are money hungry wolves with no care for the well being of the customers, or because they don’t want to make mistakes, or both. Me, I have no time to work with these companies, nor these people. I’m onto more relevant things than money. Businesses that invest in being personal will win in the future – they will help more people, make the world better, and yes, they’ll increase their revenue because their customers will be telling their friends just how much this company cares.

Of course, this won’t be mainstream for years to come. But do yourself a favour and think innovatively for a moment. My predictions:

The wise utility companies (Phone, Gas, etc) will start having personal reps. No longer does John from Vodafone call me but I can’t call John back and am instead stuck with Sally. In the years to come, I will become a client of John, my rep for Vodafone, just as much as I am of Vodafone.
The wise high streets store will start cultivating personal name based relationship with their customers, as opposed to only the few that currently do like independent retailers and the innovative Gap and Starbucks.
‘Removed’, as a mark of stature, will be replaced by ‘In Touch’. The ‘In Touch’ CEO will nurture a more emotionally connecting brand, and will command greater respect than the ‘Removed’ CEO.
Mobile Phone numbers on websites will no longer be a mark of being ‘shoddy and can’t afford a landline’, but be an expected way to directly get hold of the person you need to talk to.
Websites, then, without the names of the people who are running it and the people you want to speak to, will become essentially worthless. Average Joe loads the webpage, can’t find the person he needs to speak to, and figures ‘why bother?’ I don’t know about you, but business websites without names make me think they’re fake.
Company Twitter accounts, unless they are brands that have thousands of followers, will make you look small because why follow the company when you can follow the CEO? Hence, Company Twitter accounts will become CEO Twitter accounts.
Twitter, social media and realtime personal customer care – i.e. ubiquitous business – will boom as people flock to their mobiles for the internet. A quarter of Facebook’s 250 million users are mobile, for example. Decisions can finally be made in a moment – by checking on your mobile.
An extension of the above, reviews and rating of products and service has become real time and will continue to become more intuitive. For instance, HSBCreviews.com is a realtime monitoring of HSBC tweets, creating an overall rating of how good / bad they are.
The current clumsy nature of getting train time updates, for example, will be replaced by digital personal assistants – a merger of the Google voice activated iPhone app and ReQall – only far faster. If I had the capital, I’d be investing in this technology. It’s Star Trek in action.
Mass personal customisation – a hallmark of the experience economy – will become increasingly more mainstream. Think about the personal card greeting market that is increasing, and then imagine it across over markets and products.

Is all of this new? Not at all. As our friend Roger Martin-Fagg points out, it all goes back to year-dot behaviour, just with modern technology. Hairdressers, shopping in upmarket stores, small businesses and coffee houses, as well as others, have been doing relational, personal business for years. It is now time that the big companies scale down and get personal. Big used to be an advantage, but now, consumers are wanting names – and the companies that are flexible enough to offer them will win.

Fast forward to Tuesday night as I’m putting the final touches on this post and talking to Dave Thomas over the phone. Dave was telling a story of contacting his clients and receiving referrals from them. The point was, that unlike the ‘Removed CEO’, Dave had built relationships with his clients, was in touch with them, and could personally ask for a referral without the fear of embarrassment – because, hey, friends ask each other for favours, don’t they? This takes me to the final punch for making business personal…

The old method of doing business – the one that’s currently struggling to survive in the face of the social media revolution – is based on fear. I, the customer, fears the business. The IT agency knows all, and I fear their knowledge. The web host mysteriously holds all my files, and I fear they’ll switch my hosting off. British Gas serves my utilities, and I fear their bills when they don’t reflect our monthly arrangement. I fear the big successful CEOs and Creative Directors, especially compared to my small budget. It’s all fear.

Making it personal means trading fear for friendship. I don’t fear the IT company who are friends with me (and incidentally, that’s Dave’s company down to a T). I don’t fear the big CEO because through Twitter, I’ve made friends with her. Sure, I’m not inviting the CEO over for dinner, but there is friendship and relationship in the place of fear and the unknown. Alistair Banks (@banksy6 ) put it like this:

People buy people and that is so important – without being personal you simply don’t get that.

The ball is in our court. As innovators, Executives, Directors, Pastors and thinkers, we’ve got to take the first step of friendship towards our customers. I know full well that if you went onto the high street and asked people if they wanted their mobile phone company becoming all personal with them, they’d say ‘no’. But what I gleaned from Steve Jobs and Henry Ford is this: you need to tell people what they want. If Henry Ford had made what people wanted, he’s just have tried to make horses faster. Thankfully, he saw beyond what others saw. And that’s the point. People are so used to customer sacrifice that talk of customer surprise seems alien to them. (BTW, for a great slideshow on this subject, check out this.)

The challenge, then, is for business to grow some kahunas and be the first to do it. Because second place just sucks.

Again, One Is Too Small A Number

Posted on August 12, 2009 by Scott Gould

Happy birthday to us. We celebrate our first birthday today. Right in the middle of recession hype, on August 12th 2008, I put paper to pen and Aaron+Gould was born.

One year later I realise again than one is too small a number to acheive significance.

One is too small a number because one year isn’t enough to do what we want to do. We believe in experience, we really do, and the frameworks that we have built contain the type of thinking that is needed not only in businesses, but in charities, churches, families, cities, orphanages, and the rest. Memories matter. And memories are made from compelling experiences. Families need to make memories. Churches need to make memories. Orphanages need to make good memories, to balance out the bad ones.

In our work with young people we find that all too many of our nation’s children’s are over exposed to abuse, drugs, alcohol and gangs – but they are under exposed to opportunity, the reward of work, culture, and even their own potential.

And so we believe the market for experience is as large as the human race.

One is also too small a number, because I didn’t do this year by myself. I signed the papers, but my team has worked tirelessly with me. But even we didn’t do this by ourselves. We did it with you. Every Exeter Twitterati, every friend from around the world, every person who comments and encourages me on this blog, every person whose had coffee with me – every one – we did it with you. And we intend to do the next year with you too.

Today at 12:00 BST, to say thanks, we’re giving out some birthday presents. I’ll be doing a Qik to announce it, and then the blog post will appear on the Aaron+Gould blog. It’s only little, but it’s well worth being there.

So, again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Uncompromising On Your Experience

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Scott Gould

I founded Aaron+Gould on August 12 2008, and in order to get cash flow through the door I did some work at a really cheap rate – I mean, stupidly cheap. You tell yourself that you’re building your portfolio, or building your network, but after it all you realise it’s just one of the things that you do to make ends meat.

Side note: most business people would never be this honest – they’d be too busy posturing – but I know that you learn just as much from the scars as you do from the successes. Anyway…

So I took the job late last year. To cut a long story short, we finally got the last bits of copy we needed this week (after 7 months of silence) to wrap the project up. Thing is, our rates are now exceedingly more, and thus I faced the dilemma: do I do the bare minimum, quickly and to a low standard, and say “that’s it”, or, do I treat them just as valuably as our other clients?

My solution was found in the following Gucci slogan: Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.

Let me rephrase using my favourite word: Experience is remembered long after the price is forgotten. Every person I am in contact with, every client my agency serves, every visitor that enters my church, every follower on Twitter and reader of this very article – every single one deserves a compelling experience, and it is that experience that they’ll remember above all the other factors that fade over time.

To this end, I resolved not to compromise this client’s experience. I’ve decided that providing a compelling experience is now one of my personal and business non-negotiables. I won’t compromise it.

What won’t you compromise?