Published by Econsultancy in association with Offerpop

Winning Hearts in Real-Time

♥By Jay BaerNew York Times bestselling author

Masters of CX

Customers are facing an invitation avalanche...

Winning Hearts in Real-Time / Jay Baer

Companies of all sizes and descriptions ask them to like, share, comment, follow, click and view. Combined with the constant barrage of messages inherent in an always-on world, it’s easy to see why fatigue sets in, and consumers simply tune out.

The way for businesses to succeed in this exhausting, hyper-competitive environment is to stop trying to be amazing, and start being useful. After all, we crave useful things.

In the book Contagious, Wharton Business School professor Jonah Berger describes a research project he and his class undertook whereby they analyzed every New York Times article (online edition) for a six-month period. They found that useful articles were forwarded 30% more than average. Of course they are! Everyone wants to be useful. Our friends are useful (for the most part). Your company can be useful in the same way, and use that as a competitive differentiator.

That’s the core premise of my book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is about Help not Hype.

There are many ways that companies can be useful, but one of the optimal approaches is be useful in real-time. Smart companies are improving customer experiences by providing on-the-fly assistance and offers that don’t feel like marketing, but rather like a helping hand. We must recognize that ultimately, great customer experiences are great because they are relevant.

When you provide a customer experience that is disproportionately useful or delightful or cherished or worthy of praise, those outcomes are because that customer experience is hyper-relevant and valuable. Interacting with customers in real-time, often through mobile and out-of-home, may be the best way to produce that differentiating relevancy.

Many companies of all shapes and sizes across the B2B and B2C spectrums are experimenting with real-time relevancy and Youtility. Here we’ll focus on four variations of these programs: Reactive Relevancy, Circumstantial Relevancy, Behavioral Relevancy, and Location Relevancy.

Reactive Relevancy – Conversational Usefulness

The concept of reactive relevancy is a relatively new one, given that its viability is largely driven by Twitter and other social venues where questions can be posed and answers provided in a near-synchronous fashion. Certainly, discussion boards, forums,

and even review sites like TripAdvisor, have some of the same underpinnings but they lack the speed and “hey, I didn’t expect that” nature of truly reactive relevancy.

To engage in reactive relevancy, companies (or individuals) closely monitor social media for particular keywords and phrases and then tactfully jump in to proactively assist people making inquiries. At its core, this is strategic eavesdropping. And it works.

Holli Beckman is the Vice President of Marketing and Leasing Operations for WC Smith, a Washington, D.C. headquartered real estate developer and property management firm that oversees more than 10,000 units in the region.

Holli also owns Apartminty.com, an apartment-hunting consultancy that helps locate apartments for clients across the United States. Holli writes a comprehensive and useful blog on Apartminty about all things apartments.

She knows the apartment locating business, and realizes that it’s far from easy.

“Everyone complains about apartment hunting,” says Holli. “If you just type that search term into Twitter, you’ll see. It’s incredible. No one’s enjoying the experience.”

Recognizing that if someone was taking the time to complain about apartments on Twitter, their need was both acute and present, Holli set out to take as much pain as possible out of the process, and generated more than 100 leads for Apartminty within 30 days, all from Twitter.

Currently define “real-time” as the ability to respond within two minutes.But 88% of marketers say they aren’t fast enough.

Read more in Econsultancy’s Real-Time Marketing Report

ecly.co/XWXNsd

80%

53% of customers who ask a brand a question on Twitter expect a response within one hour. But if they’re making a complaint, that figure goes up to 72%. If companies don’t respond within that hour, 38% of people feel more negatively towards the brand, and a 60% will take action against the brand using social media. Therefore, response time is more important with each passing day, as consumers increasingly take to social media to name and shame brands.// Read more on the Econsultancy blog: ecly.co/1tWPKrR

Twitter response stats

“I just started offering help. If someone complained “My roommate sucks” or “I can’t find a good roommate,” I would tweet them and point them to a blog post we had already written about that,” says Holli. “But then I started tweeting more open-ended responses

like: “Hey, I saw that you’re overwhelmed. It can be overwhelming. If you need any assistance, let me know.” And people responded immediately to that.

To people complaining about apartment hunting in the Washington, D.C. area, Holli responded empathetically and quickly from her WC Smith Twitter account, with similar results. “In two months, we generated six confirmed leases from my interactions on Twitter. Total lease amounts of approximately $144,000,” says Holli.

“In two months, we generated six confirmed leases from my interactions on Twitter. Total lease amounts of approximately $144,000”

Holli Beckman, Vice President of Marketing and Leasing Operations, WC Smith

40 million impressions

Went out to 12 millionTwitter users

Featured across1,300

blogs and newspapers

In another example, in 2011 Ben and Jerry’s wanted to run a campaign that raised awareness of that year’s World Fair Trade Day. The company noticed that many Twitter users do not use the full 140 characters allocated to each tweet. This prompted it to create an application that allowed consumers to send tweets from its website, and any space remaining was used to automatically add a message about Fair Trade produce.

Over a two-week period, Fair Tweets picked up 40m impressions, went out to 12m Twitter users, and was featured in 1,300 blogs and newspapers.

Circumstantial Relevancy – When You Need It, You Need It

There is no courtship, ramp up, or slow build with real-time relevancy. You’re either sufficiently useful at any given moment, and can connect with the customer, or you’re not. It’s customer experience in the blink of an eye.

Once you have new glasses, your ability to get questions about them answered by Warby Parker (the e-tailer that is disrupting the optical business partially by answering customer questions instantly on Youtube and

Twitter) becomes a less-fulfilling proposition. Until, one day, you need new glasses again, and then you’ll know where to turn. Meanwhile, they have your money from the first purchase and are patiently waiting for your

needs to re-align with their usefulness.

Like an endless game of informational hide and seek, circumstantial real-time relevancy consists of popping out from behind a tree to assist when necessary, then fading back into the woods waiting for the next opportunity.

Columbia Sportswear, a Portland, Oregon-based manufacturer and retailer of outdoor wear and gear, knows a lot about woods,

and an equal amount about circumstantial relevancy. The company has a useful and free mobile application called “What Knot to Do in the Greater Outdoors.” As you’ve probably guessed, it provides detailed instructions for how to tie dozens of knots, including which to use when. With little marketing support, it was downloaded 351,000 times in its first 20 months of existence, and is so relevant it’s even creating circumstances for use, as described in this review from the iTunes App Store:

According to Adam Buchanan, the Social Media Manager at Columbia when the app was released, the company conducted research and found it is very common for outdoor enthusiasts to carry smartphones on excursions. “Customers regularly report using the camera, GPS, and music features of their devices while in the field, in addition to its obvious use as a phone,” says Adam.

It makes perfect sense. If you need to remember how to tie a knot, being able to recall that information with the assistance

“I went out and bought a rope so I could try my hand at these knots. Now I’m looking forward to the next time I go camping so I can display my knot-knowledge to the other guys.”

Chris496

Downloads within 20 months.

“What Knot to Do in the Greater Outdoors” app

351, 000

of a mobile device is far more practical and reasonable than accessing that information through other methods.

Of course even the merchant marines aren’t tying knots all the time. That’s what makes this program a circumstantially relevant customer experience. If you need to know how to tie a knot, Columbia Sportswear has a solution for you. If you’re not presently in knot-tying mode, that’s okay, the app will stay on your mobile device, ready to produce real-time helpfulness when you need it do so.

What’s particularly interesting about the knot app, however, is that Columbia Sportswear

doesn’t sell rope, or knots, or anything of the sort. But based on its research, Columbia understood the correlation between its outdoors-loving customers, and the need to tie a good knot now and again. And when you use that application, Columbia Sportswear is inserting its brand into your life in a circumstance where otherwise they probably would be wholly absent.

This is the power of using real-time relevancy to transcend the transaction – to provide something of value that isn’t your products and services, per se.

Behavioral Relevancy – Just Do It (So We Can Help You)

Real-time relevancy that relies on behavior is perhaps the easiest way to construct a great customer experience because the behavior itself provides so many cues about intent and need and purpose. The behavior creates a temporal market segment called “people who are engaged in this action, right now.” And of course, mobile devices are one of the best ways to mine for behavior, because apps and certain elements of the mobile web are ONLY used during that particular behavior. People don’t check movie show times on a phone unless they are pretty far into the consideration set for going to the movies. The behavior creates a targeted audience, and mobile is the segmentation cleaver.

But, behavioral relevancy is also the most difficult form of real-time relevancy with which to actually make an impact on customer experience. This is because customers are usually already accustomed to performing these actions in a particular way, and anything that tries to be inserted into that

routine needs to be a far, far better customer experience to be bothered with at all. Behavioral relevancy must cause behavior change during activities that may have become rote. You probably have a particular way that you look up movie show times on your mobile device (and there are about 20 ways to do so). How could a company create a customer experience that would cause you to fundamentally shift your behavior, incorporating them into your flow?

The diaper company Huggies figured this out. Perhaps not for movie times, but for a behavior that’s perhaps even more routine…changing diapers.

Test marketed in Brazil, Huggies created the Tweet Pee device and companion mobile app. The former is a moisture-sensor, shaped not unlike Twitter’s logo, that clips to a diaper in the region most likely to accumulate wetness. When the sensor detects wetness it sends a Twitter direct message to the app user (presumably a parent or caregiver) to alert them. Amazing!

When the sensor detects wetness it

sends a Twitter direct message to the app

user to alert them. Amazing!

But that’s not all. The system also tracks diaper usage and includes the ability to order more diapers from inside the app.

While the Tweet Pee system has not been rolled out widely, it demonstrates how an app that adds real relevancy (real-time alerts and supply chain/ordering capabilities) could cause behavior change, even with a mundane and oft-repeated task like diaper changing.

Location Relevancy – We Know Where You Are and What You Need

Because mobile devices are consistently providing a steady stream of location information for use in mapping apps, weather apps, and even social media content creation (if geo-location features are turned on), location relevancy is perhaps the most pervasive form of real-time relevancy at present.

Many brands seek to improve customer experiences by mining location and providing relevant information correspondingly.

Charmin’s “Sit or Squat” mobile application recommends clean restrooms in the United States based on crowd-sourced data (which seems like a huge partnership opportunity with Tweet Pee).

Not available on a mobile device, but still location-driven (by entering your postal code into a web application) is Achoo from Kleenex brand facial tissue, which uses your location and a Google data API to predict how likely

you are to catch a cold or influenza within the next three weeks.

A particularly creative form of real-time relevancy through location comes from the board game Scrabble, which provides free Wi-Fi in several areas of Paris, but only if potential bandwidth users first unscramble letters. The more points they score, the more free minutes of Wi-Fi they receive.

What a terrific way to provide a stunning customer experience, and keep your brand top-of-mind simultaneously. And like Columbia Sportswear, Scrabble does so without talking about their product directly. It’s helpful first, and a brand message second.

The Scrabble campaign won a Gold Mobile Lion at the Cannes advertising festival in 2013.

Of marketers agree that consumers expect them to know where they are and what they are doing, to provide a more relevant experience.

Read more in Econsultancy’s Real-Time Marketing Report

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♥

86%

It’s About Help Not Hype

Today’s customers are being bombarded by messages and invitations and opportunities at an unprecedented rate. Internet advertising is set to increase its share of the ad market from 18% in 2012 to 23.4% in 2015, and overtake television spending by 2017. Yet 54% of online ads are not even viewed by consumers. Brands that seek to succeed in this environment through sheer volume and by shouting ever louder are doomed to fail as consumers turn an increasingly deaf ear to those pleas and appeals.

Instead we find more and more examples of brands embracing the paradox that the less you sell, the more you sell. Consumers respond to help, and relevance, and a truly great customer experience. Many of the best of these experiences are delivered in real-time (or nearly so).

Brands have a choice. They can choose to engage in the pushy marketing approaches that have been stuffed down consumers’ throats for a century or choose instead to provide marketing that customers actually WANT to receive.

Whether it’s Reactive, Circumstantial, Behavioral, or Location-based relevancy, the tools are there, today, to deliver something useful, even wonderful, to customers.

I hope you have the courage and the support to try it in your own organization.

// Jay Baer

Internet advertising is set to increase its share of the ad market from 18% in 2012 to 23.4% in 2015, and overtake television spending by 2017.

Yet 54% of online ads are not even viewed by consumers.// Read more in Econsultancy’s Advertising Statistics Compendium: ecly.co/1poocp0

Internet advertising stats

The Masters of CX series features true marketing thinkers and industry heavyweights, covering the issues surrounding your customer experience approach and strategy.

These unique reports will be published between October and December 2014, along with two dedicated webinar sessions where you can gain first-hand insight from the authors on the key issues raised.

We’re delighted to be working with some of the most influential authors within digital marketing.

Reports in the series include:

Winning Hearts in Real-time by Jay Baer

Influence the Influencers - The Magic of Co-Created Content by Lee Odden

Beyond the Sale: Building Customer Relationships for Life by Brian Clark

Empower your Employees to Power your Customer Experience by Ted Rubin

Customer Loyalty Lessons from Medieval Times by Mark Schaefer

Why Brands are Stuck on Like and Failing at Love by Mitch Joel

Find out more about the authors and reports athello.econsultancy.com/masters-of-cx and join the discussion using #MastersofCX

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Published by Econsultancy in association with OfferpopAbout the Masters of CX