citizen Evangelist

Now, that’s an interesting concept: “customers possess actual rights.”  It’s a sad thing that a company with as many positive attributes as JetBlue would need to react to a congressional intervention in order to construct their own commitment to customers.  The Bill of Rights the company published was far less than I hoped it would be.  There is no heart in the words.. and only minimalistic commitments that any reasonable customer would expect.

A few examples:

Opening statement:  JetBlue Airways exists to provide superior service in every aspect of our customer’s air travel experience. In order to reaffirm this commitment, we set forth this Bill of Rights for our customers.  These Rights will always be subject to the highest level of safety and security for our customers and crewmembers. 

This sounds pretty good.  Superior Service is a good aspirational goal.  What I read after that found its standard at “expected” service.  A far cry from superior.

Cancellations: All customers whose flight is cancelled by JetBlue will, at the customer’s option, receive a full refund or reaccommodation on a future JetBlue flight at no additional charge or fare.

Uhh … perhaps I’m missing something, but I would natually assume that if you’re going to cancel my flight, you’ll either return my money to me or make sure I can get where I need to go.  Failure to do so would be… fraud??

Ground Delays:  For customers who experience a Ground Delay for more than 5 hours, JetBlue will take necessary action so that customers may deplane.

The next time I have to spend more than 5 hours on a plane on a tarmac is the last time I’ll ever fly your airline.  Why not be more accomodating and set the standard at half that time?  And don’t feed me any rhetoric about costs.  Your costs are largely variable and you’re bound to suffer more if you don’t fill your seats.  I can guarentee that my customer lifetime value combined with my willingness to speak negatively about your services will have a far more significant impact that deplaning.  Think about it.

Now.. its unfair of me not to point out a few of the positive stances.  JetBlue does make a commitmentto compensate for certain issues.

Involuntary denial of boarding = $1,000
Departure delay of 1 to 2 hours = $25 voucher
Departure delay of 2 to 4 hours = $50 voucher
Departure delay of 4 to 6 hours = 1 way ticket voucher
Departure delay of +6 = Round trip ticket voucher
Ground delay of 30 to 60 minutes at arrival = $25 voucher
Ground delay of 1 to 2 hours at arrival = $100 voucher
Ground delay of 2 to 3 hours at arrival = 1 way ticket voucher
Ground delay of +3 at arrival = Round trip ticket voucher
Ground delay of 3 to 4 hours = $100 voucher
Ground delay of +4 hours = customer’s round trip ticket value

The only real problem with this: money doesn’t show me that you appreciate my business.  It doesn’t communicate that I’m important.  It puts my mind in a place where money becomes a lever to be used to get things done.  You want to earn my trust?  Don’t delay.  If you do, be sincere and let me know what is going on.  Provide me with information on when I can expect get on my way.  But, most importantly, find something to comfort me during this time of anxiety.  I’m guessing here, but I don’t think I can use those cash vouchers at the restuarant there in the midway… or at the bar.  If I can’t find a way to relax, I’m going to carry that anxiety on to the plane with me and it will add to the negativity felt by all of the passengers.

C’mon guys.  I have higher expectations of you than this.

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In Pyromarketing Greg Stielstra discusses the power metaphors have provided him in the process of trying to understand marketing and what actually takes place in the market. While reading this section, I couldn’t help but think about the number of metaphors I’ve heard used over the years.

The ones that I particularly had trouble relating to this time around were the one’s I’ve heard used for sales people for years. “Hunters & Farmers” In the rare case you haven’t heard this used before, a hunter is the type of sales person who goes out and hunts big game customers. The farmer on the other hand, deals with customers by getting them to graze on new products and services.

A hunter’s job is to kill. A sales person’s job is to close deals. This metaphor gets really close to communicating that a sales person’s job is to kill the customer. I’ve seen plenty of sales incentive plans that were creating an environment of hate…

A farmer’s job is to get the animals fat so they can be milked, sheared, or slaughtered. Again, this does not lend itself to ‘relationship’ oriented images.

What’s particularly interesting to me is the power of images and the words which invoke that imagery. In “What The Bleep Do We Know” we’re exposed to the power certain words have at a metaphysical level. When our sales cultures are oriented to thinking like and acting like hunters and farmers, we’re not creating an environment where customers endear themselves to the organization. We need to look at our customers as citizens within a capitalist community. It is our responsibility to do what it takes for them to elect to do business with us again. Thinking about and treating our customers like animals is just stupid.

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A good citizen is well read. Here’s what I’m consuming today:

Assumptions have a sell by date - Creating Passionate Users
We can’t expect to innovate new products, services, techniques, etc. without challenging our assumptions. Have some of your assumptions “gone off”? How frequently are you checking? In other words, do you have a plan in place for regularly sniffing the milk? I swear that half my battles at Sun were about questioning assumptions… many of which had been around long enough to be science fair projects.

[Citizen Evangelist: What I think is even more challenging are the hidden assumptions that permiate throughout the team. Ever been in one of those situations where it sounded like everyone was talking about the same thing but it was pretty obvious that no one was on the same page??]

Going mobile against T-Mobile - Church of the Customer
A year ago, “Dell Hell” was the rant of an angry Dell customer that eventually spread across the Web. We found out later that “Dell Hell” was a leading indicator of bigger problems at the computer manufacturer, which eventually dedicated $100 million to rebuilding its customer service operation.

[Citizen Evangelist: Its amazing what lenghts folks will go to in order to make you hear something when it is important to them. Silly T-Mobile. If their actions were not perceived as overtly abusive, they wouldn’t receive this type of abuse from their current and former customers.]

Good enough - Seth GodinSo, just about everything that can be improved, is being improved. If you define “improved” to mean more features, more buttons, more choices, more power, more cost.[Citizen Evangelist:Seth, I love your writing, but you gotta give me some context here. There are lots of moving parts here. Let’s take music for a moment. Its features are words, sounds, & rhythm. There are 26 letters in the alphabet. 8 notes in an octive, and really only a few variations in rhythm. Since music has been around throughout civilization, mathematically, we should have created all the music that have ever can be written has been written, right? After all, there are only so many different combinations of those elements. Features and functionality can be good enough as long as the exeperience that one has or associates with those tangibles are new. Even beer has only 4 primary ingredients: water, hops, barley (and specialty grains), and yeast.. but each ingrediant has its own variations. At the end of the day, its the experiences we associate with the beer that makes it special. Especially with the mainstream varieties offered in the US.]

Guy Kawasaki and Unstructured Data- The Post Money ValueI got asked the other day why our firm invested in Nstein. In reading Guy’s post, there was an excellent example of the great unwashed, unstructured data problem out there.What the general feeling about (for example) Dell is a fairly simple exercise. Look for burning laptops, screaming people on tech support hold, and employees crying about the evaporation of their stock. Dell sucks or other such comments get picked up and added to the “Houston, we’ve got a problem” pile when all the Dell corporate types dig through the data about what the world is saying with respect to Dell.

[Citizen Evangelist: I love how we all try to solve problems from the context that is most familiar. NStein defines the problem as a “Search” issue and that through technology we can improve our service to customers (and of course, profitability) by scouring the web with another search engine in order to find and understand unstructured data. Wouldn’t it just make more sense to treat customers better, provide them with an easy channel to provide feedback, and actually act upon that feedback? You don’t have to “search” for data if they are bringing it to you.]

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In Crossing the Chasm , Geoffrey Moore teaches us that a marketplace is made up of a group of consumers with similar needs who are self-referencing.

While most marketing practitioners have not been able to put Moore’s ’self-referencing’ framework into practice, the Internet has gone a long way in helping. Technology has allowed us to reduce the costs associated with measuring a person’s personal network and deriving the level of influence that individuals posess. These technological improvements have only made it easier for everyone to increase the reach and the velocity in which a person can reach into their network and request or share information about a product. Google, in particular, has done more to help users of similar interests and needs reference each other than any other tool available.

This access to information has driven the need for another mechanism which was not as critical previously: filtration systems. Ironically, the combination of referencing, reputation and filtration, a new information access paradigm was born. Users could proactively seek out Buzz products, determine the ratings based upon the crowd, and in some cases, their personal network, and receive recommendations through interactions with certain sites such as Amazon .

These tools have since enabled a plethora of individuals to transcend their previous activities and organize into smartMobs, get paid for their opinions, and garner bragging rights as amateurs. I’m particularly interested in the experiment taking place at BazaarVoice. Despite the presence of these examples within the consumer product sector, isn’t it strange that no one has any form of practical implementation of these tools and techniques with the context of the software industry?

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A good citizen is well read. Here’s what I’m consuming today:

Agencies are watching as ads go online
Among the teenage video diaries, pet tricks and rejected television pilots circulating on the online video site YouTube, there is another major category of clips: advertisements.

Amazon adds ‘Search Suggestions’
Amazon.com introduced a new feature on Friday, called “Search Suggestions,” that enables users to contribute keywords for items sold on the site.

Give users a Hollywood ending
We can all take a lesson from filmmakers: endings matter. The way we end a conversation, blog post, user experience, presentation, tech support session, chapter, church service, song, whatever… is what they’ll remember most. The end can matter more to users than everything we did before. And the feeling they leave with is the one they might have forever.

Mobile Marketing
Yesterday I received an unexpected message on my cell phone. It was actor Samuel L. Jackson shouting in my ear demanding me to go see Snakes on a Plane, the new movie he’s starring in that’s about–what else–snakes on a…

New Jupiter Report on Ratings & Reviews
Today JupiterResearch released and announced a report on user-generated content for retail specifically the use and impact of ratings and reviews for retailers. We launched our own release with more detail, below

Software’s big fight over small business
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) — The software that runs businesses’ sales, finance, and operations, has never been the most exciting field - but lately, it’s been downright sleepy. Thanks to a merger frenzy over the last few years, Oracle, SAP, and to a lesser extent Microsoft dominate enterprise software sales to the world’s largest companies, and annual sales growth in this arena has slowed to a 3 percent trickle.

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