The "Customer Engagement Center"

A long (I mean really long) time ago, United Airlines ran a spot that showed verite` images of a "manager" passing out plane tickets to his group.  CU's of ticket wallets being stuffed into their hands flashed onscreen as he shouted out names. 

 

I'll paraphrase the copy: We lost our biggest client today.  Too many phone calls, too many faxes (I told you it was a really long time ago).  [then something about] No personal contact.

 

I don't remember if it moved the needle in UAL revenue seats but it was pretty doggoned good.  Made you think.  Is personal contact all that important?  Short answer:  You bet it is.

 

This blog isn't a promo for anyone or anything but if you haven't read Never Eat Alone, Who's Got Your Back? (K. Ferrazzi) or Cluetrain Manifesto (R. Levine et. al), and you're responsible for relationships with other businesses, you should shame yourself.

 

Yes, those books are a little long in the tooth but, c'mon, human nature hasn't really changed.  In fact that UAL spot is still relevant.

 

Well, apparently large number of companies haven't read these or any others that might be applicable - even In Search of Wow (T. Peters).  What's the giveaway?  The creation of the "customer engagement center".

 

What a wonderful thing.  Create a part of your service which engages customers and prospects on line.  I immediately imagine tossing a rubber mouse on the floor for the cat to play with. 

 

"...create part of your service which engages customers online..."  You have to say it out loud to realize the ludicrousness (ludicrosity? ludicroourusality?) of such a statement. 

 

Where to start.  Well, first, your whole doggoned site is supposed to be engaging.  If it's not, get a new designer and webmaster.

 

Second:  Are you really asking a site to do your job for you?  People are engaging.  People are great at creating experiences that are memorable - that bring you to and back to a site.  But to just create an area - we used to call them arenas - that's supposed to engage people?  Pure Barnum & Bailey.

 

If you want to engage people on your site, try this:

 

1.  What's your product?  Really.  What is it.  Is there engagement in that product?  The founder of a company I spent a long time with used the words "inherent drama."  What's the inherent drama in your product?  Can you demonstrate that on line?  Anyone remember a spot for Era detergent where the hand model wrote "Era" on a stain with the product and, after washing, you could read where it had removed the stain?  Where's the drama

 

2.  What's related to the product?  Weather?  Can you tie your product to weather and then info about weather on the site?  Can you engage people to interact with that information?  Maybe it's food.  Dietary interaction?  It might get you somewhere

 

3.  What's another degree of separation away?  Can you relate your product to something that relates to something?  Maybe it's travel that relates to history that could relate to, say, cheese, or bicycles, or golf, or... 

 

But the problem continues to be that you're thinking about automating your engagement.  You might as well go back to the old DOS text games for after customers or prospects get through it once, you're done.  The solution is to engage people to interact with you - a human - rather than canned responses from a website.  THAT's engagement.  Yes, that costs money.  But not as much as you think.  If you're spending money on a 3rd party "chat," run the numbers on eliminating that (if you've checked it out, you know it's a disaster, anyway) and you'll find that adding a person is within the realm of possibility.

 

If you want to automate engagement you can design help and prompts for a human so that as they interact with people, responses are at hand.  I don't mean "give 'em the roach letter*" type responses but, well, it might be numbers or facts or references.

 

It's about real people communicating with real people.  And I'm NOT talking about "chat" lines operated by third party suppliers.  Talk about negative experiences.

 

"But one person won't do it!" is the cry.  You should be so lucky.  Do the arithmetic on how many engagements one person can handle.  More than you'd think.  And if one person handles 100 a day, it'll work out to about a buck a contact...quite often a lead-generating contact.  Where you gonna find that kind of efficiency?  I'm talking about delivering real engagement, memorable engagement.  Make that business-repeating engagement.

 

*Doesn't anyone remember the old story?  It's covered here: 

http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bedbug.asp

That Clog Called Management

There was a show in prime time around 1970 called Arnie.  Herschel Bernardi (probably more famous as the voice of Charlie the Tuna than for his dramatic work) starred as a loading dock worker who had suddenly been promoted to “corporate.”  A real worker becomes management.

 

It was an interesting albeit short-lived concept that might be worth review today.

 

Geez, Len, where are you going with this?

 

Herschel Bernardi
Courtesy
starscolor.com

Keeping Arnie Nuvo in mind, step back and look at today’s management.  Clogged with lawyers, DBA;s and MBA’s – all trained to manage but few with knowledge of the business they’re in.  Now, with due respect to the JD and other degrees, let me say that the whole method of organization is wrong.

 

In the media world, the last thing we need is a manager who doesn’t know the specific business.  Or one who wants to put everything into discreet “silos” which are convenient for PowerPoints but, frankly, don’t work in the real world.

 

If you read any of the corporate “self-help” books, you find that the involvement of line folks in management is the exception rather than the rule.  Yet when you look at successful companies, you find that the ones that do have open relationships among everyone are the ones making it.  Go figure. 

 

When you’re making flanges as was Herschel Bernardi, you have a pretty controlled input-to-operation-to-output.  That’s just not the case in the media world.  It’s too broad, it changes too quickly, and it rests on that fickle thing called an audience.

 

So bringing in management folks who haven’t had contact with your particular business is usually a big mistake.  I’ve seen it too many times.  Decisions made by the Harvard- or Kellogg-book but which don’t work in the real world.  Best example:  broadcast station expansion.  That was fun watching the MBA’s and DBA’s running the numbers.  “Hey, it’s simple.  We take over 3 stations in a market.  We central-cast, cut a truckload of people, raise the ad rates, and make wheelbarrows (I already used 'truckload') of money."

 

Now in case you don’t see the flaws, raising ad rates isn’t that easy.  If you don’t have the numbers, you don’t get the orders.  In an agency world where you can’t even get to a buyer – and where most of them are paid to say no – you can’t just raise rates.  In fact, major advertisers are gutsy enough to say, “Here’s what I want, here’s what I’m going to pay.  Take it or leave it.”  Ouch.  That’s a little different from the world of flanges.  And cutting people?  Cool idea.  Then, looking at the payroll, they toss out folks who know the history…the ones who’ve already made the mistakes.  Ah, but a younger person – if they think they need a person at all – will come at half the price.  That is until you factor in a repeat of the mistakes the old lady you let go learned from.

 

And central-casting.  Think about it.  With more and still more modes of information or entertainment delivery, is producing your [for example] Louisville news out of Dallas a good idea?  If local is the real USP for a station, do you want the lead of a story left on the cutting room floor because that guy in Dallas doesn’t know the background?  So, sure, go ahead and put the folks who may be able to contribute most to the company’s success in an isolated location where the only interaction is the nightly critique coming out of programming, or the consultant telling the female anchor not to smile so much.

 

A lot of the problems come out of the chasm between “management” and “labor.”  Both have a lot to learn from the other.  If you’ve run across Cluetrain Manifesto, you’ll recall that Levine et. al. talk about the flattening of the corporate pyramid.  People at the bottom (I hate that term) know a lot of what people at the top (that one too) are doing.  Observation, filtration, email, and intranet let them find out.  But, sadly, management seems to think that they can orchestrate a one-way communication path.  And what’s worse?  They don’t think they necessarily have to tell the truth!

 

So they say that all’s well, that they’re not changing the news format, not letting anyone go, etc. then, out of nowhere, an anchor gets replaced.  Whatever morale or corporate equity they built up just vaporized.  And, if you trace it back, you find that those lettered management folks didn’t see the difference between a people business and a widget business.  A silo was a silo. 

 

So, the solution?  Bring some “little folks” (oh wow, that’s so much better than “people at the bottom”) along.  No, not a monthly lunch.  Put them on specific developmental or analytical projects.  They’ll ask questions you didn’t know needed to be asked.

 

I’ll give you an example:  A few years ago, we were having a discussion about offering vanity email addresses.  You can imagine it – you sign up and you get yourname@somegreatsuffix.com, where somegreatsuffix = a really neat address.  Maybe co-opting a celebrity’s name, or a professional sport.  A couple of folks had run the numbers and they turned out to be really big.  A 20-year-old ops guy asked a simple question, “How you gonna convince people to give up the email address they have?  I mean, when all their friends…”  After a little research the numbers fell like a rock.  Today, that’s a little different but, at the time, we were able to keep from stepping in it.

 

More importantly, work to collapse the pyramid.  Open the company up.  If the average coder doesn’t feel comfortable dropping a suggestion to you, if you don’t feel you can stop by a designer’s office and ask how they’d do something, you haven’t accomplished it.

 

You don’t have to put Arnie in the corporate suites, but you can have lots of Arnies out there, all with suggestions that may just save your backside.