Big data? It's the little things that count

There's much talk about 'big data' with its potential to better understand customer behaviour and tailor service and offerings appropriately. Great idea, but I can't help thinking that organisations would do well to master the 'small data' they have at present.

I've been a member of a well-known airline's frequent flyer programme for many years. In theory, they know a great deal about me and continue to gather data based upon my travel patterns, locations and preferences. Yet it never ceases to amaze me how they continue to get it wrong:

• I flew to Glasgow on business earlier this week.  En route to the airport, I received a text asking me to rate the service I had received at the airport that morning - some two hours before my flight.
• On the same day, my return flight was delayed by over an hour. I knew this in advance because I took the trouble to check. Did I receive a text alerting me? No.
• I receive at least one promotional email a week encouraging me to book my next flight or take advantage of a time-limited sale.  Often the offers are for flights that I cannot possibly take.  Why? Because I already have a flight booked during the relevant period. Don't they know this?
• One such email encouraged me to take advantage of a discount on flights to the US. This was just a few days after I had booked a flight to the US at the full price. Ouch!
• They have made of point of asking for and recording my seat preference - window or aisle - yet consistently allocate the wrong seat on check-in

It's often the small things that count in customer service. These small irritations are missed opportunities to impress.  It's a pity that with all the data this organisation has, it consistently fails to think things through effectively.

Open source branding - 5 ways to manage the process

We're living in the age of "open source branding".  Gone are the days when brand managers could focus on well-crafted advertisements to build and protect brand reputations. Today, the health and wealth of your brand is determined by what your customers are saying in social media. Customers are defining brands now, not marketers.

While the dynamics may have changed, it doesn't mean that your brand has to be thrown to the mercy of vociferous commentators on social media. Here are 5 ways in which you can support and enhance your brand reputation online:

1. Understand that social media is a conversation.  Too many organisations see social media as the opportunity to disseminate brand messages and fail to understand the need to engage in a dialogue with their customers online. Great brands engage in the conversation, pose questions and respond to feedback.
2. Encourage brand communities. Recognise that your brand advocates may want to sing your praises in their own forums or communities and support them when they do so. While building your own brand communities may be the optimum approach, recognise that attempting to control other communities can damage brand reputations.
3. Listen to and respond quickly to complaints. Monitoring customer sentiment online is essential but achieves little if you're not prepared to react. Respond quickly to both positive and negative comments, encouraging your critics to engage outside social media to get to the root of the problem and then ask them to return to social media when you've resolved their issue to express their satisfaction.
4. Avoid corporate speak and know when to step back. The well-crafted corporate response to criticism or complaints can stand out a mile if you're normally chatty and engaging when dealing with positive feedback. Maintain your tone of voice throughout. And recognise that repeating the same message in the face of a barrage of criticism may simply fan the flames and shows you're not really listening or understanding. 
5. Continually check that your service or product is aligned with your brand messages. Use the feedback you get through social media to identify and address issues in service delivery, product quality or customer service. This means being the voice of the customer internally - something marketing professionals should aspire to as a matter of course.

Whether we like it or not, social media presents customers with the opportunity to comment quickly on brand experiences. Protecting a brand means adopting similar behaviours and engaging in the debate.

Why not all brand extensions make sense

The Social Market Foundation (SMF), a cross party think tank, has called upon Transport for London to apply for a banking licence for its highly successful Oyster card.

SMF argues that the trusted pre-paid Oyster card, used to pay for rail, underground and bus journeys throughout London could become a real competitor to the retail banks.

Transport for London (TfL) has given the proposal a chilly reception, arguing that while Oyster is a tremendous success, its focus is on ‘making the journeys of our customers better’.

TfL is ruling out a significant brand extension for its Oyster card and cutting off a potential source of revenue by declining to seek a banking licence.  On this occasion I think TfL has got it right.

TfL’s primary purpose is to facilitate the travel of its nine million customers across the capital.  And, let’s face it, it has some way to go before it can rightly claim to have solved all the issues commuters face.  To seek to extend the Oyster brand might well look attractive on paper, but TfL has rightly concluded that it should ‘stick to the knitting’.

While Osyter might well be a convenient way for commuters to travel easily across London, TfL must be well aware of both the limitations of its own reputation and, perhaps more importantly, the reputation minefield that getting into retail banking entails.

Some brand extensions – where brands seek to leverage their reputations to move into new categories - make great sense.  The Virgin brand has successfully embraced air travel, financial services and health.  While Nescafe has used its strong heritage in the coffee market to move into coffee makers.  But both brands have a strong core reputations and values and have a loyal customer following.

In this case, TfL is right to draw the line

Does free coffee in the supermarket foster loyalty?

Supermarket chain Waitrose has described the traditional points-based loyalty schemes of rivals such as Tesco as ‘meaningless’.  Customers, they say, derive little value from collecting points over time.

Instead, Waitrose claim they’re all about affinity and creating a social hub for the local community.  Under their My Waitrose scheme customers are eligible to collect a free cup of tea or coffee every day and, if they spend more than £5, a free newspaper.  The result is that Waitrose now brews around one million cups of free coffee a week.

According to Mark Price, Waitrose MD, speaking to Marketing Week : “We want to say to our customers ‘welcome to our shop, have a cup of coffee, read a newspaper, we’ll look after you’”.

If my local Waitrose is anything to go by, the offer is mostly taken up by individuals who pop in to claim their free coffee, buy some ciggies and pick up a free newspaper before decamping to their local Aldi.  Whereas the target yummy mummies seem to be too preoccupied dealing with little Hugo and Jemima, wrestling with a trolley and/or buggy to want to hold a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee as well.

Waitrose say they have no problem with this.  I’m not so sure.  I admire their distinctive approach in stepping aside from the competition and their desire to create a better shopping experience (I’ve argued for this recently in my piece on short-term sales growth v loyalty).  But I do wonder whether they have missed something in the execution.

Would it not have been wise to set a spend threshold for membership of the scheme? Membership is currently unrelated to spend, hence the free coffee brigade. Setting a qualifying £5 or £10 initial spend for membership would seem to be a more commercial approach to rewarding genuine customers and creating affinity. Rather than attracting visitors who have no intention of grabbing a basket and conducting a weekly shop.

Footfall in Waitrose may be on the up and its traditional ‘posh’, and possibly inaccessible, reputation may be under question, but I wonder whether Waitrose can reasonably argue that they are fostering greater levels of affinity and brand loyalty with their target audience?

But then Waitrose might be happy being the UK’s largest purveyor of coffee. At their own expense. 

The marketer’s dilemma: short term sales growth or loyalty?

It probably won’t come as a surprise to most switched-on marketers that the modern customer is highly promiscuous.  Shopping around has become a national pastime, particularly as easy access to the internet has allowed many customers to explore the range of offers available in the comfort of their homes without resorting to wearing out shoe leather on the High Street.

This promiscuity is perhaps no more marked than in the highly competitive world of supermarket shopping.  The modern British shopper has, it seems, become adept at taking advantage of price promotions to divide their share of food spend between rival operators as opposed to remaining loyal to one supermarket brand.  Chasing savings has become more important than the convenience of making one trip to one supermarket chain.

This creates a dilemma for marketers:  do you enter the fray and compete almost entirely on price to drive short term sales growth; or do you focus on building a loyal customer base and reap the benefits of lifetime value?  Immediate commercial concerns may well dictate the former.

The answer lies somewhere between the two in my opinion. 

Yes, price promotion may well be necessary in order to drive customers to your business.  But this has to be seen as a short term measure or you may find yourself in the position of continuingly competing on price.

The challenge is to create a shopping experience that is distinctive and gives customers what they want, over and above the attraction of a good deal.  This means making the purchasing process as simple and quick as possible – we know, for example, that a proportion of shoppers abandon their baskets because of queues at the checkout.  It could mean better trained staff with greater product knowledge.  And it could mean additional services and product ranges that make the attraction of shopping in one outlet greater than another.

Marketers outside the food sector would do well to take on board the lessons being learned by the large supermarket chains:  differentiation by price alone will not generate loyal customers.

Crisis? What crisis?

Five lessons from the recent customer crisis at banking giant TSB.

On Sunday an IT problem at Lloyds Banking Group left thousands of customers unable to withdraw cash from ATMs or pay for goods with debit cards.  As the ‘new kid on the block’, TSB was singled out by the media for most of the criticism. It was the latest in a growing trend for banks in the UK to suffer IT issues.

Most organisations will have a crisis management plan in place for such eventualities.  The plan will cover the nuts and bolts of who should do what in the event that something should go wrong.  A key element will undoubtedly be communications management with clear responsibilities for handling customer and media enquiries.  But far too often the plans are focused on the mechanics of what needs to happen and not the philosophy or values that should underpin that activity.

So, what should organisations be thinking about and what should be the lessons for TSB moving forward? 

Recognise and reflect what your customers are feeing, not simply what has happened.  Most organisations know that the starting point is to recognise there is an issue and to apologise for it.  TSB did this, but talked in terms of ’inconvenience’ when the social media networks were full of people expressing their extreme ‘embarrassment’ at having cards refused at checkouts across the country.  Use your customers’ language to show you’ve listened and have really understood what it means for them.

Use everyday language to explain the problem.  TSB talked about ‘server failure’ when pinpointing the issue.  This may well be accurate but how many of their customers actually understood (or cared) what that means?  Also, the preferred internal term might well be 'ATM', but recognise that many Britons use the term 'cashpoint'.

Understand that people have access to the web and social media wherever they are.  Twitter was buzzing with disgruntled customers on Sunday and TSB did well in attempting to manage the comments and to reassure people.  However, TSB seems to have overlooked the fact that many go to the website for information and failed to carry the same messaging there which in turn drove more people to vent their frustration on Twitter.

Be clear about when to use the big guns.  The aptly named TSB chief executive, Peter Pester, set a good example by taking to Twitter to deal with customer tweets and to apologise, sometimes addressing individuals directly.  Good work TSB in avoiding the faceless approach many organisations adopt.

Keep the messaging going post incident and make it easy for customers to continue to contact you.  It may be human nature to breathe a sigh of relief when the immediate crisis has been dealt with but don’t forget that customers have memories.  The TSB website (www.tsb.co.uk) has a link to an apology on the homepage but it’s badly signposted and somewhat lost in a ‘busy’ design.   Once through to the message, customers are encouraged to ‘get in touch’ if they have been ‘impacted’.  Commendable stuff, despite the use of ‘impacted’. But click on the ‘get in touch’ link and you’re taken to the normal ‘contact us’ page with no less than 12 options, not one of them relating to the incident.  If you really want your customers to ‘get in touch’ with you about this TSB, make it easy by providing a dedicated email address and telephone number.

Up close and personal - 4 simple things an airline did to impress

I recently had the opportunity to travel long haul in business class with Singapore Airlines.  The experience was one of the best I have encountered in many years of flying.

Here are the four things they did to impress me:

1. I was taken to my seat when I boarded rather than sent off on a mission to track it down alone. 
2. All the cabin crew I encountered seemed to know my name without looking at the manifest.  Spooky at first, but also reassuring. 
3. When refilling my wine glass, the crew knew the wine I had selected first time around, irrespective of whether the individual had served me or not. 
4. On my return flight I was greeted like an old friend with a genuine ‘welcome back’. 

These four very simple actions show that personalisation doesn’t have to be complicated or stunningly innovative.  A simple recognition that I’m an individual passenger, not a number, and a willingness to remember my preferences made it a memorable experience and so very different to the 'conveyor belt' approach of many others.

If there is a downside, it’s that the personalisation ended with the flight.  No follow up communication to get my feedback.  In fact, radio silence.  

What a wasted opportunity to keep a memorable brand experience alive.