The Role of Delight in Crossing the Chasm

People choose a new technology when they’re ready to. As Rogers noted, Early Adopters just like playing around with technology. They’re the ones with Apple Newtons and Microsoft Tablet PCs in their attic. Early Adopters don’t need complete solutions – they want to play with the latest toy.

The next wave of adopters, the Early Majority, use technology to solve problems. They like tech, but they have work to do and don’t have time to play around. Fortunately, the early adopters were there first: they helped iron out the kinks and create the solution for the second wave.

The challenge, as Geoffrey A. Moore wrote in Crossing the Chasm, is bridging the gap between the Early Adopters and Early Majority. How do you convince those hesitant people that your gadget is ready for prime time?

One of the things I’ve studied for years is the role of customers in driving long-term revenue growth – how crucial their advocacy and input are to success. This applies to the Chasm as well.

The way to bridge the chasm is through the advocacy of early adopters. If you develop your solution with them, make them your advocates, you’ve got a hit on your hands.

Which raises the big question: how do you make those early adopters passionate about your product? Not by easing their pain, not just by providing a relevant product. You do it by delighting them. That delight ignites the passion.

Example? Check this out.

Products vs. Ecosystems

Some worthwhile words from FutureLab on designing products vs ecosystems here.

It’s true – you’re not designing a product, you’re designing an experience, and the more thorough job you do, the more loyal your customers will be.

When Innovation Sucks

Let’s talk about airport body scanners.

This is amazing technology – a non-invasive (physically) way to tell if an air passenger is packing a weapon. So why, then, do the devices have so many detractors, and so few defenders?

All innovation includes a cost. It might be a monetary cost, and it might be the cost of learning new habits, systems, ways of thinking. If the value outweighs the cost, we adopt the innovation. For my company, moving from Outlook to Google Apps was worth re-thinking how to sort and file email.

But for body scanners, the passengers have spoken: the cost is greater than the perceived value.

True innovations have a positive “net value” for consumers, and this one doesn’t. It’s being forced on us. If we saw the value, we’d embrace it. But it appears that, for a great many people, the cost of regular invasions of privacy – both the scanner and the alternative patdown – are higher than the perceived chances of encountering an inflight bomb.

I’ve written before about the difference between invention and innovation. An invention is a new product. An innovation is something that creates new value for people. Have we seen this before? Sure. The interactive voice menus you get when you call just about any company. Who benefits from them? Only the company that fired the receptionist. Few customers would herald these systems as creating new value for them.

Voice menus didn’t cause a revolt, however – the stakes were too low. But foist a high-cost “innovation” on masses of people, without enough perceived value, and get ready to encounter naked aggression.

Update Your “Contact Us” Page

Here’s a piece I did for Businessweek on how we’re still using those hoary old “contact us” pages.

Why Most Brands Suck

A friend recently told me about a meeting at which a senior marketing manager said, “We need to change our name – we need a new brand.”

It’s pretty shocking to hear nonsense like that from a senior marketing manager. Someone actually thought that changing a name is equal to creating a new brand?

A brand, of course, is a lot more than a name. But what is it? People seem pretty confused on that point. One hears words like “reputation”, “personality”, or the “impression” that a company’s products or services make. Considering the studies showing that strong brands boost stock price and market cap, you’d think that marketers would have pinned this down a bit better.

A brand is more than a name or an impression: a brand is a combination of the company name and associated symbols, the visceral impression people have of the company, and the experience that’s created whenever someone has any kind of contact with your company, be it products, services, or support. Most marketers, like the one at the meeting I mentioned, don’t get beyond the first two. When we evaluate our brands, we should be asking, “what is the experience we’re creating?”

And that’s why most brands suck. Most companies don’t have a clue about the experience they’re creating. If they did, they’d realize that those experiences aren’t very good, for the most part.

To understand how good or bad your brand is, you have to define what the experience is, not just for customers, but for vendors and investors too – anyone that’s touched by your company.

Brand is bigger than just the products. At my old bank, no one took charge of my experience – personnel came and went, and I never knew who was responsible for my account. No one was tasked with seeing that I walked away satisfied. But that didn’t stop them from sending me a survey so I could evaluate their “brand.” My experience: being lost, ignored, and then taken for granted.

Buy a PC in a big-box store. Then buy a computer in an Apple store, where someone will help you set up your computer, transfer your files, and see that you’re taken care of. The latter experience: being cared for and considered important.

Another example: I spoke with someone who called up two manufacturers to price some equipment. One company sent a price list. The other one sat down with him and asked about his needs and what support they could give. After the sale, they checked in to see how things were going. The experience: I am more than just a sale.

So, want to build your brand? You’ve got 3 questions to address:

1. What’s my brand experience?
2. How do I measure what’s defining that brand experience?
3. How am I going to improve that experience (what am I doing in the next 12 months to improve the brand experience)?

Anything less than those three, and you’re not on firm ground.

How to Drive Customers Away AT&T Style

A couple of days ago I offered a general primer on driving customers away. Now here’s a specific example.

A colleague of mine who uses AT&T recently called customer service. That went fine – they fixed his problem in a professional manner. But then he got an automated callback from the company asking him to complete a survey. The voice said:

“If you are the person who recently interacted with the automated telephone system on the phone, and you can participate now, Press1. If you do wish to participate, we thank you for your business and look forward to serving you the next time. You can simply hang up.”

[He presses 1]

“… Press 1. If you do wish to participate. We thank you for your business and look forward to serving you the next time. You can simply hang up.”

[He presses 1 again]

“… Press 1. If you do wish to participate. We thank you for your business and look forward to serving you the next time. You can simply hang up.”

[He presses 1 again]

“… Press 1. If you do wish to participate. We thank you for your business and look forward to serving you the next time. You can simply hang up.”

[He simply hangs up]

Building Loyalty

A very good post today on Customers Rock! about customer loyalty. The nub of it:

You must measure the customer experience continuously.

I couldn’t agree more.

Netflix Kills the “Contact Us” Page – Good Riddance!

One element of the Internet that hasn’t evolved along with everything else is the Contact Us page. Usually it’s a static form asking for your information, and offering a text box for filling in the reason why you’re contacting the company.

Businesses should look at their website statistics to check how many people actually fill out these forms. It’s a negligible number. So we’ve got a problem:

1. You can’t not have a way for someone to contact the company from the website
2. The static Contact Us form is a lousy way to do it

Netflix gets it right. Their Contact Us page offers a series of options for why you’re contacting them. Need to report a shipping problem? Click “shipping” and you’ll see which titles you’ve ordered recently. Having trouble with the streaming service? Click “streaming” and an engaging, conversational interactive form appears to help you troubleshoot the problem and report it.

Granted Netflix has advantages because you’re logged into your account when you get to their page, allowing for tight integration with the Netflix CRM. But anyone can run with this idea.

Dump your static form. Engage your customers – show them you’re listening.

Architecture and Experience

A project I’m working on now – helping the Portland Police Bureau design their next-generation collaboration system – got me thinking of how people get the process of software design wrong. Far too often, people start by trying to define the functionality of the software application. “We want it to do this. We want to do that.” And they end up with a long list of requirements that they send off to the coders to magically make whole. That’s a sure way to fail.

One thing I’ve learned working with software development is that software is 80% architecture and 20% coding. The real art is in the architecture. Once you’ve got that down, the coding is easy.

But architecture design is hard and complex. You need to do some deep thinking about how the pieces fit together. You also need to understand how it will allow for future development, for good software is a living organism that evolves, not a fixed product. That’s because we – the users – evolve, and so do our needs.

This architecture is also multi-dimensional. There are six key levels you need to consider:

• The experience
• The knowledge
• The information
• The software
• The system
• The components

Let’s go through them one at a time.

The top level of architecture is the experience architecture – the experience that the software creates for the user. The user enters into the experience with a problem or an aspiration. How is this experience going to help them address that problem or aspiration quickly and elegantly? To evaluate the success of this experience, you need to appreciate that it’s both linear and intellectual as well as spacial and emotional.

The next level down is the knowledge architecture. Within every organization are centers of expertise and knowledge. For a police department, it might be the gang team – if you want know who has the pulse on the gang activities – or the district officers, if you want to know what chronic issues are troubling a neighborhood. If you understand where the knowledge is located in an organization, you can begin to knit it all together into a solution.

Below that is the information architecture. Now we’re beginning to get into the software realm. Information resides in different databases or on spreadsheets. Often it’s scattered around and difficult to access. And some of it can’t be accessed by a system at all, because it’s stored in a two-legged computing device called a human being. So it’s critical to understand how to collect and integrate organizational information.

Now and only now do we get down to the software architecture. Only when you understand the architectures above it can you design a software architecture that can support it. But the architecture design does not end there, for next comes the hardware elements of the solution, which need to support the software architecture. You start with the system architecture, then knit together the hardware devices (the computers, storage devices, etc.) and then the device and component architectures that allow the software to perform quickly and consistently.

Sound like a lot of work? It is. That is why it represents 80% of the effort.

But the key point here regarding the innovation process is that to be successful, you need to start with the experience. In the case of the police department, you begin with police officers who need to become as smart as they can in the three minutes they have before they arrive at the scene, while driving 60 miles an hour down city streets and punching a few key words into their onboard computers. How do you do that?

I would argue that companies who understand experience architecture deeply are more successful than ones who don’t – even if the latter make stuff with great functionality. There were mp3 players that did lots more than the iPod, and ones that still do. But clearly Apple started with the experience architecture. They didn’t ask, “What do we want this thing to do?” They asked, “What do we want the user to experience when they use it?”

Apple gets it, and they effectively control everything right down to the component architecture, which is why their user experiences are nonpareil. But how can you do this if you’re not Apple?

You can start by not doing things backwards. Too often creators start by outlining the functionality, and then deal with the user experience only as an afterthought. That’s exactly backwards. Because it’s not the software that creates value – it’s the experience.

But even IBM admits that they don’t have the internal resources to quickly design, build, and evolve fully integrated architectures. That’s why they’ve embraced the principles of open innovation, in which they work in agile partnerships with others to quickly develop new market solutions.

Referrals in One Easy Lesson

Yesterday’s Duct Tape Marketing Blog had the results of a reader’s poll. John Jantsch’s observation on referrals:

What’s the number one consideration you make when giving a referral?

I had a list of 5-6 answers for people to choose from but “I trust they will do a good job” came in with 66% and “they provided me with a great experience” gobbled up the rest. Trust is always the most significant factor in a person’s willingness to refer, but a great experience is what gets them talking – you’ve got to have both.

Says it all. Build trust, and provide a great experience!