Church of the Customer: January 2004 archives
« December 2003 | Main | February 2004 »
January 21, 2004
Creating B2B evangelists
Tom Petzinger's terrific book "The New Pioneers" offers a potent example of how a manufacturing company set out to create customer evangelists...
In 1993, Toledo-based Dana Corporation agreed to assemble truck undercarriages for Toyota. As part of their agreement, Dana would provide an annual price cut beginning four years later. For the Dana Corporation, this agreement was designed to achieve two primary objectives:
1. Keep its giant customer, Toyota, happy and by extension, its customers happy.
2. Force the Dana Corporation to create and maintain an internal feedback system that would continually spur efficiency within its manufacturing process. Dana declared it would not meet price cuts by reducing wages or using cheaper materials.
Mark Schmink was in charge of Dana's program, and the book describes his strategy to create internal evangelists for a virtuous feedback loop necessary to spur innovation:
Schmink created a plant library stocked not only with research materials but bestsellers on tape to get people's minds moving in their cars on the way to work. He fostered the culture of continuous improvement by telling stories of his upbringing as the son of a Methodist minister: "The churchgoer does not become a truly devoted and learned Christian his first Sunday in a pew," he told the plant at one point. "His dedication to his religion grows as he learns more and as he practices those new beliefs." Worker teams met regularly to question every routine of the plant, right down to the sequencing of individual welds.
In the B2B world, what customer wouldn't be extremely satisfied by annual price cuts and still maintain or exceed quality expectations?
Tin soldiers marching
The RIAA's civil war against customers continues: Today, it sued 532 customers for downloading songs on the Internet. There are few industries that enjoy more law-based protections and freedoms than the recording industry; yet it and the motion-picture industry stand alone in sanctimoniously fighting every new technology that challenges their oligopolies.
The RIAA is a charter member of customer hell.
January 20, 2004
Varnish remover
I really like the Brand Autopsy weblog because it's honest and direct. John Moore and Paul Williams are voracious readers; if anything, they should be in charge of business book reviews for Publisher's Weekly. Here's an example, based on John's review of advertising tome "Bang!":
Instead of offering solid advice on how to create, nuture, and implement great marketing ideas, BANG! offers readers a glimpse into the happenings of a happenin’ ad agency. The authors glamorize how so many of their best campaigns were created at the last minute -- sometimes minutes before a presentation to their client. Do you really want to trust your company’s marketing campaign to an advertising agency that boasts about continuously developing their best ideas at the last minute?
As someone who used to work at a mid-sized marketing firm, I know the happenin' belief system is found within many of the world's ad agencies: flash = marketing + image = product. It may be a formula for selling soda, but it hardly works for the other 99% of the world's products and services.
January 19, 2004
A glimmer of light in customer hell
Regular readers of this blog know that we consider most traditional telephone companies to be charter owners of customer hell.
Their information systems are often over-engineered contraptions that are more headache-prone than helpful. Ordering and installing DSL is like trying to buy a space shuttle. There's often little or no ownership of a customer problem, and customers are often forced to hang up and call another number to reach a different department within the same company (this means you, SBC).
With the growth of VOIP and commoditized long distance threatening their existence, more than a few arguments go, let the dinosaur phone companies die off so that more efficient organizations can take their place, and the market will become less expensive and more efficient.
Today's Wall Street Journal features a Q&A with Qwest chairman and CEO Richard Notebaert, who was brought in to clean up the near-bankruptcy mess left by expensive suit Joseph Nacchio. Notebaert outlines the five top strategies to save the regional phone companies, the top one of which is the clarion call of customer-evangelism:
1. Put the customer at the center of the universe.
2. Accept that you're a commodity. Slash your prices.
3. Drastically cut your costs.
4. Use what you've got. Don't build costly new infrastructure.
5. Embrace low-cost new technologies -- don't fight them.
A phone company CEO saying that customers are the center of the universe... Heretic!
January 16, 2004
Customer evangelism begins internally
Internet.com has a compelling view of the sales culture inside AOL:
[Internet.com] obtained audiotapes of two meetings conducted by recently departed ad sales EVP Lisa Brown. In them, she repeatedly launches into obscenity-laced tirades, personally insults senior executives in her group, and at one point, pounds her shoe on the table, Khrushchev-style, when a creative director from a longtime AOL vendor speaks out of turn.
Yikes! AOL has a long road ahead to creating customer evangelists. A company culture based on fear, intimidation and shoe-pounding(!) is ideally suited for creating customer vigilantes.
He said it
"It's not the strongest of the species that survive, but the one most responsive to change."
-- Charles Darwin
January 15, 2004
Creating student evangelists
Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing reports that a class she co-taught at Emory University's business school created all sorts of evangelists because the students became actual marketing consultants for an Atlanta non-profit. A nice write up in the local business paper has all the details.
Toby says, "The students actually pleaded for us to offer the course again and gave us presents. The dean said that was 'unheard of.'"
Now that's marketing education!
Technical support is missing
I emailed my most excellent friend Matthew Lindenburg, who's a techie's techie, about a cool new gadget from Sound Blaster, and he replied with this yarn...
Did I tell you I bought one of Gateway's connected DVD players? You can connect to a server on your desktop and stream MP3, WMA and various video formats. I got the wireless version and was very excited because finally I could access all of my media from the living room.
The DVD player part worked great. Excellent picture, good features. But the wireless media part worked just so-so. It often hiccoughed when it started to play the first track of a playlist or album and sometimes would just lose the connection to the network altogether.
I talked to tech support and they suggested it might be the network card I was using (which they provided). So they said they would contact me about get a replacement. I waited two weeks to hear back from them. No callback, no follow-up email, nothing.
One day when I was on the Gateway site I noticed that they had released a firmware upgrade for the unit. I thought, cool, maybe this will help. So followed the instructions, confirmed that I had the right unit for the upgrade, downloaded the files, burned them on the CD and followed the install instructions. When I rebooted the unit, it was hosed. The UI froze every time I tried to configure the network.
So, I called them back and said, hey, your upgrade broke my DVD player. Of course, the tech accused me of installing it incorrectly. I said, hey, I'm no novice. I did it right. The tech said try it again. I said I tried it 5 times already, including re-burning the CD from different machines in my house. He said, Oh. I said, can you help me restore the old firmware. He said, no, there's NOTHING WE CAN DO. So I asked for a supervisor.
When the supervisor got on the phone, he said my favorite thing: "How can I help you?" I love this from supervisors because:
a) It's really the opposite of what they mean. What they're thinking is, how can I get you to go away and stop being a customer right now?
b) They're pretending like the last person I talked to hadn't just spent the last five minutes explaining the situation.
But I walked the supervisor through the situation again. When I was done he said: "Well, you probably installed it wrong."
Grrrr.
This guy tells me that the only thing he can do is have me send the unit in to the lab in Sioux Falls (he pronounced it, swear to god, SOO-IX Falls). I said, shit, it's almost Christmas (it was December 9) and we're going to want to watch DVDs. He said, oh, it probably won't want take that long. I said, okay. So I sent the unit in. They received it on December 12. I called around the 15th to see if they could provide any status.
Tech support said that I needed to talk customer support and transferred me. Customer support said they had no record of the service request and transferred me back to tech support. Tech support had the record but confirmed that only customer support could provide status. Oy, said I. I gave the service request number that I got from tech support to customer support and they said, oh, well, it doesn't look we've received the DVD player yet. I gave them the UPS tracking number and said that they had, in fact, received the unit. I was put on hold. When the CSR came back she said, yes, they had received it (she just went to the UPS site and checked the tracking number). I said I know.
What's the status? She said that she couldn't provide status because there was not way to reach the technical support center.
"No way?" I said.
"No way."
"They don't have phones?"
"We're not allowed to have the number."
"Aren't they in your building?"
"I'm not sure."
"Could you check?"
Hold.
"Sir?"
"Yes?"
"We're not sure where they are."
And so began this dance with the customer and tech support departments of Gateway. I was promised a call back with a status the first time I called. That didn't happen. So I've called back since, roughly once per week. Just to, I don't know, get my heart-pumping. Every time it's the same process. Talk to customer service, talk to tech support, can't get a status, we'll call you back.
Now, stop me if I'm getting this wrong but isn't Gateway the company that claims to have the highest rating of customer satisfaction in phone support? Isn't it?
So, anyway, yeah. I think the Creative wireless unit looks very cool.
Viral Dean
The Howard Dean campaign continues to show us marketers a thing or two.
Its latest tactic: a viral email postcard. Its birth and rapid viral nature are brilliant. Here's how it unfolded:
* Jan 7: "Club for Growth," a conservatave political advocacy organization, launches its first anti-Dean TV ad. It portrays an elderly couple approached by a "reporter" who asks them for their opinion of Howard Dean. The husband replies:
Well, I think Howard Dean should take his tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading . . .
The wife chimes in:
. . .body piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.
* Jan 8: Instead of releasing a statement denouncing the ad, Dean's campaign team posts its text to the campaign blog, asking supporters for creative responses to the ad, such as a flyer, a song, or their own ads. In three days, more than 600 people respond, many with funny and serious ideas on how to combat the "Club for Growth."
* Jan 12: The Dean campaign receives a "Photoshopped" postcard via email; it riffs on the attack ad and is posted to the Dean website. The postcard features a photo of its creators, a short description of themselves and a message of support. Here's a sample:
* Jan 13: Others capture the idea and postcards multiply. A Dean supporter creates a gallery of postcards.
* Jan 14: Dean campaign computer programmers create a website for anyone to make their own postcard. The campaign emails its list of over 575,000 people, inviting them to make their own postcards and email them to friends and family.
Talk about a fluid marketing strategy! A marketing campaign created and lauched to thousands of people, who then send the message on to thousands of other people, in six days.
In the customer evangelism model, this rapid-response strategy captures the passion of fervent supports quickly and efficiently and enlists their volunteer support. Its lessons:
* Ask your customers for help with marketing ideas
* React quickly to controversial or hot news in your market
* Don't be afraid to have some fun
Nervous breakdown advertising
The L.A. Times and this advertiser couldn't scream "desperation" any louder than this page-covering ad could.
