One of the main things that helped with me this is a post by Dan Blank called “Creating Interest vs Providing Solutions” from late last year. Dan says a number of pertinent things in this post, my favourite being:

If you can’t properly monetize 18 million unique visitors a month, how will another 5 million help clarify the way forward?

The point is that charging for interest is different to charging for a solution. Dan argues that many B2Bs, and publishers in particular, are thinking very narrowly about what their real asset is, and desperately trying to cling onto it, rather than actually start from the users point of view and explore what needs they really have around their interests:

Even in the cases where pay walls will work, it is not a complete solution, it is just one revenue stream. And in all likelihood, it is not one that will restore revenue and profits to the levels being lost by print.

Ads & Sponsorships are one model, but getting customers to pay you is another. If you rely solely on ads & sponsorships, how many page views is enough for your market? How many webinar sign-ups? How much growth can you garner year after year?

To differentiate your revenue streams, you may want to consider developing products that provide direct solutions. What service do you provide – could you provide- that people couldn’t live without?

Dan then linked to an exceptional presentation by David Cushman, called “a new era for specialist media.” Any regular here will find the ideas similar to our discussions on spreadability and people-to-people, but it is most certainly worth a look.

[slideshare id=2509580&doc=sipakeynotedc-091116051033-phpapp02]

All of this discussion makes me think again about the need for Social Media to be useful. And by useful I don’t mean useful for you, I mean useful for your users and/or community. We really need to understand them, with quantitive and qualitative research, and deliver what lifts restrictions for them – what enables them to do what they previously could not do.

For a really good case study on this, watch Yann Gourvennec’s Insight at Like Minds. His work as the Head of Digital and Internet at Orange Business Services is very, very inspiring.

Your Leading Thoughts

• Are you a B2B player in Social Media? If so, are you providing a solution?
• How do we begin to think ‘solution’, because I think at the moment we are very caught up with interest over solution.
• How do you communicate solutions, without making everything a sales pitch?

Experience planning isn’t a simple task, because if it was, everyone would be getting it right. I think it actually takes a lot of thought to not loose someone at hello.

Lets take my church, for instance. When a visitor arrives they are subconsciously asking themselves the question ‘who here is like me’, all the time wanting to feel safe and secure, and not having to be noticed or attract attention to themselves.

As you can imagine, it doesn’t take much to knock one of those.

The trick to keeping someone at hello, I think, is to get into someone else’s shoes and really into their mind and understand what it is like to approach you for the first time.

Your Leading Thoughts

• How have you learnt to keep someone at hello? What are your tactics?

Selling has been replaced by serving.

If you can give the best service, then you’ll get the best sales.

Rather than talking about “Our Specials”, start talking about “You’re Special”.

Does this mean I’m saying you should soft sell? No – it means I’m saying we should serve hard.

Serve each other rather than sell yourself.

(P.S. Don’t mean to be so Seth Godin-esque, but sometimes, you can’t help it

People don’t care.

No pretty picture today. No flowery language. Just let the reality hit you: people don’t care.

Remember Eurostar?

When everyone was angry, they went to the Twitter account for answers. The Twitter bio said “Official Eurostar Twitter feed. Not Eurostar customer service but trying to help get information out to our customers as received. Thanks for understanding.” But the truth is, people did’t care. I labour the point here.

If you represent the brand, you are the brand.

If people need anything from the brand, you better be ready to give anything they need -whether it’s your department or not.

The idea of customer care is so your customers don’t have to.

And that calls for some integration. With all the talk of strategy, engagement, conversation and the rest, too many people now vastly exaggerate what they can offer, and unfortunately don’t offer the basics of having something that works.

I learnt that lesson for myself again this week. We are taking registrations for Like Minds Lunch Time Talks and someone complains that the process isn’t easy. It doesn’t matter that it’s because they have to pre-order their food, and is part of us measuring how we are raising £100k for the city. They don’t care. And the truth is, they shouldn’t. They just want it to work.

Question

• If you had to offer 3 pillars for integration – and no more than 3 – what would they be?

So, I made a bit of a mistake yesterday. I wrote a 3,000 word essay on suspense and brand mystery, rolling in far too many case studies, and providing way more content in one post than I’ve said in past times that one should!

I’m going to, instead, start right at the beginning with a basic overview of expectations. One of the central pillars of a compelling experience is that it exceeds expectations. People are pleased, but not really moved, when their expectations are met. If you don’t meet expectations, then you disappoint people and provide a bad experience. But people are really thrilled and motivated to tell others when they’ve had an experience that exceeded their expectations.

Hence this diagram above that was originally drawn up by Joe Pine and James Gilmore in their seminal book The Experience Economy (affiliate link). BTW, if you any of this stuff on experience interests you at all (and it should, it’s the era we live in) then I’d really recommend you get their book. Ok? Ok. Moving on. Let’s get into what it means.

Scaling the pyramid

Let’s begin in the middle: at the level of customer satisfaction. Most companies today are patting themselves on the back and are thrilled when they hit ‘satisfaction’ levels. Now I know that the terminology they are using is not as precise as the terms I’m using here, but still I find this ironic, because satisfaction is quite simply what happens when your exceptions are met. Satisfaction is the fruit of the company delivering on what they promised they would. It’s just like keeping a promise – and in this day and age, keeping a promise shouldn’t be too hard, should it?

Of course, we all know that service and promise keeping is something companies struggle with all day. Hence many customers are left feeling under satisfied. The promise that the company made was not delivered on, which creates customer sacrifice, because they are having to sacrifice on the expectation that the promise set, for the reality of what the delivery is.

A good company will clearly never allow customer sacrifice to take place. They build a relationship of trust with their customers which says that what we say we’ll do, we will do. Not only is customer satisfaction is their standard, but because they are so geared towards delivering great service, the customer often experiences customer surprise. Their expectation as a customer was exceeded, and they were pleasantly surprised.

But what does a great company do that’s different? When your customers are used to being surprised, there comes a new level of experience. It is in fact one of anticipation – the experience of anticipating an experience. This is customer suspense.

This top level is where the big boys live, most noteable of which is Apple, who as I detailed yesterday are masters of suspense (well, almost – there is one lesson they could learn from me.) They have learnt how to manage expectations skilfully – which requires working with a new concept that I’ve been towing with of ‘brand mystery‘.

How does this help me?

Two ways. One, it helps you know where you are, where others are, and how each of them build on the other. Two, knowing what they are, you can now use them to your advantage to manage expectations.

Huh? Manage expections?

Yeah, manage expectations.

And because I’m keen to not overstep the mark and write a long post again, I’ll stop here! But perhaps next week I’ll get into how you begin managing expectations. Again, some of this is in what I wrote yesterday.

So, question time. Where are you on this scale? Come on, let’s get real and be honest. For years I was causing customer sacrifice – I never delivered on the promises that I made. Learning this stuff made me grow up.

That’s me. How about you?

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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!
7. Exceed expectation. If they are looking for one thing, give them something better – preferable something that they can share. Scale the pyramid of expectation.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.

The idea of experience in marketing is not at all a new one, and indeed the general public can now observe that more often than not, the notion of experience is being used to sell a company’s goods or services.

But today it is no longer sufficient for a company to use experience to sell. Experience is itself the offering that consumers want. Experience is today’s currency. In a desperately over saturated market, an experience sets one brand / company / product / person apart from all the others.

Starbucks does not produce a quality bean (far from it), nor are its drinks made with the accuracy of an artisan local coffee shop or its pastries fresh. But, none of those matter. When you walk into Starbucks you’re paying for the experience of firstly ordering a drink exactly how you like it, waiting at the bar in anticipation as the barista makes your drink (not someone else’s), adding a range of condiments, sugars and milks, and the experience of walking out holding that green emblem in your hand and participating in the tribe of Bucks drinks all around the world. For that experience, you pay a premium price that is above that of any other coffee shop in sight.

Nor are Disney’s rides the scariest, customer service the best, or food great quality. But the experience is incomparable and the reason why it is the gold standard of family holidays. How about the trailer, ”Cinema, it’s the experience that counts”? What makes ordering a Philly Cheesesteak at Pat’s more than just eating a cheesesteak?

Or consider the iPhone. Many of the groundbreaking features (Touch screen, map, app store, VOIP) have actually been around for a good five, six, seven ten years on mobile devices (Palm, Vodafone Live, Nokia Communicator, etc). But these features appear to be new because whereas previously it was so hard to use and work those things out, the iPhone gives you the experience of exceptional ease. The whole reason why I have an iPhone is because from slide to touch to pinch there is an matchless user experience. It’s like Seth Godin’s tale of sliced bread. The thing was invented in the 1910s but no one knew about it for 15 years until Wonder created a user experience for slicing bread.

Consumers are cutting back… Yet… An experience is still part of the budget. Cinemas are packed this summer. Starbucks paper cups can be seen in bins everywhere. Apple sold over a million iPhone 3G S units in a week. Sure, the holiday might be scaled down, but the experiences that people’s days or weeks hinge upon are so compelling that they have become integral to their routine, and are pretty much non-negotiable.

Shift your thinking from using experience to sell, and instead customise your goods or services into rich, compelling experiences.