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Did you ever see the movie Crazy People?  It came out in the early 90’s and starred Dudley Moore and Darryl Hannah.  The premise of the movie was Dudley Moore was an ad executive who reached his breaking point because he had to lie everyday in his work.  He eventually found himself in a mental hospital and began working with other mental patients on ads that only told the truth.  The movie was not the best movie, but it popped in my head recently when I watched a number of Sprint television commercials.  I am sure you have seen them, they have Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse walking down several New York City streets talking about the digital revolution and how “cool” these new cell phones are.  He ends the commercials asking us to join him in the digital revolution.

Now for the last what couple of years Sprint has been hemoraging customers.  If you take five minutes and do a few searches on the web, you would quickly realize that many of the customers left because they believed Sprint had atrocious customer service.  Give it a shot, do a Google search for “Sprint sucks”.  Now I don’t know anything about Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse and I have not been a Sprint customer for many years, but instead of spending millions of dollars on commercials that talk about the “digital revolution” wouldn’t that time and money be spent more wisely talking about how Sprint has heard the complaints and feedback and is taking steps to change?

Am I nuts or would a commercial with Dan Hesse sitting in a diner saying, “We have made mistakes in the past.  We have listened to our past and present customers’ feedback and we realized that without great customer service our cool phones and great plans mean nothing.  That is why Sprint has made the following changes….  Yada yada yada..”

I think a commercial like that would raise more attention and deliver a greater ROI than their present, “You can update your Facebook status from our phones, how cool” commercials.  Though if Dan Hesse Sprint CEO would ask me, I would say cut down your TV media buy considerably and put that money into engaging with your present and potential customers online.  Though now I am just plain talking crazy.

I think one of the biggest challenges that companies both large and small are wrestling with at the moment is how to better engage with their customers. I think for many companies they are beginning to realize that the old stick your head in the sand and hope it goes away technique is just not working out and even more importantly, I think they are realizing that discussions and conversations are going to be taking place online about their company, products and services whether they get involved or not. Now that many are coming to this realization, the question is how do they go about engaging these online conversations while of course still protecting their brand and company?

At one time, I was under the belief that many of these companies don’t get involved out of pure apathy and lack of understanding. There might be companies out there that this is true, but as I have been working with larger and more established companies over the last couple of years, I have begun to realize that there are many other more complicated reasons on why companies are not engaging more with their customers online.

One of the issues that I have recently seen first hand take place is the risks that specifically larger companies take when engaging with people online whether it be in blogs, discussion boards or social networks. Unfortunately, we live in a litigious world which in layman’s terms means that you can be sued by anyone for absolutely nothing. And even though many of these suits are baseless and eventually thrown out of court, it still costs companies a great deal of money defending themselves from these lawsuits. I was having a discussion with a client of mine and he said something that stuck with me in regard to getting involved with these online conversations happening about his company.

He said, “There have been so many times that I have read something that I dearly wanted to respond to, but before I do, I need to weigh how much it will cost my company if someone sues us based on what we say compared to the any type of reward our company would receive from posting a response.”

It’s an interesting issue, one with many different facets to it.

So I have been a bit lacking lately when it comes to my posts as well as me responding to other people’s comments. I apologize for that and am absolutely going to try to do better. I thought I would start off the week with a question where hopefully can stir some great thoughts and debates.

I am doing a speech in front of the Charlotte chapter of the American Marketing Association on October 10th and I thought I would get your input and ideas as I put together what I want to say for my presentation. If you are in the area, please feel free to attend, I would love to see you.

So here’s the question. Is it a good thing for companies to try to engage their customers online? Does the good outweigh the possible repercussions that could come from it? And finally what are some of your ideas on how companies can engage online with their customers?

Technorati Tags: engage with their customers, online conversations

I was meeting with a specific business group within a company that I have worked with in the past. This particular group, I had never worked or met before this meeting. The gentleman in charge came hustling into the meeting room about five minutes late and pretty much from the get go acted like he was being forced to attend this meeting instead of actually wanting to be there. My colleagues and I were going through some analysis that we had done on their company and their customers.

About twenty minutes into the meeting, I brought up and showed some blog posts and discussion boards entries I found online that were discussing this company and the authors of these posts were speaking about their unhappiness and poor experiences they have had with this company. Well I guess that was as much as this guy could take as he immediately interrupted me and said something like,

“I am not going to sit here so you can tell us about a couple of random kooks!”

I tried to go into more detail, but he was not having any of it. I hit some sort of thorn in his side and he had moved to an internal red alert, he had raised his shields and was taking defensive maneuvers. In other words, I had lost him. He was gone and at least for that day, I was not going to get him back.

Ever since this happened, I have been playing and replaying the course of events in my mind. Trying to figure out what I could of done or should of done differently. If you ask anyone who knows me, I tend to always be on the side of honesty and at times bluntly honest which does not always work out no matter how good my intentions were.

We have had numerous discussions here on how can we get our clients to start really listening and hearing us. To get through all the red tape and bureaucracy so we might actually be able to accomplish something. Here is a perfect example where I failed to do that because I did not know who I was meeting with and what tactics were going to work and which would not.

The good news is that I have another shot with this guy next week as we have a follow up meeting. I am trying to figure out a new strategy so if you have any thoughts please share.

Stay tuned for part two next week.

Technorati Tags: poor experiences, bureaucracy

We discuss a great deal here about the customer experience and how important it is in this day and age for companies to truly open up a dialog with their users. I found this absolutely amazing letter online that I had to share. Let me give you a short back story on this.

There is a real person named Scott Williams who lives in Newport, Vermont. What I guess Mr. Williams does as a hobby is he digs things up in his backyard and then sends them to the Smithsonian Institute. He names the random crap with scientific sounding names he finds in his backyard  and insists they are archaeological finds. Let me state upfront, I am not making this up.

So picture that you are the Chief Curator of the Smithsonian Institute and you have some crazy guy sending you trash from his backyard, what would you do? I know I most likely would throw his letters and crap into the garbage and not think of it for another second. Well, the Chief Curator of the Smithsonian is a much better man than I as he actually sent Mr. Williams a letter back regarding one of his “artifacts”. Below is the letter that Mr. Williams received. I know it is a bit long, but I promise you it is so well worth the read.

Smithsonian Institute

207 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20078

Dear Mr. Williams:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post…Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago. Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety that one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be “Malibu Barbie.”

It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:

1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.

2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-homonids.

3. The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.

This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:

A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.

B. Clams don’t have teeth.

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results.

Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name Australopithecus spiff-arino.

Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin. However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a Hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly.

You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your Newport back yard. We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe
Chief Curator- Antiquities

Mr. Rowe, I salute you for taking the time to write this absolutely classic letter. I found via this web site.

Technorati Tags: customer experience, Smithsonian Institute

I signed up for a Yahoo! Mail email address in 1998. I have used that email address as my primary personal email address from signing up till Gmail was released. I still use my Yahoo! Mail address because there are just so many people who have that address for me since I have had it for so long. Unfortunately, I have made the decision that I am going to start notifying people of my Gmail address because Yahoo! Mail has plummeted to levels that I cannot take anymore.

Yahoo! as a company confuses me in so many different ways. They created way back when all these great properties that recently seem to be dying a slow and painful death while they continue to buy new properties which then very soon after purchasing them they begin that very long walk off of a short cliff. I just don’t get it. Has Yahoo! forgotten about user experience? Do they actually think that they know what their users want? Because trying to actually find somewhere to submit feedback and actually get some sort of response is a near impossibility.

Today, I actually went to the Yahoo! Mail Blog. And like a bad dream I discovered that they do not even allow comments on their blog!?!?!?! A blog that the only reason it was created was to communicate with it’s users on their product does not allow their readers to actually comment. It’s like a freaking Greek tragedy…

So before my Yahoo! Mail account becomes my spam email permanently, I would like to list out why I believe Yahoo! Mail has gone from the best web email program to the absolute worst.

1. The front page is slower than my grandmother and she has been dead for ten years. Why do I have to wait for my local weather to load to go read my emails? Did I ask for local weather? Did anyone?

2. Does the SPAM button actually do anything? Come on, be honest, you guys are just deleting the messages and have absolutely no spam control whatsoever. That seems to be the only logical explanation on why I get the same damn spam almost everyday when the senders name and email address never change…

3. Why is it when you ask for feedback, you send us to your Yahoo! Tutorials page? See I did not ask for a tutorial. I actually understand how to send email, to be honest, I think I understand it much better than most of the people you have working on the Yahoo! Mail team. If you actually want feedback, then provide me a way to give feedback. If you are not interested which obviously you are not, THEN DON’T ASK FOR IT!

4. Why oh why don’t you have a target=”_blank” in your code? If someone sends me a link in an email and I do not right click and choose open in a new tab I will leave my email totally. Do you want us to stay within Yahoo! or not?

5. Finally, what the hell is this?

Why is it that every time I type in a person’s name in the TO: line and you actually find that person from my address book it still gives me this error message? Why is it that every time I send an email I have to remove the person’s name and just have their email address in the TO: line to actually be able to send?

Yahoo! Mail, you took what should of been your flagship and have turned it into a second class citizen of cyberspace. Shame on you.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, spam

First off, I want to apologize for the lack of posts over the last week or two. Work responsibilities has taken a great deal of my time, but I am absolutely going to try to make sure I am posting on a much more regular basis. So without further adieu, let’s get to some news.

Dell announced the release of two new programs, Studio Dell and IdeaStorm. Studio Dell is a video application that allows people to view videos about Dell and it’s computers, technology and tech tips. While Dell IdeaStorm is to be an honest, a blatant Digg knockoff where people can make suggestions to Dell on their company, computers, etc. Now even though there has been some rumblings in the blogosphere about Dell ripping off Digg, I personally think both of these applications are a great step in the right direction for Dell. For a very long time, Dell was known for their customer focus and service, but between Dell shipping all their customer support to India as well as numerous other problems, they have lost their luster and their reputation has suffered.

In regard to Dell’s IdeaStorm, what will truly determine it’s effectiveness and success is what Dell does with this feedback. Anyone can ask for suggestions, but if you do nothing with it, very quickly users will realize that they are just yelling at the moon and move on. It’s interesting because some of the most popular suggestions are issues that I don’t think Dell can do anything about. For instance, bar none, the most popular and numerous suggestions are about Dell’s customer service in India. There are many posts of people requesting that Dell bring it back to the US. While I would love to see that happen, I think that will happen right around the same time hell freezes over.

One of the other great suggestions is Dell shipping their computers without all the BS software on it. I am referring to AOL, EarthLink, etc. Wow, I would not of even thought of that, but that is a great idea. When I buy a new computer, the first thing I do is uninstall all of those offers. Though just like the overseas call centers, the software offers add revenue to Dell’s bottom line and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

What will be definitely interesting to see is if Dell does anything with these comments or is this yet another example of a company putting all their efforts trying to make themselves look better instead of actually being better.

Technorati Tags: Dell, Studio Dell, Dell IdeaStorm, Digg

I have written a couple of posts discussing my unhappiness with the Yahoo! Mail Beta. You will notice in the comments for each one of those posts, Ryan Kennedy, Yahoo! Mail’s Beta Evangelist was nice enough to stop by and comment on some of my thoughts. One of my biggest issues that I discussed in previous posts was the lack of information and communication Yahoo! Mail was providing us. Ryan pointed out in his comments that they have a blog focused on updating everyone on what is going on with Yahoo! Mail. I thought that was great, the only issue I had was the blog had not been updated since December 15th. DOH!

Well two days ago, the blog finally had a new post, hallelujah! Ryan announced the upcoming integration of Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger. He also has a little video of how it will work. I would love to show you myself, but Yahoo is rolling this out “slowly” and my account has not been integrated yet.

After reading Ryan’s post and watching the video, I was sitting here wondering what my feelings were on this and I came to the conclusion that I really do not have any strong feelings on this one way or the other. It’s an incredibly basic component that Google has had since the launch of Gmail. I feel that this capability will drive no-one to sign up for Yahoo! Mail nor will it bring me or anyone else back to use Yahoo! Mail as our primary personal email account as it had been for many years.

One other thought that I wanted to share. When I was reading Ryan’s blog I noticed something interesting, he is not offering users the opportunity to comment on his posts. My question is why? Ryan how does someone call him or herself an evangelist if they are unwilling to hear and read comments and feedback by the people you should covet most, your users? True evangelism at least in my humble opinion is not a one way street, it’s two ways.

This is I think the third article I have written about Yahoo! Mail. Why do you think that is? Is it that I am just a big pain in the a**? Maybe, my mom would say so, but I would say it is because Yahoo! Mail is an application that I have used for a long time and I have/had some passion for it.

How many others are out there like me? How many others are slowly moving to Gmail, MSN or something else and taking the place of where Yahoo! Mail had been for years? What are you doing to get us back? What are the “WoW” factors of Yahoo! Mail? What is going to help me read and send email better and faster? You want my eyes and attention so you can sell ads, you are going to have to give me something worth using and right now you do not have it.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, blog, Yahoo! Messenger

As you saw from my last post, I had a little bit of trouble getting into Wal-Mart’s new movie download service. I like many other millions of people use Firefox as my browser and Wal-Mart does not support it. I would suspect the reason for this is that Firefox is open source which means they have absolutely no control of it and that scares the pants off of them. Even though my bank, my health care provider and my stock broker all support Firefox. Oh well, let’s put that aside for the moment, shall we…

Wal-Mart’s foray into online video downloads will fail and it will fail miserably. I believe this for several reasons, but the most important one is that it is Wal-Mart. You have to really take a look at how this service works. Once you buy a video and download it, you can only watch it on your computer or a “portable device”. Though portable device means only 13 devices that Wal-Mart supports and obviously, no iPod. You cannot burn the movie on a disc so the only way a user could watch it through their TV is if they have their computer hooked up to their TV. Now be honest, how many people who would shop at this service will know how to do that?

The difference in price is neglegable. The movie Departed with my buddy Jack can be downloaded for $14.88 or I can buy the actual disc online or go to Wal-Mart and pay $15.88. Is that dollar savings going to really make people download the movie compared to buying it online or in the store and actually having the disc that they can watch on their big screen TV and have forever?

I think it is grave leap to make from iTunes selling songs and even half our TV shows to Wal-Mart customers willing to watch a two and a half hour movie on a portable device let alone their computer. I think people are dramatically taking for granted that we Americans like to have stuff. We are stuff hounds and we like having that nice DVD case sitting up on our DVD rack waiting for us to have the craving to watch that movie again.

I give the over/under 6 months until this Beta is pulled and added to the Wal-Mart scrapheap where their online video ordering service that was supposed to compete with NetFlix already lives. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Wal-Mart, video downloads, iPod

There has been some interesting discussions here on a previous post of mine discussing the two guys kissing and chest hair pulling Snickers commercial. When launched the commercial drove users to the web site afterthekiss.com. Though today if you try out that URL, you will just be redirected to the Snickers site.

AdRants has a good write up on this where they say,

“While we liked this spot purely for its shock value, there’s a faintly high probability this will have a very real negative affect on sales. Can you imagine the looks one will now receive from the checkout clerk when they buy a Snickers bar? That’s just way too much snickering for most people to take and there’s plenty of other perfectly good candy choices with far less embarrassment attached to them.”

Though I do hear that the follow-up commercial to this will be video of everyone in the marketing department of Snickers pulling out their own chest hair after seeing their sales drop from their commercial being aired on the SuperBowl.

Technorati Tags: two guys kissing, Snickers, commercial

While I was working for Dell, we had this saying that each one of us were sharks all swimming in a relatively small ocean. If anyone one of us started to slow down or stop, we would be eaten by another. It might of been a little over the top, but it did make the point crystal clear. Keep pushing forward, never stop, never be content.

A couple of months ago I posted a story on the new Yahoo! Mail Beta and the issues I had with it. As the story explained, I have been using Yahoo! Mail as my primary personal email address for many many years and it seemed to me that Yahoo! released this new Beta without any consideration of the customer experience people would have. The entire user experience on this application was terrible and to be honest, a bit embarrassing to release this as a Beta.

Since I wrote that story several months ago, I have been sending Yahoo! Mail feedback on all my thoughts, issues and suggestions for this new email application. They have a little feedback button, so I thought I would share. I believe I have sent them at least 6 different emails with thoughts and suggestions. These were not bitch emails, they were my personal suggestions on what could make their new application better. I received exactly zero responses from Yahoo! on any and all of my feedback. Not even a fricken form letter. And more importantly, in the last couple of months, I have seen absolutely no changes to this Beta release, nothing.

So what happens when a company turns it’s back on longtime brand evangelists as well as giving the impression that they are doing absolutely no work? They tend to become irrelevant and fade quietly into obscurity.

So what could Yahoo! do to rectify these issues with very little effort?

1. KEEP US INFORMED! – Send out a progress email to all members. You know a little status report. Tell us what you are working on, what’s going on.
2. KEEP US INVOLVED! – Just like how every open source application does today. Create a online request log that users can add feature suggestions and thoughts.
3. KEEP YOURSELF RELEVANT! – Show some sort of progress. Change something, fix something, let us know that you are still breathing.

You are running out of times around the track here Yahoo!. Personally, I see my Yahoo! email address becoming my spam email address if things do not change in the future. As always, I am here Yahoo! if you actually are interested in communicating with your users. Please send all correspondence to my Gmail email address. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Technorati Tags: Dell, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, customer experience