http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress Customer-centric, not organization-centric Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:41:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/08/29/the-new-marketer-and-communicator/ 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 ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/08/22/the-problems-with-faqs/ 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 ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/08/15/web-management%e2%80%99s-biggest-issue-confusing-menus-and-links/ 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 ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/07/18/website-need-constant-feedback/ 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 ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/07/11/innovation-in-customer-experience/ Never make management decisions for a website based on opinions. There is often a Jekyll and Hyde difference between what people say and what they do. SIMS is a hugely popular simulation game. They wanted to improve sign up for optional registration for those who had purchased the game. At ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/07/04/it%e2%80%99s-not-what-people-say-it%e2%80%99s-what-they-do/ Separating the top tasks from the tiny tasks is one of a web manager’s most important responsibilities. A major publisher has for the last 30 years published technical books that can be up to 200 pages long. When they started moving their books to the Web, they found that the same ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/06/27/web-manager-top-tasks-versus-tiny-tasks/ Today, customers expect organizations to listen, observe and respond. Don’t say you care. Show you care. I was recently testing some website tasks with a customer. At the end of the tests I asked him if he had any observations. He said he was impressed by the way this organization was ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/06/20/web-testing-is-the-new-pr/ Goggle has achieved its position by delivering great quality search results really quickly through a very simple interface. I was at dinner with some friends when one of them said: “Did you see the Google homepage today? They’ve put a background image on it!” Everyone looked on in disbelief. “Look, I’ll ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/06/13/is-google-losing-the-plot/ The organization is a tribe and the customer is a stranger. That’s why it’s so hard to be customer-centric. Some years ago, HSBC Hong Kong had what they thought was a reasonably straightforward mortgage inquiry form. It had 17 fields requesting: • Property information (address, price) • Applicant information (name, occupation) • Loan information (amount, repayment period, ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/06/06/the-customer-is-a-stranger/