What was our senior exec. blogger’s problem? He was just too damn perfect. My client was carefully crafting his copy, working through his arguments and presenting such a complete and well-rounded case for his opinions that no one felt confident enough to engage with him in debate or add their thoughts.

Engagement requires more than providing a feedback form or a Facebook ‘Like’ button.

The role of errors, mistakes and incompleteness in Customer Engagement is often underestimated. Anyone who has ever been involved with customer service will already know that a problem solved is often more powerful in driving customer satisfaction than initial perfection. Indeed I know of one major Telecoms Company that instigated rolling network ‘downtimes’ in order to be seen fixing them quickly. Intentional service disruption like this is a risky approach and I certainly don’t recommend it, but I do think that there is a role for lack of perfection in some well-chosen customer interactions.

For example, did you know that one of the best indicators of engagement in an online customer community is that a customer has completed their community profile page? To encourage people to provide information on their interests I have experimented with pre-populating text like ‘I’m a supporter of Chelsea Football Club’, or ‘Model railways have always been a passion of mine’. And you know what? More people provide their details when you offer them this incorrect information than when the form has no default text. After all who can resist correcting someone when you know they have made a mistake?

Cultivating Customer Engagement requires more than providing a feedback form, a Facebook ‘like’ button or even a customer community to join. It means triggering our audience’s imagination, encouraging their ideas and tickling them enough for them to want to scratch or laugh.

Like my C-suite blogger we could all learn that a little imperfection provides us with the opportunity to engage with our audience. He’s now spending less time crafting his blog posts and more time engaging with the people who read his shorter and more open thought pieces – he’s also enjoying it more.

This opinion piece was originally published in the 2011 Annual Online Customer Engagement Survey Report and republished here with permission.

I first spoke with Anjali back in 2009 when I was working at The Carphone Warehouse and she Tweeted about a problem she was having difficulty resolving. I got in touch with here via Twitter and eventually we managed to resolve the issue. Anjali went on to write a blog about her experience – Carphone Warehouse on Twitter: Customer Service with a Virtual Smile.

After I left The Carphone Warehouse and joined Foviance I got back in touch with Anjali to find out why she turned to social. I’m now finally getting round to actually write the whole piece out. A very brief extract of what she said appeared in an article I wrote – Social Media and Customer Service – as part of Sampson Lee’s “Social Media under One Roof: Integrate Social Media with the TCE Model“.
I think what is interesting about Anjali’s replies are:

• when asked about why she used social, her response is more about the negatives to do with traditional customer service than the positives of using social
• her expectation that companies should be on Twitter, that it will go mainstream
• she often refers to the idea of the ‘multiplier effect’. That a complaint or issue could turn into a firestorm is an inherent part of social

The Twitter conversation:

@Guy1067: What social platforms did you use and why?

@Anjali28: I use Twitter as the first mode of reaching out to brands on Twitter, as I believe that if they are going to listen at all, then they are likely to listen on Twitter more than e-mail (or anything else).
Prior to Twitter, the rare email I’d send to address my concerns usually got no response. So from that point of view, Twitter plays a very important role in customer service – probably more important than many brands think it does.

@Guy1067: Why did you resort to social? What were you hoping to achieve?

@Anjali28: I resorted to social because as a consumer I am tired of being placed on hold for interminable periods on the phone which historically has been a brand’s mode of choice for engaging with customers – and I wind up building up my phone bill in the process.
I was also tired of sending emails which, if they are acknowledged at all, get nothing more than an automated reply – something that is extremely impersonal and gives no indication of whether anything will be done at all.
Twitter is a public forum, and brands don’t want to be seen as negative when customers complain about them there, for the simple reason that it gets magnified many times over by the simple rule of what I like to call Twitter amplification – not only a person’s ‘x’ number of followers, but the ‘y’ number of followers who follow the ‘x’ followers. I was hoping to get a solution to my problem, and I did.

@Guy1067: Why go from blog to Twitter? Was it a natural progression for you, reflecting in a sense an escalation path of the issue for you?

@Anjali28: In the specific case of The Carphone Warehouse that you helped me with, yes, it was a natural progression at the time. I felt that in case my blog wasn’t noticed by any relevant employees of the brand, then escalating to Twitter would be more likely to be noticed, and therefore to solve my problem.

@Guy1067: Did you use social media in the expectation of something actually happening, or simply as a final ‘shout in the wind’ to sympathetic followers?

@Anjali28: It depends. In The Carphone Warehouse case, I used social with the expectation that something would happen and also to talk about it with fellow consumers who may have experienced the same thing. However as I notice more and more brands on Twitter, I use social specifically with the expectation that something will happen, and my expectations have so far been justified 100% of the time, which I genuinely appreciate.

@Guy1067: What would you have done if the social avenue didn’t work and no one answered?

@Anjali28: As someone who works in the digital media industry, I know that journalists are very easy to contact (and indeed, I know a few myself). If I had sufficient grounds to complain, I’d approach one of them via Twitter, or contact friends who use social media who are sympathetic to my cause, and tap into their networks too. As I said, social has a multiplier effect which shouldn’t be under-estimated.

@Guy1067: Why do you think companies seem to get it right on Twitter and yet traditional channels which have been around a lot longer are falling down?

@Anjali28: It’s all about the personal connection. As I mentioned above earlier, the traditional call centres that brands employ to deal with customer service issues are usually outsourced and result in the customer being directed to someone who often does not understand your situation, leading you to become very frustrated. As we all know, a frustrated, disgruntled customer is someone who stops at nothing to hurt the brand to get some compensation for the hurt they themselves feel.
As for email, an automated response is hardly personal, and also leaves one feeling frustrated because for all you know, you could have been shouting into an empty well.
I admit, however, that when used in the right manner (as The Carphone Warehouse, American Airlines and Best Buy have, in my personal experience), email can be very effective.

@Guy1067: Can the two be used successfully together?

@Anjali28: Yes, they can – in my Best Buy example, I contacted someone via phone, then via mail (post) as I was requested to send them documentation, then I followed up via Twitter and was finally instructed to contact someone at the company by email. All these mechanisms functioned beautifully as I was able to speak to people who understood my problem and were very willing to help.
Even when I contacted you via Twitter, I used mail and email to follow up, and I had pleasant experiences every time.

@Guy1067: You started off as a detractor, by the end you became an advocate because of the way the issue was handled, which implies the resolution of the issue is not necessarily as important any longer as long as the experience/final experience is well handled?

@Anjali28: I think it always depends on the context. Usually, the two go hand in hand. I became an advocate because the resolution of the issue was favourable in addition to the fact that the experience was good.
With American Airlines, however, I’d had a less than 100% satisfactory resolution to my case, but the experience was still excellent, and I am an advocate because the specific issue wasn’t easy to solve, which I understood.

@Guy1067: Does Twitter set unrealistic expectations in the customer’s mind that all complaints/issues can be resolved by Twitter? Does a company in your experience do anything to manage this expectation?

@Anjali28: No, Twitter definitely does not set unrealistic expectations in the customer’s mind. If a brand is on Twitter, which is a platform that mixes the personal (the ability to have individual conversations via @ messages and DMs) with the public (what is said by a customer can be seen by all his followers and if he/she is re-tweeted, it could reach many more people), the very fact that they are on Twitter means that they have committed to listening to their consumers and solving their problems in a personal way. If they aren’t committed to that, they shouldn’t be on Twitter in the first place.
In my experience, a company does all it can to manage this experience by listening (which is very important – it is easy to NOT track what is said by millions of people on Twitter, but it is the brand’s responsibility to listen) rather than merely talking (usually PR or other brand messages).

@Guy1067: Have you resorted to the use of Twitter/social for any other complaints/issues? Would you? Would you expect companies to be on Twitter by now?

@Anjali28: Yes, I have: Bose, American Airlines and Best Buy. I would definitely do it again in the future if I had issues with a brand’s products.
Yes, I do expect companies to be on Twitter by now. A company exists for its consumers and there are millions of them on Twitter. If brands aren’t on Twitter, not only are they missing an opportunity to connect with thousands of people, they also lose the opportunity to explain themselves and control any damage that may very well arise.

@Guy1067: What’s the future of social customer care? Mainstream or fad?

@Anjali28: Mainstream. Most brands clearly indicate that they have a Twitter and/or a Facebook presence, which means they are open to conversing with customers there.
For me it is almost second nature to expect a brand to be on Twitter – I commend them for the good stuff they do and good experiences I have as much as I vent any unhappiness with them.
Compliments are as much a part of the process as complaints, and both are useful mechanisms for the company to understand what is working and what is not, thereby enabling them to improve their brands, their image, their consumer base, and ultimately their profit.

@Guy1067: Thanks for your time.

Today, apart from being Friday 13th, is also National Complaints Day. Research conducted by ComplaintCommunity suggests that over the course of today more than one and a half million complaints will be lodged across the UK.

Against this backdrop, I was fortunate enough to bring together a variety of people from the public sector, retail, financial services, customer experience and social media monitoring to discuss the impact of social media on complaints specifically, and customer service more generally.

What was interesting from the discussion, was that whether you were a large enterprise living social media, through to one yet to take your first tentative step, the journey was clearly more about mindset than toolset. There was also a need for organisations to understand that the rules of engagement were changing, and with it a different type of lexicon was being defined. Customers were now shaping the service they wanted, and whether companies liked it or not, the bottom line was: get used to it!

Echoes of one of the theses from The Cluetrain Manifesto, written some 11 years ago, still ring true today: “If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!”

Some of the other common themes that ran through the conversation were:

• ROI – return and investment doesn’t have to be financial
• At what point does a company engage with its customers?
• How do you identify where your customers are?
• How do you define ‘complaint’? Negative sentiment, direct issue or poor experience
• How best to establish internal procedures?
• Social media becomes engagement media
• How do you manage customers’ expectations?
• Identifying ways to best ‘handle’ customer complaints? Who is responsible? 
• Localisation of social media for online customer service

It became evident as the discussion progressed that what we were all really talking about, in the words of Rob Skinner (Head of PR, PayPal UK) was the ‘re-invention of the corporation’, with perhaps social media and smartphones, the catalysts of this business change.

I was nervous going into this roundtable with the calibre of people sitting round me, and the thought of ‘what happens if no one says anything?’. But by the end of the discussion it was absolutely ‘affirming’, not only at the level of discussion that took place, the breadth of topics covered, the openness with which BT, PayPal and the Ministry of Justice shared their insights, experiences and concerns, that this thing we white-label ‘social media’ is here to stay, signals a change for the good, and requires an honesty in approach that customers not only deserve, but are finally experiencing as well.

So to those who took part, I thank you, and to those who are yet to start your journey, I encourage you to do so now. If your children are already ‘doing social’ now via sites such as Club Penguin isn’t that a telling insight into their future and the future of your business?

For a summary of the discussion on the impact of social media on complaints please click here

If you would like to be notified when the audio and video are available from this event, or for more information about the the impact of social media on complaints or customer service, please feel free to contact Guy Stephens by email or on 0845 054 6545.

Last time I looked at some of the characteristics of data collected from surveys, particularly data collected from surveys run on websites where you have no control on who is answering the survey. Generally this lack of control can cause some bias in the data which can cause some issues if you are looking at the aggregated reports. For example the data on the profile of visitors (i.e. gender, age etc) that you collected from survey data may not actually reflect the true profile of visitors to your site because of the different propensities of different groups to respond to surveys. So, does that mean that survey data is useless? Not really but it does means that it needs to be handled with a bit of caution.

One way to reduce the impact potential biases in the data is to trend the results over time. I’m always think that survey data is most useful when you have it running continuously anyway as it means that you have a constant monitor of the health of the site and you can refer to it to assess the effect of all sorts of marketing and product development activity. Having a continuous dataset also helps to reduce some of the bias. Say for example, that your survey shows that the age profile of visitors to your website is 40% under 35 and 60% over 35. We know that generally younger people are less responsive to surveys than older people and so we might suspect that there is a bias in the data towards older people. If however, 6 months later you look at the data and it shows that the profile has changed and that it is now 60% under 35 and 40% over 35 then, all other things being equal, whilst we still can’t be sure that the profile is absolutely correct, we can be reasonably confident that there has been a change in the profile over time and that the profile has got older. If we wanted to we could also check whether the change had been statistically significant or not.

Another way of reducing bias in your data is to segment your data. In fact I would say that you absolutely have to segment your data to make it useful and to understand it properly. So whilst I might not be confident that the profile data is properly representative of the reality, I can still use the profile data to look for differences in some of my key metrics such as customer satisfaction or the Net Promoter Score (NPS). I can compare satisfactions scores amongst the younger age groups and the older age groups to see if there are any significant differences and because there often are, I should always be looking at these key metrics amongst key segments of the site’s visitors. This is because changes in the visitor profile of the site can have a significant impact on the changes in these key metrics. Let me give you an example.

As I mentioned last time you can see differences in metrics like satisfaction score or NPS amongst different segments depending on their familiarity with the site or the brand. Often people who are visiting your website for the first time will have lower scores for satisfaction and NPS than those who have visited before. Let’s assume that you have been running some campaigns either online or offline and have driven a significant amount of new traffic to the site. The survey you’re running on the site will probably reflect the increase in new visitors and as a result it’s possible that the overall satisfaction score will go down. This not because people are overall less satisfied with the site experience but because you have a greater proportion of people answering the survey (i.e. first time visitors) who generally tend to give lowers scores. Nothing may have actually changed in the site experience itself, the only change has been in the mix of visitors to the site. In fact, the satisfaction amongst first time visitors can have stayed the same and the satisfaction amongst repeat visitors also can also have stayed the same but apparently overall satisfaction can appear to have gone down.

So, on the face of it online survey based data looks to have some serious issues with it. However, by understanding the source of these issues and interpreting the data wisely can ensure that you can get some real value from this rich source of customer insight. And remember…segment, segment, segment!

One call to my bank confirmed it was a simple confirmation SMS, however it was interesting that my response to this device was not a positive one. From a customer experience point of view, what my bank probably considered as an innovative customer-orientated gesture did somewhat backfire in my case. The main reason for my mixed response was that this communication was unsolicited as I had no memory of signing up for such a service; consequently I initially felt it could not be trusted.

From a customer point of view, it seems that my bank has automatically opted me in to a service without the courtesy of asking. My initial feelings were that confidential details (my mobile phone number) had been used inappropriately. My next step is trying to find out how to opt-out of receiving SMS alerts and confirmations. However, interestingly the customer service person I spoke to wasn’t sure if there was a way to do this – watch this space for updates!

• World’s first* neurological experiment into poor online customer experience proves existence of ‘web stress’
• Brain wave analysis indicates that consumers need to concentrate 50% more than normal when using a badly performing website
• Two most stressful points of the online sales cycle are search and checkout

* Based on extensive desk research in February 2010.

London, UK February 24, 2010 – CA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CA), the world’s leading independent IT management software company, today announced the first ever neurological study of consumer reactions to a poor online experience. The research proves that many consumers experience ‘web stress’ when trying to make an online purchase. The stress levels of volunteers who took part in the study rose significantly when they were confronted with a poor online shopping experience. In order to retain customers, attract new ones and prosper during the economic recovery, CA is calling for European businesses to focus on giving their customers the best possible online experience.

CA partnered with Foviance – a leading customer experience consultancy – to explore ‘web stress’ in relation to application performance, and its impact on consumer behaviour and buying habits. Brain wave analysis from the experiment revealed that participants had to concentrate up to 50% more when using badly performing websites, while facial muscle and behavioural analysis of the subjects also revealed greater agitation and stress in these periods.

During the study, volunteers were wired up to sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, including an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap which was used to monitor brain wave activity. The volunteers then carried out a series of everyday online tasks such as finding and buying a laptop PC and travel insurance. Using all the data gathered, CA and Foviance identified the two most stressful points of the online sales cycle were search and checkout. At these two points, subjects experienced heightened levels of ‘web stress’. During the experiment, volunteers persevered and completed the purchase but in reality, more than three quarters of customers will abandon the site. The study also revealed that after a bout of heightened ‘web stress’, on average it took each participant up to a minute to return to a relaxed state.

“The results of this study sends out a clear message – businesses need to reduce ‘web stress’ and improve the online experience of their customers if they’re going to maximise returns from their web channel,” said Kobi Korsah, Director, EMEA Product Marketing at CA. “It’s not just about website design or internet connection speeds – the performance of a website is dependent on the performance of the web applications that support it. Businesses need an Application Performance Management (APM) solution which not only provides real insight into how customers are experiencing their web applications, but will proactively manage the performance and availability of these applications. This translates into better customer service, improved brand loyalty and increased sales.”

Catriona Campbell, leading behavioural psychologist, Director and Founder of Foviance, said: “Consumers have very high expectations of web applications and web sites – to be always available and instantly responsive. This experiment simulated the experience of underperforming web applications for our volunteers. The results show that when online expectations aren’t met, people quickly become agitated, confused and have to concentrate 50% more than normal. All these problems can be detected and prevented as long as businesses take a proactive approach to measuring the customer’s experience of web applications.”

The experiment builds on the CA 2009 Web Stress Index published last year which examined the frustrations associated with underperforming web applications. The research found that more than three quarters (77%) of European consumers blame either website owner or the website host (which is in any case chosen by the website owner) when an online application fails. It also revealed that if consumers encounter problems online, 40% will go to a rival website and 37% will abandon the transaction entirely. Only 18% said they would report a problem to a company, which means companies need to have their own measures in place to understand how their website is performing from the customer’s point of view.  

About the Experiment

Foviance carried out the study on behalf of CA at the labs of Glasgow Caledonian University in January 2010. Thirteen volunteers took part in the study – eight female and five male participants, aged between 22 and 42. The participants were from the UK, Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. During the study, volunteers were wired up to sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, including an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap which was used to monitor brain wave activity. They then carried out a series of everyday online tasks such as finding and buying a laptop PC and travel insurance.

Download the study here

View video below: 2 minutes 34 seconds

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmYSLWGYZzA

Press contacts

Catriona Campbell – Foviance  info@foviance.com +44 (0)845 054 6500

Press Coverage

Financial Times podcasts: ‘The stressful side of web surfing’ featuring Foviance founder Catriona Campbell

Using an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap and sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, volunteers were wired up during the study and had their brain wave activity monitored. Everyday tasks online such as finding and buying items were tested by the volunteers.

The results revealed that search and checkout were the two most stressful points of everyday processes carried out online, resulting in the volunteers exhibiting a heightened level of ‘web stress’. This type of stress results in more than three quarters of customers abandoning websites before they have completed the task that drove them to the site in the first place. To download the whitepaper a valid e-mail address is required, however Foviance will not contact you unless you specifically request it.

We’ve previously mentioned the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust browser case, and this week sees the initial limited roll-out of Microsoft’s “web browser choice screen” for European users. In a nutshell, the European Commission ruled that bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with the Windows operating system was a big no-no and forced Microsoft to give users the choice of which browser they wanted to use.

Accordingly, as of today, a ballot screen can be downloaded via Windows Update (or automatically downloaded if you have this set up in XP, Vista or Windows 7) which will ask users to choose between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera as their default browser.  Microsoft are calling the initial roll out a “test” of the choice screen, which will be followed by a full roll-out in early March.

So which browser will you choose? What will the market share pie chart look like this time next month? Will the anti-corporate outrage deliver big wins for the little guys? Or will people just keep doing what they’ve been doing? Presumably people who care about this sort of thing are already using their browser of choice so, no biggie, and those who don’t care…well, they probably still don’t care. My guess is that there may be a little shuffling of deck chairs, with IE losing some ground to the other browsers, but ultimately I’d be surprised if we saw a dramatic shift in any direction.

Still, anything can happen in the wild and wacky world of the interweb, so I’ll make sure to have the brown sauce on hand if the time comes to eat my words…

 Whilst on the topic of the last 10 years in web analytics (www.clickz.com/3636166) one of the major positive shifts in the past few years has been the emergence of the “Voice of the Customer” market. For far too long organisations tended to be too “site centric” in their approach optimising online performance believing that the solution lay in just knowing “what happened” and “when it happened” as opposed to “who did it” and “why they did it” – or more often than not “why they didn’t do it”. These days organisations are more aware of the need to complement and support their web analytics data by having insight into why people come to their site and what they thought of the experience. This is evidenced by the growth of companies such as ForeeSee Results at one end of the market (who recently reported a doubling in revenues over the last two years ) and the adoption of free tools such as 4Q from iPercpetions at the other. But having gone through the process of selecting or implementing a Voice of The Customer programme is it working hard enough for you?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes have the opportunity to play a vital role in an organisations data eco-system. They can provide tracking data to look at performance over time as well as diagnostic data to drill down into specific issues. That data can be quantitative in nature such as Customer Satisfaction or Net Promoter Scores  and it can be qualitative, for example the comments left by visitors in responded to open ended questions. So VoC programmes can be extremely insightful but like any measurement system there needs to be an ongoing investment in order to extract the value. Often I have seen organisations who enthusiastically set up a VoC programme and are all over the numbers in the first few months but over a while the major output becomes a few top-line numbers that end up populating a monthly report or similar. Here are some thoughts about how to extract longer term value from your investment in VoC programmes.

Make it somebody’s job
This might seem like a statement of the obvious but any measurement system needs ownership. Somebody somewhere needs to be responsible for managing the programme and realising the return on investment. Often the challenge is that within e-commerce departments the skills may not already exist to set up and run such a programme. Those skills may exist elsewhere in the organisation but in any case a VoC programme needs to find a home. Someone needs to be responsible for ensuring that the programme is running properly from a technical perspective, that the questions are relevant and up to date and that the right insight is being extracted at the right time.

Look to integrate with other data
Any measurement system that sits in glorious isolation is not doing its job properly and VoC data is no exception. In the data world synergy is a reality and two plus two really does equal five. You will extract greater value form your VoC programme if you actively seek to integrate with other data. At the simplest level, integration can mean working with two or more datasets side by side. An example would be looking at the funnel from a web analytics systems and looking at reasons for not achieving goals from a VoC programme. Alternatively it might be starting with some specific comments left by visitors in a VoC programme and then investigating their behaviour in a tool like Tealeaf or other customer experience measurement tools.

At a more complex but more powerful level, you can look to physically integrate the data by creating a link between the VoC programme and your web analytics system. Many of the major measurement systems in each area now have data integration capabilities. These mainly allow key data from the VoC system to be captured into the web analytics database and reported alongside the usual web analytics metrics. Having with the segmentation capabilities built into most web analytics systems these days, it also allows the analyst to look for relationships and patterns between people’s attitudes and option and their behaviours. For example, are people who land on our marketing landing pages more or less likely to achieve their goals than people who land on the homepage?

Actually listen to “The Voice”
Whilst a lot of value can be gained from systematically tracking various different customer orientated scores, a huge amount of value can also be mined from the comments that visitors leave when asked for their opinions on issues or reasons why they did or did not do certain things. Depending on the scale of your programme you might have a lot of valuable feedback there which is often left to gather virtual dust in the bowels of the system. The trouble with this data though is that it’s not structured and so it can be difficult to extract sense and meaning from it and also there can be a lot of it.

Some of the higher end VoC programme services have developed or are developing algorithmic approaches to analysing free text data and trying to quantify the “sentiment”. However if you programme is more modest then there is no substitute for the human brain in terms of making sense of free text. When you set up your programme make sure that you read through the comments that people are leaving. Quite quickly you will get a sense of the main themes that are coming through. Note these themes down and then quickly tot up how many comments relate to each theme, this will give you a sense then of how important or how widespread these issues are. If you do this on a systematic basis, every day or every week, then you can also build up trends of how these themes are changing over time.

Hopefully these thoughts will help you to extract more insight form the investments you make in understanding who your visitors are, what they think and why they do the things that they do (or don’t do…)

In my mind, text messages hold a certain level of importance, more so than e-mails, because we always have our phones on us. Therefore, if someone sends a text, it must be important, right? I’ve read that mobile marketing is on the increase (British Gas have been texting customers for over a year now), but at what cost to our privacy and sanity?

Customer satisfaction is part of customer experience, and I’m not currently happy with my mobile phone provider because I feel they have invaded not only my Sunday (day of rest!) but my personal domain. Hearing about some ‘not so special’ specials on my mobile holds no importance for me. Is there any place of sanctuary left for us anymore?

I have since tried to figure out how to ‘opt out’ of receiving text notifications from my mobile phone provider, but unfortunately haven’t found any options on the customer service number, and their website links aren’t working right now – I’ll have to remember to try again later…