Saturday, March 11, 2006
Customer Experience Management 2005 survey
From Customer World:
The annual global Customer Experience Management 2005 study, conducted by the Strativity Group, finds 54 percent of senior executives claim they do not deserve consumers’ loyalty.
According to the study, 67 percent of executives do not meet often with customers and only 33 percent say they have the tools and authority they need to serve their customers.
“Customer Experience Management”? I’d rather have my experience mastered than managed.
Friday, March 10, 2006
Making companies pay for our time and attention
I’m in Los Angeles, and last night had dinner with fellow Engagement Alliance advisory board member Hillary Johnson and our friend Amy Alkon, a syndicated advice columnist whose work is carried in more than one hundred newspapers across the US. (If you think her column is a great chance to be influential, you should see what she can do with her blog.) In Amy’s spare time, she fights the good fight:
If I have a hobby, it’s being a part-time detective. I’ve tracked down one stolen car and the dirtbag who stole it, then tracked him down again and made him pay me his court-ordered restitution. Then there was my hit-and-run driver, whom I also tracked down, and had prosecuted. I also tracked down a friend’s birth parents, figured out who was e-harrassing another friend of mine and made the person stop. (The friend wanted to send a person an email demanding they stop. Naw. I instead looked up their corporate email policy—all the small print every big company puts out about not using corporate email for nefarious ends—and we sent the harrasser a screen shot of it. That was the last my friend heard from the harrasser, of course.
Amy might best be described as a customer justice advocate; that, however, might be missing the point. The truth is that with the tools now available online, anyone can take back control of their time and attention like Amy has. It’s not that difficult. Just ask the companies that Amy has forced to compensate her for the time they’ve stolen from her with their intrusive, annoying, and disruptive marketing tactics. As she says:
The point isn’t really to make money off people (although I’m going after a telemarketer next, and because of the guy’s arrogance, plan to sue him in small claims court for my posted prices), it’s to show people that they just can’t just walk all over people with impunity and play out their lives as if they’re the lone member of the ME! ME! ME! generation...I’m all for freedom of speech...such as the freedom to hire somebody to stand on public property to ask us to give them our phone numbers so people in a boiler room can irritate the crap out of us. The freedom I’m not for is the freedom to hijack a telephone line I pay for to interrupt me at dinner time (or any other time) to try to sell me something.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Café Press combines contextual ads with tags
I’m flying to California this morning. While I’m there, I will be attending the Techdirt Greenhouse conference, which promises to be a great event. Techdirt is a corporate intelligence company whose employees author one of the best blogs around. Yesterday, they had a must-read piece on Café Press‘s newly announced combination of contextual advertising with tagging.
While most people think of the company as a place to simply sell t-shirts, not enough people recognize how CafePress really catalogs timely events. Within hours of any major news event, it seems that someone, somewhere will have set up a Cafe Press store to sell items related to that event. Of course, with such rapid setup of timely news-related products, regular contextual advertising doesn’t necessarily work. So, instead, CafePress is offering a program where people can define specific tags, and immediately have ads for related products show up. In other words, rather than contextual ads, the ad topic can be very narrowly defined by the site owner. This certainly makes sense for the type of timely content on CafePress, but you could see it make sense elsewhere as well—where the context of the words on a site might not necessarily correctly suggest what ads should be displayed.
Like I said, Techdirt is a great daily read, and one I wouldn’t be without; add its feed to your RSS reader and you’ll see what I mean.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Communities Contextualize Brands
Engagement Alliance advisory board members Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen have received more rich praise for their book, Communities Dominate Brands, this time from Rob Kleine at Digito Society. Kleine writes:
Ahonen & Moore’s book is, at one level, an extended meditation on why the ubiquitious cell phone will be the ultimate tool for connecting individuals (via SMS, voice, IM, and for internet access).
At another level, Ahonen and Moore build the case that —as they parse it—communities dominate brands. My preferred parsing is that communities contextualize brands. Communities—whether you care to call them sub-cultures, social networks, or whatever—provide the context in in which consumption generally, and brands specifically, are contextualized; communities provide a context in which brands do (or don’t) make sense. The reflected appraisal process appears central to connecting communities, stuff (brands), and individuals.
... There’s much more to this book; I’ve but scratched the surface here. But these are the elements that resonated most powerfully with me. More gems are buried in the book. Give it a read. Find them yourself.
I think any author would gladly take such a smart, considered review. (You can read more praise for the book here, and here, and also here.) Well done, guys.
Talk to a human
Thanks to Cheapflights.co.uk for this very handy telephone cheat sheet on their site, which helped me get around Lastminute.com’s insistence on only providing an online form for their customers to get in touch. (When you’re flying in less than 24 hours, you really don’t want to rely on an online form, do you?)