Here’s another one of those customer experience stories that I’ve been shaking my head about for a month or so. It’s also a story about how NOT to do customer research–two marketing stories in one!

I was at my doctor’s office for a visit recently (my third such in as many months…don’t ask) and when I checked in for my appointment I was handed a clipboard with two, one-page surveys attached. The receptionist behind the window (call her Sally for narrative sake) asked that I fill them out while waiting to be called in for my appointment. I asked what they were for. Sally answered that the first was a “phone survey”. Being asked to take a phone survey while standing there in-person naturally confused me so I asked Sally to clarify. She said it was a survey about their phone system. Albeit still confusing, I discerned (on my own) that they wanted feedback on my experience with their interactive voice response (IVR) system when making appointments, getting information, leaving messages etc. The second, I was told, was “some research” one of the doctors in the practice was conducting. She then offered that if I had already completed a “PHQ-9″ survey that I shouldn’t do it again. Having never heard of anything even remotely similar I took the clipboard and sat down.

I began to fill out the surveys. The first was straight forward and asked, from my professional perspective, meaningful questions that related directly to my actual experience. It was short and to the point and took all of a minute to fill out. There were nine quantitative and one final, qualitative question. (Note: this practice’s IVR system is simple and pretty good; as good as these things can get in my opinion…that’s what I told them on question 10.)

I flipped the page to the second survey and started reading. It had only PHQ-9 printed on the header. There was neither a description nor any directions. The first question was my name. The second was, well, very personal. So were the third, and the fourth…all the way to 20! Having a wife who used to rep Prozac for Lilly for a number of years I recognized that the survey was asking about the incidence of the symptoms of clinical depression–a worthy topic for a doctor to be researching for sure.

I paused to consider the subject matter and the fact that my name was requested. I looked at the bottom of the page for the privacy disclosure (remember HIPPA?) Surprised not to find any, I walked back to Sally’s window and asked her specifically what the survey was going to be used for and was my name required. To my first question she answered, “I don’t know, I was asked to hand these out to everyone who checked in.” I then further inquired about which doctor was commissioning it. To this Sally replied, “I don’t know,” and turned back to the work she was doing. So I asked her my second question (is name required) again. Sally turned to me, a bit annoyed, and said simply, “yes”. “What happens if I fill it out without my name?” I countered. And with all the frustration Sally could affect she said, “It won’t be counted.”

As a patient I wanted to ask more questions: won’t be counted toward what? Will my responses be posted somewhere available to the public? Is this part of a larger survey this doctor is participating in? Sally, clearly, wasn’t going to have any of the answers, and the pain I was going to feel in the process of getting them was probably more than any I might receive on the other side of the office door.

As a marketing professional I wanted to ask even more questions: is the survey testing some hypothesis? What is the target sample size? What respondent criteria was the survey designed around? What is the chi-squared? (Not really, but throwing that stat term around always seems to impress our research vendors…maybe it’s having the same effect on you??)

None of us would expect even a professional research administrator to know the answers to the hard core research questions, but certainly Sally needed to be better trained to answer, even simply more informed about, the basic FAQs. This is especially the case with a survey regarding such a private matter (we’re not talking about a post-service questionnaire from Jiffy Lube here!) In about five minutes Sally could have been educated about everything she needed to know in order to answer 95% of the questions she might be asked by patients.

In addition to being left with a very low opinion of the research acumen of my doctor’s office (not to mention my extreme doubts about the efficacy of the research itself), I was disappointed with the customer experience I just had. And yes, although not often referred to as such in a healthcare setting, I am their “customer”. Research can be a very valuable customer touchpoint on a number of levels if administered well. Done poorly, it can have the exact opposite effect. If you’ve deemed your research objectives to be important enough to take your customers’ time and effort, take some of your own time and, if necessary, money to ensure they are free to focus on the topic at hand and are not distracted by poor handling. Your findings will be more accurate and your customers will appreciate it. You will make them happier to be your customer. This is a huge return on a small investment.

-Dave Goldberg

If you’re like me and you read some of the paper, watch a little TV news and visit a couple of online news outlets every day, you’re probably thinking that we’re all doomed. Everything seems to be going to hell, and quickly. “How can it be THIS bad?” I ask myself often these days. I’m not in denial, I know it’s bad. After all, we are in a recession (and if you hadn’t already realized we were in one, maybe say, because you were in a deep-sea submersible since last winter, a bunch of economists officially told us so a couple of weeks ago. Whew…am I glad they did!) This is my third such event since I started scratching out a living on my own. Based on this vast experience I could tell, evidently before the economists could, that this was definitely one of them, and a bad one at that. But again, how can it be THIS bad? — as bad as I read, hear and see in the media everyday?

With this on my mind pretty much all the time, I was very happy to read an article by David Carr of the New York Times, Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look (December 7th). Here’s the link to the piece. The article was posted on Facebook by my friend and talented professional colleague Tim King (Tim’s own blog can be found here). Carr writes that to a much greater extent than in earlier downturns, we’re inundated with media that allow the doomsday messages to be delivered to our eyes and ears much faster and in many more places. The speed and furiousness of those messages is too much for us and it becomes hard for us to make sense of it all. So we get confused, get panicky and then fall in line and start, in fact, acting like there’s a recession. We buy less, pull our money from the markets, and hide under our desks like they taught my father to do in elementary school after Pearl Harbor (you know, in case the Japanese Navy decided that Springfield, Massachusetts should be their next target). A self-fulfilling prophecy if there has ever been one.

By the way, and not incidentally, I blogged about this very issue a few months ago and suggested that no one panic as the financial markets were collapsing around us. Clearly none of the million (or so) readers of this blog took my direction!! It seems we have all indeed panicked. Here’s the post if anyone wants another chance to comply.

So what came first, a real recession or the reporting of such? Carr, who covers the media business and certainly has an informed perspective on the issue, connects the depths of this recession to the media’s coverage of it to date. After digesting the article I sent the link (again via Facebook) to Eric Blom, a journalist and business editor of the Portland Press Herald, our daily newspaper here in Southern Maine. In my message I asked him what his thoughts were on the issue. Please note: he and I have no professional relationship and he did not respond to me in his capacity as an editor of the paper; rather, as a smart citizen who has something to say about it. I know Eric by reputation and have met him once casually. And as I mentioned we are Facebook “friends”. Eric responded with his own informed, thoughtful and well-written take on this “chicken and egg” question. His entire response is below. I know I’m asking everyone to do a lot of reading here, but reading is good for you (that’s what I tell my kids). I’m interested in your own thoughts on the matter.

-Dave Goldberg

Hi David,

Thank you for sharing that interesting article. It really did spark a lot of thoughts for me, about the changing communications landscape, the role of consumer psychology in the economy and the history of financial downturns.

My conclusion would be different, though, than the one the author arrived upon. To me, modern communications – the proliferation of media, social networking, 24-hour commentary, etc. – is doing one thing: Ripping the Band-Aid of financial recovery off faster than in the past.

Economic problems don’t start because of the public psychology. They have their roots in some real-world problem. A famine. A war. Or, more commonly, greed coming home to roost.

The Dutch tulip bulb craze kicked off an economic decline because, at bottom, tulip bulbs don’t intrinsically have the value that people put on them as an investment. (In February 1637, tulip contracts sold for more than 20 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.)

Florida real estate speculation, rampant purchasing of stocks on margin and other foolish financial practices kicked off the Great Depression.

And, more recently, the pouring of money into loans that people couldn’t possibly afford caused an explosion in real estate values that couldn’t possibly be sustained. People defaulted, prices declined and we were off to the races.

Of course, the idea that mass psychology drives markets and economies is widespread and has some truth to it. Consumer spending is two thirds of our economy. And people can act irrationally as individuals and as a mob, to the detriment of the collective population and themselves, when frightened.

My dad, for example, sold off all his stock after the Black Monday market collapse. The market recovered within the year, but he’d lost a large fraction of his nest egg.

People used to call sudden economic crises “panics,” as in the Panic of 1893 or 1907. FDR warned us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. People call me every day to say we shouldn’t run stories about how bad the economy is doing because that’s causing (or at least making worse) the situation.

I disagree.

I am aware that when I assign a story, it creates buzz about something, magnified many times: the radio reads from the paper in the morning, the television produces their own version of the story that evening, the wire picks it up, other newspapers pick up on the idea, people tweet about it with friends and share their concern with others via Facebook, IM, texting and conversation over lunch.

But if you look back at history, the thing that really fueled fear and bad decision-making was a lack of information. People didn’t know what was going on or how the system worked. So they really hunkered down.

Recessions of 5, 6 or 7 years were common. We had one in the late 1800s that lasted 23 years. The Great Depression lasted 10.

People weren’t wired back then. People weren’t being bombarded with the bad economic news. In fact, the hot media of the day – newspapers – were often boosterish, actively trying to put a good face on the news because their publishers felt that would help their local economies grow.

Think of the character Jimmy Stewart played in It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey has to try to explain the banking system to a crowd of his neighbors making a run on the savings and loan.

Now that everybody has telephones, television sets, radios, Blackberries and the Internet, recessions have been lasting a year or two.

It hurts emotionally to hear about all the problems that exist. People do hunker down, and that slows consumer spending and business investment in the short term.

But it also gives people the motivation to act to correct deficiencies in public policy, stimulate the economy and to find ways to innovate and be entrepreneurial in their own lives.

The constant hand wringing and chatter, as bad as it feels, rips the Band-Aid of recovery off far more quickly than if we still lived in an age when it took months to get a letter from one part of the world to another.

Thank you again for the article and the chance to share my two cents.

I hope you are well and enjoying the holiday season.

Best wishes,

Eric

Ok, let me know if I heard this correctly. We’re going to give $25 billion of taxpayers’ money to GM so they can continue to lose $2 billion of it each month. I’m no math genius but that means they will lose all of it in…let’s see…divide 12 into…carry the…bring the remainder over…A YEAR! (Right?) To be fair, if they simultaneously implemented massive cost cutting measures they could make it last another entire six months!

I agree we have to do something. If GM ceases to exist, so does the entire U.S. automobile industry (how far behind can Ford and Chrysler be?) This doesn’t just mean the end of the Big-3; it means the end of an entire supply chain — hundreds of companies employing hundreds of thousands of people. The U.S. needs this industry and it is in a very bad place. When I think about the government writing GM a check for $25 billion (a very, very…very small portion of which is mine) I get, well, angry. The word “insanity” comes to my mind.

If I believed for a minute that the decision makers who run GM could take $25 billion and magically reverse thirty years of bad decisions in order to save an industry of strategic importance, I would say go for it. But we’re talking about massive reengineering, retooling, reorganization and, hardest and most improbable of all, cultural change. Therefore, the $25 billion will be used to simply keep GM operating as is — “keeping the lights on”, so to speak. It’s going to take something much harder than a handout to stop the bleeding and fix this industry. So what would work? Let’s seeeeee…how about selling more cars? Brilliant!

So here’s an idea: why not use $25 billion to actually help GM (and the others) sell more cars? Here’re the basics of how it might work:

1. Keep the lights on. Write a check to GM for something south of $25 billion, say, $10 billion. Sadly, GM is at that place where only a huge infusion of cash can keep them alive in the short-term. This is necessary to keep the production lines going for a while. If GM up-ends and can’t make cars then they can’t sell them either.

2. Give the rest of it to me (and all the other taxpayers, of course) in the form of tax incentives to buy an American car. Give me the opportunity to actually get something of value for helping to bail out the industry, like a car! If the thousands of American households who buy Japanese and European cars every year are offered a meaningful incentive to instead buy American, we will hear a loud, collective, “hmmmm”, as the nation pauses to consider the offer. Hey, we’re Americans. We love incentives, especially the tax kind.

Now I can’t ignore one of the main reasons why our domestic auto industry is in the shape it’s in: decades of poor quality and design vis-a-vis imported alternatives. This debate will continue; however, U.S. automobiles are now comparable in quality to most foreign-built cars and have come a long way on the design front. Look it up. Again, motivate me to shop, test drive and be impressed, and I might just buy.

3. Make it meaningful. I’m not talking about a tax break of a few hundred dollars here. I’m talking about a real incentive. How about $5,000? I don’t know about you, but for that I would not only seriously consider an American car, but I might even accelerate my next purchase by a year of so to get one. Not everyone will take advantage of the offer for a variety of reasons, but for arguments sake, at that level of incentive the industry could make up to (more math here) three million incremental car sales! Now THAT would keep the lights on.

4. Sweeten the deal. How about added tax breaks if I buy the fuel efficient variety? Yes, GM, Ford and Chrysler make them too. This way we help solve another big problem we face.

5. Make credit available. Remember that other bailout that’s underway? That one is about getting the banks to make loans again. How about car loans? Can we tell the banks that a certain amount of the $700 billion has to be for auto loans to people buying American cars? For $700 billion we can tell them to do lots of things.

6. Lower the boom. Taxpayers have to get angry about this. Sure we might get a deal on a car, but honestly we’d rather not be in this situation. If the above worked, then GM and the others will still be in business and generating life-giving cash by doing what they’re supposed be doing (making and selling cars) and not by draining the Treasury. But the underlying problems at these companies will still exist. These companies have to get competitive and self-sufficient so they can continue after the life lines run out (I’m not advocating an evergreen program here). I don’t know enough about the people running GM at the moment to know whether they’re the architects of this death spiral, but they are accountable regardless. $25 billion buys a lot of influence over decisions and decision makers. Time to use some of it. It wouldn’t be the first time.

So there you have it. We save an important industry, we use taxpayers’ dollars responsibly, we incent positive behaviors in the system, and we stimulate the economy.

That’s “Goldberg” with an “e” if you’re writing up the Nobel Prize submission.

Here’s an interesting customer experience lesson (I collect customer experience lessons, either really good or really poor. If you have one to share, add a comment to this post).

Not too long ago I was at the place where I buy my morning coffee most often. I won’t say the name of the place…ok, it was Starbucks. I like Starbucks. Always have. I respect the “buy local” efforts and do, in fact, buy coffee from some of the independents near where I work in downtown Portland. All are very unique and have distinct personalities and products. I also respect the Starbucks story. It too was once a small, local coffee house. Wouldn’t we all like to do what Starbucks was able to do?

About a year ago Starbucks opened a new store in my town directly on my route to work. It came along with a drive-through! “What’s better than a neighborhood Starbucks with a drive through?” was my first thought, followed quickly by, “how in the world is that going to work?” I envisioned long wait times in my car while everyone’s multi-syllable drink was being carefully brewed, steamed, spooned and doctored (my drink is a black coffee, making long wait lines at the Barista counter kind of annoying). But with the exception of the first few buggy weeks following the opening, they’ve pulled it off. Impressive. The wait time is the same as it is at Dunkin’ Donuts and the drive-through folks at Starbucks are very bubbly and friendly (which can be a double-edged sword at 7:15 in the morning…but that’s my problem, not theirs).

One day after receiving my coffee at the window and driving on down the road toward work, I realized that I had not been given my change. The price of my drink at Starbucks is $1.98 and more often than not I pay with two, one-dollar bills (or the equivalent thereof in quarters and dimes that I scramble to fish out from the overflowing change well in my dashboard after realizing I don’t have any bills in my wallet). Either way, the change is 2 cents. I hadn’t been paying attention during the “transaction” because it’s 2 cents — pennies that end up in the aforementioned dashboard well. No big deal I thought, and let it go.

The next day, after being handed my coffee it happened again. This time I realized it moments after pulling away from the window. It wasn’t worth going back for 2 cents, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that, although 2 pennies are relatively worthless today, I, the customer, hadn’t been given the choice of taking my pennies or letting Starbucks keep them…or for that matter dropping them into the tip jar, or putting them in the “need one take one” ashtray, or throwing them out the window at 40 miles per hour, or whatever I wanted to do with MY pennies!!

The very next day, now very conscious of my 2 cents, again I wasn’t offered them. I waited but I got the sense I was expected to drive on. I asked for my change. This was followed by a short, awkward, somewhat incredulous pause until the bubbly friendliness returned and I was graciously handed my coins. But the behavior didn’t change over the next week and I realized it was actually institutional because a number of different Starbucks associates were all doing the same thing. Were they keeping the pennies for themselves? Was it too much trouble to make the change? Did Starbucks need my 2 cents? (umm…no). It really didn’t matter.

So finally, after I got to work one morning (with coffee in hand), I called the Starbucks store in my town and talked to the manager on duty. I didn’t mention names or give any clue as to who I was dealing with at the window but in a very matter-of-fact way let her know what was happening. Her response to my story was to be appropriately appalled that her employees, her store, her brand was doing this. I told her it wasn’t about the 2 cents. We fully agreed that it’s often the small, unpleasant things that can undo the many bigger, better things when it comes to customer experience. She vowed to correct what was happening as soon as possible, including calling an all-shift meeting, posting some reminder signs in the break area, and sending a message to “regional” to share the issue with other stores.

Starbucks has all the reason in the world to ignore me and my 2 cents. But they know that I, and others who are probably (yet perhaps obliviously) experiencing the same thing can easily get our coffee anywhere within Portland’s can’t-swing-a-dead-cat-without-hitting-a-coffee house culture. More important, it was simply wrong. They listened, were genuinely appreciative I called, and took immediate action to shore up a hole in the Starbucks experience. Starbucks is a great company. Not perfect, but great nonetheless.

To this day I am offered my pennies. Sometimes I tell them to keep the change.

-Dave Goldberg

Unless you were just rescued from a year on a desert island you’re painfully aware of the financial crisis that’s boiling over as I write this posting. Pages 1, 2, 3,….,10 of any newspaper or TV news show covers the massive failures of big financial institutions, the roller coaster ride in the markets, the effects (as the candidates like to say) not just on Wall Street but on Main Street and, unless you were really out to lunch last week, the ka-jillion dollar “bailout” of the whole mess. Seriously, if someone suggested to me in January that Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros and ING would all be gone by September I’d wonder what they’d been smoking. No doubt these are crazy and scary times, however, I read a short blog posting the other day that had the affect of slapping me out of my media-induced malaise.

I’m neither an economist nor an expert on fiscal policy, but as a marketing professional I’ve been through this a few times before in my 25 year career. I spent sixteen of those years as a marketer at various financial institutions, thirteen at either big, global banks or investment banks. I’ve marketed everything from swaps to savings accounts, asset-based loans to asset-backed securities, private placements to private banking.

I bear first-hand witness to the behavior of big banks during crises. I joined Bank of Boston the same week the Fed took its credit keys away (read: no new loans until you can show us you can drive safely) in the wake of the commercial real estate disaster of the early ’90s. I lived through the global liquidity crisis in the mid-’90s following domino-like currency devaluations around the world. My favorite was the mass write-down of Russian debt in the late ’90s that evaporated the earnings of many major banks overnight (including the one I was working for). And, of course, let’s not forget the loud “pop” that ended the dot-com era, as well as the existence of many financial institutions. All of these crises created widespread panic and a tightening of credit, the life blood of economic growth.

Today’s crisis is, of course, different and unprecedented, both in cause and effect. But just when you thought the entire banking system, and life as we know it, are crashing through the guardrail and heading down the cliff, read what I read by former Commerce Bank CEO Vernon Hill: http://bankstocks.com/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=5390&ArticleTypeID=2.

It provides evidence that even if the clouds haven’t parted yet the sun is still up there PEOPLE! In short, while the large banks are reeling, and the mostly unregulated (surviving) investment banks are gasping for breath, there are thousands of smaller, community banks out there that have been largely untouched by the crisis and, for the most part, are proceeding with business as usual. Good news if you’re running a business or a household. As a matter of fact, on the very day two weeks ago when the stock market was tanking in reaction to the Lehman implosion, our banker (note: works for a small bank) was at our office with new loan documentation that extended our line of credit for another year. New credit…hmmmm…go figure. Did I mention she was AT OUR OFFICE??

Is this just an example of me seeing the glass as half-full? Yes and why shouldn’t I? Optimism works. It keeps us getting up in the morning even if we went to bed listening to doom and gloom on the eleven o’clock news. So take a breadth, gather yourselves, and stay focused on your business and personal objectives. Should we proceed cautiously? Yes. Should we panic? Absolutely not.

-Dave Goldberg

I don’t know about your industry, but it’s hard to find an ad agency these days that isn’t hanging out a green shingle — blogging or writing columns in the local business section about their green expertise (which they may or may not actually have), updating their websites to purvey a greener vibe, or speaking about green marketing on some panel somewhere. To be fair, real, honest-to-goodness, dedicated green ad agencies do exist. They choose their clients carefully. No nuclear power utility clients (eek). No plastic extrusion clients (uh-uh). No food additive clients (run!). Certainly no big-box retailers (although this business model falls apart quickly as Wal-Mart becomes the largest U.S. seller of organic foods…they really have, I looked it up). Joking aside, I applaud these agencies’ heroic efforts. They’re helping to move the ball across the field of public consciousness.

KG Partners is neither a band-wagoner nor a zealot when it comes to green marketing. In our view, neither are sustainable business models nor ways to make the world actually greener. We’re like most companies today. To a person we care very much about our Earth and how to sustain it; we’ve adopted green practices around the office; and, notably, when a client comes to us to help announce, promote or otherwise further a green initiative of their own we jump all over it! Here’s an example of one client’s green initiative we worked on recently that is very real and will make a profound difference:

Con-way, Inc. (NYSE: CNW), a $4.7 billion freight transportation and logistics company and KG client, recently implemented a significant sustainability initiative. Con-way figured that they could save diesel fuel (five million gallons annually) and reduce carbon emissions (134 million pounds annually), WHILE increasing its profitability. How? By lowering the speed governors on its fleet of more than 11,000 trucks by three miles per hour! The emissions savings alone is equivalent to pulling almost 14,000 cars off the road. Pretty green for a trucking company — for any company, actually. The results are tracking to plan.

Con-way is a Fortune 500 company deeply committed to making money for its shareholders. They connected the dots between getting more green and “making more green.” And this, readers, is how it will happen. And as for us? Well we worked the PR hard on Con-way’s behalf. So hard, in fact, that since April the Con-way brand has earned more than 1.2 billion media impressions (and growing) from this program. Does that make us a “green” agency? More than most, I suspect.

-Dave Goldberg