IT orthodoxy has long held that large companies are best-served by a single-instance, single-vendor ERP strategy for the core financial and other back-office processes that govern, operate and support their businesses. A single ERP system deployed across all business units can deliver many advantages, from the productivity gains realized by having standard business processes, to improved regulatory compliance.

The above quote is so true — when your business gets big, you desire everything to be centralized for consistency and efficiency. With this, though, comes the below challenge:

“These small businesses in a big company portfolio tend to change a little bit faster and come and go a little bit faster than the core businesses,” he said. “Forcing them into the mold tends to stifle their growth and innovation — the very reason you bought them.”

The last thing a technology platform should do is get in the way of business — which can often be the case with massive ERP implementations that span multiple years and multiple business units. Small, nimble businesses no longer behave this way and like the above quote mentions, you lose competitive advantage if these are the reasons they were acquired.

Instead he opted for a two-tier ERP strategy, using the Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne platform at corporate headquarters, and choosing NetSuite OneWorld for the smaller business units.

I found this to be quite interesting — if this is an emerging trend in the systems that run businesses, I wonder how this trend will make its way into the e-commerce space (if at all).

Two-tier e-commerce strategy? Or single platform that is easily extended?

The ability to adapt to changing consumer needs quickly and efficiently is paramount in e-commerce business, so it begs the question if there will be a two-tier e-commerce strategy in the future for businesses. Nearly all e-commerce platforms boast flexibility and adaptability, but perhaps the dual-platform approach is unnecessary if the e-commerce vendor appropriately scales and supports an app-style paradigm that allows a platform to be extended beyond core functionality, quickly and efficiently.

Can e-commerce functions be standardized across businesses?

A single e-commerce platform strategy that must support multiple go-to-market models in the digital world is no small endeavor. That’s not to say it can’t be done either. It really comes down to the business strategy and how consumers in B2C environments, or customers in B2B environments behave and require e-commerce services. If there are enough similarities and overlap in what’s needed to operate an online business, then a single platform could work.

If your e-commerce business is similar to the challenges in the article above where there’s a base business, but several outlying businesses that require a considerably different way to operate online, then a dual-platform strategy may be in the cards.

The next few years of e-commerce and digital platforms should really be interesting, particularly as more businesses go online within well-established organizations. We’ll definitely see the IT-centric philosophy play out where a one-size-fits-all approach is the starting point.

Traditional marketers are used to identifying market segments and organizing those segments by personas in order to better target products and marketing messages appropriately. For more on market segmentation, see this Wikipedia article.

Digital marketers, and more specifically, User Experience professionals need to not only incorporate the broad market segment personas, but also further divide up target users into user personas.

How do user personas differ from market personas in a digital environment?

If your target market (persona) is “Sally,” a 40+ female, works full-time, has a family, is a DIYer when it comes to her home, and loves being the one “in the know” about home decorating ideas, this is a great start at understanding your market.

But Sally’s needs are vastly different when you factor in her needs as a user visiting a website, kiosk, or using a mobile device and her stage in the shopping process — all of which require a much more granular level of understanding than her market persona. This is where Sally needs to be categorized into one or more user personas.

Examples of user personas

In the scenario above, “Sally” (our market persona) could be purchasing new flooring for her home. If she’s just getting started on her shopping journey, and she’s never purchased flooring before, her needs are completely different than another “Sally,” who fits the same market segment profile, but has purchased flooring within the last year and has spent the last 4 weeks researching and comparison shopping.

The user personas of these two individuals require very different approaches to their needs at their stage in the journey — one’s virtually an expert, the other is a novice. Misaligning a digital experience so the expert’s intelligence is insulted and the novice gets intimidated is not an outcome you want with the user experience; hence the need for identifying user personas within a digital experience so the correct information and experience gets delivered.

There can be many user personas…

Depending on the complexity of the product or service you’re offering, there can be many user personas because information needs change throughout the journey. If your shopping process is lengthy (i.e. days, weeks, or even months), the understanding and proper handling of these needs is also important to ensure the optimal user experience.

Service Design can help

In a previous post, I wrote about Service Design — the essence of Service Design is the design considerations made around the user persona you’re trying to meet the needs of. One caveat to Service Design is that it doesn’t address how to speak to a user — this is where market segment personas come into play (in addition to brand positioning and brand language).

Market Segment Personas and User Personas, while they sound similar, are very different in practice. There’s a lot of science that goes into the identification of the various personas, but it’s also just as much an art to successfully design and build an experience that aligns with the personas.

As you begin to design experiences that will bridge across channels, this creates a broader perspective of a user’s experience than just their experience with an interface or digital tool. An element of service is now introduced because you aren’t dealing with something tangible anymore as a user transitions across channels. The fact that you can use your mobile device is a tangible element of a digital strategy, but the information being provided in the context of the customer’s shopping/navigation experience, is really an element of service.

What is Service Design?

Service Design is the articulation of the context, actions, needs, and emotions of the customer along their journey. In an omni-channel experience, there are several touchpoints (physical and digital) along the way and the relationships between these touchpoints is critical.

For example, designing a mobile experience for use in the aisle of a store will likely require considerably different needs (where do I find XYZ product in the store, I want more detailed information on XYZ product) than the mobile experience for outside the store (what are the store hours, where is the store located, can I order online and pickup in-store).

Omni-Channel Strategy Must Incorporate Service Design Strategy

Omni-channel strategy cannot just simply be the inclusion of digital tools in different channels. At the time of this writing, the tendency I see with brands and retailers in the consumer shopping space is to rush to a digital tactic and call the collection of the digital tactics an omni-channel strategy. Without a proper Service Design strategy, it would be easy to provide the wrong information to users because the digital tool/application may be misaligned for the needs and context of the user.

Understanding the customer journey and how physical and digital touchpoints can provide value to the customer along their journey is the essence of Service Design. My favorite example of a customer journey map is done by Adaptive Path for Rail Europe:

The reason this is my favorite example is because it’s so specific in terms of what the user is doing at various stages of the journey, what their needs are, what emotions they are experiencing, and what the opportunities are for improving on the experience. It is an easy tool for an entire team to refer back to to ensure that the tactics being deployed in the omni-channel experience are appropriate for the particular point in the customer’s journey.

Omni-Channel Strategy and Service Design are Hard

There is no silver bullet for designing the optimal omni-channel experience. But the key to success will be having a service design strategy at the core of your omni-channel initiatives. The service design strategy, and more importantly, the customer journey map is the holy grail of how to think about the total experience for your customer. Without this, you’ll find yourself guessing at what information to provide (and where to provide it), and you’ll be trying to make each digital tactic and physical touchpoint do too much. When you try to do too much, or when each touchpoint tries to be everything to everybody, it ends up providing little-to-no value.

Omni-Channel and Service Design are Iterative

It’s tough to get things right the first time when designing a service in an omni-channel experience. The more important thing to recognize is that the entire process is iterative, even if the execution is done flawlessly out of the gates, customer needs will inevitably change and the experience will need to evolve with these changing needs. So what this ultimately means is that an omni-channel strategy doesn’t have an end date. When embarking on this type of initiative, it’s best to organize for regular improvements than a “one and done” type strategy.

Service Design Resources

If you’re looking to get more background on Service Design, check out the following resources:

• Learn about the history of service design — it’s not exactly new, however there is a new way of thinking about its importance as it relates to digital experiences and an omni-channel strategy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_design
• Attend UX Intensive by Adaptive Path — whether you’re a visual designer, interactive designer, product manager, or leading a team, you’ll find the sessions at UX Intensive beneficial and you’ll leave the training understanding how to think about design strategy. The Service Design day is excellent: http://ux-intensive.com/sessions/#service-design
• Service Design Tools — plenty of examples of how other companies are using different tools to plan service designs: http://servicedesigntools.org/
• A simple search for “customer journey maps” in Google Images is also a good source of inspiration

For those of you working in an enterprise and trying to implement Agile software development methodologies, you may be wondering how it’s possible to implement Agile best practices for your organization. In an enterprise, with legacy systems, system teams, complexity, and sheer size of an organization, sometimes the Agile manifesto sounds good on paper but really falls short of working in the “real world.”

Recently released as version 1.0, check out the Scaled Agile Framework at http://scaledagileframework.com. I’ve found this framework to be valuable at helping me think about how agile can fit within a broader enterprise and perhaps you can take bits and pieces of it and apply it within your organization as well.

I’ve specifically found their System Team Abstract and System Architect abstract helpful in how these types of functions sit inside an enterprise and integrate well in an agile environment.

I’ve been on a quest to better understand how “the industry” defines roles and responsibilities between ownership of deliverables between Digital Product Managers and User Experience professionals.

Before we can determine who does what, we need clear roles and responsibilities.

Seems simple, right?

The conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s no right or wrong way because these disciplines are still in somewhat of an infancy stage as it pertains to the digital space — and this is what makes this process difficult. The reasons are because these roles vary by company almost primarily due to the skill set of the employees, and therefore organizations have a somewhat organic way of dividing up responsibilities.

The challenge in the above scenario however, especially in larger organizations, is the lack of clear, formal definition. This is the worst of all scenarios because when roles are not definitive, there can’t be any accountability.

Lack of clear roles and responsibilities makes it difficult to recruit

Lack of clear roles and responsibilities further exacerbates itself as employees advance and you try to backfill the individual skill sets they brought to the table, or employees leave and you try to hire an exact replacement — you find yourself recruiting for specialists (which is extremely difficult) and if you can’t find them, you then find your organization structure in a constant state of flux as you alter it to account for the gaps the departures have created. This is not sustainable because your team is impacted by the constant state of change and instead of focusing on building great products, they get bogged down with the constant ebb and flow team structures.

Digital Product Management Roles & Responsibilities

In our business we already have traditional Product Managers, so we are delineating responsibilities here by specifically calling out that these are Digital-specific, so we call it “Digital Product Management.”

With that said, the primary focus of this role is to be focused externally on the market and specifically identifying problems in the market that can be solved by our organization.

Digital Product Management defines the “what” we need to go and do based on an external market focus.

We outline two primary responsibilities as follows:

• Partner with key stakeholders across the business to understand clearly the business needs, consumer insights, competitive landscape, and customer dynamics to develop a Digital User Experience Strategy for our Digital Products
• Work in partnership with Interactive Design and Development & Technology teams to continually test, seek out, and research new digital technologies and standards to evolve our current digital capabilities and build new ones

As you can see, in our business, Digital Product Management is responsible for identifying the User Experience Strategy. Digital Product Management, at the end of the day, is the sole role held accountable for a Digital Product meeting the needs of the market.

User Experience Roles & Responsibilities

We define three core responsibilities for User Experience:

• Information architecture
• Interaction Design (IxD)
• Visual Design

User Experience defines “how” to go about solving the market problems as identified by Digital Product Management.

The User Experience team is still externally focused, but specifically focused on the how’s of usability and delighting end-users; not specifically on what market problems to solve. They receive their direction on what to do from Digital Product Management, but are still accountable for determining how to solve the market problems with the best possible user experience. Digital Product Management is then responsible for validating the “how” in the marketplace and identifying any new problems that need solving.

What if there is no Product Management function in my organization?

First, given the above responsibilities and skill sets of the employees in your organization, you may have individuals operating as Product Managers. You’ll need to first determine if the formal definition is needed. Some organizations it doesn’t make sense, and that’s fine. If you have no Product Management, then User Experience takes on more Product Management responsibilities.

This is where the roles and responsibilities get blended so much across organizations — in organizations that don’t have a Product Management function, the User Experience team often is responsible for handling Product Management duties. Organizational type and culture really is the reason for this. If your organization traditionally manufactures/produces products, then you probably have a formal Product Management Department, so a Digital Product Management function seems like a logical parallel for Digital compared to the traditional Product Management function.

Recognize though that if no Product Management function exists, this puts greater pressure on the UX team to be both externally focused on identifying what the market problems are as well as defining how to solve those problems. Just make sure that the roles and responsibilities between the “what” and “how” are divided amongst the team. It’s tough for a single person to be responsible for both, as they become less objective with the final product.

Fashion Police everywhere are on the hunt for me because of this crime I’ve committed with this shoe design.

The Blank Canvas

Usability issues aside, even the best interfaces don’t always make product customization decisions any easier because of the proliferation of choice. Particularly when it comes to fashion, the choice of color is emotional and often times confusing and scary — The Blank Canvas, where a consumer starts with nothing and must build from scratch, is a daunting proposition.

A Love/Hate Relationship

Product Configurators are loved because you typically are allowed do anything you want.

Product Configurators are hated because you typically are allowed to do anything you want.

For consumers untrained in customization tools, two challenges are presented to them when configuring a product:

1. Learning the user interface of the tool
2. Transforming themselves from “consumer” to “product designer”

These are two distinct challenges. #1 is a usability strategy. #2 is a content strategy. See more on Why Usability & Content Strategy Matter with mass customization.

Configurators Need to Offer Guidance & Recommendations

Product configurators ideally should offer guidance and recommendations, not simply a laundry list of all possible options that can be manufactured or produced. In the above example from Shoes of Prey, I’ve managed to put together an awful example of fashion, and the configurator does little to assist me with alternative design and/or color choices in order to right my wrongs in the eyes of fashion police.

Make your configurator act like a design consultant, and you’ll be able to cater to the masses (read: more marketshare). Make your configurator strictly a blank canvas, and you’ll cater to experts only (read: niche marketshare).

Side Note: At the time of this writing, Shoes of Prey landed $3M in funding and will certainly be using this to make enhancements to their product configurator. I really like their business model and am only using this as an example which plagues most product configurators, including the ones I’m responsible for.

What is Mass Customization and what are its Benefits?

Mass Customization is the process of providing the low unit costs of mass production with the flexibility of individual customization (definition modified from Wikipedia’s Mass Customization entry). Essentially, this means delivering customized products to each end-user based on their own design — and on a mass-scale. Typically, high-level customization occurs on a small scale due to complexity with technology, manufacturing, supply chain, and/or product design.

Some industries however do benefit from advances in these key functions and are capable of providing mass customization to the masses. The capabilities in and of themselves however, do not automatically equal success. The purchase process also plays a key role in the ability to market, merchandise, and sell mass customized products.

What is a Considered Purchase?

A Considered Purchase is one where the product or service purchased is durable, long-lasting, and of solid benefit and enduring value. Products or services that are a considered purchased are owned over a long period of time (definition derived from http://www.smithdahmer.com/content/difference-and-truth-about-considered-purchase). This means the frequency of purchase is low, but the level of engagement is high when the end-user has arrived at the point of purchase decision.

What is a Mental Model?

A mental model is an explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world. Mental models help shape behavior and set an approach to solving problems and doing tasks (definition derived from Wikipedia’s Mental Model entry). Mental models are developed with exposure to a problem or task, so the less frequent the exposure means a more simplistic mental model if the problem or task is complex in nature.

The Role of a Sales Associate in Considered Purchases

In an environment where mass customization and considered purchases are a reality, simplistic mental models interfere with the end-user’s ability to successfully comprehend the choices they are presented with and therefore they require a significant amount of help to reap the benefits of mass customization and to achieve satisfaction with their considered purchase. Help may come in the way of a sales associate who is a seasoned expert. This is why many considered purchases are accompanied by a professional sales associate (buying a home, buying a car, buying flooring, etc.) because they are there to remove the roadblocks to purchasing.

Sales associates however, can be expensive to retain and keep trained if products and services that are considered purchases change regularly. Additionally, the departure of an expert sales associate, or a high turnover rate of sales associates can wreak havoc on the success of your ability to sell considered purchase products because when end-users enter your environment trying to understand considered purchases without that associate’s expertise to guide them (because of their simplistic mental models), they will be lost.

If not lost, they will not reap the benefits of mass customization in your products and will instead choose the path of least resistance because of their low confidence level and still-simplistic mental model. And at the end of it all, you will lose to lower margin competitors who offer the same basic features at cheaper prices.

Offering More Choice than a Mental Model was Built on

At the crux of mass customization benefits is giving end-users nearly limitless choices. This often means introducing possibilities that end-users previously did not know were available to them requiring them to stop and consider their purchase at each step of the way a new piece of information is presented. Herein lies the dilemma: offering more choice than a mental model was built on. How do end-users take advantage of the choice if their mental model wasn’t designed to understand choice? How can you effectively expand the user’s mental model without overwhelming them? And how is this all done without relying on a sales associate to facilitate the process?

Enter usability & content.

Why Usability & Content Strategy Matter

Usability is the ease of use and learnability of an object or process. Self-service systems are only successful when they are easy to use. “Easy to use” can take on several forms, and in an environment where simplistic mental models exist, mass customization is available, and the product or service is a considered purchase, usability must not only be viewed as an interface element, but as a means for providing a process around consuming content and further developing a mental model.

Content aids in educating an end-user, and expanding their mental model to develop an understanding of the choices available to them. The content developed for a user experience is as critical as the interface design elements that are responsible for aiding an end-user through a system.

Vague shopping process familiarity exists in traditional Marketing roles

On the other hand, with Digital we typically see a marketing team with vague familiarity around the intricacies of the touch points of a shopping process trying to build comprehensive shopping experiences.

User Experience is not a marketing campaign

Because the rules of store operations, merchandising, and customer service are different in a digital world, we see little crossover in the expertise of these traditional departments, and marketing departments fall back on what they do best: campaigns. Making a big splash with a new idea, hoping it sticks, and moving onto the next budgeted initiative. The problem is that campaigns have a short life-span, and you never want to treat your digital experience like a campaign.

Enter the User Experience (UX) practitioner

UX practitioners will excel now and into the foreseeable future as marketing departments in both retailers and brands work to bridge cross-channel shopping gaps with digital. It’s these folks who will help map touch points from the traditional world to the digital world, and vice versa because they see the details so no stone is left unturned.

Experiences are never-ending

An experience is never-ending; campaigns and products do however come to an end. Marketing Departments must rid themselves of this mentality and embrace an era of User Experience design.

For years, manufacturers build product, sell it into a retailer, and wipe their hands of most responsibilities after the fact — often focusing on promotional calendars to help drive point of sale with some arm’s length control over point of purchase signage.

As the shift to building experiences becomes more of a priority for brands and manufacturers, they find themselves with an organizational structure and culture that may be highly unprepared for what it takes to embrace this new experience-driven mentality.

These are exciting times for consumers as retailers and manufacturers push the envelope for their attention across channels. These are equally exciting times for retailers and manufacturers as the advances in consumer technologies and their expectations are driving substantially different conversations at the brand and retailer level than in years past.

I don’t watch the local news.

I don’t watch the national news.

This doesn’t mean that the news doesn’t matter to me but rather the way in which I consume the information does. I get my news in bite-sized chunks online as free minutes are available a couple times throughout the day.

The Daily

Despite my fragmented habits of consuming “news,” I do however spend the time once per month to read magazines of interest to me. So how does “The Daily” fit into my routine?

“The Daily” iPad subscription for the news is an interesting concept. I have been testing it out and find myself liking the format but coming to the realization that it’s just not how I keep up with news anymore.

I feel like this is more of a product of me not having 30 minutes to dedicate each day to rather than it being because of the convenience of the free news available online. I don’t spend 30 minutes reading freely-available online news, either. It’s not that I’m unwilling to pay for content, I’m just unwilling to pay for content I won’t use.

The technology isn’t what’s changing my habits, it’s the pace of life and lifestyle that is.

I actually don’t hate the newspaper format. I enjoy the content available in newspapers — my lifestyle however doesn’t afford me the time to sit and read it each and every day.

If my favoriate magazine came via an iPad subscription, I would prefer to read it that way vs. on paper. But that’s more a product of leveraging the convenience of the device rather than despising the paper its printed on.

Is the newspaper industry dying because of technology or because of consumer lifestyles?

A little bit of both. But I think it’s more a product of consumer lifestyle than anything. Many people aren’t paying for a newspaper anymore not because the content quality is poor but rather because they can’t dedicate the time out of their day to sit and read. The Sunday newspaper probably remains the most-kept subscription because of the coupons and also because that’s a day of the week where many do have a few moments to sit and unwind (all speculation – I have no data to support this).

The industry must adapt to the changing behaviors of consumers, not simply move the same concept to another medium.

The newspaper industry needs to instead learn how to deliver news that caters to the faster-paced lifestyles of consumers. It’s certainly not in the printed format and it may very well not be via an iPad subscription. The iPad subscription of The Daily is no different than a newspaper — I still need to dedicate time I don’t have to reading it.

I hope The Daily succeeds because it will provide a blueprint for other traditional publishers to make the switch to Digital Media and we will see some creative work come out of it. However, the concept is fundamentally flawed because it has taken the same business model and made it available on a different medium — and its demise may very well be because consumers’ reading habits for the news simply aren’t what they used to be.

On a related note, in an article on February 7th from VentureBeat about Microsoft potentially cleaning house to make room for more technologists on the Executive team, this particular quote from an Analyst in the article resonated with me:

“You see the engineering team ascending because Steve is realizing that there is a need to execute on a vision and in order to do that you have to actually understand how software is built,” said Wes Miller, an analyst at the Kirkland, Washington-based research firm Directions on Microsoft, in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “It’s a whole other thing to be able to say, ‘I’ve been at Microsoft, I understand software, and what you are saying will or will not work.’”

The underlined portion is of particular interest to the Marketing Technologist – in order for Marketing departments to execute on a vision, an understanding of the technological underpinnings for that vision and the end-user experience it delivers is vital.

The Era of the Marketing Technologist

More importantly, you don’t have to be a software company like Microsoft to require this expertise. For more in-depth discussion on the topic, read Scott’s post on The Rise of the Marketing Technologist.

Making the Case for an Embedded Marketing Technology Team (E-Business)

In my interview, I make the case that Marketing departments should even have their own technology arm – at our organization we call it the E-Business team. E-Business drives multichannel sales, new customer acquisition, brand recognition and loyalty, and customer retention. For more on E-Business, read on.

I love Apple products and the Apple retail store. The checkout process however, needs some work.

Unless you are getting help from an Apple retail associate, the store is not really setup for someone who just wants to go in and buy a product. The lack of a line of registers is a novel idea and by giving each associate their own iPod Touch / credit card scanner device, you have no need for the checkout line bottleneck.

Checkout/Cash Registers Provide a Destination for Paying

However, there is something natural about a line of checkout/cash registers — you know where to go when it’s time to purchase. You don’t feel like you are interrupting an associate who’s floating around the store. You know the person behind the register is there for one reason and one reason only:  pay them your money for a product off the shelf.

Self/Expert Checkout

Since I do most of my product research online before heading to the Apple store, I walk in knowing exactly what I want. I end up spending the majority of my time wandering aimlessly trying to snatch up an Apple associate before the next uneducated shopper occupies them for the next 15 minutes with questions.

I’d love the ability to self-checkout at the retail store. Or some other means for getting an associate’s attention that signals them that I’m ready to buy.

If this were an e-commerce site…

Checkout is perhaps the most critical component of an e-commerce site. It’s the make-or-break moment for your customer in the shopping process. Frustrate them and they will bail.

However, a template won’t fix a fundamental misunderstanding of the commercialization process.

The Purpose of Commercialization

Commercialization is about transforming the value proposition of your brand or product in bite-sized chunks that are tailored for the end-user at the appropriate stage in their shopping process.

Commercialization is NOT about picking items from a menu of capabilities from your marketing communications department and web teams to randomly fit as many tactics as possible into your available budget. Remember, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

1 Simple Tip to Factor User Experience into Commercialization

A general rule of thumb I use is asking one simple question: What is the next step you want the consumer to take?

If you can’t answer this question, put your work on pause and honestly map out the context in which the consumer is arriving at this point in the shopping process and how your message is going to help them proceed to the next step.

Ask this question frequently throughout your commercialization plan and you will find yourself building a mental map of how your target end-user is navigating your product category. This will help you frame up the user experience across multiple tactics in-store and online in digestible chunks.

Why do consumers call customer service?

Maybe it’s just me, but when I spend my time to call customer service, it’s to get a specific issue resolved on that call. I do not call to “leave feedback.”

Additionally, I go online first, perform a Google search, and see what resolutions are available to my problem (if any). My confidence level in finding an answer to my question on a company website is low. Odds are, I will find a discussion around my topic with other consumers who are experiencing the same issue. All of this takes place completely externally of a company’s call center.

So, why are companies relying on call center data to measure satisfaction?

Call centers were previously the “front lines” of interaction with your customers. This is no longer the case. Online communities are the front lines. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

1.) Apple’s iPhone 4 Antennagate

Apple’s antennagate was a great example of where Apple released statistics based on their own call center and support center data. While the data supported the fact that the antenna issue was small relative to previous reception issues on older iPhones, in no way did their data incorporate feedback and comments from the public. I own an iPhone 4 and didn’t have the problems that others reported, but at the same time, Apple’s call center is the last place I go for support for my device.

2.) Spike TV: “We actually don’t get many viewer calls…”

Similarly, (I’m an MMA fan) Spike TV recently aired a tape delay of a UFC event that took place in the UK. The tape delay allowed Spike to air the show during primetime hours (8PM-11PM Eastern) in the U.S.

Because sports newscasts like ESPN report on the news in realtime, many MMA fans were furious when ESPN posted fight results during College Football on Saturday as the live event took place in the UK.

This prompted the MMA community to question why Spike TV would air the broadcast via tape delay. Their research shows that primetime is the best time — and I totally understand this. It’s actually when I want to watch these events (rather than early afternoon). However, this is what I found interesting:

There was quite a bit of hand-wringing among MMA fans this weekend over Spike TV showing UFC 120 on tape delay from London, leading to some fans finding out the results of the fights before they aired in the United States. But Spike TV says that the hand-wringing has been limited to a relatively small number of fans, and that the majority of viewers prefer to watch the fights in prime time.

“We actually don’t get many viewer calls,” said David Schwarz, VP Communications at Spike. “I’ve never received any and I know it’s very minimal.

(Source)

I’m not even sure where I would go to call Spike TV. Their website contact form is only a customer service contact form (no email address, either). It’s no wonder why they don’t receive many viewer calls…and they shouldn’t use this as the only source of data to measure satisfaction.

3.) Domino’s Pizza utilizes multiple communication channels

A company can no longer rely on just their internal data they collect when a consumer calls or emails.

Via brandchannel.com:

Weiner says the new recipe “came from the thousands of direct consumer feedback messages on several media channels.”

Domino’s had an image problem with the public. They performed focus groups to understand why. Notice how they reached outside their normal data collection channels to truly measure satisfaction…we’re not talking just call center data to back up a change in product.

Kudos to Domino’s (and their new recipe is better, too!).

Consumers talk about brands outside of a brand’s communication collection points

It’s easier for me to post my opinions on a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. There are a lot of other opinions from consumers on these networks, too. Companies need to invest in monitoring tools to measure true satisfaction of their products — because consumers are shifting behavior more and more to posting to their communities online than to offering feedback directly to the company.

In fact, it’s not even a behavior shift because public opinion has always lived outside of a brand’s communication channels — there’s just now technology to broadcast your opinions.

And for businesses, technology exists to measure consumer comments and sentiment outside of your normal data collection channels like customer service, email support, and product surveys.

I say this because every time I open the refrigerator, I can’t quickly identify which type of milk the two 1-gallon containers are without carefully reading the tiny letters on the package:

Consumers are trained to shop by skim, 1%, 2%, and whole milk. Yet the Publix label emphasizes “reduced fat” (their 2% name) and “low fat” (their 1% name) as the primary label. This is a usability faux pax because the single, most important descriptor on this product package is not the primary part of the label.

When there are no standards, use best practices

When there are no color-coding standards (Publix uses green and pink for their 2% and 1% color labels, respectively — other suppliers use different color schemes) and the product packaging itself is identical, then the most important part of the packaging label needs to describe what the product is. “reduced fat” and “low fat” are not how consumers shop for milk.

This would be like Apple calling their line of iPod Touches something other than the storage size that differentiates them:

Here’s how Apple really does it. This makes sense to the consumer and doesn’t force me to explore more to understand what each of these products means. Milk labels should also leverage this best practice:

Marketing organizations fall prey to waterfall approaches to updating websites and this generally is a result of an annual budgeting process. Since you’d never leave a retail store untouched for weeks or months on end, why should your online visitors suffer this mistreatment with your site?

It doesn’t matter if you sell online or not, your website is a storefront, not a campaign. As such, maintaining a website is a process, not an event.

Consumer-friendly messaging, right?

Aside from the visual design of the site, it’s the vague message that has my eyes rolling. Basically, this website exists to tell you your tax refund status, but the Department of Revenue cannot provide specific estimates on when individuals will receive their refunds. But alas, everyone who is due a refund will receive a refund! I guess that makes it all better, right?

Imagine if you placed an order for a product, it’s been weeks and you haven’t received your shipment. You call the retailer only to hear them say “we can’t provide you with a status of your order but rest assured, you will receive your shipment.”

Voice of the taxpayer online

I would love to see a government site use OpinionLab or ForeSee Results on their sites. Taxpayers should then be able to see the aggregated feedback ratings & scores. Government website operators could then focus on ease of use and helpful tools online. Messages like above only insult taxpayer intelligence and further throw gas on the fire.

However, I’m wondering when they (and other satellite & cable providers) will begin to think differently about how they present channel guides both online and via the TV remote?

Here’s DIRECTV’s guide:

These are mainly local channels. Wouldn’t it be better to offer a filter that said “Local Channels” that I could click and see these? I’m not familiar enough with the Station IDs to know if they represent ABC, NBC, CBS, etc. Sure, I can generally tell by the programming listed, but still. This would never fly on a major retailer website for listing products this way.

If TV stations were like consumer products…

If this were an e-commerce site, end-users would be driven away if they were forced to only view products by numerical product ID and a short-code. Through history of channel surfing by number, I suppose this method of thinking is engrained in many people’s minds.

However, with the volume of channels being what they are, presenting them in numerical channel order is a growing usability challenge. I live in a world where I DVR virtually everything and watch it at a later date. I am completely channel number and station ID agnostic — I honestly don’t know what channels “my shows” are on.

Searching for TV shows

Let’s look at keyword search results for “olympics”

Support topics are shown first. Then site pages.  Hopefully there’s research to support this ordering, but generally speaking, a topic like “olympics” is probably more related to TV programming than a support article. “Satellite doesn’t work” would certainly be a reason to show support articles first. Below the fold (scrolling down on a 20″ monitor) I see 5 results for TV programming.

I don’t know what NBCw vs. NBCwHD means. Unfortunately there’s no title for me to click on to find out why this matched my search for “olympics.” Let’s click “view all”:

More empty titles. Again, search results displayed by channel and then by date with no sorting options.

DIRECTV offers a slick option to “Record to DVR” from their website. As such, having the ability to filter search results by content rather than channel and date/time is important because on the web and with the ability to “Record to DVR”, the channel and date/time are irrelevant.

For example: Because I’ve been buried in doing actual work the past couple weeks, I first heard about Google Buzz through RSS feeds before getting the notification that it was ready for my Gmail account.

And judging by the RSS feeds, the type of coverage was akin to TMZ covering Jersey Shore cast news.

Oh my, people. Relax.

The early adopter community of these technologies get so caught up in overanalyzing every move in the industry that they lose sight of where these innovations and changes take us from a consumer perspective.

It makes me yearn for the format of a magazine that reports on industry news in a less timely format, but without all of the initial noise, gossip, and speculation woven into the article like I’m seeing so much of online.

Social Media has the potential for large companies to feel small and make each customer feel valued like local businesses have been doing for years.

My local dry cleaner

Each week when I drop off my dry cleaning at the local dry cleaner, the owner greets me by my first name. I’ve even seen the owner working out at the local gym and he still referred to me by my first name.

Making me feel valued and worth remembering

It’s one thing to see a customer’s vehicle pull into your parking lot giving you have a few moments to recall their name, it’s another to see the customer out of context and still remember their name.

It’s hard to explain how this feels as a customer to be remembered both in and outside of the business.

I have yet to feel this way after visiting or purchasing from a website.

Which is your social media strategy?

That of my local dry cleaner? Or something else:

There’s little in the relationship and loyalty department to be gained when your business’ Twitter account is for posting your cheapest products, your Facebook page is about acquiring the most followers, and your blog is filled with content designed for search engine rankings and not people.

Build a relationship, not a campaign

The point of Social Media is not to “build a list,” “go viral,” or “get impressions/mentions.” Social Media is not a campaign.

Social Media, done correctly, enables your business to intelligently connect with your loyalists to build deep relationships over time.