By Janus Boye
Hype can be a problem. Often it results in doing something, because everyone else is. But that is seldom a sound strategy for attaining one's goals.
Tim Walters is a much sought after speaker and business strategist, and he spoke at the Boye Aarhus 15 conference where he made quite a riot with harsh truths and a preposterous number of slides (the abridged version only has 89)
In this posting, I’ll share some of Tim's valuable perspective.
More technology equals happy customers?
Technology plays a big part in hype. To many it seems to hold the promise of the future, but we have to ask ourselves if the way we are using technology is actually helping us accomplish anything? Or if our practices are actually nothing more than mumbo jumbo under the heading of future?
In his presentation, Tim problematized the appealing and also alluring promise of customer experience management. He argued against stockpiling data just because we can. And he posed a simple question: What is it actually doing for us?
Throw more data on the fire!
Everyone is stockpiling data, because data is always nice to have. Right? But there isn't any research that supports the idea that vast amounts of data on customers actually work towards our goals of making them more satisfied with our products and services.
Still we continue to gather conspicuous amounts of data, since data has somehow become the only thing that doesn’t require data to support its usefulness.
Remember to annoy them in the evening
So, companies can now stockpile almost incomprehensible amounts of data about the customer. But to what end?
Good personalisation doesn’t mean that because you can now track people across multiple platforms, you should hurry and sent them an email in the evening with an offer on the product they were looking at earlier in the day.
The email ticks in with a hi wrong name. And let’s be honest, even if the system gets the name right, people will spot the still very generic advertisement in a second and never open it.
This approach is not good personalisation, actually it’s hardly personalisation.
We have to ask ourselves what kind of data we really need? Right now some companies are piling up data that they don’t do anything with at all. Or worse, they do something that will make the customer shun them.
Hi wrong name.
Just buy more banner ads
This is one area where a large majority of the businesses say they want to spend more money. It is again rooted in the idea that because we can now target the exact audience we want, everything will be great.
But the clickthrough rate for banner ads is 0,06 percent - the number gotten from Doubleclick - which means the customer is infamously more likely to become a navy seal than to click on an ad. Although the math behind this is not overtly clear, which Tim stresses.
Also adblockers are rising rapidly throughout Europe and now in the United States, with approximately 40% of all Europeans using them, and 28% of all Americans.
All this for the utopia of total control
Some seem to think - or hope - that we can control every step of the customer experience. But of course this isn't possible. The customer will often have a high number of interactions with the company, and you can’t control stuff like what mood the customer is in at any given moment.
There are times in the customer's life where he or she cares next to nothing about the company, and then there are other times when the interaction with the company will be extremely important. It is at these times that you can really profit from managing the experience.
This means that good customer experience management will often be about helping the customer, when the customer comes to you.
A vast majority of companies are spending more and more money on managing customer experience, but nothing points to the fact that people are actually experiencing better interactions with those companies and trusting them more. Actually, studies points towards the opposite.
It is time to take a step back and be realistic about what we actually can do in order to manage customer experience.
Kevin Chapple shared this comment:
“Data harvesting is one thing, but actually asking the customer about what they want makes a world of difference. Converting more site visits to purchases is much cheaper and more effective than pushing more and more people to a web site while keeping the conversion rate static. If you are getting the traffic and not the sales, ask people why they are not choosing to be your customer. This act alone will get many more to pay attention to you - and make the changes they want and they’ll probably become quite loyal.
There’s a real person behind that data - talk to them.”