Vegas Style Marketing

1-to-1 targeted marketing is the dream of just about any sales and marketing organization.  It is highly coveted and extremely difficult to attain to, especially if you have thousands or even millions of customers to serve.

However, there are some industries (or better stated companies within industries) that have come very close to reaching this nirvana.  One company and industry that is often cited as a leader in 1-to-1 is Harrah's Casino in Las Vegas (or Harrah's worldwide), but other gaming companies have started to follow suit and are attempting to play catch up.  At one of their casinos, a "guest" playing on the casino floor that is starting to lose consistently will at an opportune time be greeting by a casino staff member that will offer the guest show tickets, free dinners at a buffet or restaurant within the casino, or another valued commodity to avert the possibility of the guest having a negative experience (and potentially keep them at that facility).  Implementing this 1-on-1 guest rewards program has been very successful for this and other gaming companies both in terms of customer satisfaction and ROI that they are considered models in the world of high-touch database-driven marketing.  You may have heard the phrase "Vegas-Style" when referring to CRM database marketing before and this is one of the reasons why.

Given that I've worked at the company that supplied many of these companies with the underlying technology that drives this 1-to-1 CRM success, I am familiar with the keys to success in making an effort like this happen.  While the ROI is significant; the effort, energy, and investment required to realize this dream is also extremely significant.

So what are the keys to success?  Here are, at a very high level, a few required steps:

1.) Committing to create a single, 360-degree view of the customer:  As long as the data that a company uses to drive decisions regarding customer interactions is disintegrated, there is no possibility of being able to market Vegas-style.  There must be a single source for customer data that is strictly governed at a high level in the organization and is considered the single source of truth.  This is important because whenever a customer interacts with you and this interaction isn't aligned with other interactions they have with your company, then that interaction cannot be factored into your relationship with the customer.  In a case where customer data exists in multiple places in your organization, each group that interacts with the customer will have their own version of the truth, and those versions can conflict with one another.  In that case, your company can look schizophrenic to your customer, which does not help your brand.  Implementing an effective 1-to-1 strategy requires consistency and consistency requires accurate, complete, and well-governed data.  In this world, giving data governance the appropriate attention, visibility, and authority is paramount to your success.

2.) Committing to marketing based on data-driven customer insights:  The reason that Harrah's dual-active data warehouse understands when to alert the casino staff that a customer service professional is needed on the floor is twofold:  First, Harrah's spent time reviewing the behavior of its guests from the casino data and knew with a certain degree of certainty when those "points of frustration" would occur and decided as an organization what the rules of engagement would be.  They knew not just intuitively when to make an offer, they reviewed the data and knew exactly when to act.  Second, they took the data analysis and decided as an organization what the rules of engagement would be based on insights.  These rules were built into the database, along with a certain degree of flexibility to ensure that the personal touch would not be lost.  However, the decision to act was decided, vetted, and justified prior to that high roller losing a quarter of a million on the slots and the show ticket giveway action put into effect.

The true value of data analysis is on the front end strategy development side of the marketing process.  While it is valuable to analyze "what happened?" once a campaign has completed, it's value is not nearly as significant as the value of predicting "what should happen and how should we drive behavior based on our insights about the customer?"  In fact, "what happened?" gains a lot more value when the strategy itself is based on rock solid data-driven insights.  This creates a feedback loop where future campaigns can be refined and strengthened based on validated or perhaps invalidated insights and assumptions.

3.) Committing to align your organization around the roadmap:   The "Vegas Style database," once the insights were analyzed, the customer data completely consolidated, and the rules of engagement decided upon, defined the going forward marching orders for interacting with the customer.  This is not only key to developing consistent communication with the customer but it is paramount to strengthening the company's brand.  A brand, being a "promise of value," is built over time when the customer's experience with you consistently matches up with their expectations of you.  When these expectations are high and they are consistently met, then your value to them and their loyalty to you grows.  To achieve this, everyone on the organization needs to be working from the same playbook, the same customer data, and the same M.O. - it's why the West Coast Offense won the San Francisco 49'ers four Super Bowls in the 80's and is why Harrah's consistently "wow's" it's visitors with it's guest service.

At the end of the day, 1-to-1 marketing is not technology-driven, even though it is technology-enabled.  It is a strategic decision that requires investment in organizational alignment and cultural focus in addition to the technology.  It is worth the effort, however, as people in the gaming industry will attest.

"So much cooler online"

The other day, I saw a tweet come across my feed that made me laugh out loud.  It stated:

"I still hate Comcast, but @ComcastMarc_NE makes me hate them less. Good customer service guy." (from @617patrick)

This tweet illustrates that importance of authenticity and ensuring that the interactions that you have online and in social networking as a company align with the reality of your brand.  Comcast has been very successful with using social networking, and specifically Twitter, to improve their customer service.

A banner at Dreamforce evangelized their success story with social media, claiming a 46% increase in their net promoter score as a result of using SalesForce for Twitter to engage with their consumers.  They have a team of customer service reps (like @ComcastMarc_NE) that strictly look for complaints on Twitter (which I can imagine based on the staffing in this organization and my own personal experience that there are many) and start conversations in the attempt to resolve their cable, internet, or phone issues.

However, as we can see (and a lot of us that use Comcast can attest), the offline interactions many of us have with Comcast haven't changed much.  They are giving us one image online with their "Twitter Ninja" team and another one with the contracted technician that visits our home and does very little to meet our expectations.  Are they like the guy in the Brad Paisley song "Online" who works at the Pizza Pit, drives an old jalopy, and lives with his parents yet portrays himself as a hot model from Malibu with extraordinary tastes?



At the end of the day, being successful with marketing in social media requires authenticity, and is not a highly-effective image management mechanism.  Customers today are very savvy and can tell, and in many cases will call us out if we are "so much cooler online."  News does travel fast in the social networking world.  The good news is, if we are authentic online and offline,  serve our followers, customers, and fans well, and deliver on our brand promise in every channel it will do wonders for our brand.  Good news also travels fast.

Salesforce Chatter

Attending Dreamforce 2009, as with every one of Salesforce.com's conferences you know that an exciting game-changing announcement is in the works.  This year provided one that I believe could be monumental.

Chatter.

"Chatter" is Salesforce's new "Facebook for the enterprise."  It essentially takes the "feed, follow, and profile" features and best practices of Facebook and Twitter, and applies them to the CRM cloud model that is currently in place.  What it creates is an tool where anything that is worked within Salesforce.com or communicates with Salesforce.com can "talk" to you through a live feed that is similar to the one that you see when you log into Facebook and view the news feed.

In Mark Benioff's keynote, he made this statement that I believe is the core reason why this may really take off (especially in younger companies but is not limited to).  He asked "Why is it that I know when one of my 5,000 Facebook 'friends' have gone to a certain movie but I don't know when my VP of Sales has visited a key client?"  The point is this:  social networking has greatly enhanced our abilities to organize our social lives and disseminate information in our personal lives, so why can't we have these same abilities in our businesses?   Why can't the same automatic notification I get when a picture of me from a party has been tagged come when a creative brief that I'm collaborating on has just had a key revision?

In business today, I have to either be proactive, I have to get alerted through my dedicated communications system (Outlook or IM... all disparate) or someone has to take the initiative to push the information I need out to me.  In social networking, I get all of my information socially from the feed.  Essentially, "Chatter" is their attempt to bring this metaphor and this "integration of people, applications, and data" into a single collaboration engine that is familiar to those of us that use tools like Facebook, which statistically is most, if not all of us.

Time will tell whether this bet will pay off... and if business will indeed transform based on this new metaphor.  However, considering that SalesForce.com's initial inspiration for SaaS was Amazon.com (another highly successful consumer web application), they may be on to something.

According to the folks I talked to at Dreamforce, expect Chatter to hit your Cloud in Summer '10.  However, their Safe Harbor statements indicate that we shouldn't put all our chips on this quite yet, but it will be exciting to see what it brings to the table when it is generally available.