Medallia Ideas

Yup, super weird. But SUPER cool!

It's amazing how much you can subtly communicate in a simple visualization.

Just because you can't innovate the product doesn't mean you can't be innovative. Consider books by the foot.

Ballpoint pen maker Pilot has launched a creative ad campagin of tattooed Lego figurines.

Some dramatic photos surfaced of a Canadian fighter pilot who lost control of his plane moments before a crash—and a video, too. Crazy!

Finally, today is Sys Admin Day. Thanks so much to Serge and his team—you all work so hard and are appreciated tons!

Chatter is a weekly collection of links to articles that Medallia employees found relevant, interesting, or just plain fun.

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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Matt Nitzberg of dunnhumby hits the nail on the head: Talking customer-centric is easy, but it's often difficult to execute.

So where does one begin?

Nitzberg provides seven requirements that provide a good starting point. (Don't overlook his table comparing traditional and customer-centric organizations.)

Give the list a read. Consider it. And become a more customer-centric organization.

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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This is the third and final part of our discussion of Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh.

Service That WOWs Translates to Great Marketing

Tony Hsieh often talks about a concept he calls WOW. (In fact, it’s Zappos' first core value, Deliver WOW Through Service). Here’s how he defines it:

To WOW, you must differentiate yourself, which means do something a little unconventional and innovative. You must do something that’s above and beyond what’s expected. And whatever you do must have an emotional impact on the receiver.

I love it. Creating WOW moments Building a great company is about delivering positive "emotional impact." Leadership in the marketplace today is more than just goods and services and a clever marketing jingle. It's about connecting with your customers in a truly meaningful way. It's about setting their goals at the core of your business.

It's not traditional, but it can be win-win. (The Zappos deal is just one example.)

Free Shipping Both Ways

Look at every interaction as an opportunity to WOW your customer. There are things your customers need. Things they want. And then there are things that go beyond all that. That's the Zappos model. That's WOW.

For instance, at Zappos, shipping is free both ways. The policy isn't intended just to hook the customer, it's to WOW them into a loyal relationship. Sure, the costs are high, but Hsieh rationalizes that quite easily:

The additional shipping costs are expensive for us, but we really view those costs as a marketing expense.

Now, most companies might find the free shipping model a satisfactory WOW experience. But is this really going beyond all possible expectations? Not for Zappos. It also upgrades frequent customers with free overnight shipping—ya gotta love a company like this.

Going Beyond Goes Beyond

Great customer service doesn’t merely translate into friends sharing experiences with friends. As time went on, stories about "the Zappos way" popped up on popular blogs and even in the mainstream media. And none of it was scheduled. It was all organic. And it all took Hsieh and his team by (pleasant) surprise.

Every once in a while, a reporter or popular blogger would pick up on something that we were doing, and the story would spread like wildfire. We were as surprised as anyone else by the publicity because it was never planned for on our end.

We learned a great lesson: If you just focus on making sure that your product or service continually WOWs people, eventually the press will find out about it. You don't need to put a lot of effort into reaching out to the press if your company naturally creates interesting stories as a by-product of delivering a great product or experience.

Conclusion

Treat every customer interaction as an engagement critical to the long-term health of your business, and find every opportunity to overwhelm customers with excellence. Keep in mind that WOW moments resound long after the actual experience and do more to build your brand than any traditional marketing effort ever could.

Yup, Hsieh and Zappos have set a high bar. We think you should set a similar one.

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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World-renowned magician Jamy Ian Swiss gave an excellent 25-minute presentation at Gel 2009. In addition to some tricks (which were fabulous), he shared some amazing insights that he's learned as a magician, which also apply to anyone who is interacting with end users or customers.

Empathy has to do with knowing the mind of another person. All magicians know that magic occurs only in the spectator's mind...if anything you create has any sort of end user in mind...then theory of mind is important to you too.

Swiss has found that magic happens in the minds of those watching, and he's spent years understanding what people expect and how they respond—theory of mind.

Usability is a brand attribute. Good design is a brand attribute. And all of it requires empathy. All of it requires getting out beyond the thing and understanding what the human experience is at the other end.

I love that last part: "it requires getting out beyond the thing and understanding what the human experience is at the other end." Empathy is all about listening, about understanding, about perspective. It's about getting into other people's minds and seeing what they see. And it's certainly useful for a lot more than just magic!

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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This is the second part of a three-part quasi-review of "Delivering Happiness," by Tony Hsieh.

Your Culture is Your Brand

Social media is disruptive, and it's certainly having its way with traditional marketing and communications. No longer can brands (at least in the long term) conceal their true characters. By its very nature, the social web exposes the core of a company. Tony Hsieh writes:

With the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee can blog about a bad experience with a company, and the story can spread like wildfire by email or with tools like Twitter....the good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great experience with a company can be read by millions of people almost instantaneously as well.

Some companies might find the social web unnerving, while others outright deny its strength. We think it's exciting, an opportunity for corporations to focus on their culture and their people. What's more, we believe that any investment in people (whether employees or customers) will ultimately lead to rewarding loyalty and profits.

At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff — like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers — will happen naturally on its own.

Hire the Right People

This is interesting: Zappos has two separate groups that interview candidates. The first evaluates simply on ability and experience. A second team is commissioned to evaluate "purely for culture fit."

We've actually said no to a lot of very talented people that we know can make an immediate impact on our top or bottom line. But because we felt they weren't culture fits, we were willing to sacrifice the short-term benefits in order to protect our culture (and therefore our brand) for the long-term.

In fact, after a brief training period, new hires are offered $2,000 to quit—the company actually provide incentives to leave! Here's why: Zappos recognizes the core of its business IS its culture, and without it, the company is just another online shoe store. And so management zealously guards this by finding and ensuring that only passionate people who uphold Zappos' ideals work there.

Define the Culture You Want

For a few companies, great culture is innate and naturally bubbles up from within. This is ideal. But others require careful planning, discernment, and continual cultivation of a culture. That's okay. Zappos is a bit of both. The company obviously has a charismatic leader in Hsieh, but it also work hards to articulate and cultivate its vision—which the oft-published "10 Core Values" illustrates:

1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

One Last Point

As the web becomes more social and brands are forced to be transparent, companies that ignore their culture will be penalized. Articulating and defining your culture, and vigilantly hiring around that, will ultimately provide a company with the necessary foundation to achieve both meaningful impact and rich profits.

Both are possible!

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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The big news this week was the launch of FlipBoard, a beautifully designed and engaging iPad app. We love it, but unfortunately we weren't the only ones!

Craigslist has a Barter section, and apparently it's pretty lucrative—some kid traded his cell phone for a Porsche!

Why are GPS voices are so condescending?

Whether or not you were around back in '65, you'll think this pool table is groovy.

We're always willing to consider new ways to measure customer value.

Indeed, it is fascinating to consider the "spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed."

Chatter is a weekly collection of links to articles that Medallia employees found relevant, interesting, or just plain fun.

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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Tony Hsieh doesn't just "get" customer service, he's made a bajillion dollars from it. And his new book, Delivering Happiness, isn't just a history of the making of said bajilions, but an essential read for anyone looking to understand customer satisfaction in today's marketplace.

We throughly enjoyed the book and recommend it entirely, and we found three ideas are particularly interesting:

1. Never Outsource Your Core Competency
2. Your Culture Is Your Brand
3. Service That WOWs Translates to Great Marketing

In this first post (of a three-part review), let's take a look at: Never Outsource Your Core Competency

The Warehousing Dilemma

Early on, Zappos hired a company called eLogistics to store and ship its inventory of shoes. However, eLogistics didn't have the infrastructure to ship the orders accurately and was consistently behind in updating inventory. It was a mess, and to preserve the brand, Zappos had to set up its own warehouse. The company built a facility with the capacity to grow.

The takeaway for Hsieh?

We learned that we should never outsource our core competency. As an e-commerce company, we should have considered warehousing to be our core competency from the beginning. Outsourcing that to a third party and trusting that they would care about our customers as much as we would was one of our biggest mistakes. If we hadn't reacted quickly, it would have eventually destroyed Zappos.

If shipping is core, it has to be done correctly. And even if the infrastructure exists, any customer touchpoint must be met with the same passion and excellence or your brand will suffer.

Telephones

As time progressed, Tony and the team determine that the Zappos brand had to be about more than just selling shoes. They determined that it would be about offering the very best in customer service.

Soon thereafter, they considered outsourcing their call center activities overseas. But equipped with the lesson learned from the eLogistics debacle, and the company's newfound focus on service, Zappos kept call center activities in-house. Hsieh and his team recognized the deep value of a phone interaction, and in the long run they scored a huge win.

As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer's undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we've found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.

Conclusion

On the surface, warehousing and phone support might seem auxiliary to your business; they may seem ripe for pruning and restructuring. But proceed cautiously. The heart of these things are customer contact points, and that needs to be your passion. Guard them. Keep them under your control (as much as possible). Don't make the mistake Zappos initially made. Your customer relationship is your core competency.

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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That Old Spice guy went on a social media rampage and won big, responding to people on Twitter by posting some 87 videos of YouTube awesomeness.

"Unless you're a fourth-grader, or being ironic, or the author of a comic book, or on vacation from the 1990s, never use that typeface."

Not sure if these inventions from the past are "cool," but they're certainly interesting!

In response to the new regulatory climate, banks are changing the way they relate to customers. That's always a good thing.

And last, sometimes inspiration comes by changing the rules.

Chatter is a weekly collection of links to articles that Medallia employees found relevant, interesting, or just plain fun.

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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In an oversaturated marketplace, in a 24/7 digital age, how can a product or company stand apart? Seth Godin, in this 18-minute TED Talk from 2003, observes that "very good" is not good enough. Today, you must be remarkable.

In a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff.

His solution: focusing on early adopters of a product. It's an interesting concept, though we're not entirely convinced. What we do agree with—and the heart of what he's saying—is this: Find passionate people and make them promoters. These people care. They're zealots. They're obsessed with something.

Make that something your something.

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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Join Medallia and Megan Burns from Forrester Research, Inc., to learn how you can improve customer web experience end-to-end and use the power of customer feedback to drive web sales, lower churn, and increase web customer satisfaction and profitability.

At 11am PT on July 14, Borge Hald, CEO of Medallia, and Megan Burns of Forrester Research, Inc., will discuss best practices in improving web customer experience.

Register today for this live event and:

• Hear why so many companies lose revenue due to poor customer web experience
• See how leading companies maximize the customer web experience by understanding user behavior and taking action to correct issues
• Learn how to improve the customer web experience with a few effective actions

Register now!

Date: July 14, 2010
Time: 11am PT, 12pm MT, 1pm CT, 2pm ET
Location: Your computer
Speakers: Megan Burns, Senior Analyst, Forrester and Borge Hald, CEO, Medallia, Inc.

Posted by Ryan Dunphey

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