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A Second Look at Second Life...A New Practicality Emerging For Virtual Reality Technologies?

A few weeks ago, I was far from the first to speculate pessimism on the viability of virtual reality site Second Life as a marketer's dream.  A few recent articles have prompted me to revisit the topic of virtual reality; one which validates my thinking on Second Life, but a couple of others that discuss remarkably exciting and practical uses of 3-D and virtual reality technologies.

For an entertaining look at Second Life through a fellow skeptic's eyes, there's a great read in a little-known magazine called GOOD.  The article, Get a Life: The Hollow Promise of The Internet's Next Big Thing had me both laughing and pondering the bizarre motivations of Second Life's most loyal users.  One thing's for sure, these people are not likely to be the marketing target of any high profile company anytime soon.

On the more practical side, a recent WSJ article, A Virtual View of the Store Aisle got me very excited about a real world application of virtual reality technology; using it to observe and improve the customer experience and effectively drive sales.  Consumer packaged goods companies like Kimberly-Clark and P&G are using virtual reality labs to get consumer and retailer insight on new products, packaging and displays in early stages of development.  Replicating how new packaging looks in virtual store aisles, observing how customers find a product on virtual store shelves, and experimenting with the size, color and effectiveness of virtual merchandising displays are all part of the new  real world of product development.

Similarly, you'll enjoy an article in Storefront Backtalk called The Strange World of 3-D E-Commerce, about how retail chain Tweeter is working to make 3-D replications of customers' living rooms a practical tool in making home entertainment purchase decisions.   The whole process of photographing customers' homes, replicating them in a 3-D technology environment and helping customers select the right products specifically for them not only builds confidence in the selection and purchase process, it builds a highly personalized level of engagement, and likely, loyalty.

One of the key questions I ask myself is this:  if I'm such a skeptic, why do I keep reading articles about Second Life?   I think the catch is that while the current execution of Second Life and the motivations of it's users are not that interesting to me (other than for pure humor and entertainment), the practical tools that virtual reality technology will eventually bring to us as marketers and creators of customer experience are well worth investigation and testing.

5 Tips and 1 Little Secret About Hiring A Consultant

One of my favorite sources of corporate humor is Despair, Inc.   As expected, they have something to say about my chosen profession:

"Consulting...if you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem"

That's my favorite of their many stabs, though it's sad to think that the sentiment rings all too true with executives who have hired consultants. High hopes abound, only to be aggravated by high prices, formulaic approaches and overly intellectual discussion without action.  You can avoid all of that and have a successful experience with a consultant, if you are well prepared and willing to do some work yourself.

Here are a few (serious) tips to help you get and keep things on track when working with a consultant:

1) Complete this sentence: "Here's what I want: ...." It might be a specific deliverable, like a report or a business case.  It might be advice or an education on an important topic. Many times I'm asked to "put a proposal together".  I am happy to, of course. The thing I find surprising is how many times I am also asked to guess as to the desired outcome of the engagement. Take time to think about it.  The clearer you can be on this, the happier you will be with the result.

2)  Spend time, save money.   Of course you expect them to be self sufficient, and good consultants usually are.  But they need to understand your company, your culture, your strategy, how decisions get made....and yes, where the bathroom is.  You will save the consultant time (and thus, save yourself money) if you ask yourself " what does this person need to know to do this project?  What information do I have that will help them be successful? "  Prepare background information and set up sessions for your consultant to meet stakeholders early on.

3) Ignorance is not an excuse for disengagement.  Many times I hear  " We hired you because we don't know anything about this".  Part of your request of the consultant should be that they teach you about what they know.  You'll need to function on your own after they are gone.  Very few projects are so self-contained that a consultant can come in, do the job and leave with no residual impact.  Their work will need to be understood, absorbed, maintained and altered as time goes on.  Be sure that you engage enough to be able to speak to their work confidently without them around, and assume successful ownership of it going forward

4) They get to leave, you have to stay.  Remember, you have to live with the outcome of the project. The consultant ultimately gets to walk away. Of course, the consultant is responsible for the project's success, but you are too.  Are you making sure she has the information she needs?  Giving her prompt feedback on the work so that she can meet her time line? Giving the project the proper priority in the organization so that she can get the support she needs from stakeholders? It's well worth your effort to be sure you are getting what you want.

5) Ask a lot of questions, even if you might not like the answer. Here's the advantage to asking your consultant a lot of questions: you will wind up getting more than you paid for.  Consultants have a unique perspective on your organization because they are an outsider. While that might disadvantage them in terms of granular detail, it can bring clear benefits - they can help you find a solution to a problem you didn't know you had. While these insights might not officially be part of the engagement, they are food for thought you might not otherwise have access to.  Nothing says you have to agree or take their advice, but it's a good idea to listen.

Think about what the project is worth to you. Now, here's the little secret: There isn't a single consultant I've met, me included, who knows exactly what to charge for their work.  Some of us have an hourly or daily rate, some of us charge by the project, there are more than 31 flavors.  They'll quote you a priced based on their best estimate of the time it will take and the value they'll deliver.  If you have no idea what the project is worth to you, any price they quote will sound too high.  If you have a firm budget, don't be afraid to say so.  They'll understand and probably work to fit within your means.

I hope this has been helpful...but then again, I may be optimistic in thinking that this message is actually being read.  It reminds me of my favorite Despair, Inc. tee shirt.  It reads:

"More people have read this shirt than your blog."

An E-Commerce Christmas Carol: Lessons of Christmas Past

October is typically among the most stressful in retail.  If you're in e-commerce, you're worried about whether your site is ready for the  coming (you hope) onslaught of customers.  You're in the last minute "lock down" of any new site features that you want to deploy, and once that's done, you probably won't touch the site, other than for routine maintenance and promotional updates, until after the deadline for Christmas delivery has passed.

I was sifting through some old reading material yesterday, and I came across a very good WSJ article (Big Box Stores Aim to Speed Up Shopping) that I had saved about big box brick and mortar retailers like WalMart, Costco, Target, etc. and the work they are doing to streamline the navigation and checkout process in their stores.  It's well worth the read, whether you spend your time selling in stores or online.  By watching their customers and timing their activities in the store, then tweaking staffing, signage, systems and processes to reduce the amount of time customers had to spend shopping and checking out, these retailers were able to increase sales volume and average order size. For those of us that are fans of site usability testing, this is like using the brick and mortar store as one big lab.  It reminded me of a story from my e-commerce Christmas past that I talk about every year at this time.   

It was late Fall on the early side of the dot-com bust.  The crunch was on to get all of the last bells and whistles deployed on the site in time for the holidays.  And then the hammer hit: business for the company had been tough, and marketing budgets were cut.  We panicked. How would we make our sales numbers without the ability to drive traffic to to the site? 

An astute member of the team pointed out that we had more than enough traffic coming to our site to make our numbers without the marketing spend.  We just needed to be sure that more of those people actually bought something.  In other words, focus more on the bottom of the purchase funnel, less on the top.

This was a resourceful team. Within a week, we borrowed a video camera, hooked it up to my brought-from-home TV set in another office, and voila!  A crude, but functional usability lab was born (probably one of the first of its kind for e-commerce).  We focused our first study on one area: the checkout path.  Not only did we watch customers struggle with the basics of getting through the task, we timed them, and quickly learned that it took a lot longer to buy that shirt than it should.

Quickly, the design team got to work. There were a handful of simple changes and even language changes that could be done immediately, and some more involved changes that we wouldn't be able to catch in time for the holidays.  Even without the major changes, the team was able to significantly reduce the "task time" and improve the ease of checkout.  The result?  Higher conversion, and we beat our holiday numbers, even without the marketing spend and a few of the bells and whistles we had sacrificed in order to get the checkout work done.

Now,  to most of you that have been in e-commerce for a while, you've grown used to sophisticated usability labs, analytics tools and site optimization practices, so this story probably sounds a bit "101". But I make a point of telling it every year about this time, as I think it is an appropriate reminder that bells and whistles, exciting as they may be, are no substitute for some of the important, and yes, basic things that customers really want for Christmas - like an easy and error free shopping experience.  That's a gift that will give back to you, may dollars over. Even the brick and mortar guys are starting to figure that out.