I think TLC might have finally gone off the deep end with this one... 

So you think engineers just sit in a dark room all day, slamming down colas and coding till dawn? "Coders and Crowns" will challenge all your preconceived notions about what it takes to be a hotshot engineer in today's highly competitive world.

"Coders and Crowns" is a 15-episode unscripted drama in which 16 engineers, including everyone from Stanford PhDs to savvy tech entrepreneurs with no college education, will endure rigorous tasks each week while living together in a hip San Francisco loft apartment. 

These tasks will test both their coding abilities as well as other skills, like cooking a gourmet meal for eight (judged by famous celebrity chefs Alice Waters and Cindy Pawlcyn), learning to dance the mambo and performing it in front of a crowd of thousands at salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference, and designing (and modeling) a pageant-worthy gown for the Miss USA organization. 

Each week, you, the television viewing audience, will vote off one of the engineers until only one is left standing -- the "KING (OR QUEEN) OF SILICON VALLEY", who will be granted a lifetime supply of Red Bull and $750,000 in funding from the legendary Y Combinator to get their dream company off the ground.

What do you think? Has the "celebrity programmer" craze finally gone too far?

If a Twitterbird chirps on DM, and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

Twitter recently announced that they will be changing the rules for DMs (Direct Messages). Previously, Direct Messages could only be sent between two parties that followed one another, often resulting in tedious exchanges like this:

• To fix a spelling mistake on my @united ticket... I'm told I need to purchase a new ticket. No #customerservice or @staralliance love.
• @United Follow me so I can DM you.
• @customer Please follow us so that we may DM you back.

What does this mean? Well, one of two things:

1. You could potentially get a floodgate of DM spam. Since the feature is off by default, if you don't want to run that risk, don't turn it on.

2. Enterprises will now find it much easier to use Twitter as a pseudo-chat client, since (if they turn the feature on) any of their customers with complaints or problems will be able to DM their customer service channel instead of sending open @ discussions. 

The interesting thing will be to see how many people opt to communicate with companies this way. One of the more satisfying elements of complaining on social media is that those complaints are public. So by Tweeting "@united you screwed me over again with a late flight", you not only generally got customer service, but also the ability to tell all your friends of your displeasure at the same time.

In addition, because so many social media customer service exchanges were done in the public eye, social teams tended to be more friendly and responsive on the whole, since they were basically also PR reps. If more people turn to DMs, will this behavior change?

Finally, if more exchanges are done completely in private, companies will find it harder to benchmark sentiment against their competition.

Fascinating times, indeed.

My Quest for a Plush Owly

Here's my submission for HootSuite's "win a #PlushOwly" contest. I think this officially qualifies as "musings on random stuff"...

Oh little Owly, I love you so
Seeing you always makes my heart glow

I wish I had my own plush to keep
So that I could hold you as I sleep

Please little Owly, cuddly and cute
Put my home on your migration route.

If you come fly to San Francisco
I'll be so happy, I might disco.

HootSuite's the app that I love to use
To post to Twitter and Facebook too.

Scheduling helps me manage the flow
Mobile is awesome when on the go.

Security's great - glad we have that!
Conversations allow us to chat.

So many features in great array...
But a plush Owly would make my day.

I've just one more thing to say in verse
Before all these rhymes get even worse

I'd also like to join HootSuite's team
And live my product management dream.

For I have some ideas, quite clever
To make HootSuite just that much better.

If you enjoyed this poem today
Click here for my LinkedIn resume!

Why "Bad" Reviews Can Be Good

A large part of building good brand equity is all about creating and meeting a customer's expectations.

For example, one of the biggest challenges for an individually owned property is in managing their customer's expectations of them. For example, I once stayed at an awesome little place called The Andrion in Mendocino. Quirky, peaceful, and relatively inexpensive -- with owners who clearly care about the place and their customers.

However, The Andrion has one big problem. For whatever reason, their listing on Expedia is wrong, in spite of the fact that they have contacted Expedia several times to try to fix it. It says things like they have a "full service spa", a kitchenette, and shops on the property.

So, in spite of the fact that their website is perfect and tells you exactly what the property is like, they were getting customers who were upset that the property didn't have what Expedia said it would have.

The good news is that customers who went to Trip Advisor (for example) and checked out the reviews have a completely accurate view of the property and know what to expect, as well as how to get the best experience possible. "Do not miss happy hour or breakfast" "Pet the goats" "This room does not have a Kitchenette, but has coffee service and a mini-fridge" "Quirky and fun" The list of why this place is NOT the Sheraton goes on and on. 

I do this all the time. It's important to read the text of the reviews and not just the bullets.

I also recently stayed at the Housekeeping Camp at Yosemite. (Yes, those cabins. The ones with the hantavirus mice. Which by the way, I didn't see any). In among the reviews talking about the fantastic views and in-park setting were "negative" statements like "bring a broom, the rooms can be dirty", "bring your sleeping bag, the rooms can get very cold even with the blankets you can rent", and "put your food in sealed containers, not just Ziploc bags, because while the Bear Boxes keep bears out, the mice can still get to your food otherwise"

So, when I went, I got exactly what I expected and I was prepared for the "negatives", with broom, plastic-containered food, and sleeping bag in hand (the broom I didn't need, the sleeping bag I most decidedly did!).

Hotels also have a chance to respond to bad reviews, in case some of them were time-specific "the pool was closed". (I encourage all hoteliers to do this by the way. We're all human and have our "bad days".) 

If hotels completely deleted their "bad" reviews, though, then the issues propagate themselves. For example, for some people, a noisy room can completely ruin an otherwise wonderful experience. I don't care; I can generally sleep through a train rumbling through the room, and I've been known to sleep through earthquakes. So when I read a review and it talks disparagingly about noise, I'm ok with it, as long as the room is also clean and well-located, on the other hand, I generally couldn't give two figs about the on-site restaurant that I will never use. So a negative review about the on-site restaurant doesn't matter to me.

In short, by encouraging visitors to write reviews, and by prospective visitors reading reviews -- good and bad -- guests can self-select, get what they expected, and everyone's happy. 

And, by improving guest self-selection, you also end up improving your average ratings -- because customers that would be unhappy with your establishment won't go there.

So go ahead - be proud of your "bad" reviews! They just might get you the customers you want, and avoid the customers you don't.

The challenge of wrangling 178 cats

Last week, we talked about how marketing and customer service need to be able to work more effectively together to create a harmonized brand experience and improve brand equity with their customers.

But how can these two groups accomplish this? What are the techniques and tools that marketing and customer service groups can use to respond more quickly and team together to deliver a quality customer experience?

One way is to solve the problem technologically, through a marketing/customer service system that ties together both outbound (push) campaigns and inbound (reactive) campaigns.

However, when one considers that the average large organization has 178 different social media accounts, trying to create a solution that can help users coordinate and provide insight into all of these activities, let alone manage interactions in traditional channels like phone and email, can be incredibly daunting.

With the current state of technology, choosing one tool to rule them all can often be a difficult exercise for a company. Usually one group "loses" in the choice - either the marketing group, which often wants sophisticated publishing capabilities and extensive audience reporting, or the customer service group, which needs robust workflows, agent performance reporting, and often cross-channel capabilities. 

In addition, even sub-groups can often lose. For example, one application might be good for publishing to Facebook, one for customer service response on Twitter, and another for managing community sites.

This is why we are starting to see increased activity on both the partnership and M&A front. 
For example, the latest partnership between social media management companies HootSuite (which started out more on the marketing/publishing side) and Attensity (which started out more on the customer service side), was driven by a customer who wanted to be able to use both solutions in-house and yet have a unified communication between the two.

Meanwhile, Salesforce, a powerhouse in CRM, purchased both Radian6 (social media monitoring and light engagement) and Buddy Media (experts at Facebook publishing). And Lithium, a leader in community site management, purchased Social Dynamx (social media response).

There are a host of other social media management applications (Adobe, Sprinklr, Conversocial, Sprout, etc) that started out on one side or the other and are now trying to "reach across the aisle" to address the needs of the "other" constituency.

All this can make it a real challenge for organizations to settle on a single solution, and I would expect a good deal of "solution churn" to still occur in the next 12-18 months as companies implement a solution, discover that it doesn't work in some areas, and look to pivot to something else. Or they might find a solution that works, only to find that the provider of that solution is being purchased by a larger company that then slows innovation down, or even shuts down the solution entirely.

So in short, there is as of yet no technological "magic bullet" on the engagement front. Hope is on the horizon, but in the meantime, the simplest solution may simply be to make sure that marketing and customer service continue to talk to each other about the challenges, either informally or by creating a single contact point via a role like the Chief Customer Officer or Chief Digital Officer.

In my next blog post, we'll discuss some Customer Experience Management reporting solutions that try to solve these problems at a data collection level, and outline the pros and cons of some of them.


 

Customer Service is the New Marketing

I threatened on Twitter last week that I'd start blogging again, and so I have! I did, however, refrain from adding posts to my 2008 blog, which was an amusing blast from the past (PowerSet? Mahalo?), but didn't quite feel relevant. So we're starting fresh!

I was thinking today about brand equity and how companies can better build it. 

Now when most people think of brand equity, they think it's the purview of the marketing department.

But when you think of brands like Zappos, Kimpton Hotels, or United Airlines, what comes to mind? Their advertising?

For most people the answer is no. 

They think of customer service.

Whether for good or ill, one interaction can make or break a customer's relationship with that company. I know many people who will "never fly United again" or, conversely, who are rabid fans of Kimpton. 

I'm pretty sure the people who will never fly United don't feel that way because they don't particularly like Gershwin's music. 

It's because they had a bad experience, or they had a friend who had a bad experience. 

And now that social media makes so many interactions public, it's even more important for companies to respond well to their customers' issues.

Dimensional Research reports:

• 42% of consumers purchased more frequently from a business after a good customer service experience.
• 52% stopped dealing with a business after a bad experience.
• 95% of the people surveyed admit that they have told someone about a negative customer service experience. 
• 54% of those people who have shared their negative experience have, at least on one occasion, told a minimum of five people.

In short, customer service is the new marketing. 
 
And a good experience isn't just about responding well... it's also about responding quickly.

In a study by The Social Habit (cited by Sprout Social), 32% of people contacting a company via social channels expect a response within 30 minutes. And only slightly less -- 24% -- expect a reply within 30 minutes regardless of when the contact was made — meaning the same response time is expected at night and on the weekends as during normal business hours.
 
The average response time for a company? It's a bit longer -- 4.2 hours, according to a recent study by Simply Measured.

Clearly there is some room for improvement here.

In my next blog post, we'll discuss various techniques and tools that marketing and customer service groups can use to respond more quickly and team together to deliver a quality customer experience.