Cracks in the Customer Experience

Ask most marketers and they’ll tell you it’s critical their business deliver an outstanding customer experience. But I wonder how many brands really drill down to this level: When does the customer experience end?

My family and I spent part of last spring break at a ski resort on Minnesota’s North Shore. The weather was pleasant. The skiing, fine. The condo we called home for three days was certainly serviceable. Friday night, our last, my teenager and a friend shared laughs and memories while coloring Easter eggs. All in all, a memorable experience.

Lovingly Made, Left Behind
Next morning, we hustled to pack for the nearly five-hour drive home.  Twenty-five minutes in, my daughter gasped, glanced over her shoulder, then pivoted back and asked a panicky rhetorical: “Who brought the eggs?” 

The delicate dozen — placed carefully back in the carton for safe transport home — had been left on the condo’s kitchen counter. 

With one brief, wordless glance, the parents shifted into recovery mode. I looked for a place to U-turn. My wife dialed the resort, where the front-desk operator said she’d attempt to get a message to housekeeping.

Within 60 minutes, we were back. The housekeeper’s SUV was parked in front of our unit. Hopeful, my wife stepped inside, where she was greeted by two cleaners, but no eggs. The guy who collects the garbage had come … and apparently tossed the eggs.

So we spent the next few hours driving, recalling, wondering.  The pink, blue and yellow baby’s blanket, nowhere to be found just 10 minutes after we left a four-star hotel in Boston. My brown belt, disappeared within minutes after I left that hotel in Washington, D.C. And now, a dozen colored eggs. Stored neatly in their carton. A day before Easter. Left alone less than an hour.

Owning the Experience
Really? Even if you’re the garbage guy? You don’t pause or think twice? Maybe run the carton over to the front desk, 100 yards away, on your way to the dump? Just in case the customer calls or returns?

Your business is to host people who are away from home. There’s a good chance young guests will be arriving with favorite old treasures, or going home with new ones. It’s more than likely adults will lose track of items. Things will get left behind.

But there’s also a good chance the customer will miss the item and call you on it. After all, since kindergarten there’s been a lost-and-found. Hasn’t there? 

This is not a rant on the hospitality industry so much as a thought for businesses of all kinds:

If customer experience is key to your brand, then it pays to chart that experience on a timeline. Where and when does it start? Where and when does it end? Does it end? And who plays along the way?

It’s a huge challenge, but worth tackling. Getting everyone bought in to ensure the customer experience continuum, unlike last year’s Easter eggs, goes untrashed.

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Data Depot No. 1: Let’s Assume They’re Online

It’s hard to go a day without seeing a news report, often several, with fresh research regarding consumer insights, B-to-B marketing trends or online marketing best practices.

In fact, sometimes the data stream gets so heavy, you feel like a salmon fisherman standing on shore, trying to drop a fly in front of the one fish in a school of thousands that might just be a bit more meaty, a tad more catchable. Which one is it? They all look the same. And this river is flowing so darn fast.

Recognizing this challenge of data overload — research factoids that are here today but swept away tomorrow (just when you need to find them) — Touch Point City will be keeping its eyes peeled for marketing, sales and brand data points that might be especially meaningful, perhaps even seminal.

As we collect a few of them, we’ll serve up a post, then archive them on our “Data Depot” page. Ideally, over time, Data Depot will become your scannable warehouse of not just interesting facts and forecasts, but important and useful ones, for planning or defending communications and content strategies.

So, here’s Data Depot installment No. 1:

Let’s Assume They’re Online

Do you still find yourself in strategy and brainstorming meetings where someone will say about the target audience, “Yeah, but do we really think these people are online?”

Last week a handful of data points flew through my inbox to suggest that, indeed, it might be time to stop asking this question.

African-Americans Online
Citing it as evidence that the “digital divide” — the gap between Internet “haves” and “have nots” — is narrowing, research by eMarketer in February 2009 found that nearly half (48.7 percent) of U.S. African-Americans use the Web at least once per month. By 2013, eMarketer projects, the figure will be 56 percent.

For comparison, eMarketer found these online-at-least-once-monthly rates among other U.S. ethno subgroups: Asian 73.5 percent, White 67 percent, Hispanic 50.8 percent.

Grayhairs Get Tech
People in their 50s, 60s and 70s are using technology at rates very comparable to younger folk, according to a joint survey by TNS Compete and the Consumer Electronics Association. Among other findings:

• Consumers 50-59 are as likely as those younger to own,
  or plan to buy, an HDTV.
• 80 percent of people 60-69 used a cell phone in the past week,
  just slightly less than the rate of people 18-34.
• 71 percent of people 60-69 and 52 percent of people 70-79 used a search engine in the past week, compared with 77 percent of people
  18-34

Social Media Surge
According to a study by Netpop Research:

• Since 2006, the amount of time people spend online has increased 18 percent, while time spent on entertainment has dropped 29 percent.
• 105 million Americans contribute to social media, with 7 million qualifying as “heavy” users (6 or more social media activities).

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Quiz Your Audience with Content

“If you have knowledge, let others light their candle at it.”
                                                                     Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

As a fan of trivia games in general, I’m obsessed with the TV quiz show Jeopardy. On the road, when settling into a hotel room, if I come across an episode I’ll drop everything and focus. Once I’ve sized up the categories and the competition, people in adjacent rooms might hear a series of staccato ehhh! sounds as I “ring in” and blurt answers (in question form, of course) before the real contestants beat me to the buzzer.

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this affinity for the test-your-knowledge format. In fact, trivia games and quiz shows might have something to teach us about content marketing. Consider:

• Simply being approached to participate in a test of knowledge gets some people’s emotions, intellect, even adrenaline revved up. 
• There’s an inherent promise of value and possibility in a quiz — you’re either going to learn (education), or have multiple opportunities to showcase and be affirmed in your knowledge (validation).
• Information, interaction, calls to action, feedback, reward, measurement — all occur in a steady stream of small increments, so there’s a natural type of continuity and engagement to a Q&A “touch stream.”
• Conceptually, the organization delivering the content is automatically coming at the audience in a value-add way. This is about information-sharing, learning, fun — it’s not a hard sell.

When deciding on a content marketing strategy, it’s easy to fall into “here’s the whole story” mode. Assemble an article, a white paper, a robust collection of news and information, and make it available to the target. 

But another model to consider, perhaps as a change of pace or another touch point within a broader campaign, is the quiz format.

Identify subject matter around which the audience and the brand have shared interest. Then parcel out relevant information in the form of test-your-knowledge quizzes, questions of the day or week, longer-form continuing ed courses or your own, unique “did-you-know” execution.

Here’s my current favorite example:

When parents register their high schoolers for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), a key step toward college admission, the folks at SAT invite student and parent alike to receive The Official SAT Question of the Day via e-mail. 

This feature gives students 
a chance to practice (and parents the opportunity to
feel humbled), thanks to a daily stream of multiple choice math and language/
grammar questions of the type students face on the SAT.

I registered my high school junior months ago. She took the test weeks ago. Yet here I am, still eagerly awaiting and answering daily questions (all the while confirming what a smart move it was to choose journalism over math as my college major).

Is your key audience parents? Teachers? Chefs? Engineers? Travelers? Teenagers? It probably doesn’t matter. 

To spice up your content marketing approach, consider taking “Content Marketing for $500.” The answer: “Test their knowledge.”  The question: “What’s another way to achieve engagement and add value with my target audience?”

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