You Can Lead a Person to Water, But Will They Purify It?

I was intrigued by a story on NPR this morning titled A Surprising Barrier to Clean Water: Human Nature. The story was about Innovations for Poverty Actions' efforts in Kenya to encourage people to purify their water. Most water comes from springs or wells, and it is contaminated. The co-creation of value story here encouraging Kenyans to add a few drops of chlorine to their water containers. The first design was to sell chlorine cheap at stores ($0.30 per month) with a social marketing and communication campaign. Adoption was very limited. The next design was to place chlorine dispensers next to the well or spring. 61% of water in Kenyan's homes tested positive for chlorine treatment, compared to 8% for a treatment group. A good trend.

From a customer performance perspective, the designers were primarily manipulating the Access component of the coproduction experience model by providing the tool (chlorine and its dispensers) and manipulating the interface (how and where it is dispensed). They also manipulated Incentive (making chlorine free). I assume that there is some customer education in the mix as well (it is not discussed in the project details I found), and the Vision, well, is self-evident: better health for kids and fewer deaths. You would think that would be enough for 99.9% adoption.

Isn't Being Healthy a Good Enough Incentive?

There has been a rise in news stories about new innovations in encouraging customers to stick to taking their prescriptions as directed. The motivation? It seems that Medicare is providing financial rewards to insurers and pharmacies for improving patient compliance. The latest story (WSJ, 5/21/13, p. B7) introduces a whole host of customer performance tactics, such as:

• Big data analytics (scan patient claims and clinical data to identify people with high non-compliance risk)
• Earn points and prizes for taking medicines as directed
• Including sensors in pills themselves that report to a mobile device when a pill was ingested (with reports delivered to doctors and family members)
• Including sensors in pill bottles to assess remaining medicine
• Designing a pill bottle that develops "banana" spots to indicate expiration

Movie Theater Experience - Norming Deviant Customers

My wife and I went to the movies last night, something we rarely do. After all, with a big-screen TV and Netflix, one's home is a movie theater.

Before the movie started, the screen displayed an ad for a new service called CineMode. CineMode is an app for your smart phone that, when activated, puts your phone in a sleep mode. But here's the customer performance kicker. If your smartphone remains in CineMode for the entire length of the film, then you'll earn a reward. - a digital coupon for treats, movie discounts, and so on.

The whole aim of CineMode is to influence customer performance, specifically that of deviants who text and do other things with their phones that impact the quality of the customer experience for other movie goers. Obviously, setting customer expectations didn't work. So some stronger medicine was needed. However, after displaying the CineMode ad, the theater then displayed a stronger message: if you use your phone in the theater during the movie you will be asked to leave. Which incentive do you think will be more effective? The CineMode reward or the threat of removal from the theater?

In my customer experience class, my students conducted fieldwork several years ago that explored this kind of deviant behavior. They set up situations in which a confederate's cell phone rang in three situations: a public area, a quiet room in the library, and at a diner that has large signs prohibiting cell phone use. The "customer norming" in the first situation was none; in the second, it was non-verbal expressions and glances shunning the behavior; and in the third it was both verbal and non-verbal actions by both other customers and staff to shun the behavior.

But the classic theater behavior modification is John Water's short that informs people about smoking policies in theaters. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnpofBtijF8.

Coproduction for Green Consumers

Paul Stern in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 17, 2012 R8) offers six principles for getting people to take steps to save energy. He suggests that changing behavior does not depend on the size of the financial incentive, but other factors as well, which I connect to our Coproduction Experience Model:

1. Get people to think big (in terms of the one or two big changes that have the greatest impact) - Vision
2. Make the savings obvious - Incentive
3. Market effectively - Vision, Access
4. Provide convenient, credible answers - Expertise
5. Keep it simple - Access
6. Provide quality assurance/guarantee - Access, Incentive

Mr. Stern goes on to give an example illustrating these factors, Cash for Clunkers, as well as a variety of private company business models that apply the factors. But he also reminds readers that saving energy isn't a key objective of most households and businesses.

The Most Innovative Loyalty Reward System

It was late at night when I checked into this Marriott Courtyard hotel in Seattle, WA. As a Marriott loyalty club member, I am offer points or an amenity when I check in. I usually choose points. So I was surprised when the front desk clerk reached back and pulled out this, a mechanical toy pond with plastic baby ducks swimming around it.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's how we award loyalty points," answered the clerk. "You pick up one of the swimming ducks and on the bottom of the duck is the number of loyalty points you've won. Some ducks have more, some ducks have less."

So I let the ducks swim around a bit and picked one. It was for 1,000 points, 500 more than what I would have earned if they had just given me the normal allocation.

So a couple of cool customer experience things are happening here. First, the hotel employees were empowered to do something like this. Second, it is a very creative way to allocate loyalty points, which I don't think any "professional" experience designer would have ever thought of. I also learned that this wasn't their only loyalty point game. They also had a game that used playing cards. All-in-all, well done!

No Phone Zone at Masters

Similar to the cruise ship Paradise which I wrote about in our book Creating Do-It-Yourself Customers, where smoking was banned on the ship with severe penalties if you did smoke, the 2012 Masters golf tournament has a similar policy. Cell phones are banned from the Masters, and if you are caught with one then you are asked to leave and banned from the Masters as well (see WSJ 4/6/12). Here we have the use of an incentive (specifically, punishment) to influence customer performance. What's also interesting about this policy is that it has forced spectators to revert back to other methods to keep in touch with their friends and family at the Masters, such as having a plan (Vision:Plan).

Better Keep That Reservation

There appears to be a trend in restaurants to add a little punishment to their customer experience, in the form of penalties of up to $75 if your party doesn't show up for its reservation. The customer performance angle on this is, of course, preventing no-shows, which in the restaurant trade can run up to 20% of reservations taken. It's a method similar to what doctors and dentists do these days. See the WSJ 3/14/12, D1.

PartnerCare

PartnerCare is a project I've been involved with over the past couple of years off and on, and I think it is one of the coolest customer co-creation of value examples out in the market, if not the most radical. Basically, PartnerCare is a service provided by STD clinics that is legal in 31 states (as of 12/2011) where a health care provider can treat a patient for a bacterial STD, and then give the patient medicine that the patient can take to their partner(s).

Obviously, this service has a number of customer performance elements to it, as it essentially puts patients in the role of being a dispensing pharmacist (and that's a whole new twist on self-service). My colleagues and I shot an interesting video documentary at Denver Public Health's STD clinic. You can check it out at http://partnercare.org/clinic-case-studies to see how it all works. We even shot videos illustrating "what it might be like" for patients to provide these kinds of medicines to their partners.

Training Brain Performance

An interesting article about conditioning related to incentive programs that help train the brain to change behaviors and performance (WSJ 4/28/09, D1,3). It is all about different kinds of incentives, such as lotteries, deposit contracts, and financial incentives.

Key to this article is a report of a GE stop smoking program that offered workers $750 to stop smoking. 847 employees participated.