Tag: business

Customer Experience: The Vanishing Reviews

SJE is an excellent supporter of the online economy. However, she is also very focused on the experience she suffers through on many online retail applications. The question I get frequently from the other end of the living room (Retail and Wardrobe Management Control Center – see image) is: “Is Company X a customer? Because their site (is slow | is badly designed | doesn’t work | sucks)!”.
Most of the time, there isn’t much to do, and the site usually responds and SJE is able to complete the task she is focused on.

Last night, however, a retailer did something that strayed into new territory. This company unwittingly affected the customer experience to such a degree that they actually destroyed the trust of a long-term customer.

This isn’t good for me, as I wear a lot of fine products from this retailer. But even in my eyes, they committed a grievous sin.

This retailer decided, for reasons that are known only to them, to delete a number of negative comments, reviews, and ratings for a product that they have for sale.
I just checked, and sure enough, all of the comments, including my wife’s very strong negative feedback about the quality, are gone.

I can think of a number of really devious and greedy reasons why a company might do this. It could also be an accident. If it was an accident, you might want to note that reviews and comments for this product were accidentally lost.

Now, if you went to a retailer and saw that your comments and reviews had been deleted, how would you feel? Would you trust that retailer ever again? What would happen if the twittering masses picked up the meme and started to add fuel to the bonfire?

A strong business, a solid design, an amazing presentation, and unrivaled delivery aren’t enough for some businesses. As a company, there is substantial effort, time, and treasure dedicated to converting visitors into customers. And it sometimes takes only one boneheaded move to turn a customer into the anti-customer.

Customer Experience: Standing on your own four legs

Tables. They’re pretty ubiquitous. You might even be using one right now (although in the modern mobile world, you may not. LAMP POST!).

A strong business is like a table, supported by four legs.

  • The Business. The reason that resources and people have been gathered together. There is a vision of what the group wants to do and what success looks like.
  • The Design. Don’t think style; think Design/Build. This is where the group takes the business idea and determines how they will make it happen, where the stores will be, what a datacenter looks like, who they will partner with.
  • The Presentation. How the Business and the Design are shown to people. How the shelves are stocked, the landing pages look, the advertising is placed, how the business looks to potential customers.
  • The Delivery. This is the critical part of how the business uses the systems they have designed and the presentation they have crafted to deliver something of value to the potential customer.

Without any one of these, an organization will fail to meet the most critical goal it has set to be successful: an experience that turns a visitor or browser into a customer.

All the Business and MBA grads in the audience are yawning, and slapping their Venti non-fat, no-whip, decaf soy lattés down on the table. This message isn’t for you. Well, it is, but you can stand up and give your chair to one of the people behind you.

Now that I have Dev, QA, and Operations sitting with me (remember, the Business guys are still in the back of the room, tapping away on their Blackberries), tell me what you think of this conceptual table. How does the Table of Customer Experience relate to you?

Ok, put down the Red Bulls and Monsters and listen: Everything that Dev, QA, or Operations does has an effect on the experience (negative or positive) of the potential customer. If one of the table legs is broken (or even shorter than the others), the rippling shockwaves will eventually affect the entire operation.

So, if I were to ask the member so of your organization how their daily activities supported the online application in each of these four areas, do you think they could answer?

Grab a white board. This is going to be a long day.

Picture courtesy of sashafatcat

Business Thoughts: Tool Providers v. Service Providers

The hip new shiny thing for a new company is to position themselves as a service. Stepping back from the hype machine for a minute, can you really identify a service provider when you see one? Or are the companies that sell themselves as services are actually tools. And what differentiates a tool provider from a service provider?

A tool is designed to deliver a single unique function, such as a hammer or Twitter. Yes, Twitter is a tool. It is designed to take customer input in a variety of formats and from a number of sources and blast that content out to a variety of other formats and destinations.

Twitter is the tool. The items that feed into Twitter could be other tools (Tweetdeck as an example), or they could be true services, such as Ping.fm. What separates these two?

TweetDeck is a tool that feeds input into Twitter, and helps you manage output.
Ping.fm takes your input, and sends it where you what, modifying the format appropriately and hiding it all from you. It took the complexity of a problem (How do I post to multiple social media sites simultaneously?) and delivered a service solution, not a tool solution.

The problem with tool providers is that the problem, no matter what it is, always is a great for their tool. All customer problems fit neatly into the boundaries of what they know, and can be solved by what they sell. Tweetdeck’s answer to helping you with Twitter is to give you more Twitter your way. But it doesn’t extend or build on Twitter to create something that is truly new.

Solution providers look at the customer problem and see something new. The team at Ping.fm took a look at their personal social media management issues and found a way to create a social media input service. FriendFeed and FaceBook looked at the social media world and created a social media output service.

While tools are cool and shiny, they inevitable face the “Hammer v Screw” moment. The point when the tool reaches the outer ability of it’s ability to be useful.

Having many different hammers isn’t the solution. Heck, throwing in a wrench and a screwdriver isn’t the answer either. You’re still just selling tools.

When you step back and think about your business, when you consider what you deliver to your customers, can you really say that you deliver a service that extends and adds value to the tools you have at your disposal, that you are providing to your customers?

Or does everything just look like a nail?

Modern Business and the Culture of Assurance

I often wonder how much business is lost but the levels of assurance that exist within modern companies.

As information passes through and upward through a company, it is filtered, shaped, refined down to the one salient decision point that all the executives can then discuss. The concern that I have is whether the devolution of detail within organizations stifles their ability to innovate, especially in times of stress.

Small companies have a short distance from those that create and work with the product to the senior levels. As a result, senior managers and executives are tightly tied to the details of the product, of the company, of the customers. They understand that details are important.

Mature companies discuss how their strategies and initiatives will shape an entire industry and change the way everyone does business. But how that happens is often lost as those concepts flow downward. Just as detail devolves on the way up, detail evolves on the way down.

It is nigh on impossible to participate in an industry-defining paradigm shift when your everyday activities double and triple, leading to a complete dissociation between the executive level and the worker level.

Why does this occur?

Its not that detail devolves on the way up an organization, but rather that each level needs to assure each higher level that everything is ok and that solutions can be found for those issues that may be challenging, so lets just keep pressing forward.

So the devolution of detail coupled with the culture of assurance gets too many companies in trouble.

The devil is in the details. And sometimes, the devil can be your friend.

Why Terms Matter: Consultant v. SME v. Evangelist

The term consultant is bandied about so much in this new economy that it has lost it’s meaning. Wikipedia defines a consultant as

A consultant (from the Latin consultare means “to discuss” from which we also derive words such as consul and counsel) is a professional who provides advice in a particular area of expertise….

A consultant is usually an expert or a professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter. A consultant usually works for a consultancy firm or is self-employed, and engages with multiple and changing clients. Thus, clients have access to deeper levels of expertise than would be feasible for them to retain in-house, and to purchase only as much service from the outside consultant as desired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consultant

What this definition misses is that a good consultant, especially in a small firm, is not simply a person with specific subject-matter expertise and therefore a subject-matter expert (SME), a consultant is a jack-of-all-trades.
A simple list of skills needed by a good consultant include:

  • Sales
  • Project Management
  • Product Management
  • Educator
  • Trainer
  • Mentor and Coach
  • Business Manager
  • Subject-Matter Expert

In large consulting organizations, these functions are broken out into specific team members. In a small consultancy, everyone has to be able to manage all of these items.

Then there is another leap: How does a consultant move to being an evangelist? These two roles are substantially different.

While both are SMEs, an evangelist takes that one final step from being a functional expert who is able to make things happen and work in a product to a place where they can stand in front of any audience and make the product sing. It is not just able the abilty to do anymore; it is about the ability to show.

Go through the list of people that you or your organization work with. Do you work with true consultants, SMEs, or evangelists? Which group is most effective in helping your organization get better? Are you using consultants as expert problem-solvers, or are you simply using them as staff augmentation?

To draw on my experience, I am learning to be a better small-firm consultant. I have developed my skills as a SME and Evangelist over the last decade, but I have not had to be worried about any of the things listed above until the last two years when I started working in a more structured consulting/Professional Services environment.

What has your experience been? Did you start as a SME and become a consultant?

Or did you come out of B-school and then develop into a SME?

How has your development as a consultant affected the clients you have worked with and experiences you have had?

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