This document summarizes different approaches to real-time relevancy and customer experiences. It discusses four types of real-time relevancy programs: reactive relevancy using social media responses, circumstantial relevancy providing assistance when needs arise, behavioral relevancy targeting assistance to specific customer actions, and location relevancy tailoring offers to customer locations. It provides examples of companies using these approaches successfully, such as a real estate firm generating leases from Twitter responses. Throughout, it advocates for focusing on being useful to customers rather than hype by delivering timely, relevant assistance.

1. Masters of CX
Winning Hearts
in Real-Time
♥ By Jay Baer
New York Times
bestselling author
Published by Econsultancy in association with Offerpop

2. Winning Hearts in Real-Time / Jay Baer
Customers are
facing an invitation
avalanche...
Companies of all sizes and descriptions ask them to like, share, comment,
follow, click and view. Combined with the constant barrage of messages
inherent in an always-on world, it’s easy to see why fatigue sets in, and
consumers simply tune out.
The way for businesses to succeed in this exhausting, hyper-competitive environment is to
stop trying to be amazing, and start being useful. After all, we crave useful things.
In the book Contagious, Wharton Business School professor Jonah Berger describes a
research project he and his class undertook whereby they analyzed every New York Times
article (online edition) for a six-month period. They found that useful articles were forwarded
30% more than average. Of course they are! Everyone wants to be useful. Our friends are
useful (for the most part). Your company can be useful in the same way, and use that as a
competitive differentiator.
That’s the core premise of my book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is about Help not Hype.

3. There are many ways that companies
can be useful, but one of the optimal
approaches is be useful in real-time.
Smart companies are improving customer
experiences by providing on-the-fly
assistance and offers that don’t feel like
marketing, but rather like a helping hand.
We must recognize that ultimately, great
customer experiences are great because
they are relevant.
When you provide a customer experience
that is disproportionately useful or delightful
or cherished or worthy of praise, those
outcomes are because that customer
experience is hyper-relevant and valuable.
Interacting with customers in real-time, often
through mobile and out-of-home, may be
the best way to produce that differentiating
relevancy.
Many companies of all shapes and sizes
across the B2B and B2C spectrums are
experimenting with real-time relevancy and
Youtility. Here we’ll focus on four variations
of these programs: Reactive Relevancy,
Circumstantial Relevancy, Behavioral
Relevancy, and Location Relevancy.
Reactive Relevancy –
Conversational Usefulness
The concept of reactive relevancy is a
relatively new one, given that its viability is
largely driven by Twitter and other social
venues where questions can be posed and
answers provided in a near-synchronous
fashion. Certainly, discussion boards, forums,
and even review sites like TripAdvisor, have
some of the same underpinnings but they
lack the speed and “hey, I didn’t expect that”
nature of truly reactive relevancy.
To engage in reactive relevancy, companies
(or individuals) closely monitor social media
for particular keywords and phrases and then
tactfully jump in to proactively assist people
making inquiries. At its core, this is strategic
eavesdropping. And it works.
Holli Beckman is the Vice President of
Marketing and Leasing Operations for WC
Smith, a Washington, D.C. headquartered
real estate developer and property
management firm that oversees more than
10,000 units in the region.
Holli also owns Apartminty.com, an
apartment-hunting consultancy that helps
locate apartments for clients across the
United States. Holli writes a comprehensive
and useful blog on Apartminty about all things
apartments.
She knows the apartment locating business,
and realizes that it’s far from easy.
“Everyone complains about apartment
hunting,” says Holli. “If you just type that
search term into Twitter, you’ll see. It’s
incredible. No one’s enjoying the experience.”
Recognizing that if someone was taking the
time to complain about apartments on Twitter,
their need was both acute and present, Holli
set out to take as much pain as possible out
of the process, and generated more than 100
leads for Apartminty within 30 days, all from
Twitter.
80%
Currently define
“real-time” as the
ability to respond
within two minutes.
But 88% of marketers say
they aren’t fast enough.
Read more in Econsultancy’s
Real-Time Marketing Report
ecly.co/XWXNsd

4. Twitter response stats
53% of customers who ask a brand a question
on Twitter expect a response within one hour.
But if they’re making a complaint, that figure
goes up to 72%.
If companies don’t respond within that hour,
38% of people feel more negatively towards the
brand, and a 60% will take action against the
brand using social media.
Therefore, response time is more important
with each passing day, as consumers
increasingly take to social media to name and
shame brands.
// Read more on the Econsultancy blog: ecly.co/1tWPKrR

5. “In two months, we generated six confirmed leases
from my interactions on Twitter. Total lease amounts
of approximately $144,000”
Holli Beckman,
Vice President of Marketing and Leasing Operations, WC Smith
“I just started offering help. If someone complained “My roommate
sucks” or “I can’t find a good roommate,” I would tweet them and
point them to a blog post we had already written about that,” says
Holli. “But then I started tweeting more open-ended responses
like: “Hey, I saw that you’re
overwhelmed. It can be
overwhelming. If you need
any assistance, let me know.”
And people responded
immediately to that.
To people complaining about
apartment hunting in the
Washington, D.C. area, Holli
responded empathetically
and quickly from her WC
Smith Twitter account,
with similar results. “In two
months, we generated
six confirmed leases from
my interactions on Twitter.
Total lease amounts of
approximately $144,000,”
says Holli.
In another example, in 2011 Ben and Jerry’s wanted to run a
campaign that raised awareness of that year’s World Fair Trade Day.
The company noticed that many Twitter users do not use the full 140
characters allocated to each tweet. This prompted it to create an
application that allowed consumers to send tweets from its website,
and any space remaining was used to automatically add a message
about Fair Trade produce.
Over a two-week period, Fair Tweets picked up 40m impressions,
went out to 12m Twitter users, and was featured in 1,300 blogs and
newspapers.
40 million
impressions
Went out to
12 million
Twitter users
Featured
across
1,300
blogs and
newspapers

6. Circumstantial Relevancy – When
You Need It, You Need It
There is no courtship, ramp up, or slow
build with real-time relevancy. You’re either
sufficiently useful at any given moment, and
can connect with the customer, or you’re not.
It’s customer experience in the blink of an
eye.
Once you have new glasses, your ability
to get questions about them answered by
Warby Parker (the e-tailer that is disrupting
the optical business partially by answering
customer questions instantly on Youtube and
Twitter) becomes
a less-fulfilling
proposition.
Until, one day,
you need new
glasses again,
and then you’ll
know where to
turn. Meanwhile,
they have your
money from the
first purchase
and are patiently
waiting for your
needs to re-align with their usefulness.
Like an endless game of informational hide
and seek, circumstantial real-time relevancy
consists of popping out from behind a tree to
assist when necessary, then fading back into
the woods waiting for the next opportunity.
Columbia Sportswear, a Portland, Oregon-based
manufacturer and retailer of outdoor
wear and gear, knows a lot about woods,
and an equal amount about circumstantial
relevancy. The company has a useful and
free mobile application called “What Knot
to Do in the Greater Outdoors.” As you’ve
probably guessed, it provides detailed
instructions for how to tie dozens of knots,
including which to use when. With little
marketing support, it was downloaded
351,000 times in its first 20 months of
existence, and is so relevant it’s even
creating circumstances for use, as described
in this review from the iTunes App Store:
“I went out and bought a rope so I
could try my hand at these knots.
Now I’m looking forward to the
next time I go camping so I can
display my knot-knowledge to the
other guys.”
Chris496
According to Adam Buchanan, the Social
Media Manager at Columbia when the app
was released, the company conducted
research and found it is very common for
outdoor enthusiasts to carry smartphones on
excursions. “Customers regularly report using
the camera, GPS, and music features of their
devices while in the field, in addition to its
obvious use as a phone,” says Adam.
It makes perfect sense. If you need to
remember how to tie a knot, being able to
recall that information with the assistance
351,
000
Downloads within
20 months.
“What Knot to Do in the
Greater Outdoors” app

7. of a mobile device is far more practical and
reasonable than accessing that information
through other methods.
Of course even the merchant marines aren’t
tying knots all the time. That’s what makes
this program a circumstantially relevant
customer experience. If you need to know
how to tie a knot, Columbia Sportswear has
a solution for you. If you’re not presently in
knot-tying mode, that’s okay, the app will stay
on your mobile device, ready to produce real-time
helpfulness when you need it do so.
What’s particularly interesting about the knot
app, however, is that Columbia Sportswear
doesn’t sell rope, or knots,
or anything of the sort.
But based on its research,
Columbia understood the
correlation between its
outdoors-loving customers,
and the need to tie a
good knot now and again.
And when you use that
application, Columbia
Sportswear is inserting
its brand into your life in
a circumstance where
otherwise they probably
would be wholly absent.
This is the power of using
real-time relevancy to
transcend the transaction
– to provide something
of value that isn’t your
products and services,
per se.
Behavioral Relevancy – Just Do It
(So We Can Help You)
Real-time relevancy that relies on behavior is
perhaps the easiest way to construct a great
customer experience because the behavior
itself provides so many cues about intent and
need and purpose. The behavior creates a
temporal market segment called “people who
are engaged in this action, right now.” And of
course, mobile devices are one of the best
ways to mine for behavior, because apps
and certain elements of the mobile web are
ONLY used during that particular behavior.
People don’t check movie show times on
a phone unless they are pretty far into the
consideration set for going to the movies. The
behavior creates a targeted audience, and
mobile is the segmentation cleaver.
But, behavioral relevancy is also the most
difficult form of real-time relevancy with which
to actually make an impact on customer
experience. This is because customers are
usually already accustomed to performing
these actions in a particular way, and
anything that tries to be inserted into that
routine needs to be a far, far better customer
experience to be bothered with at all.
Behavioral relevancy must cause behavior
change during activities that may have
become rote. You probably have a particular
way that you look up movie show times on
your mobile device (and there are about 20
ways to do so). How could a company create
a customer experience that would cause
you to fundamentally shift your behavior,
incorporating them into your flow?
The diaper company Huggies figured this
out. Perhaps not for movie times, but for a
behavior that’s perhaps even more routine…
changing diapers.
Test marketed in Brazil, Huggies created the
Tweet Pee device and companion mobile
app. The former is a moisture-sensor, shaped
not unlike Twitter’s logo, that clips to a diaper
in the region most likely to accumulate
wetness. When the sensor detects wetness
it sends a Twitter direct message to the app
user (presumably a parent or caregiver) to
alert them. Amazing!
When the sensor
detects wetness it
sends a Twitter direct
message to the app
user to alert them.
Amazing!

8. But that’s not all. The system also tracks
diaper usage and includes the ability to order
more diapers from inside the app.
While the Tweet Pee system has not been
rolled out widely, it demonstrates how an
app that adds real relevancy (real-time
alerts and supply chain/ordering capabilities)
could cause behavior change, even with a
mundane and oft-repeated task like diaper
changing.
Location Relevancy – We Know
Where You Are and What You Need
Because mobile devices are consistently
providing a steady stream of location
information for use in mapping apps, weather
apps, and even social media content
creation (if geo-location features are turned
on), location relevancy is perhaps the most
pervasive form of real-time relevancy at
present.
Many brands seek to improve customer
experiences by mining location and providing
relevant information correspondingly.
Charmin’s “Sit or Squat” mobile application
recommends clean restrooms in the United
States based on crowd-sourced data (which
seems like a huge partnership opportunity
with Tweet Pee).
Not available on a mobile device, but still
location-driven (by entering your postal code
into a web application) is Achoo from Kleenex
brand facial tissue, which uses your location
and a Google data API to predict how likely
you are to catch a cold or influenza within the
next three weeks.
A particularly creative form of real-time
relevancy through location comes from the
board game Scrabble, which provides free
Wi-Fi in several areas of Paris, but only if
potential bandwidth users first unscramble
letters. The more points they score, the more
free minutes of Wi-Fi they receive.
What a terrific way to provide a stunning
customer experience, and keep your
brand top-of-mind simultaneously. And like
Columbia Sportswear, Scrabble does so
without talking about their product directly. It’s
helpful first, and a brand message second.
The Scrabble campaign won a Gold Mobile
Lion at the Cannes advertising festival in
2013.
♥
86%
Of marketers agree
that consumers
expect them to
know where they
are and what
they are doing,
to provide a
more relevant
experience.
Read more in Econsultancy’s
Real-Time Marketing Report
ecly.co/XWXNsd

9. It’s About Help Not Hype
Today’s customers are being bombarded by
messages and invitations and opportunities
at an unprecedented rate. Internet advertising
is set to increase its share of the ad market
from 18% in 2012 to 23.4% in 2015, and
overtake television spending by 2017. Yet
54% of online ads are not even viewed by
consumers. Brands that seek to succeed in
this environment through sheer volume and
by shouting ever louder are doomed to fail as
consumers turn an increasingly deaf ear to
those pleas and appeals.
Instead we find more and more examples
of brands embracing the paradox that the
less you sell, the more you sell. Consumers
respond to help, and relevance, and a truly
great customer experience. Many of the best
of these experiences are delivered in real-time
(or nearly so).
Brands have a choice. They can choose to
engage in the pushy marketing approaches
that have been stuffed down consumers’
throats for a century or choose instead to
provide marketing that customers actually
WANT to receive.
Whether it’s Reactive, Circumstantial,
Behavioral, or Location-based relevancy, the
tools are there, today, to deliver something
useful, even wonderful, to customers.
I hope you have the courage and the support
to try it in your own organization.
// Jay Baer
Internet advertising stats
Internet advertising is set to
increase its share of the ad market
from 18% in 2012 to 23.4% in 2015,
and overtake television spending
by 2017.
Yet 54% of online ads are not even
viewed by consumers.
// Read more in Econsultancy’s Advertising
Statistics Compendium: ecly.co/1poocp0

10. About the Masters of CX Published by Econsultancy in association with Offerpop
The Masters of CX series features true marketing thinkers
and industry heavyweights, covering the issues surrounding
your customer experience approach and strategy.
These unique reports will be published between October
and December 2014, along with two dedicated webinar
sessions where you can gain first-hand insight from the
authors on the key issues raised.
We’re delighted to be working with some of the most
influential authors within digital marketing.
Reports in the series include:
Winning Hearts in
Real-time
by Jay Baer
Influence the Influencers
- The Magic of Co-Created
Content
by Lee Odden
Beyond the Sale: Building
Customer Relationships
for Life
by Brian Clark
Empower your Employees
to Power your Customer
Experience
by Ted Rubin
Customer Loyalty
Lessons from Medieval
Times
by Mark Schaefer
Why Brands are Stuck on
Like and Failing at Love
by Mitch Joel
Find out more about the authors and reports at
hello.econsultancy.com/masters-of-cx and
join the discussion using #MastersofCX
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