I was reading a very interesting article by Don Peppers on the Untapped Value of Customer Complaints. I thought it was a lovely piece which brought out some very important points on this topic in a brilliant manner.

• If you feel a company has wronged you in some way, then you’ll be examining every new interaction with it for evidence to confirm this personal belief. (This is your confirmation bias at work. Don’t even bother trying to deny its existence.) 
• Even a single complainer’s dissatisfaction and distrust can soon infect a large number of others. So complainers, if left to their own devices, can do immense damage to the value of your overall franchise.
• The more a business contradicts the customer’s own pessimistic expectations, the more noticeable and memorable its initiative will be. When done right, like the boiling pot of water that freezes faster, a boiling complainer will often become a highly convinced brand advocate even faster than someone who never had a complaint to begin with. 

In fact, Don Peppers gives some lovely tips on how to handle customer complaints:

1. Acknowledge
2. Apologize
3. Amplify
4. Ask
5. Act

Most often, companies and individuals who work for these companies are always in denial mode when complaints happen. Also, many of them I find are not honest to ackowledge it. Customers love individuals who acknowledge the complaint and sincerely try to solve them. The fact that they first listen to the problem is critical. Then, trying to solve the most important aspect or even part of the problem or even giving it their best shot to ensure it is heard or addressed is the next step.

Many companies have processes,software, tracking dept for complaints but customers look for the 'soul' when they raise a complaint. Many a times employees become 'numb' to complaints and that does not help. 

I always find the best doctors are the ones who understand the problem of the patients and their relatives even though they handle thousands of cases. The best ones spend a lot of time hearing and empathizing with the near and dear.

Customer complaints are also similar. They are invaluable assets and companies need to treat them not just as business as usual. 

In Don Peppers own words "When done right, like the boiling pot of water that freezes faster, a boiling complainer will often become a highly convinced brand advocate even faster than someone who never had a complaint to begin with."

At the tone, leave a message.....When was the last time you logged into your voice mail box and checked the messages in it? Increasingly, more and more consumers rarely check their voice mail. Consumer don't have the time, it seems, to hear long voice mail messages, they would rather respond to people or friends who called instantly.  Also, it is not easy to search voice mail messages on your phone. Nobody has the patience to go through it one by one!

Here's an interesting statistic from an article that I had read:

More than 30 percent of voice mail messages remain unheard for three days or longer, according to uReach Technologies, which designs voice messaging systems for Verizonand other phone companies. And more than 20 percent of people with messages in their mailboxes rarely check them, said Saul Einbinder, the firm’s senior vice president for marketing and business development. A survey done for Sprint by Opinion Research Corporation found that with the exception of people age 65 and over, adults respond more quickly to a text message than to a voice message. Those under the age of 30 are four times more likely to respond within minutes to a text message than to a voice mail.

If you are a brand having a call center for customer service, how often do you make it easy for consumers to send text messages with their queries, if there is a huge waiting time on the call, so that you get  your service reps to either call these customers back immediately or  quickly respond back with a text message? I have rarely seen companies do so.

Remember, text message box has taken over  the voice mail box!

It's always interesting to see how marketers struggle to gain the attention of customers. Even after spending big bucks on marketing/promotions, some products catch the attention and some don't . This led me to think what makes customers lap-up certain product concepts even if they don't buy it the first time but how does one create a buzz that goes around it which enables others to make their decision faster. Here's an interesting perspective on the same topic:

If you want people to talk about your product or service, you need to ratchet up one of these three traits. Consider a 360-year-old Finnish company named Fiskars, which makes orange-handled scissors. If ever there was a viral-marketing challenge, it's scissors -- a product with all the sizzle of a RAM upgrade. Brains on Fire, a brand-identity firm based in South Carolina, helped Fiskars find the emotion. "We knew we had to move from a product conversation to a passion conversation," said Spike Jones, the firm's "firestarter." Jones and his colleagues realized there was one community that was indeed passionate about scissors: arts and crafters. They found four arts-and-crafts zealots and christened them "Fiskateers." Then Brains on Fire asked the Fiskateers to select additional compadres who would support other people in their crafting hobby. (Notice the added public-service element.) Since the project launched, there has been a 600% increase in online mentions of the Fiskars brand. (I had covered this in my previous blog post)

Start thinking about emotion, public service, and triggers.

Step # 1: People are emotional. If you can get them to either agree/disagree, love/hate, join/oppose your messages they tend to get involved. Your marketing efforts need to appeal to them to do that. Also, you need a method to know your believers and disbelievers by name and contact - a database. Then, build a one-to-one dialog with them.

Step # 2: People want to contribute Remember, people always want to give back something to the community. When you let them know you are the catalyst for the same, they tend to align with your products or brands. Include that in your marketing efforts, they tend to feel good and talk about their contribution to others and hence about your product or brand.

Step # 3 People want the right triggers  Not always, everybody wants to do the talking. But they definitely do so when there is a trigger. For example, green and energy efficiency, acts as triggers to get people to talk to each other about their contribution to this environment by buying products that are energy efficient. Or getting somebody to use or try your product before others( a preview) or a test your product before the launch encourages chatter as a trigger.

If you don't treat customers as " transactional" elements of your marketing efforts but as "emotional" absorbers of your messages, it can work a long way in gaining a passionate dialog about your products/brands leading to higher conversion and market share.

Destination CRM has an interesting article this trend. The article highlights the following facts:

Recent research from Gartner analyst Michael Maoz predicts that by the year 2012, 30 percent of investments in CRM will be via software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Gartner research indicates that the increased deployment of SaaS initiatives might have underwhelming implications for consulting and professional services. Maoz explains that many companies view software-as-a-service applications as plug-and-play. The implementations lack process involvement and merely connect applications in the cloud, rather than looking at the bigger picture of business process management. "CRM is not just the technology," Maoz expels. "It's more an issue of ‘How do I interact with my customer?' Using some of these SaaS applications without changing the business process could be just enabling to do bad things even worse." In other words, without a bottom-up approach, deploying new applications in the cloud is automating a tired or flawed process. "Using software-as-a-service is not going to help CRM," Maoz states. "We shouldn't be enamored by cloud computing instead of in lieu of process improvement."

My View: I can't agree more with Gartner on this trend. Increasingly, clients will prefer this as a hosted and managed service. In fact, the second part of the article seemed more important to me. It's not only important to have SaaS as a model in customer management but the ability to understand the process and business impact & action is a key need where I see is a huge gap that exists currently in such models.

I believe there must be 4 stages before implementing SaaS in a customer management environment:

Stage 1: Define your CaaS : Customer management as a strategy - How are customers or prospects being defined by current and prospective value, opportunity and segments?

Stage 2: Define your IPPM: Set-up a clear interaction planning and process mapping & migration  of your customers and prospects.

Stage 3 : Implement SaaS:  Once you have done the above 2 stages, then plan your SaaS roll out.

Stage 4: Plan the analytics,campaigns & metrics: SaaS is just the start but post customer management in SaaS is critical. The analytics around customers, campaigns around potentially valuable segments and tracking key metrics is often overlooked.

Being a resident of Mumbai in India,  the last 3 days since the blasts and terror attack have been traumatic for the citizens in Mumbai.

Such a crisis also brings to light brands and companies that really care for you. This is the time that you realize many companies pay lip service to customer relationships and customer centricity.  There's not one company that reached out to me during this time of crisis. Neither did my bank, insurance company, financial planner, mobile company, internet service provider,  mutual fund, utility company, credit card service provider, airlines( which am a frequent flier!) bothered to get in touch with me.

Funny, this is the time when a call or a message or an email could have made a big difference to my relationship with them. Some of these relationships are over a decade or more old!  I also know am quite a valuable customer for them. Whenever they wanted to up-sell or cross-sell products, I could see them desperately get in touch. But that was the time, I didn't want to talk to them!

Having said this, I did receive a couple of  thoughtful messages from only one company RCI during the last few days. I was indeed surprised, moved and felt good.

When will companies learn to get more real and less plastic in their relationships with customers?

I have always felt the traditional link-based online advertising model does not fit the social media eco-system. Consumers don't go to such social networks to see ads. Rather they are blind to ads or hate ads. They want to  chat, talk and share their emotions about a particular topic or spend time with their friends here. There needed to be a different model which takes the same context and converts this into a "conversational" opportunity. Facebook seems to have done just that. Take a look:

Facebook has recently unveiled a new advertising product - "engagement advertisements"!

According Jeremiah Owyang, this is a ad product that encourages members to interact with the ads by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans.

Brands will only succeed with these “WidgetAds” if they create content that puts community first, lean on new interactions, integrate with other tools, plan for the long haul, and change how they measure success –traditional internet advertising tactics won’t apply.

Engagement Ads provide three unique experiences
Rather than clicking on the ad and being whisked away to a branded microsite, these ads allow members to stay within the contained walls of Facebook and their social community. Engagement ads come in three major flavors:

1) Comment Style Ad: Members can now leave comments on these advertisements, much like wall posts. Brands that are focused on entertainment, new product rollouts, autos and apparel are well suited. The ad can show up to 4 comments per object, and the activity spreads to the users newsfeed.

2) Virtual Gifts Style Ad: Brands can now create virtual items that users can share, spread to each other. This wildly popular behavior within applications and Facebook is suitable for consumer products, entertainment, and some media.

3) Fan Style Ad: A play off the Facebook pages, users with a persona affinity for a product (like Apple) can become a fan, triggering a notification to their network, and could then tie on social ads. Will work great for established brands, like guitar hero, passion products, luxury products, or any brand with a rabid customer base.

In the last one or two decades, enterprises have been focussing on the supply side of their business. This was primarily related to reducing inefficiencies, extracting more value out of leakages in supply processes, shaving-off wastages thro' better logistics & distribution, managing inventory in near real-time and hence improving margins by reducing capital employed.

As companies continue to implement many of these SCM initiatives, in the next decade or two, what will drive value for companies? I believe they need to shift their focus to Customer Chain Management(CCM). Here's where maximum value can be created for companies.SCM can only squeeze incremental value for companies.That may not be just enough. Hence, they need to adopt CCM to gain market leadership and to improve market capitalization.

Let's take an example of Apple. They have excelled in managing the customer chain better than any of their competitors. The iPod is a great example of best practice CCM. Here the premise starts with customers wanting to hear great music. The customers just  didn't need only a product.There were thousands of them to choose from. The way iPod organized the music for them, iTunes as a  service where they were given "pay-as-you-go"  flexibility, accessories that made it possible for them to hear "on-the-move"  and " in-the-room"  to enhance their lifestyle made it a compelling proposition.

Take a look at what are the various elements of the customer chain that they have brought together in the diagram below. The "value creators" of tomorrow will be ones who can bring various parts of this customer chain together. There is value to be " added" at every part of the chain and CCM has the ability to significantly multiply the revenues for companies.

Marketing investments increasingly are being looked at by CEOs with great attention and with a renewed focus on what ROI is it getting the organization in return. The ANA( American National Advertisers) had a Marketing Accountability Conference and the presentation by Brooks provides interesting perspective on how to operationalize the thinking within an organization.

Lou Carbone, founder and chief experience officer of Experience Engineering, a Minneapolis-based consulting firm  writes & explains about this concept:

" I say experience engineering, not customer engineering, is focus on how to turn the customer experience into value,” he says. “Whether it is an employee experience, a shareholder experience, or the customer experience, all of these experiences are the totality of creating valuable personal relationships.”

Several key principles are necessary to engineering customer experience, says Carbone. “You are moving from making and selling to really sensing and responding. We create an emotional by thinking and looking at everything from the customer back. It’s understanding and leveraging the role of the unconscious mind, becoming clue conscious, and developing a rigorous system that manages those clues.”

To understand the value, Carbone stresses, you have to understand people. “Customer satisfaction isn’t a predictor of customer loyalty,” he adds. ”Most defectors are actually satisfied customers. It’s really based on the need for emotional engagement.”

“Customers consciously and unconsciously filter a barrage of clues and organize them into a set of impressions—some rational, some emotional,” he continues. These clues involve all five senses. Some clues are relayed from human behavior (voice tone, body language) and others are mechanical (design, color, temperature). Thus, without consciously knowing it, we are aware of the comfort of a chair in Starbucks or how our hotel folds towels and half-empty toilet paper rolls.

My take: Experience is irrational and emotional but the key point being made is how do we turn  experience into value. It's about making every experience tangible. One example that comes to me is Honda Service in India(as experienced by a friend of mine). While he had signed for an annual AMC for the car, everytime he would take the car for service round the year, an invoice would be raised for the service/work order amount( Say INR.33,00) but what he had to pay - Rs.zero was raised too( there was credit & debit in the same invoice)!! The value of the Honda AMC experience, therefore, became tangible and would lead to higher renewal rates year after year.

Lauren Hoyt, Editor, SearchCRM provides some great perspective on the difference between CRM and CEM( Customer Experience Management):

First there's the question of a definition. I asked Lior Arussy, one of the thought leaders in this arena, to define customer experience management.

According to Lior, a customer experience is the total value proposition provided to a customer, including the actual product and all pre- and post-sales interactions with the customer. Meanwhile, CEM is the science and art of managing all interactions with customers across all touch points in order to maximize the value provided to customers.

"There are quite a few differences between ," Martha said. "If we look at CRM, that's how a customer looks to a company. And if we think about CEM, that's really how the company looks to the customer ...we're talking about making it worthwhile to do more business with us because we become more worthwhile to them. It's taking the time to see their point of view, understanding how to be reciprocal with them, understanding how to be trustworthy."

"CEM systems and CRM systems serve different, although complementary, purposes," he said. "While CEM is about creating the best customer experience, CRM is about managing relationships while focusing on maximizing revenues. CRM is tools geared to manage and analyze customer information, while CEM is tools geared to enable and enhance customer interactions."