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Sharon McCarthy


DEMAND, CREATED

The Newsletter

Oct 2022

WELCOME

To the 200 new subscribers. Thanks for signing up!


Hi Sharon

Below is my latest monthly newsletter. I've changed the name to: Demand, Created. Here I'll provide insights on Growth Marketing, Innovation, and Strategic CX. 


Thanks in advance for reading it!

Sharon

MARKETING MOMENT

Reviving a Stale Brand -- Where to Start

It’s day one. You are now responsible for a brand you inherited. Year-over-year transactions are down, your team has been discounting to stimulate sales, and you’re not sure your customer understands how your brand is differentiated from its peers. Your brand is stale. 

Where do you start? First, get to know your brand, business, and team. Learn their strengths and weaknesses while optimizing your marketing plan's easy, tactical components. You may be tempted to tackle your brand first, but wait. Learn your business while earning those small wins that strengthen credibility with your stakeholders. Then build your brand, starting with the end in mind – a modern, relevant, brand. I developed a cheat sheet to guide you, The 7 Pillars of A Modern Brand.  READ MORE


THE 7 PILLARS OF A MODERN BRAND UPDATED

STRATEGIC CX

The Customer Has More Ways Than Ever to Contact You 

Which means this: chances are, your costs have skyrocketed and your customer experience is suffering. Where do you start?

  • Calculate a contact rate, the number of contacts per key driver or CPX. For an airline, CPX might be contacts per flight; for Amazon, its contacts per order.
  • CPX trends indicate whether these contacts are adding friction to the customer experience (CPX is increasing) or reducing it (CPX is decreasing).
  • You can hire me and my colleagues at Driva to improve your customer experience while slashing costs and increasing revenue. Or you can simply buy the book. The Frictionless                         Organization.

BE-SCI BITES

Behavioral Science Bites to Drive Revenue

THE OPPORTUNITY IN UNCERTAINTY

As humans, there is nothing more uncomfortable than uncertainty: we hate it. Uncertainty is the unconscious dread your customers can't even verbalize. And therein lies the opportunity. Your competition is blind to the upside in mitigating it because "uncertainty" doesn't often show up in a survey response. 


Uber believed the uncertainty was in the painful wait in the rain wondering if the cab will arrive. A James Bond movie inspired one of its founders to develop a UX to reduce that uncertainty. 


Amazon recognized the uncertainty customers had with package deliveries. So it sends text messages indicating how many stops away your package is and a photo of where it was delivered. 


A recent client had customer complaints with service requests. The problem was not in the efficacy of the service but in the uncertainty of the service team's arrival time and whether the problem was fixed when they left. I'll update you on their innovative response in a future blog post.


What if uncertainty was YOUR opportunity?  

Where's the uncertainty in your customer experience?


WATCH  Rory Sutherland's fascinating talk on The Magic of Original Thinking. Fast forward to 16:45-18:30 to hear just his take on Uber, James Bond, & uncertainty. 

MY NEWSLETTER HEADLINE TEST 

Humans vs A.I. - Go Humans!

AI guided the development of last month's newsletter headline. I compared the performance of it vs the headline I created in the prior month. Humans won. Last month's open rate from the AI headline was 64% or 5 points below the prior month. But there were many variables at play not accounted for by A.I. One is simply that the topics were different, so it wasn't exactly a clean test. But over time, we expect AI to get even better, says Anant Kumar, head of Driva's Analytics practice area, "as clean data becomes more available, compute capacity less expensive, and the skill at training these algorithms advances."

At Driva we use A.I. to develop predictive models, most recently for a Real Estate Investment Trust. They wanted our help predicting retention rates in apartments. The results were surprising and refuted long-held industry heuristics.

ABOUT ME

Consulting for Driva Solutions, Customer Experience Consulting for the World's Most Innovative Companies.

Driva clients include: Apple, Google, Tesla, and TMobile.


Personal Superpower: a growth mindset

Career Superpower: 3x success in middle-market turnarounds

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Sharon McCarthy

Demand, Created

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