Shaping the customer service experience

Improved customer service experience can be approached from two angles – business process changes or technology choices (or some combination of the two). I’d like to share some key trends shaping the business processes related to customer service today:

  • Take an “outside-in” approach: a growing number of businesses are realizing the importance of having a greater explicit customer interaction when designing new service processes. Service executives need to be asking themselves: “What is the customer’s experience as they consume the service?”
  • Traditional customer service tools have been “field based” or even “task based” – service executives need to move to more “intent driven” systems for customer service agents to use. Agents need to be empowered with a system that shows them a customer’s real context – their last interaction with your company, overall background, current sales deals, customer satisfaction. Give your agents a 360 degree view of the customer and things will inevitably improve.
  • Home service workers are a great way to improve response times, attain localized support teams for your global products or services and reduce operating costs. Although this does raise some unique challenges, it is definitely worth exploring.
  • Fear of taking responsibility: for customers, for change, for measurements. Few organizations want to empower a single person to change processes – especially with so many other variables in play. On the other hand, few service executives want to “stick their neck out” for fear of getting it cut off by upper management. Customer service executives need to take responsibility and ensure that their customer’s expectations are fully met.

Don’t forget: the customer’s experience needs to match your brand’s promise. If you’re in a competitive market (aren’t we all), customer service can be the differentiator between you and your competition.

PBwiki – A typical day at the office

We’re big fans of spicy food here at PBwiki and so today we set up a contest at the office to see who can take down the spiciest hot sauce within a set period of time.

The rules:

The participants:

Ramit: <I’m super impressed that Kristine actually competed>

Kristine: <This is what happens when you work with a bunch of men – you end up chugging hot sauce. This time Ramit is going down – way down >

The first taste:

hotsauce-competition.png

Second thoughts after the second round – Paul has the defibrillator handy:

hotsauce_5.png

David acted as the judge and jury:

daves-insanity.png

This is why you should come work with us at PBwiki.

Great Expectations (Management)

One of the skills every marketer (if not every person) needs to master is the art of managing expectations.

Managing expectations is a “Goldilocks” task–too high, and they’ll be impossible to meet; too low, and they’ll detract from your accomplishments; just right, and you’ll be a hero.  Of the potential pitfalls, high expectations are perhaps the most dangerous.

High expectations are seductive.  It feels good to have everyone saying good things about you.  “The Next Bill Gates” is a favorite chestnut that the business press dusts off whenever a hot new company with a photogenic founder appears on the scene (see Andreesen, Marc; Abrams, Jonathan; and Rose, Kevin).  But no matter how good it feels to ride the wave of hype, sooner or later, you’ll have to deliver the goods.  Too-high expectations carry a double-whammy: When they prove to be wrong, not only is the result a downer, it kills your credibility.

Take the impact of expectations on the current U.S. presidential race.  Senator Hillary Clinton began as the prohibitive favorite.  As recently as November, the Iowa Futures Market (the best predictor of presidential politics, since real money is at stake)  showed that her chances of earning the Democratic nomination were 75%.  That’s what made her third place finish in Iowa so shocking.  And as a result, in the immediate aftermath of the loss, she plummeted to a projected 25% chance of winning the nomination.

 

After that, however, the expectations game shifted.  Now the high expectations shifted to Senator Barack Obama, as a tidal wave of coverage (helped along by his own strength at inspirational oratory) sent his poll numbers skyrocketing.

But while the excitement helped Obama’s campaign in many ways, allowing expectations to get ahead of reality came back to haunt him.

Clinton had held a 17-point lead in New Hampshire, but it seemingly crumbled overnight as poll after poll showed Obama leading in the state.  On election night, Clinton squeaked out a 3-point win.  So who actually won?  Was it Obama, for making up 14 points in less than a week, only to fall short at the end?  Or was it Clinton, who held off her challenger when all expected her to lose.

The race was close enough for either explanation to take hold, but it was the latter narrative of Clinton’s resurgence (despite being a frontrunner who had lost 14 points off her lead) that ended up holding sway.

We saw a near replay on Super Tuesday this week.  After the South Carolina election (an unexpectedly large victory for Obama), Hillary and Bill Clinton indicated that they expected an overall victory once they took their message to the broader public.

Once again an Obama surge in the polls dropped the expectations for Clinton; I often thought that the national media was openly rooting for Obama to land a knockout blow.  Here in California, poll after poll indicated that Obama had closed a 20-point lead, and had even pulled ahead of Clinton.

When the dust settled, an objective analysis showed a near-perfect tie.  Obama won more states, but Clinton won the bigger prizes in New York and California.  Obama won the critical swing state of Missouri, but Clinton overcame a tidal wave of endorsements to win Massachusetts.  Obama came out with slightly more delegates, but it was statistically insignificant.

So who did win?  Nobody.  But both campaigns tried to frame the results as a win for their side–Obama by pointing out that he had overcome a big deficit in the earlier polls, Clinton, by arguing that she had done better than projected in the most recent polls.

Just politics?  Perhaps, but just ask the folks at Joost, who went from being the future of television (Sequoia had to beg Joost to take their money), to the walking dead in less than 9 months.

Great expectations require even greater execution.  ‘Tis better to set and exceed realistic goals than it is to ride the wave of hype…right into the trash heap.

Software-as-a-Service: Give 'em what they want

We’ve come a long way since the early days of Salesforce.com, when Marc Benioff was blazing a trail with his “No Software” campaign.  Back then, the big question was whether or not corporate IT departments would ever accept on-demand software, as opposed to the traditional approach of on-premise hosting.

Here’s what Sun had to say:

At an event Sun hosted recently, one room was filled with CTOs from some of the world’s largest on-line companies; the room next door was filled with CIOs — from a broad spectrum of companies from China, Japan, Europe and North America. As Mr. Schwartz spoke with attendees from each room, he noticed that not a single company in the CTO room paid for software. They were interested in open source or software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives. In contrast, not a single company in the CIO room allowed free software without a commercial support contract. Not one.

There are two clear implications for ISVs. First, the time to move to the SaaS business model is yesterday. Your customers are asking for it; your competitors are offering it; it gives you a way to grow subscription revenue and move your service offering to the SMB market at the same time. Second, the cost of downtime is an overarching concern for customers. If you can deliver your software as a service, on demand, with extremely high levels of availability, you can win over both the CIO and the CTO.

That’s music to our ears.  Here at PBwiki, we have one simple business principle: give ’em what they want.  We’re convinced that offering a reliable, easy-to-use service is the best way to serve our users and customers.  That’s why we’re the #1 SaaS wiki for business collaboration.

How has SaaS made a difference in your organization?

PBwiki co-founders will be speaking in Palo Alto on Monday, February 4th

This Monday Monday, February 4th, we (the PBwiki co-founders) will be speaking at an SDforum event on PBwiki and entrepreneurship. We’ll talk about how we grew, what the technical/organizational challenges were, and how we spread the word about PBwiki.

If you want us to speak about anything in particular, just leave a comment here and we’ll definitely cover it. But we’d love to see you there!

“At an all-night SuperHappyDevHouse event in May 2005, David Weekly spent 7 hours coding a simple hosted wiki service from concept to production-available. Within 48 hours of launching, PBwiki was adopted by over a thousand groups as news of the service spread on blogs like LifeHacker and BoingBoing. PBwiki is used by the SDForum Startup SIG, and is extremely easy to use: its name suggests it’s as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich.

Fast-forward 2.5 years and PBwiki:

  • Runs 300,000 wikis for millions of montly users.
  • Supports 20,000 businesses, including AT&T, Wal-Mart, and 1/3 of the Fortune 500.
  • Has 11+ fulltime employees and several part-timers and contractors.
  • Has received $2.5 million funding from Ron Conway, Seraph Group and Mohr Davidow.

We’re delighted to host PBwiki’s founders, David Weekly, Ramit Sethi, and Nathan Schmidt.”

SDforum charges $15 if you’re not a member (see their event calendar here).

Get the full details here.

If at first you don't persuade, try, try again (The Rule of Six)

One of the most important principles of marketing is persistence.  Every marketer I’ve ever worked with has said that a target has to be exposed to your message at least six times before it sinks in.

At first, I wasn’t certain if I believed them.  After all, six times seems kind of arbitrary, and I never saw any scholarly research to back it up (I am so ancient that this was actually in the pre-Google days, and you had to go to the library to look anything up).

Yet as the years went by and I heard it from more and more people, I came to accept it…which just illustrates the power of this homely rule.

But there are also some important implications to this rule that most people forget, especially in this age of instant gratification.

If it takes six impressions to make an impact, the relationship between marketing and results is non-linear.  In a linear world, buying 1 week of ads would drive 10% awareness, 2 weeks 20%, and so on.  Here’s a quick table for emphasis:

Week 1: 10%
Week 2: 20%
Week 3: 30%
Week 4: 40%
Week 5: 50%
Week 6: 60% 

But in the non-linear world of the rule of 6, the results actually look more like this:

Week 1: 0%
Week 2: 0%
Week 3: 0%
Week 4: 0%
Week 5: 0%
Week 6: 60%

If you give up after Week 5, you’ll have spent 83% of the money and achieved 0% of your goal.  You can only achieve a worthwhile ROI if you have the stomach to stick with your guns and keep sending your message out, even without visible results.

I have a theory on why this principle works.  I believe that what’s actually happening is that a lot of the effects of marketing are exponential, rather than linear.  That’s why overnight success is generally an oxymoron.

What’s actually happening is that the press only picks up on the effects of “week six” marketing–the debut album, or the starring role in a sleeper hit that shocks Hollywood–and completely ignores the previous five weeks of marketing–the years of playing in clubs and building up a fan base, working for scale in indie movies and making the right contacts.

In my own life, I began 2002 as a failed entrepreneur who had managed to lose $6 million of investor money.  I had no job, no money, and no reasonable prospects (caveat: I did have degrees from Stanford and Harvard Business School, but we’ll ignore those for the time being).

It was around that time that I started getting involved in professional organizations such as SDForum and HBS Tech.  It was also around that time that I decided to change my hermit-like workaholic ways, and start reaching out to venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs.  And I started using something called Blogger that had recently been launched, and was being run by a single dogged entrepreneur named Evan Williams.

For years, it was difficult to see how those activities were making a difference.  Those were weeks 1-5.  But fast-forward to today, and all the little things and persistence ended up making a big difference.  I’ve met hundreds of wonderful people since then, including the founders at PBwiki, whom I invested in, and later joined, and PBwiki’s main VC backers.  And most of these good things have happened in just the past 18 months (helped along by a heck of a boom in our industry).

But if I had gotten discouraged with entrepreneurship and decided to cash in my chips by becoming a consultant or investment banker, I would never have had all these great experiences.

Marketing is hard, and the rule of six makes it harder.  You have to be willing to persist, even when all the standard measures scream for you to pull back and give up.  But if you’ve made the right call, and you persevere through day six, you may find you’ll get the chance to bask in the glory of your “overnight success.”

Putting Customers First

I’m nearing my first two months here at PBwiki and as they say, time flies when you’re having fun! We’ve come a long way since I started:

  • We’ve setup support metrics and begun measuring the team (and the company) wherever possible
  • We’ve added 2 more great people to round out our support team
  • We’ve improved the PBwiki community and our entire team here at PBwiki is actively involved 

And the best part – we’ve got a lot more on the way in the coming weeks!  We’ve made some conscious decisions to ensure that our customer’s needs come first – our support team is actively working to ensure that the answers you receive are high quality and relevant to your situation. Although we sacrificed some speed for this, we feel this is the right decision - I’ve received some great feedback from many of you (keep it coming!) with regards to our new support processes – here’s one that I got just today: 

I gotta tell you, I am MUCH happier with your help on my recent help ticket (and for hearing me out with my complaints about past help tickets) then I would have expected. You guys are doing good things on the customer relations front, and I appreciate it 🙂     

So, for those of you that are already using PBwiki – thanks for sticking with us, we’ll make sure we continue getting better at everything we do. And for those of you not using PBwiki – what are you waiting for?!  Hear what our users are talking about and get involved in the discussions here! 

You Get What You Inspect, Not What You Expect

When I started my first company (long, long ago in a valley not so far away), I learned a valuable lesson from Jim Fitzsimmons, the guy I recruited to be CEO.

Jim had experience both as an entrepreneur, and as a corporate manager (he had been assistant controller of all of Pepsico), and he had a favorite saying:

“Chris, you get what you inspect, not what you expect.”

Translation?  Unless you can define success in measurable terms, you’re not likely to achieve it.

This is why metrics are the lifeblood of marketing.  Just as professional military commanders understand that logistics are usually more important than the oh-so-sexy field of strategy, so professional marketers understand that metrics are more important than flashier cousins like branding and positioning.

Unlike Sales or Engineering, where everyone knows how to measure the results (“How much did you sell?”  “Does the product work?”), Marketing is not blessed with such simple metrics.  While it is important to be in the right sector of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, inclusion or exclusion doesn’t determine the fate of your company.  And don’t forget, Pets.com had great brand awareness.

There are marketers that slide by on pleasant talk and cool advertisements–these are often enough, especially in large organizations, to satisfy questions about the marketing budget–but startups don’t have that luxury.

It’s a challenge, but you have to pick the metrics that matter, and then manage to them.

My personal philosophy is to manage sales support and branding/awareness separately.  Measure your lead generation programs on the sales they generate (and how cost-effectively they do so), and separately agree on the amount you’re willing to spend to generate awareness and PR.

Even then, I believe it is important to set PR targets such as # of mentions and article placements.  Otherwise, it is far to easy to spend $20K/month on a PR agency without knowing what you’re really getting.

Figuring out what to measure isn’t easy, but if you do a good job of defining your goals, it makes your ability to judge your success (and justify your budget) far greater than relying on that old-fashioned blarney.

Support Happenings: Satisfaction

As most of you know, we recently locked up our forums and started a new community discussion space here. A number of you emailed me directly asking for more insight into how we made our decision here at PBwiki. So, rather than send out a mass email, here’s the answer:

The problems with classic forums are well known, particularly in the context of mainstream customer service. The best answers get buried in long conversations, they breed endless duplicate topics, they’re hard to search, they tend to be either under-populated or clubby. They generally aren’t friendly or inviting to casual use. We’re using Satisfaction to harness open conversation without falling into these traps. One example of how we’re doing this so far is the “talk box” at the top of the page-by merging the process of actually asking a question and searching. The result is very few duplicate topics, and more focused engagement around the issues. The pages are designed to be more like blog posts, with each topic creating a focused conversation piece that makes sense even when entered from a Google search. The conversation threads themselves are more personal.

From the standpoint of customer service, traditional forums are too general purpose to be that useful. We’re building tools that support the distinct activities that dominate conversations between our customers and the PBwiki team – questions, problems and ideas. There are outcomes and interactions in these activities that forums just are not suited to support. Satisfaction provides us the ability to mark certain answers as “official responses,” and our community to vote best answers to the top. This has the surprising effect of auto-generating FAQs based on the real interactions with and between our customers.The result is a more trusting, valuable conversation space. The value of this approach for providing a higher level of support will become apparent over time -or so we’re betting.

Feel free to join me (and the rest of the PBwiki Team) here as we talk more about why we made the switch – we’d love to hear any feedback you’ve got for us.

Education is Compression

Last night, Nathan (the CTO) and I were talking with our roommate Ben, who at 22 is working on his first startup and naturally has a lot of questions about the process. We were all somewhat surprised by how much wisdom we could communicate to Ben in about half an hour of discussion, but then it became clear to me: education is the compression of others’ experiences into rapidly transferable knowledge.

Were it faster to just have the experience, education would be meaningless. A well-taught math course can generally teach a student several centuries of discovery per year.  Reading the journals of the best minds in a field is much less efficient (and, for most, less effective) than reading a well-written summary of their work.

Wikis let people collect and compress knowledge continuously, making it discoverable and usable. Wikis mirror the very processes by which education operates. It’s no wonder that hundreds of thousands of educators found us before we found them. It’s good that your customers can help slap some sense into you and give you a clue.

-David Weekly, Founder & CEO of PBwiki