"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys,"

Sir William Henry Preece (1834-1913)*

You will not have seen these last two predicitions anywhere else…or, at least, I predict that you haven’t!

5. Rethinking Customer Rankings: Big Brother has a Product Endorsement for you!

Customer rankings may have been pioneered by the likes of Amazon, but they have become pretty mainstream. Entire sites (think Tripadvisor) have built their business around the notion of an open pulpit for customers to opine on products, services, hotels - you name it. And it’s valuable stuff. You can’t help but be drawn to the advocacy – or lack thereof – that comes attached. We have learned to live with the natural limitations of the medium – significant sample bias for example – because it’s just so authentic, and we do love a strongly argued opinion. On just about anything.

Right now, you can read 101 customer reviews on Amazon of a PNY 1GB SODIMM Memory Module; yes, an add on memory chip for your computer. You would think this would be a pretty binary post; it either works or doesn’t. But you would be very wrong. There is alot to comment on (and most of it very positive, by the way).

But the novelty can wear off? How useful is this information?

When it comes to matters of personal preference, not very. Take hotels for example; a popular hotel depends a lot on your budget and definition of “luxury”. To some, a cheap clean budget hotel is going to be #1, for others it’s nothing short of the Ritz Carlton that will do. Both customers could be right, but both could be wrong in the context of what makes the best choice for me.

What we need is published customer feedback in the context of our own personal tastes, and the good news – if you can call it that – is that we are furiously populating the web with information about our personal tastes. Social media sites already have enough information about our tastes and friends to be able to filter details about products and services and provide us with a customer ranking from people just like us. Or at least what we declare to Facebook is “just like us”. Expect highly personalized guidance on purchasing as commerce guidance, based on customer reference, has the potential to replace significant advertising resources on the web.

6. As Economies start to Recover, Business will risk Forgetting the Lessons of Customer Loyalty in a Recession.

Tough times have a habit of getting you to focus on basics. If customer acquisition is hard, companies naturally focus on customer retention. Does that mean that, with economic recovery a possibility, acquisition will become easier? If it does, will we stop worrying about retention?

At a macro level, it seems unlikely that we will return to the “go-go” acquisition years of the 90s (the Chinese market being an exception). But for many individual firms, a strong rebound in business is likely to take management’s eye off the retention ball. Loyalty is a longer term leading indicator; if short term business is good, it’s human nature to shorten horizons. At the level of an individual company, customer loyalty has a habit of becoming counter-cyclical with the economy.

On the other hand, we are experiencing a generation of managers who lived through “the great recession”. There is every reason for them to remember the lessons learned; to use better economic circumstances to build a solid foundation for good profits. An improving economy is exactly the time to create loyal customers.

Best of luck with your Customer Experience Program in 2011!

* Sir William Henry Preece (1834-1913) was a Welsh electrical engineer and inventor. Preece was an empiricist, relying on experiments and physical reasoning in his life’s work.Upon his retirement from the British Post Office in 1899, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB).

“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years”
John Von Neumann (1903 – 1957)*

‘Tis the season to be making predictions, and I’m not going to miss out on the annual opportunity to be proven wrong and demonstrate the world’s unpredictability. As smarter people than I have already made most of the well thought-through predictions, I’m going to try a different tack; my challenge is to come up with predictions you have not already thought of, or at least not heard somewhere else. This of course, increases the probability that they are simply wrong. Anyway, there are seven of them… as always your feedback is welcome! Here are the first 2...'

#1 Net Promoter Fusion

This is a trend that I believe is set to accelerate in 2011. It seems too self serving to simply say that Net Promoter will continue to gain adoption in 2011 (which it will) so perhaps a more interesting observation might be that it won’t be as distinctly “Net Promoter” as it was in the past. I believe that more companies will claim to be adopting Net Promoter, but when we look at their programs they may have little in common with prior years. This is not your father’s Net Promoter.

This is in part because NPS has always been a big tent. Beyond the standard calculation, and the notion of promoters, passives and detractors, there isn’t much else that is absolutely “standard”. Lots of companies run their Net Promoter programs with lengthy questionnaires that look more like traditional programs; adopt focus groups in support of their understanding of loyalty and otherwise do stuff that they have been doing for years without the benefit of the moniker.

On the other hand, some of our favorite staples of Net Promoter Discipline are well practiced in programs that don’t care about NPS. Closed loop action planning, verbatim analysis, widespread distribution of data to front line employees etc. can still be executed with the most arcane and compounded set of loyalty metrics.

During 2011, companies who claim to focus on NPS may find themselves with more in common with those who don’t, than with those who claim a similar methodological choice. So what? Well, it’s a timely reminder that companies are wise to stay clear of perceived methodological purity solely in the name of a flavor of customer loyalty program. Get the basic principles established and stay true to them, but don’t be worried about being wedded to chapter and verse.

#2 The Social Media Sandbox

The majority of industry pundits point to the inevitability of social media as a lynchpin of your customer experience program. And certainly there are lots of firms willing to sell you solutions – many quite useful – to the “opportunity” presented by twitter, facebook and their ilk. But in 2011, significant corporations will continue to treat social media as a sandbox; an opportunity to experiment and learn in an (ideally) fairly safe environment. In short, we will make less progress than we imagine.

The hypothesis that social media is primetime for customer experience has lots of supporters and few willing to disagree. If you are selling solutions, your incentive to push the idea as mainstream is obvious, but lots of companies desire the publicity from being on the cutting edge – or at least making sure they are not seen as social media luddites. So a stream of exciting ideas and case studies is virtually guaranteed. Don’t read that as an indication that the kinks are worked out.

We can expect a few, well publicized examples of major brands engaged in sharp swerves, if not u-turns, based on micro-communities of vocal social media users. These groups are now quite powerful relative to their size and, once empowered, are hard to ignore. Only time will tell if the choices companies make will be the right ones. We can also expect companies to experiment with social media favoritism: you might get a more rapid response to a problem by tweeting than calling the established 1-800 number. The consequences of such service bias are hard to estimate. 15 years of call avoidance efforts around use of the internet might look silly if we just found a new route for creating calls, and many firms will be hoping that their customers don’t catch on to the notion that going through the support operation is less effective than micro-blogging your unhappiness.

What is a well intentioned customer experience leader to do? By all means join the experiment, try a few simple ideas and see what you learn. But it’s pretty tempting to let others do the heavy lifting and make the mistakes. 2011 might be a year to watch and learn.

* John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history.