The Most Hated Brand in Countries Around the World

 What brand do people complain about most in different countries around the world?

To find out, Merchant Machine evaluated tweets containing brand names for positive or negative tones using an AI sentiment analysis tool.

The researchers then determined the most hated brand for many countries based on the highest proportion of negative tweets.

An infographic (below) presents the findings of the analysis.

https://cutt.ly/R5GNMSJ

10 Lessons We Learned About Telling Customer Stories

NADIA BASIL

Does anyone really want to read another success story about how a software company changed a customer’s life?

But testimonials, case studies, and customer success stories are ubiquitous across industries. Everywhere you look, companies are investing in written testimonials and marketing videos to showcase how much better off a customer is after finding their product.

Surely there has to be value in sharing them.

Why bother telling customer success stories?

A few months ago, we began focusing on our customer stories. While attending industry conferences and hosting small in-person events, we’d heard interest from customers in learning about how other customers were using Help Scout. We were also hearing from customers about new ways they were using the product that we hadn’t evangelized before — like how their team was transitioning from a shared email inbox to a multiple mailbox approach, or was working with Zapier in creative ways to connect to other productivity tools like Asana.

While companies have marketing teams behind their websites, stories from the actual folks who are using the products bring these messages to light in a different way than traditional copy. “Customer stories help our prospects with three distinct things,” says Tim Thyne, Head of Sales and Partnerships at Help Scout.

In “Use Stories from Customers to Highlight Your Company’s Purpose,” Harvard Business Review’s Erica Keswin shares that these 

customer success stories can ultimately become part of your company’s mission statement 

:

“Stories make us all pay closer attention to what matters. Start paying attention to the stories unfolding in your organization, and figure out how to help the best ones spread. Because people have a lot to say, and if we’re smart, we’ll start listening.”

So the question of whether or not to tell customer success stories is solved: you should. Now — how do you move it from “See how we stay SaaS-y” to something people actually want to read?

10 lessons for telling customer success stories

Here’s what I’ve learned about how to tell a compelling customer story.

1. It’s not about you

Approaching the project of telling customer stories, I thought I was coming at it from the right angle. It was simple, really: Anyone who was reading these stories wanted to know how Help Scout could change their lives, too, right?

I prepared a set of questions that would serve as a guide through the interviews, such as:

• How do you use Help Scout’s workflows?
• What are your favorite features — @mentions, Tags, etc.?

But after a second look at how a few of the stories were shaping up, it was clear that approach wasn’t working. What was so wrong with it?

It’s that my toolkit was inherently biased. I was using these probing questions as a way to get answers out of customers quickly — I was grateful for their time and didn’t want to waste it — but the reality was, I was injecting my point of view by asking these types of questions.

While the solution and how the tool is used is definitely helpful — not talking about how the product is used at all isn’t helpful for anyone — 

when telling stories, there has to be a bigger focus on the customer 

.

2. Start with the customer’s mission

Instead of following customer problem + your solution = success story, 

think about how your company’s solution fits with the customer’s mission 

. Yes, this means the onus is on you to learn more about your customers.

A few questions to consider as you get started:

• What about this particular company’s background attracted them to Help Scout?
• What would perfect customer support look like?
• How can you draw a parallel in your company’s mission and the customer’s?

Take BeerMenus, for example: They help people find beers and browse menus for beer stores, restaurants and bars nearby. But aside from the functional elements, the company credits its success to doubling down on their core values: respect for small business owners and all customers, and, of course, love of beer. Our goal was to make sure these ideas were elevated in the opening of their story.

10 Lessons We Learned About Telling Customer Stories

3. Take thorough notes before developing themes

When a customer tells you their story, avoid the temptation to simultaneously create the story’s framework. Instead, concentrate first on meticulous note-taking. Then, for the second round, go through, pull the key themes, and see where the supporting facts fit.

If you’re trying to create the framework and final story as the customer is speaking, there’s the potential to exclude an “add on” item that the customer could later delve into — all because you’re focused on the framework in your mind, and subsequently modeling a story based on your ideal instead of the customer’s true story.

Hiten Shah, Co-Founder at Quick Sprout, shares how he approaches customer research interviews: 

Take thorough notes during the customer interview, then find the core themes within your notes. 

“It’s better to finish all the interviews before analyzing them. Why? By separating the interviewing and the analysis, you avoid spreading yourself too thin between two different tasks. And when you try to analyze what you hear while doing the interviews, it’s another way to introduce bias into your learnings. You also give yourself time to step away and let your mind subconsciously process the interviews, which will give you better results when you start analyzing later.”

4. Don’t throw out all templates just yet

While including features in your questions sometimes injects your own bias, that doesn’t mean you should toss out using an organizational template altogether.

After taking notes and identifying key themes from your interview with the customer, an outline is a great way to organize your content before editing, while still giving room to identify any areas that you’d like to follow up on and quickly see if there are any areas that are repetitive.

• Background — what’s the company mission?
• What does ideal customer support or customer service mean to you?
• How is Help Scout used?
• Any standout features or integrations?

5. Be comfortable with (some) silence

No, not to the point where you think a call has dropped — but remember that it might take a minute or two to remember the highlights they’ve had with your product.

Avoid filling the void with suggestions of what other customers have said — give them space to think it through! I made a personal note to do more of this during customer story writing. (And dating. But that’s for a different blog post.)

One of the biggest highlights of your piece might come as a comment about a previous thought. Listen for these details, and wait for them to form. When I was interviewing Director of Marketing and Business Development Diana Murray at ASAP Accounting and Payroll, for example, she started talking about Help Scout’s Saved Replies feature:

“The Saved Replies feature is really key in our world. We’re dealing with explaining very complex information like payroll data, or wage requirements, or laws.”

But then she turned to Docs:

“...and in addition to Saved Replies, the Help Center, ASAP’s Knowledge Base, has also been a huge time saver when communicating information repetitively. We currently store and update over 250 articles, from best practices articles, to new client transition, and general business resources.”

… which became a story about how both features have helped all areas of ASAP’s business succeed:

“We’ve gotten traffic from some of these best practice articles in search engines, which has led users back to our site. Having Help Scout has definitely had a ripple effect for us to succeed in all areas of our business.”

6. Complement written stories with visuals

Once the narrative is complete, see how else you can bring these stories to life, whether it’s imagery, supporting infographics, or video. If you don’t have an in-house team, video agencies and video production firms can team up with you to bring the customer story to life. (We love collaborating on marketing videos with Boston-based Video Pilgrim — in them, we’ve found an incredible partner who understands our company mission and can draw that out on film).

10 Lessons We Learned About Telling Customer Stories

If video isn’t an option, there’s still a ton you can do to humanize your success stories through photography and visuals. Content marketer Jeff Bullas shares that you should publish images and photos as part of marketing tactics — and that articles with images will get 94 percent more total views.

Here’s the shot list template we love to use whenever we’re sourcing the photography session, or as a guide when requesting photos from our customer:

2-4 posed portrait + landscape style images of the interviewee(s)

2-4 images of the interviewee(s) at work

2-3 shots of the interviewee(s) with their team

7. Follow up about specifics and metrics

Once you’ve nailed the elements of the piece — the top features the customer is addressing and the solutions they provide — you can start digging into where you need to follow up for more information. Coupling qualitative statements with metrics make them that much stronger.

Of course, the customer’s time is precious, so it’s great to do these in a single email or follow-up call. For example, during our customer calls with OnePageCRM and NW Maids, one of the recurring themes was that using Help Scout has made their teams more productive. The follow-up emails helped us assign quantitative metrics:

8. Keep content that didn’t make it into the story

At the start of every customer story, we feature a header image and quote, which can later be used as social promotion.

There’s also quite a bit of content and strong testimonials that might not make it to the customer story. Trying to cram everything into a story isn’t helpful — it becomes a laundry list of feature highlights with no narrative arc, and that’s dry to read. But don’t dismiss all that extra content altogether.

Change the framework from “oh-look-at-all-this-excess-copy” to “let’s-do-something-with-this-copy,” and extract more value from content you’ve already produced by experimenting with customer story promotion.

For our customer story on Threadless, we found more ways to share beyond the written testimonial, each highlighting different angles, like how to set up automated workflows to assign conversations:

9. Share customer stories with current customers

Customer case studies are great for potential customers who are looking through your site and curious to see how your product is being used. But there’s another audience who might not be leveraging the product the same way and could benefit from learning new use cases: your current customers.

We include snippets of customer stories in our monthly release notes, coupled with a link to an article on our Docs site, so we can share company backgrounds and use cases and provide additional information for folks who want to try and execute the same on their own.

10. Be grateful that this is part of your job

Hearing time and time again about how much your company is making a difference to people all over the world? It doesn’t get better than that.

So be generous with gratitude. These folks are taking the time out of their day to talk to you about how much they love your company. You get to showcase it to the world. And that’s pretty awesome.

Better Website Testing: Five Steps To Knowing What To Test

Website testing can help you figure out what’s actually converting, and what’s not, on your landing pages.

You spend all that time and effort optimizing and managing your PPC AdWords campaigns to drive targeted traffic to your site and landing pages, so take advantage and optimize for the conversion, too.

By testing out all the various parts of your website and landing pages you can end up with a well-designed and intentional converting machine, which can help you increase your business ROI.

We’ve partnered up with VWO to bring you these five website testing ideas so you can you start to optimize your landing pages today.

Set Your Optimization Goals

You’ve got a long list of things you want to test out and need to start attacking the items on the list, in order to optimize your landing pages.

Wondering what to test first?

Set your optimization goals and figure out which order to test your various components. There’s a handful of prioritization frameworks out there to choose from. Here are four of them:

1. PIE – Potential, Importance, Ease

This one’s pretty popular and measures: how much improvement can be made (potential), how valuable traffic is (importance), and how complex the testing will be (ease).

2. ICE – Impact, Confidence, Ease

There’s two ICE frameworks. This one helps you prioritize what to test first by: measuring the impact of the test (impact), confidence level in the test working (confidence), and how easy the test is to implement (ease).

3. ICE – Impact, Cost, Effort

The second ICE framework helps you prioritize by: measuring growth and company benefits (impact), determining the cost of implementing (cost), and understanding the amount of resources required to test (effort).

4. PXL – ConversionXL’s framework

Our friends at ConversionXL came up with their own prioritization framework, where they make the potential, impact and ease of implementation categories more objective.

By prioritizing your optimization tests, you can have a better idea of which optimization goals you want to test for and reach first.

Remember to match up your optimization goals with your overall business and revenue goals.

Improved click through rates and conversion rates can be beneficial but only if they contribute to improved revenue streams.

If the optimization process isn’t going to make you more money in the end, then  you may have missed the mark.

Identify What to Test

Drumming up a list of which items to test can be a tricky part of the process. This takes place even before prioritizing your test list.

VWO recommends testing out almost anything on your website that affects visitor behavior.

Here’s their recommended list of 12 things to test out:

1. Headlines – Is your headline explicit and clear?
2. Sub headers – Does your sub header further support your unique value proposition?
3. Body copy – How’s the paragraph text readability?
4. Testimonials – Are your testimonials accurate and realistic?
5. Call-to-action (CTA) copy – Does the CTA threat level match your audience intent?
6. Links – Are you shooting for a 1:1 attention ratio?
7. Images – Does your hero shot portray your offer benefit being used?
8. Content near the fold – Which is the best landing page length for your offer?
9. Social proof – Are your social proof numbers high enough to publish?
10. Media mentions – Does inclusion of media mentions build or hurt your credibility?
11. Awards and badges – By including awards and badges are you building trust?

There are numerous other things to test for to improve your conversion rates. For more ideas on usability testing, check out 27 usability testing tips to help you win more conversions.

By combing through all the various parts of your landing pages and determining which pieces of the landing page anatomy to test, you can uncover some items with pretty significant improvement potential.

A/B Test Your Website

With A/B split testing you can isolate one factor at a time to see which of two variants accumulates more conversions.

Here’s an example of what an A/B split test can look like, where you have two variants testing for the same thing. In this case, Novica is testing for which email capture format is optimal:

By conducting the A/B split test, Novica was able to find out the email capture in Version A had an overall 67% lift in email submissions over Version B.

Definitely worth the testing effort…

VWO suggests following these six steps when A/B testing:

1. Study your website data – By analyzing metrics within your Google Analytics reports, you can uncover insights that can point you in the right decision-making direction.

For example, an attribution report like this can debunk your judgments about visitors coming in from your PPC display ads:

Although the display ads didn’t bring in direct conversions, they definitely played a hefty role in assisting with conversions. Now you can dig deeper into your reports and find out more specific trends.

Use these stats to figure out which parts of your site are high-performing and which aren’t converting as well. Then use those issue areas as testing topics to hypothesize areas of needed improvement.

2. Observe user behavior – Usability testing can help you find out how real people are actually interacting with your websites. By moderating in-person or recording a remote session, you can observe your participants’ behavior and look out for any major bottlenecks that might stand out.

You can observe user behavior using three usability testing methods: moderated in-person, moderated remote, and unmoderated remote. Here’s what a moderated in-person session looks like:

You can observe and record the session to analyze later – image source

3. Construct a hypothesis – After checking out your Google Analytics stats and observing your users, you can come up with more specific ideas to test. Maybe there are certain hypotheses that come up just by analyzing the data you’ve gathered thus far. Hypothesize on any glaring stats first.

4. Test your hypothesis – This is the stage where you implement your A/B testing and create variants for your subjects to test out. Find out if your hypotheses are true or not.

To calculate the appropriate test duration for your monthly visitors, current conversion rate, and expected change in conversion rate, you can use VWO’s Bayesian calculator.

5. Analyze test data and draw conclusions – Collect the results from your A/B testing and decipher what all that gathered data means. You should have a much clearer picture of which variant will optimize your landing pages and website.

We have a winner – image source

6. Report results to all concerned – Sharing is caring, especially when it comes to internal squad members so share your reports and findings with those that need to be in the loop.

When team members from your marketing, IT, UX, UI are all clued in, you’re likely to all be on the same page and ready to move forward as a collective group.

Multivariate Testing for Combination of Variations

Let’s say you have numerous items and combinations of each that you want to test, but it just won’t work with A/B split testing.

No worries, multivariate testing is the way to go. Here’s how VWO draws it out for us:

Testing for headline and image combos – image source

You can test out combinations of different items that you want to test, and you can test it in one session.

This can help you save time by knocking out various test items in one fell swoop. Just be sure your website testing process is calculated, intentional and fits into your optimization goal.

Split URL Testing for Heavier Variations

To test out more broad variations of your website you can use split URL testing.

With a split URL campaign you can test multiple versions of your website hosted on various URLs.

With VWO’s split URL testing feature, you can have two landing pages for your website hosted on two different URLs and split the traffic between the two to find out which one converts better.

Here’s an illustration of what that could look like:

Testing two landing pages on two different URLs – image source

You can take it a step further and set conversion goals for things that you want to track on your page.

Here’s how you set it up in VWO’s dashboard – GIF source

Tracking things like page visits, engagements on a page, form submissions, click on links or elements, revenue generation and even custom conversions, can help you optimize your specific URLs even more.

Closing Thoughts

Now that you’re up to speed with optimizing goals and knowing what to test, you can try out A/B testing, multivariate and split URL testing for yourself.

By sticking to your goal plan and conducting your testing process diligently from start to finish, you should have the highest converting version of your website and landing pages.

Now get optimizing so you can bring in that ROI…

Cynthia Meyer

Content Marketing Manager

10 Signs of a Company That Really Cares About Customers

Did you know that there’s such a thing as International Clients’ Day? Although I’ve been in customer service for more than a decade, I first learned of it last week through a special offer email that I got in my inbox. Did you happen to hear about it too?

Whether or not, the fact is that this informal holiday has not been around for that long. Actually, it was proposed (and celebrated for the first time) by Lithuanian and Russian businessmen on March 19, 2010 as an opportunity to show gratitude to their customers. Since then, the occasion has been supported by many organizations and businesses in Western Europe, and it’s constantly expanding, with more companies joining the initiative year by year. Would you join the club too?

Isn’t It Nice?

I was surprised and amused to discover this interesting fact, and as I pondered over it, I began to realize that I definitely like the idea. Along with the discount offer on the special occasion, I got the acknowledgment of how much the company appreciates me as a loyal customer and that it cares about the relationship. For me, it’s certainly a good sign, important and valuable for further business relationship. Later on it served as an inspiration for my article, as I decided to extend on it a little bit.

In this post, I would like to speak about the signs that show a company cares about its customers in deed and not in name. I managed to come up with my own version of 10 things that are truly important for me as a customer. Take a read and let me know if you can find out a bit more!

What Do Companies That Really Care Have in Common?

1. Providing Easy-to-Access Customer Support Options

Today’s consumers expect that the process of contacting customer service is seamless and straightforward. Statistically, 83% of online customers require some degree of support to complete a purchase and 71% expect to be able to access help online within 5 minutes.

Top performing companies realize that their customer service channels should include many, if not all, of the options available today. Be it email, phone, Live Chat, social media channels, FAQs or self-service, companies that care about customers ensure their contact details and other relevant information can be easily found, all of the options are working properly, and agents are swiftly responding when their help is needed.

2. Being Obsessed with Customer Service Excellence

According to another research, 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service, and 40% are sure they will cease doing business with a company if they happen to experience it. That sounds too disturbing to ignore.

These days we witness high product availability, increasing choice options, and more competitive prices. Business competition has evolved into the challenge of building and maintaining exceptional customer experiences. Companies that stand apart recognize the importance of excellent customer service for keeping customers feeling positive and happy about their experiences with the brand.

3. Constantly Striving to Know Customers Better

Today’s consumers are much more demanding if compared to what they used to be a while ago. 72% of them now expect a customer service representative to know their contact details, product information and service history as soon as they get in touch with support.

Knowing your customer is an essential key to business success. Without this knowledge, you just won’t have the information needed to make the right decisions about pricing, marketing and almost any other aspect of running your business. As market landscape is evolving, and social media and many other resources allow companies to connect with their customers on a personal level, true customer care implies going all out to know customer expectations and tend to their needs.

4. Living In Customers’ Shoes

Stepping into customers’ shoes is all about being able to see a situation from another’s perspective, understand how a customer feels at each particular stage of their journey and provide tailored solutions based on the situation. Closely related to the notion of empathy, this skill enables employees to communicate better with customers and address the emotional side of customer interactions.

There is a brilliant quote by Marsha Collier that reads: Customer service can’t always deliver solutions, but it can always deliver empathy. Companies that lead the pack recognize the importance of emotional connection and train their staff to listen to customers’ verbal and non-verbal communication to come up with tailored solutions right on the spot.

5. Willing to Go an Extra Mile

Majority of companies offer staff training to make sure everyone knows basic procedures to follow in standard situations. While having clear policies and procedures is important to make sure everyone is one the same page about applying them, it’s also critical to encourage and empower employees to take decisions on their own.

This might include breaking the rules and flexibly using employee creativity for rewarding customer experiences. Companies that empower their staff to go above and beyond for great customer satisfaction know its worth. They do not tie their employees with scripted scenarios and encourage staff to use their unique personality to serve their customers the best way possible.

6. Rewarding Customer Loyalty

Companies focused merely on attracting new customers could be in trouble. Regular customers admit they feel frustrated and left out as they observe businesses shouting out heavy discounts and juicy offers only to attract new customers. Buying growth through discounts and promotions while not caring much about longtime relationship and rewarding customer loyalty can do more harm, actually. According to a research carried out by The Grass Roots Group, about 49% of consumers even consider switching loyalties if a provider’s special offers are only available to new customers. Those businesses that survive and prosper, build their strategy based on fostering customer loyalty and do so with great reward.

7. Taking Care of Internal Customers

It goes without saying that customers are your most important assets, and deserve to have the best service and experience you are able to provide. However, what sometimes goes unnoticed is that the same applies to the people inside your organization, often referred to as its ‘internal’ customers. And that stands for a reason. In fact, company’s employees are an equally important resource. The way they approach customers clearly reflects the way they themselves are treated. Companies that treat their staff like gold, make them feel valuable and important, enjoy better employee performance and higher customer satisfaction rates.

8. Acknowledging the Importance of Customer Service Roles

We often hear that these days customer service is no longer just a department within an organization, but rather an attitude behind the entire company culture and strategy. Companies that realize how important customer service is for their business, adopt the “everyone does customer service” approach. They reinforce excellent performance by stressing the significance of jobs that involve interaction with customers.

9. Treating Leaving Customers Right

When a customer decides to stop doing business with you, whatever the reasons behind the decision, it’s better to leave the door open. There’s still a huge probability (20% to 40%) of successfully selling to those who left at some point if you manage to cope with it professionally and positively. Companies that truly care about their customers find ways to softly ask for feedback, express regret and stay in touch.

10. Keeping Customers Informed

Whether it’s good news or bad, your customers deserve timely, open and honest communication. It is critical to keep them informed about your company innovations and events to justify their trust and gain more credibility.

Truth be known, there are too many follow-up communications like auto-replies, post-sale surveys and special offers, largely left unopened and unread. Yet it’s absolutely imperative to proactively inform your customers about product recalls involving safety issues or product defects, as well as changes in pricing and other significant terms. Those businesses who really care do their best to reach out to their customers with relevant information and pass it via all the communication channels available – to make sure the important message got through.

•  by Julia Lewis