Customer Service - getting it right

My love for my Subaru and my Subaru dealership is well known and often mocked by my friends and colleagues...

But great customer service is one of the pillars of consumer loyalty, and there is no question as to which car dealership I'll go out of my way to use.

So, what makes the customer experience so good?

1. Friendly, helpful, human staff. When you call the dealership, your call is answered by a live, friendly, bilingual receptionist. She or he transfers you to a live, friendly and knowledgeable member of staff in the appropriate department. No voicemail unless you call after hours.

2. There are no stupid questions. Go ahead, ask them where the block heater is or how to open the frozen gas cap door. They listen to every question and make sure they answer each one and that you understand the answers.

3. Feedback and Follow up. After every service call, I get a short automated survey call to ensure I had a good experience and that I was satisfied with my service call. Subaru compiles this information and uses it to train staff. When I wasn't happy, they called back immediately and went above and beyond to made the situation right.

4. Living the brand. Subaru is known for safe, practical cars and kicking butt in rally events. Take the shuttle and you get a personable, calm driver who quietly and efficiently navigates traffic and alternative routes to get you to and from the dealership on time.

Social Marketing - Evaluating Programs

A British Medical Journal article on Interventions to reduce unintended pregnancies among adolescents: systematic review of randomised controlled trials concluded that “Primary prevention strategies evaluated (1970 to 2000) do not delay the initiation of sexual intercourse, improve use of birth control among young men and women, or reduce the number of pregnancies in young women.” The study reviewed the “effectiveness of primary prevention strategies aimed at delaying sexual intercourse, improving use of birth control, and reducing incidence of unintended pregnancy in adolescents.”

I found particularly interesting a study finding that “four abstinence programmes and one school based sex education programme were associated with an increase in number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants. There were significantly fewer pregnancies in young women who received a multifaceted programme , though baseline differences in this study favoured the intervention.”

In short this study from June 2002, points to the challenges of developing effective and long-term strategies to affect behavioural changes in the intended direction.

Social Marketing - Constructing a Message

Numerous studies cited for instance in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein point toward a deliberate, effective message construction for social marketing campaigns that aim at changing behaviour. For instance, in experiments it has been shown that behaviour can be modified by not merely emphasizing the nature of a problem, but by offering a positive message. (Example: a sign that reads “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the park,” was far less effective in preventing visitors from removing artifacts than this positive message: “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest”).  

Similarly, a message focused on how many people are engaging in an unhealthy activity have been shown to be less effective at motivating the desired behaviour than one that emphasizes how many people are already doing things right. This type of message can aid in correcting social misperceptions and boost the healthy behaviour. (Example: “20% of Montana college students drink too much alcohol.” versus the much more effective “Most (81%) of Montana college students have four or fewer drinks each week”).

Again in a similar vein, a neuroscientific study reported on in Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom showed through bran scans that explicit non-smoking messages, for instance the explicit depictions of the effects of cigarette smoking found on Canadian cigarette packs, and explicit messages like smoking causes lung cancer or smoking kills do little to keep smokers from smoking. On the contrary, brain scans showed how these messages in fact stimulated the craving in smokers, suggesting they may well be achieving the opposite results. 

Social Marketing Or What it Takes to Change Behaviour

This is the first in a series of posts I will write on social marketing over the next few days. 


Recent research on the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns has demonstrated that some campaigns aimed at changing behaviour produce superior results while others based on the same message premise fail to meet objectives. Steering people toward healthy choices, it appears, has to go beyond the typical methods of raising awareness of an issue and highlighting rational strategies for changing behaviours. This may well be of particular importance in activities that are essential to human survival, such as sexual reproduction or food consumption, yet also hold significant health and social risks.

Therefore, it may not a matter of categorical change, but of discriminating change. A level of emotional intelligence should be appealed to and fostered through a variety of methods in order to achieve the desired behavioural changes. Research suggests that a large number of decisions are made every day in an instinctive, automatic manner, learned over time and reinforced in many subtle and explicit ways. Advances in neuroscience, in particular the ability to examine information processing and decision-making through brain scans, have enabled more clarity in how these processes might work. 

Website code and Competitive intelligence

I recently came across a piece of code on a web site I was checking out in preparation for my SEO seminar.

Programmers used green comment text as a way to distinguish notes to the programmer or reminders, from code that makes the site work. These notes do not show up as content in the graphic interface of the web site. If you want to see what sort of "conversations" and notes programmers leave behind when building a site, simply look at the source code and scroll for the green bits.

Now, imagine a company in a highly competitive field having this sort of programmer's annotation about a future product in the code. This could well be a major issue if a competitor receives advance notice of future actions, just because a programmer wanted to identify a placeholder for a future product on the web page.

While I find this interesting from a competitive intelligence perspective, it raises another question: when you approve your web site, do you ever actually look at the code? Have you considered the liabilities that inadvertent disclosure can bring to your company? Do you have any sort of quality assurance and brand protection process in place re: coding? And, in earlier posts I talked about the importance of meta tags and title tags - so: what is your quality assurance process to make sure these search engine optimization aids are in place and make sense from a brand and messaging architecture point of view?

SEO Analytics

Analytics are an important aspect of search engine optimization. You can use analytics in developing a brand new site or you can use it to assess performance of an existing site and figure out what changes need to be made to improve the standing of the site.

Some of the analytical data at your disposal, often available using free tools but at least cheaply includes:

• Web Traffic Statistics - Traffic and keyword analysis. Whether you use a custom, proprietary package or Google Analytics, just remember that they give you great trending information, but they may not be comparable data points because they may use different methodologies, e.g. cookies based tracking vs. IP address look up, to arrive at their reports.
• Text analysis - this includes keyword extraction from your curent web page to see for which keywords your page does well, and assessing term targeting, ie how well does your site perform against your important keywords
• Crawl test - ie how does a search engine see your site
• Indexed pages - are there pages missing that shoudl be indexed by a search engine. Here a sitemap and robot.txt file can alleviate any problems
• Rank Tracker - software that tells you whether your site ranks anywhere near the first page of search results for specific keywords
• Back links - get a report on how many sites and who links to your site. Linking strategies can be an important part of achieving high search engine rankings.
• W3C validation - the World Wide Web Consortium is the standards organization for the web. It offers several free validation tools such as HTML validator designed to help you determine whether your site meets international standards.

SEO - keyword thinking

No doubt, the most important part of your web site is what it says to the human visitor. However, when you write your site with SEO in mind you should evolve a keyword mindset: Humans categorize and we use keyword concepts to make sense of the world and the web.

Keywords are also the driving force in search engines. That's why in addition to weaving these important words and phrases throughout your web site, you need to ensure that the coding aspects of the site are considered.

Here's the source code view of my web site (if you click on the image you can see it larger)  at www.strategicmoves.ca. Note the underlined elements:
- Description and Keyword meta tags
- Title tag
- Image alt tags
These tags exist in code only and should support your actual content. They are useful in ensuring search engines interpret your site correctly.

Consider this question: how do you make keyword thinking an integral part of web development?

For instance, do you task your creative writing team and technical web team with creating these tags as each new page is written? Who writes your description, keyword, image tags- your writer or the developer? Who determines the title tag - and are they in tune with your brand strategy?

I always recommend that the writing and web teams work closely together from the outset and involve the client to ensure the best results for the users. I say for the user because SEO is about users and positioning yourself effectively in the content of search engines.