Customer experience - Rhythm

I don't know about you, but I love to dance. I love rhythm like a horse loves sugar cubes. If rhythm came in the form of sugar cubes I'd be popping rhythm-cubes like a horse if it had opposable thumbs (and a few fingers). 

It's no secret that humans are big into rhythm - not just musical rhythm, but the rhythm of life. The sun rises and falls - we wake and sleep. The seasons come and go. In London you'll often hear people say "Summer's finally here!" as if they've been waiting for it. They've been waiting because summer is amazing. It's the natural rhythm of the world.

So why have a business with no rhythm? 

Why go against nature - against what humans know?

In the UK people look to the future in summer knowing that winter is coming. They enjoy what time they have of summer, taking in as much sun as possible. Then when autumn comes, their resolve is even stronger to take in as much of the suns rays as possible, to get the most use out of their t-shirts and shorts. Then winter hits and people are dreaming of the summer again.

Ned Stark from
A Game of Thrones*

This is the mentality I'd want my customers to have when thinking about my business - although leaving winter out probably! To be thinking, "Wow! This is great! When can I have more?!"

You can see examples of seasonal marketing in lots of places, but once you've noticed, you see it lacking almost everywhere. The greatest example of this seasonal marketing is the pub quiz.

Every week on one day a pub has a quiz. People come for so many different reasons - some for the prize, others for an excuse to have a night out, to socialise, to meet people, to do something together. People think less of the price of the drinks because their perceived value is in the night itself, the great time they'll have. People are also feeling good so they'll think less of spending money too.

On a normal night in a pub, what is there except the drinks at the bar? Maybe a pool table? The point is that the reason to go to the pub on a night where there is no event boils down to need, not want. "I need a drink."  But on the night of the event, "I want to have fun!" People are far more willing to weigh up their needs compared to their wants. Someone might need a drink but not want to spend a lot of money, resulting in a drink bought from the cheapest retailer. 

Let's look at another example but still in catering. Ed's Diner, my favourite milk shake place in London, also has seasonal marketing. Monday night is cheap shake night. I know I can go whenever I want and get a milk shake, but if I'm near an Ed's on a Monday I'll definitely head down for one. Of course, there is an incentive in the pricing too - there's a little bit off the top - but I now know that Mondays = Ed's Diner shakes. If I'm out in London on Monday's, I will always recommend heading to Ed's for one of their milkshakes to my friends. 

They could have just sent me an e-voucher but I wouldn't wake up once every week and think "Shall I have an Ed's milkshake?" In actuality I'd be more aware of the finite nature of the voucher and maybe be afraid to even use it! Whilst vouchers are good for generating business and attracting new customers, they do nothing for repeat business, unless they're tailored to do that of course.

Using seasonal marketing in this way taps into the natural rhythm that all of your customers will have built into them. Tapping into that rhythm is a great way to keep a really good service offering seated in your customers minds.

So what could a shop offer? What could a taxi company offer? What extra value can you give to a customer one night a week, or often enough for them to remember it - so much so that they drop other plans to use your service?

A cleaning company - reduced cleaning rates 1 week a month or 1 day a week? A restaurant - open tables / network corner? There are so many possibilities available to you which could see the creation of a small club of valuable customers forming or see your companies name ploughing through the social media networks as being a great place to go if you find yourself in Croydon on a Thursday night, for example.

Harnessing that will furnish your business with so much value and customers will see it.

Now, please excuse me, I'm off to have a
milkshake now (literally).

* Ned Stark from A Game of Thrones' family moto is "Winter is coming." Well worth a read of the books if you have the time!

Croydon Dinner Club a mouth-watering success

It's been a long time since my last post, which is not through a lack of trying or will, I assure you. My last post was effectively on a sky pie - this crazy idea that people will just leave their houses and give up their evenings to come and eat somewhere with a load of people they don't know..

Yes, that's the glass half full version I realise and what better way to fill up that glass than by reporting what's going on?! It's really very exciting.


The first thing I had to do was take all that I'd learned from my previous networking events, take the best of those and leave the worst - so I had to create a twitter account. Knowing the guy who organises events is great if you get stuck or lost because you can just tweet or text them. But if you don't know them; maybe don't even know who they are if you've heard about the event through a 3rd party, it can be very difficult to find the information you need about the networking event. 


So to Twitter - providing a central point for news and updates which people can follow and interact with.

Croydon Dinner Club's first tweet

After my blog post it all got very busy. Lots of hits and a ground swelling of interest from some of my closer twitter friends (people I'd met through twitter at various times). The reaction was positive and exciting to say the least. 

Profiteroles made by the Gods - sampled at
Croydon Dinner Club.

A few re-tweets later and a follow count in the 20's and we had a very healthy total of 13 people turn up to the first night at an Indian restaurant. 


The month trickled on and I started seeking out people mentioning Croydon in their tweets and adding them or just chatting to them. The follow count gradually grew.

We then had the 2nd club which attracted 18 people and the 3rd which attracted the same number. People who'd only joined in the 2nd stayed on and came back to the 3rd.

Next week sees the 4th Croydon Dinner Club. Now with 170 followers and counting, made up of real Croydon local's and a few food based local businesses, the "club" is really heading somewhere. We will be heading to Galicia's Tapas bar in South Croydon. The gradual increase in interest is really great and a very encouraging sign for Croydon. People see others talking about Croydon Dinner Club, click on the profile and join up. The more people love it, the more people talk about it, the more people hear about it.

I'm looking forward to talking to the local press about the club in the next week so hopefully that will double the number of Croydon people aware of the dinners. With the introduction of the new Croydon Radio I'll be looking to get on there as well to speak about Croydons restaurants and the fabulous range of food we have on offer in Croydon.

Here's to the future!

Croydon Dinner Club blog
Croydon Dinner Club twitter

Croydon Dinner Club experiment

The result of typing "dip hand
experiment" into Google image search.

As some of you who follow my personal account on Twitter may know, I have recently decided to dip my hand and try out a little social experiment.

For the past few months I've been to a few social gatherings and networking organised through Twitter. The idea being that people of a similar interest meet other people of a similar interest over a breakfast, dinner, lunch, that sort of thing. The whole thing sounds frightfully "blind-date-ish" but actually it's pretty good!

We've reached a point in society which has been ever growing, where everyone is afraid of their neighbours, where the news has convinced us that everyone will eat our unborn children and/or put a bomb under our bed. Meeting people in a new environment with a very loose connection was surprisingly good!

Now, I've been to business networking events before and I'm very happy in them, coming away often with a buzz of "anything is possible!!" But when that safety net of "we are here for business" is taken away and it's just getting to meet people, that's where it gets interesting.

Inspired by the good work of Jonny Rose in his mission to make neighbouring Purley a more socially engaged town, I have taken part of the mantel up for Croydon by introducing the Croydon Dinner Club.

The idea of this and from what was done in Purley, is to get people engaged with social media and in Croydon to come out and meet others face to face over a plate of good food. With Croydon being all over the news recently, but still with seemingly large divides in many social areas, it seemed like this needed to happen.

So the first one is planned for the 27th March. If you're interested to see how this develops, you can check out the twitter feed for the event: @CroydonDC and follow how it progresses through that.

If you're thinking about setting up a dinner club in your town or City, feel free to get in contact - I will gladly help out!

Customer Experience: Connected

You know, the problem with not being a professional blogger is that, when business comes your way, you kind of follow it in a mesmerized, moth to a flame sort of way... except that usually you end up better than the moth in that analogy.

In my last post I briefly spoke about the outcome of a lucky tweet, or at least, what seemed to be a lucky tweet. In fact, it wasn't luck, it was an honest response to an interesting challenge. It was also a brilliantly informed move.

Peter Shankman is a very well known guy at the moment. Here's a short bio about him, taken from Business Insider:

Peter Shankman is the founder of HARO and is generally regarded as one of the top marketing consultants and speakers working today. His clients include Saudi Aramco, NASA, The U.S. Government, Haworth, Disney, Foley-Hoag LLP, American Express and countless others.

By responding to Mr Shankman's tweet in the way Morton's Steakhouse did, they gave great customer service to a well followed, high profile guy. Now, I'm not about giving celebrities or famous people extra stuff, but what is partly key to this is that he is high profile for the right reasons.

He's not high profile because he kicks a ball in a goal or can string some notes together. He's not famous because he owned some tech company in the 90's which went big. How he's earnt his "fame" (of course I'm using fame loosely here) is unimportant but what he is famous for is. What's he famous for? Marketing. Under marketing comes customer service. Shankman knows the value of marketing and knows the value of good customer service, so in repayment for the quality customer service he received he repaid them in value with a little blog post.

But, let's step back a bit further here. This isn't a post about Shankman, this is about remaining connected. Morton's Steakhouse exemplify this. Having an open channel for customers to connect to the business in a quick, almost throw away way is what has made the difference here. Without Twitter, this never would have happened - it was a total throw away comment. But also, without the business taking Twitter and engagement seriously, it may have never happened either.

What makes Twitter a beautiful resource for a business is the ease of connectivity. Whereas before you'd have to find the website of the business, locate the contact page, find an e-mail or a number, decide which is more appropriate, spend more time deciding what you're going to say... now a customer just has to take out their phone and, in what feels like a throw away few words, tweet the company. (Forgive me for saying this, but...) BAM, that company instantly has feedback from a customer. Honest, without much thought feedback. You're getting that customers thought then and there. Whether it's good or bad it's feedback, which is vitally important.

The happiest winking Twitter bird
I could find, especially for you, Reader

So, the customer loves it, but it requires a lot from the business. It requires you to be plugged in 24/7 to be able to respond to the requests, questions, feedback.

Social Media does not sleep. People are social all the time. If you're a 8.30-6 weekday business and suddenly an article appears about your business on a news website at the weekend and you're not online to capitalise from it, you've missed out. Likewise if a customer wants an answer to a question which is time dependent, you've also missed out. This is why many businesses outsource their Social Media, as it's cheaper than paying a member of staff around the clock, 7 days a week. Of course, having in-house Social Media Marketing is great, something outsourcing can't ever fully reach, but not all businesses are in that luxurious position.

Remaining connected to your clients through Social Media is so vital but is still so undervalued because people still just don't understand it. This is a smaller dot-com all over again. The businesses which have got a large and growing online following will certainly be doing far better than those who don't. Why? Because people care about that business with the quirky or informative twitter feed, who engages with them every now and then...

It's the equivalent of the local shop keeper who knows your name. Sure there may be shops closer, but because of that relationship you've built up, no matter how shallow, you'll go that little bit further. Twitter is doing exactly the same for businesses.

Stay connected.

Customer Experience - A joke tweet, turned awesome.

It's been a while since my last post. The reasons for which are numerous and positive, but I do apologise to my regular readers. One particularly exciting reason is because of a sudden rush of interest in a business I co-Direct with my dear friend Charlotte Henry, called Social Form - a social media marketing company for SMB's (small to medium sized businesses).

I thought a post about a twitter-meets-business story would be incredibly fitting as social media is such a great convergence point between customer experience and engagement - and it ties in nicely with what I'm busying my evenings and weekends with.

Mr Shankman with Alex
of Mortons Steak House

So whilst I prepare for the next post, I thought I'd whet your appetite with an inspirational story about steak. But not just about steak... "Colossal Shrimp, a side of potatoes, one of Morton’s famous round things of bread, two napkins, and silverware."

I am now hungry. So I'm going to go off and have something to eat, which may not be quite as nice as steak, but still nice, as you would expect.

Whilst I'm preparing my food and writing my next post, entitled Connected, check out this post by Peter Shankman and his story of a joke tweet turned awesome.

Customer experience - Through the screen | Video

Double Fine Adventure is the new pin-up for all aspiring game developers.

If you've not heard, the story goes that Double Fine studios posted a video pitch on KickStarter.com - "A new way to fund & follow Creativity". In practise, a crowd sourcing website, where you pitch an idea and request that "the crowd" fund the project.

They pitched for $400k and reached that figure in just under 8 hours of posting the pitch. At the time of posting this article, just a day and a half of the pitch being online, they've now raised $1,247,221. Sure, the guy who's doing the pitch has a huge following, as does another member of staff at the company - but still, it's pretty impressive!

Since I started this post 10 minutes ago they've received another $7k... Another $2k in 5 minutes... "How?" you ask: by performing to the customer.

Click here to take a look at their pitch 

The beautiful thing about this pitch is the video. In fact, it's the main element to this pitch as it's the first thing you see. It's funny, it's personable, it's self aware - as in, they know they're making a video, they're not pretending that they've rocked up in your living room and are striking up a conversation on your couch. It's great to watch. I've shared it with my friends and now I want to give my money. The goal of the video is surpassed by quite some way!

So let's look into why this method has been successful, as ever, from the customer's experience.

First of all, it's well edited and shot. The sound quality is great (where a majority of self-made ad's fall down). This adds to the trust-factor of the pitch and the perceived legitimacy of their company. These guys have clearly put money into this production so it looks like something you might see on TV, a medium which people trust. If this was filmed on a camcorder, shakey with terrible sound then the professional and trusted veneer would not exist. Not all businesses will have the funding to be able to make something like this - they might think - but put out some feelers and you could easily string together a film student, sound recordist, a semi-pro photographer who'd relish the opportunity to get some credited work out there. If you can, they should be compensated - you'll get custom from this video, fair is fair.

Video is a disastrously underused method of getting a pitch across. It's also used quite disastrously some times. I'm talking here about the struggling entrepreneurs, the small shops, the sole traders. There are some very lucky examples of small companies and individuals making terrible adverts and them going viral (see Flee Market - Montgomery, Chuck Testa).

True

Unfortunately, not every terrible video goes viral and it can serve to discredit and over-shadow your business. That's why it's important to think, get a creative person or people on board and spend as much time as is needed to get that video polished - that is critical. Do not rush it out because you've got a deadline in mind, or for any reason. Once it's on the internet, it's there forever, as this internet meme attests to (above left).

Recording a video and posting it on-line gets your business into the comfort zone of the audience, too. Be careful not to abuse it. You should consider your video being watched as the equivolent of the customer inviting you into their home. You wouldn't walk into their home and start rambling on about your deals and offers, trying to get their money... I hope.. It will also be there forever, so steer clear of anything which may date the video - "This January we've got a mega sale on..." You can plan to make more videos to supplant that one and that gets around that problem, but ideally, they should be timeless.

So, what to do? That depends on your customer reach strategy and your business type. A law firm may not need their customers to relate to them on a lifestyle level, but a Cafe might. A gym may want to tap into the energy and aspiration of their potential and current customers, whereas a car-cleaning firm may not as much.

A video gives your customers an insight into the way your brands mind works. If your video is poorly edited, clearly shot "on the cheap" sounding like voice in a tin can, then you'll need to revisit it and certainly don't post it! If your video is the visual and audible representation of your brand to the dot, professional, well made, then congratulations, you've done it!

Customer Experience - Performing for your customers

The customer story is a tool I use more frequently these days when trying to analyse how a business performs. This is a method of my own devising which provides business owners with a clear guide in how to look at the intricacies of their business + customer relationships. This post looks at one aspect of the story - 2. The Middle.

I said "how a business performs" and it should be seen as just that. Every time a customer comes in to the business premises, sees the business from a far, or every time the business comes to them, it should be seen as a performance. Why? Because, for whatever reason and whatever way, your business has to stand out. Plain, ordinary, kicking it's heels in the corner doesn't stand out, but extraordinary, thought provoking, exciting and different does.

If you ever get a chance to visit Amsterdam, I would thoroughly recommend it, as there are shops there which exemplify my point so well. Let me give you one example...

One particular night we walked the strip of town and spotted in the distance a distinctly "chain" looking restaurant, called "Burger Bar". Burger restaurants still being poisoned in my mind by McDonalds and other fast-food "restaurants", we weren't going to even consider eating there. But as we walked past, looking inside we were totally taken in.

"Burger Bar" Amsterdam, 2011

The most striking feature of this place was the up lit wall lined with cuts of wood at different lengths. It was a wall of art! There were large hard-wood tables with benches to match which looked like they had a history of their own. Small metal chairs for the smaller tables. Huge blackboards over the kitchen area displayed hand-drawn wording and pictures, with stories about where the beef had come from and fun facts - no prices. There was a giant blackboard (out of shot on the left of the picture) where customers had written little messages about Burger Bar or just anything they wanted. One message I remember distinctly was a UK mobile number with a message "Call me if you ever get to London."

The staff were lively, literally jumping around sometimes, whistling and singing along to songs played in the shop. They laughed a lot too!

With a little creativity and a low cost, this small franchise business made my night on holiday and I honestly can't wait to go back there again. The food was delicious as well and service was with a smile always. If I'm honest, of all the places we ate, this burger bar gave us the richest experience which is on par with and better than some gigs I've been to. Just sitting in the place soaking up the atmosphere was a pleasure. We bought some more snacks after the meal too because it was just so nice.

What a performance!

The great thing about this place was that, for very little cash, they made the place look extraordinary. No expensive lighting, no expensive furniture, in fact nothing fancy at all. Everything is simple but used to great effect to enrich the experience.

When a customer walks into an establishment, they should be thinking "This place has got something. I want to be here." If you give people a reason to like an element of your shop or business, a physical one, a tangible one, they are far more likely feel a shared sense of identity and will not hesitate to contribute, financially and through publicity, to your business. Encourage a sense of community too like "Burger Bar" did with a blackboard. Psychologically the blackboard is great too. It's like leaving out Lego or Play-Doh. People want to have a go. People want to interact with your business.

So how does your business perform for your customers?