I was watching the 6pm news last night, and heard a story about the impact small businesses have on the job market. It related: how small businesses generate 60-80% of all new jobs and are at the heart of our economy, how a recession would impact small businesses, and, again, how much small businesses impact the economy- crazy circle talk!
They highlighted a small business owner in the NE somewhere who owns a gourmet food shop called Garlic & Oil. She sells mid to high-end gourmet food items. When the reporter asked her what issues she was dealing with, she listed: higher utility bills, higher delivery costs, higher product costs, and fewer customers. When the reporter asked her what she was going to do, she said (in this order):
- Let go of her part time staff and work more herself-to cut costs
- Open up on Sundays- adding another day to her already 6 day work week-to be more available
- Somehow, someway get more people to come to her store- she needs more foot traffic. (Can you say, demand generation? )
She indicated she had about 12 weeks left (if things didn’t improve) before she would have to shut down her business.
Couple of thoughts- this was an interesting view of the “conversation going on in the heads of the small business owners.”
Her first reaction to pressure was- try to cut costs (overhead, and other costs.) Her second was to increase availability- which, if she was online, wouldn’t matter. Her third idea was to generate more demand to save her business- “more foot traffic.”
Obviously, this is a single business owner, however, there will likely be a TON of TSB’s that begin to fail due to the “recession.”If we could somehow begin to save them from failure- by using our services- we would be Heroes! Can you say Bold and Audacious?
I’m not sure how we would get the word out, but I literally wanted to call this women last night and say, “You need some help generating demand and using additional channels for selling, get and use partners etc., and last but not least you need our software to make all this easy- and cost effective.”
Food for thought!!
I recently read this article on B to B online. Being the VP of Customer Loyalty at a Software company made me really sit up and listen. What is this, someone questioning the NPS (net promoter score), isn’t that just a fancy way of saying customer loyalty. The NPS has long been a favorite in Fortune 100 for touting and measuring how loyal their customers are, this is getting interesting.
And speaking of fancy! My 4 year old has a favorite booked called Fancy Nancy (written by Jane O’Connor), the story is about a little girl who loves being fancy, throughout the book are things like Nancy’s favorite color is fuchsia which is a fancy way of saying purple, or a stupendous idea, which is a fancy word for a great idea, or my favorite- my family is posh, that’s a fancy word for fancy! While this is entertaining to my 4 year old, it is not so entertaining to your employees or your customers when we use fancy words to describe business processes. What does Net Promoter Score mean? It is just a fancy way of saying measuring customer loyalty!
We measure customer loyalty at Infusion Software, via a similar methodology as many companies. We send a monthly survey to a subset of our customers where we ask them, “would you recommend Infusion Software to our friends/colleagues/business associates?”. Our customers are allowed only 2 ways to respond- thumbs up or thumbs down. I suppose we could do something a little more fancy, like multiple questions or varying degrees of loyaly, are we uber cool? Or just cool? Since we service small business customers, we like to keep it simple and straight forward, but most importantly, we like to keep it simple to provide us with the data we need to act on, and super cool, vs uber cool doesn’t help us much.
One really important aspect of NPS, again, fancy words for customer loyalty, that is often over looked or not used as often as it should be as a balancing metric, is, in my mind the most fancy way of measuring customer loyalty- follow the money!
 If your customers are continuing to pay you- since we are a SaaS provider, our customers essentially vote their loyalty every month, by continuing to pay us, by purchasing more services from us, or on the converse by stopping their billing- we just got a big goose egg- fancy word for thumbs down, or dissatisfied customer. I believe, many times, inside big companies people look to one metric and say look how well we are doing our NPS is high, we are uber cool. However, without looking at how people really vote their loyalty- the monthly recurring revenue or new services revenue generated, licensing revenue etc., you are getting a false sense of good fortune- fancy word for inflated happiness, when you may actually have a flat or decreasing bottom line. Fancy words for not good news for your company.
So measure customer loyalty, or NPS, find a way that works for your company, but always keep your eye on the real vote of confidence, approval, or loyalty your customers give you- which is their money.
At Infusion we have a strong desire to remember our original roots, our original passion, and our reason for existing- caring for our small business customers, and to put this focus in the front of everyone’s face- every day, we launched a new company wide customer loyalty building program- called Riding the Trains.
Some history..For those of you who have lived in or visited a big city, and had to ride the subway to get around town you know what this experience can be like, in some cities like LA its awesome, in others like Chicago- it’s a crap shoot! Many years ago in a major US city, the subway system was in deep trouble- think back to the 80’s- I know it’s a long time ago, or before some of you were born, but trust me the subway system in this city was dirty, scary, not on time, and sometimes down right dangerous. Trouble was, the folks in charge of the transit system didn’t realize any of this.
Why you ask- because the folks in charge at the top, drove nice fancy cars to work- the Transit Authority leadership did not have to ride the trains to get to work or anywhere else for that matter. Thus, a disconnect between the riding publics experience on the subways and the leaderships view of how they were doing.
A visionary new leader was hired to solve the problem. He came in to a pretty dire situation- rider revenues were down, traffic and population growth were increasing and incidents on the subway were increasing. So, among the first things he determined was the Transit Authority leadership was out of touch with their customers- the people who ride the trains. So, he came up with a program, that required everyone who worked at the Transit Authority to “Ride the Trains” at least 2 days per week- forever! If they did not bring in their stubs and suggestions/findings they had to pay $$ into a pool.
What does this have to do with us here at Infusionsoft? We’ve started Riding the Trains to stay in touch with our customers. As we continue to grow, just like the subway system, sometimes it is easy to get farther and farther away from our customers. I bet you are thinking- hey, Kelly there are no trains at Infusionsoft- correct, what we do have is live customer contact going on every day!
Riding the Trains = listening to live customer phone calls
Here is how our program works:
- Supervisors/Managers and above are required to Ride the Trains 4 hours each month.
- Riders can listen to support calls or IM calls- you pick!
- Headset will be hanging on the wall outside my office- grab one and come on over.
- My assistan logs each session completed - riders can do these whenever they want to, and it fits in their schedules!
*From time to time we will offer other programs to fulfill this requirement- like calling customers who give us double thumbs down on surveys, calling from a list of high usage clients just to see how they are doing- more details on this to come.
Rules:
1. Rider cannot interrupt the Support rep or IM- questions must be saved to the end.
2. Riders must provide a riding the trains report- 3 things learned during each session
3. Each VP has the authority to reward or penalize their required team members at their discretion. (for example- in CL whoever does not Ride the Trains will put $25 in the Riding the Trains pool, which will be donated to a local charity every month)
Happy Train Riding! In all seriousness, this program ensures we stay in contact with our most important asset- our customers- they are the reason Infusionsoft exists.
In response to this article: Does CEM Replace CRM?
Interesting- but more acronym speak for “forcing customers” to use the web…
Do you know anybody who says- Hey, Joe, I really love it when I call my bank and they make me press 4 options before I can talk to someone? Or, over dinner conversation, someone says, you know Mary I called my local pizza joint last week, and placed my order without ever speaking to someone- it was awesome! I have been in the contact center, and CRM space for over 15 years, and have never personally used an automated system I liked via the phone. So, now, we are to assume that CEM (Customer Experience Management) is IVR (Interactive Voice Response) for the web- Use the word IVR, and most people first say- huh? You respond with “You know those automated press 1, press 2 systems you use at your bank- that.” The customers first response is, “Ooohhh those, I hate those!” Now tell them, “Hey, how about if we put this on the web for you, wouldn’t that make it cool?”
What we all have to realize is customers don’t dislike IVRs- the technology… They don’t like being forced to do anything, follow somebody else’s logic to get to what they want, abide by your internal rules, use certain channels for specific activities etc.. They simply want to find what they want, and move on. We should never assume we know what the customer wants or needs when a customer contacts your company. My favorite is when the phone rings, and the helpful person on the other end says, in their most pleasant phone voice, “Did you know you could find your answer on our website.” Translation- are you stupid, or are you lacking a computer or the brains to find this answer or buy this product on your own, we really don’t want to talk to you. Well guess what, if I am any indication of most customers, I don’t call, or ask for help on your website, unless I really cannot find the answer or complete my transaction without your help. I, like most customers prefer to do it myself, let’s face it, it is just faster to do it yourself.
So, if your company is thinking of translating your IVR to your web processes and customer experience, you should consider how much negative baggage your customers have with IVRs, not just your IVR specifically, but every company, and, in this case, throw out the baby with the bath water and start from scratch. Try some new tactics, like asking your customers what they want to see, and what they want to do on the web, and what they want to call you directly for. Try following your customers home or to the store, and see what barriers exist, what frustrates them. In the end you will learn a ton about your customers behavior, and ultimately stop forcing or managing your customers experience. Anytime, you force your customers to do something you are more than likely forcing them to your competition. If you allow your customers choices that meet their needs, they will choose to spend their $$ with your organization.
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