It is an inescapable part of our existence that we have to make important decisions in our private and professional lives without sufficient amount of information. In fact, in most cases, there is no amount of information that can make an output of a decision to be certain. We can only improve our odds (i.e., increase a probability of a decision to produce the desired outcome) by making a “good” decision. The process includes gathering relevant information, analyzing it and making good judgment in an effort to reduce economic uncertainty.

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” — Will Rogers

Presumably management decisions are made by experienced people, and the more important these decisions are, the more experienced are the people who suppose to make it. However, people who make it to the higher ranks in management hierarchy are often those who avoided making mistakes before or at least managed not to be caught making them. In other words, most career-minded people often display a risk-averting behavior. If this is true, then the management decision-making process is irrational according to Dan Ariely, the author of best-selling books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. In his blog post, Dan wrote:

”Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”

One needs to make uncommon decisions to achieve uncommon results, even though the consequences of being wrong can be devastating. Just ask Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappo.com, who decided to allocate most of his marketing budget to fund customer support call center and to turn upside down the most common Customer Service Reps’ performance measurements. Their call center has become their marketing growth engine that generates customer retention, Word of Mouth and revenue per customer returns that outpace common marketing investment performance by a wide margin.

We often rely on the “knowledge” of the past, while the rate of change around us seems to escalate relentlessly, and traditional approaches to gathering, analyzing and judging the relevance of information we consume to make decisions today seem to be less than adequate. Big help could be found in uncommon sources of empirical information and market intelligence, particularly if it challenges your institutional orthodoxy. Change requires courage and conviction according to Jim Farley, Group VP, Global Marketing, Sales and Service at Ford Motor Company. Here is what he said in a recent interview with Brian Solis:

This analysis was updated. Click to see the new report

I am getting ready to buy one, but buying one is just a beginning of the experience. The trick is to select the DMR that will give me more joy than a headache. Somebody said that there are 3 kinds of people:
1. people who learn from other people mistakes
2. people who learn from their own ones, and
3. people who never learn.
Let’s try to be the first kind of people and learn from others about their DMR experiences.

Let’s start with filtering the DMRs that have most customer reviews available on Social Media venues as there is a safety in numbers. I am not saying “Eat shit – 5,000,000 flies can’t be wrong!”, but there is a value in statistically representative information and it is much more difficult to plant a large number of reasonably descriptive customer reviews – just ask the Idiot Marketers who tried and got caught.

Comparing the “stars” of these receivers does not reveal much

as all of them sport 3.5-4 stars forcing me to sift through hundreds of reviews to decipher which one would give me the most satisfaction with the least risk and headache. This problem provided motivation for development of Opinion Miner® software and applications that are using it to produce the following score card.

The green shadowed cells indicate the highest score for an attribute and the red one highlight customer disappointment.

This makes my selection much easier as I can see that Roku XD delighted their customers with most of the attributes important to them. More than any other receiver we considered. However I also have information to make this decision personal, not just following the math – I do not buy from a company that disappoints their customers with Customer Support that makes…..

Drum rolls please!

The winner of 2010 Piplzchoice Award in the Digital Receiver Category is Apple TV 2010

As Samsung reported shipping over 600,000 units the first month after introduction, Galaxy Tab customers started to publish reports of their experiences with this exciting product on the online customer review sites and other social media venues. Not surprisingly many of them compare it to Apple iPod tablets.

A new study of 1,142 customer reviews available online, revealed that both tablets Customer Satisfaction exceeds customer expectations  by 17% and 15% respectively, which is well within margin of error. Both products fall short of customer expectations when it comes to Price/Value, however Galaxy Tab customers seem to think it offers better value and prefer its smaller size.

Galaxy Tab buyers are citing Android open platform and availability of Flash as critical reason for their purchasing decision, however Samsung and/or carriers poor customer support of this tablet may cause it fail to its claim of becoming an “iPad killer”.

Analysis Methodology: For this study we aggregated consumer-generated reviews published through November 26, 2010 on multiple popular public sites. This data was analyzed with our proprietary Opinion Miner software. The complete data set of competitive products, services and brands selected by Amplified Analytics’ customers is collected, monitored for updates, processed and analyzed through a paid arrangement. Source Data and attributes analysis for each model is available by request at info@amplifiedanalytics.com

Many Social Media proponents, activists and analysts express strong believe that its advance creates revolutionary changes to role and importance of consumer voice in market dynamics.

So far it gave birth to hordes of consultants and marketing services that promote ideas of influencer chasing and reputation management monitoring technologies, however the “scream” of offerings seem to counteract the idea of increasing the volume of the voice of customer.

One example is a number of websites, offering depository of customer reviews about products and/or services, outnumber the customers who are willing and capable to contribute to these depositories. The end result seems to be counterproductive as consumers who look for such information are hassled to sites that have no content to offer.

Some companies spend substantial energy to explore and pursue some form of activity involving Social Media and there are very few, but loudly celebrated examples of those. However that doesn’t seem to change overall reputation of these companies. One of my favorite whipping “boys” – Comcast is still rated dismally for the delivery of their customers experience, despite heroic efforts of their Social Media team on Twitter and Facebook.  Here is another example, a darling of the Social Media mavens – LinkedIn. Based on Customer Service Scoreboard scores

LinkedIn is ranked #253 out of the 273 companies that have a CustomerServiceScoreboard.com rating with an overall score of 19.35 out of a possible 200. This score rates LinkedIn customer service and customer support as Terrible.

There 56 negative comments vs 1 positive one and most of them by paying subscribers, who cannot get their issues resolved. Ironically the 19.35 score is below the LinkedIn lowest monthly subscription fee of $24.95.

I know that 56 complains is a very small number considering millions of people who use the network, but I wonder what is a percentage of them who actually use it actively enough to care, and even more interesting is how many actually pay for it. I personally am one of them and my experience is one of neglect. I have an issue outstanding for almost two years without resolution. The issue resurface from time to time and causes me a lot of aggravation and waste of time. I finally decided to use LinkedIn Inmail to escalate the problem to the founder of the company, Reid Hoffman.

On 7/2/10 12:18 PM, Gregory Yankelovich wrote:
——————–
I am expending a valuable Inmail credit and hope that you will read it.

This is the 3rd time I am erroneously locked out of my ability to ask for Introduction. I am paying customer, but I cannot get resolution for almost 2 years. The 1st time I have experienced this problem, I reported it 10/27/2008 and I am having problems with it once again and it negatively impacts my efforts to bring my product to the market.

I rely heavily on my network to reach out to potential customers and partners. However every time I encounter this problem I have to wait for 2-3 days for your Customer Support to reset the system’s counters. 2-3 days are a long time to waste in the life of a startup. I understand the power of reputation more than most people and don’t want to scream #fail all over Twitter. Please help.

To Reid’s credit he responded

Gregory,
I am reading it; I’ll put your issue into the executive escalations. Since I don’t know what you’re doing that hits problems, I don’t know if we support what you’re doing or not. (For example, not saying that this is what you’re doing, but we have very clear messaging limits to prevent spam.)
Hope it all works out. (And, btw, you can write what you feel is right on twitter: I apologize for where we step when we’re wrong or slow.)
all the best,
Reid

However his response was the only one, I am still waiting for any contact from the Customer Support. I eventually did express my frustration on Twitter:

Wasted yet another day waiting for help from #LinkedIn technical support – still no love.

What is a reasonable response time for #customersupport? Does anyone else has #LinkedIn Introduction Withdrawal or is it just me?

and here the reaction I have received

@piplzchoice Do you have a free linkedin account? If so, be thankful you get to use linkedin at all. Just sayin.

I did not write this to whine about my “misfortunes”, but to explore what, if anything, is actually changing with advent of Social Media in respect to the treatment of the customers. Advertisers keep complaining how difficult it is to gain share of consumer attention, yet when a company like LinkedIn or Facebook, does manage to do it, and end up raising enormous amounts of capital based on that fact, our attention doesn’t seem to be that valuable anymore. Let’s face it, Social Media is nothing more than another communication channel, like a next generation of telephone, radio, TV and email. All of these improved our life experiences at some cost to our privacy or quality of life, but how we use these channels is the only thing that may influence how Market delivers our Customer Experiences.

As consumers we all can recall the experiences that have left us feeling abused and mistreated by companies we have selected to give our money to. In some instances I promised to myself never to come back for more and kept my promise – I would rather go back to dial-up ISP than deal with Comcast.

According to the research of Bruce Temkin, former Forrester analyst and an authority on Customer Experience management,

In Forrester’s 2010 Customer Experience Ranking of 133 companies, Comcast came in 126th for it’s Internet business and 125th for its TV service. It also came in 105th/109th out of 114 companies in the 2008 rankings and 95th/101st out of 112 firms in the 2007 rankings.

The point of this writing is not to bash Comcast, even though it definitely deserves bashing, but to ask an important question: Does the Customer Experience (or Customer Satisfaction) really matter if in spite of its miserable scores a company like Comcast can produce healthy profits?

These financial statements show steady growth in revenues and profits over the same periods, and the numbers do not provide any evidence to support the belief that mistreatment of the customers is a good business practice.

I have posed this question to Bruce and his response

“@piplzchoice Good question. Cust exp is a long-term asset. Comcast (and others in the industry) are squandering it. It will catch up to them.”

This response is encouraging, but not entirely satisfying because it appeals to emotional belief (faith). I would prefer some empiric evidence of correlation between profitability and customer experience ratings or reputation.

I have heard about Claes Fornell of CFI Group who has done very interesting work in that field, but yet to learn more about that methodology.

To be fair, one example, particularly of a company that operates in rapidly growing market with very few competitors, does not offer any meaningful insight and I would love to find some other, more representative examples.

Woody Allen once said – “I would gladly accept existence of God if he would give me some evidence of his existence, like transferring $5M to my Swiss bank account”. Please let me know if you are aware of any definitive studies and/or methodologies that quantify and/or predict financial performance based on the Customer Experience – I am still faithful, but yearn for evidence.

I understand brand as a collection of products, marketed under common name/trademark by a specified company.  While the brand is “owned” by a company, perhaps a symbolic image of a brand resides within the minds of consumers.  Formerly, when tenative threats were made to a brand, it could take months for it to be publicly identified.  Social media has altered the timeframe to mere minutes.

Recent blogs discussing the topic of real-time brand management were based on the March 13 Virgin America flight detained for more than 4 hours due to inclement weather.  I find the debate quite interesting.   The story suggests passengers and crew on this flight became quite restless and nerves were waning.  During this time, David Martin, the CEO of Kontain.com, utilized a social media app on his IPhone to “share” the unbelievable experience.

This effort initiated a phone call to Martin from a Virgin marketing officer with a $100 voucher proposal for his inconvenience.  His response was that all the passengers deserved more.  Subsequently, he was called by Virgin’s CEO, David Cush where Martin maintains he negotiated a full refund and a $100-per-person voucher for all passengers.

While you cannot amend the acts of Mother Nature, I am concerned that spontaneous reflexes such as this will begin to emerge when they are more likely very expensive patches for inadequate customer service processes or poor brand management.    A deeper analysis of root causes for poor customer experiences with a goal of the these causes systematic elimination constitutes a real “function” of brand management.

In response to the Virgin account John Sviokla suggested, “Every company must have “a brand radar system” to constantly monitor social media.”  He also states in a recent blog for the Harvard Business Review that businesses need to adjust to the new reality of being “on stage” at all times.   However, Real-time brand management is more than responding at the speed of a tweet.  Conceivably, we should strive for real-time identification, monitoring and analysis of customer feedback in an effort to develop a consistent set of rules that makes our brand stand out. 

I used to have a sign in my office that said – “Happiness is expectation management” that could be interpreted as “It’s hard to be disappointed if you don’t expect much”. Apparently this wisdom does not resonate with a lot of consumers:

A recent Brandweek article titled “Retail Customer Service Stinks” reported that the service received by shoppers in over 1000 retail interactions in the study rated 48.2 out of a possible 100 points – a flunking grade. The study, conducted by the research firm The Salt and Pepper Group, examined retail interactions in 73 stores over a four-month period.

This quote, and the others to follow, came from an excellent article by @RetailProphet appropriately called  How Consumers Killed Customer Service. In this article, the writer puts responsibility for deteriorating Customer Service on the shoulders of Consumers with our focus on low price.

We demanded the lowest airfare wherever we flew. We went to the buy-one-get-one sales. We made Walmart what it is today. We camped out for Black Friday. We built the dollar store channel. The bottom line is that we voted with our wallets and customer service lost. We killed customer service.

I’m glad this is finally articulated as I’ve felt this way for a long time. It is rare to see an advertising campaign that is focused on quality of experience, and the only differentiator seems to be the price. These unbalanced optimization attempts inevitably trigger a “law of unintended consequences”. Results range from retail stores, that both feel and smell like dumps, to rising costs of waste disposal caused by purchases of low quality products, that do not last and are priced too low to fix. Apparently most of us do not value the extra time, effort and energy wasted to deal with inferior products and services, to balance the economics of our decisions.

Examples of better balanced services (Apple Store, Nordstrom, etc) point to the fact that market segmentation works as intended and some of us, who expect more than just the lowest  price, can still find better experiences.

For most of us it’s become a matter of making trades and concessions based on the type of product, the brand, or the store we choose to shop at. Just as we don’t expect the lowest price for a laptop at the Apple Store, we can’t in good conscience demand brilliant service at Sears, whose stores have become a virtual sea of sale banners. And if in fact we really can’t live with that trade-off, then I’m afraid we’ll need to rethink our definition of value as consumers and as a society.