• $12.5 billion in 2005 to $22.7 billion in 2009: The amount of advertising dollars spent generating leads
• 2,241 U.S. companies: The number of companies measured in the study to test lead response time
• 37% of the companies responded within one hour, 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours to respond, 23% never responded
• 42 hours: The average response time by all companies measured
• 7X: If you try to contact a potential customer (i.e., a “lead”) within one hour of receiving a query, you are nearly seven times as likely to qualify that customer as those individuals who wait two hours
• 60X: By contacting a potential customer within one hour of a receiving a query, you are more than sixty times as likely to qualify that lead than individuals who wait 24 hours

Take-away: The fastest to respond wins the opportunity to serve a customer. Insight: Once you’re earned that opportunity, keep delighting that customer by remaining responsive.

The research article delves into the impact technology has had on service delivery. Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Zappos obviously have leveraged technology to deliver superior service. Similarly, technology has enabled many customers to serve themselves more effectively and efficiently while giving companies a global reach. But as the expectations of customers and the pace of technological innovations increase, firms will encounter obstacles to delivering a superior customer service experience.

The GMSQ explores the gap between a customer’s expectations, their perceptions, and the reality of what they experience. Technology profoundly affect these relationships. To illustrate this, the authors focus on personal photography. In the past, individuals took photos, passed film off to be processed by a service provider, and then shared printed photos amongst family and friends. Now many individuals take digital photos, download those photos to their computer or upload those photos to a photo-sharing site, and digitally share their photos, albums, etc. An individual engaged in this process is a co-producer with the technology service provider. Thus, technology fundamentally affects a customer’s expectations and perceived value of the service provided and the GMSQ offers a way to ensure that firms leverage technology to meet customers’ expectations.

There are four gaps in the GMSQ: Listening, Design and Standards, Service Performance, Communication.

Listening Gap
What is the difference between a customer’s expectations and a firm’s understanding of those expectations? That is the gap. In other words, a customer could have a different set of expectations than what a firm understands those to be. Thus, firms need to engage in active and passive listening. Active listening can take the form of surveys, polls, etc, and passive can take the form of web data analytics. Close the gap by: (1) engaging in customer research, (2) focus on building relationships over time by meeting customer needs (i.e., CRM and relational database marketing), (3) when there is a service failure actively solicit input from customers on what went wrong and rectify this failure.

Design and Standards Gap
Focus on developing systems that meet customer needs while setting standards to measure your service operational environment against customer expectations. Close this gap by: (1) engaging in services R&D, (2) conduct 365 degree service mapping or blueprinting (i.e., map the customer lifecycle through all points of engagement), (3) measure operations against CUSTOMER-DEFINED rather than company-defined standards.

Service Performance Gap
Even though a firm may have closed the listening and design and standards gaps, if employees or independent contractors lack motivation or lack proper training and support, customers’ needs could remain unmet. Close this gap by: (1) aligning HR policies and practices around delivering superior service (Zappos’ core values are a great example of this tenet); similarly you should consider employee reward practices as articulated in the book Drive, (2) clearly tell customers what’s expected of them (oftentimes customers have no clear understanding of what they’re to do), (3) ensure that technology designed to support employees’ core functionality maps back to the listening and design and standards gap analysis (a good book to read in this regard is Rework)

Communication Gap
If your communications do not actually reflect what’s delivered to customers, there’s a gap. Close this gap by: (1) employing integrated messaging strategies, (2) actively manage customer expectations over time as their needs change (e.g., integrate social media messaging options in your drip marketing messaging platform), (3) ensure that you have consistent messaging before, during, and after a transaction, and make sure this messaging aligns with and reinforces customers’ expectations.

Photo: malias

This study and this presentation are fascinating examples of what’s occurring in sentiment and message analysis. The first study focuses on a sampling of 9,664,952 tweets from 2008 and found that Twitter (surprise ;-D) is an excellent media for analyzing public sentiment on topics of national significance (e.g., the 2008 Presidential elections). The authors find that social, political, cultural, and economical issues have relatively short-lived effects on public mood, but that Twitter may “highly affect the dynamics of public sentiment.”

The presentation cited above gives an overview of the concept of media influence modeling to better predict audience opinion formation. The author cites as theoretical underpinnings: Agenda-setting theory, opinion leadership theory, social influence theory, co-orientation behavior, priming and framing theory, and information theory. What’s interesting about this presentation is the depth and sophistication going into analyzing message influence. The bibliography (page 13) is an excellent resource too.

Fogg’s model is fairly easy to digest. For example, let’s say you want to drive more listing appointments (the target behavior), there is a trade-off between motivation and ability. In this scenario, a user’s motivation is somewhat variable (either they are interested in the property or not). Thus, as website designer you should concentrate on the “ability” side of the equation: do you make it a simple fill-in-your-email-address form, or do you make users fill out more detailed information prior to submitting their request? On this issue, Fogg concludes:

The implication for designers is clear: Increasing motivation is not always the solution. Often increasing ability (making the behavior simpler) is the path for increasing behavior performance.

Contemplating appropriate triggers is where it gets really interesting for website designers. According to Fogg, without an appropriate trigger, targeted behavior will not occur even if motivation and ability is high. There are three elements of a successful trigger: the trigger must be noticed, the trigger is associated with the targeted behavior, and the trigger occurs WHEN we are both motivated and able to perform the targeted behavior. Fogg argues that timing is THE critical element and is often missing:

In fact, this element is so important the ancient Greeks had a name for it: kairos – the opportune moment to persuade. As I see it, the opportune moment for behavior performance is any time motivation and ability put people above the behavior activation threshold.

Poorly-timed triggers (e.g., pop-ups) generally do not drive a user to take a targeted action and can even cause a negative emotion. Thus, Fogg argues that proper triggers will align with collaborative CRM concepts (which I earlier discussed), functioning mostly as “signals” or “facilitators”. I encourage you to read Fogg’s research paper (all 7 pages) as he further details the discreet elements under motivation, ability, and triggers that influence website behavior.

Photo credit: ell brown (off to Italy)

Data is the new plastics

The second article from the Los Angeles Times, He’s start-ups’ best friend, profiled angel investor Ron Conway and his theories about investing in start-ups. The most telling quote from this article:

His current focus is “real-time data” companies that help people share what they’re doing instantly – using text, photos and video. “This sector is going to be huge,” he said.

As real-time data begins to inundate firms more and more by virtue of their forays into the social web and mobile world, data analytics offers a way for firms to utilize this data in novel ways to deliver more engaging and relevant experiences to their customers. For example, a firm could use data analytics in a predictive manner to dynamically deliver more relevant web pages based on consumers’ behavior throughout a firm’s website. Similarly, firms can use a service like Flowtown in conjunction with a service like First American Core Logic’s lead qualification services to gain insight into a registrant by combining their social persona with their transactional persona and then deliver relevant data and content based on this combined persona. Firms that begin to leverage data analytics will have distinct advantages over their competition in the near and long-term future.