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I recently took my 6-year-old son to the Ringling Brothers Circus and was really impressed with the focus on the customer. Buying tickets from Ticketmaster was comparatively easy (though the nanoseconds you have to actually make the purchase could be extended), and printing out your tickets ala airline e-tickets was great, but the really impressive stuff happened upon arrival. While we were in line to get into the arena, we passed the essential “guy selling programs” (I’m sure there’s an official title for this, I just don’t know what it is). We bought one ($7 as I recall; not cheap, not expensive: good price point) and instead of the usual take-your-money-enjoy-the-show moment he paused, looked directly at my son and me, and said “I hope you enjoy the show” with real earnestness (and, it seemed, sincerity). A long time ago, when my then-girlfriend and I frequented a very small restaurant called the Fallen Angel, the maitre d’ there (Geoffrey: a … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, digital life
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We are full-on into what Joseph Pine and James Gilmore dubbed “The Experience Economy” in their 1999 book of the same name. No news to marketers, right? Well, maybe. Although Amazon comes up with 48 books in the immediate neighborhood of “experiential marketing,” and Google weighs in with 495,000 hits, do you really treat marketing as an experience? Do the shops, suppliers, partners, and vendors that you’re a customer of treat you to an experience (and is it a good one? Merely good? Awesome? Nonpareilled? Un-be-freakin’-lievable?) For many customers, the prelude to any “user experience” with you is going to be an electronic engagement, usually though the web site or an email. And while designers and programmers (good ones, anyway) worry a lot about the “user interface,” do marketers worry nearly as much about “user engagement?” Because before you can have a “user experience” you have to have user engagement, and while user engagement may start with the user interface, … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, digital life, user experience
Look around. What are people doing? If you’re at work reading this, chances are pretty good that you and all those around you are banging away on a keyboard, that you’re interacting more digitally than you are humanly. Admit it: when you’re in a meeting, how often are you more focused on checking your email from your laptop or Blackberry than you are on the meeting? In a presentation, how often is the presenter (and often, the audience) more engaged with the Power Point than the humans? If you’re in Starbucks, chances are that the same kind of thing is going on: people are having coffee with each other, but with a measured amount of Blackberry use. If you’re at home, odds are you and your family members are connected: not to each other (although I hope that happens too), but electronically to the news, the weather, friends, games, or God-knows-what. And everywhere, people are talking or texting on their … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, digital life
I learn a lot talking with customers, but I learn a lot more talking with lost customers. I think losing a customer should hit a company like losing a friend or lover hits a person: you should (usually) just feel darn bad about it. But even losing a customer can be turned into a good experience, and the concept of electronic engagement can help. In fact, if the experience is right, you might not lose the customer after all. In a July, 1990 article in Harvard Business Review entitled “The Profitable Art of Service Recovery,” the authors offer evidence that organizations who respond immediately and decisively after a bad customer experience are actually more likely to retain the customer than if no blip in the experience had occurred in the first place. Now, while I’m not suggesting that we should all go out and develop strategies to create bad customer experiences that we can respond to, I am suggesting that … Continue reading
Posted in: Branding, digital communication, digital life
A few weeks ago, right before school started, my six-year-old son and I went to Herseypark amusement park, in Hershey PA. It’s about a three-hour drive from home, so going there was a commitment, and expectations were high, particularly since going there with his older brother and sister had been a ritual that we absolutely loved for years. I hadn’t been there for seven years, so I was interested to see what changes had been made, and hopeful that they’d kept everything we loved. Our natural first stop, before we’d even left home, was the web site. I’m thinking we’ll check out the rides (and, quietly, the height requirement) and maybe even buy tickets online so that we can just stroll through the gate. Good in theory, bad in practice. Think about this interaction: you google “Hersheypark” and of course up comes the “official” web site. Wouldn’t you want me, right then, to book online? Wouldn’t you want to offer … Continue reading
Posted in: Branding, digital communication, digital life