In the Land of Too Many Conferences, This is a Good One

It’s rare that I’m sad to leave a conference — usually I can’t leave fast enough.  But such is my mood today leaving Mediapost’s third Email Insider Summit.

Our industry is way over-conferenced in general.  I’m guessing that our company’s full conference calendar has 40+ events on it over the course of a year.  It’s more than we can afford to exhibit at, participate in, speak at, attend.  We do our best, and what money we spend is much more carefully monitored and measured than it used to be, but usually it’s with that sick feeling in the pit of our collective marketing stomach that we’re throwing money away just because our competitors are there.

But the Email Insider Summit is different.  While there are some aspects of the show that I don’t love — four days is a long time, and three half days of golf and snorkeling is a little too heavy on the boondoggle side for my personal taste — the content and attendees are fantastic.  Mediapost’s formula of comping marketers and charging vendors very high prices to attend ensures an intimate, high level, and vendor-light crowd.  That’s a recipe for success in my book!

The two most interesting nuggets from today:

1. John Stichweh from Coca-Cola’s observation that brand marketing and direct marketing continue to rapidly converge, and that measurement of outcome (e.g., ROI) as opposed to measurement of process (e.g., GRPs or impressions) are gaining steam, never to look back.  I couldn’t agree more.  What can be counted will be counted.  And it can all be counted in the world of advertising, somehow.

2. Lisa Galli from CNET’s discussion of mobile marketing and what they’re doing to take advantage of the channel.  The best example I’ve heard in years of a marketer leveraging a medium is their new SMS Reviews product — just text message CNET1 the words Review xxx (insert name of product here), and you’ll get a text message back with a product review.  Now THAT ought to make shopping for electronics much more interesting.

I’m ready for more conferences like these, and fewer mammoth trade shows.

Book Short:  A Good Dose of Introspection

I rarely blog about non-business books since this is a business blog — and I read a lot of them!  But occasionally, one manages to slip in, and this time, it’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom.  From the author of Tuesdays With Morrie, which I also liked quite a bit, this one is excellent.  And a very, very quick read.

The book, in short (i.e., a book short <g>), is about a guy who dies, and who, in heaven, meets five people who have shaped his life and died before him.  Some he knows well, some he knows barely, some he’s never met.  Each one tells him a story that explains some part of his life to him and in doing so, helps him understand more about himself and why/how he lived on earth.

The book, as I said, is a short read.  But more than that, it’s a wonderful story and provides an opportunity for a structured moment of introspection, one that I found very valuable.  Quite frankly, this book should be a “once every year or two” read.

Drawing the Line:  Where We Come out

In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we’ve had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in “grey” businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part — the so what.

We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here’s where we come out.

First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially “troublesome” clients: those whose businesses are illegal, or who advertise or sell illegal products; those whose businesses are involved in litigation around email, data, privacy, or security; and those whose businesses are in the grey area, or what we called in our discussions “morally hazardous.” In the end, we decided that for us, there’s no difference by type of product in terms of how we handle the situation. But each class of client has its own issues as well as enforcement mechanisms.

Let’s start with the easy one. Clients who break the law or whose businesses encourage others to do so have no place in our company. The challenge here is more on the edge cases — what about companies whose products or advertising are sometimes illegal (by geography or by age of target audience)? I will come back to that topic.

Next, we move on to those companies who are involved in email-related litigation. We added this category to our thinking because we view ourselves as advocates for end users, the champions of good, high quality email. Ultimately, the decision about whether or not to take on a client who is involved in email-related litigation is subjective. One example of a client we would take on is a very reputable company that has a single instance of a CAN-SPAM violation or investigation by the FTC. But there are other companies who are in much deeper. I will somewhat impolitely refer to them as “pissing in the pool.” As advocates for good email and as stewards of the email ecosystem, we can’t in good conscience allow some of these people to be clients, even of our software, if they have the potential to use the software for evil and not for good. Of course, once the litigation is finished we can re-assess, assuming the company was found to not have violated any laws.

Finally, the tough category, the “morally hazardous.” There certainly is something that resonates with us around one user’s comment that, to paraphrase, if you’re not comfortable telling everyone around the dinner table that you work for Client X, you shouldn’t work for Client X (or, Client XXX, as it were). But at the end of the day, legislating morality is impossible to get right for everyone, at every time. We think it’s not our business what kind of legal business our clients are in. In fact, we go so far as to say that as advocates for end users, our criteria around which clients to accept should be as objective as possible — that is to say, much more around their email reputation (how much do users like the content) than about some arbitrary judgment about what’s right and what’s wrong. We feel like as long as we maintain our policy of allowing employees to opt-out from working with clients or seeing clients’ content that makes them uncomfortable, we’re in as good shape here as we’re going to be.

Of course, that’s not to say we won’t, on a case-by-case basis, turn down a client because of their business. We aren’t a public utility. We have the right to walk away from a client for any reason (or, not to put too fine a point on it, no reason at all). But as a matter of policy we’ve decided to focus on email practices as a basis for who we work with and leave questions of morality of certain types of business aside.

As a final note, we clarified our policies for vetting and enforcing these standards. These do differ a bit by product. For our by-application whitelist, Sender Score Certified, we will continue to ask questions around the types of products and content that prospective clients include or link to in their emails. We will perform extra pre-client research on clients that check a number of boxes on the application that indicate they might be in a grey area or are involved in litigation. We will ask clients to self-certify their goodness. We will perform spot audits of these clients to make sure they stay in compliance with the things that are impossible to automatically monitor, even those tricky ones which are “sometimes legal.” And we will not be shy about terminating those who aren’t.

For our software and professional services, we have a “client vetting” document that asks some of those same questions, and against which we will research and audit as appropriate. For clients of our professional services, we require that sales/client services fill out this document 100% of the time for our standards and compliance team to review. For software clients, we leave it up to sales/client services management to flag the cases where there might be an issue and to run only those clients through the same vetting process.

I think that about wraps this topic up, at least for now. We do our best on this stuff, but it’s tricky, and I have no doubt that however we handle these situations, we will upset someone. I appreciate everyone’s input on this, and I welcome more by commenting below.

Living With Less…For Good?

Like all companies, Return Path is battening down the hatches a bit on expenses these days.  Our business is very strong and still growing nicely, but in this environment, the specter of disaster looms large, so there's no reason not to be more cautious and more profitable.

We weren't an extravagant company before this, and we never have been. But there is almost always room to save. Less travel, leaner budgets for office cafeterias, no more pilates classes in the Colorado office.  We've been very clear internally that our three priorities are protecting everyone's job, everyone's salary, and everyone's health benefits.  Hopefully things continue to go well and those can remain sacrosanct.

We are now a few months into our various cost savings plans, and it's great to see the results on the income statement and balance sheet.  More than that, it's great to see how everyone in the company is rallying around the common cause and looking for other ways to save money as well.  We've made it chic to be cheap.  And so far, there's no impact on the business. 

It will be interesting to me to see what happens on the far end of this economic badness.  It's often said the companies that make it through times like these emerge stronger on the other side, and I think I now understand why:  it's clear to me that some of the changes will work long term and some will only work short term, which means that we'll learn during this period that we can live with less. 

That doesn't mean we were profligate in the past; but it does mean that I think we are going to retrain ourselves.  We don't have to send 10 people to a big trade show to have an impact and drive the business forward.  We don't have to be the vendor who picks up the tab at the end of the night.  We don't need to pay for half the company to have cell phones (a very 1999 policy) to retain top talent.  I bet we will learn those things — and a bunch of others to come — in the next few months.

Stuck In Legal, Responses

Well, I certainly struck a nerve with my Stuck In Legal rant/post last week.  As of now, there are 32 comments on the blog — my typical post generates 0-1 — and I've picked up between 50 and 75 new followers on Twitter, probably mostly because Fred tweeted about the post. 

Most of the comments on the blog were cheering me on; a couple were from lawyers, one well reasoned and another just a counter rant against stupid business people that had one or two good points buried in it.  You can certainly click through the link above if you want to read them.

But two comments didn't get put on the blog, which I thought I'd post here.  Keep the good thoughts coming on this topic.  It's an important one.

First, Jonathan Ezor (a professor of law and technology) posted his response — not a rebuttal — on the Business Week blog here.  He makes some very good points about how both sides, businessperson and counsel, can work better together to eliminate a bunch of the hassles I noted in my original post.

Second, Joe Stanganelli, a lawyer, emailed me the following, which was too long for my Intense Debate comment software to handle:

In defense of my profession…

EXPLANATIONS:

•Why companies' legal departments or outside counsel aren't directed to be as efficient in doing their work as their other departments

How exactly do you mean?  I'm not sure this is true.  Given the average amount of hours our profession works as it is, we *have* to be efficient.

I can tell you, however, that a huge pet peeve of us lawyers is when our clients essentially say (typically when they’re being billed hourly), "Gee, I want an answer to this very complex legal question that will require a lot of research because no statutes or case laws are directly on point, but don't spend a lot of time on it."

This is a bit like saying, “Look, don’t spend a lot of time on this transplant…I’ve got a meeting in an hour, and I’m trying to save money besides."

Also bear in mind that lawyers are not widget-makers or assembly line workers.  We aren’t even (usually) executive decision-makers.  We are in the knowledge and information industry.  We read, we think, and we write.  If you can provide us with some tips as to how to read, think, or write more efficiently, we would be delighted to hear them.

•Why companies insist on using their standard form of agreement if they're going to staff a legal department to review contracts anyway (this clearly wouldn't work if everyone in the world behaved this way)

The standard form of agreement has already (presumably) been determined by the company’s legal department to be the best form for the company's interests as part of the legal department’s careful legal analysis (i.e., the job they are paid to do).  Often, however, other companies, clients, etc. don’t use the standard form, or send their own form, or modify the standard form, or any number of other idiosyncrasies can happen with the execution of a contract.  All of these things have legal ramifications and have been the subject of past litigation.

•Why lawyers insist on answering questions with "because that's how all our contracts are" instead of applying their brains and logic to situations

(I'll try not to take too much offense at that last part.)

This generally happens because the answer “because that’s how all our contracts are” is a lot easier to say than to give the CEO a crash course in contract law.  It’s not fair, but it’s true.

A good lawyer, however, should at least be able to explain to boil it down to a few bullet points without being arrogant about it.

•Why business people seem to have no leverage with their legal departments, especially in larger companies, therefore surrendering the negotiation of business terms and the timing of relationship launches, technology usage, etc. to lawyers

This criticism is, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, a bit mind-blowing.  It’s not a matter of “leverage" at all.

Companies have legal departments as a preventative measure because they recognize that the best time to hire a lawyer is before you actually need one.  Most of law practice, in fact, is this “preventative law” and compliance work.  It saves the client (in this case, the company) time and money down the road by staving off lawsuits and liability.

These lawyers are in the business of protecting their clients from themselves – which the clients willingly pay them for because the clients (usually) recognize that they did not go to law school, pass the Bar Exam, and gain years of experiencing practicing law.

So when a company wants to launch a potentially harmful product via a distribution agreement that allows the distributor to get more money than he should because of a technicality, the legal department has to step in and tell the company, “YOU WILL GET SUED IF YOU DO THIS AND LOSE X AMOUNT OF DOLLARS!!!” or they aren’t doing their jobs.

A lawyer is a counselor – an advisor.  Any leader who totally disregards his advisors is not a good leader.

Again, this is not a matter of not having leverage with legal departments; it is a matter of not being able to change the law.

Please don’t shoot the messenger.

•Why in-house lawyers make the same dumb changes to wording and formatting that lawyers who bill by the hour make

The law is the law is the law; how the lawyer gets paid does not impact what the law is.  Those “dumb changes” are tried and true terminology that mean certain things in the courts and (usually) all the lawyers and judges know what they mean.  If the lawyers left it alone, your document or contract would potentially (perhaps even likely) mean something totally different.

Overall, please recognize that lawyers – at least in the legal department / “preventative law” context that you discuss – are in the risk management and compliance business.  They don’t make the law (at least, not the ones who work for you); they’re simply the guides who are navigating you – the layperson – through the legal system (one that took us years to understand).

After all, if you were blind, and you had a seeing-eye dog, would you get mad at the seeing-eye dog for not letting you cross the street when it’s a green light and a Mack truck is coming down the road?  Would you think that seeing-eye dogs were conspiring against you to not let you cross the street?

I will say this, though: Joshua Baer makes a great point.  A good lawyer should be able to provide you with a list of options, and explain (at least in a rudimentary fashion) the dollars-and-cents consequences of each one.  As J.P. Morgan said, “Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.”

Use Your Powers for Good

Neil Schwartzman, our compliance officer for our Sender Score Certified whitelist program, wrote a great post on the Return Path blog entitled How the Sender Community Can Help Fight Spam.  If you’re a commercial mailer, I’d encourage you to read it.  It’s a great perspective from a long-time anti-spam leader.

The Problem with Titles

This will no doubt be a controversial post, and it’s more of a rant than I usually write. I’ll also admit up front that I always try to present solutions alongside problems…but this is one problem that doesn’t have an obvious and practical solution.  I hate titles. My old boss from years ago at MovieFone used to say that nothing good could come from either Titles or Org Charts – both were “the gift that keeps on giving…and not in a good way.”

I hate titles because they are impossible to get right and frequently cause trouble inside a company. Here are some of the typical problems caused by titles:

• External-facing people may benefit from a Big Title when dealing with clients or the outside world in general. I was struck at MovieFone that people at Hollywood studios had titles like Chairman of Marketing (really?), but that creates inequity inside a company or rampant title inflation
• Different managers and different departments, and quite frankly, different professions, can have different standards and scales for titles that are hard to reconcile.  Is a Controller a VP or a Senior Director?  And does it really matter?
• Some employees care about titles more than others and either ask or demand title changes that others don’t care about.  Titles are easy (free) to give, so organizations frequently hand out big titles that create internal strife or envy or lead to title inflation
• Titles don’t always align with comp, especially across departments. Would you rather be a director making $X, or a senior manager making $X+10?
• Merger integrations often focus on titles as a way of placating people or sending a signal to “the other side” — but the title lasts forever, where the need that a big title is fulfilling is more likely short term
• Internal equity of titles but an external mismatch can cause a lot of heartache both in hiring and in noting who is in a management role
• Promotions as a concept associated with titles are challenging.  Promotions should be about responsibility, ownership and commensurate compensation.  Titles are inappropriately used as a promotion indicator because it inherently makes other people feel like they have been demoted when keeping the same title
• Why do heads of finance carry a C-level title but heads of sales usually carry an EVP or SVP title, with usually more people and at least equal responsibility?  And does it sound silly when everyone senior has a C level title?  What about C-levels who don’t report to the CEO or aren’t even on the executive team?
• Ever try to recalibrate titles, or move even a single title, downward?  Good luck

What good comes from titles?  People who have external-facing roles can get a boost from a big title. Titles may be helpful to people when they go look for a new job, and while you can argue that it’s not your organization’s job to help your people find their next job, you also have to acknowledge that your company isn’t the only company in the world.

Titles are also about role clarity and who does what and what you can expect from someone in a department.  You can do that with a job description and certainly within an organization, it is easy to learn these things through course of business after you join.  But especially when an organization gets big, it can serve more of a purpose.  I suppose titles also signal how senior a person is in an organization, as do org charts, but those feel more like useful tools for new employees to understand a company’s structure or roles than something that all employees need every day.

Could the world function without titles?  Or could a single organization do well without titles, in a world where everyone else has titles? There are some companies that don’t have titles. One, Morning Star, was profiled in a Harvard Business Review article, and I’ve spoken to the people there a bit. They acknowledge that lack of titles makes it a little hard to hire in from the outside, but that they train the recruiters they work with how to do without titles – noting that comp ranges for new positions, as well as really solid job descriptions, help.

All thoughts are welcome on this topic.  I’m not sure there’s a good answer.  And for Return Pathers reading this, it’s just a think piece, not a trial balloon or proposal, and it wasn’t prompted by any single act or person, just an accumulation of thoughts over the years.

(This is the third post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  First two posts are here and here.)

Friday, March 20, Day 4

• Morning pilates going pretty well, a good daily routine here
• Wellness Screening on the way in for the first time.  Uniformed National Guard guys taking temperature on surface of face/temples.  Can’t get it to work – takes 6x
• Leadership and prioritization of important over urgent – staff the team
• Strategic National Stockpile failure – they send us 60,000 masks and Colorado is using 68,000/day.  They send us ZERO ventilators. Seems like it’s neither strategic nor a stockpile. Guess it really is every state for itself
• Unclear sometimes what the actual role of the state is – sometimes procuring, sometimes getting private sector to procure with some coordination, etc.
• Getting out in front of the parade – the private sector is swarming all over this, how can we help coordinate and channel the energy?
• State gov seems incredibly nimble here – seconding people from departments all over to the crisis, etc.  Bureaucracy is real, but it can melt away in an emergency, or when the governor wants it to. Really impressive
• Going to try DoorDash and see if it’s any different than UberEats.  (It’s not.) Big night.

Saturday, March 21, Day 5

• Saturday but office still 75%
• Wellness Screening again.  Still can’t get thermometer to work for quite a while
• Mike Willis asked for feedback and observations (good) – they are
  • Atmosphere in EOC calm, focused, integrated, SMART, nimble, fast – opposite of “government”
  • Opening meeting on Tuesday morning – calm, focused, caring, quiet urgency
  • Didn’t realize he was military
  • Mentioned yesterday’s “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” moment, poignant but respectful
• Team pull up, drowning in emails, plan to get organized
• Governor briefing
• Working on replacing me…
• Seamless prioritization of things that are gateway items and enablers.  We have a project tracker, but it’s almost useless. Mostly we are just doing prioritization in the moment.  No choice. Crisis mode
• Gov call – carefully weighing isolation strategy (economic as well as risk of civil disobedience) with number of projected deaths – sounds like the same conversation I’m reading about in the papers at the national level, but really interesting to see it up close and personal. Asked for plan around making food and services safer – super thoughtful “it’s not the economic activity that causes problems, it’s social proximity, are there ways we can keep one and minimize the other?”
• Colorado still has around 500 cases statewide – about ¼ of Westchester County.  Denver has less than 100. Still, feels like we are watching the tsunami coming at us in slow motion
• Dinner at a very close friend’s house who lives in town – elbow bumps and sat at the other end of the table.  Fun and social, but feels like even things like this are about to come to an end. Got to do laundry

Sunday, March 22, Day 6

• Sunday but office still 75%
• Multiple failures again with wellness screen, then we figure it out – on the walk over from the hotel, it’s cold enough that my skin temperature is out of range for the contact thermometers they have.  Since I am coming in early when there is no line, my face is too cold when I get to the front
• Adding staff, nowhere to put them, no organized email lists, working on org charts, have to retool O/S for meetings/tasks.  A little chaotic, but at least I know how to do this stuff
• Finally got connection to NY State to do some benchmarking on testing – doesn’t seem like states coordinate or share info a lot, but the team there was happy to 
• Finally have a few minutes to do planning on major swim lanes
• More working on replacing me
• This is the problem with statistics.  Models are only as good as the inputs, and the inputs here seem like they’re all over the place…not just here in CO, but everywhere.  It’s not like we have a pandemic every year to refine our math
• Interviewing Sarah Tuneberg (came in via Brad) to replace me with Lisa and Stan – she’s AWESOME and she’s hired – starts on the spot by coming in to stand with us behind the Governor at a press conference.  Talk about a rapid recruiting process!
• Seems like she will be awesome.  Probably way better than me – has a ton of public health and emergency/disaster response experience in addition to some private sector/startup/tech experience
• Her first worry never even occurred to me – Fatality Management – morgue surge capacity.  “Gift to the living” – so awesome
• Lameness of Trump press conference – self praise followed by sycophants in the midst of a typhoon
• Gov press conference (here) – authentic and well received.  “Grim reaper” was quite poignant. He worked in the key messages we asked him to about public misinformation of testing, talking points was Google Doc with 30+ people in it – good example of collaboration and control, seamless, last minute but still came out great.  Announces social distancing and lots of good examples about groceries, jogging, still no lockdown
• Lots of RP Colorado people seeing press conference…phone buzzing like mad in my pocket!  So many awesome notes from friends and former colleagues thanking me for being there to help, only one or two snarky comments about my orange tee shirt while others were in blazers (hey, it was a Sunday and the presser was called last minute!)

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

I read a ton of books.  I usually blog about business books, at least the good ones.  I almost never blog about fiction or non-business/non-fiction books, but I had a good “what did you read this summer” conversation the other night with my CEO Forum, so I thought I’d post super quick snippets about my summer reading list, none of which was business-related.

If you have kids, don’t read Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant’s Option B:  Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy unless you’re prepared to cry or at least be choked up.  A lot.  It is a tough story to read, even if you already know the story.  But it does have a number of VERY good themes and thoughts about what creates resilience (spoiler alert – my favorite key to resilience is having hope) that are wonderful for personal as well as professional lives.

Underground Airlines, by Ben Winters, is a member of a genre I love – alternative historical fiction.  This book is set in contemporary America – except that its version of America never had a Civil War and therefore still has four slave states.  It’s a solid caper in its own right, but it’s a chillingly realistic portrayal of what slavery and slave states would be like today and what America would be like with them.

Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance, is the story of Appalachia and white working class Americans as told by someone who “escaped” from there and became a marine, then a Yale-educated lawyer.  It explains a lot about the struggles of millions of Americans that are easy for so many of us to ignore or have a cartoonish view of.  It explains, indirectly, a lot about the 2016 presidential election.

Everybody Lies:  Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, written by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, was like a cross between Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise and Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics.  It’s full of interesting factoids derived from internet data.  Probably the most interesting thing about it is how even the most basic data (common search terms) are proving to be great grist for the big data mill.

P.J. O’Rourke’s How the Hell Did This Happen? was a lot like the rest of P.J. O’Rourke’s books, but this time his crusty sarcasm is pointed at the last election in a compilation of articles written at various points during the campaign and after.  It didn’t feel to me as funny as his older books.  But that could also be because the subject was so depressing.  The final chapter was much less funny and much more insightful, not that it provides us with a roadmap out of the mess we’re in.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Noah Harari, is a bit of a rambling history of our species.  It was a good read and lots of interesting nuggets about biology, evolution, and history, though it had a tendency to meander a bit.  It reminded me a bit of various Richard Dawkins books (I blogged a list of them and one related business topic here), so if you’re into that genre, this wouldn’t be bad to pick up…although it’s probably higher level and less scientific than Dawkins if that’s what you’re used to.

Finally, I finished up the fourth book in the massive Robert Caro quadrilogy biography of Lyndon Johnson (full series here).  I have written a couple times over the years about my long-term reading project on American presidential biographies, probably now in its 12th or 13th year.  I’m working my way forward from George Washington, and I usually read a couple on each president, as well as occasional other related books along the way.  I’ve probably read well over 100 meaty tomes as part of this journey, but none as meaty as what must have been 3000+ pages on LBJ.  The good news:  What a fascinating read.  LBJ was probably (with the possible exception of Jefferson) the most complex character to ever hold the office.  Also, I’d say that both Volumes 3 and 4 stand alone as interesting books on their own – Volume 3 as a braoder history of the Senate and Civil Rights; Volume 4 as a slice of time around Kennedy’s assassination and Johnson’s assumption of power.  The bad news:  I got to the end of Vol 4 and realized that there’s a Vol 5 that isn’t even published yet.

That’s it for summer reading…now back to school!

Book Short:  Is CX the new UX?

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, was a good read that kept crossing back and forth between good on the subject at hand, and good business advice in general.  The Customer Experience (CX) movement is gaining more and more steam these days, especially in B2B companies like Return Path.  The authors define Customer Experience as “how your customers perceive their interactions with your company,” and who doesn’t care about that?

A few years ago, people started talking a lot more about User Experience (UX) as a new crossover discipline between design and engineering, and our experience at Return Path has been that UX is an incredibly powerful tool in our arsenal to build great technical products via lean/agile methods.  The recurring thought I had reading this book, especially for companies like ours, was “Is CX the new UX?”

In other words, should we just be taking the same kind of lean/agile approach to CX that we do with technical product development and UX — but basically do it more holistically across every customer touchpoint, from marketing to invoice?  It’s hard to see the answer being “no” to that question, although as with all things, the devil is in the implementation details.  And that’s true at the high level (the authors talk about making sure you align CX strategy with corporate strategy and brand attributes and values) as well as a more granular level (what metrics get tracked for CX, and how do those align with the rest of the companies KPIs).

The book’s framework for CX is six high-level disciplines: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture — but you really have to read the book to get at the specifics.

Some other thoughts and quotes from the book:

• the book contains some good advice on how to handle management of cross-functional project teams in general (which is always difficult), including a good discussion of various governance models
• “to achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy, you have to change the way you run your business. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way.”
• one suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into your culture (if it’s not there already) is to invite customers to speak all-hands meetings
• another suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into everyone’s objectives was one company’s tactic of linking compensation (in this case, 401k match) to customer experience metrics
• “Customer Experience is a journey, not a project. It has a beginning but it doesn’t have an end.”

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Goldsmith for recommending this book.

Response to a Deliverability Rant

Justin Foster from WhatCounts, an email service provider based in Seattle, wrote a very lengthy posting about email deliverability on the WhatCounts blog yesterday.  There’s some good stuff in it, but there are a couple of things I’d like to clarify from Return Path‘s perspective.

Justin’s main point is spot-on.  Listening to email service providers talk about deliverability is a little bit like eating fruit salad:  there are apples and oranges, and quite frankly pineapples and berries as well.  Everyone speaks in a different language.  We think the most relevant metric to use from a mailer’s perspective is inbox placement rate.  Let’s face it – nothing else matters.  Being in a junk mail folder is as good as being blocked or bounced.

Justin’s secondary point is also a good one.  An email service provider only has a limited amount of influence over a mailer’s inbox placement rate.  Service providers can and must set up an ironclad email sending infrastructure; they can and must support dedicated IP addresses for larger mailers; they can and must support all major authentication protocols — none of these things is in any way a trivial undertaking.  In addition, service providers should (but don’t have to) offer easy or integrated access to third-party deliverability tools and services that are on the market.  But at the end of the day, most of the major levers that impact deliverability (complaint rates, volume spikiness, content, registration/data sources/processes) are pulled by the mailer, not the service provider.  More on that in a minute.

I’d like to clarify a couple of things Justin talks about when it comes to third-party deliverability services.

Ok, so he’s correct that seed lists only work off of a sample of email addresses and therefore can’t tell a mailer with 100% certainty which individual messages reach the inbox or get blocked or filtered.  However, when sampling is done correctly, it’s an incredibly powerful measurement tool.  Email deliverability sampling gives mailers significantly more data than any other source about the inbox placement rate of their campaigns.  Since this kind of data is by nature post-event reporting, the most interesting thing to glean from it is changes in inbox placement from one campaign to another.  As long as the sampling is done consistently, that tells a mailer the most critical need-to-know information about how the levers of deliverability are working.

For example, we released our semi-annual deliverability tracking study for the first half of 2005 yesterday, which (download the whitepaper with tracking study details here or view the press release here).  We don’t publicly release mailer-specific data, but the data that went into this study about specific clients is very telling.  Clients who start working with us and have, say a 75% inbox placement rate — then work hard on the levers of deliverability and raise it to 95% on a sampled basis, can see the improvements as their sales and other key email metrics jump by 20%.  Just because there’s a small margin of error on the sample doesn’t render the process useless.

Second, Justin issues a big buyer beware about Bonded Sender and other “reputation” services (quotes deliberate – more on that in a minute as well).  Back in June, we released a study about Bonded Sender clients which showed that mailers who qualified for Bonded Sender saw an average of a 21% improvement in inbox delivery rates (range of 15%-24%) at ISPs who use Bonded Sender such as MSN, Hotmail, and Roadrunner.  We were pretty careful about the data used to analyze this.  We only looked at mailers who were clients both before and after joining the Bonded Sender program for enough time to be relevant, and we looked at a huge number (100,000+) of campaigns.  Yes, it’s still “early days” for accreditation programs, but we think we’re off to a good start with them given this data, and the program isn’t all that expensive relative to what mailers pay for just about everything else in their email deployment arsenal.

Finally, let me come back to the two “more on that in a minute” points from above.  I’ll start with the second one — Bonded Sender is an accreditation program, or a whitelist, NOT a reputation service.  Accreditation and Reputation services are both critical components in the fight to improve inbox placement of legitimate, permissioned, marketing emails, but they’re very different kinds of programs (a little background on why they’re important and how they fit with authentication here).

Accreditation services like Bonded Sender work because, for the very best mailers, third parties like TRUSTe essentially vouch that a mailer is super high quality — enough so that an ISP can feel comfortable putting mail from that mailer in the inbox without subjecting it to the same level of scrutiny as random inbound mail.

There are no real, time-tested reputation services for mailers in the market today.  We’re in the process of launching one now called Sender Score.  Sender Score (and no doubt the other reputation services which will follow it) is designed to help mailers measure the most critical levers of deliverability so they can work at solving the underlying root cause problems that lead to low inbox placement.  This is really powerful stuff, and it will ultimately prove our (and Justin’s) theory that mailers have much more control over their inbox placement rate/deliverability than service providers.

Where does all this lead?  Two simple messages:  (1) if you outsource your email deployment to an email service provider, pick your provider carefully and make sure they do a good job at the infrastructure-related levers of email deliverability that they do control.  (2) whether you handle email deployment in-house or outsource it to a service provider, your inbox placement rate is largely in your control. Make sure you do everything you can to measure it and look closely at the levers, whether you work with a third-party deliverability service or not.

Apologies for the lengthy posting.