The Customer Experience Gap and How to Bridge It

Our  friend and customer service advocate, Becky Carroll penned an interesting post over on her blog, Customers Rock. The jest of the post is the significant disconnect with what companies think they are delivering relative to Customer Experience, and what their customers purport.

Understanding the principles of customer experience and actually delivering them do not necessarily go hand in hand. In 2008 Bain & Company found that while 80 percent of companies believe they deliver a superior experience to their customers, only 8 percent of those companies’ customers report having such an experience. Similarly, a CMO Council study found that fifty-six percent of technology vendors perceive themselves as being extremely customer-centric, compared with only 12% of their customers.

There is a clear disconnect between the experience companies think they deliver and what customers experience, perceive and – more importantly – desire. It’s not about what you think… it’s about what your customers think.

In order to determine whether you are disappointing, meeting or exceeding your customers’ expectations, you need to continuously listen. And it’s not as easy as it sounds. It goes far beyond monitoring the chatter on Twitter and other social media platforms or performing your annual customer satisfaction survey. It requires soliciting customer feedback on a regular, ongoing basis at multiple touch points, and closing the loop to address issues and understand root cause.

How to Bridge the Gap

I think part of the issue stems from confusing Customer Service with Customer Experience. It is much easier to Enhance the Customers Experience than to deliver stealer Customer Service. We confuse great customer service as being Ritz Carlton or Nordstrom, it isn’t, as customer service varies based on the product type, brand and product price point.

Folks can argue that if they want, but you simply do not expect the same level of customer service at McDonalds, a fast food chain as you do at Mortons, a high-end steakhouse. The problem with focusing on increased Customer Service is, irrespective of your product price point, folks always expect a little more “service” than your product offering is designed to deliver. Trying to out service your competitors is a race to eroding profits. I am not suggesting that a company only deliver minimal customer service, but am pointing out there are differences.

However, companies that shift their thinking toward Enhancing the Customers Experience should have a much easier time, and really speaks to shifts in your behavior to align with your brand. This was an epiphany moment for us at Urbane, as once we started behaving, consistent with our Brand, things became much easier and more clear, all of which centered around Enhancing the Residents Experience at each of the touch points throughout the resident life cycle.

What are your thoughts about this? Is there a difference between Customer Service and customer Experience?

Social Influencers Help You Sell More Stuff

Social Influence Marketing, as described in Social Media Marketing for Dummies, is a technique that employs Social Media (content created by everyday people using highly accessible and scalable technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, microblogs, bookmarks, social networks, communities, wiki’s and vlogs) and Social Influencers, (everyday people who have an outsized influence on their peers by virtue of how much content they share on line) to achieve an organization’s marketing and business needs.

Social Media, which was likely one of the most hyped buzzwords in 2008, refers to content created and consumed by regular people for each other.

Social Media and its making now allows everyone in the world to be a content publisher and arbitrator.

Social Influencers are the everyday people who influence the consumer as he/she makes a purchasing decision. Simply, the people who influence a brand affinity and purchasing decisions are Social Influencers. Engagement is a Lost Art, are you targeting Social Influencers as part of your overall marketing objectives?

Social influence is the change in behavior that one person causes in another, intentionally or unintentionally, as a result of the way the changed person perceives themselves in relationship to the influencer, other people and society in general.

Christine Thompson describes Social Influencers in her post titled Social Influence Marketing;

Key influencers – people who have almost celebrity status in the social media world – in some cases can exercise considerable influence on purchase decisions throughout the consumer’s buying process. Rarely does the consumer actually know these key influencers in real life.

Social influencers are people whom the consumer follows on Twitter or FaceBook, or whose blogs and product reviews appeal to the consumer. Their influence is greatest during the earlier phase of the buying cycle: awareness and consideration, but wanes during the action phase. Although the social influencers are likely to be within the consumer’s social graph, they may not actually know each other.

The greatest impact occurs through known peer influencers: colleagues, friends and family. How much impact these “known peers” exercise varies by product category and how much the consumer respects the person’s insight and expertise in that category. For example, a husband can influence the brand and model decisions when it comes to auto purchases or leases; however, he has no impact on purchase decisions for yoga classes, mats and accessories, or other yoga-related items. This is because I don’t believe he has an informed opinion in this arena.

1. Are you connecting with Social Influencers to drive your marketing needs and business needs?
2. Does your Digital Footprint have the required reach and inclusion of Social Influencers relevant to your brand?

Apartment Marketing; It Starts with a Google Search

A Guest Post by Brian Owen; Executive Director of Marketing for Laramar Group in Denver CO. Brains post illustrate exactly what we teach folks in our Move the Google Needle sessions, most recently at Optimization Summit in Dallas. Here are the slides should you have interest.

Enjoy Brian’s post, and let us know your thoughts and comments,

Google Killed the Adjective

Quite frankly, Google doesn’t care what serene, beautifully landscaped, sparkling surroundings your apartment community is nestled in nor do the prospects using Google, per se.  Not initially at least.  This makes marketing apartments a little less creative from a writing standpoint, but a little more fun and challenging from an analytics and strategy standpoint.

If you currently have Google Analytics on your website, run a report to see if anyone found you by typing in adjectives other than those related to proximity or cost (close, near, cheap, affordable).  Trust me, they didn’t.  So why do many of us continue to use those “romance” paragraphs on our website and in our ILS advertising?  The only answer I have is that some of us are still stuck in a print mindset, and between you, me and Dupree, using romance paragraphs in your print ads is a waste of creative energy as well (that’s a whole other discussion).

I’m not going to tell you what keywords you should be using on your landing pages of your websites, but I will say that if you are close to the campus of University of Michigan, you sure as hell better mention that because Google will find that a lot more relevant than a sparkling pool.  Highlighting your city name, neighborhood name, landmarks, points of interest, major roads and freeways, public transportation, shopping and entertainment in the area is the way to define your community and for many of our communities are the true amenities prospects seek.  It’s not sexy, but those of us who are creative and savvy will find a way to make it work and boost our search engine results.

Web Site Performance and Conversion: Get Out the Measuring Stick

Our Guest Post today comes from Jennifer Kennedy, Technology and Operations Specialist at Property Counselors Management Group in Fort Myers, Fl. Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and getting the conversation going. This is Jennifer’s second Guest Blog with us, her first post, Does Increased Web Traffic Draw Increased Sales had lots of comments!

Get Out the Measuring Stick

A few years back industry leaders were conveying the importance for properties to have a website and online presence.  This is when our team at PCMG decided to move forward with each property having its own website for current and future residents.   After the initial launch, we saw a significant increase in traffic.

However, it is far too easy to create the websites and then just set them on the shelf.   Are the photos currently on your site from the fun and exciting resident function you had last week or last year?   We have come to realize that it is critical to keep updating content and evaluating website performance.   We just completed revamping our entire company website, which is quite an undertaking that requires resources constantly allocated to website content and improvement.

Now that the websites are launched and the content updated, it is time to get out the measuring stick.  The primary purpose for a property website is to generate traffic and secure leases.  In order to properly evaluate these goals, standard metrics need to be in place.  We currently measure our website conversions for unique visitors that lead to an online guest card or a phone call to the property.    As a portfolio, websites are converting 5% of new visitors to an online guest cards and 4% converting to a phone call resulting in a 9% total conversion.

The most important part of measuring is that our efforts are producing new leases.   Portfolio results consistently show that any property that converts 10% of its new visitors has seen a boost in occupancy with most averaging a 3% increase.

There is nothing I would like to see more from our industry than coming to a consensus on how to measure website performance with benchmarks that we can gauge our results against. What measuring stick are you using to evaluate your property website performance?

Your Blog IS About Results;

We Are Driving Ourselves Mad

Content Curation, Original Content, Re-purposed Content, Purchased Content, Content Yada, Yada, There sure is a lot of fodder these days about how to slice the Content Pie, from bloggers, clients, side liners and such.

What is a Business To Do?

How about starting with what you always do when operating a business, Look at The Numbers. If no one is reading your blog, what you are doing isn’t working. How the content is labeled has little bearing on the success of your blog.

There is an underling current surrounding original content, and sometimes folks get stuck on always wanting original content on their blogs. That is a flawed approach. As an example, a good friend of mine, Erin Rose runs a local news blog  Positive Detroit,, now a couple of years running was just voted as The Best Local Blog in SE Michigan by our local media, Real Detroit. Erin does an outstanding job curating content, but guess what friends, none of her content is original!

The point here is this, Erin has a keen understanding of what type, and feel of content her Circle of Influence wants to consume, and she satisfies that by filtering through localized content for her readers and following.

Focus on Results

If you are using your blog for your business, it IS about driving leads. Marketing has always been about selling more stuff to more people for more money. If you are using new media, social media or whatever the buzz word of the day is, Focus on the Results. Nothing else matters,

Working Within Social Media Red Tape: 5 Rules and a Case Study

There are many organizations ready to pull the trigger on using social media to connect with the community and start doing business. For some industries, however, there is a lot of red tape. Law offices, medical professionals, and industry regulators share one main concern: How do you connect with the community without sharing too much? Whether coming from HIPPA or Joe Blow, a law suit is always a headache. You can avoid these issues by following a few rules:

1. Start with strategy. Organizing your efforts will make all of the difference. While you should have a method for listening for your brand across the web, focusing efforts on social media websites that are most relevant to your brand’s community will reap the greatest benefits. Outline where boundaries lie.
2. Choose your team wisely. Interns are great for teaching, not for de-facto project management. Avoid traditional PR pros, as they may stifle the conversational-feel, but keep them close by. Those responsible for conversations on behalf of your brand need to be people you would put on your sales floor, manage your press conference, and “live” the brand. These critical thinkers need to understand the boundaries of the industry and of the company. This generally discludes those who use stuffy press releases, RSS feeds, or overly technical jargon to communicate. Remember: Social media is akin to a conference call, not a megaphone.
3. Consider what you CAN share. Consider your everyday offline conversations with potential clients. What do you discuss? How do you engage them? Is it always all-business?
4. Start with which resources you CAN provide. Your business is successful because you provide things your consumers need. This makes you the expert. Take a look around the office for trade publications and books. These topics influence your business for a reason. Check out the content within them and share it.
5. Understand what makes your brand human. Chances are your consumers don’t have particularly fuzzy feelings your brand’s legal team. In fact, those guys have probably never crossed your consumers’ minds. Most of the conversations in social media are topical and resourceful.

CASE STUDY: Hospital system & HIPAA A hospital system I’ve worked with had the same concern:

How do we honor patient privacy (and HIPAA) while connecting with the social web community?

Let’s consult the rules:

1. Start with strategy. We plugged in a few tools to listen for relevant keywords. We identified what types of hospital information we could not go into detail about. For example: No discussing patient-specific care. No mentioning doctors by name without prior consent. No providing specific medical advice.
2. Choose your team wisely. This particular hospital system had a great network of hospital support staff ready to jump in. While a member of the marketing team managed most of the day-to-day engagement, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists took a few hours each month to help out. With the marketing team member guiding things, getting “buy in” from other team members was a breeze.
3. Start with what you CAN share. Just as the hospital had receptionists on each floor the marketing team member could guide the social community around their website and direct to external resources (see number 4). They could talk about and share images from company picnics, published (and exciting!) research milestones, and the latest charity.
4. Consider what resources you CAN provide. Just like major health magazines–and even the government–providing topical health information was very much on the table. For this particular type of information a disclaimer was always required. We chose condition-specific advice (“Cooking for New Diabetics: The sugar exchange”) and general healthy living topics (“Family Health: Exercises every age will love”).
5. Understand what makes your brand human. We took a look at how some members of the community were already engaging with each other. The hospital system was encouraged by budding condition-specific communities such as My Cancer Place and KnowCancer. While they avoided joining communities like this, it was clear the community was actively discussing their experiences online. Listening is an incredible tool for building trust. So we took a look at what causes a community to trust a hospital system. It was clear: The trust fell in the hands of the human element–the staff. Consumers trust doctors beyond their credentials. Consumers trust them because they feel doctors understand their human-needs–and their bodies.

The result was an engaged hospital system. They knew the community unlike many businesses within it. Opening up to the social web community allowed this client even greater understanding and way to connect and share resources in an unprecedented manor. They were able to provide healthy living tips without the exorbitant costs of printing. They were able to follow up on consumer concerns because they were listening. They were able to further the communities’ trust because they participated. YOUR TURN: What red tape has your company run into? How can these tips change your approach to the social web?

Your Blog Is Not a Brochure; Create Inbound Links for Increased Business Leads

If you operate a business, you have a much higher interest in Results than those who do not. Absent Results, the business doesn’t make money and will soon fail. As a business owner, you get to make as many mistakes as you have available capital to fund those miscues. There are a thousand and one clamoring social media marketers with lots of theory, and some of those ideas are good, some not so much. Here at Digital Sherpa, we like to test things, and see what works and what doesn’t. We think that gives our clients an edge when expanding their Digital Footprint. We also like to focus on driving business leads, which is the reason to advertise.

One thing we have learned from our own businesses we manage is that when our Digital Footprint expands, our web traffic increases. There is a direct correlation to increased web traffic verses actual, physical traffic, meaning customers in the door. At the end of the day, that IS the result we are all looking for, more traffic in the door, which increases our opportunity to sell more stuff to more people.

Your Business Blog Is Not a Company Brochure

When first starting a blog it is easy to get hung up on all of the details. Notwithstanding, details are important, but we often see clients getting stuck on certain details of the blog that have little to no overall value to what the goal of your business blog should be, which is to sell more stuff. Your business blog does provide an excellent opportunity for Inbound Marketing, which is really no more than providing content that your prospective customer, and customer base find interesting and useful. While it can be about your product, it typically is not.

The good folks over at Hub Spot continue to provide us with excellent case studies on the effects and results to your business when you apply inbound marketing.

Are you sitting on data that might be interesting to others?

Inbound marketing rests on the assumption that people seek out and want to consume remarkable content.  PR, historically, has been about getting a message, remarkable or not, in front of an audience.

Inbound marketing and its opposite outbound marketing have various meanings depending on the context.

Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively).

Hub Spot said it well;

If you think your company doesn’t lend itself to creating interesting content, you may be mistaken.  Companies across various industries are blogging, reporting and creating remarkable content that matters to their target market.  Why?  Because it drives traffic and generates qualified leads.

What are some stories that your customers may find helpful or useful, we would love to hear about what is working, and what hasn’t worked so well.

How Are We Measured; Create Return Customers in Your Small Business

Good Morning, Hope everyone had a pleasant Valentine Weekend. We spent the weekend Up North (Northern Michigan) at a B & B in Traverse City. I love the drive up, about four hours, as it provides a lot of time to think about things.

I have been pondering lately the debate I am having in my head about Service verses Product. While I would never debate that customer service is ever so important, but does customer service secure the sale. Does great customer service outweigh deliverables?

One of the bloggers I follow, Jim Connolly who has worked in marketing for 23 years and had his own successful marketing business since the mid 1990’s, is best known worldwide for his ability to help businesses make massively more sales and boost their profits.

Jim’s recent post Superb Service, Average Marketing, strikes a similar cord, although he is comparing service to marketing.

I have lost count of how many outstanding businesses I have seen go broke, simply because they failed to market their services correctly.  They enjoy superb customer retention, because their services are so good that people just don’t want to leave.

However, because they win too few new customers, their revenues and profits stagnate and if they do lose a big account or have a large, unscheduled financial commitment pop up, they can suddenly be running at a loss.  If that loss goes on too long, they are in deep trouble.  If only they adopted better marketing, they could achieve great things.

How Are We Measured

It has always struck me as to why certain brands garnish significantly more money for their product or service than their counterpart. For instance, we were walking through downtown Traverse City this weekend and wandered in a Sun Glass Hut. I wanted a new pair of Oakley sunglasses They were priced at $130, which to me is a lot of dough for sunglasses. Although I am not a bling sort of guy, I made the purchase. However, there were sunglasses that were thousands of dollars, and folks were buying those too,

So how are we measured, what does create a return customer, a renewing resident, a long term client?

We would love to here your thoughts on the topic, and what moves you to renew with your vendor or service provider?

Who Took Away S & H Green Stamps? Is FourSqaure Digitally Recreating the Centennial Tradition?

In returning home from a recent trip from NYC this week, the driver taking me home from the airport was quite a character. His story was his trek with S & H Green Stamps, back in the day. I remember as a kid my folks glove box of our family car being stuffed with them, and my mom leafing through the catalogs on what the next purchase may be when the stamp books were full.

‘S&H Green Stamps’ (also called Green Shield Stamps) were a form of trading stamps popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s. They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry and Hutchinson company (S&H), founded during 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson. During the 1960s, the rewards catalog printed by the company was the largest publication in the United States and the company issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service. Customers would receive stamps at the checkout counter of supermarkets, department stores, and gasoline stations among other retailers, which could be redeemed for products in the catalog.

Where Do Things Go

So, for almost one hundred years a company and a certain culture, stamp collecting was popular, peaking in the 1960’s and dying out in the 1980’s, a pretty good and long run. So as we embrace this digital age, and Social Media is all the rage, what ideas of the past can we apply differently. Is Four Square today’s stamp collecting?

Our five year old granddaughter can very effectively navigate the web, what does that mean? We laugh about it, but what should marketers be focusing on. The floor is shifting, what are we doing, or not doing to sell to the buyers of tomorrow?

What is the value of Expanding Your Digital Foot Print?

What is the risk in ignoring the digital buzz?

What are your thoughts, or challenges or successes at making sense of the change.

Your Digital Reach; How to Increase Your Social Media Outreach

Good Morning, A few random thoughts of Digital Footprint and Digital Reach

We are pretty excited here at Digital Sherpa as we organize the final details to launch a series of Lab Experiments, for the purpose of helping our clients Expand Their Digital Footprint. It will be a fun time as we drill down into the whys and why not of engagement, metrics, what is meaningful to measure and what isn’t.

In thinking about this, different clients will have different things that are important to them to achieve through their marketing initiatives. Social Media touches a lot of different marketing points across your company.

eMarkter summed it up well in their post titled How Social Media Can Work Across Multiple Parts of Your Business

If you accept that your company needs to be involved in social media—as most marketers do—then it’s important to figure out where social media fits within your organization.

Tempting as it might be to compartmentalize social media, most companies find that it gets assimilated into various functional teams, including marketing and communications, sales, customer service, human resources, IT and executive management. Firms from Ford Motor Co. to Dunkin’ Donuts to Hewlett-Packard describe social media as a cross-organizational discipline that touches a wide range of functions.

What is Your Digital Reach

The ways and means at which Social Media Outreach works is nothing less than fascinating. We have started to track and log most everything we are doing here in the Digital Sherpa Laboratory, starting with our own personal blogs, twitter feeds, facebook profiles and fan pages, blog traffic, web traffic, blog comments and so forth. Some of the stuff likely doesn’t matter, but what really struck me was the significance of Expanding Your Digital Footprint, or put another way, Your Digital Reach.

Shelf Life

The advent of all of the tools allow such a rapid expansion of marketing outreach. But what these tools, platforms and venues also allow is  Infinite Shelf Life. Unlike traditional marketing, the effects of a given marketing campaign had a shelf life equal to or a bit longer than the length of the campaign itself.

In the digital world, your content is out there forever.

So What Does That Mean

Start by Getting in the Game. Your Digital Reach will not expand by itself. Folks say that followers don’t matter, and there is truth in that, sort of. What matters is the engagement level of your Circle of Influence. If you are adding value to your Circle of Influence, your business will drive more leads.

We would love to hear about ways in which you have extended your Digital Footprint, and what your challenges and successes were,

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