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Greetings!
First a big thanks to all of those people
who have completed my recent survey. If you missed it first time around you can
still access it here, your input is very valuable so please take a minute to
complete it.
Results so far have been interesting and very
useful helping to shape future newsletter content and new product and service
development for my membership based CRM/CEM tool kit. You can see the survey results so far here.
I was editing this newsletter whilst
travelling on a train heading to the North East on the day when travelling
through London was a nightmare due to the Underground Tube strikes. This is an example
of how the employee experience directly impacts upon the customer experience. In
this case the poor employee experience relating to pay and conditions led to
industrial action which led to a strike followed by a poor customer experience
for millions. And of course the word of mouth or 'buzz' created as a result
spread rapidly.
Apart from the Tube strike, Swine Flu was also
in the headlines on the day of my train journey as it was expected that the
World Health Organisation would class the outbreak of this disease a pandemic.
So
today's newsletter answers the question "how can you learn from Swine Flu to
improve your Employee and Customer Experiences?" Believe it or not there are some simple things you can do.
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Word
of Mouth Spreads Like a Virus
The H1N1 virus that causes Swine Flu passes
from person to person, staying alive in the air and on surfaces waiting to harm
the next unsuspecting passer bye for hours often days.
The stories we tell of our experiences as
customers or employees are the same, they spread from colleague to colleague,
from friend to friend, from audience to audience through word of mouth or digitally
across the Internet.
Like viruses our experiences stay alive by 'hanging' around
on social networking sites like Facebook, You Tube, Twitter, Bebo, My Space and
so on, waiting to be passed on to the wider global audience, shared ultimately
with people we will most likely never meet but often dramatically affecting
their perceptions of brands and organisations, "I was going to buy it from brand Y but after hearing that I'll
choose brand X instead." And our experiences remain in our minds to be
recalled often years into the future, "That
reminds me years ago when I worked for X they we're great they always let you..."
Word of Mouth as a marketing strategy (WOMMA Word of Mouth Marketing Association) is increasingly helping to build
brands through positive buzz but equally if it turns against you and negative
buzz is generated it can do your brand serious harm.
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Learning
from Swine Flu
I'm not going to repeat the World Health
Organisation's advice on managing Swine Flu but there is one piece of published
information that caught my imagination which I'm going to share with you. With
a few tweaks it's something that you can implement within your own Experience
communication campaigns.
To
Avoid Negative Buzz - Catch It, Bin It, Kill It.
In the UK we've probably all seen the
campaign literature and posters around town or seen the infomercials on the TV
designed to instruct us on the three essentials to combating the Swine Flue
virus. Catch It, Bin It, Kill It.
This is 'behavioural' campaigning designed to
alter people's behaviour in order to reduce the spread of something negative, in
this case an infection, and to remind us of the part we all play.
So I recommend that you apply that same
principle for an Employee or Customer Experience campaign.
For those circumstances that will spread negative
buzz you can still Catch It, Bin It, Kill It by doing the following.
Catch
It - catch the negative behaviours (or
processes) that lead to a poor experience then Bin It and Kill It. Make sure
you explain to those involved why this type of behaviour or this part of the
process or system needs to be singled out and treated differently (binned) and changed
and removed forever (killed). Explain how it will impact the customer or
employee experience if it's left untreated. Make sure you bin it and kill it so
it never returns.
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To
Create Positive Buzz
For instances where actions or behaviour can
lead to positive buzz you need to apply a different behavioural campaign, you
need the principles of Catch It, Keep
It, Spread It!
Catch
It - here the trick is to catch employees
doing the right things, right. Look out for the positives (actions, behaviours,
attitudes) that you know will cause others to talk about their experience of working
for you or doing business with you. You want these positive experiences to be spoken
of, you want word of mouth advocacy to spread like a virus throughout your
market place. So look for those actions, behaviours or attitudes. Catch it and then;
Keep
It - make sure you hang on to it. Encourage it's
repetition by praising the person demonstrating it, reward them in some way especially
with on-the-spot-rewards and recognition. This will encourage the individual or
team involved to keep doing it. When
you've kept it;
Spread
It -
next make sure you demonstrate and communicate to individuals, teams and your
wider organisation as a whole that this type of behaviour is what you want
everyone to do and why. Explain how this is the type of action you want to keep seeing repeated. By constantly
communicating the message, by giving examples of what you've caught others already doing, you can help
spread the behaviour across your organisation.
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Your
Call to Action
1.
Viruses hijack our own healthy cells
to attack us, so with Swine Flue still a topical news feature hijack the theme
and incorporate the concept into your Employee and Customer Experience communication
campaigns.
2.
Work out what's causing negative
buzz and then Catch It, Bin It, Kill It! Ask your customers what's causing them
pain when doing business with you and commit to change it.
3.
Work out what you are doing or could
do further that will cause positive buzz and then Catch It, Keep It, Spread It!
Ask your customers what it is that drives them to do business with you in preference to others and then build on it.
I hope to see your great customer
experiences being spread like a virus across the Internet. Let me know if you
already have some examples and I'll spread the buzz for you amongst my
community of followers too.
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if you'd like to find out more call me on 0784 3284310 or respond to this email.
If you'd like other colleagues to receive copies of these newsletters then please forward me a list of individuals including first name, last name and email address.
Please take my two question survey telling me if you found this newsletter useful or not.
Kind regards,
Mark Gregory
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