The approach, and the comment aren’t unique this one retailer or retail at all but rather it’s just one example of the growing gap that exists between how companies operate at the point of interaction and the growing focus on customer experience in corporate.

As this discussion was taking place I could see the lines growing… and yet employees were visibly scampering around to other parts of the store, backrooms, and out the frontdoor for their current task. Some consumers waited and filed the experience away into their own head while others likely chatted about the long waits to whoever they were with on the spot or when they got home and then of course there are the few people who pulled out their smartphone and shared it with the world right then and there. But no matter how they acted, no matter what the, tickets / cashier or any other store KPI may have been, the perception of the store was impacted.

Just about every company has or is in the process of creating a team tasked with building reputation and yet these teams are often kept away from the process where impressions are actually made, left trying to leverage the good outcomes and mitigate the bad ones. For stores, call centers, even web teams, the focus is often on the same metrics they’ve known for years: items per basket, cashier efficiency, upsell dollars – drive the bottom line. It’s not the two sides are at odds with each other, it’s simply how they look at the world – social attacks experience to drive results while stores look at results to determine what to do in experience.

When the idea of social business first started to catch, we could only see as far as our team – how do we in corporate marketing get more people talking, how do we drive more reviews – agencies did this, brands did this, I did this, well did this – it was, at the time, the right way to go. But now we know better, we know that while we may say “social”, we don’t mean what happens at Facebook or Twitter, we mean what happens at the store, with the returns call center, during the tradeshow that creates the experience which will make it to Facebook.

So when we talk about bringing “social” to the entire company it doesn’t just [just] mean get everyone on Twitter to respond to questions, it’s about changing the culture, the metrics, the very way we do business. We have to think about what’s going to make our reputation against what we want out of our business – is our price point low enough to really be able to get away with long lines? Is our service really what we think it is?

Social should start in corporate, it should be managed by a team, defined and run as a part of everyday operations but that’s not where it ends.

Customers form their opinions at every interaction point and the impact of each positive or negative is huge – even if it’s never put out with a public comment that the corporate team can see. This requires a complete shift; we can’t assign reputation to a small team and leave those on the floor who actually make it ignorant of the realities of the market. To improve reviews, shares, likes – social, we have to improve the experience first.

The chief issue with a like, a retweet, or any other broadcast that is asked of a user is the endorsement behind it. Just as social has a code of conduct for brands engaging with consumers, the same exists for consumers engaging with each other. Posting to the wall and using a strong statement, each “like” is a statement. And not only do you have to get past that hurtle, but under the current feed systems, each action disappears off in minutes to a sea of new updates, photos and other likes leaving little long term connection outside of a smart counter.

But with Facebook’s new timeline feature and the apps that plug into it, the sharing game is in for a massive change.

As Facebook demonstrated with their launch partners at the recent f8 developer conference, a timeline app is an aggregation of activities from a particular site or tool that are individually less visible but collectively add up to reflect a part of someone’s life in their profile — whether it’s sharing a live playlist with spotify, last nights’ movie with Netflix, the current craft project, or even an automated stream from a vacation, apps will allow for users to associate activities as a part of their self identification.

Less visible & less significant, the opportunity for exposure will increase

The challenges to liking that I mentioned previously poses a significant barrier on many levels — users are selective about how many companies they like in total, how frequently they will add something new and even how they interact with sub-level pages like a brand vs an individual item for fear of overdoing it or being spammed by brands. By lowering the priority of each post and enabling more reasonable actions (reading, watching, listening to, researching, etc) it’s logical that users will become more willing to share and even allow for automated posting for trusted and appropriate tools.

In traditional advertising we consider repeated exposure vital to building up awareness and consideration so while these changes reduce the impact of any individual share action that is moved over to a timeline app, repetition is a worthy tradeoff for building social credibility.

Social has gone far beyond speeding up support inquiries or driving discussion n product launches, brand building is now really more “brand attachment” or the connection a brand is able to make, keep and show within a customer’s life. Timeline draws this evolution out literally and even further drives home the significance of moving from a buyer-supplier relationship to a partnership of sorts.

Early adopters will benefit significantly from viral effects.

While f8 outlined a few possibilities, there’s really no consumer facing brand that can’t find a way to bring themselves into a timeline.

The opportunity for timeline apps to is significant across many b2c and even b2b channels going from the very straight forward and “obvious” activities like a streaming service post to far more complex sharing like an update after a QR code scan or the departure of a plane.

Pulling in my own real world example, we see timeline as a game changing way to launch and build activity bringing gift related actions out from our standalone web and mobile platform and into a user’s existing social base without having to force (or build) a full app connection. With a simple confirmation, the wishlist picks, reviews and discussions around products created on our site live in a central place right where our user is most — Facebook. This in turn drives up repeated impressions which not only gives us the chance at growing our users but it helps the user fulfill their goal of getting their wishlist shared, seen and that gift purchased – it’s an action that we both want.

From my seat as both managing a consumer service and bringing brand marketing programs out, timeline apps are one of those changes that we will look back on and say “wow, that changed things” but I am eager to know what you think — is your team mapping out ideas, knee deep in code or holding on the sidelines to see if things shake out first?

Of course anyone working in ecommerce, or any corporation, could have told you there would be problems. Tens of millions of flower orders , dozens of companies, and just 18 or so hours  to get them all there on time (but not too early), it’s only logical that some orders would fail within the process… Some complaints were inevitable.

And some level of complaints are inevitable for almost all b2c companies. No matter how perfect the process is, something will fail at some point and whether it’s the fault of the company or something entirely out of their hands, like the weather, it’s all going to come back on them, and these days back to social media. So knowing that something bad will happen, it’s up to us as marketers/ social strategists to insure that when problems come up we have the right plans to respond, but also that they don’t dominate the conversation or become the purpose of our page. We need to be more than just support channels .

Going back to my Teleflora example (and to be clear and not just pick out one company, the same issue is happening with ProFlowers and others that I checked), something is missing – balance. On the pages of most flower brands I visited just about everything was negative and support related. If these companies had happy customers (and I know they do because I am one) they were nowhere to be found and likely for good reason, no one had asked them to join up and share.

My suggestion to flower business earlier in the week was to provide an insert with orders for people to evangelize their great orders (or their bad ones, a review is what it is). All it takes is a simple note to remind people to comment, to tell them where you are, and out of the millions, thousands or even of just hundreds of customers you touch, you’ll get some balance… You’ll get light advocates.

Take this a step further, build a social program that encourages fan participation before the issue and you’ll be far more prepared when one does strike. This is where best practices really kick in – buying fans in masse with discounts, coupons and giveaways is easy and gets numbers, but successfully cultivating them takes a great deal more than good offers, it takes useful content, engaging directly around posts other than support, even how the business goes to market, the policies and programs that you have and how your fans react to them. But if you can build a dialogue and a regular flow (and yes, this is possible for even seemingly mundane brands) then you have moderate advocates on and around to help when there are negatives, to explain that there is a good to the bad, and to be talking about things other than support and trouble. And of course if you really go all the way, develop that full advocacy program and engage customers to become brand evangelists, community leaders, and the like, well now you have a whole force of people to balance and even better, aid.

Now don’t get me wrong, the issue customers are having with their flower orders are certainly very real and need a response, not to be buried or hidden by a flood of off topic discussions. Transparency is good, real responses are what matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have both – it is again a balance of what your social media channels do for you and your customers.

As for the support side, we all know it isn’t easy, or cheap, but it is something which companies tend to get… and here, the flower companies are doing a good job of responding 1:1, giving direct email addresses, and all of the other support processes you’d hope for when customers are upset and support lines are backed up with callers… they may not be perfect but they’re on it for this part. But while the support side is going well, when all people see is bad, they get more upset, the assume nothing is going right, and they lose the benefit of peer to peer support or comments to turn too.

And that’s why you need your fans to know, connect and be involved with your social media presence now, when things are good. Social media is not just about offers and sales generation, not just a support system, but when used right, it can be a dialogue platform to get insights, have the right discussions that curtail or stop issues early on, and yes, be a place where people share all the great things your product / service / brand are doing that may them advocates and repeat customers.

I’ve spent the majority of my blog entries thus far talking about how to meet the needs of your customers as well as how to make their experience better but all that’s fairly meaningless if you don’t know who they are and what they’re thinking about when they purchase (or exit). Unless you’ve already got the research aspect handled, chances are you don’t know enough about your customers to really be able to do the things they want (your assumptions don’t count, even if you are in the demographic – a sample of one isn’t a sample) and even if you do the research, chances are you can do more.

From an online perspective it always seems like it would be so easy to know what’s going on if you had an offline marketing job but the truth is there’s still plenty of ways to get to your consumers online and they work pretty well. So here are a few ideas for how to talk to your customers and prospects online as well as a few that cross over into the offline world for those of you doing multi-channel business…

1 – Ask them. (Duh) This one is fairly easy but so many companies fail to do it consistently. When I complete a transaction, ask me about it. Not just for a user review or PR purposes but for your own internal QA and understanding. The hotel and travel industry is starting to get this down, especially the travel booking sites (big time kudos to Priceline on this one) with nearly immediate and automated emails after a booking and it works great. Spitting out a simple survey email is basic and if you’re really working to improve the customer’s response, pair it up with an outbound call center to address those bad remarks (and even some of the good ones as means of building the brand).

2 – Survey the lists & website visitors. Immediate product surveys are a great first stab but they only speak to people who bought, bought online and opened the darn email. Step things up and encourage a wider audience to chime in. This audience can come from your in-house lists, website visitors or a combination of the two – both are familiar with the brand so you’re not going to measure awareness but you can get at site satisfaction, technical issues (IT will just love this one), competitive concerns and a whole heck of a lot more. Throw up a Zoomerang or SurveyGizmo survey on the cheap end (under $600 a year each) or get sophisticated with a consumer confidence score like what Forsee Results offers. With a few simple and fairly quick surveys you can get a great pulse on things in a statistically significant and meaningful way plus since you’re surveying your own base the costs are all but non-existent and even better, you can repeat the exercise over time to see how things change.  

3 – Survey beyond the people who take the survey. The problem with web surveys is that they only talk to people who stick around. If there’s a real site issue, product mismatch or something else major, chances are the people seriously affected are bailing which means you don’t get an opportunity to talk with them. By asking broader questions about the website, about the offering, even about the brand to a general sample, you can get a great sense as to what resonates and what offends or just doesn’t appeal. I’ve been included in a fair number of these types of surveys and some have even gone so far as to show me a few page mockups or banners, almost as if it was mass-usability testing. While I didn’t give as rich an answer as I would have in a focus panel or one-on-one testing scenario, I sure did give my opinion and the company had a great chance to get some broad and narrow stroke responses to pages well before they actually got coded.

To really get at this you may want to consider surveying offline as, well, let’s face it, online panels have their own skew and while offline ones are no different, you want to measure the right audience so if you suspect your users are more casual web surfers, asking a bunch of people who can sit through a 45 minute survey online for a couple of bucks isn’t always the right place to start. But on the flip side, if you’re FaceBook, asking people who refuse to take a survey online may not be a great way to find out anything except how it is that doesn’t have any chance of using your website… which while interesting wouldn’t help you in an exercise to improve visitor retention or anything of the sort.

4 – Talk to them, in person, ya, in person – really. Focus groups don’t mean much of anything to your statisticians but they mean an awful lot in getting imperial and detailed answers. If you’re launching a new site you must, must, must do some basic focus panels for usability testing but more importantly, upfront focus groups help you understand what people are actually looking for. There’s nothing worse than building or starting to build an app with a five or six figure budget than to find out no one cares about having their own calendar on your website. The same is true of basic info – you don’t want a hundred hours of designer time wasted because your category labels are wrong. So ask people.

Side note for anyone trying to justify a redesign or upgrade: Asking people can be a great way to prove just how bad things are on the site currently (although sometimes you’ll find out they aren’t that bad).

4b – On the subject of talking to people in person but a bit different than meeting customers in the open, you can always go super informal and have your office bring in a few friends and family. You can even spin your site around on a laptop and show it to a local group you belong to or your own buddies. There’s lots of bias and you may not even talk to people in your demo but hey, at some point you really just need to get an external set of eyes spotting those huge, but hard to see confusion points. Some people will know the brand and bring that awareness, others will be in the dark and therefore completely off the wall in their vision so while you can’t take every comment back to the designers, you’re still likely to get a few insight points from people that may be just what you need to find the next good test or serious upgrade concept.

5 – They’re already telling you. Seriously simple one here – step outside of your office and visit customer service. I’d guarantee you any long time rep can tell you 5 problems with the website and 5 ways to improve it without missing their next inbound call. Customers call when they get stuck, not in great numbers, but as I always said to my CSR agents – if one person called you, chances are a dozen more took off for the same reason. I suggest going beyond just occasional “checkins” and establishing a point person in the service department and a point person in marketing or the web team to have a scheduled update with a list of issues. Often times you’ll end up going over known issues or things you don’t want to fix, but hey, if you just get one good bug, one good insight you’ve got a winner. Plus through those conversations you and your interviewing of the CSR team, you can get some great insights into the personality nature and type of clients visiting your site, or at least the segment that’s willing to call.

6 – Use your analytics. It may seem counter intuitive – analytics group people and certainly don’t capture comments or feelings, but don’t they? When someone visits a page and bails, there’s a reason for it. Web analytics don’t often tell you what that one person did but in aggregate you can get a very good feeling for what people are doing. Path analysis is great for this sort of exploration – are 50 or 60% of the users who make it to a campaign landing page clicking in to the same next page, adding an item to their basket but bailing the second shipping information is shown? Bingo, we’ve got an insight.

These days there are a few tools that let you watch users in real time, most interesting to me are the chat solutions with proactive capabilities. What I love about this is you can track a user around your site and if it seems like they’re getting stuck or confused, invite them to get some assistance. Many will decline, few will accept but when I ran a chat program a few years back we had great results and, since we got to move from analytics to person-to-person interaction, we got insights too. There’s nothing wrong with having your agents throw a couple website usability or experience questions into their conversation to tease out feedback in very real time.

Of course you don’t have to use chat to get visitor level analytics, there’s plenty of other tools to do it. Whatever you use, try adding in some additional segmentation variables to classify people (return customers, new, campaign origin, etc…) and spend some time going through each of their common experiences. It can be difficult to figure out why they left but it opens the door for testing as well as for using some of the other tactics with a specific question in mind – if everyone bails on product 42 and testing all the pricing, color and image options doesn’t fix it, you know what you need to ask your next focus group, survey or just a couple of buddies down the street.

7 – Get offline and hit the pavement yourself. Most of us sell something offline, have retail stores or customer who experience our brand in a retail way and even if you don’t, chances are you can still find your customers at a tradeshow or local event. Every now and then you have to throw conventional measurement to the wind and just interact. Yes there’s bias, yes it means you have to talk to people, yes it means getting your hands dirty but if you’re an executive or someone up in the marketing chain and you’re not talking to people on the customer level, how can you ever expect to understand them. So many executives and managers get caught up in running things and looking at demographic generalizations that we forget to find out the issues and challanges that our customers are really facing as well as the ideas they have for how to make things better for their needs.

I’ve heard about Disneyland Execs who make regular rounds at the park with no special badges, Walmart c-levels who drop by for visits and talk to people on aisles and many other examples and these are downright amazing to me. If your company has a lot of face time (i.e. retail, an airline, hotel, etc…) why not consider hiring someone at a high level to work in marketing or ops that is just there to help mingle with customers, blend in with customers and at times resolve issues for customers at a low level. Nothing would make my day more than getting off a late, rerouted flight than to have someone with real authority there helping us after he or she experienced the same thing.

A flip side to this is letting your bottom-level employees actually access management. If you’re a larger retailer this is difficult and takes work but having managers report up to regional managers who report up to corporate just doesn’t cut it. Sure you have to do this most of the time but some days you also have to talk to the field and get a few part-timer employees giving you their individual gripes and those of the customer. This is where the insights live. These are the people who know what little things would make customers love you. Don’t forget that while the bottom rung may not have the MBA, they know what would make life easier for themselves and the good ones can almost always see where it would help the company up top… not every idea is good, but they all come from some inspiration that’s probably worth being aware of.

8 – There is an eight… What was it? Oh, that’s right… get yourself to tradeshows & events and see what’s happening in the industry. There’s a ton of people doing research online and a ton of companies with new products and services from analytics to surveying to a million things not listed here that you should be exposed to. Lots of people skip shows because for a lot of reasons (I loathe the “sales presentations” myself) but at some point you have to put those aside and realize that all the products and insights sent out in newsletters and from cold calls aren’t going to give you half of what you can get from chatting to a dozen people in the same world who’ve had a couple of drinks and are willing to share their techniques (but hopefully not their results) to getting into the consumers head.

Have your own research method or suggestion? Please share it as a comment and yes, this includes posting your relevant service offering if you have one.