Guest Post: Managing Your Customer Reference Program with a Specialized Application or a Spreadsheet

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Customer Reference, Marketing Musings

This week, we’re honored to share a guest post from Joshua Horwitz of Boulder Logic:

With tightened budgets all around, this is the most common question we hear: do I need a customer reference application, or will a spreadsheet for my reference program be enough? To help our clients make the decision, we advise them to consider the specifics of their situation and the pros and cons of each approach. Let’s take a look.

We advise starting by jotting down answers to some basic questions. What is the size of your customer base and how many referenceable customers do you realistically foresee? If you really won’t be expanding beyond a couple dozen or so reference customers, the challenge of keeping track of everyone’s activities is more limited. What is the size of your sales force? Organizations with more than a handful of team members, particularly if they are geographically distributed, tend to struggle more when tools and processes are informal. What is your vision for your customer reference program? The complexity of everything increases as you expand the activities you support, serve more stakeholders, or attempt to provide a more consistent experience for your customers and prospects.

While your initial plans may be modest, we recommend thinking several quarters ahead. It’s much harder to build a new IT justification or reset stakeholder expectations down the road. Too often we see customer reference program managers unable to expand and evolve their program because they’ve become hostages to a process filled with manual tasks that didn’t seem overwhelming earlier.

With the points above in mind, let’s look at the pros and cons of spreadsheets compared to a formal customer reference application.

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Customer Engagement lessons from the gaming world

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

Last week, two apparently unrelated things conspired to get me thinking about community, customer feedback, and how to turn customer engagement into smarter, better-informed products.

First, Projectline’s book club gathered to chat about Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody, which does a great job of explaining the social and organizational changes we’re seeing as the internet enables rapid sharing and easy communication. In our conversation, we spent a lot of time trying to puzzle out what new ways of organizing will mean for everyone doing business online (and offline). Shirky’s examples compellingly illustrated that traditional organizations are often terrible at predicting just how users will wind up using what they make. We didn’t quite solve the question of how to balance the need to monetize (which sometimes takes the form of restricting use) with the desire to provide the flexibility to let customers determine the use of the product (which often makes it much more widely used).

Second, Ars Technica reported on the PC release of popular video game Modern Warfare 2, which has been (and continues to be) wildly successful as a console game. In what looked like an effort at customer engagement, Best Buy hosted a question-and-answer session between Infinity Ward (the game developer) representatives and PC gamers. But instead of fostering real engagement, the conversation wound up highlighting the game’s fundamental disregard for PC gamers’ myriad ways of playing.

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Vlog: While You Were Working

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Company, Marketing Musings

This week, while you were working…a few Projectliners were enjoying each others’ company away from work. When we can all get our schedules to line up, our teams at Projectline get together for events and to spend some quality time together. On her recent team event, Brooke took the video camera to capture some of the fun to show you what we were up to.

Lessons from the Summit on Customer Engagement

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

Eric and Anika at the Summit on Customer EngagementFellow Projectliner Anika and I attended the 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement in Quincy, MA on October 19-21. We’ve finally managed to recover and really process all the great presentations on using customer input to drive corporate decisions.

Tim Thorsteinson (President of the Harris Corporation) and Sean Geehan (@seangeehan and Founder of the Geehan Group) started off The Summit by talking about how Harris drives corporate strategy through their Executive Advisory Board. Great presenters from AT&T, National Instruments, Microsoft Interoperability Council, and Intel followed with stories and advice about using advisory boards comprised of influential customers to guide and inform business decisions.

What’s stuck with me longest?

It was exciting to hear from Citrix’s Chris Fleck (@chrisfleck) about how customers’ voices can directly sway new product development. In his presentation, he mentioned that Citrix had intended to build a new Blackberry application. But, suspecting they needed more info, he blogged the question, “Do you want Citrix XenApp to run Windows apps on the iPhone?” When his post got more than 500,000 views, he used the interest to get resources assigned to building an iPhone app. By tuning into customer needs, they were able to prioritize the app that customer wanted most.

So, what’s next?

There seems to be a movement to integrate broader community-based engagement plans, like Citrix’s, with more narrowly focused advisory boards. As companies engage with customer communities, they have the chance to use community input alongside feedback from advisory boards and other councils. By posing questions to both the community and to advisory boards or internal leadership, you can find out whether there’s a single clear direction. Even when there isn’t a straightforward consensus, clear, genuine communication will let your community members and advisory board know you’re listening. Open lines of communication also mean that, if you change your mind based on the reaction from an advisory board or community, you can admit you’re wrong and amend your decision.

The big takeaway:

We came back ready to start working on coordinating advisory boards, communities, and all the other ways of engaging customers. With transparency and responsiveness, they can work together to strengthen your customer relationships—which is always the top priority around here.

Why the new FTC Guides are good for you (we promise).

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Customer Communities, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings, Social Media

In about a month, the FTC’s new Guides for using endorsements and testimonials in advertising will go into effect (read the press release or the full text in PDF). It can be easy to get sidetracked by a narrow understanding of endorsements, but these guidelines have implications for all kinds of marketers.

So, what’s the big deal? How will this affect customer engagement marketers?

(Keep in mind: we’re not lawyers, and we’re not giving you legal advice.)

  • The new Guides throw out the old loophole that let advertisers get away with putting a cursory disclaimer next to an exaggerated claim (i.e. “Results not typical”). They stress that one way to avoid implying typicality is by providing the details of the situation—we think the best way to do that is a thorough, detailed case study!
  • The revisions explicitly address new and social media, stressing that “consumers’ willingness to trust social media depends on the ability of those media to retain their credibility as reliable sources of information” (see page 11). Arguing for transparency and honesty, they make clear that both advertisers and endorsers can be liable for obfuscation or dishonesty.
  • The Guides expand potential liability to the endorser, which makes sense in the context of blogs and customer communities. The key to avoiding the pitfalls of consumer-generated endorsement-confusion? Clear policies and processes.

So, are the new guidelines good or bad?

Of course, there are some tricky things about the Guides. You’ll want to make sure you have someone monitoring or managing your social media presence, blogs about your products, and customer communities. You’ll need to double-check that you have solid processes in place for reviewing and approving consumer-generated content. You’ll have to make sure that final editorial pass has legal and ethical issues in mind.

But ultimately, we think the revisions are pretty great. Social media, testimonials, and customer stories are only as powerful as the trust between companies and their clients. The FTC’s choice to weigh in (relatively) early, rather than in a few years, is only a good thing for those of us who know the real value of customers’ trust.