Customers are talking: the empathetic company

The New York Times today features an interview with Dev Patnaik, a consultant specializing in helping companies to develop growth strategies and the author of a new book, "Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy," which claims that a missing ingredient in recipes for corporate success is the human train of empathy:

[Patnaik] argues in the book that it is not the lack of innovation that hampers companies, but the “empathy gap” — the chasm between employees in organizations and the people that they serve. Companies, he said, “do a good job of stamping empathy out of employees, then are surprised when employees make poor decisions or try to sell things that people don’t need.”

In a way this reflects the "bringing the outside in" concept from Kotter's "A Sense of Urgency." Patnaik gives the example of the auto managers who never experienced the car business from a customer's point of view--buying a car, financing it, servicing it, etc.--and thereby lost touch with the consumer and the marketplace.

Part of this "empathy gap" is the distancing of management from the customer and the customer experience--where dashboards and status reports have crowded out anecdotal information and real human experience. This is what the "customers are talking" initiative is attempting to do--to connect managers and leaders with the ground-level experience of their customers and by so doing to equip them to make better decisions about their products and services.

Here's an interesting observation from Patnaik about one of the big problems with marketing:

The companies are trying to get the customers to identify with their product rather than getting their own employees to identify with their customers.

In other words, companies are trying to make up for their lack of customer insight with messaging. These marketers believe that if they create a powerful, resonant message, it will draw people to their products. But if the product is not created with a deep sense of the customer in mind, the message won't work.

I'll have to pick up a copy of "Wired to Care" and see what else the book has to say about this important subject.

Related posts:
A Competitive Advantage: Employees who spend most of their time talking to customers
Time to start listening to front-line employees

Customers are talking: using reverse logistics to improve products

As part of our regular Tuesday series on finding and acting on customer use stories, let's talk about reverse logistics. This is the process by which retailers and manufacturers deal with customer returns.

This article (hat tip Colin Shaw) discusses how companies can examine and make changes to their reverse logistics procedures to reduce costs and streamline the process. This is good advice as far as it goes.

But like many "customers are talking" topics, companies need to take an additional step in order to really utilize the reverse logistics process to its utmost.

Each customer return is a story. Capturing and collecting those stories, and regularly examining them for patterns, can yield important information about how the product is designed, communicated and supported. For example, consumer electronics are notorious for their returns frequency, and the reason for these returns often is that the product is difficult to use or its documentation is poorly written or inadequate (multi-language manuals introduce another set of obstacles for customers).

A company can work with its retailers, as part of the overall design of the reverse logistics process, to capture important information about why the product was returned. Ideally, the verbatim customer story is captured--which is easy to do with online returns.

The collection, of course, is the simple part of the equation. The more complex task is the sensemaking of the numerous narratives captured. This sensemaking, more of a collaborative thinking process than an analytical one, can be accomplished with training and skilled mentoring.

The potential payoff is large: marketing managers who are made of aware of why returns happen can make (often simple) changes to packaging, design, channel strategy or documentation to improve initial customer satisfaction. Not only does this reduce returns, it also increases the likelihood that more people buy the product in the first place.

A friend owns a company that manages reverse logistics for name-brand consumer electronics manufacturers. I asked him if he knew why a certain product was often returned and he said, "Yes, always." I asked him if he had a way of letting the marketing folks at his client know these reasons. And he shook his head.

Given that many companies are outsourcing their reverse logistics operations to third parties, they need to take care that they keep the channel of communication open to learn why items are returned, and what can be changed about the product, its support documentation or its point of sale in order to make more initial purchases successful ones.

Customers Are Talking: Reading Between The Lines

One of the important insights in looking for meaningful stories in customer interactions is the following: you can't read a story by looking at metrics. That is to say, how long someone talked, what time of day it occurred, etc., has no relationship to the content itself. In my work, I listen to lots and lots of customer stories, and I have experienced this very thing. If you want to understand the story, you have to read, or listen to, the whole thing.

It's unfortunate that this is so, because the quickest way to absorb information is to read it in summary. It's also the easiest way for computers to process information. Computers are excellent at counting, measuring, etc., but terrible at reading and interpreting.

I hear you already: what about semantic analysis? Good: doable by computers. Bad: doesn't provide much insight. Here's an example: evaluate all customer service calls longer than 8 minutes and containing the word "unhappy." Let the computer pull out two sentences before and after that word. Won't that sort out all the unhappy customer calls and allow us to analyze a manageable data set? [If you think this is difficult to do, I can point you to a slew of vendors who are dying to talk to you about their products.]

The problem is, "unhappy" is context-dependent. The caller may be unhappy with the quality of her service. She may also be unhappy she forgot to pack her son's lunch that morning, Someone else may be unhappy for a completely unrelated event.

[As an experiment, I've been monitoring Tweets referring to the Blackberry Storm using the happy :) or unhappy :( emoticons--easy to do with Twitter Search. With more than 100 tweets examined, very few of the emoticons represented satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the device itself--they were related to wanting the device and not getting it, or hoping to get it, for example.]

In a recent discussion, a friend talked about word clouds as very useful summaries of social media data. I pointed out to him that the appearance of a word in a story doesn't create significance. Similarly, the absence of a word doesn't mean that word is insignificant. (What's unsaid may, in fact, be the most important words in the entire dialogue. Harold Pinter won a Nobel Prize for his mastery of this truism.)

In sum, at present, the intervention of a person close to the customer interaction at the time it occurs is the best way to determine if a communication is significant or not. If it's someone looking at it after the fact, that person will have to read the entire story, not a summary. I wish there were a shortcut, but there's not.

Are keyword searches or word clouds useless? No. If you are a cable company, searching for specific, unambiguous words like "DVR" in your customer communication is likely to be useful. Searching for context-dependent items like "unhappy" or "delighted" is not.

Customers are talking: you can't listen to customers if you hate them

Every Tuesday, this space will cover "Customers Are Talking... Are You Listening?"

"Customers Are Talking" builds on the work I've been doing for the last fifteen years in product management, sales & account management, & specifically on the story-listening work I've embarked upon in the past year. (I cheated a little by sneaking in two posts on this subject yesterday.)

It was great to read a recent interview with one of the quietest great thinkers I know, Cynthia Kurtz.

While discussing some things she had learned in her work helping companies and governments gather and work with stories from customers and employees, she said this:

Several times now [in these projects] I have seen people viewing their clients or customer or employees or constituents with contempt, for example equating weakness, confusion or ignorance with insignificance, low status/value/worth or even wrongdoing.

As I read this I was surprised and shocked, yet at the same time I nodded my head and said to myself, "Oh, yeah, I've seen this lots of times." No company would admit that it hates its customers, but if the leadership looks deep into their hearts they may recognize the behavior that Cynthia mentions.

And for marketers this is a big concern. Because marketers, more and more these days, need to listen to and act on customer feedback. People don't listen to those they hate. They disregard, dismiss or rationalize their statements. Even when marketing believes in its customers, if the organization's culture is a customer-hating one, the messages won't get acted on. [It may go without saying that customer-hating companies will be punished first in a difficult economic environment.]

So, if you're instituting a voice of the customer program, or if you've already got one, answer these questions first: do I think my customers have something valuable to say? Will I listen to it and try to act on it?

Because if you're one of those companies that holds their customers in contempt, asking them what they think won't do you any good.

[By way of equal time, I should probably refer to this earlier post where I talked about companies who are hated by their customers.]

Stop reacting, and start listening, to customer online feedback

I generally like this post from Matt Rhodes, my fellow Futurelabber ("How to react if somebody writes about your brand online"), but I have a bone to pick with the premise.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers are making in social media now is focusing on reacting. They are taking lessons learned from political campaigns and applying them to their relationships to the public. It's a misfit. Political campaigns are adversarial. If your relationship with the public is that way, you have bigger problems than what people say about you on Twitter.

Reacting as strategy is a last, desperate attempt to deploy the marketer's favorite tool, "messaging," into a connected marketplace. As Doc Searls wrote, "There is no market for your messages."

Rather than a futile tit-for-tat, your post to my counterpost competition to establish the preeminence of a company's message in the networked marketplace, how about listening to what customers are saying, and taking it to heart? Thinking about it, perhaps? And, if warranted, a respectful, measured contribution to the dialogue? It can be done. Ask Comcast, and Dell, for starters.

Book marketers figure out "sense and respond" strategy

I talked in a recent post about marketers' inability to control their audiences (there are more and more examples every week about this difficulty). It's rare to see evidence that marketers are hearing that message--but some arrived today in a page one Wall Street Journal article.

As reported by Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Penguin Books has nurtured a breakout bestseller in Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" by reading the weak signals coming from the market, responding to them, and persisting. The book sold a respectable number of copies in hardcover (likely less than 100,000), but is now on the way to selling millions as a $15 trade paperback.

Here's what Penguin's marketers noticed:

1. As it is published in hardcover, the book is chosen to be excerpted in O Magazine.
2. February 2006: a very positive front-page review in the New York Times Book Review.
3. March/April 2006: the book spends four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list (never rising above #12)--one week comes after the author's appearance on the Today Show.
4. The author receives hundreds of emails from readers stating how the book affected them.
   
5. Booksellers such as Barnes & Noble reorder the hardcover steadily through year-end.

Penguin felt that the book could be a paperback bestseller, and so ordered a large print run of 175,000 copies. They sent the author on a second book tour (seeing that her personality was an asset to marketing the book), and placed ads in outlets like Yoga Journal because of the spiritual themes of the book.

The book entered the paperback nonfiction bestseller list on February 11, 2007, and is still there today.

The "Eat, Pray, Love" story is not easy to replicate. It takes energy, confidence and persistence. It won't always work. But it shows two things: the customer is king (queen?). And marketers' best strategy, for more and more products, is to expose and nurture, not to push.

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What are marketers to do, if customers won't accept our messages?

Karl Long at Experience Curve (and fellow Futurelabber) has produced a short but potent post on the shift from "traditional marketing and new conversational, people-driven marketing." (The impetus was the following observation from Hugh McLeod in his blog Gaping Void: "Ironies of Ironies: Companies are forever being told 'You no longer control the conversation', yet from what my buddies in the PR industry tell me, their industry is utterly thriving.)

Karl homes in on the concept of social equity. Through forums like blogs, companies and individuals can accrue value in the eyes of their customer base, post by post, link by link. (And there's no doubt that the rise of blogs has been a great asset to the PR industry. Blogs, even crappy, quasi-advertising-laden ones, are a lot of work and require communications talent.)

My two cents: since we marketers can "no longer control the conversation," we are instead listening to customers, tastemakers, retailers, early adopters, then reading the weak signals, removing the noise, amplifying, and sending the customers' message back out into the world--through blogs and other media. That takes far more creativity (and effort) than creating a catchy name, unique selling proposition, and tagline for a product, then slamming it home via advertising.

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