A recent McKinsey study (link hat tip to Dion Hincliffe) highlights the importance, for brands, of focusing holistically on all the touch-points of the customer journey rather than on isolated interactions (which they call “moments”):
“Customers are increasingly using multiple channels to interact with companies in an effort to meet their needs. To resolve a billing issue, for example, customers will often start with their bill, turn to the internet, call in to a call center, revisit the web site to check for resolution, and finally confirm a resolution on their next statement. In fact, over 70percent of very satisfied customers build a favorable impression when their needs are met over three or more touchpoints. A Customer Journeys approach addresses this.
Additionally, Customer Journeys are consistently better predictors of value. They do a better job than the touchpoint approach of predicting a customer’s willingness to recommend the company to others or to renew their business. They also give more reliable insight about a customer’s likelihood to cancel/churn…”
The McKinsey research is worth a read: http://csi.mckinsey.com/knowledge_by_topic/consumer_and_shopper_insights/consumer_experience_journey
Communal TV Viewing
I recently purchased, after some consideration, a new flat screen television with built-in wifi. One of the big selling points of TV manufacturers these days is integration with download services (for me, it had to come with iPlayer integration to be on my short list) and social networking platforms.
I just don’t get why someone would want Facebook, at least in its native format, on their television. Facebook is a personal experience, centred around an individual’s profile, whereas television viewing, at least in my household, is a communal experience – something an individual centric, profile based platform can’t natively support.
I’ve thought of a logical workaround, however – a Facebook app that allows all viewers (perhaps it could use the built in sensor to determine which family members are viewing) to be logged in simultaneously, with the newsfeed, potentially filtered by “updates related to what you are watching now”, appearing alongside the programme on screen.
By filtering for programme specific content, the app would deliver relevance, and extend the communal experience of watching to friends outside the home. Watching a documentary about New York? Your friends in New York will see an update inviting them to reply. Got a friend who is watching the same show? The app connects you.
The filter would also stop your kids from seeing content containing certain keywords, your partner from seeing posts from that ex you’ve sworn your no longer in touch with, etc etc – again, something I think presents a stumbling block to bringing Facebook into a communal TV viewing experience.
I struggle to think of any social networking or Internet service that have solved the challenge of communal usage. I’m often frustrated that it’s not possible to create, for example, a household iTunes account. We use my account on the iPads and Apple TV my family uses, but my wife’s phone has to have it’s own account, meaning iTunes content and app services aren’t available on her device.
It’s somewhat ironic that profile based services, whilst opening up a huge variety of communal experiences by diminishing the barriers of distance and time, don’t yet support shared experiences thru a single device. I don’t think there’s a huge space for communal social networking apps, but if someone does it right, perhaps by building an app like I’ve described for TV viewing above, I do think there would be a market for it.
relationship between owned, social and search
It’s long been known that social media impacts a brand’s overall visibility, both through it’s reach into social media audiences as well as by generating new inbound links, wrapped in useful context, that search engines index and apply within their algorithm so as to (help) determine relevance.
The latter of these – the “boost” that social media gives to a brand’s visibility in organic search results, is a potentially useful source of outcomes based metrics for social media activities. Let me explain.
Google, according to a 2012 study, usually displays 10 results on it’s first page, 85% of which are organic with the remainder paid. Over half – 53% – of users will click on the first organic result. A further 34% will click on results 2-5. That’s a total of 87% of users clicking on the top five organic results. How much is a top five search result listing worth to a brand? A lot.
And it’s not just a brand or product name that needs to be found within search results – brands also want to be associated with key words related to their product or service offering so they can dangle those links in front of users with little or no brand awareness.
In instances where it’s possible to control for other factors, such as SEO activities, benchmarking a brand’s appearance in search results offers a useful opportunity to, during and after a social media campaign, measure progress towards a number of desired outcomes including:
- the ranking of brand owned pages in search results (from 3 and 5 to 1 and 2 for example)
- the dominance of the brand’s pages or pages containing references to it in results (from 20% of first page results to 40%, for example)
- the crowding out of the results of competitors, etc (three competitors appearing on front page instead of two)
In addition to measuring the (potential) impact of social media activities on search visibility, it is, of course, also possible to interrogate the brand or product website’s analytics to determine what impact, in terms of actual click-throughs, that enhanced search visibility has had. It might also be useful, when doing this, to conduct an analysis of how much a similar number of click-throughs would have cost through paid search placement activities. This allows direct comparison of costs vs benefits.
It’s not perfect, but search visibility and the resultant click-throughs are a reasonable enough place to start when beginning to measure progress towards specific outcomes, and starting to understand how the cost/benefits of social weigh up against those for paid search.
Hidden in Plain Sight
I’ve long been of the view that user experience methodology is useful well beyond the design phase of a web based proposition, product or service – it can and should be part of the strategy development process which proceeds it. The techniques used by user experience designers, which range from workshops to interviews to card sorting exercises are just as useful when utilised by management consultants, process designers, pr and marketing professionals, in human resources contexts such as change management, etc etc.
I’ve just come across a useful excerpt from HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: How To Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow’s Customers by Jan Chipchase and Simon Steinhardt on the use of user experience methodology in a corporate context. They write:
If there’s such a thing as a default framework in corporate research, it’s the customer journey map, which provides detailed information about each event in a customer’s typical day, diagrams how she moves from one event to another, and identifies all the touchpoints where she may use the product or service we’re designing. Customer journey maps tend to be very precise in their documentation and technical in their appearance–many boxes connected by many lines. They’re useful for building a basic level of understanding, and certainly no one would accuse them of being arbitrary, but reading them can sometimes feel like a mechanical process.
In addition to customer journeys, which tend to start at the trigger point and end with resolution, Chipchase and Sthenhardt reveal, in the excerpt, a less widely used technique, threshold mapping:
Threshold mapping allows us to map out “default” conditions–the normal state a person experiences a majority of the time (for example, most people feel clean enough throughout the day that they won’t drop whatever they’re doing and hop in the shower if it’s available)–and then understand what happens when a person crosses the line into an alternative condition. Often, the feelings that people experience as they approach or cross a threshold lead them to think and act differently.
Just about anyone who has looked at the website analytics for a corporate website will be aware that the percentage of visitors using the homepage as their landing point is on the decline. This is likely to be due to a mix of the following:
- the inclusion of deep links in search results for a brand name (see screenshot below)
- people are getting better at refining their search queries - typing brandname careers for example
- the long-tail of past content appearing in a myriad of search results
- inbound social media links tend to go directly to content of interest rather than the homepage
Despite the data, many brands and organisations continue to assume their homepage as the entrance point for everyone. Because those visitors have not self identified, through the links they’ve clicked on (whether those are from search results or social), the challenge these organisations face is providing navigation and content to guide a users with a wide variety of potential interests to the content quickly, so the homepage ends up offering a little bit of everything.
There are now, however, ways of getting around this challenge:
1.Wrapping Site Visitors in Relevancy
The first, and obvious one, is for brands to think of every piece of content as a potential landing point. Assuming that users land in the right place in the first instance, it’s easy enough to figure out, editorially and perhaps with a bit of help automation guided by content tagging, what other content might be relevant to that user. Someone who lands on a careers page, for example, might also find it useful to find, on that same page, details of corporate investments in training initiatives, stories of people who work in different roles within the business, details of the application process, etc.
2. Using Data on Inbound Users to Trigger the Display of Specific Content
Enterprise content management platforms are becoming more sophisticated, offering a way to wrap users in relevance not only on specific content pages, but also on what used to be a “generic” homepage. By integrating the CMS with an analytics platform, it’s now possible to trigger the display or priority of specific content to specific users based on what is known about them. Here’s a few scenarios to help illustrate what I’m talking about:
- A website from Canada clicks on a link to a piece of regulated content (think finance or pharma) published on BrandX’s Australian website. The CMS recognises the geo-IP of the inbound user and flags the content as being non-compliant in Canada, or restricts the user from viewing it altogether, potentially replacing it with the relevant and compliant content for the user’s market.
- A site visitor clicks on a link from a business or financial news site, for example FT.com or the BBC News Business index. The CMS notes the source of the referral and prioritises last weeks Quarter 4 results and investor relations content on the landing page, since that’s what the user is likely to be interested in.
- A site visitor, who works at a leading competitor, searches for BrandX and clicks on the homepage link. They CMS recognises the IP range of the visitor and serves up content highlighting careers for experienced hires, in the market where the user is visiting from.
- A user is a fan of BrandX on Facebook. According to their profile, they attend a technical university in Canada. When they click on the homepage url listed at the top of the brand’s Facebook page, the content they see on the homepage when they land highlights Engineering and Science careers in Canada
- A user visits a website or Facebook of an opposition group. When the user clicks the link to the brand’s homepage, the CMS highlights content that addresses the concerns of the opposition group, and doesn’t display the stunningly good Quarter 4 results because those might inflame the visitor more, nor does it display careers information because the visitor is unlikely to want to work there
When I’ve mentioned some of these scenarios, all of which are possible to support today, the questions I usually get are around user privacy – “won’t people be upset that the brand already knows something about them and services up content based on that data?”
I don’t think so. To me, this type of functionality is all about reducing the number of clicks in a user’s journey to content they are likely to be interested in. That is, because it’s helpful to the site visitor, few are likely to be upset by it. Anyway, most if not all of the data being gathered is readily available to anyone who bothers to investigate the website’s analytics – the main difference is that in the scenarios above, the data is being used proactively, and productively, for the benefit of the website owner as well as visitors.
Many brands already do this sort of thing with search and social advertising as well as to target branded posts at specific fans – and about the only time one hears anything negative about it is when they get the targeting badly wrong. Now it’s possible to do this on the brand’s owned website.
There are several ways of delivering relevancy to every visitor to a website – through editorial decision making, by thinking of every page of a website a user’s potential entry point, by using tags or other meta data to display related content so as to wrap the user in relevancy, and to use the data available on inbound users to trigger specific content based on that data.