Enough with the 'thank yous' please: Where charities get it wrong.

Have you been thanked by your charity lately? In my last call from one of the charities we support, I certainly was.  Not once, but numerous times.

As of late it seems, many charities think they have discovered a magical power in saying thank you to donors.  In the course of our pro bono work we have come across this quite a few times where other consultants advise them to emphasise to the donor how important their support is. This mostly seems to translate into constantly saying thank you.  On the face of it, it seems obvious; you know treat others how you want to be treated etc. 

Charities, in their effort to attract the most donors and dollars easily buy into this misleading advice.  They think it makes make donors feel more valued, gives them a better supporter experience and increases loyalty and donations.

But for the vast majority of supporters it falls on deaf ears or even backfires.   To a great number the thank yous show that charities don’t really understand them or what motivates them to give.

In fact, our needs modelling data shows that only about 1/3 of people who support charities seek external appreciation for it.   Among child sponsors this falls even further to just 25%.  And of those, a good number don’t want appreciation from their chosen charity, but from family, friends, colleagues and local community.

Many of them feel that the charity is only the facilitator or conduit of their own goodwill. Therefore, they feel that the charity thanking them (even on behalf of the beneficiaries) is misplaced and presumptive, misunderstanding its role.  Others feel that the simple act of giving money doesn't warrant excessive gratitude and find it embarrassing.

Increasing the focus on supporter experience is laudable and for that I congratulate the charities. However, the trick to improving supporter experience is to understand what motivates the different supporter segments and create mechanisms that encourage and reward them.  Or simply, what kind of supporter experience they want to have.

Saying thank you, as a blanket solution, is counterproductive to increasing donor support.

Mext has researched charity needs with the public, HNWIs and corporates for the last 8 years. This is done with HuNeeds®, the powerful needs modelling approach based on the most modern psychology. The needs modelling approach shows 6 distinctive segments that are driven by well-defined needs. The HuNeeds Model is the basis for supporter experience development, positioning, value proposition & product development.

If you would like to know more about these results and what it could mean for you organisation, please contact melissa.wraith@mextconsulting.com

Don’t just do unto others.

Customer experience – by the very nature of the term – is a holistic construct of functional purpose and emotional perception. Because many organisations don’t really understand the ‘experiential’ bit, they tend to fall back on functional and rational aspects, striving for a generically good service experience.  And it is difficult to elicit from customers what they want to experience overall and at specific touch points.  Ten years ago we developed a tool, ConceptSnap® to overcome this and try to take the subjectivity out of the discussion.  Never have we been called on to use it as we are at the moment.

Developing impactful experiences that go beyond process improvements and guiding staff by telling them to ‘take charge’ and ‘treat the customer the way they want to be treated’ is difficult.

Process redesign is an important job considering how many are still way below acceptable. Many customer experience consultancies are now very good at understanding the customer journey and improving processes, but the design of the actual functional/emotional interaction proves far more elusive. ‘Treating customers the way you want to be treated’ is the typical guidance given to staff when the managers don’t know what to say. Using touch point specific feedback loops ensures continuity, but what you get is sweet talking people that drive their satisfaction scores but misread what customers really want - leaving the real opportunities to gain a strong and sustainable competitive advantage undeveloped.

One reason is that the n=1 is prone to misread how customers want to be treated. That applies from top executive to front line staff. All too often we hear ‘the customer just wants to get it done as efficiently and friendly as possible’. The truth often couldn’t be further from that.

Case Study

ConceptSnap:

To overcome the difficulty in understanding customers’ desires and maximise these opportunities, we developed a tool called ConceptSnap. It allows you to take experience design out of the functional and put into an emotional context. ConceptSnap is a combination of image, attribute and emotion sort that provides a precise and inspiring expression of the current and desired customer experience.  A sound structure makes it easy to construct experience flows and translate this into specific actions, language, tonality, behaviours and messages.

The image sort is based on 42 conceptual mood boards with calibrated images. These allow customers to pinpoint the atmosphere and symbols they want to connect with the experience. Starting with the images eases participants into the next, more specific exercise, the attribute sort. The attribute sort is designed to help customers precisely articulate what they do and want to connect. In day to day life we use only a small percentage of the available vocabulary. When asked, we fall back onto the most salient and easy words – like innovation. Our system does away with that. It contains over 350 attributes that are developed based on linguistic families and connect to colour psychology. That way customers can tell us if they really mean ‘innovative’ or ‘ingenious’, ‘creative’, ‘bold’, ‘advanced’, ‘ahead’, ‘visionary’ or anything else. The third component is the emotion sort. It combines over 170 verbal emotional expressions with visual expressions to help customers define exactly what they want to feel like and what they don’t.

Sounds easy, but ask yourself, can you precisely articulate what you want your customers to feel when they interact with you? Would everyone in the organisation say the same?

That’s where a tool like ConceptSnap provides further strength. Not only can customers provide valuable expressions of the desired experience, everyone in the organisation can do so, too. In working with one client we conducted a ConceptSnap workshop with the senior leadership team. At the beginning they considered it a waste of time, feeling they were fully aligned and could express the experience they wanted to offer customers. Very quickly it became apparent they were not that aligned and it took them a while to agree on the exact visual and verbal expressions. If the senior leaders can’t express the customer experience, they can’t brief it into their team, can’t control it and reinforce it through their own actions. Simple as that.

Quantifiable:

Working with small samples externally and internally always has issues. And understanding qualitatively the nuances of the desired experience across segments is way too expensive. Internally, everyone should be part of offering a great customer experience, but in the design only few can partake. That’s why ConceptSnap also lives online. In just June this year over 17,000 employees and customers in 5 countries, across 4 languages provided their feedback and input for one brand alone using ConceptSnap online. This means you can identify the biggest common denominators between customer groups, and distinguish where needed and possible. Internally the opportunity to invite all of your people ensures you can gather what experience your people feel they deliver and what customer experience they would like to deliver. By finding aspects of their input back in the design, they not only have ownership, but intuitively understand better how they can bring the experience to life.

Indeed, the ability to define your emotional and functional experience that way allows you to improve faster, better – and as importantly specific to your brand rather than some sort of service generic in your category.

Satisfaction not enough, more trust & better customer experience is key - Asia-Pac Banking+Finance feature article

As a point of differentiation and as a source of competitive advantage trust and customer experience become more important than just satisfaction. - Asia-Pacific Banking & Finance feature article.

The 2012 Australian Bank HuTrust® research study conducted by mext Consulting has been featured together with Capgemini's research in the print version of Asia Pacific Banking & Finance Magazine. The headline article looks at satisfaction not being enough, that trust and customer experience are far more important for customer loyalty and sustained business. For this article Mext MD and HuTrust® developer,Stefan Gräfe, was extensively interviewed on customer trust.

Click here to see the AB+F article or visit mextconsulting.com.



About Stefan Grafe: After an international career as head of creative and strategy for the BBDO and Bates marketing networks in Europe, Asia and Australia, Stefan founded mext as a management consultancy to help clients achieve substantial growth by better connecting with their customers.

Creating value growth through innovation.

Innovation and value creation, differentiation and leadership are emerging as important topics in professional services.

With global and local structures quickly changing and competition intensifying often from unexpected sources, innovation is high on the agenda with most firms.
But at the same, time innovation that delivers a real advantage is hard to come by. Across all industries some estimates say that up to 9 out of 10 innovations fail to live up to expectations.

Common issues found in the less than successful innovations include:
      ˃ Too narrow and unstructured collection of ideas,
      ˃ Pet project advancement instead of objective criteria 
         assessment,
      ˃ Internal blindness to simple, cheap, big impact opportunities,
      ˃ Lack of prioritisation, planning & process and resource 
         allocation,
      ˃ Lack of client orientation,
      ˃ Resources are focused on the launch rather than spread 
         equally across the development process including testing.




These issues often lead to innovation not having the desired impact, not being delivered well enough or at all – resulting in wasted resources as well as innovation fatigue.

In our innovation work with professional services and other industries 4 key success factors emerge:

1) Innovation must be client need focused.

If you don’t know client needs beyond the obvious, rational and functional, it is very difficult to identify ideas that could offer genuine value. Understanding client needs is therefore critical. It not only makes sure ideas are focused on the client; it also makes sure your innovation is focused around platforms you want to play in and supports your business strategy.

2) Develop strong idea platforms.

Innovation can relate to many aspects of the business. Technical ones are often the first that come to mind. But left of centre ones often disrupt better and tip the playing field towards you much better. 

For example:
˃ Product & technical aspects including IT use,
˃ Service aspects such as interaction, processes and content,
˃ People & communications.
In ideal cases through the first workshops additional platforms specific to the firm can be identified, ensuring even more differentiated innovation.
An aspect often overlooked is IP development from existing business capabilities or approaches. This can be a low cost, very strong source of competitive advantage.

3) Pipeline horizons.

Structuring and assessing innovation into horizons is critical to building a pipeline that delivers immediately and strategically on your business plans.

Typical structures are the Horizon 1, 2 and 3 structures that look at maximising current business, developing additional income streams and fundamental business changes. Often these are re-interpreted into immediate, mid-term and long term.
Other ways are the capability vs impact prioritisation and thus time framing, or using concrete to hazy front end terminology.
In any case, these frameworks serve to ensure that a continuous pipeline of relevant innovation at different levels of impact and significance can be driven. It also allows for resource allocation.

4) Process & Tools.

A strong process and the right tools ensure the impact is as powerful as expected. This starts with the overall process. The best known one is probably the Stage-Gate process developed by Robert Cooper and Scott Edgett.
It splits the innovation process into five distinct stages from ideation to launch. After each stage there is an evaluation gate that consists of different, stage relevant criteria and stakeholders. It starts with the overall ideation to ensure as many relevant ideas as possible are developed. After that these ideas are filtered into the process to ensure the right ones are advanced at the right time with the right speed and the right resources.
Each stage & gate has its own tools and criteria. Some of these are standardised, others are individually created to suit the firm.
Another important aspect of process is continuity. Successful innovation is a continuous process with new cycles starting typically every 3 to 6 months.
The perception that innovation is a difficult, big and a resource hungry distraction from core business is an oft cited reason for not pursuing innovation or doing it haphazardly. But innovation can be simple, focused and create immense value through differentiation, leadership and better client need fulfilment if the right knowledge and processes are applied.

Community Foundation on the Edge. Do Australians Trust Their Local Community?

With the recent Canada study using mext’s IP HuTrust® to investigate community trust in politicians and community services compared to major brands like Google and Blackberry; mext teamed up with AOR to investigate the state of Community Trust amongst Australian citizens.

What we found is that only half of Oz residents surveyed say they trust their local community, 14% actively distrust their community and 15% strongly trust their community.

We looked at 4 critical community engagement areas:
1)Neighbour relations - How we engage with neighbours
2)Community support & safety – willingness to volunteer and report offences
3)Community prosperity – keeping local dollars local and willingness to recommend living in my area
4)Political support – voting and council support

Analysing the trust drivers and inhibitors for communities and their local councils.

Download the free report here.

For more information see also:
HuTrust News & Research: Australia on the edge. New study shows every 2nd A...: A new survey by mext Consulting and Australia Online Research (AOR) with 1346 Australians looked at the strength of Australian communitie... 

Contact: Stefan Grafe or Melissa Wraith

Using the most modern psychology we can help you better understand your consumer’s and customer’s needs and motivations and build trust with them. mext

HuTrust News & Research: Big four fare hardly better on customer trust than...

HuTrust News & Research: Big four fare hardly better on customer trust than...: Australian banks are only marginally more trusted than crisis battered German banks even though Australia has one of the stronger world ec...

When diamonds aren’t forever.

At mext we've spent a lot of this year thinking and talking about client needs in legal services, so it wasn't a big surprise that this New York subway ad caught my attention. 

Amusing, audacious, perhaps a little bit shocking. With a few exceptions, in Australia we are not used to seeing a lot of law firm advertisements in mainstream media. There seems to be a great divide between those who advertise their services and those who don’t. 

What is so surprising about this ad is the way it treats the subject matter. We tend to think that those going through separations and family breakdowns are finding it overwhelming and depressing; that what they need is to be treated with sympathy and sensitivity. To approach it other than with the utmost gravity seems almost taboo. But maybe not for everyone. 

By using humour, this ad momentarily diminishes the problem and makes it just a little bit easier to cope with. For many people this will be just what they need. Nothing like a bit of gallows humour to take the stress out of a situation. 

But for me, the best bit is the disclaimer. There is probably a legal requirement for it, but…. Attorney Advertising: Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome…