Experience Is All That Matters

It's a great saying: "Be Your Own Customer".

It's only when you actually experience being a customer that you really know what it is that you are selling. OK - you might be able to hold the product you are selling. You might be able to go into the shop and see the shop. It's not until you actually try and find the shop for the first time, find what you are looking for, buy it and take it home to use it that you truly experience what you are offering your customer.

The key point is this: you never sell a product - you always sell an experience.

Let's take an example. The iPod. The iPod has been phenomenally successful. You hear people extolling the virtues of the "user interface", the "design", the "packaging", the "marketing".

Really though, it's the sum of all of these parts (and more) that is the iPod experience. The marketing campaigns convey a simplicity and "cool factor". If you go to buy one from an apple store (online or in the high street), you are wowed by state of the art presentation. You may get good service in the shop, or - if online - you get site that is well designed and easy to buy from. The packaging is so slick, neat, clean. You unwrap your iPod and just "feels" great. You just plug it into your computer, it charges fast. You download iTunes - nice and easy. In fact, iTunes is just as much a part of the iPod experience as the player itself. It's all so easy. Then of course, there's the user interface - the simple controls. On top of that it just "looks" cool.

You see - the iPod is not successful for any one of these individual factors. The total "experience" is what counts. I'm not saying that everyone has a great experience every single time - I know of people who have a had batteries that fail after just a year. Some of these are genuinely annoyed and will never use Apple again (Apple, take note - "must improve here"). Equally though, there are fans that will just dump the old player whose batteries failed and just buy a new one. Their experience to date was SO good, that the simple fact that the product was substandard did not put them off buying another one. Kudos to Apple.

For any business therefore, every point of detail matters. The message, the communication, the product features, the sales process, the purchase experience, the convenience, delivery / pick up experience, customer service, product reliability. None of these details ever stand alone.

Unless you are a company of just one person, you always have different staff members dealing with different parts of the experience. As a result, none of them get to see the overall picture from a customer's perspective.

The only way to see what you are really delivering, is to be your own customer.

Go buy your own product. See what it feels like. Is it good enough? Is it better than your competitors? Go test their products too. Now you're getting somewhere.

What Is Customer Engagement?

You can't hide from your customers.

I don't know about you, but I've noticed a recent trend evolving whereby the term "customer engagement" is becoming increasingly prolific in online businesses.

There's been a lot of comment on the subject throughout the net, and if you want to get the definition, context and background, you'd do worse than read the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

If I was to explain what it is to my Mum, I'd most likely say something like...

"Well, until recently, companies had all the power when it came to communicating with their customers. They controlled their message through advertising and traditional marketing. In recent years, thanks to the rise of the internet, consumers increasingly have a voice, whether it be through blogs (Mum says: "What's a blog?"), posting product reviews, creating fan clubs around a product or indeed, the opposite: groups of disgruntled customers. Communication has become two-way. As such companies or organisations that embrace this and invite comment and involvement from their customers are more likely to be successful in the long term. The loyalty of their customers will increase and they will reduce the risk of being seen negatively if something goes wrong. Conversely if they bury their heads in the sand and ignore connecting with their customers they risk it back-firing in their face when all their competitors get it right".

I welcome this trend. It makes sense that companies are held accountable for the quality of their service and product. It ensures that competition does not just depend on price alone.

Just as "conversion" and "usability" are now well understood by many (and equally misunderstood by a surprisingly large number of companies), "customer engagement" will develop a following, experts will emerge, books and research will published and it won't be long before the majority of large E-commerce companies have a "customer engagement strategist" in their marketing team. We'll start to see standard vocabluary (i.e. jargon), measurement systems and sub-disciplines.

This week I was talking to a friend who had been at a management meeting of a small off-line company. They were talking about "the internet", what they could do to attract more business through their website etc. One person suggested adding a blog, allowing the company to post news and allow clients to comment. The immediate reaction was that this was too "risky", "what might be posted? - it could damage our reputation!".

Yes, it's true, you might get the odd negative comment, but these days disgruntled customers are able to get this out to an audience whether you let them or not. It's better to show you're interested and get a relationship with your customers. Better still, deliver a service that means that your customers will always be postive about their experience.

Until companies can take that leap of faith, they will still sit in the 20th centuary. There really is no option now for companies, especially online ones, to hide from their customers.

Social Networking Sites Are The Fastest Growing UK Online Brands

Neilsen Netratings' recent report showed that of the 10 fastest growing UK online brands, three were social networking tools (Rock You!, Slide and Bunnyhero labs), one was a social network (Facebook) and one was a professional network (LinkedIn).

Networks arrive, take hold, and surge. They reach a tipping point where suddenly they mutate like a contagion and take over the inboxes and phones of the country. Not surprising therefore that they dominate the top 10.



However, it takes a very special network to hold out. Remember Friends United? It was the "Facebook" of 5 years ago. Now, it's history. Today's users are fickle. What is cool to this generation will be old hat to the next. So you can expect networks to rise and fall like the tide. They arrive fast, they die fast. Only the lucky few survive.

However, despite this cynicism, I must admit that it seems that the age of the network has arrived. Is it a blip in the history of the internet or an era that will last? Time will tell.

In the meantime, what to do?
1. If you are creating a network, make sure it has some real value.
2. If you are in the business of promoting your product, you have to embrace the networks, or get left behind.

View the official Nielsen release here.