Like Apple, Virgin America is a model citizen in the small but important world of businesses that design company products and services to steer customer experiences. Razorfish, one of the largest global interactive marketing and technology agencies, studied how Virgin America engages customers in a groundbreaking study, “Liminal: A Razorfish Analysis of Customer Engagement in Transition.” The report was designed to surface the answers for any brand seeking new customer insights.
The Razorfish Liminal report is revealing in so many ways. Most notably, it took a customer perspective in its approach to defining engagement. It also studied Virgin America’s approach to engaging the connected customer and shared its findings.
As Razorfish noted, Virgin America is a brand built around customer loyalty. In the report, Virgin America’s vice president of marketing, Porter Gale, shared why. “We felt early on our customers were likely to use social channels, and the following we have gotten confirmed this. However, we realized we didn’t know nearly as much as we wanted about what our customers wanted to get from us in these places. And, we didn’t know what the value of our more social customers was. Especially when one takes into account the ever-expanding roster of channels, we needed to look beyond our customers’ self-reported insights and beyond our customer base, to get a full picture of how we might better engage with our customers.”
To find these answers, Razorfish and Loyalty Lab drew from a survey of 5,600 Virgin America customers. The team also sourced anonymous social data from 100,000 Internet users, existing information from Virgin America on its customers’ engagement and lifetime value, self-reported attitudes and preferences, and independently tracked behavior.
In the Liminal report, Razorfish identified the six most important needs consumers possess when they reach out to a brand: feeling valued, trust, efficiency, consistency, relevance, and control, with the first three rating the highest in regard to importance. These elements of engagement (or as Razorfish calls them, engagement elements) are the attributes of successful connections in the last mile. These elements require attention and design first and foremost to enrich customer interactions. Possessing these elements, and not merely having a presence, is paramount to steering meaningful customer engagement.
In my last book, Engage!, I introduced the importance of identifying consumers’ needs within their channels of relevance before attempting engagement. But engagement is just the entry point. The entire experience that follows is as important as the engagement itself.
The challenge to businesses, however, is that these engagement strategies require design if each of these encounters are to foster positive experiences. Without this, businesses are, in fact, diluting their brand, leaving customers feeling disconnected, unsatisfied, or confused. Everything begins with a shift in perspective from viewing stakeholders as a separate entity, “us versus them,” to a singular view of “us,” as this enlivens a new era of community-focused marketing and engagement.
Studying the needs of our customers and identifying the best ways to deliver through six elements of engagement will help businesses connect with connected customers.
Valued: In the Liminal report, consumers cited “feeling valued” as the most important element of brand engagement. Connected customers expect companies to go out of their way to support their needs and value their business. This is in direct contrast to how most businesses view customer engagement today. Businesses are designed to make the customer come to them and jump through hoops to get information, satisfaction, or resolution. For Virgin America, almost every step of the experience is designed around communicating customer value and appreciation. It starts with the flattering messages on its website and in all of its marketing materials. It continues when arriving at the ticket counter at the airport. You recognize immediately that there’s something special here... the red carpet, slick music, stylish furniture, prevalent smiles, and the sincere desire to help. Customers know they’re in for a treat. Once the customer boards the aircraft, the experience continues. Cabins are lit with a low-level of purple ambiance combined with fashionable beats. Passengers are then greeted by attendants who are as pleasant as they are stylish. Customers can’t help but feel accepted.
Efficiency: Second, customers expect efficiency and quick, decisive actions in each engagement. If a company can demonstrate that it respects customers’ time and energy by promptly addressing their needs, it will earn their appreciation and support. With Virgin America, efficiency is incorporated into multiple steps of the customer cycle. The website is designed to expedite the delivery of information and the process of purchasing tickets. Before leaving home, customers can check in online to upgrade, change seats, and print tickets. At the airport, customers are greeted by glossy white kiosks to make travel changes or print out boarding cards.
Trust: Customers need to feel that the companies that they do business with can be trusted. Trust is earned as a measure of a culmination of business actions and experiences. Credibility is at the heart of the matter and through honest, transparent, sincere, and authentic engagement, businesses earn a critical differentiator and value-add in the market, believability. Over time, I’ve come to trust Virgin America. Through every interaction, at every step, the company has communicated with me as defined in this paragraph. But more importantly, I feel appreciated in my experiences and also in my interactions with company representatives in my channels of relevance.
Consistency: As I trust Virgin America through the reinforcement of experiences and interactions, the fabric of my relationship with the company is woven in consistency. Communication, sales, service, policy, attitude, and representative behavior are all uniform across every Virgin America experience. I’ve yet to have such consistent service with any other airline, which is why I am loyal to Virgin America, as well as a vocal advocate.
Relevance: A mantra that you’ll hear time and time again throughout my work is the importance of relevance in engagement with the empowered customer. Again, this customer is at the center of their own egosystem. The connected customer is immune to generic attempts at engagement. If the information is personalized or material to their world, they’ll pay attention. If it’s designed to make them feel valued with a click to action integrated into the engagement, they just might take action. Relevance is the net a brand casts to lure customers into its culture and its story. Then, and only then, can we hope for advocacy.
Control: This is my favorite subject when discussing new consumerism, and it is the very thing that executives fear losing should they attempt engagement with the connected customer. The reality is that control was never theirs to lose, as they held only the reins to the semblance of it. Engaging, however, allows businesses to become part of the process and thus, take some control in shaping and steering the experiences of their customers. Also, customers enjoy the empowerment of control within the dynamics of business and customer relationships. To them, it was the least important, but still important element that they shared in the Liminal study. In the egosystem, the connected customer is in control of the relationships that they weave and how and when information and people (and businesses) swim into their social streams. To this genre of discerning customers, control is a switch they turn on and off when they decide to initiate engagement or are open to contact. But control is also a way for a brand to empower customers to become advocates. By putting them at the center of the experience, customers feel appreciated and as such, are appreciative in return. For example, one of Virgin America’s key value propositions is its in-flight entertainment network, Red. Red is one of the first truly on-demand systems deployed by any airline with which the customer can watch movies, videos, shows, talk to other passengers, play games, order food and drink, make playlists and listen to the music they want. Combine this with the in-flight Wi-Fi, and passengers feel compelled to tweet, update their Facebook status, and email friends to share the Virgin America experience.
The results of this research demonstrates a series of processes that every business will endure, studying the roles, needs, and connection points for connected customers. It only helps to get to know these customers, as doing so will inspire the shift from static business models to a more adaptive framework. The Liminal report introduces us to four customer engagement types. Let’s get to know them a little better.
THE END OF BUSINESS AS USUAL
AUTHOR: Brian Solis
PUBLISHER: Wiley India
PRICE: Rs 399
Reprinted with permission from Wiley India
