Giraffe Forum

The Web is radically changing how we as marketers and communicators need to do our job. We need to change our mindset from organization-centric to customer-centric.

Over the years I have had the pleasure of dealing with some really great companies. My web hosting company is Verio and I am very loyal to them. They deliver good value and excellent service. Even in a crisis they performed well. I remember during Hurricane Katrina some of their servers went down, affecting my website. But they handled the whole situation with honesty and professionalism.

I have always been impressed with my newsletter provider, Newsweaver. Now, I publish a very basic text-only newsletter, and their system has many more options, but whenever I have had an issue their staff have been wonderful.

I’m demanding as a customer but also quite loyal once I feel the company I’m dealing with is treating me with respect. My training and profession is as a marketer and communicator and I believe these two disciplines are essential on the Web. However, I have to say that there is a dark and manipulative side to marketing and communications that has often held sway for the last 30-40 years.

This dark side is based on a deep understanding of human psychology. It knows that we are highly irrational and emotional and that if you press the right psychological buttons you can get people to pay more for lesser quality.

Amazon is one of my very favorite companies. I have bought all sorts of things from them over the years. I have never had a bad experience with Amazon and I have had some exceptional experiences that I will never forget. I remember once I got a CD case without a CD. I sent an email and got a very quick reply apologizing and saying a new CD was on the way. But what was amazing was what they said next: save the postage, don’t bother sending the CD case back. That’s trust. That is true branding.

“Before, if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product,” Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, recently told Charlie Rose. “So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.”

As a marketer and communicator, are you in danger of becoming the needy child in the room? The game has changed. Are you still shouting with big graphical billboard ads and soft, soapy, meaningless language?

The customer isn’t king anymore. They’re dictator. Highly impatient, skeptical and deeply cynical of traditional marketers and communicators. But in an information-saturated, time-starved world, they are more than willing to be loyal if treated with genuine respect.

Charlie Rose interview with Jeff Bezos
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11138

Links are signposts. They are promises to the customer. They must tell customers where they are going and what they will get when they get there.

The essential problem with the Frequently Asked Question is that it is not useful or helpful. In Ireland it is mandatory to pay an annual license for your TV. I’ve just moved house so I need to find out how this affects my license. I go to the TV licensing website and am presented two choices: General FAQs and Online Service FAQs.

At least I know what FAQ means. However, I have found that many ordinary people have no idea. It’s a real IT term and is completely foreign to millions of people.

But there is a much deeper issue here, one that I only realized a couple of months ago. We were testing a task with a bunch of IT professionals and the website was failing miserably. A major point of failure on the website occurred when these professionals arrived at a page and needed to click on a “FAQ” link to progress. Practically nobody did.

When we dug deeper we found that the IT professionals being tested just didn’t see the FAQ link as being the right one to click on. It was the first time they had tried to solve this particular task. They didn’t know whether it was a frequently, moderately frequently or infrequently asked question. The link “FAQ” is simply not a good signpost.

When I scanned the links General FAQs and Online Service FAQs I had no clue what to click on. And what’s more I absolutely hate FAQs to begin with, and I know lots and lots of customers hate them as well. They generally consist of a long list of randomly ordered questions all beginning with useless intros like “How do I.” What I needed were links like “Moving House”.

The reason why FAQs are so unsuccessful is because they reflect organization-centric language and thinking. The organization knows if a question is frequently asked or not, but how can a customer know?

It’s the same with links like “Tools” or “Resources”. These are internal ways of classifying things. They do not reflect the way the customer thinks. You don’t go to a hotel website and click on Tools in order to find the Book a Room tool. You don’t go to an airline website and click on Tools in order to book a flight. You don’t go to Amazon and click on Tools when you want to buy a book.

What do you do? If you want to buy a book you click on Books. If you want to buy a laptop you click on Computers & Office and then Laptops & Netbooks. There are tools that support the buying process but they should not be reflected in the architecture. A customer is not looking for a tool. A customer is looking for Desire by Bob Dylan. They want to fly from Dublin to London. They don’t think: ‘I need to find a tool to help me do this.’

We should never classify based on the content type (FAQs) or the tool. We should instead classify based on the task the customer wishes to complete.

No other single factor causes greater customer frustration and dissatisfaction than confusing menus and links.

The root cause of most confusing menus and links is organizational language and thinking. Take, for example, the FAQ. Over the years, I’ve found that most customers don’t even know what an FAQ is. That certainly surprised me because I thought everyone knew that FAQ meant Frequently Asked Questions. I thought everyone knew that, just like everyone knows that the logo is a link to the homepage.

However, the FAQ has a deeper problem. From a customers’ perspective it is essentially a useless link. It is a classic example of organization-centric language. I was trying to renew my TV license recently and was offered two choices: General FAQs and Online Service FAQs. Which should I choose? On another website I was given two different choices: Frequently Asked Questions; Most Frequently Asked Questions

You’re a visitor to Ireland and you’ve hired a car to drive around the country. You want to go to Mallow in Cork and on the way you see a signpost stating: “Frequently Visited Towns.” That’s really helpful, isn’t it? Do you follow the sign or not? It will be the first time you’ve been to Mallow, but maybe Mallow is a frequently visited town. How do you know? Of course, you don’t know. How could you? The Irish road authorities know. They’ve got the data, so to them it makes some sense. But to you, the traveler trying to get to Mallow, it’s a useless sign.

How about the link “Useful Links?” Is that a very useful link? What are all the other links? Useless Links? And what about “Quick Links?” Are the other links Slow Links? And what about “Tools”? Is that helpful? When you go to an airline website are you looking for a tool or are you looking to book a flight?

It’s incredibly hard to create clear menus and links that are truly customer centric because there is an intense pressure to be organization-centric. We were trying to simplify the links in one website recently and an IT person became quite agitated. “We have to have a Tools section,” he said, “because that’s what we look after and we need that section so that we can have proper control over it.”

But if we have a Tools section, shouldn’t we also have a section called “Stuff,” or “Content” or “Information” or “Infinity and Beyond”?

The web team’s single greatest challenge is to truly think like and use the language of the customer. However, there is great pressure is to think like and use the language of the organization.

I do a lot of presentations. I have a presentation folder and inside that folder are names like “Microsoft” or “Cisco” or “HP”. This works for me because I’m preparing a Microsoft presentation and calling it “Microsoft” is logical from my point of view. However, how useful do you think it is if I send a copy of my presentation to Microsoft and it’s still named “Microsoft?” What I really need to do is call it something like “Gerry McGovern Presentation”.

Naming things based on your internal working structure is fine in certain cases. But when you want to make these things public you need to rethink how you organize and name them.

Living systems get constant feedback from their external environment. To truly succeed, web teams need constant feedback from their customers.

You’re a manager in a restaurant. It’s raining. A customer walks in and almost slips on the mat in front of the door. You’re very busy at this stage, but you make a mental note: “I must change that mat.” About 15 minutes later another customer comes in. She, too, almost slips on the mat. You rush up to her, apologize profusely and then change the mat.

People are slipping on our websites right now but, because we don’t see them slip, we don’t change the mat. I’m one of the biggest offenders. Over the years I have left content and applications on my websites that had problems that I was vaguely aware of, but they just didn’t seem important enough to warrant any action. Even when I became clearly aware of the issue I didn’t react with enough urgency.

Why was that? Why was I so complacent? I would like to think that if I was running a restaurant I would have apologized to the customer and changed the mat. Why don’t I do that when it comes down to managing a website? I think a core part of the problem is the lack of real feedback.

I’m not actually seeing the customer slip. I don’t actually see real people use my websites.

Customers are hugely impatient on the Web. When they slip, their first impulse is to hit the Back button. Jared Spool wrote an excellent article in 2009 called the “The $300 Million Button.” In it he explained how the removal of a registration button from a particular step in a purchase process resulted in a dramatic improvement in sales.

The Web team had created the registration button so as to make it easier and faster for regular customers to buy. But people absolutely hate registration. New customers felt they would be spammed if they registered. One potential customer summed up their feelings as follows: “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”

The regular customers didn’t feel much happier. “45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10,” Jared wrote. “We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day.”

The Web is so important today. And yet many of the web teams I deal with are way down the management hierarchy. Intranet teams, in particular, tend to get negligible resources. That needs to change because the reality is that the Web is central to the present and future success of most organizations.

One of the ways we make that change happen is that we start developing much better feedback mechanisms for our websites. At a most basic level, we must find ways to regularly (weekly at minimum) observe our customers carry out top tasks on our websites. That’s how Jared Spool discovered there was a problem: by watching customers trying to buy.

According to Wikipedia, “Living things are systems that tend to respond to changes in their environment.” Let us embrace our customer environment. Let us observe and evolve. The rewards are very substantial.

The $300 Million Button
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/?link=tips20101405_article

In a complex world, innovation shifts from creating and adding to simplifying and removing.

I once had a chat with a frustrated content management salesman. He believed in simplicity but had great difficulty selling it. “Customers may need simplicity but they always end up buying complexity. If we don’t have all these extra fancy features, they simply won’t buy.”

“Feature / function innovation has long been the mainstay of technology companies and the primary sort key of competition for many of us,” John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer for Novell, wrote as 2009 drew to a close. “And while many technology companies continue to innovate in this area at astounding rates, customers aren’t demanding the type of innovation they can’t consume, use or integrate into their business.

In 2009 Dragoon had noticed a new trend emerge. This involved “Innovation around the technology business model. Innovation around how technology is developed, sold, supported, integrated and used. Innovation that helps them manage the cost, complexity and risk inherent in their IT environment. Innovation that helps them leverage and extend what they have. Innovation that delivers a more compelling customer experience.”

This is indeed a new type of innovation and it will only grow with the rise of cloud computing and web services. When customers are buying software or other products as a service, they are much less likely to buy complexity. One of the reasons feature ‘arms races’ arose was because customers wanted to ‘future proof’ their purchases They might not need a particular feature right now but were worried that they might need it in 12 months time. Such a reason is not nearly as relevant once you’re buying a service; you can simply add to the service if you need to.

The world has become very cluttered and there is now a lot of value in simplifying things for the customer. I have often seen these simplicity tipping points. For example, blogging exploded when blogging software became so simple even a writer could use it. There are just so many opportunities out there today to make the customer’s life easier; and the rewards are very, very substantial.

Simplicity these days is often a faster and much more adaptive process. As Dom Sagolla, one of the creators of Twitter, states, “The simpler you make your idea, the easier it is… to understand the market and get it out there”.

In a rapidly changing world simple is more flexible, simple is more adaptive. However, larger organizations, in particular, find it very difficult to be adaptive. That’s one of the primary reasons why their websites go through big lumbering redesigns every couple of years. The organization can handle a redesign because that’s a project and they are structured to handle projects.

What the organization actually needs is a process of continuous improvement of top tasks. It needs to regularly review and remove. It is often the process of taking away that truly gets to the essence of simplicity. The new innovation is about taking away and stripping down. It is not about focusing on the lifecycle of the product, but rather focusing on the journey of the customer as they go about their daily tasks.

Innovation does not have to be some flashy new thing. It can also be some pared down old thing.