Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Are rankings rank?

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Regular readers of this blog on Typepad (versus in a feed reader) will notice something different this morning. I deleted the badges for the AdAge Power 150 and Mack Collier’s Top Marketing Blogs.

I’ve never cared too much for blog ranking systems. Ranking systems are popularity contests, of one form or another, and just not my thing. I enjoy writing Marketing Roadmaps, am thrilled and honored that so many people get something out of it, and love reading your comments. This blog has never been and never will be about having a top ranking.

But I do follow the different systems so I understand what’s going on, and in all honesty, did get a kick out of being on the AdAge 150, albeit toward the back. I also think  Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs was a good effort.

The problem is that the source data these, and other, ranking systems use is, well, rank. As in "strong or offensive in odor or taste." And it just doesn’t seem to get any better.

Consider the following:

Bloglines has no idea of the total number of readers who’ve subscribed to my feeds. Or at least it can’t count them, and delivers a different set of choices each time you subscribe. Yup, I tried it this morning, and first time I was offered my old atom and rdf feeds, which are still active with subscribers, and the second time I was offered my feedburner feed and the rdf feed. Feedburner on the other hand has no problem counting them up and getting to a total number. But the AdAge ranking just uses one of the numbers. Does that mean it under-reports my Bloglines subscribers? Or is Feedburner double counting somehow? Who knows, and really who cares? Bloglines is so cluttered with inactive or duplicate accounts, it doesn’t matter which of these numbers is the right one. There are just so many opportunities for error, Bloglines subscribers is totally suspect as a measure of readership.

Alexa. Man, I just don’t get Alexa. Or rather, I just don’t get how it has managed to become an important measure. It counts page views by people who’ve installed the Alexa toolbar. Hmm. It seems that if you use the Alexa toolbar yourself, your ranking goes up. Mine went up 29% since I installed it last week. Hmm.

Google Page Rank. What Google bestoweth, Google taketh away. Just ask all the Posties who had their page rank reset to zero. I’m not fond of Pay Per Post (or whatever it is called now), but something that can be artificially reset to penalize is not a terribly good basis for a ranking system. Too bad Google already apparently owns the world.

And Technorati. Ah Technorati. You have had your problems over the years, but until last weekend, you were fairly consistent. Marketing Roadmaps had been hovering somewhere between 450-550 in authority, and in the top 10,000 blogs, for quite some time, even before the W list pulled some women, including me, up a bit. Because it represented people linking into a blog, it was more dynamic than counting feed subscribers. And you could *see* what the ranking was based on. That’s why I thought Mack Collier’s list was more representative of influence than measures that use subscribers or hits. But this weekend, Technorati imploded. God only knows what they did to the algorithm, but suddenly Marketing Roadmaps’ authority is in the 200s and we are nowhere near the top 10,000. Why? The same blogs are still linking in. I can’t imagine that EVERYONE who had the blog in their blogroll suddenly decided to drop me. We don’t know why things changed. And that’s the problem with using Technorati as a ranking measure. Not a big deal if it is just your ego taking the hit. But what if you are using a ranking system to set ad rates for your blog? Yeah, not so good.

Don’t even get me started on subjective ratings. Certainly, they are important for understanding the  influence of a blog or a blogger, but they are also situational and inherently biased. They do not belong in ranking systems.

I’ll continue to measure the health of this blog by your comments, visits and the general trending I see in Google Analytics and Feedburner. I applaud the folks who are trying to come up with systems to measure the influence of a blog or a blogger, but am not sure it is possible given the highly suspect data sources available to us.

So I’ve taken down the badges. Not sure I’ll ever put them back up.

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Customer Service (Part Two)

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(warning, long post)

As I wrote in my previous post, it seems we have a serious disconnect when it comes to customer service. At the same time we champion the "conversation" with the customer, the general level of customer service is decreasing. Sure, there are exceptions, but stories like Mir’s recent internet service "dis-service" and Mary’s lovely experience on American Airlines seem to be the norm.

I’ve been wondering, why? Do products just "suck more?"  Are the occasional wonderful customer service stories really that WONDERFUL or is it that they just exceed our now much lower expectations?

What is customer service excellence?

First, let’s hear from two of the bloggers I used in my examples: Mir Kamin and TDavid.They both replied to my questions in email so I’ll let them speak for themselves. In part three, I’ll share some of my thoughts on the subject.

Mir:

"I think the norm of shoddy customer service,and yes, in a lot of ways I do think it’s become the norm) is yet another symptom of our "fast food society." Look, I’ve said it over at Cornered Office (and somewhat more obliquely, at Woulda Coulda Shoulda), but I’ll spell it out right here: I was on a plan that only cost $6.95/month. I’m not saying I necessarily DESERVED to get screwed, but honestly, what did I expect for that amount of money? We want it faster and cheaper and as a consumer body, THAT is what we demand, rather than quality and courtesy, sadly.

That said, lesson learned over here, bigtime. I can make all the excuses I want — they promised me service, I bought that plan when I was first starting out and was worried I couldn’t afford more, whatever. I’m paying a lot more for my new service, and at least this has taught me that it’s worth every penny.

The businesses that triumph in America right now are the ones that can do it the cheapest and the most conveniently. That’s why the Walmarts continue to thrive while the heart-and-soul community mom-and-pop stores struggle. You can’t be cheap, convenient AND personal. It just doesn’t add up. And most of us simply cannot afford to go top-shelf for most things.

Until we as a consumer body start making a lot of noise and putting our dollars where our mouths are, it’s not going to change.

Think about the best customer service you’ve heard lately. I’ll bet it was the Zappos story of the woman who not only ended up having them basically white-glove a return for her, but sent her flowers in condolence because when she was talking to the rep she mentioned that her mother had died. Zappos is committed to customer service and they do it better than almost anybody out there, right now. They are also INCREDIBLY expensive. They have to be.

Now. All of that said, I think a VAST IMPROVEMENT in customer service is possible without spending billions of dollars, and that’s to encourage CSRs to act like they care. In my situation, a lot of my ire could’ve been circumvented had the CSRs involved simply apologized and/or seemed less apathetic. That doesn’t take that much time and it would’ve made a world of difference. Maybe in today’s "GIMME" society "the customer is always right" is an impractical goal, but when did we just plain stop being NICE to the customer?"

TDavid:

Do products just "suck more?"

"Either it’s very coincidental or there is a direct correlation between more ad-supported software and services and negative customer experiences.

Somewhere along the line beta and release software and, as in the Xbox 360 case, hardware have merged. This has noticeably lowered the overall quality of products and services on a wider scale. In some cases these days customers are being expected to become unwilling beta testers and sometimes even paying for the privilege like the Xbox 360.

It’s one thing to not be charged in a beta test, it’s another to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars and be told the only solution is out of warranty repair or buying more of the same faulty hardware.

Microsoft in their much publicized Red Rings of Death warranty extension didn’t cover another common problem: game/DVD disc read errors. So if you have a machine that’s older than one year and doesn’t read discs any more, they’ll expect you to pay to get that fixed or you’ll need a third party warranty.

On the software side, the amount of time new/upgrade versions are being turned around seems to be shortening so that just when you start to get to an acceptable level of usefulness and value, you’re being asked to pay for a new version and rinse, repeat."

Are the good stories really wonderful or do they just exceed our now much lower expectations?

"Expectation levels are lower now, but there are still some positive stories out there. Harder to find, but they’re out there.

These days if a company ships something that runs on the computer without causing installation migraines or turning our computing experience into slow-mo that’s cause for joy, where that should be expected. Demanded.

We’re putting up with more negative customer experiences in web 2.0 than we should. Sites, services and mashups being engineered poorly that if they become popular won’t meet demand without major restructuring. Some services have come to the rescue like Amazon S3 to address these needs and that’s a good thing, but I see a lot of web 2.0 headstones over the next couple years that couldn’t make a viable business plan out of being ad-supported. VCs are already pulling life support systems, flatline imminent.

But it’s not just Web 2.0.

Marvel came out with a paid product: their comics online for $9.99/month and they couldn’t even scale up to demand. Spider-man is on the phone looking for help.

How funny is that? If we paid to access comics — and couldn’t because the site was down — would we receive some proportional refund of the time we couldn’t access?"

What is customer service excellence?

"For web services: fast response time, good, reliable uptime (at least 99.5%). Essential for paid services.

For all services/products: Minimum amount of time and hassle solving issues and problems. Being treated like an important asset of the business rather than a nuisance. In the case of faulty workmanship on a product, fixing it with as minimal hassle as possible. Companies that recognize and reward loyalty through better deals on future business being conducted, sharing income from referral sales and creative promotions are providing a valuable service.

And good customer service includes having an easy to find telephone number on the company website with an operator on the other side — preferably without having to navigate through a machine — that speaks clearly and doesn’t resort to some canned script to answer questions.

Bad customer service is forcing customers to email their responses, fill out a form or navigate through some confusing knowledge base and wait who knows how long only to be sent a scripted response. Or being told you have to pay $$$ just to talk to a human being about the problem installing the software or hardware you just purchased."

Thanks, Mir and TDavid for giving us such meaty food for thought. Tomorrow, I’ll share some of mine.

Update 12/10: Just a couple of links apropos of the customer service conversation. Geoff Livingston tells us about the Comcast must die blog and Lauren Vargas shares a piss-poor email response from a craft supplies company.

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Blog Council

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By now most marketing and PR bloggers have heard about the new Blog Council — created by Andy Sernovitz, former head of WOMMA, 12 big company members, etc. etc. In fact, most marketing and PR bloggers have already written about it and I don’t have much to add. I’m going to reserve judgment until we see what the Council actually does.

However, I do have one comment, which is that I am once again disappointed by an industry group’s speaking roster. So far the Council appears to have had nine members-only presentations of some sort, with  13 speakers, some from vendors, some from member companies. 10 men (77%), 3 women (23%). Better than some recent events, but still not good enough.

We have to do better than this. I hope the Blog Council does.

If customer service is the new marketing (Part One)

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(warning, long post)

If customer service is the new marketing, why do so many companies have such crappy marketing?

In recent posts, Brian Solis and Kami Huyse both argued, with slightly different but generally similar perspectives, that customer service is the new marketing. In simple terms [and without any of the great nuances they shared, so read their posts 🙂  ] what they are getting at is that the customer’s experience with the company, with the product/brand, is what forms his decision to purchase, or not. And that experience is created by much more than exposure to a few marketing campaigns or the occasional customer service call. Blogs, online forums, word of mouth are all becoming part of this experience, and companies need to understand and respond appropriately.

Companies also have to understand that now more than ever, it is ALL about the customer. No matter how great the product, how wonderful the blog, without a customer, there is no business. Everyone in the company is in customer service. This was of course true before as well, but it is so much more obvious now. Simple things like an ill-placed blog comment or "astroturfing" positive anonymous comments on posts negative about a product create far more complications for a company than a rude customer service rep could in the "old days." We’ve got the proof, you see, in the email and RSS trail.

I agree with them on pretty much all counts. I have always believed in placing the customer at the center of our marketing activity. This is not an equivalent to saying "the customer is always right." She isn’t. We aren’t. But there are positive ways of handling negative situations, whether the company’s fault or the ubiquitous "operator error." It is possible to say "no, you can’t have it for free" or "not under warranty" or whatever it may be in a way that doesn’t leave the customer feeling cheated.

Why is it then, that there seem to be so many instances of bad, awful, terrible, nasty customer service? Here are just some of the more recent stories I’ve heard or read.

Popular mom blogger Mir Kamin’s websites went down in November. Her Internet provider WiredHub was unresponsive (and that’s putting it mildly) even after multiple days of outage. Yes, you read that right: no information, no response. And when the response did come, it wasn’t terribly comforting. Read her post for the details.

On her way back from Europe, marketing blogger Mary Schmidit got tagged with an overweight baggage charge from American Airlines. Even though the bag was an acceptable weight for international travel, because she switched carriers and had to recheck her bags,  the domestic carrier AA charged her the overweight tariff. She describes the tremendous sympathy of the airline employees here.

Shel Holtz learned that the motto of bank Washington Mutual didn’t extend all the way to actual practice when he tried to send money to his son, a soldier about to deploy to Iraq. The bank had closed his son’s account for being overdrawn $0.98, without any notification, and refused to reactivate it so Shel could deposit funds. He could open a new account, but that would mean a new ATM card, which would not reach his son before he left for Iraq. In other words, SOL. The good news: another financial insitution came through. [Kami Huyse also posted about this.]

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote about brands that didn’t respect his time. So far the only one mentioned in his post that hasn’t responded to him in some fashion is Delta Airlines. Jeneane Sessum wrote about Google inexplicably losing email messages.

These are just a few examples from the blogs I read from the month of November. Imagine what I might find if I really started to dig. No, in fact, don’t imagine that. It is too depressing.

I also had my own little customer service contre-temps in early November with a small specialty goods catalog company. I didn’t blog about it then, and am not naming the company here because it eventually was resolved satisfactorily, but it illustrates how the intermediation effect of email escalates situations.

The details:  I had ordered something more than a year ago. Manufacturer delay upon delay, they could not deliver the products. They had charged my credit card upon the order (not really good policy BTW), and when the product could not be delivered, instead of refunding the money, they issued a store credit with an expiration date.

Now, as we all know, this in itself is not legal, on two counts, but they are a small company, so I was willing to let it go and use the credit. Until  I placed an order on the website, and couldn’t use the credit.

So I emailed them, and learned that I had to call with my credit card number in order for the credit to be applied. They could not get the information from the web order. This seemed odd although I am certain the answer to that lies somewhere in the shopping cart they use.  So I tried to call. And there was NEVER any answer.

I finally followed up with yet another email asking them to resolve the situation, and was met with amazing email hostility from one of the business owners. Rude and disrespectful doesn’t even begin to cover it. It was apparently up to me to keep calling until I could reach someone, and I could not cancel the new order either. It was sounding more and more like they just didn’t want to give the credit.[ Twitter friends may recall this because one Sunday morning, I asked for opinions on whether to blog about it. ]

In the end, I didn’t over-react, sanity prevailed, and I got the credit. And the new merchandise I had ordered. But, just think about it — the vendor felt perfectly justified being downright rude to a customer. How can that happen? Sure, it is easier to be rude in bits and bytes than face-to-face or even on the phone, and that certainly creates some of the negative customer service that happens these days. But not all. Mary Schmidt was at the airport. So was Jeremiah. Shel Holtz went to the bank. 

If we can’t get this most basic thing right, how can we possibly expect to have a mutually beneficial "conversation" with our customer? Why is courtesy so uncommon in so many customer service situations?

I haven’t even touched on the issue of shoddy products. They are even more central to our experience. And just as much of a problem as poor customer service. Here’s just one example. Technology blogger TDavid has had five Xboxes in the past year. All but one returned under warranty. This can’t be helping the bottom line, yet wouldn’t we all say that a bottom line mentality is what causes the shoddy products in the first place?  

Now, of course, there are exceptions.  Who hasn’t heard the wonderful story of Zappos sending flowers to the woman whose mother had just died?  That’s exceptional customer service. In fact it is more than that. It is exceptional humanity.

But most positive customer service stories are much more mundane. Do we call them great because our expectations are so much lower, or is it truly great? For example, on two separate occasions, I had some problems with my Blackberry. Both times, Verizon call reps did a great job solving the problem, and following up with me to make sure the problem really was resolved. Do I call it great simply because cell phone providers usually get bad marks for customer support and my previous company  (rhymes with singular) did a horrible job? Or was it really great?

Part Two will try to answer some of  these questions, with some input from Mir and TDavid who were kind enough to share their thoughts with me.

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