Member communication is necessary to maintain engagement and top-of-mind awareness. Is a monthly newsletter sufficient? Consider these points from Customerthink.com. The amount, frequency and recency of activities are all important. Treating your members right for max engagement means sending just the right amount of activity invites. Too few and they forget who you are, too many and they feel you are not treating them with kindness. The right amount tends to be around 4-6 times per month. Humans are creatures of habit, so setting a regular cadence is also important (setting expectations). visit www.memberallegiance.com for more ideas on member engagement.
1. Make it Real
Creating a highly engaged community first starts with realizing you are in a relationship – with each and every member of your community. Think about your significant other, your Mother, your child, your best friend… what makes that relationship work well? (assuming it works well!)
Trust. Kindness. Open Communication. Setting Expectations. Admitting when you are wrong.
2. Content is King
Content throughout the community needs to be thoughtful and interesting. Otherwise, why would someone bother to read it? or to participate?
The content you write for the community website is critical – this is the place your members call ‘home’ and you need to give them a reason to keep coming back. Share, share, share information – about your company, about your brand, about how the last survey they did made an impact on the business. 73% of members join your research community because they enjoy taking part in surveys and want to know they are making a difference in how you develop your products and services. I hear this often “but we can’t share because the information is private – we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag ahead of the campaign, no spoilers, etc.”. I totally get it, there are ways around this: add a few questions to the end of a survey where the information is important but can be shared, do a survey just for the members where the information collected isn’t going to jeopardize anything, and finally, share the information after the critical campaign is over -it’s not too late.
3. Offer the right Incentive Program
If you must ask your members to participate in something boring, or lengthy, then be sure to offer the right extrinsic incentive. One entry into a draw to maybe win 100 bucks is not going to cut it for a 30 minute survey on the topic of widgets. Same for qualitative reports, if you want members to spend 3 hours of their time each week taking pictures while shopping, spending 20 minutes on an online diary every night and then participating in a 30 minute discussion, it will be important to pay them for their valuable time. Even your Mom wouldn’t participate in all that without some incentive (I know I wouldn’t!) The rule of thumb is think about how much time you are asking of your member and then provide an incentive appropriate for that length of time.
4. “Just Right” Timing
The amount, frequency and recency of activities are all important. Treating your members right for max engagement means sending just the right amount of activity invites. Too few and they forget who you are, too many and they feel you are not treating them with kindness. The right amount tends to be around 4-6 times per month. Humans are creatures of habit, so setting a regular cadence is also important (setting expectations). Create a calendar of events so you stay on a schedule.
5. Communicate using Next Generation Tools (platform)
Finally, you need the right community tools to be able to build an online relationship with members and ultimately benefit from a highly engaged and active community. There are many new tools out there – most platforms can’t do it all, so choose the platform that fits the majority of your needs, then supplement for the rest. Is your community more quantitatively focused? Then you need a platform with a killer database, survey and reporting tool. More qualitatively focused? Then you need a platform that can not only handle in-depth online discussions, but also has features that allow members to interact with one another and that can categorize members into status levels – so you can track how active they are and reward them appropriately. An ability to manage extrinsic rewards is often forgotten, but essential – can the platform handle points programs? Regardless of qualitative or quantitative needs, a platform that can be customized to your brand and to make members feel welcome and invited is most important.
Understanding The Customer Beats Lowering Prices
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In their new book, The Intuitive Customer, authors Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton contend that companies experiencing plateaus in their Net Promoter Scores cannot combat declining customer loyalty by cutting prices and focusing on cost.
“Understanding why customers do what they do allows you to predict what they will do next,” the authors write. They identify three key precepts:
- Customers are people, not hyper-rational automatons, and their decisions — even the seemingly rational ones — are often driven by emotions.
- We need to understand the psychology of why people do things if we are going to anticipate them and serve them better.
- People don’t buy just based on price; buying decisions are far more complex than going with the cheapest option.
Being able to predict customer behavior opens opportunities to sell by designing an experience that leads customers down a particular path to buy – where buying isn’t a natural decision, it’s an intuitive one, like driving on auto-pilot.
Apple, Zappos and Mandarin Oriental hotels are companies the authors cite as leaders in establishing customer memory.
A customer experience is a customer’s perception of their rational, physical, emotional, subconscious, and psychological interaction with any part of an organization. These perceptions influence customer behaviors and build memories, which drive customer loyalty and thereby affect the economic value an organization generates.
Organizations the authors describe as “flat-earthers” look at customer experience from the rational and physical perspective — focusing on how quickly a delivery is made or how quickly a phone call is answered, or the objective quality of the product.
The authors contend that more than 50% of customer experience is about how a customer feels.
Here are the seven imperatives for moving to the next level of customer experience, as defined by the authors.
- Recognize that customers decide emotionally and justify rationally.
- Embrace the all-encompassing nature of customers’ irrationality.
- Understand that customers’ minds can be in conflict with themselves.
- Commit yourself to understanding and predicting customer habits and behaviors.
- Uncover the hidden causes and unintended consequences of customers wanting things to be easy.
- Accept that apparently irrelevant aspects of your customer experience are sometimes the most important aspects.
- Realize that the only way to build customer loyalty is through customers’ memories.
In a preface to the book, Glenn Laverty, president and CEO of Ricoh Canada, says it raised its Net Promoter Score by 34 points in 30 months through a combination of factors, which included:
- Sharing the customer experience vision with the entire team — including HR, IT and Finance — up and down the organization, regardless of title and position.
- Introducing a compensation structure tying pay directly into customer focus.
This has translated into a 10% year-over-year sales increase for the past 10 years, reduced customer churn and increased market share.
For more ideas contact, kevin@memberallegiance.com
- Pay and promote a patronage dividend – One of the best ways to remind your members they are owners and not simply customers is to pay an annual dividend based on member participation. The amount of the dividend per member is less important than the act. And make a big deal about the patronage dividend by sending a personal letter from the CEO and enclose a check to every member. In the letter remind them they own their credit union and cooperative and how unique that relationship is in today’s business world.
- Board term limits – regular turnover at the board level will increase member awareness about the value of democratic control in your credit union/cooperative. Plus your new board members will generate fresh ideas.
- Lead with your WHY – It is not WHAT you do that is important to people, it is WHY you do it that people care about. Your members will have strong, warm feelings about your credit union/cooperative when they understand your WHY. If you are not sure what I mean, click this url to view Simon Sinek’s TED Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sioZd3AxmnE as he describes the decision-making process all people share.
- Educate staff about cooperatives – Every employee is a representative of your credit union and cooperative. They should be knowledgeable about the cooperative business model and why it is important to members and the local community.
- Change your web site home page – Place your Why on your web site home page. The first experience a visitor to your web site should have is a heartfelt story related to your Why.
- Adopt technology for governance – Make it as easy as possible for interested members to get involved in your credit union/cooperative. Post and email Board meeting notes and decisions to your members following every meeting. Make it easy to vote in board elections by using printed ballots, email replies, and mobile voting apps. Use a video conferencing service to record and archive your board meetings.
Net Promoter Score Should Not Be The Only Measure
