My experience with Orange was, as usual, pretty terrible. Waiting on hold followed by repeatedly explaining my problems to various staff, all of whom stated strict instructions (that they had been given by Apple) which they had to complete before they could even consider giving me a replacement. Some of these were completely unfeasible. For example, they asked me to swap my SIM card with someone else with an iPhone4 for a whole weekend. Then, I had to swap my handset with someone for another full two days. How was I supposed to find someone that would be happy to live without their mobile phone for almost a week?! I was lucky and found a very kind and obliging friend but still think the request from Orange (or was it Apple?!) was ridiculous. Anyway, having completed the various tests, Orange finally passed me over to Apple who they said would deal with the replacement.

The dispatch of the new handset was efficiently arranged by Apple. Following a very simple telephone call with instructions on how to return my iPhone and how the replacement would be delivered, the shiny new iPhone arrived as promised, within 24 hours. A great delivery experience!

Although Apple get a gold star for this final end point with the delivery, I’m left feeling negative about both brands. If Apple really do give Orange such ridiculous guidelines to the mobile retailers then it’s partly their fault. However, Orange must have agreed to those guidelines when signing up to selling Apple goods and therefore need to improve the way that they deliver their customer service, so not to infuriate customers and by simply blaming Apple for setting the rules.

There’s no simple answer as to who is to blame. But, since it’s a co-brand experience, the experience delivered by either company, at all stages of the customer lifecycle, will impact customers’ perceptions of both brands regardless of which one they’re directly dealing with. This can be a positive thing for companies as it gives them multiple chances to shine. However, in the case of Apple and Orange it’s also very risky given that a brand can be tainted through association, even if it’s not directly involved in the negative customer contact. What is clear is that it’s essential for brands to agree upon a customer service strategy as part of their contract to sell each other’s goods, to ensure that any contact with either brand is positive and therefore only improves customers’ perception of both brands.

Calculating the return on investment when using social media can be tricky. The inability to measure its impact can be a huge barrier for companies wishing to employ social media. And for those who do use social media in their business, it’s difficult to see how well, or indeed, how badly, a campaign is going.

So why is it so difficult to measure ROI when it comes to social media? Firstly, it’s difficult to measure the quantitative nature of human interactions and conversation. It can also be problematic to measure the benefits of elements such as time with brand, brand positioning and the building of trust. The benefits of using social media are generally qualitative in nature – for example, social media campaigns can increase loyalty and influence – and as a result can be problematic to monitor. Social media has many different aspects and as such it’s impossible to measure ROI in just one way. Breaking down these qualitative attributes into understandable chunks that we can measure, understand and translate easily into a business context is an essential step in measuring social media ROI.

Traditional analytics measurements can be used, which may include the uptake of offers, the volume of people interacting with social media, and the engagement with a brand through social media. It is important to combine different metrics to gain a broad picture of what is happening. Currently, many people measure and combine standard analytics elements such as length of visit, duration, bounce rates etc, but these measurements all come along with controversy. Some also measure ROI in a more abstract way, by monitoring the amount of buzz or conversation in a community and the opinions of the public. However, these sorts of elements are tricky to measure, or to attribute to any one facet of a campaign.

There are important factors that need to be established before anything can be measured. The first thing to establish is, from a company’s perspective, what is the objective? And what would be classed as success – metrics need to take into account the specific goals of a company, the specific goals of the social media campaign, what social media is being implemented and how it is being used. Appropriate metrics can then be established across different areas of a site, and measured over time. Of course, choosing relevant success metrics is difficult, because there are many things that can be measured. A business needs to understand which metrics will translate efficiently into a business context. These can be both quantitative (sales, new leads etc) and qualitative (for example, satisfaction, loyalty). By defining success metrics, qualitative attributes can be broken down into smaller, measurable metrics.

With these factors in mind, the ROI of using social media can be calculated successfully. In terms of calculating qualitative returns, Starbucks did this during a campaign where they asked customers what would increase their satisfaction and engagement with the brand. The goal was to obtain a specific number of suggestions per month that they could implement. They measured the number of new, good suggestions, and the number that were implemented. It was also possible to carry out opinion polls on the brand before and after the campaign.

Dell was able to measure quantitative returns by setting up a Twitter account (@DellOutlet) to advertise discounts on refurbished products. It published promotions exclusively to over 600,000 followers. In June, Dell published sales worth over £1.8m from the Twitter campaign. Dell is also listening to feedback from customers regarding the products themselves. For example, customers were complaining on Twitter that the keys on a particular laptop model were too close together, resulting in the announcement from Dell that they would amend the design of the keyboard in future models.

These are two really positive examples of how ROI can be measured in social media, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and will hopefully pave the way for other businesses to do the same.

Back to July/Aug newsletter

Holiday season; I excitedly went online to Expedia, found decent fares for my flight to Thailand and proceeded to the booking page. Everything went smoothly until I reached the confirmation page: instead of getting the much anticipated confirmation number, I received a sad “Sorry, we were unable to make your reservation” message. Ok, fair enough; I told myself that I must have had mistyped my bank details and decided to try again.

Following this slight disappointment, I went onto my online banking to make sure that a lack of provision on my account hadn’t been the reason of the failure. Once logged in, the view of my statement petrified me: I had actually been debited of the amount of the flight I was trying to book. I must have sworn harder than for my internet problem.   I had no booking but the money had gone.

Upon calling Expedia, I was immediately reassured and told to contact my bank, ask for a fax number and a representative’s name, so that Expedia could fax the bank a cancellation order. Basically, my money had flown out of my account to land into a mysterious buffer zone between my bank and Expedia, waiting to be authorised. What I did not know at the time, was that if the retailer doesn’t claim the money, (which was the case with Expedia as the booking had not gone through) the pending transaction would cancel out after a few days and the money would return onto my account.

What follows now is a joke of call centre support:

• Phoned up the ‘current account’ service of my bank for the fax number (20 minute wait)
• Told “in the wrong service department” and transferred to the ‘fraud division’
• Another friendly but unhelpful support person (another 20 minute wait) told me I still wasn’t in the right service and the operator told me “Sir, I’ll transfer you to online banking operations”.
• From then on, every 5 minutes, the lad would pause the increasingly annoying waiting tune to announce me that he was trying to jump the queue and connect me to somebody.
• Another 20 minutes of this comedy (I was 1 hour on the phone at this point), told that nobody seemed to be working anymore as no-one was picking up the phone. Out of curiosity, I asked him for the direct number of that department.
• Called direct and received the automated response “This service is no longer available. Please call xxx for online banking operations”. Guess what Gordon Ramsay would have said at that point.

After blaming loudly and angrily my bank’s internal communication system, I phoned up the new number, waited a tiny bit, got to talk to someone, got a name and fax number, call back Expedia and eventually got my money back three days later.

So what’s the morale of the story…? Did this epic experience affect my perception of Expedia? Yes, a little bit as I now fear the same issue to happen again. However, the bad online user experience was offset by a professional, quick and friendly service on the phone.

Did this affect my perception of the bank: yes a lot, as it felt like no-one on the phone knew what they were talking about (I actually forgave them the waiting time). The incompetence of a few ones completely discredited the seriousness of the bank. However, I went to my local branch on the following working day and had my distrust of the bank blown away by a professional and very capable clerk.

Hopefully for them, neither of these two brands relied on one channel only to convey their image. But this story really demonstrates is how a travel agency almost made my bank lose a customer.

This post was originally posted by Xavier Klingenfus

This month we’re taking a look at where brand meets customer experience. In my column, I’ll explain why operations directors must be involved in rebranding exercises. Sean looks at the role intranets can play in reinforcing brand values internally, so that they are reflected in every customer interaction.

Paul asks whether the recession will drive integration, and ultimately improve customer experience. He also shares an interview he conducted with Jason spencer, managing director of Millward Brown in Shanghai. Find out how digital marketing differs in China.

As ever, if you’ve got any queries or would like to chat about how we can help you to align your customer experience and brand, feel free to email us.

Marty.

• Will the recession drive integration?
• Internal affairs
• Brand and the customer experience
• The Chinese Way

The answer could be the intranet, but probably not as you now know it. Most companies invest a tiny fraction of their website budget in creating their intranet. Often the intranet software will be bought off the shelf, like the word processing and spreadsheets packages, rather than shaped to the needs of the business and its employees. If something is too hard to use (clue: if it needs training, it’s probably too hard to use), then it’s unlikely to communicate effectively.

By contrast, if an intranet is designed around the company and its employees, it can be highly effective in articulating the company voice, beliefs and values. Employees can be kept up to date about what’s going on in the business, and this can inform their behaviour and attitude when speaking to outsiders. Whether it’s the airline or the mobile phone company, we expect Virgin staff to be friendly, personable and efficient. Virgin’s brand experience is consistent across all its products and services, partly as a result of clear internal communications.

Some companies can benefit by tapping into the forums where their employees already share their knowledge and experiences, such as Facebook. While conservative businesses like law firms might be uncomfortable with the blurred line between formal and informal communications there, some companies can avoid reinventing the wheel by integrating the intranet with Facebook. Posts there can be reused in forums, and colleagues can see who’s online and communicate quickly in an informal atmosphere.

To create an effective intranet, companies need to ensure there is clear ownership and leadership for it. There needs to be a clear understanding of how the company’s brand is conveyed internally, and the impact that has on external perception of the company. In order to achieve that, companies should use the same analytics tools on the intranet that they already use for understanding how customers use the public website. Forums might look inactive, but could be performing a valuable service to the lurkers who are content to read posts without replying. An analysis of common search terms can also be used to identify company policies that need to be communicated more clearly. By phasing intranet growth, and building on what works well, it’s possible to achieve buy-in from employees.

Employee behaviour is the clearest expression of a brand. Isn’t it time companies devoted as much energy to helping the team understand the brand as it does to trying to convey it to end customers?

There’s a saying that beauty is only skin-deep, and for some companies, branding is only logo-deep. When they invest hundreds of thousands of pounds rebranding, the result is a new swirly logo to represent some re-imagined values. What goes on where the company meets the customer remains the same, though, so the customer’s perception of the brand is unchanged.

There can be a wide gulf between the brand promise, and the brand experience of the average customer. The website Brandtags invites members of the public to say what springs to mind when they see famous logos. The keywords entered rarely echo the company’s brand values, and all too often are a direct rebuttal of them.

Customers are more suspicious than ever before, with the latest Edelman Trust Barometer showing that more than half the customers surveyed trust brands less than they did a year ago. People are less likely to be influenced by marketing, and are more likely to trust their own experiences of a brand and those of their friends and influencers. With people densely connected online, the word of mouth effect is amplified, and that’s particularly true when there are negative experiences to share.

The investments that companies make in branding are important and should be sustained. They help to build trust with customers, and reinforce key messages. But they must be supported and reinforced at every customer touch point. You can’t be “innovative” if you make customers wait five minutes for a call centre agent, or if you can’t cope with customers moving between channels in a single transaction. You can’t claim to be a “luxury” product, if it’s a hassle to buy from you.

If companies are to ensure that their brand experience supports and enhances the brand promise, they must make delivering the customer experience a much bigger part of brand planning. They must involve operations directors in rebranding exercises, and ensure the performance metrics on the shopfloor reflect the company values, rather than just pushing for sales and conversions. They must strive to turn customers into ambassadors, and use word of mouth to build the business.

When companies get it right, the brand can be the business’s greatest asset, and its greatest defence against competitors. Without customers trusting that the company delivers on its promise, though, the brand is nothing more than a sugar coating on a bitter pill.

There has been more written about the iPhone than any other technology gadget in the last ten years. How do I know this? According to PC World’s 50 greatest gadgets of all time, the others on the list don’t even come close.

The iPhone achieves a staggering 315m Google search results, where the Nintendo Wii has 239m, and the Sony Walkman 3m, it’s fair to assume that it is a gadget which creates a good deal of buzz.
However not all that buzz is generated by people enamored by the iPhone. In April Virginia Heffernan: a US Journalist at the New York Times wrote a personal account of her experience: “Why I hate my iphone” It is an article written by a well-heeled journalist, and one we should take note of. She opens with an introduction into the heady world of the iPhone enterprise and how it requires so much attention, organisation, explanation, praise, etc.

“I was late to get one – and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe my hopes for the iPhone curdled in the time it took for my perfectly good T-Mobile plan to expire so I could switch to balky AT&T and purchase one. But I had bided my time. And, really, my enthusiasm survived right up to the moment at the AT&T counter, post-sale, when a saleswoman transferred my address book from my battered BlackBerry to the sweetie-pie iPhone.
“Can you set up my e-mail too?” I asked. She handed me the phone and told me what to type. Pressing her good nature, I asked if she’d do that part too, since I wasn’t yet handy with the iPhone’s character-entry system – the D screen-based simulation of the qwerty keyboard.
She gave me a hard look. Truly, as if she was supposed to be on the lookout for people like me. “It’s your phone,” she replied briskly. “It’s time you started typing on it.”

It is disappointing that the Apple store experience has not been transferred into the AT&T store where she purchased the handset. The Apple store would have delivered a better “out of the box experience” – they may well have had a pre-charged up handset for her – and they would certainly have helped her transfer her data onto the iPhone, as well as showing her how to use it. Apple store staff are trained in each of the Apple products, and staff are encouraged to understand them inside out. The staff are even called “Creatives, Geniuses” or “Specialists” as opposed to sales assistants.

“I didn’t trust myself either, there were warning signs. I didn’t rush to explore the phone or load it up with apps. You can see I wasn’t thinking clearly. To answer the phone, I had to touch the screen. Years of not touching screens – so as not to smudge or scar – made me wary. But I brushed the “answer call” and up came fragments of my mother’s cheerful voice. AT&T no doubt works like a charm in other areas, but as I’d been warned, it wasn’t so hot on holding calls where I live. I let it drop her. I hunted for a keypad to call back, but it was gone.”

The next example she gives in her dalliance with the iPhone is about learning how to use the device’s keyboard. It points out an issue we have with the way we use technology – Behavioural Psychologists call it “Learned effects” – the fact is that once we have learned how to do something – it takes a great deal of time to relearn it, and for some, that is time best spent elsewhere….

“The morning after my sleepless night of charging the phone, a text message arrived from a colleague, about breakfast. It came up in a little dialogue bubble, as if we were characters in a comic book.
Now I had to reply. My throat tightened. “Running late,” I decided on. “See you in 15 min.”
What came out was this: “Runninlate. See you in 15 Mon.”
And so the iPhone made suggestions. Did I want to say Ride? Ripe? Ruin? No. I wanted to say Running. I refused to fight further with the smug phone. Off sailed my text – the work of a blithering idiot.
The failure to appreciate the iPhone was all mine. But I decided not to dwell on that. “I thought you might be back,” the AT&T saleswoman said as I walked in the door. “So?” I said. “You were right.” With some satisfaction, she took the iPhone, and I walked away with a new BlackBerry and money to spare.

Does one person’s experience make a universally popular device unusable? No, of course not, but unfortunately the iPhone does expect a different kind of human interaction, and one that takes some time to get used to or “learn”. Above all else – if a device is not intuitive, as I would argue the iPhone is not, then it needs to be taught. When the iPhone is sold in non-Apple stores you rely on the non-Apple staff to sell the product, this dilutes the brand experience.