Plaid Summer Tour: What are you doing with your .01%?

Thursday, July 30, 2009

What are you doing with your .01%?

FedEx has one of the most perfect delivery records of any company in any business. More than 99%. But when you're dealing with millions of packages delivered every day, if .01% of your overall business experiences a service failure (even by five minutes), that can represent a few thousand people. That's a near perfect delivery record, yet there are still a few thousand people left unhappy.

What if a percentage of those people are on Twitter? Or have blogs? This presents an interesting challenge that only a high volume brand like FedEx might experience. Chances are that you're not tweeting "I just received my FedEx package." Or "just dropped my package at the FedEx box." But if you were one of the .01%, you might be tempted to tweet "FedEx didn't deliver my package today."

People are most passionate about brands when they do something extraordinary. Extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad. But every day success? Probably not. When soap works well in your dishwasher, do you tweet about it? Nope. But if it fails, or does something magical, you may choose to share it with the world.

We found this to be an interesting challenge that FedEx and other high volume brands have to deal with every day. FedEx has a team of people devoted to monitoring this social chatter, and they proactively reach out to folks experiencing issues. They've also created blogs and other media to help tell more of the magical things that they're doing every day. They're clearly doing a great job at managing the .01% in addition to the 99.9% success stories. For good reason. FedEx SVP of Digital Access Marketing Mark Colombo points out that a 1% increase in loyalty can bring significant earnings straight to the bottom line.

What about your brand? Are you addressing the .01%?

Labels: fedex, memphis