When you need to buy some new clothes, do you go to more than one store or website to find them? How do you decide which stores to go to?

Today’s guest, Tim Keiningham, author of The Wallet Allocation Rule: Winning the Battle for Share, became controversial when he challenged the Net Promoter Score, with the help of some pretty solid research data. Part of his argument was the we don’t consider brands, even those we like, in isolation.

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He didn’t manage to knock the score off its pedestal — huge numbers of companies still use the Net Promoter Score as their key measurement of customer satisfaction — but he did make a strong point that it should not be the only thing you rely on.

The Problem With the Net Promoter Score

The problem, he says, is not the metric itself, but a key assumption that underlies it: the belief that if people are our Net Promoters, ours is the only brand in our category that they promote. In fact, people tend to use several brands of most products, and what matters most in terms of your company’s growth potential, says Keiningham, is not the absolute NPS, but the relative rankings of the brands. He also points out that the number of detractors is likely to be artificially low if you are surveying your current customers, because many detractors will have already left you.

What You Should Be Focusing On To Grow Market Share

Once you understand how you rank relative to other brands your customers use, the key is not to keep improving what you are already winning at, but to find a way you can offer something that will be at least close enough to what your competitor offers that it won’t be worth the customer’s time or effort to go to them. Going back to our clothes example, if I shop at Nordstrom for the customer service but also at Petite Collection because I’m only 5 feet tall (yep, that’s my real height!), Nordstrom might get more of my business by stocking more petite clothes. I’d probably start with them, instead of starting with the Petite store. I’d sure be happy if I could find what I was looking for at the first store.

Also In This Interview

* How to measure the rankings effectively but simply.

* Why you should not explicitly ask people to rank order the brands or companies.

* New research that shows that, on social media, positive brand-related comments tend to be posted 3 times more often than negative comments on the same brand. (Unless it really screws up!)

* The need for the marketers and customer experience folks to share their metrics.

* The Zipf Law, which helps explain why rankings are so important. (Here’s a relatively simple explanation of the Zipf law courtesy of http://io9.com/the-mysterious-law-that-governs-the-size-of-your-city-1479244159

“Back in 1949, the linguist George Zipf noticed something odd about how often people use words in a given language. He found that a small number of words are used all the time, while the vast majority are used very rarely. If he ranked the words in order of popularity, a striking pattern emerged. The number one ranked word was always used twice as often as the second rank word,

Back in 2001, when I first started selling usability and 360 degree customer experience (CX) testing to companies through Web Mystery Shoppers, I made a huge mistake.

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The Logic of Customer Experience & Usability Testing

You see, I thought that the logic of why it was important to test these things would prevail. I mean, obviously if your customers can’t figure out how to navigate your website or use your shopping cart, or if your call center staff have no idea what the returns policy is, of course that is going to lose you business. Testing should be a no-brainer. My first client, the Royal Bank of Canada, agreed, but now that I think back on it, I hadn’t been trying to sell them. I had asked their top e-banking guy if I could take him to lunch and get his reactions to an idea I had for a business. At that point, the business was nothing more than an idea. Luckily for me, he understood the vision and bought into it.

Logic ≠ Sales

But then I had a series of rejections from companies that should have easily understood the value. I realize now that I was approaching it all wrong. Instead of telling them the value and making a business case for the testing, I should have started with a demo. Not of my software, but of theirs. If I had taken them on a walk-through of what it was like for a prospective customer to try to use their websites, far more of them would have bought in. A walk-through approach is a big part of what CX expert, Jeanne Bliss, advocates in her new book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine.  Although we keep hearing about how customer experience and online marketing need to prove the ROI — and they do — before you get there you need to get emotional buy-in. And seeing how customers struggle is a huge part of getting that buy-in.

Help Your Executives See The Customers’ Struggle

Jeanne’s book is an indispensable guide for people who have been tasked with improving their organization’s customer experience. I highly recommend it. I won’t recap it all here (just read the book!), but there are a few things that really struck me, and that she and I discuss more in today’s interview.

1. The Power of Language

We’ve touched on this before at Frank Reactions (see for example, the John Deere interview) but using language that your audience is familiar with can make a huge difference to getting your ideas accepted. So Jeanne, for example, talks about:

* “Net Customer Assets” – Using that terminology with top executives helps them realize that customers themselves are assets. Like any assets, you want to make sure they are well looked after so they retain or increase their value.

* “Defector pipeline” – Sales executives are quite comfortable with the concept of a sales pipeline, but often tend to focus on customer acquisition and forget about the impact of losing customers. Just like the sales pipeline, there are predictable stages in the “defector pipeline”. Only here the goal is to stop the flow instead of inc...

Systems Integration: Not Sexy, But Very Important

One of the biggest barriers companies face trying to improve customer experience is the challenge of systems integration.

All the wonderful tools we have now to help us do more effective marketing need to share data quickly, easily and reliably. But how do you get them to do that?

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In today’s interview with Robin Smith, co-founder of Virtual Logistics, we discuss:

* What a systems integrator is

* The process your company should go through in deciding what technologies you need.

* What to look for in choosing new systems and tools to be sure they’ll work with the rest of your software.

* What to ask a potential systems integration partner.

It Starts With Strategy

As with everything in marketing, before you can decide what you need, you have to start by deciding who you are. What does your company want to be known for? What makes you unique? What sorts of experiences do you want your customers to have?

Once you know the answers to those questions you can start figuring out what types of data will be important so you can deliver the desired customer experience. That means thinking through your entire process.

Chris Hadfield, in his book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, talks about a question that he and his fellow astronauts ask constantly during their training and missions:

Well, in planning your processes, you need to keep asking what could go wrong? What will we do if that happens? How can our system be set up to handle that automatically?

So if, for instance, a product ends up out of stock, how will you notify the customers who had ordered it? How will you keep them informed if it is backordered? How will your payments system deal with the need to delay charging their credit card? How will your accounting system deal with that?

Dealing With Ever-Changing Technology

Often, says Robin, companies get into trouble by adding bits and pieces of software and connecting them “point to point” as needed. In other words, setting up direct links between, say, your online shopping cart and your inventory management system, but not connecting them to your shipping or accounting systems.

The problem is that with technologies changing so quickly, and especially if your company is growing, those ad hoc connections can quickly become a “spaghetti of links”.

Instead, argues Robin, it is better to use a “hub and spoke” model: have one central source of data and connect all other systems to it. Then if you change one spoke (e.g. your shopping cart), you just unplug it from the central data source and plug in whatever new one you want.

If Only Tech Firms Would Use Plain English!

Yes, technology is complicated, but it is too bad that most tech firms, especially those who handle the difficult things like systems integration, make it sound scarier than it is. And the result is that too many of us avoid dealing with it, or are swayed by less competent companies that are smoother talkers.

Here’s a non-techie explanation of some of the common jargon:

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) – Software that transfers information and d...

United Airlines Paid a Big Price For This Customer Service Screw-Up!

If you haven’t heard Dave Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars song, start here:

I’m one of a great many speakers who use this video to show how NOT to handle a customer complaint. I also use it to show the power of social media to spread customer service complaints that can really hurt your brand.

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It boggles the mind how badly United muffed this one.

Customer Service Mistakes Made

Where did they go wrong? Let me count the ways:

* Poorly trained and/or supervised baggage handling crew. Why the heck where they throwing around his guitar in the first place?

* Failure to apologize immediately. There were witnesses. It was pretty clear that their staff had messed up.

* Failure to take the complaint seriously and offer immediate reparations. All he asked for was the $1200 it cost to repair the guitar. The brand damage done has been many multiples of that.

* Gave customer the runaround. For nine months they had him running through a customer service maze. Then, after he warned them he was going to release videos about the incident, they had seven more months before the video launched, but they still didn’t take him seriously.

* Too little, too late. It wasn’t till after they saw how quickly the video was blowing up on social media that United execs even reached out to him. And, as he discusses in our interview, they still didn’t handle things appropriately. He even gave them a golden opportunity to get in on a 3rd video, but they brushed him off.

What Else Can We Learn From This Story?

Fundamentally, United Airlines had (still has?) huge internal problems. Dave believes they never fully understood what motivates customers. Yes, customers like to fly in new planes, and on-time performance is important to them. But…

Customer Service is About People

Even more important is how they interact with people. All people. Their customers, of course, but also:

* Their staff. It’s pretty sad that Dave has had so many emails of support from United pilots and crew.

* Their suppliers & partners. I don’t know if any of the customer service folks or baggage handlers were outsourced, but if they were…

* The public. They just didn’t believe that this could blow up into something so huge. Certainly most social media complaints don’t. But is it worth the risk, especially when your organization was so clearly at fault?

Why Did United Breaks Guitars Go Viral?

Nobody can predict which videos will go viral, but this one had several elements that really helped:

* Humour. People love to share things that make them laugh.

* Catchy Tune. People also love music and rhythm. And music makes things easier to remember.

* Well-Structured Story. The video tells the story beautifully, following all the classic elements of good storytelling.

* A Problem Many Of Us Relate To. Anyone who has flown more than a couple of times has probably had some bad airline experiences. So we immediately identify with him and his pain.

* Emotion. The video provokes feelings of outrage (and empathy for Dave), which also makes people want to share it.

What Are Your Favorite Examples of Customer Ser...

Bernard Rosauer's 3 Bell Curves that go into creating solid customer experiences are similar to what I've been calling the "3 P Profit Formula":

Promise (the "why") + Process (the "work") + People (the "who") = Profit

As you know, the Frank Reactions podcast is focused on customer service and customer experience in the digital era.

But when I first asked Internet marketing super-star, Pat Flynn, to be a guest back when I was doing the Frank Online Marketing Show,  the focus was the broader topic of online marketing.

Our schedules were such that we didn’t pull it off that year.  When we chatted at this year’s New Media Expo (NMX ) and he again agreed to be interviewed I worried about whether his comments would still be relevant.  Turns out, his talk this year was totally about customer service!

If you aren’t familiar with Pat, he’s got to be the most loved guy in Internet marketing. Check out his Smart Passive Income podcast and I bet you’ll become a fan too!

3 Key Customer Motivations

In today’s interview, Pat discusses three core elements of what motivates customers:

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* People Want Convenience.  In what he calls “the era of availability”, convenience meant some time saving thing was finally available for purchase. Things like pre-sliced bread, or vacuum cleaners. Then came the “instant era”, with things like Uber, Netflix and podcasts making it possible for us to get what we want when we want it. Next, says Pat, is the predictive era, where companies know and present you with what you need before you’ve even thought to ask them for it. Big data is starting to make this possible now.

* People Want To Be Heard. Not just that, but they want to know you’ve heard them and are acting on what they’ve said. The proactive era of being heard, says Pat, is reaching out to customers before they’ve asked for help. Staying in touch, in a friendly, helpful way. I argue that there’s a fine line here though: you don’t want to waste a customer’s time with a “what’s up?” call; make sure you are either providing value when you touch base and/or that you do it in a non-intrusive way, such as a tweet.

* People Want to be Loved. This is where the little, unexpected signs of affection help. Things like handwritten notes, public recognition, and what my mother used to call “unbirthday presents” enter in. Mark Holowaychuk, founder of Vitamart, had some great ideas on this when we chatted in Episode 20 of Frank Reactions (iTunes link).

In addition to today’s interview, you can watch Pat’s full NMX keynote presentation at https://youtu.be/9s43rVJn1SE.

Productivity: A Secret Weapon That Helps You And Your Customers

We also talked about productivity, and work-family balance.

I love that Pat so openly puts emphasis on the importance of spending lots of time with his family. One conclusion I reached when I wrote Canada’s Best Employers for Women: A Guide for Job Hunters, Employees & Employers,

How To Sell Senior Executives on Customer Experience Improvement

More from the CXPA Insight Exchange on today’s episode, including an interview with Lorraine Schumacher, Director of Marketing Transformation (previously the Director of Customer Service Strategy & Planning) at Verizon. She’s taken the concept of personas, which many of us use to understand our customers better, and applied them to her internal customers.

She’s developed personas for the different types of people who have to be “sold” internally. What are the strategies that will work to win support from each type?

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They include such lovable characters as:

* Fearful Freddy, who worries about how to protect the reputation of the company, and can be found in any department

* Competitive Carol, who is often found in sales or operations, and really wants to be the top dog

* Samantha Smartypants, who always does her homework and expects you to have done the same

* Harry the Data Hog, who can be won over if you give him the numbers to prove your case.

Lorraine points out that, realistically, our goal as customer experience (CX) professionals is not to work ourselves out of a job, because providing top-notch customer experience is an ongoing effort. Rather, she says, “Our goal as cx professionals is to get customer experience embedded in every employee.”

More from the CXPA Insight Exchange 2015

Today’s episode also includes more useful tips that I picked up at the CXPA’s Insight Exchange a couple of weeks ago.

* Bruce Temkin‘s advice on anticipatory customer experience. (Pat Flynn also discusses this in the interview with him that I’ll be airing next week.) If you want to hear more from Bruce Temkin, check out this interview I did with him a few weeks ago.

* Lesley Boucher, of the Pensare Group, described a simplified alternative to customer journey mapping, that helps employees get engaged in the customer experience process and gets them identifying and acting on changes that are under their control.

* Gavin Winter, of CXAct, focused on “guided customer experience” — identifying which channels are the ones where the customer is most likely to be able to get their problem solved on the first contact, and then guiding them to those channels.

* Sandra Fornasier, of  Ciena Corporation, found that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) was not the best approach for her B2B-focused company. She discussed an alternative to NPS that they found works better when dealing with business customers.

If you work in Customer Experience, you should check out CXPA.org. They’ve got a ton of great resources and an awesome forum were folks in the CX trenches answer each others’ questions.

Speaking of which, I’d love to know more about your customer experience questions so I can make sure this podcast continues to bring you the most relevant and useful information for CX practitioners and business leaders.

What Are Your Top CX Questions?

Please post your questions below. (Or if you feel shy, you can send them to me by

Is It Possible To Compete Against Amazon on Books?

[NOTE: To see my full notes from the eTail conference, scroll down to after the notes on my interview with Renee.]

At the recent eTail Canada conference I interviewed Renee Racine-Kinnear, VP of Customer Experience for Digital Channels, at Indigo.ca.   Some people find it amazing that chains like Indigo still survive. We’ve seen many, like Borders, die in the face of Amazonian pressure on profit margins. In today’s interview, we discuss how Indigo aims to compete through better customer experience, online and off.

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One key is to really understand one’s customers, and appeal to those who are seeking a different experience from that offered by Amazon.

As in their physical stores, Indigo tries to provide a calmer, more peaceful atmosphere in its web store than does Amazon. Here’s an example of how that translates:

First Page of Business Books

There’s no question that the Indigo experience has more white space, and that will certainly appeal to many readers and site users. I remember writing a blog post years ago about how others should not copy the Amazon site design because it is too complex and confusing for new entrants. Amazon succeeds because so many Internet users have grown up with it. We are used to its structure, and put up with its frustrations because we value the massive amounts of content (and great prices). But it is not for everybody.

Is White Space Enough?

It may be. One thing we discuss in the interview is Indigo’s extensive use of customer panels and customer feedback to find out what’s really important to its customers. Through consumer research they learned that their customers were not after an action-packed, high-tech, atmosphere. They are looking for an oasis of calm.

On the other hand, Indigo can’t completely ignore the online pricing of the behemoth rival, and it poses severe omnichannel challenges. For instance, they realize that they have to compete on price in their online store, but try to recoup some of the difference in the physical stores. But, as Renee points out in the interview, how do you explain to a customer who’s in a store about to buy a book  why you won’t match your own, lower, online price?

We also discuss:

* How to build and use a customer panel

* What is an IdeaAgora, and how can it help you

* The sneaky tactic that can win budget and backing from a CEO

More From Etail Canada 2015

I attended several other talks at the eTail Canada conference. Most of my notes were done via Twitter, so I’ve put together a Storify document for you with my notes as well as tweets from others. I’ve just included the content tweets; not the many talking about what a great conference it was. That said, kudos to the organizers for a job well done!

[View the story “eTail Canada 2015 ” on Storify]

Have you ever thought about the challenges of delivering consistent, excellent customer experiences when you have to sell through third parties?

Today’s episode brings you interviews with two speakers I met  at the B2B Online Conference in Chicago who grapple with that challenge daily. The 3rd parties in question are distributors, in the case of John Deere, and eBay sellers in the case of eBay.

Customers Attribute A Bad Experience to Your Brand, Even if It Was a Reseller or Distributor Who Messed Up

The challenge is that how people perceive you, although strongly shaped by your brand, can be messed up by the intermediaries. If a distributor doesn’t have the right attitude or product knowledge, that will reflect badly on your brand. People think about buying a John Deere tractor, and don’t stop to realize that the distributor is not employed by John Deere.

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Likewise, we talk about buying something on eBay, but we are actually buying from an individual eBay seller. There’s only so much control eBay can have over the sellers. If a seller takes a week to ship the product you bought, you may think badly of eBay, even though it was not their platform that caused the problem.

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Use Training, Coaching and the Voice of the Customer

Erin Wallace, Global Manager of Customer Experience, John Deere (@Redejong), and her team work closely with distributors and managers to let them hear and understand what customers are really thinking and saying.

They have used many innovative approaches for customer feedback, such as their “Chatterbox“, which is a recording studio in a trailer that gets set up at trade shows and events. Customers can go in and record their thoughts about what they are experiencing and what is frustrating.

They also have a “Customer Experience Multiplier Program“, which provides extensive dealer training in person; assessment, monthly coaching, and performance reviews against operational models.

They teach distributors to really understand their customers’ business, and are willing to leverage other parts of John Deere to help them in ways the customers might not have imagined the company would be able to help. For example, they collect a lot of data on agronomics, and can help customers figure out how to get greater crop yields.

Customer service & customer experience expert, Shep Hyken, tells a story in today’s interview of walking into a hotel. Instead of having a square of chocolate waiting for him on his pillow, this hotel gave him a full chocolate bar and bottle of water when he checked in.

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Nice little customer service touch, you think. But the thing is, at the prices they were charging for the rooms, this would have cost them about 6% of the room rate. (Who knew that big name speakers don’t always get to stay at five star hotels?) That’s a pretty big hit to the bottom line.

Was it worth the cost?

In our social media era, absolutely. Why?

* It made the hotel visit memorable. You wouldn’t think a little thing like that would make such a difference, but I had a similar reaction the first time I walked into a hotel that had fresh baked cookies at reception. I still remember the name of that hotel (Adara, in Whistler) and tell others about it. A chocolate square on the pillow used to work, but now it has become so common that, even though we like it, that won’t be enough to wow us anymore.  Think about what you can do that would add a little touch to make a big difference.

* Shep Hyken speaks to thousands of people a year. The experience impressed him so much that he talks about that hotel. (Unfortunately for them, he didn’t mention the name of it in this interview, but he probably has at other times, and he has definitely recommended the hotel to colleagues who will be travelling in the area.)

* It leverages the principle of reciprocity. When people do something nice for you, you are more likely to do something nice for them. This special touch makes visitors much more likely to take time to do a positive hotel review on Trip Advisor, Yelp, or Booking.com.

* If it gets even one person to book a night who wouldn’t have otherwise, it has paid for itself many times over. It doesn’t take a lot of word of mouth for those chocolate bars to help keep the hotel’s rooms booked.

[Tweet “What little touch can you add that would have a big impact on customers? @temafrank http://frankreactions.com/26. “]

Other Customer Experience Thoughts from Shep Hyken

In the interview we talked about the challenges of getting buy-in across the organization. “If it doesn’t start at the top,” he warns, “it’s not going to work.”

Hyken’s 6 Ds of Great Customer Service

This 6-step process is key to having a good customer service/experience culture, says Hyken.

* Define it. What does customer experience mean in this company? Develop a common terminology so everyone understands and discusses it the same way.

* Disseminate it. Get the desired experience communicated effectively throughout the company.

* Deploy it. Do a lot of training, and keep on doing it. “Customer service & experience training isn’t something that you did, it’s something that you do,” says Hyken.

* Demonstrate it. The CEO and other senior leaders must show, through their actions,