Author: Stuart Richards

One of the most common questions I receive is about how a brand should combat negative comments in social media.

It’s true. There are many horror stories that you are most likely familiar with of negative word of mouth spreading like wildfire through social media. Employees and executives behaving badly, questionable product quality, poor treatment of customers – these are the stories that many people love to spread, and many brands in turn are wary of opening up their social media channels because of this. The reality is however that these are by no means the only comments about brands customers are making online.

In fact, customer experience programs that stress active advocacy may serve as the perfect solution for brands concerned about negative sentiment.

There is an old adage in sports that “the best defense is a good offense.” In other words, by being more proactive in any activity, you can reduce the harm caused by any oncoming risks.

In the world of social media and active advocacy this strategy has two prongs. First, by encouraging happy customers to become advocates of your brand, you can effectively build a safety net of positive sentiment throughout the online world that can cushion the negative effect from any negative comments that may pop up once in a while. What better counter to a negative portrayal of your brand online than to simply reference back to hundreds if not thousands of pre-existing positive stories of great brand experiences from your own happy customers.

A customer experience management program can also serve as an offensive weapon against negative commentary through the alert mechanisms that most have. These customer alerts allow brands to intercept unhappy customers at their moment of truth, allowing an opportunity for management or brand representatives to reach out personally to improve their brand experience before any negative sentiment is released to the world.

Customer alerts while simple in nature can be quite profound in their impact. By connecting brands directly to unhappy customers, brands are able to open up a true dialogue with them, to glean often meaningful insights, while also having an opportunity to create more advocates as well. After all, what better experience to share on social media than a brand so dedicated to customer service that they reached out to you in a timely and personal manner to correct an issue that you had reported.

Two facets of a simple strategy to reduce the risk of negative online sentiment the old-fashioned way: leverage positive word-of-mouth and never take a single customer for granted.

Figures have historically shown that September is a month when retailers should be drawing customers into stores, as parents hit the shops ahead of the new term. In September 2011, retail volumes grew 0.6 percent month on month due to back-to-school and university purchases (UK National Office of Statistics). It will be interesting to see if this year differs.

Traditionally, the back-to-school period is an opportunity for retailers to deliver great customer experiences at this rather unique time of year. The back-to-school shopping trip is laden with emotion – excitement, anxiety, pride, dread, resentment – and that is just the parents. Some consumers will be overwhelmed with the costs involved and desperate to bargain hunt, others will only settle for the very best for Little Johnny – or maybe Big Johnny as he prepares to leave home for the first time. Either way, shopping trolleys are likely to be laden and there is a real chance to maximise sales and score points with customers by understanding their needs and responding accordingly.

Unfortunately, getting it wrong will not only mean that sales opportunities are missed but there is also likely to be a negative effect on long term customer loyalty. I remember the ritual of visiting Woolworth’s every year – new shorts, new pencil case, new geometry set – that so easily couldn’t have been set if the first visit had been a negative one. And this loyalty doesn’t just apply to the traditional stationery shop any more: the 357,915 new undergraduates (UCAS) this year will be requiring bedding, kitchen utensils, food, clothing, white goods, brown goods, computers, etc. The ritual is hard to break once formed, and highly valuable.

Starting infants’ school, moving to senior school and leaving home for university are all massive rites of passage with all elements of the process being inevitably relayed to friends and family in minute detail – online and offline. This could be a great marketing opportunity or a customer relations disaster! On a positive note, we know that 69 percent of consumers are willing to share great experiences (Empathica Consumer Insights 2011).

Our advice to retailers is pretty straightforward. The critical factors at this time of year are not that different to other times. Ensure staff are empowered and educated enough to provide advice as well as to man tills and to order sufficient stock levels for key products; prevent long queues forming and keep stocked up in core mandatory items. The key difference is that at this time of year the emotional resonance is turned up to 11 – making any let down much more impactful!

Whatever happens in reality this September, the critical discipline is to measure customer satisfaction alongside sales: not just how you perform against a checklist of standards, but how your customers feel. This will enable retailers to understand what really affects consumer behaviour in this very specific annual spending window which will allow better planning next year – and regardless of weather, or any other variable, September 2013 will again bring back-to-school fever.

With the buzz surrounding the 2012 Olympic Games reaching fever pitch in the UK and an anticipated 11 million visitors due to descend on the capital city, many organisations will be carefully considering how they can manage or enhance their customer experience for the duration of the event for maximum benefit. However, without the right staff and staff management, a solid customer service strategy, and a way to listen to what customers really want, these organisations are probably risking customer loyalty in the longer term.

The good news is that the pitfalls can easily be avoided by good forward planning and putting some thought into how your location dynamic will change throughout the Games.  To start the process here are my top five tips on how to satisfy customers during this exciting period, learned from working with leading retailers and hospitality organisations over the past few years.

Tip #1 – Hire people who like people

Many brands are going to have to rely on temporary staff over the Olympic period, as regular team members take holidays and extended opening hours result in needing additional resources.

We often see customer satisfaction dip when organisations are reliant on temporary staff  who care less about customers and the success of the company, and may be less customer-focussed (school holidays and Christmas being notable examples).

Be as stringent in your hiring practices for temporary staff as you would for permanent staff – ensure that you are getting people who are naturally inclined to be customer-focussed, and a lot of the potential issues will look after themselves.

Tip #2 – Be thoughtful about your staffing rotations

Think about it, when your manager or deputy manager takes the day off, or when you lack experienced team members in your location, it’s ultimately the customer that suffers.

At Empathica, we see this happen a lot with our clients. We have worked with several organisations to identify weak spots during their trading week (Sundays are chief culprits here!) and improve senior staff cover in locations. As a result, we’ve seen massive improvements in customer satisfaction levels through our Customer Experience Management programmes.

Make sure your best and most important people are spread across the week and don’t leave inexperienced staff to cope alone.

Tip #3 – Let your staff have fun

It’s simple – happy staff lead to happy customers. We have seen on many occasions that one of the key predictors of whether a customer will enjoy their experience – and subsequently actively advocate for a brand – is whether they perceived the team to be enjoying their jobs while they were in the location.

Allow your staff flexibility to get into the spirit of the Olympics, and participate appropriately in the major events, and customers will notice the positive atmosphere and respond accordingly.

Tip #4 – Focus on your customers

This seems like a truism, but is worth mentioning. The influx of thousands of Olympic ticket holders from across the globe is likely to deliver unusual demand patterns and a whole heap of associated logistical challenges. When facing this type of challenge, it’s not unusual to observe organisations turning inwards and focussing on things they feel better equipped to manage: out of stock items, wastage, shrinkage…

But you cannot lose sight of the most important measures: including how your customers feel.

To succeed at delivering a great customer experience, you need to understand what your customers want and focus on delivering it. If you do have a Customer Experience Management programme, make sure you know what your key drivers of customer advocacy are, use the programme to listen to what customers are saying, and reinforce great behaviours every day.

Tip #5 – Think about the tourists…and what they can teach you about your customers!

London in particular will have thousands of visitors from many different countries for the duration of the games. I’ve seen organisations planning extra signage in their locations here because they are uncertain that new customers will find their way to what they want; or simplifying their menus to make the most popular items easier to find; or training their teams to be extra helpful in case they spot customers looking confused while in locations.

If you are doing any of these things, great! Thinking about your customer experience through the eyes of the customer is a positive thing. But one question: why did you wait for the Olympics to do it? Imagine if you’d made these changes a year ago. How many more satisfied, loyal customers would you have spending more with you, and telling their friends to visit you?

Whenever we think about the variability in our customers’ experience, it is tempting to consider just the differences between locations. Who are our best stores, how can we learn from them – who are our worst stores and how can they improve.

The reality is that there is just as much variability in the experience within individual stores as there are between them – even our best locations have bad days.

So when considering the pros and cons of mystery shopping, I always think – “what happens if the mystery shopper comes into the best store on a bad day?” – or conversely my worst store on that rare good day. With a sample of one I risk transposing those two stores and focusing my efforts in the wrong place.

A more systematic approach to gathering feedback through surveys however is able to pull a much more representative sample of data, with which insights and analysis can be done.  That’s really where customer experience management programmes are fundamentally different than mystery shopping. By gathering feedback in larger quantities, through multiple sources such as web, mobile and IVR, a CEM programme can ensure your insights will come from a variety of customers and days, allowing your best locations to clearly surface and allowing under-performers the feedback they require to improve.

While there really are no right and wrong ways to approach customer feedback, there are best practices. One of these is remembering to take both quality and quantity into account when formulating how you want to gather your feedback.

“What is the one thing that can make the biggest difference to my customers today?”

This is a seemingly innocuous question, but one that can have far-reaching impact. For local managers this is likely a question they ask themselves every day. Their job is to motivate and guide their staff to deliver great branded experiences, and coach them on the little things to focus on to make the biggest impact for their customers.

Getting to the answer to that simple question however, is all too often anything but simple.

Running a location is an all consuming job. Location managers are asked to do many things. In both a figurative and literal sense they’re the ones tasked to keep the lights running on a day to day basis. As such their time is incredibly valuable; from dealing with logistics, to dealing with staff issues, locations managers have little time for tasks that fall outside their immediate duties. In many cases this means managing a customer experience program falls through the cracks.

Customer experience management programs have been used for many years as a mechanism to ensure operational efficiency. In many cases however the results of these programs have hit a standstill. One of the reasons for this is how these programs have evolved into rather complex data analysis programs. All too often programs require managers to focus on time consuming reporting, rather than helping them drive actions and develop new behaviors in their staff.

So how can these programs evolve to help local managers better focus on and understand what can be done each day to have the biggest impact on customers?

Some elements to consider when considering how to drive more action from a customer experience program are as follows:

Simple, clear information

Location managers need answers and focused directions, not more work. These busy professionals need tools to help surface only the information critical to them and to present it in a way that makes sense to them.

Select and align each location with specific top priorities

Location managers are not data analysts – they do not have the time or training to become one. Look for customer experience tools that provide algorithms to analyze the data and deliver insights so that they don’t have to. The right tools can provide specific focus areas and clear target objectives. This allows busy managers to focus their time on executing on priorities.

Action plans to execute behavior change

Knowing what area of the customer experience that needs to improve is just the beginning of a successful customer experience program. If the staff does not change their behavior then the customer experience will not improve. A location manager’s role in the customer experience program should be to coach and motivate the frontline staff to drive behavior change that will benefit the customer.They need the knowledge and the tools to execute this behavior change. The right tools should be able to present an action plan based on best practices for their specific focus areas.

Social sharing of best practices

Locations should be able to learn what actions have been successful in other locations with similar issues. Best practice libraries are living online resources that can adapt to the real world. Location managers (and their regional managers) can use these tools to contribute new actions and give feedback on which actions work well and which do not.

Status monitoring to track progress

Locations need an easy way to track their overall progress as well as the execution of specific staff behavior. In thirty seconds location focused tools should be able to tell a manager exactly what the staff is successfully executing on and not. This enables data-driven conversations based on real customer insights.

You know a concept has reached the mainstream once you see it discussed on a morning news talk show. There I was preparing my breakfast while enjoying my usual morning chat show and lo and behold the topic of social media came up.

The interesting thing about the discussion was not that they were talking about social media (Facebook has long been a topic of fascination for the world at large for the past few years), but that the guest commentator  was chatting about how the best way for brands to take control of their image on social media is to get ahead of it by encouraging positive chatter from their fans.

This idea of active advocacy, or a more pro-active approach to brand building through social media is something that has been discussed quite a lot by all of us here at Empathica, but it’s quite satisfying to see the topic now showing up in mainstream media outside the world of CEM.

An interesting quote came from that news discussion “In the age of social media brands don’t even own their brands anymore”.

While a bit over the top, there is some merit to that statement. Most brands these days are acutely aware of the negative impact that social media and the wrong story going “viral” can have on a brand’s reputation. However, the flip side of that equation is also true. A large volume of positive mentions and recommendations from the happy customers are equally powerful in building up a brand’s reputation.

So in a practical sense what are the steps to identifying happy customers and building a foundation of active advocacy?

1. Convert brand advocates by identifying happy customers through existing feedback programs
2. Target the recommendations based on the customers own experience (i.e. location visited)
3. Amplify recommendations to become a tangible local marketing campaign by sharing messages via social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter
4. Extend the relationship with the brand advocates by offering incentives and offers

As long as I’ve been in this industry most of the innovations I’ve seen in understanding loyalty and delivering great experiences have centered on data. In particular, many of us have focused on accessing more data to unlock deeper customer insights.

Undoubtedly this has made a tremendous impact on a brand’s ability to understand their core customers and how best to deliver great experiences.

It’s interesting however that from the “front lines” I suspect that this volume of data is beginning to reach a point of diminishing returns.

I like to use the Internet itself as an analogy. You can pretty much find anything and everything online these days. However, if you were new to the world wide web, or if you are looking for something in particular, the breadth of information available can be intimidating. This is in some ways what’s driven the growth of “apps”. Most apps are curating online information to help users filter out the noise of the immense amount of data online, and to deliver content around a specific topic of interest, be it movies, technology news, sports, or whatever interests the user has.

In the early days of customer experience management location managers were amazed by simply having access to any feedback data regarding their customers and how they felt about them. As with many of us, those same location managers today are more harried than back then and also have access to more customer data than ever. The problem is that those two circumstances do not necessarily mix well for a few key reasons.

Location managers constrained by time.

One of the scarcest resources for most location level managers is time. While the insights that can be gleaned through traditional customer feedback reporting can be tremendously valuable the value is often not realized until an appropriate amount of reporting and analysis is done. In many instances this is time that location mangers simply do not have, with the demands of their daily tasks. If they do spend the time on reading reports and performing analysis, then other critical tasks may be neglected.

Location managers constrained by a lack of analysis expertise.

Even if location managers have the time to dedicate to reporting and analyzing customer feedback data, they may not have the expertise required to effectively use complex reporting tools. In these cases the complexity of the tools themselves can be a barrier to success. Locations will make poor choices and spend effort improving factors that do not change the overall customer experience.

Location managers with limited experience with the brand.

Over time, great managers will intuitively understand what needs to be done, and what needs to be prioritized to deliver great experiences. Managers with less experience with the brand will not have this ability. Insights and best practices gleaned from those intuitively great managers and top performing locations can be a tremendous asset in helping to deliver great experiences consistently across locations. More importantly these blueprints for success provide a guide as to where to start and what definitive goals to strive for.

Location managers only need access to the most applicable information to them. In fact some might even argue that location managers don’t need data at all. What they need is the actions and insights that the data can uncover. In other words, location managers need action plans not reports.

The good news is that this is the direction that customer experience management programs are going in. The next phase of innovation in CEM isn’t simply pulling more data, but taking a more active role in turning that data into real tangible actions.

Having returned from the annual National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show conference in New York I am increasingly excited for the opportunities that lie ahead for retailers. Each year retailers and solution providers from around the globe gather to discuss the latest trends in retail and share best practices around how best to adapt to the road ahead.

The central theme of this year’s show was focused around bringing the human element back to the retail experience. This echoes the sentiment that is our raison d’etre here at Empathica – retailers and consumers need to reconnect at a human level. The engine of the global economy depends on it.

Retail truly is the engine of the global economy when you take a moment to study some staggering statistics:

• Retail supports 1 in 4 jobs in the US economy
• Retail in the US is forecast to grow 3.4% in 2012 (compared to estimates of US GDP growth of 2.1% to 2.4%)
• Retail contributes over $2.5 trillion to America’s GDP each year

From the opening keynote by former president Bill Clinton, through the educational sessions I attended, and the conversations I had with other delegates, it’s clear that retail provides a pathway out of the recession. A back to basics approach is needed to running a business. Most people have a favorite retailer where employers and customers’ have elevated their relationship to that of a friendship. If not, then you have heard stories from parents and grandparents of a time when the locally focused small businesses were able to deliver a very personal experience to their loyal customers. As time went on, successful businesses began to grow, and sadly achieved much of this scale by focusing on growth and increasing their points of distribution often to the detriment of those necessary friendships and relationships.

Today’s innovations in technology have created a turning point in the world of business.  Technology is now becoming a tool allowing business owners to rebuild these relationships and maintain them on a global scale.

The challenge that now emerges is how to convert this capability to an actionable model.

• Retailers need to actively solicit feedback from their customers and then engage with them at a deeper level. This can be done in three ways. Use marketing science to understand what drives loyalty. Dig deeper… knowing for example that friendly service outranks other loyalty drivers isn’t enough. The real question is, what are the elements of the experience that build a belief that this brand is friendlier than all others?
• Deliver a consistent brand experience at the ground level. I argue that its more important for most retailers to become more consistent than it is for actual improvement in their overall service quality scores. Reduce the anxiety and make the choice simple for customers by letting them know ahead of time exactly what they’ll get.
• Finally, use technology to help personalize the shopping experience. Social media, mobile phones and the new consumer behaviors they foster have created tremendous innovation opportunities. It’s interesting that one of the competitive advantages online retailers have developed over the last few years is a much deeper personal relationship with many consumers. Recommendations, complimentary products, remembering history and preferences… in many ways technology has effectively allowed online retailers to personalize a highly impersonal experience.

I leave you with an interesting exercise that I was challenged with by one of the speakers at the conference. Each day when we all prepare for work, we should challenge ourselves to complete this phrase “What the world needs now…” (yes I know I can Google the remainder of the Burt Bacharach lyrics). Such a simple yet profound phrase can help put the value of what we all do each and every day in a new context.

Earlier this month I had the good fortune to post on the Harvard Business Review blog network.

In an article titled “Using Social Networks to Improve Operations” my colleague Mike Amos and I discuss how the programs for soliciting customer feedback have evolved from mystery shopping, to early customer experience management programs, through today’s more sophisticated experience management programs we’ve dubbed “Social CEM”. Social CEM programs go beyond simply measuring satisfaction and focus on turning delighted customers into active brand advocates on social media channels.

As I reflect on the implications of the cycle of innovation we’re in, I become increasingly excited about the opportunity that lies ahead. Not simply for the world of CEM but for the intersection of businesses and consumers as a whole.

There was a time when business owners were on a first name basis with all their best customers. As businesses grew ever larger with more sources for distribution (many enterprises have 100s of store units) successful scale became an impediment to those relationships. Today, the convergence of social media and customer experience management bridges much of that divide. We are at a crossroads where the old business ideal of “knowing every customer” can be made possible through technology, enabling large corporations a level of agility that matches that of the time when our grandparents shopped at their local general store.

Nobody needs to be reminded of the growth of social media. Some believe that social networks are the most significant advance in communication since the birth of the internet itself. While the value of social communication is clearly understood from the consumer side, it can still remain muddy from a business point of view.

The initial focus of social media use from businesses has been to leverage its growing audience as a channel for the ‘same old’ advertising. That is, viewing social media users as consumers rather than creators of brand content. This is ironic since social media is in fact defined as the collaborative consumption AND creation of content. As the social media user base continues to grow so does the opportunity for mobilizing brand content creators or active advocates.

Rarely have I worked with a brand that scored less than 80% satisfaction amongst its customer base. Being involved in hundreds of customer experience programs over the last 10 years has taught me that the vast majority of customers are happy. Focusing on active advocacy is a huge opportunity for brands to tap in to this happy (but silent) majority to solicit genuine recommendations to be shared amongst peers.

The advocate process is proving far more powerful than regular social network advertising. The key is authenticity: we listen to our friends and colleagues for advice and recommendations. So while retailers and restaurant owners can buy social media advertising, the real place to drive growth is on the consumer newsfeeds. Not only are those kinds of click throughs more numerous. They are also more powerful. Beyond simple word of mouth advertising, poor-performing outlets get suggestions for improvement, which they use to guide better operational performance.