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Make Like a Retailer
Konczal sent me an excellent whitepaper entitled “Becoming Demand-Driven: The Communications Service Provider as Retailer” that Stratecast published last year and which happens to have been authored by my friend and mentor, Susan McNeice. In the opening paragraph, she argues that communications service providers “want to consider the thinking (and operations) of world-class retailers. For many, this means shifting…to a demand-driven, digital lifestyle enabler.” Ooh…digital lifestyle enabler. That’s exciting. Enablers get you hooked on guilty pleasures. There’s no better sales technique than that.

McNeice continues, writing, “It means having…a robust and fully integrated set of distribution (read: selling) channels to provide a consistent, high-quality experience to the customer.” This is dead on. CSPs offer the inverse of this today. Too often are promotions offered to those who aren’t eligible for them. Worse, promotions are different across web, call center, and retail channels, making for a confusing and frustrating buying experience. Sales channels just aren’t consistent and they don’t provide continuous, guided, contextual, or compelling experiences.

A continuous experience is one where “you can start an order at one point and complete it at another point,” Konczal articulates. This means that if you start an order online, get stuck, and call the contact center, the agent who answers the phone should be able to figure out where you left off and pick up the process from there. “The customer expects the provider to have awareness of that,” says Konczal. “The best retailers have that. If I start an order online at BestBuy.com and want to complete it or pick it up at the store, I can do that today,” he says.

A guided experience makes sure to “give the user assistance at specific times in the order,” Konczal says. In other words, if the customer

A contextual experience is of the sort to which Amazon, iTunes, and YouTube are habituating customers. If you search for a certain book or product, Amazon tells you what others who bought that product also bought with it. If that’s the right HDMI cable that goes with my high-def TV, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll buy it. That’s a contextual up-sale that doesn’t really hard sell me, it just makes a useful suggestion.

YouTube also makes useful, contextual suggestions. If I search for X-Men cartoons (and I sometimes do) it suggests other X-Men episodes I might want to watch, and I usually watch them. That helps me sort through all of the nonsense (or long tail content) on YouTube and just jump from one video I find interesting to another. That’s part of the viral experience, and it’s reinforced by my ability to send a link to that video to my friend Josh who also loves the X-Men.

iTunes is similar. I fell in love with a short-lived science fiction show called “Firefly” and bought all 14 episodes on iTunes. iTunes also let me know that there was a soundtrack and let me sample it. Turns out, I didn’t want it, but I appreciated the opportunity to check it