A Brand Reputation Metric: The Customer Effort Score
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A Brand Reputation Metric: The Customer Effort Score
Digital Marketing News: Advertising, AI, Content Marketing, Search, Social Media, Society & MUSIC MONDAY!
Dom Nicastro at CMSWire has published a thorough article about the Customer Effort Score (CES), a customer experience metric that helps determine the degree of effort a customer exerts to complete a specific task with a brand.
The purpose of CES is to improve the customer experience (CX) by indentifying areas for CX improvement and therefore, one would imagine, customer satisfaction.
CES is often used in conjunction with other customer-specific metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Churn Rate (CCR).
All of these are reputation metrics:
The Net Promoter Score measures the likelihood a customer will recommend an organization or brand to someone else,
The Customer Satisfaction Score asks just that: How satisfied a customer is with a given brand experience, and
Customer Curn Rate measures the degree to which you’re losing customers.
CES scores are collected by surveying customers afer they’ve completed the task in question with a Likert scale [PDF], a numbered scale such as that used with the Net Promoter Score
or a happiness scale that simply uses emoticons with an angry expression, a neutral expression or a happy expression.
All of these tactics for capturing the satisfaction with customer experience are dependent upon customer response.
You’ll need enough customers to give you feedback to provide meaningful data and customers are not always truthful, intentionally or not.
Additionally, context and the language of your survey questions can influence customer responses.
While these are common tactics and work well enough, where possible I’d couple them with digital metrics to more fully capture the reputation of your customer experience.
These can include:
Rage clicks
Task path abandonment
Time to task completion
An excellent tool to use in understanding digital customer experiences is session recording services where you can watch the cursor movements of actual website or app users.
Digital Marketing News
Advertising
Axios - Scoop: Branded content tools coming to Threads - Instagram's branded content tools aren't currently available on Threads. But a source told Axios that Instagram is working to quickly make them available, which would give marketers an opportunity to begin experimenting with paid promotion, while advertising is still unavailable.
It sounds like Threads needs to reach a billion users before Meta rolls out proper advertising for the platform. Count me as skeptical it will take that long.
AI
The Verge - OpenAI’s DALL-E will train on Shutterstock’s library for six more years - Shutterstock is extending its partnership with OpenAI for six more years, allowing the AI company to train its models using Shutterstock’s sprawling library of images, videos, music, and metadata during that time.
I don’t think anyone’s told them that this is just likely to result in stock photo-y AI generated images.
PetaPixel - Real Photo Disqualified From Photography Contest For Being AI - Suzi Dougherty had captured a striking photo of her son with two smartly-dressed mannequins in an intriguing pose while visiting a Gucci exhibition. Happy with her creation, she entered it into a photo competition.
Dougherty didn’t think much more of it until a friend showed her an Instagram post declaring her photo ineligible because the competition’s organizers suspected it to be an AI image.
The first actual, documented instance I’ve seen of a phenomenon we’re going to be seeing much more of: Questioning everyday reality.
Google - Introducing NotebookLM - NotebookLM is an experimental product designed to use the power and promise of language models paired with your existing content to gain critical insights, faster. Think of it as a virtual research assistant that can summarize facts, explain complex ideas, and brainstorm new connections — all based on the sources you select.
A key difference between NotebookLM and traditional AI chatbots is that NotebookLM lets you “ground” the language model in your notes and sources. Source-grounding effectively creates a personalized AI that’s versed in the information relevant to you.
I’m really excited about NotebookLM’s potential, given how much research and writing I do. I joined the waitlist. I’ll write a review once I have a chance to take it out for a spin.
Harvard Business Review - How to Train Generative AI Using Your Company’s Data - Leveraging a company’s propriety knowledge is critical to its ability to compete and innovate, especially in today’s volatile environment. Organizational Innovation is fueled through effective and agile creation, management, application, recombination, and deployment of knowledge assets and know-how. However, knowledge within organizations is typically generated and captured across various sources and forms, including individual minds, processes, policies, reports, operational transactions, discussion boards, and online chats and meetings. As such, a company’s comprehensive knowledge is often unaccounted for and difficult to organize and deploy where needed in an effective or efficient way.
Emerging technologies in the form of large language and image generative AI models offer new opportunities for knowledge management, thereby enhancing company performance, learning, and innovation capabilities.
This is an issue that has driven me crazy my entire career. From my experience as a strategic communications professional, email is where knowledge goes to die. The expertise, knowledge, advice and wisdom you share via email typically is sent to one person and that’s where it stays. What if I could turn my sent folder into a chatbot that others internally or externally could benefit from?
Washington Post - FTC investigates OpenAI over data leak and ChatGPT’s inaccuracy - The FTC’s demands of OpenAI are the first indication of how it intends to enforce those warnings. If the FTC finds that a company violates consumer protection laws, it can levy fines or put a business under a consent decree, which can dictate how the company handles data. The FTC has emerged as the federal government’s top Silicon Valley cop, bringing large fines against Meta, Amazon and Twitter for alleged violations of consumer protection laws.
The FTC called on OpenAI to provide detailed descriptions of all complaints it had received of its products making “false, misleading, disparaging or harmful” statements about people. The FTC is investigating whether the company engaged in unfair or deceptive practices that resulted in “reputational harm” to consumers, according to the document.
Good. In case you missed it:
Axios - AP strikes news-sharing and tech deal with OpenAI - The news industry is grappling with ways to best leverage artificial intelligence to improve output, while also protecting its work from being used to train AI algorithms without permission or compensation.
Fascinating. You may not have known this, but The Associated Press and other news organizations have been automating content production long before the advent of generative AI.
Vox - Even the scientists who build AI can’t tell you how it works - So there’s two connected big concerning unknowns. The first is that we don’t really know what they’re doing in any deep sense. If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside, you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second, and we just have no idea what any of it means. With only the tiniest of exceptions, we can’t look inside these things and say, “Oh, here’s what concepts it’s using, here’s what kind of rules of reasoning it’s using. Here’s what it does and doesn’t know in any deep way.” We just don’t understand what’s going on here. We built it, we trained it, but we don’t know what it’s doing…The other big unknown that’s connected to this is we don’t know how to steer these things or control them in any reliable way. We can kind of nudge them to do more of what we want, but the only way we can tell if our nudges worked is by just putting these systems out in the world and seeing what they do. We’re really just kind of steering these things almost completely through trial and error.
Sobering read. Kinda makes algorithmic transparancy and ideas like a National Algroithmic Safety Board I’ve been on about irrelevant.
Content Marketing
- The world’s oldest content marketing campaigns - …when a tyre company produced what is arguably the most famous content marketing campaign of all time, without consumers even knowing that it is one.In the 1890s the Michelin brothers, André and Édouard, founders of the Michelin tyre company, faced a conundrum. How could they convince people to embrace this new mode of transportation called the automobile? Because if they were able to, their tire company would do really, really well.
As they thought of ideas, they realised that for the automobile to truly take off, people needed more than just reliable tires; they needed enticing destinations. They needed somewhere to go to. And what do the French want to travel beyond their own towns for? Food, of course.
And so, they created a guide that would not only give directions to motorists but also inspire them to explore the culinary treasures of France.
I did not know this story! Very clever.
Search Engine Journal - Bluehost Unveils AI-Powered WordPress Platform - Bluehost announced the rollout of a suite of six capabilities that create a workflow for quickly and easily launching a website or store using WordPress.
This looks like a product intended to make it easier for startups to quickly spin up a website. But the incorporation of AI into content management systems like WordPress is pretty exciting.
Several years ago I tried to sell a bank that catered specifically to small businesses on redesigning its website in a hyper-personalized fashion so that the website itself would take into account the behavior of individual visitors and would essentially redesign itself so it was customized to that individual visitor. It would take into account content consumption from previous visits to more display content tailored to that user during subsequent visits. The client didn’t bite due to the price tag, but it should be fairly trivial to incorporate this idea into websites using generative AI.
The other idea is that websites with a large archive of historical content may just turn into chatbots with a specific knowledge domain focus. I’ve been writing about digital communications since 1994. If I could train a generative AI on my content, I could create a site that could allow anyone to more easily tap into what wisdom I may have shared.
Search
SEO Roundtable - Google Might Not Showing Your Site Name Over A Confidence Issue - Google introduced the site name feature last October for mobile and last March for desktop search. Did you know that sometimes Google might not show a site's site name in search if it doesn't have enough confidence in the name?
Do a brand-name search, quick!
Social Media
The Conversation - The deinfluencing trend reflects a growing desire for authenticity online - In a recent paper, my colleagues and I examined over 440,000 YouTube comments from 2011 to 2021 and found an increase in conversations about sustainable fashion.
The deinfluencing movement is positioned at this intersection, contrasting sharply with the traditional influencer culture that often fuels rampant consumerism and wasteful habits.
Deinfluencers are in a unique position to foster a more sustainable approach to consumption. Rather than promoting the latest products or trends, they highlight mindful consumption, sustainability and the importance of making thoughtful choices.
This interesting trend coincides with the anticipated backlash against AI-generated content I discussed in my post on the discoverability crisis.
The Verge - Twitter says it will start paying creators this week - The revenue sharing program is only available to users who pay for a Twitter Blue subscription and is driven by ads placed in the replies to tweets. So far, payout amounts are ranging from a few thousand dollars to nearly $40,000 for accounts with a few million followers. In a thread, Twitter says it will expand eligibility to more creators later this month.
This from the biggest deadbeat second only to Donald Trump? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Society
New York Times - With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores - Dr. Henderson…[developed] an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants: the socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D.
The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.
The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action.
Missed this one last time. This is a clever work-around to obviate the Supreme Court’s disasterous decision.
CNBC - Getting rich isn’t the American Dream anymore, says new survey—here’s how people define success instead - A recent GoDaddy survey, which asked more than 1,000 U.S. small-business owners to describe what achieving the American Dream entails, to them. Fifty-four percent of respondents defined it as “feeling happy in life,” and 49% said it involved “freedom to follow my passions.”
Fifty-six percent still cited wealth as a motivator, saying they wanted to make enough money to live “a comfortable lifestyle.” But roughly three-quarters of the respondents said their definition has changed since they were a kid.
Owning a home, historically seen as a marker of success, was only the fourth-most popular answer, at 45%.
Well, this is a hearteningly healthy attitude toward and definition of success. Of course, the cynic in me might say that’s only because fewer and fewer people believe economic upward mobility is realistic.
by - DeSantis's Fascist-Style Macho Video; GOP 2024 as a Race to the Bottom - Fascist aesthetics work through contrasts: things are good or bad, black or white, and there is no room for nuance. This dictates the structure of the ad, which juxtaposes Trump as "soft" on LGBTQ issues and DeSantis as "hard." Although Trump banned transgender people from military service during his presidency, we see older footage of Trump expressing support for the LGBTQ community, and a clip of him as owner of the Miss Universe pageant saying he would allow transgender people to compete…As the author of a book on Fascist propaganda movies, I have viewed many Fascist fantasies in film form. The point of the images is to train viewers to see hatred and brute force as positive male attributes, and this is what the DeSantis ad does as well. The hammering music and quick pace are also familiar: they are meant to elicit strong emotions rather than give you time to think.
Ben-Ghiat is one of the most keen observers of the rise of American fascism and a must-read to understand this threat. She does a superb job of explaining how authoritarianism works in very specific ways.
It is important to understand what they are doing instead of dismissing it—as many media commentators do—as bizarre or stupid if we are to defend ourselves against it. Propaganda is a primary tool of fascists.
Music Monday
Glorious Midjourney Mistakes
The thing I love about Midjourney is that even the mistakes are amazing. These are some of my mistakes when trying to create an image for this post.
I Have absolutely no idea why The Mandalorian showed up in this one!
