1. Be accessible on Social Media

Research had shown that nearly two-thirds (or more) of customers had used the company’s social media site for customer service. This highlights the importance of social media in customer service. Responding to customer inquiries on social media can greatly improve customer sentiment and enhance the appearance of quality service.

Social media allows customers to easily contact brands and engage with them. Customers will have a higher expectation of quality service if an event is perceived positively. Negative experiences, such as price increases, will lead to customers having higher expectations for quality care.

2. Be ethical

Ethics spans a number of things within business – everything from pricing and quality, to the management of returns and even social responsibility.

Nowadays, the market is saturated, and customers have a plethora of companies to choose from when shopping around for goods or services. To make your business stand out, it is important to provide something beyond the norm.

Right now, sustainability is a trendy watchword, and can help to elevate your business and the way that your customers feel about their purchases. Whether you offer recyclable goods and packaging, pledge to help an aid organization, or use recycled materials during production, your customers will feel satisfied that their purchase is an investment in the future, and not merely another boost to the wastage of consumption culture.

Moreover, this ethical stand needs to be reflected in your financial dealings. Do not overcharge for your products, accept returns without causing hassles and red tape, and show your company to be honest and fair in all your dealings. Basically, follow the age-old golden rule: be the company that you yourself would like to shop from.

3. Listen to your customers

The best way to truly cater to your customers is to listen to what they have to say, and the best way to gauge their opinions is through post-purchase feedback – even complaints – and customer surveys.

Every company will receive a complaint at some stage, but the customer who issued a complaint is not lost. The manner in which the company handles the complaint and deals with the customer will ultimately determine the customer’s final experience and satisfaction.

So listen closely to what the customer has to say, do your best to remedy the situation, and provide the best service you can in order to appease the customer. The way a complaining customer is treated will do much more for your reputation than a mistake ever will. Think of it this way: you order a pizza for delivery and the restaurant sends you the wrong order. You complain to the pizzeria. The restaurant apologizes, sends you the correct order, and gives you a coupon for a free pizza. Of course, you will use that coupon and, if they get that next order right and provide you with a delicious meal, why would you not order from them in the future? Small gestures and apologies can have far-reaching effects.

You can also use customer surveys to gather information about your company, covering everything from the purchasing process to customer service, accessibility, and shipping. However, make sure that you take onboard and implement the information that this feedback provides, so that the customers feel like you have truly heard what they have to say.

Haypp, a snus company that increased its sales by 250 percent within six months, maintains that its success is based on its close relationship with its customers, and that:

“the closer we become with our customers, the more we will understand their needs across different markets and customer segments. Only then can we be on the customers’ side and create proper change.” 

4. Be honest

Take a second and imagine you are surfing the web and find a product you absolutely love. You go through the checkout procedure and then wait with bated breath until your new item arrives. Now imagine that once it arrives, it is smaller than promised, lacks a feature you thought it would have, or it just makes you feel like you were misled into an unsatisfactory purchase. Whatever its shortcoming, your perception of the company that supplied it will be tarnished, and your likelihood of being a return customer will drastically decrease – unless that company is willing to open a dialogue about the issue (consider the ethics and customer communication points above).

Naturally, accidents happen, and a faulty, broken, or wrong product may be delivered to a customer. However, incidents like this need to be the exception rather than the rule, and your approach to fixing mistakes needs to be swift and honest. Take responsibility for misrepresentation or shipping errors, and make sure that the customer emerges from the event compensated – be it through replacement or reimbursement. This is the only way to maintain your integrity as a business. If your customers can trust you, they will be far more satisfied and loyal.

Forbes said it best (paraphrased): “a merely satisfied customer is still a free agent, exploring the marketplace [so you need to] design [your service] to be perfect – foreseeing all that is foreseeable.”

In short, the best way to build a loyal and satisfied customer base is to be honest, be open to communication, and truly listen to what your customers are saying. This builds a relationship that makes customers want to support your business. 

The post 4 Ways To Increase Customer Satisfaction Using Social Media appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

A good social listener is able to generate leads, create content their audience finds resourceful and improve their overall customer experience. It demands deep analysis so as to gain clarity from a conversation. Here are ways to generate business leads using social media listening.

Learn Their Language

To convert your target audience into customers, you have to communicate in their language. This way you can position your message to those who want to use your brand in a relevant manner. Gathering your target market’s data should be your first step. Find the common phrases you can track.

The common phrases will lead you to the content they are interacting with and the competitor pages. Do your own research and come up with words that may translate into topics or hashtags your target audience uses. You will able to use these keywords to optimize your content for your target audience.

Create Social-lead Gathering Campaigns

From the list of keywords you created, choose those that are most relevant to your brand. Monitor each of them using a social listening tool. Most tools will give you daily reports on mentions. Check the daily mentions of keywords that matter to your business.

Reach out to those interested in your services and engage in meaningful conversations. This is a chance to connect with them, make them understand your brand and that will transform a lead to a sale.

Wow Customer Experience

One of the major reasons why people shift from one brand to another is as a result of poor customer service. Through social media listening, you can create exemplary customer experience by:

• Responding to complaints and questions quickly- Ensure you have a system of responding to potential and current customers
• Gather feedback- Listening to your clients helps you solve numerous problems at once.
• Create solutions- Don’t only focus on your brand mentions. Offer to advise, answer questions and give guidance to questions relating to relevant keywords. You might just convert someone into a client.

Engage With Influencers

Based on research, influencer marketing brings about higher ROI. Collaborating with a like-minded influencer will help you utilize their immense influence and audience. Check out the hashtags and keywords influencers’ use that could be of lead to your niche. Add them to the monitoring tool and continue analyzing posts and tweets of the most active influencers.

Create a campaign just like you did for clients. Be sure to contribute to social media conversations when appropriate. By doing this, you get to reach a new market and increase awareness around your products.

Follow Industry Hashtags

Keep an eye on the industry hashtags. You may find your niche’s most used hashtags using various tools. After identifying the most popular keywords, monitor them using your social media listening tool for alerts. Look out for emerging trends and how people are responding to them. Do they need something? Solve their problem

Never Stop Learning

The only permanent thing is change, and to stay relevant you need to learn new things. Dig into your industry in any way possible. What brand is your inspiration? Check their strategies and how they implement them.

This will give you new ideas and trends that can be valuable for your business. NetBase uses social media listening to generate leads for your brand and discover new opportunities. Be the trendsetting brand in your niche!

The post 6 Ways of Optimizing Social Listening to Generate Business Leads appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

This post was inspired by a truly incredible experience I recently had at Royal Taj, an amazing Indian restaurant in Columbia, Maryland. I went to Royal Taj the week they opened when there were few patrons and I’ve watched the restaurant grow over the last few years. I’ve been so impressed to watch it turn into a hot spot with lines out the door during peak restaurant times. My recent experience made me stop and question the differences between my experience there and my experiences at other restaurants, and honestly with other businesses. Here are the key ingredients I believe led to their success. Each of these ingredients are relevant to every business that wants to drive their companies’ success with a customer-centric approach.

They Provide an Exceptional Product

The best customer experience won’t matter if the product isn’t good. Royal Taj, by far, has the best Indian food in the area. The best way to describe their food is that well…it’s perfect. The flavors are bold and you can get your food spicy or mild to ensure it meets your palettes desires. As a connoisseur of ethnic cuisine, one of the best tests is whether or not they can attract patrons from the culture. On numerous occasions, I’ve watched as their Indian patrons talk about how amazing and authentic their food is. I’ve watched as friends recommend Royal Taj to other friends telling them they have to go because it is the absolute best Indian food.

The first step for companies to begin putting their customers at the center of their business model is to ensure their product is top notch. Your products need to speak for themselves and leave an impression that people want to share with friends.

They Know their Customers By Name

Royal Raj is owned and managed by Bindha, Soni and Jasvinder Singh. Every time I’ve been to Royal Taj, I’m greeted by Bindha with a big hug welcoming us back. I’ve watched Bindha work the room and he has an innate ability to make every customer feel like they are the most important customer in the room. He asks questions about your family, who you are, what you do and then he remembers it the next time you come. As a person who is awful with names, I’m amazed that he can keep all the customer’s personal stories straight. Bindha goes above and beyond at every turn. When I was there last weekend, it was raining. I watched Bindha walking customers to their cars with an oversized umbrella to make sure they didn’t get wet. As I watched Bindha with his customers, it’s clear he truly cares about their experience and their lives. He makes you feel like you have a close friend at Royal Taj, so why would you choose anywhere else to enjoy an evening out? Frankly, you wouldn’t. You want to go back to say hello to Bindha.

The more we know about our customers, the better we can be at predicting their needs and building relationships.

This can be a challenge for large companies with thousands or millions of customers, but it’s not impossible. It just requires really good record keeping inside the CRM. Every customer service or sales representative has the ability to take notes on more than just the issue the customer is trying to solve. They can take notes on the conversation and take the time to get to know more about the customer. This will require that your company doesn’t measure your front line employees on how quickly they can get a customer off the phone. Instead, we should be measuring how much intelligence they can gather about the customer in the short-time they have with them. True customer intelligence goes beyond their experience with your product experience. It should also include who they are buying the product for and what they can learn about their preferences and their lives in the process. The more we know about our customers, the better we can be at predicting their needs and building relationships. When at all possible, customers should be able to talk to the same person they have formed a relationship with for continuity in their experience. Customer service and sales representatives should have enough information to be able to ask, “How did (your child’s name) enjoy the (product) you purchased from us last time?”

They Surprise and Delight

Another thing I noticed about Bindha is that he always surprises and delights his customers. When he is about to leave a table he offers a free round of wine, a free dessert or something else he thinks you will enjoy. He knows I love Chateau St. Michelle’s Reisling and he makes sure we get a glass on him every time. He’s given us free dessert and free Naan. We never expect to get anything free and we are more than willing to pay for what we consume, but he always surprises us with something meaningful that we remember. This is one of the reasons you feel like Bindha is a friend who treats you like a special customer. When I started watching, I noticed that Bindha does this with every table; it’s a secret sauce he uses to make sure you remember your experience. And I think it’s brilliant!

How can your company surprise and delight customers? It could be something simple like a hand-written thank you note, free shipping, free rush delivery, or a special gift they weren’t expecting. The key with surprise and delight is that is must be a surprise. Customers can’t start to expect it; they need to feel like it was something special just for them. We need to figure out how to surprise and delight customers EVERY time. This requires companies to allow their front-line staff to have the power to decide what the right surprise and delight gift is for each customer. And it’s even better if they can personalize a note with the gift so the customer knows the person they dealt with was the reason they got the gift and that they were thinking of them when they included it.

They are Always Ready to Serve

The great experience at Royal Taj, doesn’t start and end with Bindha. It’s clear customer experience is something they engrain in their employees. When you dine at Royal Taj you will see the entire staff standing in a line right in the dining room waiting for an opportunity to serve. They scan the dining room constantly and all you have to do is look at them and they rush to your table to serve you. We’ve all been at restaurants where the staff casually stands chatting each other up, getting distracted and even doing unprofessional things. As a customer you feel like your needs are less important because they don’t convey an interest in being ready to serve you.

How can your company always be at the ready looking for an opportunity to serve? Are you monitoring social channels for mentions of your company? Do you have live chat on your website? If so, do you proactively reach out to website visitors and let them know you are there to help? How are you making it ridiculously easy for customers to get your attention?

How committed are you to ensuring customers have a great experience?

The challenges with putting customer experience at the core of your business comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. But seriously, it comes down to one thing; how committed are you to ensuring customers have a great experience? If you are truly committed then you won’t let any obstacle get in your way. You will find creative solutions to challenges instead of using them as excuses for under-serving your customers. Isn’t it time for every company to put their customers at the center of their business model?

How important is customer experience in your company? Are you making great strides or using a lot of lip service? What are your biggest frustrations that company’s need to address? Leave a comment and join the discussion for helping company’s put customer experience at the core of their business model.

The post Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business Model appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Reputation management is not only an important thing to monitor on social networks, but for SEO rankings as well.  User experience across all channels of interactions, whether online, on the phone, or in-person, will have an impact on how people react to your brand.  If you are providing poor customer experience or sub-par content that is  irrelevant to your target customers, chances are they will talk about you negatively online.  Companies should have a handle on all of the terms they are ranking for and proactively address any causes of negative keywords.  Be sure to include SEO in your typical  reputation management process.

The post Reputation Management and SEO Rankings [CARTOON] appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

em·pa·thy

[em-puh-thee]

noun

1.the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

Instilling empathy into your business is about clearly understanding your customer. It’s about aligning the entire customer experience with the path of least friction. Can you craft a customer experience that makes them feel like it was tailor made for them? Many of the most popular brands have exhibited a clear understanding of the power of empathy and their ability to put it into action across key areas of their business.

Apple has built one of the most successful physical retail spaces in the world by implementing empathy in their retail experience. How they lay out their products for touching, the ever helpful Apple Genius, the ability to pay for your product anywhere in the store via mobile Point-of-Sale devices. The list goes on and on. Other companies like Starbucks and Zappos have thrived off of this approach in different areas. Zappos empowers their customer service reps with the tools they need to practice empathy each day.

Well trained, awesome employees are often the first great force of empathy, but what if your human capital is invested elsewhere or perhaps spread thin? How do can you scale empathy without stretching the human factor even further?

I believe it can be done by taking a more customer centric approach to the process, products and other customer touch points that already exist in your business.

Here are my 3 suggestions:

1. Get to Know Your Customers Better by Developing Personas
2. Reduce Friction by Applying Personas to Customer Touch Points
3. Create Open Channels of Feedback and Review

Get to Know Your Customers Better by Developing Personas:

One of the most effective ways of putting yourself in the shoes of your customers is by developing customer personas. Personas are essentially a document that paints the profile of your customer and humanizes who it is your serving. Personas come from existing research, but even more importantly hands on experiences, customer conversations and your imagination. It combines them all and turns them into a vivid human profile.

The end result is not to create a persona based off “Johnny Regular”, an actual customer that you’ve shaken hands with numerous time. A persona may take partial inspiration from Johnny,  but the challenge is to take a step back and paint a more well-rounded picture of your average customer. Being too specific can often end in naming future business decisions off of a very narrow and specific person rather than a more broadly representative profile. Also, create a single persona for each of your customer segments.

There are lots of potential tidbits to include, but here are some things you should consider including:

Give Them a Name

Every human has a name. Give a name to your customer, one you can refer to throughout the rest of the process. For example, lets use the name “Charles Dillard”.  Referring to “Charles” instead of “our customer” makes the process feel more connected to an actual human being in comparison to just some data on paper.

Demographics

General demographic information. Pretty straight forward here.

• Gender
• Occupation
• Location
• Job Position/Title
• Income
• Marital Status
• Education
• Race
• Religion
• Political Position

Habits/Lifestyle

Include what does this person do regularly that might be useful to consider. This is where your storytelling skills come in handy. Don’t just list out a bunch of data points. Try very hard to sound like you are describing the daily life of this person as almost to make them real. Ask questions like …

• What is their average day like?
• What might they do in their free time?
• What media do they consume and how much (TV, movies, music, video games, books, magazines, etc)?

Social Media and Online

Considering a person’s online and social media related habits is more important than ever. Here are some questions to start answering:

• Where and how do they find information (online/offline, search engines, reviews, white papers, videos, etc)?
• How do they make decisions (online research, asking friends/family, colleagues form work, ratings and reviews, etc)?
• Where are they most active online (games, ecommerce sites, social networks, Youtube)?
• What devices do they use to access the internet and social media services?
• What kind of content do they like (white papers, webinars, videos, blog posts, infographics, podcasts, etc) ?

Objectives/Problems

In my opinion, this is one of the most critical areas of a persona. This is an opportunity to really think about the needs and objectives of this person and subsequently map a list of ways your business can alleviate these problems or help them achieve their objectives. Here are a few examples of objectives/problems might include.

• Has a busy, results driven boss that demands concise, easy to read reports be sent to him each week.
• Wants a new tablet, but has a lot of photos and music on her old computer that he feels she lose access to in the switch.
• He has arthritic hands which make it hard for him to open his medications in child proof containers.

Personas are not an exact science, but the benefits of developing them and using them is immense. I’ve seen personas developed in a handful of different ways so there’s not just one right way to do them. Fellow SME author Ilana Rabinowitz previously wrote a useful piece on how to use Facebook to develop better personas.

What’s Next?

Great! You now have a customer persona or 3 in hand. These are completely worthless unless put into action. In part 2 of this post I’ll show you where and how you might put these into action. Specifically, where you can apply these insights to customer touch points that easily scale without stretching your human capital thin. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this process in the comments.

The post The Future of Successful Business Means Scaling Empathy – Part 1 – Customer Personas appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The rest.

We often got lost in the bright and shiny glare of the tool-of-the-day, and lose track of what’s important.

Now that you’ve launched, you need to take a critical eye and examine what seems to be working and what isn’t. And while there are so many variables for small/medium/enterprise and retail/service that a checklist isn’t really viable, there is a way to make sure you’re asking all the right questions about how you are maintaining your program.

Think like a journalist. Re-focusing is just this easy:

• Who are we trying to communicate to?
• What do they want to talk about?
• Where are they going to be receiving this information?
• When are we delivering it?
• Why should they care about receiving it from us?
• How will we deliver it?

Who

Think for a moment about your customer base, potential customer pool, and other organizational stakeholders. Have they changed? Have you been surprised in some fashion about either higher or lower adoption/engagement than you had anticipated?

Most importantly, have you generated any engagement with a group of people that you had not intended? This could be a clue that maybe your content isn’t focused where you need to be — or maybe that you have an audience to cultivate that you have simply been ignoring.

What

Often, you don’t get a lot of feedback about what is not working. People who are not connected to you don’t have the emotional investment to leave you detailed complaints, and when you consider the very high percentages of site visitors who do not comment, that’s a lot of potential wasted.

Are you asking them what they would like to know? Are you running the occasional survey? Even better, are you tracking their behavior once they are on your site? Following the breadcrumbs of site visits can be instructive — but maybe the best thing you can do is simply ask people. Go back a few months to those who have commented, and reach out with a personal request. Ask them if they still come by, and if they don’t what you’d need to supply to make it worth their while.

What? You don’t get any comments at all? Well, that’s a signal right there…

Where

With the explosion of mobile devices, you really need to know more about where your content is being consumed. Are you simply casting your seeds everywhere, hoping that some will find fertile ground? Or are you spending more of your time and energy cultivating fields that are more likely to develop leads and sales?

This is the hidden secret of the location-based services — it let’s you identify your mobile customers, and gives you an opportunity to develop a more personal relationship with them. Not because you want to “treat the Mayor” or give them overtly special treatment — but so you can find out more about their habits:

• How many other places do you “check in?”
• What’s your motive for “checking in?”
• How many of your friends act on Tips?
• What were the last three apps you used or mobile websites you visited before walking in here?

When

Giving potential customers information too early is almost as bad as giving it to them too late. This complements the “Where” proposition above, because the right pitch gets magnified in effectiveness when delivered at the right place at the right time. Much in the same way we can use Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of different channels or campaigns, you can experiment with the lead time of your offers. After a while, go back and see which factors mattered. It may just be that your conventional wisdom about when to pitch an offer was off by a day or two in one direction. (Or, when combined with a location-based punch, hours.)

Why

This is one of the easiest to address, but it also slips away from us if we aren’t vigilant. As writers become more comfortable creating for the web and for email and for blogs and for tweets, there’s a tendency to get too cute. Yes, there are some very clever phrasings and drop-dead funny pictures and funny jokes that simply don’t translate into effective marketing.

This isn’t just the Super Bowl commercial that was so clever that no one could remember what it was about — this is the little things, like remembering to include a value proposition, or a call to action. It’s amazing how important some of those seemingly repetitive words and phrases can be.

How

How are you delivering your content? Are you using the right platform? Is your audience starting to do something else? Are you updating regularly, engaging like a human being where warranted? Are you offering different facets of the same message through parallel channels? Or are you simply auto-posting from one to another, and in the process clogging up customer streams with soggy Xerox copies of what could have been a compelling message?

Take a moment to look at what your customers are getting. Emails, Facebook posts, Tweets. Maybe your Twitter client stopped rendering your photos a couple of months ago — would you know? Is your Facebook copy showing up in the description or in the post? Has the formatting of your email broken? You’ve got to know.

Six simple questions — Who What Where When Why and How — which will ensure you’re being thorough in your review of your social success.

There are very likely some we missed.

Add them to the comments.

The post The Reporter’s Guide to Customer Experience appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

I am sure you would agree that you will not find success just by selling a product and walking away. The entire experience counts. From the first touch, your customers are forming an opinion of you (and your intention) to provide them a product or service that won’t make them regret it in the minutes, days, or months to come.

I refer to these things as ways to “honor your customers.”  Honor in the sense that you are showing them, even in seemingly small ways, that you acknowledge and respect them. Think of them as a multitude of ways to smooth out potential bumps in the experience of interacting with your brand. You may have an outstanding product, but that can be easily overshadowed by the overarching experience of a poor customer experience. Common sense? Maybe, but brands slip up far too often when given the opportunity to sweat the small stuff so customers don’t have to.

In no particular order, here are some of the ways I think you can honor your customers:

1. Hire employees that are passionate about helping your customers and not just making a buck.
2. Share great content that makes your customers better, faster, stronger, smarter, etc.
3. Make your web site easy to navigate. And don’t assume it already is.
4. Provide an easy way for your customers to submit feedback and suggestions.
5. Don’t advertise one thing and sell another.
6. Make transactions painless. How many steps does it take to select a product and then have it in hand?
7. Share the successes of your customers even when they are not related to your product or service.
8. When you make a mistake, provide a sincere apology and an effective solution … as quickly as possible.
9. Listen first, then speak. This goes for online and offline communications.
10. Don’t pass the buck. If you are not the one with the answer then make sure your customer gets placed into the hands of someone who has it.
11. Leave your emotional baggage at home. Your moaning, slouching, and frowning is contagious.
12. Host an event for your customers so they can meet each other face-to-face.
13. Introduce your customers to other businesses and people they may benefit from.
14. Don’t put them on hold for more than 30 seconds. Better yet, ask for their number and call back when you are free.
15. Enable your customer service staff to tackle all possible issues without transferring them to another department.
16. Smile and say, “Hello.” You might just make their day doing something this simple!
17. Make it easy for customers to contact you in whatever way is most convenient for them (Phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, store front, etc)
18. Feature your customers in a blog post. They might just share it with their friends and family.
19. Include them in the process of developing new products. After all, they are the ones buying them.
20. Make your email newsletter as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe. Spam makes everyone unhappy.
21. Let your customers rate and review your products or services. If you have a great product then you have nothing to fear. If you don’t then you will soon find out.
22. Make sure you have enough staff available to help everyone in a personable and timely manner.
23. Give whenever possible with no strings attached. Hidden fees and agendas rarely make for loyal customers.
24. Make it easy to return or exchange items. Reducing the risk of being stuck with a bad purchase instills confidence and peace of mind in customers.
25. Let your customers get to know your employees. Their passion for your brand is infectious.

So I shared quite a few suggestions here, now it’s your turn. Mind sharing a few of your thoughts on honoring customers? Leave them in the comments section for all to see.

As a final treat and because I think Apple does a pretty good job of honoring their customers, I wanted to share with you a video of my experience buying an iPad 2 (after waiting in line for a few hours with a bunch of really cool people who made the experience fun). You might notice at least a half dozen little things that Ross, the Apple employee, does to make my experience a positive one.

The post 25 Ways to Honor Your Customers appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Information makes data geeks drool.  And yet those thick, aggregated reports are largely ignored by Those Who Make Things Happen.

How can that be?  The reports are just what they asked for!  Tabbed, cross-tabbed, and on a rolling three-month basis, too. Line graphs … pie charts … it’s all there!

What people want and what they ask for may be two different things.

The big-wigs really want to make the right choices, so their intent is in the right place.  They think data will be the fuel they need to make changes, adjust budgets, rework channel distribution plans, advance launch timetables and the like.

What they find is that data alone – or worse, the standard mind-numbing meetings during which the reports purportedly are to be discussed but are instead filled with other distractions and agendas – is an insufficient means to evoke decisive action, particularly in larger organizations.  They hamstring themselves with so much information, and no effective way to draw meaningful conclusions.  Or no one brave enough to ask “When was the last time any of us actually used any of this?” Or “What does this stuff mean, really?”  They’re intelligent high-earners so they grasp the academic concepts represented by the reports, but the question remains “What do we do next?”

The data is essentially meaningless without sufficient surrounding content and underlying context.  Developing strategic insight is the hard part Seth Godin recently wrote about – insight comes from synthesizing information from a variety of sources, finding patterns and discrepancies, and looking in other directions, channels, and platforms.  Customers lead multi-channel lives, so analysis of the data pile had better look at those areas, too.

The real objective is not to collect the data.  The real objective is to find the “something” in a sea of potential options when the environment is not controlled.

More choices do not necessarily lead to better decisions or greater satisfaction.

For about 10 years now, the leading bodies in cultural trends, food service, and grocery retail have reported that Americans are increasingly seeking flavorful options, even in well-established categories.  See Malcolm Gladwell’s famous TED talk for details. These groups believe it’s because we want to exercise more control over our lives and fill our needs for self-expression and customization. Yet studies conducted by Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar suggest that while people like some variety, we are easily overwhelmed when our selection of choices – be it jam, computers, or clothing – exceed six or seven.  There are neurological limits on humans’ ability to process information. It becomes too much for us to compare and contrast.  We’ll even abandon the situation without having made any choice at all.  We overestimate our own capacity for managing these choices.  (I’m talking about consumers now, but doesn’t it sound like the business scenario above?)

Help me help you.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve configured my new Dell online, only to abandon the shopping cart.  The whole thing got to be too much.  It wasn’t any sort of sticker shock, but rather the fear of making the wrong selection which gripped me.  Was that the right processor for my 67-open-tabs-at-a-time habit?  Could I store all my raw video files without risk?  Better to stick with the dog I have for now, I guess.

Consider for a moment the veritable cornucopia of choices in women’s outwear at Land’s End.  Not only are there designations of parka, jacket, and coat but then there’s down of various fills, Polar This, Therma That. The list goes on.

That vast assortment could just lead to decision paralysis. All that data!  Instead, Land’s End designed a shopping experience which categorizes their large assortment of clothing options into something I can latch onto and digest.  I don’t really want to know the warming properties of one individual material over another, but with high-level categories like “Warm” “Warmer” and “Warmest” along with a temperature performance designation, I can now translate all the product info into something meaningful.  And take decisive action.

What we really want is a better choosing experience – the information-processing component of choosing.  We want to minimize our cognitive stress to make better selections which will satisfy us. “We frequently pay a mental and emotional tax for the freedom of choice.”

Iyengar and article coauthor Agrawal wrote:

If the market for your product is saturated with choice, you can’t gain a competitive edge by dumping more choices into the mix. Instead, you can outthink and outperform your competitors by turning the process of choosing into an experience that is more positive and less mind-numbing for your customers. You can design a more helpful form of choice.

The bottom line.

Business:  when they say they want more data, what they really want is better analysis of the data.

Consumers:  when they say they want more choice, what they really want is a better choosing experience.

How can the interests of business and the wants of consumers meet to drive revenues and satisfaction?

*Note:   Cold Stone Creamery boasts 11.5 million flavor combinations with their array of ice creams.  Baskin Robins differentiated itself in 1953 with 31 flavors, one for every day of the month, before growing to 1,000 flavors today.

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