Giraffe Forum

It is time for marketers and communicators to stop treating customers like little children and start treating them like intelligent adults.

“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology,” the good Google person told me. “This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.”

Why couldn’t they have just written:
“Over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and other older browsers.”

“Thank you for your inquiry,” the fye.com auto-generated email that was impossible to reply to stated. “To assist in providing you the quickest answer to your inquiry, please see the Help Section of fye.com.” Hello? Sorry, fye.com, but that’s not the quickest way by any means. It is, however, the cheapest way for you to deal with support. Why be so dishonest with your language?

I had to call my broadband company today. “Your call is important to us,” the voice said as I waited on hold. Is it indeed? If my call was important to you then you’d answer it. You wouldn’t put me on hold and you wouldn’t insult my intelligence by saying “Your call is important to us.”

Do organizations actually test their lies, deception, spin, and half-truths on customers? Does it really work? Or does it instead annoy and irritate customers?

I was staying at the Royal Lancaster in London and I wanted to sign up for broadband. I clicked on the link. “Welcome to the The Royal Lancaster,” Thank you for choosing us to serve as your “home away from home”” And it went on and on and on. “Whether for work or pleasure, we are pleased to introduce our industry leading in-room high-speed Internet services amenity … It’s Easy to Use … We hope you find this service exciting and valuable.” When I clicked “Continue” I was then told the price. £17 for one day. Yes, £17.

“We are delighted to inform you that the Guest Elevators are currently undergoing a complete refurbishment,” the sign outside the Hilton Edinburgh elevator told me. And me, I was absolutely delighted too, thrilled, and jumping for joy as I carried my heavy bags up the stairs.

I remember reading about a study of house selling in the book Freakonomics. Seemingly, in for-sale ads the following words were associated with houses of genuine quality: “granite, state-of-the-art, corian, maple, gourmet.” Poor quality houses, on the other hand, had these words associated with them: “fantastic, spacious, !, charming, great neighborhood.”

I saw an example of this one day when I visited a house for sale that was advertised as: “Fantastic and rare opportunity to acquire this beautiful 7 bedroom detached home. This property has got it all!” As the sales agent quietly said to me, “The only thing you could do with this house is knock it down and start again.”

Here’s a radical idea: Tell the customer the truth. They can handle it.

Modern organizations have armies of people trained in producing and publishing information, but there is a huge and growing lack of people who are skilled at organizing, analyzing and prioritizing it.

The Christmas 2009 airline-bombing attempt in the USA showed what can happen when there is too much information and too little skilled analysis. “It’s clear now that there were multiple signs in recent months that Abdulmutallab was a potential risk,” Bruce Crumley wrote for TIME in January 2010, “but they were simply lost in the unmanageable flood of information the U.S. intelligence and security agencies are designed to produce.”

As President Obama stated, “This was not a failure to collect intelligence, [but] a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” U.S. authorities are forced to sort through a massive flood of intelligence on a daily basis. “Connecting the dots becomes more difficult when multiple streams of intelligence empty into several different lakes,” the TIME article pointed out.

As one spy official put it, “Basic details can now get overlooked as surveillance becomes more technical and computerized and people wait for a warning beep to sound.” Basic details such as the fact that the would-be bomber paid cash for a one-way ticket, and that he didn’t check in any bags.

Ours is the era of the information Big Bang. I think it’s an absolutely wonderful time to be alive. Information has been whipped away from the grasp of the elites and delivered into the hands of the masses. Information is power and power has been distributed.

However, as with any explosive event there are challenges that need to be faced. I thought I’d be used to it by now but I am still often stunned at how badly most organizations manage their websites.

Take, for example, the web ‘management’ approach called distributed publishing. The theory was: buy the tool, train people to use it and watch them go. What happened? Each division or department that the publishing tool was distributed to sought to publish to the website with the absolute minimum resource input. If ever there was a disastrous non-strategy it is distributed publishing. It led to website junkyards full of vanity publishing and out of date garbage.

The Web is important. The Web is very important. For an increasing number of organizations, the Web is critical to success. We need to seriously raise the standard. Anybody can put up a document. It requires precious little skill to write boring, vain, unreadable, organization-centric content.

It takes a whole other level of skills:
1. To reject such organization-centric content.
2. To commission content that will help customers complete top tasks.
3. To organize top-task content in a way that will make it easy to be found and to make sure that tiny task content does not disrupt searches for top task content.
4. To review and remove out of date content.
5. To connect the right dots (to link well).

There is no greater skill a web professional needs to develop than the ability to create quality links. Many websites do not need more publishing. Rather, they need more linking of content in appropriate task journeys. Linking is a complex skill because it requires you to see the task through your customer’s eyes.

Too much intelligence to blame
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1952203,00.html

You build a brand on the Web one click at a time. You destroy your brand by wasting your customers’ time.

I am a customer of a number of banks. I judge these banks, at least partly, by the experience I have with them online. I used to really like the National Irish Bank experience. Then they ‘improved’ it, making it more secure. And this of course is the problem at the heart of security. You can make a process so secure that even the people for whom it is designed can’t use it without huge effort.

Now, when I go to the National Irish Bank homepage I often get a ‘page not found’ error. Usually when I refresh the page that little Java icon appears. I enjoy spending time watching it swirl round and round. It reminds me of coffee. Then I get an ‘error on page’ message. I refresh again and I actually get to the homepage.

It used to be that it remembered my User ID. Not anymore. Now I have to go get it and paste it in, because it’s long and I can’t remember it. Then it requires my password, which I can remember. Next I get to a page where I have to enter a special security number from a card they’ve sent me. It’s annoying and such a waste of time. It now takes me at least three times longer to get into my account. Once in, however, it’s a really excellent experience, well designed and intuitive.

Bank of Ireland, on the other hand, is easy to get into. However, the subsequent steps are really clunky. The National Irish Bank interface has a feeling that it was designed for human beings. The Bank of Ireland interface feels like it was designed for robots. Whereas the National Irish Bank immediately shows me balance information for my main accounts (a top task), here’s what I have to do on Bank of Ireland to get such information: click on a link called ‘Accounts’; click on a link called ‘Select All Accounts’; select an account from a list; click on a different link called ‘Accounts’ (Yes, there are two links called ‘Accounts’); select ‘Transactions’. It’s a real pain, a big waste of time.

Halifax Ireland is positively primitive. You can’t even transfer money. This is a top task for sure and if in 2010 a bank won’t even allow you to transfer money online, then it loses a huge amount of credibility and trust.

This isn’t usability. This isn’t interface design. This is branding. This is marketing. This is advertising. This is management. And you know what? I’ll bet senior management in all these banks could not care less about my online experience. In fact, I have rarely, if ever, met a senior manager with more than a passing interest in the Web. They think this stuff is technical - something you give to the IT department.

Where customers spend their time is where you build your brand. Organizations need to stop trying to use traditional advertising techniques to create false images. For an increasing number of customers, you are your website. It’s about time senior management woke up to that fact.

Traditional marketers and communicators are obsessed with achieving their objectives. Web marketers and communicators are obsessed with helping customers achieve their objectives.

“Brand advertising, the kind you’re used to seeing on TV and in print, isn’t nearly as big on the Internet as the search ads dominated by Google,” writes Peter Kafka for the Wall Street Journal in January 2010. “But that’s got to change, as marketers realize that traditional advertising works on the Web, too.”

“The above is an article of faith among a certain kind of Web publisher,” Kafka continues. “And some of them are even paying for studies to prove that display ads–basically all the ads you see that aren’t part of search results–really do work on the Web. Except when they don’t.”

Kafka goes on to cite a study carried out for Yahoo that found that brand ads have some impact on those over 40. For those under 40 the impact of these ads is nearly zero; no impact.

What has happened to branding? How has such an important word been hijacked by such a narrow interest group? Whenever I hear branding being talked about these days I know I’m about to enter fairyland. Otherwise sensible people start talking gibberish and lose all track of reality.

Branding has become all about organizational narcissism, vanity, ego and self-delusion. It’s all about what the organization wants (needy child that it is), where the organization wants to go, what excites the organization (or certain senior managers in it), what the organization wants you to do. Branding doesn’t care about you, the customer. It sees you as a target, an entity it must convince to do what it wants.

A number of years ago, I remember buying books from Amazon. After I added a book to the basket I was brought to a page that had a huge ad for jewelry. I was taken aback. What does this have to do with buying a book, I thought? Amazon was ‘excited’ to tell me that they had just launched a new jewelry store. I wasn’t excited. After a while I noticed that these disruptive branding ads that were unrelated to the task I was seeking to complete had disappeared.

What I learned much later was that these branding ads had not just annoyed Amazon’s customers; they had negatively impacted sales and overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. Amazon had listened and removed the disruption.

When it comes to marketing and communication we need to measure both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, both positive and negative action. Sure, if you put a big ad for jewelry in front of 100 people you’ll get 2 to click on it. And if you make it really annoying and intrusive, you might even get 5 to click. But what about the 95 that didn’t click? To get those 5 clicks how annoyed did you make the 95?

Amazon has a great brand and tremendous customer satisfaction because it cares about the 95. It listens, measures, responds. I’m loyal to Amazon because I feel it’s an organization that pays attention to my needs.

Traditional marketing is about getting attention. Web marketing is about paying attention.

Are Web Ads Only for Oldsters? Yahoo’s Disturbing Study
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100112/are-web-ads-only-for-oldsters-yahoos-disturbing-study/

A great many people have a poor view of what happened during the 2000s, with the exception of the growth of the Web.

According to a survey published in December 2009, Americans have a pretty dismal view of the 2000s. It has been voted the worst decade in living memory. “By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years,” the study states. “This stands in stark contrast to the public’s recollection of other decades in the past half-century. When asked to look back on the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, positive feelings outweigh negative in all cases.”

However, there is a bright spot in an otherwise dim decade. “The major technological and communications advances are viewed in an overwhelmingly positive light,” the study states. “Clear majorities see cell phones, the internet and e-mail as changes for the better, and most also view specific changes such as handheld internet devices and online shopping as beneficial trends.”

So, do we love technology? Do we love HTML and Flash and JavaScript? Do we love reading off computer screens, and long for the tactile touch of the well-designed keyboard? Are we yearning for robots?

Hardly. What the Web reflects is empowerment and connectedness. The Web has probably led to an increase in negative attitudes to other things because it allows us to go behind the spin, advertising and propaganda. Thanks to the Web we’re not so easy to fool, manipulate or mislead.

The Web allows us to check out for ourselves, to communicate more easily with our peers and find out what they think. The Web makes us more powerful. It allows our voices to be heard more. That’s why we love the Web.

That’s the shift, the change we can believe in. It is the movement of power from organizations to individuals and the groups these individuals may form. Because another thing the Web does is make it much easier for individuals to form effective groups. Like the group of people who stayed at Hotel XYZ and what they think of the service they got. That’s why we love the Web.

We love the Web because we can compare prices for insurance, vacations, cars. We can compare universities and political candidates. Most organizations hate being compared and ranked. Many organizations don’t even want to give you the price on their website. They’re going to have to.

Amazon has the highest level of customer satisfaction of the 40 largest US ecommerce sites, according to an American Customer Satisfaction Index survey.

Customer satisfaction matters. Customers who are highly satisfied are 65 percent more likely to buy online, according to the survey. They will also tell their friends about the good experience. And what drives satisfaction? A good price, a wide selection, and a website that’s easy to use. In December 2009, online spending was 15.5 percent higher than in December 2008.

This is the age of the empowered, cynical, skeptical, hype-resistant customer. It’s a great time to be a customer and it’s a great time to be a customer-centric organization

Pew survey
http://people-press.org/report/573/#

Amazon Tops in Customer Satisfaction
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3855836