Lessons in Customer Service From a Taco Truck

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

So there I am, in my usual lunchtime quandary—do I go for Pho? Thai? Sushi? You get the drift. My hunger is in full-blown ready-to-punch-me-in-the-gut mode and I’m at a loss for what to have (because if you’ve ever waited too long to eat, you know your rational thought process goes out the window!). As I’m stating how hungry I am for all my fellow Projectliners to hear, I spy a little red menu for a nearby taco truck. Yes! I’m saved… Or so I think.

A few of my friends at Projectline decide to join me in getting their lunch fix. Then, I discover that we can call in our order and have it ready for pickup. Wow! Who knew taco trucks took orders by phone? Is this a new era of customer service? Or is it what Tony Hsieh refers to as Delivering Happiness? If you aren’t very familiar with taco trucks or other fast-food trucks, Seattle has them everywhere—from cream cheese spicy dog vendors to trucks serving vegan dishes or very specific Korean dishes like Kalbi bowls. Many of these trucks are mobile and travel to different locations, like a mini-restaurant on wheels. You can even follow them on Twitter to see where they will be next! Some have become so popular, that they stay in one area.

Being in a rush to get to the next meeting, we decide to call in our order for a quick pickup. Voila! Our hunger and time issues are solved. So I make the call, someone answers (“Yes!”) and asks me if they can put me on hold (bummer…), but I say OK. We then decide to start walking toward the truck to save even more time. Fifteen minutes later, and actually standing in line at the taco bus, I get frustrated and hang up. What do I see next: the person in the truck picking up the phone and saying “hello?” When they realize no one is on the line, they hang up. What? Infuriated but hungry, we wait another five minutes to order and another 15 minutes to get our food. We get back to the office 35 minutes after I made the initial call.

So my question is: Do you consider this to be bad customer service? Or, do you chalk it up to something like: “you can’t expect to be overwhelmed by great customer service from a taco truck?”

My colleagues and I had a fiery discussion on this topic. My stance is that if you create the expectation of fast service, you need to deliver on that promise. So what if it’s not a Fortune 500 company. Shouldn’t every company strive to deliver great customer service? Customers might forgive your inattention to their needs once—or twice if they’re especially patient—but pretty soon, if you don’t deliver happiness, their calls will stop, and you won’t see them standing in your line anymore.

Have you had either a really good or really discouraging customer service experience lately? Do you adjust your expectations based on the kind of company you’re dealing with, or do you believe that every business should strive to deliver outstanding service every time? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Picture of the Week: Mo-Tastic!

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Company, Marketing Musings

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Monday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the previous week and share its story here.

10:42 Nov 24, 2011 - Mo-tastic

Here at Projectline, we take our causes seriously. So why is Michael Thibodeau of Projectline’s Toronto, Canada office showing off his manicured mustache? It’s Movember of course! No mere fashion statement, moustaches like Michael’s have been sprouting up throughout the month of November in support of a worthy goal: raising awareness (and funds) to combat health issues that affect men, particularly prostate cancer. We wish Michael all the best, as he closes out the month in style. Want to show your support? There are still a few days left!

Picture of the Week: Inspiration at Work

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Company, Marketing Musings

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Monday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the previous week and share its story here.

10:42 Nov 17, 2011 - View from Client Site in Philly

This photo is taken from one of our client’s locations on the East Coast where Eric Larson, Rachel Taylor, Allison Creeden, and Greg Angelo were visiting. We love the curve of the architecture of the building and the familiar fall scene outside. How do your surroundings influence your work?

Eating Healthy at Work?

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Community, Company, Marketing Musings

About six months ago, Projectline re-launched its Green Team, an internal group of employees committed to measuring, planning, and improving Projectline’s impact on the environment from a corporate perspective. As the leader of the Projectline Green Team, I felt like I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t start practicing what I preached, so I began to live more sustainably: taking the bus when possible, walking more, conserving energy, buying local. I found out how interrelated my sustainable lifestyle was with my health, especially EATING! I just felt better when I wasn’t putting a lot of chemicals or processed food in my body (though I still have a huge weakness for lime chips).

“Eating right” is something we hear a lot, but it’s not something that is usually part of a company’s core values. Projectline prides itself on being people-focused and really caring about its employees, and in early summer, the company informed me and my coworkers that it would be updating its FREE snack service for employees to include ORGANIC, FRESH, RAW produce in the office, chosen and prepared just for Projectline. The leadership had come to the conclusion, after a recent internal Projectline health fair, that the company should redesign its food purchasing to be more in line with its philosophy: Less sugar, salt, corn syrup, and processed food, and more raw, local, organic, whole foods. As someone who has recently embraced the healthy-eating lifestyle, this was great news!

According to sustainabletable.org, we spend about 90 percent of our food budget on foods that have been treated in some way after being harvested or butchered. To be more proactive with our working habits, Holly Noll from VeganShortcake.com has been at both our Bellevue and Seattle offices every Monday to prep the week’s fresh fruit and vegetable offerings. The new snack regimen supports less packaging, more local food, fair trade, and our health(!) with organic and non-processed foods.

Projectline’s new offering has already inspired a healthier lifestyle both at work and in the personal lives of Projectliners. Since the service launched three months ago we’ve already seen increased education and awareness; there has been a brown bag on healthy eating, plans among a few employees to join a CSA (community-supported agriculture) service, and healthier eating both inside and outside of the office. Personally, I’ve evolved a bit—I’m nearing the end of my 30 days of veganism! Me, vegan?! It’s actually been really fun and fairly easy, now that it’s a habit. Have you ever thought of trying to take caffeine (I know, that’s blasphemy!) or dairy out of your diet for a month?

Holly_PL_Kitchen

Anika Lehde, Vice President at Projectline, said, “Like other areas of our company, my hope is that wherever we put money, even snacks, can be a reflection of our work to be the best company possible.” The company continues to reflect and evolve in its focus and support of its employees. This truly is a special company to work for.

What types of snacks do you have in your office? Ever stepped back to see what you are eating a lot of and how much it’s processed? Food for thought.

Our Favorite Quotes From TEDxRainier 2011

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Community, Company, Marketing Musings

This weekend, a handful of Projectline employees attended TEDxRainier. We donated to this event in our clients’ names because we know that they are interested in “ideas worth sharing” as much as we are. If you’re familiar with TED Talks, then you know the caliber of progressive minds we were exposed to from 10 am until 7 pm. We were motivated and inspired and wanted to share a few of our favorite quotes with you:

“Every act of communication is a translation.”— Chris Bliss (favorite of Ann Naumann, Sr. Manager, Content Strategy, @naumannclature)

“Is your perspective giving you the quality of life that you want?”— Jim Sorensen (favorite of Jeremy Russell, Seattle Office Manager, @JeremyJRussell and many other Projectline folks)

“Life’s biggest gift is our ability to better the lives of those less fortunate than us.” — Adnan Mahmud (favorite of Erica Hansen, Director, Customer Engagement Group)

“Morale is a multiplier of velocity across a team.” — Joe Justice (favorite of John Bush, Campaign Desk Coordinator, @JBushSeattle)

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Jenn Lim (favorite of D’Laina Boynton, Marketing Consultant, @dlaina and many others)

“Pick a dream that’s longer than a lifetime.” — Daria Musk (favorite of Karin Zabel, Sr. Manger, Social Media, @kazab)

“Time bows to authentic commitment and stretches to accommodate it.” — Will Hewett (favorite of Anika Lehde, Co-Owner, @AnikaMarketer—actually everyone liked this one a lot!)

“Words are flimsy messengers for the fullness of our experience.” — Will Hewett (favorite of Damian Hoffman, Director, Marketing Operations Group)

Want to talk with us about the world, communications, business, marketing, content and meaning? Follow us on Twitter and tell us your favorite quote.

Picture of the Week: 11/11/11 At 11:11

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Careers, Company, Job Openings, Marketing Musings, Pic of the Week

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Monday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the previous week and share its story here.

10:42 Nov 11, 2011 - Zach Waud, PL Bellevue (11:11 11/11/11)

OK, so it isn’t 10:42, but some folks in our Bellevue office might have seen the 11:11 11/11/11 ghost. They all look a little freaked out. Maybe they noticed that we need to hire 15 people in the next week. If you know anyone really smart and funny, please tell them to apply here.

Taming Social Media Data

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Business Analytics, Marketing Musings, Social Media

I’m a Business Intelligence Analyst. I’m also a data geek. So when a client recently asked me to oversee the development of a comprehensive Social Media report, for monthly presentation to their upper management, I was both excited and wary.

Excited Me: Cool! The latest thing! A vast untapped resource of dialog and opinion straight from customers!

Wary Me: This stuff is mostly free-form! How are we ever going to glean relevant, actionable data from these sources? It’s like the Wild West out there…

Some basic social metrics are easy to gather and interpret. How many Facebook likes did we add this month? How many unlikes? How many Tweets were made with a hashtag we might expect, like #ProductName? How many people liked our client’s latest Facebook post? It’s a good start, but our client’s management wanted more in-depth insight.

There are several tools available for social media analytics. Visible Intelligence, Radian6, Sysomos (MAP and Heartbeat), Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, Crimson Hexagon, etc. They all offer valuable insight but go about it in very different ways. Instead of picking a tool and prying out what we could, we worked backward from our client’s requirements. We tried various tools, analyzed the results, and chose the solutions that provided the most relevant analyses for their needs. Here’s a partial list of some of the in-depth analyses we were able to generate:

Buzz Volume: Using keyword searches across Facebook, Twitter, and select blog, video, and photo sites, we came up with a “buzz” volume that we could track over time. This is good to watch for overall social interest—for example, to see the buzz from rolling out a redesigned website or a new product version.

Sentiment: Some tools are quite good at classifying posts by sentiment: positive, negative, or neutral. Tracking counts of posts by sentiment month-to-month proved to be very useful, particularly around new product version releases and press releases. For further insight we picked out specific sample posts, positive and negative, and provided links to the actual posts.

Topics by Media Type: This breaks out a percent of posts by where they occurred: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. Watching shifts in these volumes proved valuable. For example, we knew that discussions in this client’s forums tended to be mostly about troubleshooting technical issues, so an increase in forum buzz proportionally to other sources could indicate an emerging technical issue.

Top Contributors: We identified the URLs of forums, URLs of blogs, and handles of Twitter accounts providing the highest number of posts in the month. This provides a nice short list for further investigation of who is “buzzing” about our client’s product the most and might be worth approaching for a more formal relationship. For example, a person who frequently blogs about usability of the product might be an excellent person to have as a beta tester.

Competitive Analysis: Why just track buzz volume for the client’s product? We track buzz volume for competitors’ products as well, then combine and track over time to see how our client stacks up. The percentage that our client’s buzz contributes to the overall buzz in their category could be termed “Share of Voice” and is a good metric to track. When our client releases a new version, does their Share of Voice go up? If not, do they need to retool their launch marketing efforts?

Website Visits by Referring Domain: Most common web traffic tracking tools can report the domain from which a visitor came. Because many of our client’s social media posts include a call-to-action to click on a link to our website, we can track referrals from twitter.com, linkedin.com, etc. to determine how much web traffic is being driven by their social campaigns.

Success Events by Referring Domain: Going one layer further with web analytics, we worked with our client to define specific “success events” we wanted to track. These were desirable actions taken once the visitor landed on the client’s website, such as watching a video, reading a whitepaper, or downloading a software trial. Analyzing these success events by referring domain allowed us to see the level of engagement of visitors from social sites. Combining Visits and Success Events, both by Referring Domain, we calculated a “Success per 100 Visits” metric-another good way to see how effective our client’s social media posts are at engaging customers.

Blog Traffic Analysis: We used standard web analysis tools to track interaction on our client’s blog. Initially, their blog showed entire articles on the main page. To enable more detailed analysis, we drove changes to their site structure so that the home page shows only the first several lines of each article with a “Read more” link. This way, each full article receives a unique URL, and we’re able to track how many in-depth reads each article is receiving.

Blog Traffic by Referring Domain: Again, it’s interesting to see how people are getting to our client’s blog. This analysis reveals some noteworthy sources of links to their blog articles, and it can also identify sites that could be approached for a more formal relationship.

In its infancy, the process of analyzing social media data can yield some very helpful insights for marketers and managers. It’ll be exciting to see how the tools evolve—no doubt providing richer and more accurate data in the future—and to discover how we can further leverage this rich source of customer feedback data to benefit our clients.