Regardless of country, many nations are facing unprecedented levels of debt, creativity and innovation need to be utilized to reduce public spending and achieve enormous levels of efficiency but we need to do this quickly and effectively. There is a strong connection between technology and the provision of location-aware online services. Location-aware is simply the “what” being integrated with the “where.” For example, supplying the public with information about what local facilities are available and where they’re located. With websites now a primary channel of communication with the public, as well as being a cost-effective means of communication, it has become a lot easier to tie these two elements together using interactive mapping technology.

Using mapping technology as a portal or shop window to other information is becoming increasingly popular on council sites. It clearly makes sense to help people help themselves by supplying this information visually in a self-service online mapping format. But, of course, that’s not all that interactive mapping can do. Some UK local authorities have pushed this concept further by enabling self reporting of problems within the municipal environment. Rather than having to identify and speak to the department that deals with vandalism, abandoned vehicles, potholes in the road, dangerous paving slabs etc, citizens can create a place marker on an interactive map that shows the exact location of the problem and generates an inspection request. Some councils are even starting to make this functionality available via mobile phones or smart devices, so that citizens can take a picture of the problem and send it to the relevant department with the GPS co-ordinates automatically attached. All of this is enabled by technology.

Empowering the public to initiate remedial actions in their neighborhood frees up frontline council staff from having to field so many of these enquiries and reduces avoidable contact and unnecessary paperwork. The time recouped clearly translates as a cost and efficiency saving, with staff able to better concentrate on core activities – doing more with less, and helping to meet the 25% spending cuts that the UK public sector is faced with over the next few years.

Are you using mapping technology to help your customers?  If so, please share how it’s helped your organization.

Harry Kline expects that in 2011 the Age of the Customer will continue to gain momentum, whilst the financial impact of poor service is driving voice of the customer programs and better customer experience can be worth millions in annual revenue, according to Forrester. The ‘Business Impact of Customer experience, 2010’ report, published November 2010, shows that a better customer experience drives improvement for three types of customer loyalty: willingness to consider another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague.

What role does trust play?

Customer centricity describes an organization orientating itself to focus on the needs and wants of the customer. Organizations try, but it’s difficult.

“In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. Then 40 years later if you performed the same exercise less than 10% of the public believed it was true. The fracturing of trust is based on the fact that the consumer has been let down”.
Howard Schultz – Lies – Truth – Trust – Customers – Companies – Products – America

In today’s fast moving world of opt-in and opt-out, comparison web sites, instant, viral customer testimonial or bad publicity, companies can struggle to develop lifetime customer relationships – what role does trust play?

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers are recently quoted as saying “We believe customer trust is probably the ‘next big thing’ in business competition.”

What do you think?

We believe trust and marketing basics are vital to every marketing strategy whether traditionally focussed or cutting edge digital. As a way to encourage discussion and debate about trust in marketing, marketing theories and the business of marketing we’ve funded an independent initiative – ‘The Growing Trust Initiative’ – where interactions are led by marketing considerations not technological ones.

With digital channels commonplace, data streams growing rapidly and customer expectations of relevant and respectful interactions, technology is often the only way for a marketer to manage interactions, understand customers and execute campaigns. But sometimes the technology can overshadow the crux of marketing – the connection for a period of time between a buyer and a seller that involves an exchange of some kind.

Central to the Growing Trust Initiative is a series of Discussion Papers designed to initiate the dialogue. The first Discussion Paper, ‘In the Shade of the Trust Arbor: Nurturing Better Business’ is now published (link to hosting site) and freely available (quite timely really when in the UK two major banks have been fined over 4 million dollars for failing to deal properly with customer complaints and another focuses its marketing strategy on forging consumer trust).

We look forward to hearing your views.

- Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point)

About 10 years ago, Malcolm Gladwell published his thesis that ideas “spread just like viruses do.” The Tipping Point is predicated on people, content (the idea), and context (situational environment). Last week, Pat McGrew tweeted that 300K Finnish Itella NetPosti users can now use their iPhone, iPad & Android to get access to invoices, payslips, and letters.  On Friday, Norway Post announced that Norway Post is to launch a digital mail system, allowing customers to choose to receive mail in a digital mailbox as well as physically — with that digital mailbox based on a person’s street address and national ID number.

Moreover, we know that more than half of the population of Denmark is using their consumer consolidation service which Pitney Bowes helped develop.  And most recently, Siemens Mobility and Swiss Post have agreed to pursue a joint marketing strategy of an automation offering for post and postal service providers that converts physical mail into electronic mail accessible from consumers mobile devices.

The context is clear: ubiquitous broadband (wired and 3G/4G), WiFi, and an explosion of smartphones and tablet computers.

The content is clear: secure access to my mail when, where, and how I want.

This idea – a fire lit in the Nordics some 10 years ago is now spreading like wildfire – and it looks like it is ready to reach American shores.

Is America at that tipping point?  We think so.  But viewed from our shores, the idea goes well beyond mail delivery. Our consumer research shows that how we as individuals organize, manage, retrieve, and interact with the critical electronic content in the home is just as important as the convenience of how we receive it.  And that research strongly influenced the design of the Volly digital delivery service.

Context: Check.  Content: Check.  In a few months it will be up to people – the Volly service users – to determine if we are headed for that tipping point.

-Bernie

For the past 18 months, I have been immersed in a project to help Pitney Bowes create something completely digital, and completely new. Today, I experienced real joy as we announced this new service to the world. It’s called Volly™, and it promises to bring the real advantages of digital delivery and interaction to the medium of physical mail.

You can read all about it in the press release that I have pasted below. If you’re a mailer, prepare yourself for a future in which you can have richer and more robust interactions with your customers, and at a much lower cost. If you’re a consumer, hang in there for a few more months. We’re putting the finishing touches on a service that will help you save time, save money, and put you in complete control of who markets to you.

Welcome to the future of customer communications. It’s called Volly.

Pitney Bowes to Launch Volly™: Secure Digital Delivery Service that Connects Mailers and Consumers

• 84% of consumers receive paper statements
• 367 billion coupons were physically printed
• 13 billion catalogs were distributed

In total, this added up to over 170 billion pieces of physical mail last year. So, are your customers simply in love with paper? Not exactly.

It’s true that some simply prefer things the way they are and don’t want to change. However, most consumers could be convinced to give up paper statements IF it were easy to manage their documents—and IF they could receive digital mail more conveniently.

So far, they have not been convinced. Instead, they tolerate the status quo. Every household comes up with distinct ways to manage these communications. Ways that reflect specific attitudes, behaviors and differences involving how consumers pick up, sort and prioritize mail; what they choose to keep and file; who pays bills and how these bills are paid; and the disposition of mail once reviewed.

What would it take to convince consumers to adopt digital?

For starters, people don’t want to visit a different Web site with unique logins for every company with which they do business. What they want is a single platform that consolidates and simplifies bills, statements, payments, coupons, catalogs, and even scanned copies of important household documents—where mail is delivered in a way that matches their individual preferences.

Our research shows that consumers are willing to change if they can receive communications in a meaningful, rich manner… with the tools and functionality that help save them time and effort… in ways that simplify the day-to-day task of running a household.

Why have consumers responded so well to the Volly™ concept?

In the past, organizations have tried to encourage and entice consumers to “switch” from paper to Web portals or company emails. The Volly™ secure digital mail delivery service is unique in that it provides the customized, multi-channel experience that consumers have long desired. Secure, spam-free and available at no cost to consumers, the Volly service offers:

• Mail consolidation, including bills, statements, payments, catalogs, coupons and promotional offers;
• Channel choice, including physical delivery, Web portal, smart phone, iPad and new apps still to come;
• A true, mutually managed experience, which allows consumers to interact with their mail when they want, where they want, and how they want.

Consumers can interact with the Volly service based on their individual needs—and change preferences whenever they like. Every day, consumers will discover new ways to engage the rich features and functionality, such as bill pay, shopping and saving tools; tools to organize, store and archive; and ways to digitally “shred” documents that are no longer needed. Some consumers I’ve spoken to have talked about the Volly service as “an assistant” that could help them manage their lives… and that’s pretty cool.

In practical terms, the Volly secure digital delivery service replicates the role mail plays in a consumer’s life in today’s multi-channel environment.

We know that Smartphone use is on the rise and with it comes more people reading emails on their mobile.  Market research firm Nielsen condensed all time spent on the mobile internet into one hour and found nearly half of it was spent on email.  This is a very telling statistic because it goes beyond corporate, Blackberry-centric, email use to include consumers accessing Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail via their devices.

That’s important as Blackberries, despite their generally justified status as a workplace productivity hero, are hopeless at handling the sort of HTML emails that marketers deploy.  Images are off, links are exposed and the whole point of creating email eye-candy is defeated.  I’m confident this will be sorted out shortly but it’s the current reality.  And it’s one that has driven the existing mobile email paradigm.

The Current State of Mobile E-mail

Marketers that do created ‘mobile friendly’ versions of their emails (and, if we’re being candid, most still don’t) typically take the following approach:  In the pre-header of the email there’s a link saying something like ‘On a mobile device?  Click here’.  Clicking on that link will do one of two things – take the recipient to a text only version or take them to a mobile web page recreating the richer HTML experience. The latter is clearly more favourable from a branding + presentation POV.

iPhones and Android devices do a much better job handling HTML emails.  Images are displayed, for starters. But email design is web-centric.  Multi-column emails are common and with mobile’s smaller screen sizes lead to tiresome side to side scrolling.  It’s a cumbersome reading experience.

According to the PEW Internet & American Life Project, 34% of all cell phone owners have sent or received an email on their device.  This number is slightly higher than the percentage of cell phone owners that have Smartphones but is conclusive enough to confidently say, at a minimum, “Smartphone users = mobile email user.”

With Smartphone penetration set to overtake feature phones in the next year or two and only continue upward, the implication should be clear:  The approach to email marketing needs to evolve to account for changing consumer consumption patterns and expectations.

Your emails are being viewed on devices you haven’t designed and tested for and in contexts than a web-centric email approach simply doesn’t account for leading to lost opportunities to capture interest.

Making Email Work for the Mobile Consumer

To make your email marketing programs work harder and extract more value out of each interaction with a mobile consumer, there are three dimensions to address:  Design, Content, and Destinations.

1.    Design
Consider a design template that’s if not mobile-first, than at least mobile-sensitive.  Employ a single column layout consistent with mobile screen dimensions to remove unnecessary pinching, zooming and scrolling and to focus reader attention.  A vertical scroll motion allows for a more natural email reading experience, especially on a mobile device.

Think about larger fonts, bigger call to action button, and more minimalist colour palettes with high contrast between design elements.  Your design should make it extremely easy for recipients to differentiate content elements and provide intuitive, obvious action elements that account for a user who will be grazing information rather than reading deeply.

I’d also recommend keeping a text only or mobile web optimized version linked from the pre-header. Many Blackberry users will still need this and it’s good practice to be inclusive of all customers in your design (that’s why you’re looking at a mobile-centric design in the first place, after all).

2.    Content
Mobile email readers will be looking for focussed, attention grabbing content.  Consumption will most likely happen during brief moments of downtime.

Combine on-the-go relevance with actionable information with a very sharp editing pencil.  Clear but attention grabbing calls to action are at an even greater premium in a mobile context.  This may involve rethinking your content organization as the mobile consumer is best served by information that satisfies moments of inspiration or need vs. contemplation.  The best advice is “don’t overdo it”. Information overload will lead to session abandonment as quickly as a poorly designed email.  Brevity and clarity will show you’re sensitive to demands on a recipient’s time and attention.

There’s a lot to be gained from allowing recipients to specify ‘web’ or ‘mobile’ versions as well. Knowledge of how they’ll be viewing your emails can give you a glimpse into how content should be prioritized.

3.    Destinations
This is the most important piece. There is no point optimizing design and content for mobile consumption if someone clicks on a link (that’s what you likely want them to do, right?) only to end up on a desktop web experience.  All your hard work will be lost.

Building your mobile web destination involves the same content and design sensibilities you’ve applied to your emails.  Once you’ve locked down a mobile friendly design, content and destination approach, there are a couple other considerations that can impact your open and engagement rates:

• Send times:  Mobile email consumption is more likely going to be in snatched moments of downtime or media multi-tasking.  Consider when those are going to be for your customer. Better yet, allow customers to state when they would like to receive your emails.
• Cross-channel opt-ins:  Mobile email can be a great way to nurture customers into mobile CRM extensions.  Provide mechanisms for users to opt-in to SMS programming.  Enable coupon redemption by having device ‘show and save’ or ‘show and scan’ capabilities.  Push customers to your mobile apps or other content downloads such as videos or wallpapers.

Not all marketers need a mobile friendly email program.  You may be able to survive without it depending on your audience demographics.  Teen and Older demographics are probably not a mobile email/Smartphone sweet spot.  But if your customer base includes urban consumers, 18-45, there’s a good chance you have a growing segment that will expect a tailored, even optimized, experience no matter when or how they happen to view your emails.

What is “customer intimacy”?

Customer intimacy is the state of knowing your customers really well in ways that can help you serve them better. It establishes a “virtuous circle”: you know them better, you serve them better, they like you better, they use you more, you learn more about them, you know them better still, you serve them better…and on it goes.

Why is it so important now?

These are tough economic times. It’s cheaper to keep customers and deepen relationships than it is to win new ones – and the best way to deepen relationships is to establish and maintain customer intimacy, to really know your customers and meet/anticipate their needs. What’s more, when you can better define and target your best prospects for new customers and customer segments, your marketing dollars can be better spent.

These are fast-paced times. Think about how much you can learn in a few short minutes through a web search. Customers know it’s just that easy to get information in the public domain – and they now fully expect, being the important people they are to your business, that a) it’s that easy for you to know everything about them, and b) you really should.  They expect you will have a single, unified view of them as your customer regardless of the numbers and variety of departments and/or channels of distribution they contact you through.

I had the pleasure to attend and speak at a recent conference about social media, B2B marketing, and the future. The event was a typical Business Development Institute (BDI) gathering: lots of learning in a short period of time with some smart practitioners. I love BDI events.

As keynote, I decided to forego the customary PowerPoint presentation and, instead, make some guesses about what the next decade holds for B2B marketers. I’ll summarize some key ideas here:

1) Ten years from now, the lines that separate paid media, earned media, and owned media will be obsolete.

Not too long ago, there was a very clear distinction among the three channels. Paid media was advertising, earned media was news coverage, and owned media was your website, your sales collateral, your customer presentations, and the like.

If you advertised in a particular publication, the advertising rep at the publication was usually nice enough to make an introduction to the reporters and editors, but the reporters and editors would make their own independent judgments about what was newsworthy. And they would never, ever consider taking your content verbatim and using it in their pages.

This model is changing, and quickly. For example, Pitney Bowes has a relationship with a key industry publication that includes a co-branded news site. At each of the major industry trade shows, this publication assigns an editor to create news content for the co-branded site, including interviews and videos featuring industry leaders from many companies, including Pitney Bowes. Between major shows, the co-branded site is updated with breaking news from around the industry, blog postings, and new case studies, primarily supplied by Pitney Bowes. What is happening on this site is real news, but it is also very clearly real marketing. A decade from now, this kind of mashup will be the norm, and not the exception.

2) The B2B sales cycle, already undergoing tremendous change, will be almost unrecognizable in ten years.

There was nothing virtual about the old B2B sales cycle. It was labor-intensive, face-to-face, hard work, and the personal relationship was at the center of all the deals that closed. It had to be, because during the extended time between initial contact and a closed deal, you had spent so many hours with the prospect that you were friends.

Social media has already disrupted this age-old selling system. The road to contact with a prospect could be through a webinar, Twitter or Facebook. The inbound call from a prospect might come to your call center, not you, and the call center rep could be the one trained to prequalify the lead. Or the prospect might just send an email to the Contact Us link on your website – and you had better respond quickly.

Armed with web-based information from a number of suppliers, the prospect could go straight to the shortlist, bypassing the RFP process altogether. And it might not even be the prospect who develops the shortlist – it might be a procurement professional who is acting on behalf of the final decision-maker. Your only chance to influence the purchase might be to fill out an email questionnaire. If you actually get to meet the prospect face-to-face, consider yourself extremely fortunate.

3) Differentiate, or die.

Differentiation is the only real hope to overcome the ‘loose ties’ of social media and deepen your engagement with your customers. By packaging together a more valuable suite of products and services, you can shift from being a commodity provider to a more comprehensive business partner.

Pitney Bowes deals with this issue every single day. If all a company is interested in is a postage meter at the lowest possible cost, we have a difficult time explaining all the ways in which we are different from our competitors. It becomes a low-bid contest and that’s no fun.

But if we can start a conversation about the spectrum of ways in which a company communicates with its customers, we can have a much more interesting and fruitful engagement. We can talk about how leading companies put hardware, software and services together to create a better customer experience. We can demonstrate all the different ways in which we can help, and our competitors can’t. We have, in short, successfully bypassed the commodity trap.

4) The role of B2B marketers is expanding.

B2B marketers can no longer confine themselves to the tasks of identifying prospects and serving up leads to sales. B2B marketers are now the long-term managers of actual and virtual customer relationships across all channels, including social media.

The transparency that social media enables is the game-changer. The headlines these days are about Wikileaks and those embarrassing State Department emails that show what we really think about foreign leaders.

But those of us in the corporate world have been living in this world for awhile now. Our customers have taken to the web in droves to report, accurately or otherwise, about their experiences with the companies they do business with.

As B2B marketers, we need to take ownership of that complete customer experience, so that your customers don’t end up posting negative comments about your company for everyone to see. Or making snarky videos. Or starting critical discussion groups on your very own customer forum.

In short, in the future, thanks to the transparency of social media, we will no longer separate the sales cycle from the rest of the customer experience. Customer experience in all its varied forms – live, remote, virtual – will be the differentiator, and will eventually separate the brands that survive from those that perish.

So strap yourselves in. For B2B marketers, the coming decade promises to be at least as disruptive as the one we just survived.

Here are five standouts:

1 – Start with a focus – and a plan.
First and foremost, effective customer onboarding does not happen by accident. What’s needed is the declaration that defining a formal onboarding best practice is in the best interest of the organization and its customers and making it a formal priority. Ultimately, having declared stategy, almost any strategy, will in most cases be better than having none at all. Your automated onboarding process should strike the right balance between over- and under-selling. Companies that do this well will typically build in a “thank you” at the very start of the process – before any major cross-sell effort occurs. These companies also keep in mind that automating is not the same as “setting and forgetting” – they monitor, analyse and adjust their plans and processes as necessary to ensure they satisfy the needs of both customers and the business. Get management buy-in that a formalized strategy is essential to ensuring uniform treatment in accordance with your desired best practice.

2 – Reinforce value before you start selling something new.
Effective onboarders will re-emphasize the features and benefits of the solution that brought the customers to them in the first place. One way to do this well is by helping the customer get the most out of whatever they just acquired. For example, if a customer signed up for a direct-deposit account, the onboarding communications should emphasize how easy it is to transfer in funds or use mobile & online banking channels to access their new account. The key lies in helping the customer feel good about choosing the solution – and the business.

3 – Listen and learn.
Many companies are using Automated Preference Management to gather insights on how customers like to communicate with them. They capture customers’ preferences for communication channels, frequency of communications, and the types of solutions and values that are most important to them. This capturing of channel, frequency and “focus” preference information will importantly allow your new customer to “opt down” rather than “opt out” – Letting them choose to hear from the business on topics that they care about, in the right volume, or only through certain channels has the dual benefit of demonstrating sensitivity to customers’ preferences and improving your customer wallet share (i.e. lifetime value).

4- Predict and act.
Insightful planning coupled with a true understanding of customer preferences sets the stage for a truly customer-centric onboarding process. Successful onboarders take what they have learned from preference data, transactional data and customer profile and predict what each customer is most likely to respond positively to in practice. The latest generation of predictive modelling technologies are very for marketers easy to use and the pay-back is immense. It is also important to note that successful onboarders also avoid the types and frequency of communications that are most likely to elicit a negative response. After all, building strong relationship requires both knowing what – and what not – to say.

5 – Unify and enable.
The new customer is a multi-channel customer, and furthermore, is a “cross-channel” customer. They will move from one channel to the next and expect you to remember the context of the “dialogue” as this happens. Businesses that are able to unify the insights they gain and messages they send across all different channels are more effective in a) presenting a single face to the customer and b) meeting customers’ communication needs. They enable deployment of strategies consistently across all channels and connect the experience across all customer touch points. This means not only the traditional “marketing” channels but also the service and sales channels such as the branch, kiosk, ATM, call centers and more. Using automated governance rules, they ensure appropriate frequency and relevancy of messaging and using event triggers, they cross-sell when customers are likely to be most receptive.

Taken together, companies that engage in these five best practices find that they can reduce “opt-out” selections and boost customer engagement. To learn more about how to put these practices to use for your business, visit the Portrait Software website or download a white paper on this topic.

Creating an outstanding onboarding experience is vitally important. Yet few organizations have a clearly defined, automated onboarding process today; and, the CRM systems of the past have focused more on onboarding efficiency rather than effectiveness.

Onboarding – getting to know you
Onboarding is that 90-day period that begins at the moment a customer makes his/her very first purchase; and, you can think of that first purchase as very much like a first date. How you handle it – and how you manage the relationship in that period immediately thereafter – is really going to determine the fate of your relationship.

Coming on too strong just after a first date is often the kiss of death. Yet, starting a relationship, then never calling, texting, or following up in any other way sends a pretty strong signal that you’re just not that interested.

Onboarding works the same way. It needs to be treated as that get-to-know-each-other period during which trust is built. It is no surprise therefore that of the five key onboarding pitfalls, four reflect a basic lack of dating etiquette.

Pitfalls to avoid
Pitfall #1: Not saying thank you – Expressing your appreciation is good manners – and makes good business sense. If you want a second date (or continued/repeat business), it usually helps if you show some gratitude.

Pitfall #2: Not listening – This is the period in a dating relationship when you should get to understand each other’s likes and dislikes, background, hopes and dreams. In business terms, it’s an ideal time to gather feedback, assess your new customers in terms of marketing and product segmentation, match them to current products – and use what you learn about them in planning and communications. If you fail to listen, you’re likely to get just a fraction of the potential input you could.

Of course, when your business fails to listen it’s because it has fallen into one of two other onboarding pitfalls. These involve not listening – and more:

Pitfall #3: Bombardment – If you smother your date with information about you, s/he can’t get a word in edgewise. And, if you jump right in with the assumption that that your new customer will immediately want to buy all your products, you’ll be so busy promoting that, a) you won’t hear much from your new customers and, b) you may just drive them away. Two of the biggest drivers of “opt out” are frequency and relevancy – in this respect, successful onboarding is as much about what you don’t say, as it is what you do say to a customer. Clearly, in some cases the communications that you don’t send can in fact make all the difference in getting the really relevant messages heard.

Pitfall #4: Latency – Of course, if you don’t follow up at all or you wait too long, you’re letting the relationship go cold before it even has a chance to take root. The onboarding period is also the time when your new customers are most in play – one date or purchase does not a long-term commitment make. Most customers during the onboarding period will still have a roving eye – and it’s up to you to keep it focused on actions that can strengthen the relationship. Acting quickly to getting it right in first 90 days must be an essential component of your onboarding strategy.

Ultimately, whatever you do, you don’t want to leave it to chance. This is where Pitfall #5 comes in, and in onboarding, it’s perhaps the most important to watch for of all.

Pitfall #5: Not having a plan – Lifelong marriages don’t often happen by accident. And, while dates may appreciate spontaneity, the one-to-many nature of customer relations requires planning and standardized process to ensure that each customer is treated consistently. Don’t leave it to chance that customers will receive the right attention – a standardized onboarding practice can start your relationships off right, in a manner that is most effective for long-term customer satisfaction and business growth.

Help when you need it
Latest CRM solutions are designed with the pitfalls and possibilities of onboarding in mind. Check back soon to learn more about how you can create a more powerful onboarding experience – it will be the focus of my next post. Or, if you just can’t wait, check out the Portrait Software site on onboarding. Portrait Software is the latest addition to Pitney Bowes Business Insight solutions.