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Advocacy groups raise concerns over Google’s $2.1 billion Fitbit bid

July 4, 2020 Big Data

(Reuters) — Twenty advocacy groups from the United States, Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere signed a statement Wednesday urging regulators to be wary of Google’s $ 2.1 billion bid for fitness tracker company Fitbit because of privacy and competition concerns.

The 20 organizations — which include the U.S.-based Public Citizen, Access Now from Europe and the Brazilian Institute of Consumer Defense — argued that the deal would expand Alphabet subsidiary Google’s already considerable clout in digital markets.

Acquiring Fitbit would give Google such intimate information about users as how many steps they take daily, the quality of their sleep, and their heart rates.

“Past experience shows that regulators must be very wary of any promises made by merging parties about restricting the use of the acquisition target’s data. Regulators must assume that Google will in practice utilize the entirety of Fitbit’s currently independent unique, highly sensitive data set in combination with its own,” the groups said.

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Australian and Canadian groups were among the signatories.

A Google spokesperson said the tech wearables space was crowded.

“This deal is about devices, not data,” she said. “We believe the combination of Google’s and Fitbit’s hardware efforts will increase competition in the sector.”

Google announced the deal in November to take on competitors in the crowded market for fitness trackers and smart watches. Fitbit’s market share has been threatened by deep-pocketed companies like Apple and Samsung.

Australia’s competition authority said this month that it may have concerns about the deal and would make a final decision in August.

EU antitrust regulators will decide by July 20 whether to clear the deal with or without concessions or open a longer investigation.

In Washington, Google is under antitrust investigation by the Justice Department, a congressional committee, and dozens of states for allegedly using its massive market power to harm smaller competitors.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz, editing by Lisa Shumaker.)

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Big Data – VentureBeat

How To Create a Social Media Employee Advocacy Program

November 1, 2019 CRM News and Info

There’s no denying social media is an effective and essential communication tool for any business, but it’s limited to reaching a brand’s existing following. And since posting the same material to the same audience over and over again doesn’t yield a good return on investment, it’s time you started branching out beyond your current following — which brings us to today’s topic: how to create a social media employee advocacy program.

shutterstock 369008021 How To Create a Social Media Employee Advocacy Program

The numbers speak for themselves.

Brand messages have a 561% higher reach when shared by an employee rather than company accounts
Collectively, employees’ social networks are 10 times larger than corporates’
Employee posts generate 800% more engagement than corporate posts — and convert 700% more leads

Now, before you start barking at your co-workers to start sharing every single piece of branded content, gather key stakeholders to develop the purpose and strategy behind this new initiative. Today, we’re going to learn how to do just that in order to create an effective social media employee advocacy program that:

Excites and activates your employees
Builds credibility and authenticity for both employees and the organization

Let’s learn how!

What Is Social Media Employee Advocacy?

Social media employee advocacy is when a company empowers their workers to promote their brand on social media while also positioning themselves as thought leaders within their peer group and industry. Typically, employee advocates will post things to their social media accounts like:

Company, team, customer, or individual recognition (awards, features, mentions)
Workplace culture and team involvement (i.e. volunteering, office celebration)
Event attendance or exhibition
Customer spotlights
Service or product announcement/update
Relevant thought leadership — whether from the company blog, industry influencer, customer use case, etc.
Career opportunities at the company

When employees share news, insights, and shout-outs related to their company, they’re not only cultivating brand awareness on behalf of their employer, they’re also nurturing credibility based on who they are as professionals. (This is especially important for sales professionals — more on that shortly.)

Employee advocacy on social media represents authentic engagement, interest, and professional development in their expertise — not a promotional sounding board for the business. We are all invested in our careers, and part of establishing our personal brand is how we present ourselves on social media. Employee advocacy should amplify this and empower individuals to act as knowledgeable and engaged professionals rather than forcing people to mindlessly copy and paste sales pitches that only serve the company.

When done right, social media employee advocacy is a win-win for employees and organizations alike. The employee is able to bolster their personal brand as a professional while the company gains cost-effective brand awareness to fresh audiences, which leads to increased site traffic, conversions, revenue, and even new talent acquisition!

How to Kickstart Your Employee Advocacy Program

Implementing an employee advocacy program is a marathon — not a sprint. Like I mentioned above, establishing a strategy and purpose early on is essential for gaining maximum interest and involvement. So, without further ado, here’s a 4-step guide for launching your employee advocacy program:

Figure out your goals and objectives for your social media employee advocacy program — and be specific. What metrics are you measuring? What do you want to accomplish (other than something vague like “get more brand awareness”)? How does this play into your overall social media strategy? You’ll want to have a clear understanding of what you and the company expect for this employee advocacy program before jumping into launch-mode.
Become familiar with the social media tool you’ll be using to promote employee advocacy so that you can help onboard your peers. Take advantage of any training resources at your disposal, and work with your account manager/customer success representative to get the most out of its functionality. This will help you communicate how-to’s and also recognize any limitations within the platform.

Determine which department will have the greatest impact and benefit the most as social media employee advocates (*HINT: It’s Sales), train them how to use the software, and develop a regular sharing cadence. Once this team is fully onboarded and participating, move to other impactful departments, such as your leadership and marketing teams.

(Why Sales? Because their role and methodology has completely transformed within the past decade. While technology obviously plays a major role in closing the deal, authentic connections remain the biggest factor in any business relationship. Engaging on social with a salesperson is fun and personal than a cold call, and it creates a foundation for those initial sales calls because the prospect will now recognize the name and brand. It’s no surprise that sales professionals who use social media in their daily activities achieve 78% more sales than those who don’t, right?)

Create social media content that is authentic and valuable for customers and employees alike. Your staff wants to grow as professionals and become recognized as experts in their field, and sharing useful insights with their industry peers and colleagues helps them do both.

As you write your social copy, try to gain a little perspective. Account managers want to celebrate customer success rather than tout how your company helped them achieve those wins. Engineering departments are proud of achieving great positioning in product reports and are eager to share their accomplishments. Sales loves to serve as a credible and educational resource for hot leads, which means they might want to share engaging thought leadership content. Social posts that resonate with more employees will prompt more shares, clicks, engagement, and, ultimately, revenue.

The Do’s and One Big Don’t of Employee Advocacy

Do incorporate the employee advocacy program into onboarding for all new team members. This includes setting them up to use the platform successfully and reviewing company policies as they relate to social media.

Do use a social media tool with a good employee advocacy feature (like Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module)

Do occasionally encourage friendly competition — especially if there’s a certain event, go-to-market, or piece of content to emphasize.

Do create content that appeals to different departments outside of Marketing and Sales. If you aren’t sure what they like to share and engage with, ask!

Do set up notification emails for your employee advocates to alert them whenever you post new messages. (Bonus if they can directly share the post from the email!)

Don’t require employees to post to social media. Employee social media accounts are their own, and they should be able to decide if and what they want to share. Some people aren’t active on social media and others are particular about keeping work and personal completely separate — and that’s okay. Encourage your employees to participate, but never make it mandatory.

Improve Your Social Media Employee Advocacy With Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module

Social media can be a tough nut to crack, especially for smaller B2B companies, which is why employee advocacy is such an important part of any successful social media strategy. If you’re ready to take your social media marketing game to the next level, you should reach out to one of our digital marketing experts to learn more about Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module.

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Act-On Blog

Harnessing Video for Customer Advocacy

October 25, 2018 CRM News and Info

Video has risen in recent years to the forefront of any marketing campaign, recognized as the optimum medium to elevate brand awareness and share a company’s latest product buzz with an increasingly diverse and sophisticated audience. It’s so easy to work with; platforms are readily available, simple to learn, and hyper affordable.

High-quality results can be achieved on a budget; wonderfully powerful camera devices reside perpetually in customers’ pockets via their cellphones, and editing software often comes either built-in with install packages or as an included feature in video content management systems. To sum up a lot in a little, video is a marvelous marketing democratizer.

Naturally, video and marketing make for the perfect fit. However, your company can find a multitude of other uses with video elements that will expand the scope of your video infrastructure to simplify and augment a plethora of facets for your business.

Your video strategy shouldn’t just be reserved for delivering marketing materials via social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the hopes of catching a scrolling eye. Your customers want video content. They interact with it all day long in their personal and professional lives — but that doesn’t mean they’re dying to see more advertisements!

If your ultimate goal as a business is to construct a base of customers who can flow freely through your funnel and become customers for life, with opportunities to facilitate stronger bonds, video is the key.

Harnessing its power gives you the opportunity to pursue it at every stop along the way as a means to create constant customer growth, maximize customers’ personal experience and cater your products and services using a method that will target their goals as a business and help them to succeed. It’s a true B2B pathway toward mutual success through an emphasis on the customer service portion of the relationship.

There are many ways to redirect video content as a tool to advocate for your customers needs. The following approaches could be most vital in creating sustained growth for them and for you.

Creating and Maintaining a Self-Administering knowledge base System

As much as we love our customers and appreciate hearing from them on a regular basis, managing a lot of accounts can be incredibly time consuming. Besides the time we devote, we can’t always be sitting at our phones available for them on a whim. There’s only so much of us to go around, but we want our customers’ needs to be met.

From a tech support and customer relations perspective, having a one-stop shop to handle the bulk of customer requests and inquiries that can be self-administered is an absolute godsend for sales representatives. That is why taking the time to set up a committed self-administering knowledge base system can be so crucial to assisting your sales team and providing post-product purchase support for your customers.

The knowledge base is essentially a video memory bank of documentation as it relates to the most frequently asked questions about the products or services you provide. It might provide additional insight into company details as well, including corporate structure and staff introductions. More than anything, it’s a source of knowledge meant to help your customers access answers to their most urgent questions on their own when you can’t be there for them.

In-depth troubleshooting instructions for completing certain common tasks and product deep-dives are great uses of the knowledge base. It should be centrally located and a focal point of your post-purchase support, developed and advertised as a self-service station for your customers to scan through and consult.

Video instructionals are the focal point of the self-service knowledge base. The goal should be to recreate, as much as possible, a true, authentic real-life customer experience in the video setting, avoiding impersonal narratives to deliver face-to-face communication via a digital method.

Include in the videos that comprise the knowledge base visual personalization, including introductions with your face in the video. Consider including a second screen throughout the video showing you talking, replicating a Skype call, during the process.

Add humor, and reference past company meetings or conferences attended to create a true connection that customers can latch onto. If a user on the opposite end can think to themselves, “Oh! I totally remember the speaker at that trade show last year. That was awesome!” then you’ve leveraged your interpersonal character to pull into the past and demonstrate the depth and length of your customer relationship.

Using a program such as a video content management system (VCMS) will streamline the entire process, allowing you to host your knowledge base and customize the layout that your customers interact with on a daily basis. From the aesthetics to the content organization, you can choose your own adventure with knowledge base structures to maximize your support.

Organize by product or service, or by question type, and keyword searches will scan both video titles and video content to deliver tapplicable videos that will best address your customers’ questions.

Just as well, the video production itself doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Using just the webcam affixed to your computer and a built-in mic or podcasting USB microphone, you can deliver awesome results that will get the job done.

With all of this said, the knowledge base should be a supplemental program and not the sole source of your customer support and relations. It’s a bonus to buying your product, a perk for your customers with positive time management aspects on your end.

Some people simply may not find the audio component useful during self-serving; it may be distracting for certain types of learners. In other cases, video just isn’t as user-friendly as other outlets. Sometimes a basic scanning of a text step-by-step PDF will fair better, so consider including video transcripts and additional support materials linked to your videos.

Overall, the entire process of the knowledge base is the ideal way to deliver a customer service supplement that you can tout when trying to sell customers on follow-up support for your product. By offering the knowledge base as just one more service they’ll receive as a customer, you can get a leg up on the competition. With simple video production methods and affordable programming software options, you can get the job done on a budget.

Tech Support Video Messaging Services

People absolutely love having a face to go with the name. It’s a lot easier to deepen a client relationship when those personal, visual elements are involved. If you evaluate body language and determine cues to direct a conversation a certain way, your relationship will blossom.

When possible, always offer a video messaging option to customers over the strict phone option. This is particularly important when you know in advance that the call is going to be tech related. Being able to discuss and pull in computer screen grabs of software issues or service problems will boost the experience, expediting call times by allowing for customers to more easily visualize the problem fix and see how your company’s professionals exercise best practices with your product.

Above all else, consider using a platform like a VCMS or video capturing software to record and log the call. (Of course, always inform and gain consent before recording.) You can set up a system that automatically sends the recorded video to your client at the conclusion of the call for future reference. You also can go back and revisit the call, edit if needed, and upload to your knowledge base for future inquiries and troubleshooting.

Invite Customers to Share Their Own Product Stories

What better way to connect with prospective customers and create an environment of transparency than to solicit the advice and stories of your current clientele? Testimonials are a surefire way to attract clients into your funnel for future business growth, and there’s no doubting their efficiency.

What about taking things up a notch and partnering with your B2B peers to let them share their success stories for other customers, creating a professional network of positive outcomes and building everyone’s brand in the process? Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well it’s not. Here’s how you can do it.

You can create your own system to let customers in and get a feel for what other options are out there within your product and service line. It’s the ideal way to upsell in an indirect, growth-influenced manner and it will help your customers see the full picture of appreciating your products.

Take the time from your schedule to invite customers into your offices and have them sit before a camera and discuss their journey in collaboration with your company. You can even film the visit from the moment they step in, capturing their surprise and excitement to meet the makers behind the products they’ve been purchasing. Treat it as a true “documentary” experience, giving insight into what your relations look like from the client perspective.

Open the doors and invite them in! After all, you want your company to seem like one big, happy family, right? Once you’ve led your clients on a tour, ask them to have a seat and talk for a while about the relationship with your company thus far. Have them share words on the process of purchasing your products and what post-service has been like, as well as technical support.

Furthermore, and most importantly, give your customers an avenue to share how purchasing your products led to their own growth and business success. This will allow future customers the opportunity to consider how your product line will grant them the ability to seek the results they’ve long desired, proving to be an advertising tool that really can’t be beat.

Use these videos to captivate future prospects and share with current customers alike, making the most of the visit and allowing customers the opportunity to feel they may be invited next. It’s all about getting people excited about the idea of working with your company!

Meeting the Minds Behind the Team They Work With on a Daily Basis

In the same vein as recording a customer success video, allowing your customers to meet the whole team at your company is a great way to establish a deeper connection and meaning with your business. People love to get a feel for who is behind the scenes at a company. They love to namedrop, to address people on a first name basis, to feel like they’re a part of something and have insider knowledge. People love people, so give your people a chance to love you!

For many companies, the account management team may be the only level of personnel that the customer is familiar with after an initial sale. They may only email to follow up on additional sales and quarterly add-ons or supplemental materials, leaving out the opportunity to keep building a relationship for your sales team.

It may even be at the level where one sole account manager is in charge of all the relationships with a given customer, creating a litany of issues when that account manager leaves your company for a competitor.

Open up the doors and have a quarterly meet-and-greet with a few select customers. Get some catered food, send out a notice to your team members that you think it’d be beneficial for them to meet your customers, and invite everyone in for a nice afternoon.

Seems old school, right? Nothing wrong with that. Still, in an increasingly globalized market, not all (or even most) of your customers will be local enough to come to such an event. Having an option available for your out-of-town customers to meet your team can foster growth, even with thousands of miles between you.

That’s where video meet-and-greets provide the perfect solution to both distance and time obstacles. Brand a set of introduction videos as the entirety of your company representing the “customer success team.” This is essentially a superteam of sorts, the individuals you would like your customers to feel acquainted with so that they can know who exactly is in charge of helping them achieve their goals.

The style of this video is meant to be easily digestible in either an email campaign, newsletter, or a rotating option on the front page of your site. You can even cycle meet-and-greet videos on your various social media sites; they are a perfect fit for platforms like Instagram or Facebook.

You can use these meet-and-greet videos to add a touch of character to your relationships with your customers and let them feel a stronger degree of comfort with the people they are working with. The relationship will start to feel more personal and less robotic, much more trusting, and ultimately much better for everyone involved.

Take your time, meet with your team, develop a plan, and record! Put your own spin on it, let loose, and have some fun with it.

Customer Webinars With Tech Support and Personnel for Savvier Clientele

Once your customers and clients feel fully familiarized with your products and services, they very well might be at a different level of knowledge and mastery of your products than the casual user. Prospects inevitably will resort to FAQs, knowledge bases, and troubleshooting guides for the info they need to figure out products and services.

That same generalized knowledge just won’t be adequate for higher-level product users, so keeping them in the loop is crucial. After all, if they’re that good with your products, they obviously are frequent buyers and valued customers. They deserve your attention.

An awesome way to reach out to those users is to invite smaller groups to dive deeper with a niche topic in a customer-based webinar. Meet with your team and identify the customers you’ve spoken with who best demonstrate an advanced knowledge of how your product works. Once you’ve determined this group, send out a simple survey asking your customers what advanced topics they’re most interested in learning more about as it relates to your company.

From there, meet with developers and team members to decide on a topic for which there is the greatest room for growth and exploration as it pertains to their expertise. Keep it interesting; the entire process is optional and voluntary, so make it worth their while.

Once you have the group and topic set, send out an invite to your select customers for the webinar. Keep it around 30 minutes; any longer and it’s too much of a commitment for most. Host it either online, with a video call system or through a VCMS.

Let the topic be a discussion of best practices, or demonstrate troubleshooting in greater depth and detail. Consider having a tech developer or engineer come in for the call; this will open the floor for greater insights into how a product was made, and what the developer intended as an outcome. It will let your customers gain a fresh perspective on how to operate your products and services.

Give them a “behind the scenes” look into development, and make sure to leave plenty of time for questions and answers. You will be absolutely amazed to find the ways that your customers are using your products; it may provide an excellent opportunity for your engineers to be inspired by their usage ideas, and create a whole new product tailored just toward those needs.

After the webinar, solicit ideas and feedback from those who attended for a next webinar. Consider offering a full-fledged series of webinars on a monthly basis. Let your customers be involved as much as possible.

Also, consider asking permission to record the webinar. Afterward, you can revisit it for interesting perspectives. You also can save it and upload it to your knowledge base, or take clips and edit them to distribute in your next webinar invitation. Don’t let any video opportunity go to waste; there is always the chance to explore and find more content to work with as a company.

Closing Thoughts on Customer Advocacy

By now you can see that by harnessing the power of video, there is a never-ending treasure trove of options to explore further when it comes to strengthening customer relations. Video is the perfect method to shorten distances between customers and your company in a globalized economy, allowing for deep roots in customer relations to be established whether your clients are in Manhattan or Moscow.

Focusing on delivering quality content will allow customers to feel like they are part of something exclusive — a club meant only for buyers. It suddenly becomes a perk, an added value that they receive with their purchase. It’s not just point-and-click, see you later. It’s now a professional team backing them and supporting their success, being there for them through thick and thin to give the quality support they need to thrive in their endeavors.

Whether used for constructing and hosting your own knowledge base, creating webinars for your most advanced clientele, or creating a video tech service that will knock customers’ socks off, video is an affordable means to make the most of your company-to-customer relationship. So what are you waiting for? Get that camera out and start filming today!

Sean%20Gordon Harnessing Video for Customer Advocacy
Sean Gordon is the founder and CEO of
vidReach, which provides automation that personalizes customer engagement processes. He is also CEO of HireNami and executive vice president of ITC Holdings. Gordon has an extensive track record recruiting, hiring, training, and unlocking the talent of people. His career includes stints at AT&T, EMC, Aetna and West Corporation, among others. Sean has created new lines of business, reinvigorated stagnant company cultures, and mentored hundreds of employees who have gone on to do great things.

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5 Key Elements of a Winning Employee Advocacy Program

July 22, 2017 CRM News and Info

Two million blog posts are written every day. You can only imagine how many other content pieces are out there. This information overload makes it extremely tough for marketers to stand out. Sometimes, all it takes is one viral infographic or video, but most times, that isn’t the case. Rather than focusing on what content to publish, you should also be focusing on who delivers your content.

This is where employee advocacy comes in.

The idea is to simply get employees to share your content across their personal social networks ‒ to tap into their connections to help grow your reach, engagement, and conversions exponentially. While there’s no universal strategy for running an advocacy program, there are some things you can do to maximize its ROI. To get started, here are five key elements to include:

1. Quality Content

Above all, the content that you provide employee advocates should be of high quality. But what defines “quality content”?

Quality content can range from a 4,000-word eBook to a 1-minute video clip. It can take weeks to produce, or just a few hours. There’s no set criteria for creating quality content. However, you need to make sure that employees are sharing content that exceeds their audience’s expectations. Focus on content that is valuable yet super engaging.

Starting with the latter, you can make your content more engaging by:

turning average blog posts into beautiful infographics;
adding short GIFs and videos into your social content; and
posting polls and statistics that get people involved.

Next, don’t settle for one type of content ‒ go for a variety of original and curated pieces. Original content includes eBooks, case studies, webinars, blog posts, etc., that your marketing team created. Curated content consists of valuable articles and resources from third-party websites that educate your audience in a less self-promotional way.

Moreover, creating content that is valuable boils down to matching your readers’ intent. Take advantage of employees’ ability to gain insights and opinions about their audience; then use this information to create content that they’ll be interested in. This will also empower your advocates by proving their impact in the program.

2. Personalization

Now, more than ever, customers want you to connect with them on a real and personal level. Employee advocates add this element of personalization by putting faces to your brand. They create a human bridge between your company and customers.

Taking this element of personalization to the next level, you can increase engagement by getting employees to share content that’s relevant to their role in the company and to the particular audience. For example, consider your salespeople. What type of content do they enjoy sharing? What type of content is going to best resonate with their audience?

Generally, your salespeople are more likely to share thought-leadership pieces, industry-related reports, and articles from well-known publications, because these help to position them as knowledgeable and professional. On the other hand, content that’s technical in nature will be perceived as less relevant by your sales team ‒ and similarly, by their audience.

3. Simple Sharing

Another way to set your employee advocacy program for success is by fostering an environment of easy and effortless sharing. Whether advocates are attending a conference or sitting on the bus, it’s important to make it as simple as possible for them to share a large amount of content, no matter where they are.

By using a proper social advocacy platform, you can make tasks like sharing content an easy daily routine for employees. Rather than having to search for content on their own, employees who use an advocacy platform like Oktopost are guided on which content topics to post, when to post, and how to do so. Giving employees the necessary tools will get the ball rolling in your program and ensure that more content gets shared.

4. Incentive Strategy

Employees are the most essential asset of your marketing initiatives. Failing to incentivize them will result in less content being shared. Research shows that 69% of employees would work harder if their efforts were better appreciated.

Having a well-planned incentive strategy makes a huge difference and can really boost the ROI of your program. For now, here are a few examples of strategies that companies implement:

Monetary Rewards: Offer monetary rewards such as Amazon gift cards and movie vouchers ‒ or even upgrade advocates’ LinkedIn profiles to ‘Premium.’
Learning Opportunities: Give advocates the opportunity to improve their skills and expertise in the form of seminars, guest lectures, and training activities.
Recognition: Acknowledge employees for their involvement and contributions in front of their co-workers to boost their sense of confidence and accomplishment.
Fun Activities: Invite advocates for a fun and easygoing activity like a movie day or a night at a bar. Such a reward should be offered to the team or department that achieved the highest performance in the program, for example, the most content shared or the most clicks generated.

The type of incentive strategy you choose will depend on the number of advocates you have, your company’s hierarchy, and the personas that make up your program. For example, advocates from sales are more likely to value monetary rewards, while marketers will most appreciate public recognition.

5. Measurement

It’s easy to launch a program and then just hope for the best, but to make it a big success you must track and analyze its performance every step of the way. First, ask yourself what “success” looks like in your program. Is it the impact on reach? The increase in social chatter about your company? Or maybe the growth in the number of leads? By setting specific KPI’s, you can determine what’s working and what’s not. You can understand if your content needs improving, if you’re posting to the right channels, and if you’re reaching the right audience.

It’s important that you accurately tie these metrics to individual employee performance and to ROI. For the latter, you’ll need an advanced platform like Oktopost. Oktopost consolidates all of your social media marketing activities in one place for easy management and reporting.

In your advocacy program, Oktopost allows you to track everything from which prospects converted, to which employee brought in the conversion, to the type of content the employee posted. It also enables you to measure the metrics gathered by your advocacy program in the ecosystem of your other marketing initiatives. The more you measure and make adjustments, the more successful your program will be.

A winning employee advocacy program requires a lot more than giving employees content to share. Implement these five elements for a sustainable and fruitful program that can be tied to ROI, and help your employees spread the word about your brand.

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Why Employee Advocacy Fails And Personal Branding Is A Crock

July 8, 2017 BI News and Info

When it comes to buying things—even big-ticket items—the way we make decisions makes no sense. One person makes an impulsive offer on a house because of the way the light comes in through the kitchen windows. Another gleefully drives a high-end sports car off the lot even though it will probably never approach the limits it was designed to push.

We can (and usually do) rationalize these decisions after the fact by talking about needing more closet space or wanting to out-accelerate an 18-wheeler as we merge onto the highway, but years of study have arrived at a clear conclusion:

When it comes to the customer experience, human beings are fundamentally irrational.

In the brick-and-mortar past, companies could leverage that irrationality in time-tested ways. They relied heavily on physical context, such as an inviting retail space, to make products and services as psychologically appealing as possible. They used well-trained salespeople and employees to maximize positive interactions and rescue negative ones. They carefully sequenced customer experiences, such as having a captain’s dinner on the final night of a cruise, to play on our hard-wired craving to end experiences on a high note.

sap Q217 digital double feature1 images1 Why Employee Advocacy Fails And Personal Branding Is A Crock

Today, though, customer interactions are increasingly moving online. Fortune reports that on 2016’s Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that is so crucial to holiday retail results, 108.5 million Americans shopped online, while only 99.1 million visited brick-and-mortar stores. The 9.4% gap between the two was a dramatic change from just one year prior, when on- and offline Black Friday shopping were more or less equal.

When people browse in a store for a few minutes, an astute salesperson can read the telltale signs that they’re losing interest and heading for the exit. The salesperson can then intervene, answering questions and closing the sale.

Replicating that in a digital environment isn’t as easy, however. Despite all the investments companies have made to counteract e-shopping cart abandonment, they lack the data that would let them anticipate when a shopper is on the verge of opting out of a transaction, and the actions they take to lure someone back afterwards can easily come across as less helpful than intrusive.

In a digital environment, companies need to figure out how to use Big Data analysis and digital design to compensate for the absence of persuasive human communication and physical sights, sounds, and sensations. What’s more, a 2014 Gartner survey found that 89% of marketers expected customer experience to be their primary differentiator by 2016, and we’re already well into 2017.

As transactions continue to shift toward the digital and omnichannel, companies need to figure out new ways to gently push customers along the customer journey—and to do so without frustrating, offending, or otherwise alienating them.

sap Q217 digital double feature1 images6 1024x572 Why Employee Advocacy Fails And Personal Branding Is A Crock

The quest to understand online customers better in order to influence them more effectively is built on a decades-old foundation: behavioral psychology, the study of the connections between what people believe and what they actually do. All of marketing and advertising is based on changing people’s thoughts in order to influence their actions. However, it wasn’t until 2001 that a now-famous article in the Harvard Business Review formally introduced the idea of applying behavioral psychology to customer service in particular.

The article’s authors, Richard B. Chase and Sriram Dasu, respectively a professor and assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, describe how companies could apply fundamental tenets of behavioral psychology research to “optimize those extraordinarily important moments when the company touches its customers—for better and for worse.” Their five main points were simple but have proven effective across multiple industries:

Finish strong. People evaluate experiences after the fact based on their high points and their endings, so the way a transaction ends is more important than how it begins.
Front-load the negatives. To ensure a strong positive finish, get bad experiences out of the way early.
Spread out the positives. Break up the pleasurable experiences into segments so they seem to last longer.
Provide choices. People don’t like to be shoved toward an outcome; they prefer to feel in control. Giving them options within the boundaries of your ability to deliver builds their commitment.
Be consistent. People like routine and predictability.

For example, McKinsey cites a major health insurance company that experimented with this framework in 2009 as part of its health management program. A test group of patients received regular coaching phone calls from nurses to help them meet health goals.

The front-loaded negative was inherent: the patients knew they had health problems that needed ongoing intervention, such as weight control or consistent use of medication. Nurses called each patient on a frequent, regular schedule to check their progress (consistency and spread-out positives), suggested next steps to keep them on track (choices), and cheered on their improvements (a strong finish).

McKinsey reports the patients in the test group were more satisfied with the health management program by seven percentage points, more satisfied with the insurance company by eight percentage points, and more likely to say the program motivated them to change their behavior by five percentage points.

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The nurses who worked with the test group also reported increased job satisfaction. And these improvements all appeared in the first two weeks of the pilot program, without significantly affecting the company’s costs or tweaking key metrics, like the number and length of the calls.

Indeed, an ongoing body of research shows that positive reinforcements and indirect suggestions influence our decisions better and more subtly than blatant demands. This concept hit popular culture in 2008 with the bestselling book Nudge.

Written by University of Chicago economics professor Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge first explains this principle, then explores it as a way to help people make decisions in their best interests, such as encouraging people to eat healthier by displaying fruits and vegetables at eye level or combatting credit card debt by placing a prominent notice on every credit card statement informing cardholders how much more they’ll spend over a year if they make only the minimum payment.

Whether they’re altruistic or commercial, nudges work because our decision-making is irrational in a predictable way. The question is how to apply that awareness to the digital economy.

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In its early days, digital marketing assumed that online shopping would be purely rational, a tool that customers would use to help them zero in on the best product at the best price. The assumption was logical, but customer behavior remained irrational.

Our society is overloaded with information and short on time, says Brad Berens, Senior Fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, Annenberg, so it’s no surprise that the speed of the digital economy exacerbates our desire to make a fast decision rather than a perfect one, as well as increasing our tendency to make choices based on impulse rather than logic.

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Buyers want what they want, but they don’t necessarily understand or care why they want it. They just want to get it and move on, with minimal friction, to the next thing. “Most of our decisions aren’t very important, and we only have so much time to interrogate and analyze them,” Berens points out.

But limited time and mental capacity for decision-making is only half the issue. The other half is that while our brains are both logical and emotional, the emotional side—also known as the limbic system or, more casually, the primitive lizard brain—is far older and more developed. It’s strong enough to override logic and drive our decisions, leaving rational thought to, well, rationalize our choices after the fact.

This is as true in the B2B realm as it is for consumers. The business purchasing process, governed as it is by requests for proposals, structured procurement processes, and permission gating, is designed to ensure that the people with spending authority make the most sensible deals possible. However, research shows that even in this supposedly rational process, the relationship with the seller is still more influential than product quality in driving customer commitment and loyalty.

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Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, studies how the emotional brain shapes decisions and experiences. In a popular TED Talk, he says that people in the process of making decisions fall into one of two mindsets: Type 1, which is stressed and wants to feel comforted and safe, and Type 2, which is bored or eager and wants to explore and take action.

People can move between these two mindsets, he says, but in both cases, the emotional brain is in control. Influencing it means first delivering a message that soothes or motivates, depending on the mindset the person happens to be in at the moment and only then presenting the logical argument to help rationalize the action.

In the digital economy, working with those tendencies means designing digital experiences with the full awareness that people will not evaluate them objectively, says Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. Since any experience’s greatest subjective impact in retrospect depends on what happens at the beginning, the end, and the peaks in between, companies need to design digital experiences to optimize those moments—to rationally design experiences for limited rationality.

This often involves making multiple small changes in the way options are presented well before the final nudge into making a purchase. A paper that Dhar co-authored for McKinsey offers the example of a media company that puts most of its content behind a paywall but offers free access to a limited number of articles a month as an incentive to drive subscriptions.

Many nonsubscribers reached their limit of free articles in the morning, but they were least likely to respond to a subscription offer generated by the paywall at that hour, because they were reading just before rushing out the door for the day. When the company delayed offers until later in the day, when readers were less distracted, successful subscription conversions increased.

Pre-selecting default options for necessary choices is another way companies can design digital experiences to follow customers’ preference for the path of least resistance. “We know from a decade of research that…defaults are a de facto nudge,” Dhar says.

For example, many online retailers set a default shipping option because customers have to choose a way to receive their packages and are more likely to passively allow the default option than actively choose another one. Similarly, he says, customers are more likely to enroll in a program when the default choice is set to accept it rather than to opt out.

Another intriguing possibility lies in the way customers react differently to on-screen information based on how that information is presented. Even minor tweaks can have a disproportionate impact on the choices people make, as explained in depth by University of California, Los Angeles, behavioral economist Shlomo Benartzi in his 2015 book, The Smarter Screen.

A few of the conclusions Benartzi reached: items at the center of a laptop screen draw more attention than those at the edges. Those on the upper left of a screen split into quadrants attract more attention than those on the lower left. And intriguingly, demographics are important variables.

Benartzi cites research showing that people over 40 prefer more visually complicated, text-heavy screens than younger people, who are drawn to saturated colors and large images. Women like screens that use a lot of different colors, including pastels, while men prefer primary colors on a grey or white background. People in Malaysia like lots of color; people in Germany don’t.

This suggests companies need to design their online experiences very differently for middle-aged women than they do for teenage boys. And, as Benartzi writes, “it’s easy to imagine a future in which each Internet user has his or her own ‘aesthetic algorithm,’ customizing the appearance of every site they see.”

Applying behavioral psychology to the digital experience in more sophisticated ways will require additional formal research into recommendation algorithms, predictions, and other applications of customer data science, says Jim Guszcza, PhD, chief U.S. data scientist for Deloitte Consulting.

In fact, given customers’ tendency to make the fastest decisions, Guszcza believes that in some cases, companies may want to consider making choice environments more difficult to navigate— a process he calls “disfluencing”—in high-stakes situations, like making an important medical decision or an irreversible big-ticket purchase. Choosing a harder-to-read font and a layout that requires more time to navigate forces customers to work harder to process the information, sending a subtle signal that it deserves their close attention.

That said, a company can’t apply behavioral psychology to deliver a digital experience if customers don’t engage with its site or mobile app in the first place. Addressing this often means making the process as convenient as possible, itself a behavioral nudge.

A digital solution that’s easy to use and search, offers a variety of choices pre-screened for relevance, and provides a friction-free transaction process is the equivalent of putting a product at eye level—and that applies far beyond retail. Consider the Global Entry program, which streamlines border crossings into the U.S. for pre-approved international travelers. Members can skip long passport control lines in favor of scanning their passports and answering a few questions at a touchscreen kiosk. To date, 1.8 million people have decided this convenience far outweighs the slow pace of approvals.

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The basics of influencing irrational customers are essentially the same whether they’re taking place in a store or on a screen. A business still needs to know who its customers are, understand their needs and motivations, and give them a reason to buy.

And despite the accelerating shift to digital commerce, we still live in a physical world. “There’s no divide between old-style analog retail and new-style digital retail,” Berens says. “Increasingly, the two are overlapping. One of the things we’ve seen for years is that people go into a store with their phones, shop for a better price, and buy online. Or vice versa: they shop online and then go to a store to negotiate for a better deal.”

Still, digital increases the number of touchpoints from which the business can gather, cluster, and filter more types of data to make great suggestions that delight and surprise customers. That’s why the hottest word in marketing today is omnichannel. Bringing behavioral psychology to bear on the right person in the right place in the right way at the right time requires companies to design customer experiences that bridge multiple channels, on- and offline.

Amazon, for example, is known for its friction-free online purchasing. The company’s pilot store in Seattle has no lines or checkout counters, extending the brand experience into the physical world in a way that aligns with what customers already expect of it, Dhar says.

Omnichannel helps counter some people’s tendency to believe their purchasing decision isn’t truly well informed unless they can see, touch, hear, and in some cases taste and smell a product. Until we have ubiquitous access to virtual reality systems with full haptic feedback, the best way to address these concerns is by providing personalized, timely, relevant information and feedback in the moment through whatever channel is appropriate. That could be an automated call center that answers frequently asked questions, a video that shows a product from every angle, or a demonstration wizard built into the product. Any of these channels could also suggest the customer visit the nearest store to receive help from a human.

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The omnichannel approach gives businesses plenty of opportunities to apply subtle nudges across physical and digital channels. For example, a supermarket chain could use store-club card data to push personalized offers to customers’ smartphones while they shop. “If the data tells them that your goal is to feed a family while balancing nutrition and cost, they could send you an e-coupon offering a discount on a brand of breakfast cereal that tastes like what you usually buy but contains half the sugar,” Guszcza says.

Similarly, a car insurance company could provide periodic feedback to policyholders through an app or even the digital screens in their cars, he suggests. “Getting a warning that you’re more aggressive than 90% of comparable drivers and three tips to avoid risk and lower your rates would not only incentivize the driver to be more careful for financial reasons but reduce claims and make the road safer for everyone.”

Digital channels can also show shoppers what similar people or organizations are buying, let them solicit feedback from colleagues or friends, and read reviews from other people who have made the same purchases. This leverages one of the most familiar forms of behavioral psychology—reinforcement from peers—and reassures buyers with Shiv’s Type 1 mindset that they’re making a choice that meets their needs or encourages those with the Type 2 mindset to move forward with the purchase. The rational mind only has to ask at the end of the process “Am I getting the best deal?” And as Guszcza points out, “If you can create solutions that use behavioral design and digital technology to turn my personal data into insight to reach my goals, you’ve increased the value of your engagement with me so much that I might even be willing to pay you more.”

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Many transactions take place through corporate procurement systems that allow a company to leverage not just its own purchasing patterns but all the data in a marketplace specifically designed to facilitate enterprise purchasing. Machine learning can leverage this vast database of information to provide the necessary nudge to optimize purchasing patterns, when to buy, how best to negotiate, and more. To some extent, this is an attempt to eliminate psychology and make choices more rational.

B2B spending is tied into financial systems and processes, logistics systems, transportation systems, and other operational requirements in a way no consumer spending can be. A B2B decision is less about making a purchase that satisfies a desire than it is about making a purchase that keeps the company functioning.

That said, the decision still isn’t entirely rational, Berens says. When organizations have to choose among vendors offering relatively similar products and services, they generally opt for the vendor whose salespeople they like the best.

This means B2B companies have to make sure they meet or exceed parity with competitors on product quality, pricing, and time to delivery to satisfy all the rational requirements of the decision process. Only then can they bring behavioral psychology to bear by delivering consistently superior customer service, starting as soon as the customer hits their app or website and spreading out positive interactions all the way through post-purchase support. Finishing strong with a satisfied customer reinforces the relationship with a business customer just as much as it does with a consumer.

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The best nudges make the customer relationship easy and enjoyable by providing experiences that are effortless and fun to choose, on- or offline, Dhar says. What sets the digital nudge apart in accommodating irrational customers is its ability to turn data about them and their journey into more effective, personalized persuasion even in the absence of the human touch.

Yet the subtle art of influencing customers isn’t just about making a sale, and it certainly shouldn’t be about persuading people to act against their own best interests, as Nudge co-author Thaler reminds audiences by exhorting them to “nudge for good.”

Guszcza, who talks about influencing people to make the choices they would make if only they had unlimited rationality, says companies that leverage behavioral psychology in their digital experiences should do so with an eye to creating positive impact for the customer, the company, and, where appropriate, the society.

In keeping with that ethos, any customer experience designed along behavioral lines has to include the option of letting the customer make a different choice, such as presenting a confirmation screen at the end of the purchase process with the cold, hard numbers and letting them opt out of the transaction altogether.

“A nudge is directing people in a certain direction,” Dhar says. “But for an ethical vendor, the only right direction to nudge is the right direction as judged by the customers themselves.” D!

Read more thought provoking articles in the latest issue of the Digitalist Magazine, Executive Quarterly.

About the Authors:

Volker Hildebrand is Global Vice President for SAP Hybris solutions.

Sam Yen is Chief Design Officer and Managing Director at SAP.

Fawn Fitter is a freelance writer specializing in business and technology.

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