The American Consumer Satisfaction Index out this month shows that Sprint Nextel’s rating jumped 11% from 2009 to 2010. The increase for the telecom industry over the same period was an average of 4.1%. This is wonderful news for Sprint Nextel, but it turns out that it only brings them up to par with their main competitors. Two years ago, they were at the lowest point of customer satisfaction in their history.

That made me wonder: did they do anything special which they can continue to build momentum with, or did they just stop sucking? Birch Studio’s first step into any project is research, so I figured I should research this as well in hopes of learning something. As one might expect, there was a slew of press around this and quite a few differing opinions. The original source of my data, ACSI, is a significant arbiter of information in the US economy so its reports carry quite a bit of weight.

The goal of my research was to find out what they did. I found three theories worthy of exploration.

Theory 1: Structure

“Sprint Nextel had the largest increase, up 11% to an ACSI score of 70, following a year of a similar gain of 13% … Sprint’s 2004 acquisition of Nextel was probably behind much of its past customer problems—mergers of large service companies are often detrimental to customer satisfaction, and the customers acquired from Nextel had even lower satisfaction than the Sprint customers. In order to stem customer defections, Sprint has relied on price promotions and bundled services.”
– Prof. Claes Fornell, for ACSI

The proposition that a merger had something to do with dissatisfaction makes a lot of sense. Think about the last time you were merged. I’ve been fortunate enough to not need a lot of service lately but when my home phone company was purchased by another, I felt like a part of me was sold to the highest bidder. Granted, my account doesn’t represent much of my actual existence on this earth but when I signed up for the original carrier, I chose them. As it stands today, I didn’t choose the company that has my account now - they chose me. I had no choice. That becomes a customer satisfaction issue that is bound to slant opinion against a company well before any actual problem occurs.

Theory 2: Customer Service

“The company has seen subscribers flee for several years, but it has made big efforts to improve customer service. Those efforts appear to be bearing fruit, as its score rose from 63 to 70. It posted another seven-point increase the year before. Sprint’s subscriber losses have slowed in the last six months.”
– Consumers Happier About Their Cell Service By Peter Svensson (AP)

Theory 2 credits the increase in service for the increase in satisfaction – another valid possibility. After all, aside from the actual technology working or not working, the other half of a customer’s interaction with a company is how they treat the customer. There is plenty to go wrong from consistent communications to fair pricing to helpfulness of the customer rep, and more. The facts Svensson offers are scant to make such a connection from ‘Those efforts’ to ‘appear to be bearing fruit’. There may be more information that substantiates this, but at this point, I still haven’t found the truth.

Theory 3: Stability

“… despite their high satisfaction scores, a troubling 22% of Sprint’s large business customers are evaluating switching to a new primary wireless voice provider. This could indicate wariness on the part of enterprise customers about Sprint’s overall corporate health in light of its recent financial troubles.”
– Eugene C. Signorini, VP Enterprise Applications & Mobile Solutions with Yankee Group

Large business customers bring a chunk of subscribers to Sprint all at one time. So when 22% of them are considering moving, that’s considerably more than 22% of Sprint’s customer base. This suggests that people are unhappy with Sprint now because they may be more unhappy with Sprint later when those financial troubles catch up with them. For a company that has a mission-critical relationship with mobile telecom services, this can be a very significant issue. Still, switching core service providers at any time is a monumental chore so it is probable that a big chunk of those 22% won’t do anything until their service really starts to fall apart.

Each of the three sources claim a different cause for Sprint’s track record in customer satisfaction. They all are plausible. But most likely, the resolution is some dissonant mix of all three: some customers were unhappy with the merger, some were unhappy with the customer service and some were doubtful that they’ll see major improvements anytime soon.

One Last Theory
Furthering my research, and hoping for resolution, I sought answers from real clients. Well, maybe. I went to the primary source of the uptick, Sprint Nextel, to see what they had to say about this. Surprisingly, I didn’t find much but a prepackaged podcast series on customer loyalty about telecom marketing in general. The comments on the podcast, however, were priceless. I read through the first-hand comments and none of them mentioned consistency or functionality. Aside from some comments about relentlessly inconsistent data, customer loyalty was defined by their customers as providing something special that made existing customers feel more valued that new customers.

With the VP of Consumer Marketing thinking that loyalty is about consistency and functionality, it seems more likely that ACSI’s supposition is correct - that customers which had gone through the merger from Nextel to Sprint Nextel probably drove the dissatisfaction down well below the industry average, and now that the effects of the merger have worn off, Sprint Nextel is merely on par with its competitors rather than soaring past them. Time will tell whether they actually surpass their rivals as a result of their focus on consistency and functionality.

Summary
So much of how we think about branding has to do with how we think about self-promotion. This data shows that before you embark on an image building campaign, ask questions to make sure that you are not building a happy facade on a crumbling strategy. No amount of brand marketing will help with that.

Founded in 1897, nTelos has kept pace with the times and provided services to dedicated customers in the Central Virginia region. They hold their own against the big four telecoms through unparalleled customer service. Birch Studio has been a customer of nTelos since 1998 and has told everyone looking for a phone company about their incredible service.

As with most telecoms these days, the hottest side of their business is the wireless division. Most of the resources of their small in-house IT team are devoted to keeping up with the near-daily changes in that industry. So the wireline division was left behind. Wireline had a backlog of updates to make, not least of which was a redesign of that section of the website. Being that nTelos had a design in place for the wireless side, our goal was to integrate that look into the wireline side of the site and, instead of reinventing their brand, spend our time adding some additional improvements along the way.

Deliverables
On the home page, we created an auto-scrolling banner system that promotes each of the five major sections of the site - TV/Video, Broadband, Home Phone, Business Telecom and Bundles. Clicking on any of the banners takes the user to the respective section of the site. This simple, straightforward navigation allows users to be briefly entertained while waiting for their navigation link to come around in the slide rotation. Normally, we don’t want to make users take more time than necessary to get where they want. In the case of the scrolling banners, they are subtly learning the structure of the site without having to click around. They can click directly on the image that represents the section they wish to see, making navigation extremely intuitive.

For each major section of the site, we replaced their text-heavy landing pages with graphically rich ones. Best practices show that a heading and a one line description is usually enough information to help users to reach their destination. Any more than that and you’re starting to provide a summary of what they are going to read on the next page. When you’re trying to move people through a website to get to their destination quickly, you don’t want them to have to read the same information twice. The small graphic buttons in each section were also color-coded to distinguish products, or something you could buy, from ancillary pages such as support, surveys, etc.

TV is the sizzle in wireline services so this area required special treatment to make it pop. We shelved most of the design elements which we so carefully preserved in other sections of the site, keeping just the four column format. We popped in a home theater motif, complete with red curtains, silhouettes of the family watching TV in the front row, and made the page come to life with scrolling montages of video channels (sports, news, children, premier, etc) and scrolling network logos. The distinctive look and photos give a warm feeling that is more welcoming in contrast to the rest of the site. The scrolling montages allow nTelos to keep people on these pages longer for the right reason – to learn more about what they sell.

”It was refreshing to work with a company that listened to our needs and implemented them without reinventing the wheel.  Birch Studio worked within the framework that I already had in place for our website and improved upon it with their expertise and vast knowledge in website design and coding.”
– Nate Thompson, Former nTelos Webmaster

Keeping up with the trends in the telecom industry, nTelos designed bundles of products to sell at different price points. In the old site, they had a simple, data-driven table to show what features you get with each bundle and then provided a link to go to one of three pages with all of the bundles. The pages had overlapping information which created confusion. That was too much clicking and cerebral work on the part of the customer. There was no place to see a comprehensive comparison. We liked the idea of the matrix and went big with that - designing it as a full-page graphic rather than an inset. We added a three-bullet summary to each of the bundles, and triggers for each bundle that displays details in a collapsible area just below it. This keeps the user’s attention anchored around the item they clicked on, and allows them to explore and compare other bundles efficiently on the same page, without ever having to hit the back button. And the interactive, clickable nature of this page is just fun.

For the business side of wireline, we listed products and services available in a typical format. We uncovered that most of the business on the business side is done through consultative selling, meaning that very few customers pick a product from the website and buy it on the spot. To introduce and direct users to a sales person, we created an interactive map of the account executives. When a user rolls over a telecom market area, the map displays the account exec’s photo, name, phone number and email. For confirmation that the user is looking at the correct area, we repeated the name of the city in the heading of the box.

To help nTelos keep up with the pace of updates and to better use their internal resources, the majority of the site was built on a content management system (CMS). Simple text, image and document edits can all be done by their in-house staff on a regular basis through this CMS.

With the depth of the changes that we made, we consolidated many areas which had multiple pages into single pages. Knowing that search engines and users both store page URLs, created a redirect script on the server that automatically forwards traffic from the old to the new pages.

Summary
The total scope of our work on nTelos’ telecom website overhaul ran from schematic planning to design, implementation and execution. We are continuing to monitor and make incremental improvements to the site.

PROCESS
1. create written outline of the content that we will include and how we will organize it
2. research competition
3. create schematic sitemap to organize site navigation
4. create schematic page layouts to show the major information on each page
5. create first draft renderings with shading, proportion, colors, fonts, content in position
6. revise first draft after client review
7. modify design to create a special section for TV
8. set up core code for content management system (CMS)
9. integrate designs with CMS to make the website live and hand off the site to nTelos

Not all police agencies are created equal. In late 2009, we had the opportunity to work with the Washington DC Metro Transit Police Department (MTPD) on their annual report. They are the professionals in charge of the safety and security of millions of people within one of our nation’s largest public transportation systems which also reaches into the heart of our nation, a highly trafficked and symbolic area.

Metro’s goal was to tell the story of the dedication and vigilance that is the hallmark of the Metro Police. With thousands of hours of training, certification in three separate jurisdictions (DC, VA and MD) and specialized training in counter-terrorism, MTPD officers are some of the best trained in the nation. They are called on to support and train transit police departments in other cities as well.

As is typical of many annual reports, past ones simply focused on presenting data for the department. Though they do have some impressive figures (transporting 60,000 people per hour, moving 1.5 million people on President Obama’s Inauguration Day, guarding $800,000 in cash daily), Chief Taborn, Chief Delinski and Sgt. McKee all wanted to push this project further to tell the story of what goes on inside of MTPD. The story that needed to be told is the level of dedication that the officers and staff bring to their jobs. The annual report is now a piece that it commemorates, in a tangible form, their achievements and highlights during the previous year.

Sgt. McKee did a huge amount of work pulling together a year’s worth of information and photos from over 40 offices. Originally intended to be 48 pages, the page count of the annual report shot up by 50% to 72 pages once the information started flowing in from the various offices and departments. The resulting content, with more than 100 photos, put the spotlight on the heros behind the safety and security of this transportation system. Photo styles ranged from candid to formal and included those of honored fallen officers. We added captions to many of the photos to increase understanding of the scene portrayed in them.

Aesthetically, the repetition of round-cornered rectangles was a design motif inspired by the architecture of the Metrorail’s underground stops. The color scheme of the DC Metro system map was used to boldly identify and distinguish sections of the report. Tabs printed on the outer margin of the pages help keep readers oriented as to what section they are in. These two techniques serve double duty since they lend the report the familiar feel of the Metro system itself.

Organization
Birch Studio’s goal to make an annual report for this large organization was summed up in the words of Chief Delinski, “The challenges were many but the final product was worth it.” There was a LOT of information to organize. It went without saying it had to look good. But it had to be inviting and easy to read otherwise all of our work would be in vain. We easily spent as much time designing as we did organizing the information.

People read big, bold headlines and photos first, then subheads and smaller images, then captions and bullets. This is a natural progression as our eyes are hard-wired to look at big things first, before getting into the details. So we worked with the scale of images and text to enhance readability through a stair-stepping method.

We used this progression to guide readers through a section, providing signposts and resting points along the way. Headers and subheads direct the reader’s attention while groupings of photos allow for a diversion from the otherwise consistent and rhythmic structure. Chunking information in this way allows readers to skim information to see if they have any interest before diving in to read larger paragraphs.

Presented with a massive chunk of paragraph text and a bullet list, the first thing to be read is usually the bullet text. That’s because of our need to dip our toes in the pool of information before committing to going in whole-heartedly. If we like what we see in the headlines and subheads, we feel comfortable committing to reading a longer paragraph.

It’s similar to how a house with a porch gives you a more gradual and inviting way to enter its space. The gradual progression from outdoors to indoors involves time and scale.

Page Structure
For the page layout, we created a two column grid, with a large outer margin and several horizontal guides at the top of each page. This structure, especially the series of horizontal guides, allowed us a good deal of flexibility in placement of content without sacrificing the overall visual integrity between pages. We stuck to these guidelines religiously, except when where we really needed to break from it, or saw a great opportunity to show off more of Metro’s photographs.

Summary
Using several methods to break up the content and allow readers to engage with it at their own pace, we were able to make a very accessible and information-rich annual report without compromising the design or heavily editing the information. The result is a substantial publication that can be read lightly as a coffee table book or in-depth for the truly interested.

PROCESS STEPS
1. create written outline of the content
2. research public safety annual reports
3. create first draft of cover, table of contents, section divider and a typical page spread
4. revise cover, table of contents, section divider and a typical page spread
5. complete layout of annual report
6. revise text and design
7. send hard copy and PDF proofs
8. review paper samples and binding styles
9. solicit print quotes and manage production

Have you ever noticed the phrase “New Look! Same Great Taste” that lots of redesigned food packages boast?

You’ve seen it a hundred times. Most likely you never had trouble finding the product in the first place, but nonetheless, the text is there.

So, what purpose does it really serve? Do people think that because the logo is in a different position or the font is four points larger and now has a glossy Web 2.0 look about it that the taste has changed?

It’s really all about managing expectations. Now, I know that’s one of those corporate buzz phrases that gets thrown around when people don’t actually know how to express what they are really thinking so I want to step carefully through this with you to explain it in a non-cliché way.

First, consider that the marketing firms behind product packaging re-dos are typically some of the biggest and best there are; managing global brands and multi-million dollar campaigns.

Second, consider that they know how to do things right, since the have the benefit of long experience and the brightest minds in marketing.

Now, when a person is reaching out their hand to pick up a product to put in their cart, the last thing you want them to do is to pause. Even worse than that, to stop and think. This is where the message plays a critical role. In the moment that someone hesitates there is an inflection point, an opportunity in which it is easier to change their mind than when their arm is full-swing, on auto-pilot, throwing your tasty treats in their cart.

It’s fairly similar to the response you see when traffic slows down around cars parked on the side of a highway. They really don’t need to slow down but there is an object on an otherwise very smooth route that draws their attention. That object becomes a wrinkle in one’s normal smooth flowing ride or thought process. So they look. They wonder. They take their foot off the gas. That’s bad for traffic flow, and it’s bad for product sales. In fact, the highway planners would benefit to put up a sign announcing ahead of time, “Just a flat tire ahead. Nothing to see here. Please keep moving.” That pretty much answers the question in people’s mind.

A very nice book on web usability by Steve Krug, called Don’t Make Me Think, explains this principal in more general terms. It says that every time a person must make a decision, they are one step FURTHER from buying your product or using your services.

Back in the retail environment, by heading off the decision traffic jam with this reassuring and seemingly ubiquitous claim, the big guys get it right and keep the product moving right into a consumer’s cart.

It’s been a few months since I had a clear enough schedule to sit down and write. We’ve been through many changes recently. The one we are most proud of is bringing on Whitney French with her abundant thirst for knowledge and pursuit of excellence.

Whitney started with Birch Studio as an intern and within two weeks we knew we didn’t want her to ever leave. She is an accomplished designer and holds a BS in Marketing Management from Virginia Tech.

While we have experience doling out advice to clients over the years on how best to market themselves, Whitney brings methodology and rigor to that process. Look for announcements of a more robust and integrated approach to marketing from us in the near future.

A few months back, we overhauled and launched inbio.com, an educational and e-commerce, CMS website for Indoor Biotechnologies in Charlottesville. I wrote earlier about our approach to the package design we did for their Ventia product.

Just as packages require design expertise (layout, colors, visual hierarchy) and technical expertise (printing, production, folding, etc), websites require similar attention to user interface design and programming, but then they can have additional layers such as interactivity. That essentially makes them three-dimensional and tactile. It’s like a game of 3D chess where you have two or more playing surfaces stacked on top of each other. Any move on one of the boards affects the others below or above it. With any move we make on one of the layers, like design or programming, we have to consider how those moves affect the other components, like usability or site traffic flow.

We determined the overall content of the site in our usual way with a site map and then planned the various layers of user interface design with a schematic page layout. We determined the general sections of pages to be developed, and created schematic page layouts for the major ones, locating the most important features or areas on each, such as the navigation, main body area, shopping cart, login, utility links, etc.

We located the main navigation across the top and the sub-navigation (the pages within a given section) down the left column. Each section was color-coded within a harmonious color palette developed specifically for this site. As with any good branding, the colors are added to the brand’s repertoire to be used again in future marketing materials.

After a few revisions, edits to the color palette and discussions about functionality, we arrived at the final design to be converted to HTML code and then combined into the administrative suite.

The back end of the website was built on Zen Cart, an open-source e-commerce package. We selected it over several other options for its match of features to the client’s requirements and then customized it to meet the rest of their needs. We set up the site so that it accepts international transactions in three currencies – dollars, euros and pounds – and has different pricing for each of them. The news section of the site is synchronized from the US site to the others so they automatically update every 24 hours.

So it goes with interactive design. You want some variety page to page, but you also want some predictability. Common elements between sections of the site make the user feel more comfortable while changes and variety help to engage them in new content page to page. These techniques help to drive site traffic and work in conjunction with usability features to meet the client’s technical goals and requirements. Checkmate.

Just designed, programmed, copyedited and launched: www.edenali.com Great local builders.

We were pleased to work with nTelos’ wireline division (that’s everything but wireless phones) to overhaul, organize and relaunch their website. Major sections of the site include a nifty Bundles page that opens like an accordion, a TV page with scrolling photo montages of their offerings, a Business page with an interactive Account Exec map, and a content management system that allows them to update the 70+ pages anytime they want. In several cases, we were able to efficiently reduce several pages accessed through click-upon-click, to a single page with dynamic and well-organized content. Click to see the nTelos website redesign.

In the last installment, I covered matching words and phrases on your website to those that a potential customer may use to search for your service or product. I also cleared up the mystery of meta tags. This month, the topic is tweaks that you can make in your HTML code for better optimization.

Let’s go back to how Google thinks. (Artificial intelligence, at your fingertips.) It wants to look at your page in the way a human reader might, so it can optimize the results that it provides to its human readers. One thing we instinctively look for when we read is a hierarchy of information.

And here’s how we think: Hey, look, there’s some big text at the top of the page. That must be what the page is about since it’s in the most prominent part of the page (outside of the navigation, presumably). I see lots of text below that, interrupted by some more prominent text. That must be the body of the page and some sub-headings that describe the section of text below. Oh, cool picture. What’s that all about? Oh, there’s a caption about the photo. Okay, now what’s this page about?

Does that sound familiar? At every point along the way where I’ve identified a piece of information on the page, there is an HTML tag – a bit of code at the beginning and end of a group of words  – that identifies the bit of text within it as an element with purpose. The heading at the top of the page is usually set off in the HTML code with H1 tags, like this:

   <h1>This is a heading</h1>

These tags, by convention, are used to create the visual hierarchy for the human reader. Google leverages that to read that content as a very important clue to the focus of the page.

   <h2>This is a subheading</h2>

Other tags in everyday use that are helpful to Google in categorizing your page’s content include body tags, paragraph tags, captions and alt tags for images and anchor text. Anchor text is of special note since it is the (often underlined) text that links a user from one page to the the next. This type of hypertext is foundational to the “web” of the internet. The nugget you need to know about that is that the text within the anchor tag is highly informative to Google about the page that it is linking to. So, instead of saying “Click here for information about antique toasters”, where “click here” is linked, you would want to link “antique toaster.” For example, “Learn more about antique toasters.”

There is a lot more to tell of this quest to collude with artificial intelligence but I’ll leave it at that for now. Read the rest of this entry »

Based on the strength of an exclusive portfolio of monoclonal antibodies, Indoor Biotechnologies has become the world leader in detection of indoor allergens. In addition to the antibodies, InBio developed a consumer product kit to detect household allergens. The kit consists of a dozen parts in a clear plastic clamshell. The challenge they brought to us was to make that clamshell sing. Visually speaking, of course.

The focus of most packaging – in fact, most commercial art – is to get one or two points across quickly and with gusto. When you get into thinking about an appropriate image to represent a product like this, there are a few options. One is to show the actual product. But, aside from the rare, few phenomenal products, it’s hard to give someone the warm fuzzies from a purely product-driven photo. Another option is to make a drive for the warm fuzzies with people photos. We took the people photo route and selected a photo with a mother, father and young child. Then, using additional graphics, focused the message down from the vague happy family feeling to a happy family enjoying their life free of dust allergens. The two “focusing” graphics were a small image of the product and a anti-dustmite image.

To assist in production of the actual product, the manufacturer had a 3D model of the pieces in the kit. We highlighted a small image of the product on the package cover (to balance the lifestyle photo with an image of what a customer would expect to get inside of the can’t-see-through-it-anymore package). And we used several other 3D images to illustrate the accompanying directions on the backside of the label.

We purchased several clamshell-packed products from the local hardware store to share some options with InBio and lead the discussion on how our inserted label would fold, which sides of the container would be left clear versus covered with the label insert, etc. Mockups from that point became much more instructive.

Moving backward somewhat before going forward, we also delved into the name for the product. Lots of words, parts of words, prefixes and suffixes were combined. I’ll spare you the details but the client settled on ventia: rapid allergen test for it’s allusion to the flowing of air. With the name in place and having been user tested at a national conference of allergists, we finalized the text size and the remaining items affected by the name to complete the packaging.