What, exactly, is the customer experience? In a word, it’s about service, but also so much more. Particularly in B2B, what your customer experiences is the crux of your professional relationship. It’s tested in every message you send and receive – from a simple phone call to the most thoughtfully targeted content.

In this issue of WordSpin, we’ve looked at the customer experience from multiple angles – from the perspective of a frustrated shopper, to call center conundrums.

In Content Strategy 101, Chris L. Ramsden gives us a first look at how an attentive content strategy can deliver legions of loyal customers. Kathryn Casey exposes the underworld of online customer reviews, while Jomar Reyes takes a deeper look at user experience – and why it’s so important for your brand.

For language lovers, Raechelle Wilson gives us a glimpse into how and why English is changing in our Grammar Slammer and Best of WordSpin features.

This issue of WordSpin also presents readers with a special, sneak peek at Eye For Image’s Three Voices Strategy ™, a revolutionary way to engage and influence all of your corporate audiences. You can also read about our upcoming book: The Death of Propaganda – B2B buyer behavior has changed. Now it’s your turn.

We hope this edition sheds a fresh light on customer experience and provides insight into how you can keep building those positive relationships.

Also, don’t forget that you can see past editions of WordSpin exactly as they were launched – that’s one of the great features about this online magazine platform. Check out Past Editions in the menu above.

As always, we encourage your comments and feedback – and happy reading!

David Hoskin
Editor of WordSpin

By Chris L. Ramsden

The dream of anyone in B2B marketing is to build so much credibility that all those strangers who make up your target audience will end up sharing your content. They will end up talking about you and your products as if they knew you personally. That’s the moment your content marketing turns you in to a bona fide industry thought leader – and, from then on, your fan base will do the lion’s share of your marketing for you.

As you’ll no doubt have discovered, this is a tall order. But it doesn’t have to be a pipe dream. All it takes to convert strangers into brand advocates is a detailed, long-term content strategy – and a lot of focused effort. If you haven’t already, you can start by embracing a couple of key principles:

1. Don’t be the Hyacinth Bucket of your market

Ever get stuck sitting next to someone at a dinner party who talks non-stop about his own greatness? You might remember the unhappy experience, but you likely won’t remember a word of what was said. This is a no-brainer: when you’re marketing, don’t be that person.

2. Don’t be the Frasier of your market either

Frasier was the intellectual psychiatrist from hit TV series Cheers. And, although he was an expert on people, he had the communication skills of a teenager. Norm, Sam and Cliff never understood what he was on about and, though they respected his mind, they never really liked him. The lesson? Don’t forget to win the heart of your audience, as well as their minds.

So, we want to talk to our target audience about their own urgent concerns and interests in a voice they’ll respond to positively. Now we need to create content that’s relevant. And this is where work on the content strategy really begins. To strike a chord with your readers, three factors need to be in perfect harmony:

1. Business interest

It goes without saying that your audience must have a need for your products or services. You need to be able to turn that into an urgent need.

2. Reader interest

You need to understand the aspirations, pains and values of your readers so you can show you’re the right person or company to help them out.

3. Time significance

Your content will have a much greater impact if you release it to coincide with industry events, product launches or seasonal changes – use these cycles to your advantage.

Most companies are good at targeting an audience with the right business interests: that’s the same as understanding the market in which they operate. However, reader interest is often treated superficially, or overlooked altogether. And this is where a good content strategy can give your communications a competitive edge.

After all, the content consumed by a company CEO probably has little in common with the things a project consultant reads. Different aspirations, pains and values = different interests. But if both are key players in your buying cycle, your content will need to engage both of them.

Get this right and you’ll have a killer content strategy. I’ll explain exactly how to achieve this in part two of Content Strategy 101.

By Kathryn Casey

People are chatting. Twittering. Liking. Sharing. Commenting. Reviewing. And if there’s one thing that gets a discussion going, it’s a negative consumer experience. For companies and businesses, a bad review can be a reputation killer. And yet, an overly positive review not only looks suspicious, it can prompt a less-than-satisfied customer to share their bad experience. Once those reviews and comments are online, they stay there.

Going somewhere?

We’ve seen it on TripAdvisor, a consumer review site launched in 2000 that has become one of the world’s most comprehensive travel resources. With around 41.6 million hits each month and over 40 million reviews, it’s a sea of good and bad experiences – and no listing is immune to criticism.

If a negative review is posted, hoteliers and restaurateurs have the right of reply – but the post won’t be removed. Though TripAdvisor claims to monitor the site and remove dubious reviews, people have the right to say what they want – it’s an open forum.

Stacking the deck

However, some hoteliers and restaurateurs have suffered as a result of slating reviews. But it’s not just the hospitality haters who are creating a problem. Some establishments have been accused of posting bogus positive reviews and even paying to have them written to increase bookings or counter negative reviews.

Kira Cochrane, a features writer for The Guardian, describes TripAdvisor as both “brilliant and annoying,” and that the reviews are a “celebration of consumer power, of the right for everyone’s opinion to be heard and accorded equal weight,” but this is countered by the “bewildering contradictions in its reviews.”

Either way, the extreme reviews confuse users, discredit the site and defeat its purpose – booking travel services based on other people’s experiences and opinions.

Online sanitation services

So it’s no surprise that fake five-star and defamatory reviews have spawned a whole new industry – online reputation management. Chris Emmins, co-founder of KwikChex, a UK-based online reputation services company, recently claimed, “Some of the reviews on TripAdvisor appear to be just fake, or certainly contain completely untrue statements. Some are suspect and some fall into legitimate fair comment.”

Emmins is currently helping 420 paid members of KwikChex to present their grievances to TripAdvisor. If the worst complaints are not removed within 14 days, Emmins is proposing a potential group defamation action. Ouch.

Damage control or too much control?  

There are a host of companies like KwikChex helping brands and companies boost, restore and protect their online reputations. Lonely companies can buy fake Facebook friends for 10 pence each, or pay to have “watchdogs” monitor their brand online to counter any negative activity that could damage a brand that’s cost a fortune to develop.

But doesn’t this behavior challenge what social media is all about – the conversation? If people risk being sued for their opinions on open social forums, the conversation will eventually stop.

And what are the limits of online reputation management? If a company needs to buy friends or pay to have their reputation monitored, is it doing something fundamentally wrong?

Yes, fake reviews – good or bad – can destroy a reputation and ruin a business. But as consumers, it’s still up to us to post honest reviews, weigh the negative against the positive and make our own decisions. Or, perhaps do something that’s becoming increasingly rare: just follow our intuition.

By Raechelle Wilson

Language is not static. It’s a constantly evolving thing. Words come and go, rules change and develop strange exceptions. Quite often, the biggest language influencers are not the experts, but people who have no idea what they’re talking about. In English, if you misuse something long and often enough, it will eventually become “right.”

Begging the question

The other day I was reading a book review in the New York Times written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning academic, when I came across this statement:

“It begs the question of what kind of Union the war was being fought to preserve.”

If you do a Google news search for “begs the question,” you will be inundated with thousands of examples of people – educated people writing for largely reputable news outlets – misusing this phrase.

But begging the question is actually a type of logical fallacy where you assume the initial point in a premise: A implies B and A is only valid because B is assumed. This can get pretty complex, but very simply:

“I like chocolate because it tastes good.”

Begs the question (which employs an archaic sense of “beg”) was never meant to be a substitute for “raises the question” or “the question begs to be asked.” However, because of the proliferation of this particular abuse, this “new” meaning is gaining ground. According to one of my favorite grammarians, Grammar Girl, “one or two recent dictionaries claim that it is now acceptable — the New Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, says it is ‘widely accepted in modern standard English’.”

But just to be on the safe side, if you’re about to pose a question, don’t “beg” it first.

Irregardless

Oh, man. Use this around a grammar snob and you’re likely to get an earful. A classic double negative, “irregardless” means quite the opposite of what most users intend: regardless. But it’s not entirely wrong. Grammar Girl explains this and other mysteries:  “‘Irregardless’ is a bad word and a word you shouldn’t use, but it is a word. ‘Floogetyflop’ isn’t a word—I just made it up and you have no idea what it means. ‘Irregardless,’ on the other hand, is in almost every dictionary labeled as nonstandard. You shouldn’t use it if you want to be taken seriously, but it has gained wide enough use to qualify as a word.”

Yikes.

Chill out, dude

Have you ever noticed that “proper” English makes you sound like a bore? Well, maybe it’s time to relax. One doesn’t have all day to review one’s rules, after all.

The folks over at Grammarphobia have given us some great examples of stuffy rules that are, thankfully, falling by the wayside. Here are a few of our favorites:

Data is only a plural noun

“It’s time to admit that data has joined agenda, erotica, insignia, opera, and other technically plural Latin and Greek words that have become thoroughly Anglicized as singular nouns taking singular verbs. No plural form is necessary, and the old singular form, datum, can be left to the Romans.”

It is I

“It’s OK to use It is me, That’s him, It’s her, and similar constructions, instead of using the grammatically correct but more stuffy It is I, That’s he, and It’s she.”

Who vs whom

“We can’t dump whom entirely, at least not just yet. But many modern grammarians believe that in conversation or informal writing, who is acceptable in place of whom at the beginning of a sentence or clause (a clause is a group of words with its own subject and verb): Who’s the package for? You’ll never guess who I ran into the other day.”

In days gone by, company salespeople would typically be involved in a B2B prospect from beginning to end. They were the main source of information about the company and its products. Salespeople also knew where the prospective buyer was in the process at any time – and were able to directly influence the progress of each deal. Marketing materials, the corporate website and trade show stands made up the rest of the B2B buyer’s information sources.

But things have changed. Today’s B2B buyer may not be to be in touch with company sales representatives at all prior to the actual purchase – and even then, everything may happen within the company’s online environment instead of via personal contact. So prospects can find your offering, learn about it, see what others think of it, maybe even trial it and buy it, all without a salesperson.

This new breed of B2B buyers gets their information from a wide variety of sources, including independent reviews, peer recommendations and content or community sites specific to their industry. Your carefully prepared marketing messages and materials might not even come into consideration.

New marketing strategies for savvy audiences

As your buyer is fast becoming more independent, discerning and savvy, you have to step up your marketing game. Imagine engaging him or her from the early, pre-sales cycle through to supporting post-sales satisfaction and repeat buying at the other end of the chain. In order to do that – to fully address the needs of today’s B2B buyer – a new type of end-to-end marketing approach is required.

At Eye for Image, we have helped many B2B companies develop and implement their marketing strategies in a market that continues to change at break-neck speed. Reflecting on this and after considerable research and input from clients and partners, we have developed a strategy that helps businesses to better engage and influence all of their corporate audiences.

Three Voices™ strategy gives businesses a new, more effective way to engage and influence all of their corporate audiences. The model rests on three distinct concepts that are vital for B2B marketers and communicators to grasp: Voice of Company; Voice of Industry; and Voice of Customer.

Introducing Three Voices™ strategy

Essentially, Voice of Company is an umbrella term for messages and materials created by an organization to describe its business to stakeholders and prospective customers. From brochures to websites, it’s your official corporate mouthpiece.

But every company exists within the influence of an industry. Instead of directly pushing its own offerings, Voice of Industry is how a company enhances its brand by discussing industry-level matters. A recent example is A.P. Moller-Maersk’s “Let’s change the way we think about shipping” site, which encourages the container shipping industry to effect changes for a more viable future.

Finally we have Voice of Customer. This describes the peer-to-peer conversations going on between B2B buyers, who are discussing and giving feedback on your solutions and products, well before the manufacturer is consulted. This is where all the action is, and where companies need to actively listen and respond if they are to match their marketing efforts to the new realities of B2B buying processes.

Of course, there’s a lot to say on this subject – much more than we can cover in WordSpin. Soon we will be releasing a book, The Death of Propaganda – B2B buyer behavior has changed. Now it’s your turn.  Here we cover the Three Voices™ strategy in detail, and explain how to successfully engage with every level of your target audience and position your company as an influencer in your industry.

To pre-order The Death of Propaganda or to find out more, please feel free to contact us. We’ll be happy to discuss your company’s needs and how you may benefit from Three Voices™ strategy.

We all know that we need to be kind to our customers, but some can try our patience more than others. Take a look at these transcripts from tech support call centers for some classically stupid customers….

Tech support: What kind of computer do you have?

Female customer: A white one.

Customer: Hi, this is Celine. I can’t get my diskette out.

Tech support: Have you tried pushing the button?

Customer: Yes, sure, it’s really stuck.

Tech support: That doesn’t sound good; I’ll make a note.

Customer: No, wait a minute… I hadn’t inserted it yet… it’s still on my desk… sorry.

Tech support: Click on the ‘my computer’ icon on to the left of the screen.

Customer: Your left or my left?

Tech support: Good day. How may I help you?

Male customer: Hello… I can’t print.

Tech support: Would you click on ‘start’ for me and…

Customer: Listen pal, don’t start getting technical on me! I’m not Bill Gates.

Customer: I have problems printing in red.

Tech support: Do you have a color printer?

Customer: Aaaah….thank you.

Tech support: What’s on your monitor now, ma’am?

Customer: A teddy bear my boyfriend bought for me at the 7-11.

Customer: My keyboard is not working anymore.

Tech support: Are you sure it’s plugged into the computer?

Customer: No. I can’t get behind the computer.

Tech support: Pick up your keyboard and walk ten paces back.

Customer: OK

Tech support: Did the keyboard come with you?

Customer: Yes

Tech support: That means the keyboard is not plugged in. Is there another keyboard?

Customer: Yes, there’s another one here. Ah…that one does work.

Customer: I can’t get on the Internet.

Tech support: Are you sure you used the right password?

Customer: Yes, I’m sure. I saw my colleague do it.

Tech support: Can you tell me what the password was?

Customer: Five stars.

Tech support: What anti-virus program do you use?

Customer: Netscape.

Tech support: That’s not an anti-virus program.

Customer: Oh, sorry…Internet Explorer.

Tech support: Are you running it under Windows?

Customer: No, but that is a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his printer is working fine.

By Chris L. Ramsden

Let’s kick off with a bold statement:

If you have anything to do with marketing or communications, you need to read this book.

It will only take you a couple of hours. And it could turn out to be the most eye-opening two hours you ever spent. As Mark Alan Effinger, CEO & Chief Evangelist at RichContent Corporation, puts it, “Read The Hierarchy of Contagiousness before your next marketing meeting and rock the house.”

Social media and content marketing are nothing new. But surprisingly, taking a scientific approach to finding out what works and what doesn’t is. Dan Zarrella, co-founder of Hub-spot, borrows ideas and methodology from disciplines such as genetics and statistical analysis to test claims and advice from the hundreds of social media gurus tauting their wares online. And he calls any advice that fails the test “unicorns-and-rainbows.”

The advice on offer gets detailed and specific very quickly, which is what you’d expect from a scientific approach. After all, the more specific your hypotheses, the more accurate your test results shoud be. Here are some of the questions Dan Zarrella poses:

• Will your message reach more people if it starts off in a small, active group, or a larger more general group?
  
• What’s the best time to Tweet?
  
• To send out your newsletter?
  
• To post a blog?
  
• Should you talk about yourself in your blog posts?
  
• How often should you post a blog to get a good click-through rate?
  
• How about if your aim is to get more comments?
  
• To position yourself as an industry thought leader, will it help you to call yourself a “guru,” “founder” or “author”?

Not only does Dan Zarelli answer these questions and more, he also provides charts and graphs to back them up. But, what’s most surprising is how much the answers challenge the accepted viewpoints of the social media establishment. Once you see the evidence, it starts looking like common sense – but you’re going to have to read the book to get the answers.

This approach to marketing could turn out to be a game-changer. Once companies see that they can roll out a tight, targeted content strategy and measure the results, marketing will never be the same again. And, as Dan Zarrella points out, any “gurus” out there with nothing but warm and fuzzy advice had better rethink their game plan.

By Jomar Reyes

We’re not robots. When receiving a service, or using a product or a system, we don’t just interact – we can connect. The experience people have with a product or service can even become more important than the product and service itself. It’s all about the emotions.

Moments of truth

When tied to a brand, a positive user experience can build a strong relationship. The user experience often consists of a sequence or combination of brand interactions. In a book by former SAS CEO and President Jan Carlzon, these experiences were coined “Moments of Truth.”

First published in 1985, Carlzon’s book was later heralded by the American Management Association as “one of the most important developments in management of the twentieth century.” Every little engagement point between the airline and the customer, he wrote, was a moment of truth for the brand. It takes many positive “moments” to build a strong overall experience, but it will take only one to destroy the entire relationship. User experience, he argued, must be engineered and nurtured from all angles – from booking and check in, to in-flight and arrival.

Carlzon’s ideologies have been credited for SAS being awarded Airline of the Year by industry magazine Air Transport World. But, they don’t just apply to the airline industry.

The coup felt ’round the world

In a more recent example of the power of the user experience, we can look at Steve Jobs’ engineering of the iPad. Based on its specifications alone, many thought that it was destined to fail. The iPad was missing many of the technological features that were standard to computers – like a filing system and USB port – and it was nowhere near the most powerful mobile computing device on the market.

But here was an opportunity that no other company had successfully tapped into: the experience of computing in the human environment. The iPad is a small device, with no moving parts; the fact that it cradles nicely in your arms, or can be effectively used while standing and moving, has opened up new opportunities for the user, developers and Apple itself. For the domestic user, the iPad blends well into the home environment – even better than the traditional computer – while performing many of the same popular functions. For users, the device has nearly become an extension of the self.

Steve Jobs understood something that we did not: the beauty of the iPad is almost entirely in the user experience – one that is elegant, subtle and at the same time, practical and adaptable.

Personal validation

Another brand that has brilliantly redefined user experience is Nespresso. The capsule-based espresso coffee system has practically automated the home “café.” It has managed to take the mess out of it without compromising a whit of style and sophistication.

The experience goes well beyond the coffee making process, however. Ordering capsules online or walking into one of their sleek and well-staffed “boutiques” is an informative, efficient and effective process – customers are virtually pampered. Even the company’s website is elegant yet knowledgeable. Users don’t just “log in,” they are “validated.”

Like Apple, Nespresso creates an entire culture around its products, helping (often very average) customers feel like “artists” and connoisseurs. In this case, the product is basically something you can get on any street corner; it’s the experience that has added to the exponential success of the Nespresso brand.

They’re going to talk about you

Essentially, no matter what your product or service – whether B2C or B2B – it’s clearly worthwhile to celebrate the user experience. It can be done online through a corporate website or blog, or in the traditional mediums such as brochures, custom magazines or even video. Businesses don’t need a store to create an experience that will make customers come back.

Whether good or bad, however, customer experiences – these “moments of truth” –  are worth sharing. And, in today’s socially connected age, both will be – with fellow customers, suppliers, stakeholders… and the world beyond.

Jomar Reyes is the community manager for the Think International Forum. You can follow him on twitter @jomarreyes

By Alina Ovanesso

The word service is not the same in all the languages and neither is its implication. Depending on the country we are from, our expectations of service – and what that concept even means – can differ quite a lot.

However, even though the cultural aspect of service is hard to overlook, I am going to deliberately dismiss it. I’m going to tell you, instead, about my thoughts on the notion of universal service. It’s what I think is important in a customer experience and let’s see if it isn’t the same for you…

Whether you are the most outgoing personality or socially challenged, service pushes you to socialize. Like any other socialization, this affects me personally and this is why I pay attention to good service. Good service can cheer me up and put me in a great mood for a few hours or sometimes it can even make my day!

Recently, I bought a bicycle, and the good service I received affected the whole purchase experience. The shop assistant helping me was very competent and well trained. He immediately adjusted some of the parts to fit me and informed me about some crucial things to remember. I found it surprising because, during my previous bike purchases – I have owned four others in the last few years – I never experienced anything like this. Besides being competent, the shop assistant also showed empathy, sharing his own experiences. There was a very important human factor attached to his service that made me feel he could relate to me. That connection, perhaps, makes all the difference. Who wants to be served by a robot or machine?

I have, however, also experienced quite the opposite. There are numerous cases where service seems to not only lack that human connection, but also any flexibility with regard to the “rules.” Once, after choosing a bunch of roses at a flower shop, I asked the shopkeeper if I could also buy a little bit of colorful ribbon and I’d wrap them myself. Can you imagine my surprise when she said “no”? Apparently, the policy was to only decorate flowers bought inside the store, not the ones exhibited outside. But I had already selected the flowers; there was no other way to get that ribbon. And the shopkeeper could not see beyond this silly rule, which was clearly more important than a customer’s happiness.

To me service should be much more than an efficient transaction. And these examples illustrate what the ingredients of the good service are to me: humanity and flexibility. Humanity is indispensable. The ability to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What kind of service would you want? What kind of service would make you come back? And I think flexibility is something that should be built in to policies so that service providers have a chance to exercise that humanity. After all, isn’t customer satisfaction the goal of every transaction?

Sometimes I wonder: is my interpretation of good service so much different from others? I am inclined to think that it is not – that everyone, regardless of his or her cultural background, welcomes some element of humanity. After all, a smile is the same in every language. Isn’t it?

Today, standardized writing styles, spelling and word choice are as vital to successful companies as having the exact same tone of red in every logo. But whereas the process of standardizing written English has gradually become more and more developed throughout time, attempts to standardize spoken English have had a much more turbulent history.

United by the written word

By the latter part of the eighteenth century, written English had been tamed. Thanks to Caxton and his printing press (and those who followed him), written English was now more or less one standardized language. But the people who wrote and read this one language still spoke with a huge variety of dialects and accents. English-speaking society was unified only by the written word.

Seen and then heard

It was around this same time that the course of the language took an unusual u-turn. Written English, (the product of a spoken tongue) actually started to dictate and influence how English was spoken. It was supposed that the best spoken English should sound like the best written English – but who decided what that was? Scholars, linguists and not least snobs and socialites all had a hand in trying to define the answer to this question – and the discussion continues today.

The “proper” way

Called Received Pronunciation (RP) (not, as many believe, “Queen’s English”), it means the “assumed” most correct way to speak English. Thanks to the powerful social influence of correct pronunciation ideals of eighteenth-century social climbers, RP has been dominant in the upper classes and public institutions ever since. Even in other English-speaking nations, such as the United States and Australia, RP is still the pronunciation closest to “educated” British English. Thankfully, the less-oppressive class systems of these countries mean that dialects and accents were less restricted here.

New tones

In the 21^st century, regional, national and even foreign accents, once shunned by the predominant RP consensus, are no longer discouraged or “corrected” with elocution lessons. The My Fair Lady days of being rapped over the knuckles for a flat vowel or a dropped ”h” are long over. After several hundred years, the diversity of the English language is again being embraced. Accents and dialects once seen as low-status, today stand on an equal footing with “the correct way to speak.”

Untamable?

This brief look at the history of the spoken language teaches us that English is too smart to be artificially molded and constrained. Perhaps the lesson we can learn is that English is a living, growing thing. And like all living things, it has an instinct to resist being tamed.