HellerResults

Getting Them to Use It: Marshalling Customer Service, Social Support, Product Design and Updates, and User Incentives

Nelson B. Heller, President, EdNET, MDR — Friday, September 23, 2011

Intro

Keeping your customers happy and engaged are clearly on the critical path to retention and, by way of reputation and brand, to new customer acquisition. In last month’s Heller Report column, Getting Them to Use It: After the Sale, Keeping Customers Happy, we shared the insights of senior industry executives about how usage is being impacted by market trends and how they define and measure usage, use training and professional development, and calibrate by price point to tune their usage promotion strategies. In today’s column, we look at marshalling customer service, social support, product design and updates, and user incentives for customer retention and acquisition. In next month’s column, we will conclude the series with this group’s insights on the critical roles of leadership (especially change management) and implementation planning. Satisfied, active customers are no accident. Read on to score your own firm’s usage promotion strategies against the ideas of these veterans.

Customer Service

Providing adequate customer service—especially responding to customer problems satisfactorily—is almost certainly the first thing that comes to mind for keeping customers satisfied and engaged. Anything that can mitigate situations involving frustrated customers and delays in their getting intended results has to be a plus. Considering the attendant costs, I asked my sources how they decide how to deliver and staff this support and when to use on-site instead of virtual support.

Brett Woudenberg, COO at Gaggle, a provider of safe online learning tools including student email, told me, “At Gaggle, we believe it takes on-site and virtual support to successfully support technology implementations. This may seem redundant, but schools really do need evangelists and champions on-site coupled with effective internal marketing (more on this below) if they are serious about achieving exceptional results.” Gaggle’s client service consists of trained personnel who are located in their Bloomington, Illinois, office where they can continuously develop their skills and ensure the highest quality service. Woudenberg added, “We do not use answering machines—we have real people answering our phones before, during, and after school hours. For the savvier users, we provide them multiple virtual support tools, such as live chat, email, training videos, discussion boards, and user guides as well.” Gaggle also uses a remote desktop solution, which is particularly helpful at assisting clients in troubleshooting complex issues within their own network environment. The firm is also currently working on making its internal knowledge base available to users. For Woudenberg, “The reality is no one size fits all when it comes to client support, so we simply continue to provide as many options as possible. This includes account managers whose sole job is to keep in regular contact with districts to coordinate our support resources optimally.”

For Vicki Bigham, President, Bigham Technology Solutions, customer service is a multidimensional issue that can only be resolved by understanding the usage model from the perspective of each key client stakeholder’s needs. You have to ask yourself, she said, “What is their interaction or confrontation with our product? It is important, too, on the front end of product development, to plan for all that the customer will need to know, explicitly recognizing that the ‘customer’ is really multiple people”:

The curriculum or content person, whose priority is, “I care about student achievement and effectiveness.”
The IT person/tech resource, “If I can make this work and make it secure, I will have no objection.”
The financial person, “We can afford this if I am assured that ….”
Another top-level person , “I can say no even if everyone else says yes.”
Evangelist , “I am on your side and want to make this work (and I can tell you about the preceding four).”
Teacher , “This has arrived in my classroom. How can I easily use this to support my students, and how will you support my learning how to use this?”
Student, “It has to be easy to use, reliable, engaging, supportive, and help me pass the tests. If I cannot use it, my teacher is going to have one more problem to juggle.”

For Sandy Fivecoat, Founder of the WeAreTeachers (WAT), “If there is a lot of requirement for ‘break/fix’ support, it seriously impacts usage and customer service will drown. Apple is king/queen of design in this regard, focused on intuitive use of products.” For best practices, she says, look at what consumer firms like Best Buy, Sears, and the Compuserve online electronics outlet are doing, where questions posed by users are being answered by other users. “In our social media work for WeAreTeachers’ clients, we are increasingly setting up closed discussion communities, which we call ‘Champions’ user programs (e.g., for Touchmath).” These are “walled gardens” within WeAreTeachers, which give a brand a way to augment customer service, operate online focus groups without opening product concept ideas publicly to competitors and non-clients, and permit sharing of strategies to solve problems. The closed spaces also allow the running of competitions tightly tied to product, for instance, where users gain points for product knowledge. Never forget, she added, the need to incentivize behavior online to ensure engagement, with grants, recognition, and thank-yous.

Tom Greaves, President of The Greaves Group, has clients use another web strategy, putting up training videos on YouTube or the vendor’s site, to help buyers solve their own problems. He added, “Cover a lot of topics with many short videos.”

Fivecoat continued, “We are also helping clients use recorded rich media podcast programs, which we call WATcasts, in which expert users share best practices. An example, for Learning A to Z called, ‘Teaching on a Budget,’ is here.” This strategy uses the power of social media to respect the difference between customer acquisition and retention. Once problems are solved within the closed garden, the solutions can be posted for marketing purposes in a public space. “It is a virtuous circle,” she said, “providing payoffs for both retention and usage. You get good ideas from problem solving and best practice sharing and, simultaneously, get acquisition payoffs in happier customers and deliverables that add value by making the product stronger.”

Alvin Crawford, CEO of Knowledge Delivery Systems, counsels planning for two main levels of customer service support. The first is project management—not having a synergistic relationship between the implementation leads on both client and provider sides is a recipe for frustration and lots of avoidable finger pointing. (We will look in-depth at project management in next month’s article.) The second is end-user support, whose planning includes whether the support is housed in the client district or with the provider. “We like to use tiered support where we train an individual in each school as first responder, for ‘triage,’ and then escalate to the provider if the problem cannot be resolved locally. If the appropriate training can take place, this builds internal capacity. Today, there are also virtual support options where the provider can take over the users’ desktop. Finally, do not forget planning for after-hours support and how that is handled.”

“Now that I think about it,” Crawford added, “there is a third layer of support and perhaps it is greater than just support, but projects often get handed down from key strategic decision makers to project managers. The danger, due to length of implementation, is that sometimes a project begins as strategic with management buy-in but can lose its strategic value and direction based on the lack of continued (monthly or quarterly) engagement with the senior leadership team. Leadership tends to “move on” to fighting the next fire, and if they are not kept apprised, they can forget why they purchased and what impact the project can actually have to the organization. The longer the implementation cycle, the higher the likelihood that leadership is not focused on the project or expectations unless they are in some way required to stay in the loop.”

Social Support

Thanks to the Internet, it is becoming more common for vendors to provide support for users to help one another solve usage problems and share best practices. A common strategy is to help customers set up and maintain Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) or other kinds of groups using online tools. These range from local groups to virtual ones spanning geographies and market segments (e.g., by grade, urban/rural, native speakers/ESL, etc.). Some use open social media platforms, while others build this into their product or service. I asked my contributors what advice they could share from their own experience.

Brett Woudenberg told me, “Having built a professional learning community platform in a past life, I am a big proponent of PLCs. However, I also know the challenges of maintaining them. Educators were already overwhelmed before the economic downturn, and their increased workload relative to NCLB made finding time for PLCs difficult. Additionally, PLCs do not just materialize and thrive on their own. They require subject matter experts, evangelists, and sponsors to thrive." Jonathan Mann, Co-Founder and CEO of Sublime Learning, agrees. You can do more harm than good, he said, “If you open a community when members are inadequately informed, then it is the blind leading the blind. Your PLC needs to be based on solid content generated by experts.” Resources for the latter are very scarce today. Woudenberg continued, “At Gaggle, we use our online tools to help foster PLCs but only a handful are active.” Admittedly, he added, “there are more things we can do to support PLCs, but without support from educators, it is difficult to justify when there are many higher priority requests for additional features.” In the end, educators need time to participate in PLCs and that will drive participation. “Some districts are doing some very innovative things to make that possible, but even those programs are being challenged in this current budgetary environment.”

Drawing on his experience, Alvin Crawford added, “Social networking groups for users can be powerful resources for supporting usage. Microsoft, for example, has a great online knowledge base that is easy to use, has a wiki for frequently asked questions with user-supplied answers, and offers discussion forums that allow users to solve problems together. Some vendors also provide a set of downloads or a file room where people can access other documents to share best practices. These can be developed for a little money or a lot. More important than the systems is someone to stimulate and monitor the area until it becomes part of the user culture. PowerSchool, Schoolnet, escholar, and Blackboard have very active user groups. Success is when users take on ownership of the agenda, marketing, and other supports. Other firms find in-person user groups productive.”

Sandy Fivecoat pointed out that it is important to recognize that all users are not equally engaged or familiar with your product. “Think of your users as a continuum from casual to power users or a pyramid of awareness-loyalty-advocacy, with those with product awareness at the base, those committed to using the product above it and, finally, those who are product advocates at the top. Address their needs individually, in both public and ‘walled garden’ networks.”

Product Design and Updates

Making sure your products are “user-friendly” is an obvious strategy for incenting usage. Usability has to be a top priority for both basic design and for updates responding to user feedback. I asked my respondents what related insights they could share.

Jonathan Mann’s sense of “user-friendly” is, “Teachers have limited time, so we design our portal with that in mind, keeping the navigation simple so they can access the resources they need quickly and easily.” About updates, Jim Marshall, President, Promethean, said when your product is out in the field “the world changes” and you have got to keep up. “Our handheld student response systems add considerable instructional power to our interactive whiteboards (IWBs). Until June these had to be Promethean hardware, but seeing the growth of student-owned devices in classrooms, at ISTE we introduced ActivEngage Mobile, an assessment software solution to support non-Promethean mobile devices, especially smartphones,” he added. To steer clear of any impact on students’ wireless data contracts, the software taps into the school’s Wifi.

Marshall argues handheld response platforms tied to IWBs are instructionally more potent than 1:1 laptop implementations. “You can understand 1:1’s weakness in terms of Disneyworld’s Captain Nemo ride,” he said, where there are two lines of riders in the mock submarine, each rider having his or her own porthole. “In 1:1 rooms, teachers have to compete with the ‘portholes.’ With an IWB, the instructor is the center of attention, but the handheld devices allow students to interact on an individual basis. Going forward, we see the IWB as the central piece of a ring network providing the classroom’s portal into the digital universe. The kids’ own devices will link them in and support more collaboration than traditional 1:1, at a lower cost per student.”

Design impacts the adoption curve too, Marshall added. “In my previous gig at Spectrum K-12 Solutions, in the RtI space, we spec’d the product for three tiers of users: students, teachers, and administrators. Now with the handhelds there is a ‘tier zero’ of instant response for student input. We are moving to integrative curriculum too, encompassing special ed, normal and gifted in the same room, with appropriate material going to each kid in real time while the central lesson is orchestrated on the IWB. Interactive is for every kid now; RtI is not just for SPED kids.” Lots of Promethean customers are already doing this, he added. Marshall especially likes Ron Clark’s Ron Clark Academy, in Atlanta, which uses in-class and out-of-class activities with students’ own devices for differentiated instruction. No two students will have the same activity on their device at the same time because the system delivers questions based on the students’ learning pace. As for the equity issue—how to deal with kids who do not have their own devices—the school provides a handheld to those that need it.

Brett Woudenberg told me, “At Gaggle, we focus on feedback from users at all levels, but we also focus very heavily on best practice standards in user interface design.” He cautioned that client feedback must be interpreted carefully, since education users are not necessarily experts in usability. “In the past, we have at times focused too much on user feedback without supporting data from best practices in design. Too often this produces a mixed bag of results where one user group benefits but too many others do not. The software community has performed extensive studies of user preferences across global audiences and those standards are proven and very important to our design process. With that said, education is unique, and we tend to weigh suggestions relative to work flows and education-specific features very carefully in our designs. If our solutions were global and generic in design, we simply would not have grown as rapidly as we have, and our value to educators and students would have been greatly diminished.”

Commenting on ways to get usability input for product updates, Alvin Crawford said, “When I was at Schoolnet, we had a ‘voice of the customer’ site, which allowed users to provide feedback on features and functionality additions that they needed. At Knowledge Delivery Systems, we look at website logs to find out where and how people spend their time in our web-based applications. We also do lab-based focus groups to track user interaction. Sales people have lots of feedback on product usability too, based on their demos and the feedback of decision makers.” And echoing Woudenberg’s point, he added, “Hiring user interface designers is a critically important task in education, too often overlooked. User interface improvements can significantly improve the user experience and increase usage.”

User Incentives

Some firms reward users of their products to motivate usage. These programs range from user skill-level badging (e.g., intermediate, advanced, and mentor) to specific social media engagement programs like WeAreTeachers’ best practices competition micro-grants. Explicit incentives may not be needed. Jim Marshall likes to say “empowered engagement is its own incentive for teachers to embrace new programs.”

Brett Woudenberg told me, “Before you even get to user incentives, you need to think about ‘internal marketing.’ It is critical for usage and adoption but often overlooked—it is all about winning over client personnel. Most organizations focus outward and forget the internal piece or it is done accidentally and not well.” For schools, he said, “Gaggle’s internal marketing can include posters, banners, sample press releases to use in the community to reach outside stakeholders, and a collateral series to reach teachers to keep them motivated. Internal marketing combined with implementation planning for the school is powerful.” Along the same lines, Tom Greaves suggests, “Develop newsletters for both internal and external use, with meaningful usage tips, such as how to use new features or apply the product to special situations. But it cannot be fluff.”

Key stakeholders in schools for internal marketing often do not exist, so Gaggle is often enlisting someone, perhaps a PR person, or someone on the assistant superintendent of instruction’s team. Tom Greaves advocates finding evangelists in the schools to be external champions too, “like the Apple Distinguished Educator program and the Discovery Educator Network. Get them speaking gigs at conferences.”

From Woudenberg’s perspective, “With most any organization, the failure to achieve expected outcomes is almost always a function of the effectiveness of its plan and communication strategies. With schools being forced to ‘do more with less,’ communications often suffer, making all of its major initiatives more difficult to achieve.” In the past, he added, schools have been reluctant to let their vendor partners assist with internal marketing. Making a plea, he said, “I would like to propose that, for everyone’s benefit, schools need to be more open to leveraging the resources of their vendor partners to bridge the gap and improve results.”

As far as post-implementation user incentive programs, Woudenberg said, “As an E-rate vendor subject to federal gift-giving rules, we are very limited in the incentives that we can provide to encourage use of our products. As such, we do not have the ability to offer micro-grants and other value-based awards. We are, however, currently looking again at skill-level designations as a soft ‘recognition’ reward for those educators who extract high value from our products in their classroom. Over the years we have attempted recognition programs (e.g., digital badges, etc.) and reward-based competitions with users at all levels but with negligible impact on usage. Models that have worked successfully in the consumer market, such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, are not necessarily good fits for the professional or education market. He cited LinkedIn, a popular professional networking tool, but he has yet to see them extensively use incentives like badges or games to spur higher levels of usage. “In their case, usage is driven by the value of the network connections that users make,” he said. “Every software solution is different and what works for one is not necessarily a good fit for another.”

On the other hand, Alvin Crawford told me, “Skill levels are very effective for incenting people to spend more time in an application. They also work well for the user groups, where more skilled users are tagged for being able to more effectively answer user questions. Providing levels gets them bought into the idea, and the concept of earning those badges definitely supports it.” Separately, Crawford also pointed to uBoost as a vehicle for promoting usage. “This loyalty incentive company is a great approach to rewarding users for behaviors. Their platform can be configured to give users points, cash, coupons, gifting, or virtual goodies.”

Tom Greaves added one more incentive strategy, “Bring in visitors to the school—it really motivates the school to be able to tell a good story to the prospective customer.”

Yep – Product Usage Is No Accident

This article adds additional ideas for “getting them to use it,” relating to customer service, social support, product design and updates, and user incentive programs to those discussed last month: namely, defining and measuring usage, training and professional development, and price point. Next month’s column will conclude the series with insights from this team of industry veterans on the critical roles of leadership (especially change management), and implementation planning for product usage. There is no silver bullet but, fortunately, a surprising number of intelligent tactics for winning this one.