Remember the days when after your flight landed, you could walk out of airport gate and straight into the arms of smiling and welcoming family members? Well, security measures have made that impossible in this day and age. And if that was even possible, last weekend, those family members awaiting your arrival were likely to have been taking naps in uncomfortable terminal chairs, waiting hours upon hours for you to arrive. Flight delays and cancellations due to weather woes, made easy pick-ups from the airport virtually impossible.

Passengers wait for a delayed flight to Seattle at Los Angeles International Airport.

Analysis indicates that this was the worst holiday travel season in years. Today, airline performance watchdog FlightStats.com, released numbers indicating that nearly 8,800 flights were canceled between Friday, December 19th and Sunday afternoon on December 28. A week ago Friday, winter weather conditions led to airline delays up to 10 hours. Flights across the country were canceled and the entire Milwaukee airport closed due to incessent snow fall.

I experienced this chaos firsthand last Friday as my flight home for the holidays from Newark to Kansas City, connecting in Milwaukee, was canceled. I wasn’t able to fly out until Monday night — and still experienced delays on top of that. Despite the misfortune, I was home in time for Christmas, which is what really mattered. And, I surprisingly had very good experiences with my airline’s customer service hot line. Sure, I had to wait up to an hour when calling, but once an agent got on the line, I was greeted with a friendly, helpful, and understanding representative. I must have called the reservations line eight or ten times over the course of the week. And really, each time, I talked to an informed and understanding person. Read the rest of this entry »

And here you were thinking you had to be dirt cheap to be successful in this economy.

Predictions that only Walmart would be this holiday’s only victor were soon shattered when we woke up on a brisk Friday morning, the day after Christmas, to reports that this holiday season was Amazon’s “best ever.” Ah, lucky number 14.

The company’s press release uses nary a hyperbole as it illustrated just how much stuff consumers purchased:

- Twilight Series’s “Breaking Dawn” books: “stacked end to end they would reach the summit of Mt. Everest eight times”;
- GPS devices: “…combined weight of 151 Mini Coopers”;
- High-performance headphones: “…everyone attending the last three Super Bowls could grab a set and rock out”;and, perhaps a favorite for many in our office
– Coffee: “…enough to give each resident of the highly caffeinated city of Seattle a cup per day for two months.” (Metropolitan area population of 3,263,497, according to Wikipedia)

If you think about it, the news is not so surprising considering Amazon’s track record of consistently being the retailer of all retailers. In a conversation I had with Richard Owen, chief executive officer of Satmetrix, Amazon, and its neighbor Starbucks, have focused on the customer experience to drive their business — and especially since the economy depends on the (happy) customer, that’s not such a bad model to have.

He adds that Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com has been “relentless” in his assertion that the company will grow because “[its] customers have good experiences and they will call [their] friends. You [rarely] see Amazon commercials on TV,” as they focus instead on word of mouth economics as a mechanism for growing their business. Though Amazon’s initial investments suffered criticism from financial analysts in the beginning, Owen says, suffice to say they made some smart choices.

Still, we can probably count on a few companies that will continue to have a slightly skewed version of what creating a good customer experience really means. Companies, perhaps, that think like Dwight Schrute,who may strike a few wins, but for how long?

The Wall Street Journal published an article last Monday entitled “The Secrets of Web 2.0 Marketing.”

I scoured the article looking for a really juicy secret. Unfortunately, or fortunately, illicit gossip could not be found in these pages. All the tips and tricks were ones that are already jam-packed into marketing conference agendas (and our inboxes! here at CRM).

Here they are:

1. Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process.
2. Give consumers a reason to participate.
3. Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.
4. Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.
5. Don’t control, let it go.
6. Find a ‘marketing technopologist’ (defined as “a person who brings together strengths in marketing, technology and social interaction”).
7. Embrace experimentation.

While these points have not lost their validity by any means, is it old news? Or, does the fact that they keep having to get restated mean that not enough people know? To draw a comparison, Self magazine must publish some version of “how to get the best abs EVER” for what seems like at least 10 times a year. You’d think one perfect solution would be enough if it really were “the best EVER,” but nope. There are still many of us who have yet to get those perfectly air-brushed abs.

I’ve spoken to countless vendors and industry pundits who consistently reiterate the fact that, sure, this marketing best pratice may seem intuitive but the greater majority of businesses don’t know how to adjust to a highly consumer-driven playing field. The fact that the world’s moved to digital is only making it all a bit more difficult. Sure, everyone’s got a Web site now, but it was just a little under two years ago, before coming to CRM, that a company I was interested in had an About Me page that was ‘Under Construction’ — deal breaker. Now, you not only have to have a Web site, but there are social networks to consider, mobile platforms apply for, and the list goes on.

Reading the comments to the WSJ article,I found my initial thoughts were echoed:

“These are secrets? Maybe 5 or 6 years ago.”

“I think that the only “new” thing about this article is the audience.”

And it’s true, the audience may be new, and even if they are “old,” these are practices that are critical if you don’t already have them in place. As the adage goes, when it comes to implementing these strategies, it’s often easier said than done.

Aside from these, are there marketing 2.0 secrets you’re dying to get out? Spread the holiday cheer to marketers everywhere!

‘Tis the season for charitable giving, right? Despite the recession, nonprofit organizations and other charities still have a job to do — even if it will be harder to get many to give the same amount, if any, as years past according to a New York Times article.

In order to do my small part, I decided last night to donate to a particular charity — which shall remain nameless — this holiday season. (As an aside, an excellent online resource to determine which ones are legit as opposed to others that will take virtually all of your money to fulfill operation costs is Charity Navigator.)

Instead of calling up and donating over the phone, or mailing a check that could get lost in the mail, I wanted to go onto the organization’s Web site and use my credit card to instantly submit my contribution. I have high-speed Internet; this should take about two minutes, right? Wrong.

The Web site was extremely difficult to navigate, and actually rejected my submission three times by bouncing me back to the homepage or flashing an error screen.

First time, sure, maybe I made a mistake. I decided to double check all the information I had to enter and click all the proper buttons. The second time it failed, I started to simmer but decided that maybe, just maybe, I did something wrong.

By the third time I was absolutely furious, and actually closed out the window, refusing to try again. A charity should be like any other organization, right? If it cannot get its process working properly then they don’t deserve my business. I know I’m not alone in this, virtually every story I did this year about customer service touched on, in varying depth, just how increasingly demanding consumers are when it comes to being serviced properly.

My conscience got the best of me, though, and eventually I found a back-end way to submit the donation and actually have it go through.

While I decided to stick with it, albeit begrudgingly, I wonder how many individuals did not. Unless your last name is Gates, money is tight for everyone and most people are assessing their potential expenditures with much more scrutiny. All companies — especially charities — must ensure their Web sites are optimized and running smoothly in order to cull the most business as possible.

For either vendors or end-customers, have you run into the same issues? If you are a nonprofit organization, have you found your donations dwindling or staying the same during this time? While many media organizations can only hypothesize right now, it’s always better to get first-hand accounts to sense where the market is at this time.

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With that said, this will be my last post until after the New Year. I’m heading back to New York State for the holidays, not unlike the commute I used to make before moving to Jersey City. I’d like to thank all of you, the readers, for your support — I hope you all have a fantastic holiday.

Maybe it’s lazy of me, but I’m going meta with this blogpost. There’s a great post by Denis Pombriant addressing some of 2008’s trends and looking forward to some of 2009’s possibilities. Denis is always insightful, and I think he really nailed some things. Examples:

“Marketing is becoming more important to sales than ever as companies grapple with finding efficient ways to capture customer needs.” Don’t I know it—more and more of our sales coverage is about how marketing is becoming the driver and the innovator. We’re all about breaking down silos here at CRM, but it’s hard to tag stories meaningfully if everything is cross-disciplinary.

“After the debacle on Wall Street fed by too little governance I think we’ll see a great uptick in GRC’s [governance, risk, and compliance] attractiveness.” In the words of David Alan Grier, oh hell to the yes. Maybe it’s my liberal roots showing, but deregulation and laissez-faire market policies are only valuable up to a point, and we passed that point several years ago.

Denis has a lot more to add, and I won’t do him the disservice of quoting and commenting any more than I already have. Go read what he has to say for yourself, and add your thoughts to the discussion.

So I’ve been out of the office a lot in the past three weeks, as you may have noticed. While this means I haven’t been able to interact much with CRM’s readers or staff, it does mean that I’ve had more time to notice trends in my personal inbox. The major one I’ve seen is overcommunication to the consumer.

I was noticing this instance of S.A.D. (seasonal avarice disorder) even before I was stricken with the painful malady that kept me away from you fine people, but I didn’t realize the magnitude until afterward. Each of three major brands (Macy’s, 1-800-Flowers, and Godiva) have sent me an average of one SPECIAL OFFER!!!!!! email per weekday for the past three weeks, and I’m annoyed. Anybody who knows me realizes this reaction is no big surprise, but a man’s gotta vent.

Each view of my inbox is like the opening scenes of a Charles Dickens story, with Victorian-era beggars putting out a hand for a few pence so they don’t starve. It really feels like these businesses are begging for my patronage. To be fair, all three are in their busiest season — if I’d done business recently with Hickory Farms or Toys ‘R Us they’d be crowding my email as well — but the constant e-bombardment seems too hungry to be normal.

I hope these businesses are not in financial peril. Not only because it would be a shame, but because what they’re doing is probably not going to have the desired effect. Their marketing messages have long since fallen below my acceptable signal-to-noise ratio, and are getting close to my opt-out threshold. Seriously. I wouldn’t stop doing business with any of them, but I am sorely tempted to cut off their ability to bother me — even if it means I will miss some or other great limited-time-only deal.

Quality trumps quantity in smart email marketing, and this was true even before we began passing laws against spam. Rather than ringing my virtual doorbell every day with yet another reminder, send me one offer a week with an offer I may refuse but can’t ignore.

So then, the questions of the week:

• Are you getting a much higher volume of marketing emails from the same number of sources?
• Have you been tempted recently to opt out of messages from businesses you have an established relationship with?
• Is this merely a holiday season thing, or is it an economy thing—and if both, then how much of each?

Not to give the impression that I have a slight obsession with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), but it is an excellent source for customer service-related blog posts.

I recently moved to New Jersey, which means several things. A shorter commute, less tax taken out of my paycheck, and — unfortunately — a new driver license.

In order to comply with all the residency laws the Garden State has to offer, I decided to trek to the closest DMV division to show my six points’ worth of identification along with all of the other documents proving that I am, in fact, a Jersey Boy now.

After hearing all the horror stories, I was fully prepared to camp out and wait as long as it took to walk out with a brand new license. I brought my iPod, a snack, and a copy of December’s CRM magazine. Surprisingly, all of the employees were very helpful, despite it being 8:15 a.m. I was able to fill out all the proper paperwork, and go take my new picture for the license.

As I was waiting at the counter for my picture to process and my new ID to print out, I overheard two DMV employees talking to each other about a particularly difficult customer who had been ahead of me in line. Half-way through the process, he unreasonably demanded that he be able to change some very important information — which simply wasn’t possible.

Needless to say, there was a lot of yelling, pounding of fists on countertops, and audible sighs.

The two employees were complaining, which didn’t surprise me one bit. What did shock me was that it was not entirely about the customer, but rather about the processes they are forced to abide by. They wanted to help out the man despite his innate rudeness, but they were hamstrung by policy and procedure. It really opened up my eyes to the “other side” if you will, of the customer service equation. A lot is said — and written — about the end-consumer’s satisfaction, but sometimes the agents themselves fall through the cracks.

As you wait in long lines this month — whether it be for the DMV, holiday shopping, or on the phone trying to get a bill dispute resolved — try to remember that it isn’t always the fault of the customer service rep if your issue can’t be fixed right away. Just like you and I have policies at our jobs we may not necessairly care for, the same goes for them.

For companies, it may be worthwhile to take this time to rethink policies and processes that you may be able to change to give agents more power to fix problems on the front lines, as opposed to routing an increasingly angry customer to different levels of management. Studies show that empowered agents can make happier agents, thereby reducing attrition, which is still a problem in the customer service space.

For executives at organizations who have decided to give agents more wherewithal to solve problems on the front lines, has customer and employee satisfaction risen? Has productivity gone up? Or has it been business-as-usual?

It’s not often I get solicitation calls on my cell phone, but when I do, I usually try to give the caller the time of day and listen to the spiel before I hang up or give the “I’m not interested” line. I can’t think of the times I have purchased something or signed up for an offer over the phone — probably very few. Given the amount of time I spend on a computer during the day, I am more apt to buy online rather than over the phone. That, and the fact that I am a visual person. I need to see prices with my own eyes. I want to see terms and conditions before I pass along my credit card information.

About a month ago, I began receiving phone calls from my cable company, offering me a different plan for my cable and internet. The salesperson informed me that my cable bill will soon go up and that I would be unwise to not switch to a different plan. I didn’t think he was lying, but I told him I would much rather be mailed information to look over — or that I would look up the plan he is suggesting on the Web site. I was quite frank — I am not going to sign up for an offer over the phone. That is not my preferred communication channel. I asked the agent to please take me off the call list. He assured me that he would make a note of it and thanked me for the time. Problem solved… right?

Since that initial conversation, I have received calls nearly every day from the cable company. Different agents pitch me the same plan to which I have now declined five times. I continue to request that their agents stop calling me. No such luck. I have now saved the number as “Do Not Answer” and simply ignore the phone calls that come in.

Understanding how CRM works, I respect that making those calls is a sales method that may, in fact, be profitable for this particular cable company. However, it makes me question what information the company has on me. Do the agents continually ignore my request to make note that I no longer wish to be called? Or is it a sales policy to continue calling no matter what? Who or what is to blame? And will the calling ever stop?

I don’t think this is the agent’s fault, although it is easy to get frustrated when speaking to them and trying to communicate that I no longer wish to be called. I don’t envy that job by any means. We consumers are a finicky bunch, as Jim from “The Office” demonstrates in the video below.

Anand Subramaniam, vice president of worldwide marketing at customer service and knowledge management solutions provider eGain, informed me that, no, making the return process difficult (e.g., shortening the return period, hiding the return policy in a dark corner on the Web site in hopes that people will give up on the whole ordeal and settle with their purchase) is not how you want to avoid product returns this holiday season. “It’ll only reflect badly on the brand and the retailer,” he says.

You’ve wooed your customers into the store and after careful — but not excessive — attention, they finally buy something. Perfect.

But what if it they get home and don’t know how to use it? What if it doesn’t fit the neice they haven’t seen in two years? What if after all that trouble, they found it on sale somewhere else and want to save that extra $19.99?

It happens.

“Consumers often return, to no fault of the products, if they’re unable to figure out how to use them,” Subramaniam says. What’s worse is that contact center agents are unable to help them solve the problem due to lack of knowledge. As a result, customers often resort to returning the product and with policies that guarantee free return shipping, it can be a costly expense for manufacturers and retailers.

Maybe it was where I went during the Thanksgiving break, but sales I saw were so-so (I did not dare enter Walmart), and stores were disappointingly empty. Even so, the Bloomingdale’s where my parents live hit its numbers for the weekend, according to the salesman I spoke to. As if the reports we receive almost daily aren’t enough to verify that fact that people are shopping less, my weekend only affirmed those findings. So when you do get your customers to buy, your next challenge is making sure they’re buying for keeps.

Subramaniam shared his tips on how to prevent or reduce the number of returns you get this holiday season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Marketing solutions provider Loyalty Builders released today its “Sample Size and Power Analysis Calculator”. It’s a free Web-based tool (part of Loyalty Builders’s Web-based direct marketing system Longbow) that is intended to help marketers determine whether their results are accurate (power analysis) or whether their sample size is sufficient.

The purpose of this calculator is twofold:
1) help users who are testing determine the ideal sample size; and
2) encourage mathematical marketing practices.

The difference between deciding whether or not you want to use the power analysis component or find a sample size, Klein explains, is: if you’ve already done the test, use the power analysis tool to gauge the value of your statistical results; or if you haven’t done the test and are still in the planning stages, determine the power you want — e.g., 85 percent, 90 percent — and calculate how big your sample size needs to be to achieve it.

Testing, says Mark Klein, chief executive officer of Loyalty Builders, is the dreaded chore for most companies, which unfortunately, often gets swept under the rug. At the high end, he estimates that “no more than one third of the companies that we interact with have some interest in using testing.” Note: one-third only have some interest.

The reason companies don’t test, he says, is because: a) they don’t know how; b) they think it’s too time-consuming; or c) they think it’s too costly.

In his previous life as a physicist, Klein agrees that certainly, if companies are going about thinking they have to test one variable at a time, it’s going to be an excruciatingly long process. But technology is available now that makes basic A/B testing and more complex multivariate testing significantly more feasible, both in terms of time and resources.

There are three core techniques you can use to improve your marketing campaign, Klein says — segmentation, personalization, and testing — and they all have a fundamental theme: they require math.