Prepare to wonder if people are recording, and then to not care.

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/

Why you should bring your interactions to the place where people already spend their time.

Email is the #1 Destination

Ryan Hoover published a great article the other day on the trend of using email as an interface to do other things. You probably already use it in this way by sending commands to other systems: “forward this email to my expense site”, “watch my email for interesting stuff,” and “make a to-do list out of my emails.” In my experience, managing tasks through email (though hopefully not using your inbox) increases productivity and makes you generally better at getting stuff done. And there’s a bit more that we ought to be doing.

The “stuff we ought to be doing” varies, and usually relates to long-running recurrent tasks (remember someone’s birthday, maintain a daily or weekly status), project-based tasks with a deadline (I need to get some stuff done before next Wednesday), and one-time actions (“Can you find this for me, right now?”) Email is really lousy at these things, which is why we use other applications for help.

We need a better way to surface applications and services in email without breaking the way people handle email today.

Remember. All. the. Logins.

Awesome! You remembered all of your passwords (or have a great SaaS app to handle that.)

There are so many great applications that are out there (many are even free) that can get stuff done. Now, which ones should we hire to do the job? And what job are we actually doing? Just managing the logins can be a chore, and getting beyond that to switch contexts every time you want to start something new can waste a lot more of your time.

Getting started isn’t easy.

One of the great challenges of Software as a Service products is that there is a login to remember, a site to visit, and tasks to do in that other system that will help you to better manage the minute details of the things you do. You might use Sprintly for Agile Dev, Desk.com for Customer Service Interactions, Expensify for Expenses, and so on. Yet all of these products depend upon you start an action in email and then resume it in another system.

So which app was I using to do that?

When you make constant decisions that force you to have another login, another app to pay attention to when you’re on the go, and yet another slew of notifications, you dilute your ability to make quick decisions. It’s a mental burden to understand which things really need attention and which notifications arrive as a result of long-forgotten decisions that are no longer important.

Ok, Now What?

When you build an application – and need customers to participate – it’s your job to find the place and interface where they will get the most value out of your idea. I believe you should not only make your service responsive but also your service design responsive.

Towards a Responsive Service Design

Making a basic responsive design is pretty straightforward – making an insanely great one is really hard. I think the same is true when you invent a responsive service design. Making your service design responsive anticipates that customers will use different modalities and interfaces to access your idea, and that some customers will never cross into another way to use your idea. App customers may not behave the same as email customers, and vice-verse. But there are a ton of people using email, so how can you add value to their experience without being overwhelming?

Service Design as a concept implies that there are activities that customers take to get tasks done. Completing the tasks may require external actions and may depend on other tasks or actors. Finally, the activity you are designing may happen in multiple places.

Email to the Rescue: The Lowest Common Denominator

Because people spend lots of time in email and there are already many ways to access it, email is a great candidate to act as an operating system where customers might do these service tasks as part of an overall service design.

There are three basic ways you can push email towards being an operating system of sorts:

1. Create a browser extension – force your way into the experience, either passively (Klout in adding scores to your Twitter pages) or actively (Rapportive, adding persistent information to the existing real estate)
2. Invisibly solve a problem – have a background service that listens to email and makes decisions or surfaces information based on your preferences (Sanebox, for example, which automatically files your messages)
3. Take explicit email commands – “add note”, “send tweet”, etc and make them easier to use for “normal” people and abstract them to other media

Time to fight the blank page

All of these methods have advantages and challenges – let’s take a look.

Make a Plug-In

You could make a browser extension that will either take over the real estate or silently monitor or insert information in the places you’ll most likely interact with other services. Plug-ins are awesome for absolute control and transfer very poorly to other interfaces.

As an example, I love Rapportive because it does a great job of using the mostly empty screen real estate I used to see in Gmail and fills it with valuable information about the person who is contacting me. It even shows me the latest view that other people using the same service have of me. Rapportive is a great experience because it exposes some methods to other application services I use (send invitation, start tweet, read Facebook post) without cluttering my view. Some drawbacks of this method are that I don’t have any more mental space for more plug-ins. I’m sure that was one of the reasons LinkedIn purchased this scrappy team.

Create an Invisible Service That Does Your Work

Another way of approaching this problem is to work behind the scenes and make the changes necessary to increase productivity or other goals. This method is cool because it’s client-independent. And it still requires developers to create different interfaces in different client. (There’s less to customize, though.)

Sanebox just works – it filters the email I receive into Gmail labels and then gives me a single digest a day to take actions. From my daily email digest I can delete unwanted messages, set reminders, and see how I’m doing relative to prior days or weeks. When I want to ignore Sanebox, it’s still doing work for me and allows me to close email for long periods of time and then solve for a burst of emails all at once. I don’t have to worry about filing any more – I just search.

Another version of this implementation is the inverse of a service that is implemented everywhere – Mailbox lives only in an iPhone app and allows you to connect to many email clients and apply the same simple management effort to each one. Mailbox takes the best metaphors from the mobile interface and applies them to email: swipe to promote an email to a task or to archive or delete it.

Make external tasks possible in Email

The traditional, geeky way to make external tasks possible in email is to require the customer to send an explicit email command in a subject line or in an interaction body so that the server on the other end of the “conversation” knows exactly what task to execute. In practice, this works well for “send my stuff to you and have you process it” and is harder to execute for “do only the thing I want you to do and not that other thing based on the thing I type.” Normal people – that is, people who don’t talk to computers all day – have a hard time doing this.

Yet the potential exists – many of us use Siri, Google Voice Commands, or interfaces like Google Glass to create a graph search-like call and response with our services. So let’s do that with email – and that’s where Google is going.

Google’s version of this is borrowed from another company, however. Their previous versions of “do stuff in your email” were possible only for geeks to do. You needed to install a “Labs Feature,” or use keyboard shortcuts, or do other things late adopters don’t tend to do. And what’s the solution? Apps that magically show you what to do and offer fewer choices and fewer configuration steps.

We should thank Facebook and Apple for priming customers to act this way – the app economy makes customers expect one-click actions to solve their problems. So now it will be possible for publishers like Google to create structured, in-context actions for customers to complete and interact with other systems. Some will call this backsliding and the new “Death of Email.” I call this the birth of “Email, the Operating System for Life.”

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originally published at Medium.

On Saturday, I rode as part of a group of over 800 cyclists who raised money for Diabetes research in the American Diabetes Association’s annual Tour De Cure event in Redmond, WA. This was the 10th annual Tour in Seattle, and we raised almost $300,000 for the cause.

I ride because I’m at risk for Diabetes and I have family members who have the disease. You should be paying attention because of the staggering public health and civic cause this disease is causing. The takeaway? We should all be trying to move more, eat less, and help people stay physically active.

Here’s an infographic on the cost of Diabetes – it keeps going up.

Take a look – the cost of Diabetes is pretty astounding

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/robellisphotography/

Hey you there.  The one with the combination of WordPress, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Twitter, Buffer, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Slideshare, Excel, Word, and a Google Docs mishmash of information ending in Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Apptentive and others. You and I have the same problem. We want to be better at what we love – publishing valuable content for audiences that appreciate it – and we want to measure it. We also want to know which content published by which person at which time was effective. And we need to do this without the compendium of technical knowledge and project management skill that it takes today to get this done.

Consider this exchange and you’ll get the idea of why this is difficult.

a conversation among community manager types on Facebook

There has to be a better way

You need a better content calendar (and so do I.) You’d like to have the ability to make a campaign, syndicate information to multiple channels and to track analytics in the same place. You need to schedule this content for days or weeks or months in advance. You’ll need to do this for multiple authors and also have a big red STOP button to make this information cease when bad things happen in the world.

I send apologies in advance to those people think that content calendars and scheduled publishing is bad. I think that it’s better to publish live than schedule, and I also feel that it’s better to set ideas in advance and follow through on those ideas when you are trying to drive sustained, measurable success. So perhaps these two goals are at odds, and perhaps not. In the meanwhile, we all need a better content calendar than just dumping everything in a Google Spreadsheet.

There are good signs – when I asked this question on Twitter – I heard from Meshfire, Relaborate and Brightpod. I also asked a group of about 5400 community manager types and got some great answers. And I also got the feeling that there are few people out there who are managing the publishing of multiple content authors in multiple channels in multiple campaigns having a simple workflow for approval with the precision and information that they are using to manage their email marketing campaigns.

What does this mean overall? Two words: Market Opportunity. Someone needs to build a content calendar and management service for normal people that is as easy as managing your blog posts in WordPress. That service needs to handle scheduling, analytics, and content funnel management for multiple people and campaigns across multiple channels. If this service already exists, I’d love to know about it so that I can use it.

Think of the last time you contacted a “Big Brand.” Did you feel appreciated, acknowledged or loved by their response? If so, that’s great! If not, then you probably had an average service experience. They can do better. And here’s a few tips that might help.

10 Great Tips – try them today.

1. Poor Customer Service Kills Repeat Business
2. Use Social Selling to Grow Your Business
3. Give the Customer a Head Start
4. Say Thank You, and Solve the Problem
5. Customers Want Really Fast Service
6. Customers Will Go to Another Company with Great Service if You Don’t Offer Great Service
7. Protecting your Ego Might Cause Churn
8. Deliver a Shareable WOW Experience
9. Share the Solution to the Problem Broadly
10. Partner with Front-Line Employees to Solve Problems

What’s missing from this list? Feel free to chime in and add your favorite customer service tip that helps turn customer strategy into actions that you can do today to make the customer experience better for your customers.

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/miuenski/

When talking to people about customer service, I often hear them discuss the idea of the “Voice of the Customer.” Ideally, this might mean “knowing exactly what this customer wants and needs and can tell us about their service experience.” Because you can either know the exact wants and needs of a single customer or the aggregated wants and needs of a group or cohort, the idea of the Voice of the Customer is a bit fluffy without specific measurements that you and your organization agree are good metrics to show a happy (or dreadful) customer experience. Many people in the industry agree that the Net Promoter Score is a good customer satisfaction metric (percentage of people who would promote your brand minus the percentage of people who would not recommend your brand) and I believe that the Net Promoter Score doesn’t measure the real service delivery that influences these promoters or detractors.

How do you measure Service Delivery?

If you’ve read How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard, you’ll also know that simply saying “Service Delivery Experience or The Voice of the Customer cannot be measured beyond ‘verbatims’” is downright silly. Hubbard states that to measure intangibles in an organization, you have to name the business drivers that matter to the company and attach some relationship to that business driver for the quantity or quality you are measuring. Will you have great measurements? Probably not at first. But you will be measuring something.

A Modest Proposal

I have a modest proposal for measuring and sharing the “Voice of the Customer” in the real Customer Experience of an organization by looking at three metrics. The first of these metrics should quantify how fast a case moves from stage to stage in the customer lifecycle, and how many times it must repeat this cycle. The second metric is the number of positive and negative custom comments accumulated in a stage per case. And the third idea involves empowerment and ownership – the organization should measure the percentage of cases that the original case owner resolves (along with the average number of transfers per case and per agent.)

Hubbard might think these are just starting points for measurement, and I agree that I don’t have 90% confidence in what the ranges are for these values. I do know that to carry out this plan, I’ll start by making my best guess at a 90% confidence interval for each of these metrics, show some tactics to improve (or measure) the items, and then track the changes over time to see if the overall customer experience is improving. How will I know whether the experience is improving? My hypothesis is that a good customer experience overall – across multiple touch points, devices, and methods of communication – will improve overall business drivers. If I can do a better job of tracking the customer experience inputs I will be better able to create a customer experience funnel that ends with a great review, a buying experience, or a positive comment that’s not related to a product.

Using the Delivery Experience as a Measure of Customer Happiness

The first item in this list is to name the stages of the customer lifecycle and show (by cohort if possible) how long it takes for the customer to move from one stage to the next. You might start with a simple list like “searching,” “ready to buy,” “purchased,” “implemented,” “post-installation” and see if there are easy ways to find this data. You can usually find information like this from your sales team – it’s a clever hack to use it for customer service as well and see if the experience can aid or hinder a customer’s movement from stage to stage.

Do you know all the stages in the customer lifecycle? Probably not. And you know them better than anyone who comes from outside your company and doesn’t deal with the same issues you do and handle your customers. So your guess is better than most.

Takeaway: name the stages of the customer lifecycle (or borrow them from sales) and apply them to the customer cases you handle.

How many people contact this hypothetical customer in your company? If it’s more than one contact from Sales and one contact from Customer Service, you might have a problem. It’s true – there are lots of contact centers and small teams that happily disperse customer contacts to an account team or to whomever picks up the phone or answers the email – and as a customer, you know how that feels. It’s really frustrating when you find someone who understands your problem and then not be able to contact that resource directly the next time you need help. Why not follow the lead of CDW, who has a large organization yet lets you know the direct dial number of your contact team. With phone routing, this is not a hard problem – the bigger problem involves the scripting and handling of the situation when that agent is not available. So maybe there’s a compromise.

Takeaway: have a goal that one Agent owns the customer’s case throughout the lifetime of that case.

So if you try this modest proposal and find some customer lifecycle stages and help the customer by limiting their contacts to a person or an account team, how do you tell the rest of your company about what you learned? You’ll need to create a report that’s shared widely within the company at an interval that makes sense to you. Weekly is a great cadence to hit if you can manage it, and if you can automate at least some of the data collection from customers at different stages of the lifecycle their comments will make even more sense. A new customer who can’t finish a basic task in your software is a different kind of risk than a long-term customer who can’t do the same basic task. They both might need hand-holding but you might use different resources to help them.

Share your insights in Bite-Sized Pieces

When you share this information with the rest of the company, you’ll need to keep your message executive style. Other people want to know how the customer experience is improving, holding steady, or getting worse. They also may want to know about specific interesting comments people make and whether these eye openers lead to bugs that your development team can fix. And once you hear about a bug more than a few times, well then you have a stack-ranked priority.

Takeaway: share what you learn, and please, keep it to a single-page presentation.

The “voice of the customer” is really more than just a single statistic – it’s a holistic process to bring customer input into your company, quantify it, and to take this measured data as an input into the way you do business. By better understanding your customers and where they are in the process.

You can find 47 other ways to improve the customer experience here.

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntie/

You’ve probably been to your competitor’s web site recently and reviewed the content they are sharing for first-time and seasoned customers. And have you been to your own Support Site recently to do the same? There are a few things that you can do to make that support experience better for customers, starting with making the content they read better. You can also did a little deeper and seek to understand the searches they make that currently get no results. And you can also think more purposefully about what it means to make a product that people really love (not a product that people like and tolerate.)

Start By Making the Content Better

Ok, so you’ve heard this part before. Find the top ten articles that people actually use (Google Analytics is a great way to find this out, or the stats over the last 90-180 days on your blog if you don’t have a more advanced option) and make a list out of them. Now, read them with a new eye while asking yourself some of the following questions:

• Why would someone use this article?
• What would they hope to learn after they had finished reading the article?
• Are there any statements here that are out of date or just plain wrong?

Now that you’ve read the top ten articles that people are using, you should rewrite them. Consider this a freshening of your content calendar and something you should strive to do quarterly. More frequent updates are probably not relevant, and if you’re not checking what people are reading in your content every quarter, you should be checking more often.

What if I don’t want to rewrite content that’s already there?

It’s a fair point to say that you’d rather not reinvent the wheel. When you wrote this content, it seemed like it made sense, and now it’s still mostly right. Fine – now write the content that your visitors are searching for and can’t find. Again, Google Analytics can help with this, or a simple review of the search traffic against your site.

Imagine that you can write content that beautifully answers the question your customer (or visitor) is asking even before they arrive at your destination. Wouldn’t that be … awesome? If you can make the unwritten article that answers your question one of your top ten most visited pieces of content, you probably plugged a major hole in your content, marketing, or sales funnel. So what’s not there (yet) that people are looking to learn from your product or service (or from you)?

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/90155419@N00/

All you need is love.

Well, not the Lennon and McCartney kind – though that is pretty catchy – rather, the kind of instant realization and definition of what it means to love your product. Whatever that is, you should do more of that. You can write this definition by answering more questions like:

• What do people like to do with your product or service?
• What are the things that make them say, “Wow, that’s perfect”?
• And how can you do more of that?

If no one says awesome things about your product, maybe you should rethink your product. The core of creating an amazing experience for a customer is providing a solution for the problem they don’t even know they have yet, and nailing the pain points that solve the problems they already know that they have. If you can do that in a way that also is friendly, concise, and accurate, you might have a home run.

You can find 47 other ways to improve the customer experience here.

You can make a difference in a kid’s life. Yesterday, I learned that kids will give you high fives when you walk down the corridors of their school. They will enthusiastically participate in a gym relay and try to show you how great their reading is and how they can follow the music teacher’s instructions. And they are all happy to see a Dad (or Dad-type figure) in their classroom.

I wanted to get more involved in my kids’ school, so when my friend told me about the Watch D.O.G.S. program (Dads of Great Students), I volunteered to spend a day as a volunteer at East Ridge Elementary school.

Here’s a story on Watch D.O.G.S. that ran on the Today Show earlier this year:

What’s involved in being a volunteer?

First, it’s different than being a parent. Although you are there to support your kids’ school, you are there first and foremost to help out where helping is needed. I tutored in reading and writing, helped out with music and gym class, and also pitched in on the playground. Like being in a startup, being a volunteer requires patience, enthusiasm, ingenuity and resilience. No one is going to tell you exactly what to do, even when they give you suggestions for where to be as part of a schedule.

It’s up to you to make volunteering a great experience. That includes being present (put that phone away), doing whatever is asked of you, saying hello to the kids, teachers, and administrators around you, and generally having a good time.

Volunteer Support starts with a structured program

Second, being a volunteer is a lot easier when you have some structure. There’s a process involved in being a volunteer at the Northshore School District – it’s not onerous, just a set of common sense rules – and the team makes it easy for you to complete these requirements and know more about the proper way to give back to the school. The Watch D.O.G.S. program is working at East Ridge because before the volunteer shows up the leadership team at the school has asked the teachers what help they might need that day. The school administrator has paired the volunteer with a specialty teacher (Music, PE, or Library) if there’s no specific need. And there is always recess, where you can talk to kids, play a game, or just be a presence.

What if I don’t know what to do?

Third, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what to do. The kids are happy and excited to have a Dad or Dad-type figure on campus. The teachers are happy to have extra help. And you should be happy by taking a more active role in a school in your community. (I’m especially grateful to be supported in this effort by the Salesforce Foundation, which made it possible for me to spend my day as a Watch D.O.G.S. volunteer. Thanks, Watch D.O.G.S.!

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/lori_greig/

Quick: how many clicks does it take to do something important in your product? Count them. If it seems like too many, it probably is too many clicks if you want the customer to keep coming back. The “too many clicks” problem is a symptom of a bigger problem that you probably have if your product is anything but a version 1.0. The problem? It just takes too many decisions to do anything. And you have a limited amount of good decisions in your day.

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

When Good People Make Bad Decisions

When you don’t make good decisions, the results are disastrous – both in terms of tactics (do I want to do something in this web site and how do it do it) and strategy (I can make short-term decisions that fall counter to a longer term strategy when I’m frustrated.) Assuming that your site, product, or app only gets some of your customer’s time, you should make the customer’s decision count as much as possible. Otherwise, your customer suffers “decision fatigue.”

What is decision fatigue?

Decision fatigue is literally the physical and mental fatigue that results from expending the energy to make decisions. The more decisions you need to make to solve a problem, the more fatigue. Some people have better decision muscles – they spend their days training themselves to make decisions – and others do not. You should build your product with the most critical decisions in mind that you want the customer to make. And please don’t ask the customer to choose more often than necessary – when you ask for their attention, it should be a meaningful decision that also produces meaningful feedback.

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

What can you do about decision fatigue?

There are good ways to cut the number of clicks required for a customer to do something meaningful. You can count the clicks required to do the 20% of actions that happen 80% of the time. (You might call these actions when done well “the Happy Path.”) Now remove one or more of the clicks in these frequently used scenarios, and you just helped many of your customers to complete an important task in your application with fewer decisions.

Swiss Army Knife, or Razor-sharp cutting implement?

As part of your effort to limit decisions, you should have fewer ways for customers to do things. While a multi-tool approach can cover more edge cases, sometimes a tool that does only one thing extremely well is the best choice. Too many products can do “everything,” and typically don’t do one thing well.

How do you do improve the ability for customers to do things? Start by asking more closed questions, e.g. “do you want me to remind you every day or week and at what time?” is a better question than “what’s the best way to remind you?” Then, remove the jargon from whatever’s written there.

Add Learning “Scaffolding”

How do you explain these options? Add “scaffolding” by making learning content that helps the average customer get from “sorta ok” to mostly good. Smart customers who get it will get even more out of this content. You can find these learning themes by identifying the top 10 highest rated and lowest rated knowledge base articles that your customers use and rewriting them.

You can find 47 other ways to improve the customer experience here.

photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/phobia/

You should fix all the broken things in your product. You avoided some decisions in the past or made some decisions you might now choose to change, and now these broken things are still there. Your customers see this accumulated flotsam and jetsam and don’t think “you made the best decision you could have made at the time,” they just think “why is that thing so broken?” Don’t they care enough to fix it?

When your customers ask you to fix things, you can’t always fix them. There might be a very good reason you can’t fix that thing now, or to explain to your customer why it’s complicated. And I’d like to remind you that the longer those things are out there the more chances your customers have to get fed up and stop trying themselves. So here’s a simple set of ideas that can help regain customer goodwill (or make it bigger.)

Fix. All. The. Things.

Here’s one thing you can do today: make a list of the top 10 “cringe items” to fix. You know what they are – your customers tell you about them often. You might have a rubric internally for when they become truly important, and there is another way to measure whether something is truly a “cringe item.”  Ask a new customer if they think it’s weird. If they think that part of your product is weird or confusing, it probably is weird or confusing and you should make it better.

True “cringe items” emerge from this list of merely weird or confusing items. These are items that cause significant customer pain. If these items are difficult (technically) to fix, then build different ways to hold the customer’s hand and get them through the problem. You can write a blog post; you can have a call with the customer where you share your screen; and you can configure the product for them. Any solution that gets a customer through a cringe item might save a customer. You know what your cringe items are – and if you don’t know, you should ask all the people in your business who talk to customers – they can tell you.

After you know what the pain points are, make them go away.

Pain points are exactly that: things that customers find difficult. Sometimes, pain points of a product feel so bad for a customer that the customer goes away, especially when another company determines a way to make that pain point 10x easier to deal with and helps you get there. So make the pain go away.

This is an expanded version of “make it easy for the customer” because really what you are doing is making it so no customer ever again will have this problem. Ok, it’s not always easy. But fixing a cringe item offers the most return on your customer investment possible. Fixing a cringe item makes your customers believe again if they have temporarily lost faith. And fixing a cringe item brings hope to customers who’ve been waiting for you to resolve your decision debt and to do better.

Remember Pareto and the 80/20 rule.

Fixing the cringe items to improve the customer experience is a natural outcome of following the Pareto Principle. When you find the small number of cases that cause customer discontent, you should fix them if you want to maximize the investment benefit of fixing that things. Why not start with the things customers hate most? One reason is that customers famously don’t know what they want. But if enough of them are complaining about the same things, that should signal that it’s a great thing to spend more time on, even if you can’t fix it right away. So fix all the broken things. If you can’t fix them, invent a better way to help customers cope with them without getting really upset at you every time they try to do the thing they’d like to do.

You can find 47 other ways to improve the customer experience here.