Review of B-side operational activities: Find the purpose and users

The author reviewed a B-side operation activity and summarized the experience and lessons. He believed that one should start from the purpose of the activity, clarify the target users of the activity, and avoid conflicts of interest between the interests of the activity participants and the cost bearers as much as possible.

During the Double Eleven period, the company's operations team planned an incentive event for users in order to encourage more users to place orders on our platform, but the effect of the event was not satisfactory.

Although I was not the directly responsible product manager, I witnessed the entire process and results of the event and summarized some experience.

1. Activity Introduction

1. Background and purpose of the event

We are an after-sales service platform. Merchants need us to provide after-sales service for orders sold across the country. Therefore, each order on the platform will be associated with a service area.

During Double Eleven, the order volume of major e-commerce platforms is very large. As an after-sales service platform, the order volume of our platform will also increase significantly. There are multiple competing products in the industry, and in order to encourage the customer service staff responsible for placing orders at various merchants to choose our platform more, we planned and operated this activity.

2. Activity plan

The activity plan of operation planning is relatively complex, which can be briefly summarized as follows:

1. Set up 1,111 regions where you can get points for placing orders, and the points given in each region are different;
2. During the event, the first customer to place an order to the customer service in the region will unlock the "regional reward" and receive corresponding points;
3. If the order is closed, the gift points will be invalid;
4. After the event ends, customer service can use the accumulated points to redeem corresponding prizes;
5. The points given to customer service are two different concepts from the points in the merchant account system and are independent of the existing merchant account points system.

It should be noted that ours is a 2B product, but the target users of this activity are the customer service staff of each merchant who are responsible for placing orders. A merchant may have multiple customer service staff. The points earned by multiple customer service staff of the same merchant are calculated separately and can only be redeemed separately when redeeming prizes.

The number of points and regions awarded are as follows:

A total of 7,500 points are given.

The rewards that can be redeemed for accumulated points are as follows:

3. Activity Results

The event lasted for one month. After the event ended, I saw the statistics in the background.

The number of unlocked regions and the corresponding number of users (for example, 74 customer service representatives unlocked rewards in 2 regions, accounting for 8%):

The number of accumulated points and the corresponding number of customer service staff (for example, 13 customer service staff have accumulated 100 points, accounting for 1%):

In addition, two additional data are as follows:

1. All the "place an order and get points" areas have been claimed, but 1/3 of the areas have become invalid due to the closure of the order;
2. Before the redemption deadline, the number of customer service staff who came to redeem gifts was 0.

2. Problem Analysis

Some problems can be discovered through analysis of the activity plan and results.

1. The number of customer service staff who can receive rewards is small, and the number of points accumulated is small

There are a total of 1,111 regions where there are rewards for placing orders in this activity. Even if each customer service representative gets one point, only 1,111 customer service representatives can receive reward points at most.

Judging from the actual data of the activity, the number of customer service staff who actually received points rewards was less than 900.

During Double Eleven, the number of merchants placing orders on the platform reached tens of thousands, and most of the larger merchants had multiple customer service staff responsible for placing orders. In fact, the number of customer service staff who can receive points rewards accounts for less than 2%.

In addition, the highest level prize of the event requires 10,000 points to redeem, but the cumulative points given are only 7,500 points. Such a setting is obviously unreasonable.

The rule of "earning points for the first order placed in a specific area" should be changed to "earning points for the first n orders placed in a specific area". At the same time, you can also consider using a gradient strategy, such as rewarding 5 points for the first 10 orders, 10 points for the 11th to 20th orders, and so on.

Not only has the number of customer service staff who can receive rewards increased, but the accumulated points have also increased, allowing more customer service staff to receive points rewards after participating in the event.

2. Uncertain value of points

The reason why users are willing to work hard to complete operational planning tasks and earn points is because the points have value in exchanging for other goods.

Using points to redeem goods on the platform is just like using RMB to shop in a supermarket. If the purchasing power of the RMB changes arbitrarily, it will cause chaos in supermarket sales.

In the same supermarket, the same kind of rice may be priced at "3 yuan per catty, 5 yuan per 2 catties", but it is absolutely impossible to have a pricing rule of "3 yuan per catty, 18 yuan per 2 catties". Because, according to this pricing rule, when a user wants to buy 2 kilograms of rice, should he pay 6 yuan? Or give 18 yuan?

From the table of prizes that can be exchanged for accumulated points, we can find that the value of a single point is uncertain.

• 25 points can be exchanged for 5 yuan of phone bill. In other words, 5 points are approximately equal to 1 RMB;
• 150 points can be exchanged for 10 yuan of phone bills. 15 points equals 1 RMB;
• 10,000 points can be exchanged for an iPhone X. 1.7 points is approximately equal to 1 RMB.

If a customer service representative has 150 points, can he redeem them in 6 times, with each time redeeming 10 yuan of phone charges?

3. Users cannot actively participate and can only passively respond to activities

The activity rules require that only the customer service who places the first order in these 1111 regions can receive reward points. But to a large extent, this is not something that customer service can control subjectively.

Whether an order is placed to these 1111 regions depends on whether there are orders in these 1111 regions.

Whether the order placed to these 1111 regions is the first order depends on whether the customer service of other merchants has placed the order first.

Even if the customer service staff subjectively wants to participate in the event, they cannot control the progress of their participation in the event. You can only passively wait for the activity response after placing an order.

If you are lucky, when a customer service representative places an order, he or she happens to be the first customer service representative to place an order in a certain area and gets 100 points.

But again, if you are unlucky and the customer service places 100 orders, but either the orders are not placed to these 1111 regions, or the customer service is not the first to place an order, you may not even get 1 point.

But in terms of probability, the second situation is more likely to occur.

For an activity that can only be responded to passively by luck, customer service naturally has no interest in actively participating.

4. There are conflicts of interest between the activity audience and the cost bearers

In our platform, the customer service staff of each merchant are responsible for placing orders, while the merchant, who is also the boss of the customer service, bears the costs.

The activity is to encourage customer service staff to place more orders on our platform and reward them. The purpose is understandable and acceptable, but the methods used pose great ethical and even legal risks for customer service.

In order to obtain customer orders, sales staff in some factories give a certain percentage of "cash back" to the purchasing employees of the client company. The salesperson bribed the purchasing staff in order to close the deal.

For purchasing personnel, it is abusing their power for personal gain and using public resources for personal gain. For the boss of the client company, it is an infringement of corporate interests.

This kind of behavior, under concealed conditions, can often effectively conclude transactions.

The rules of this activity are open to merchants and customer service staff who place orders. How could a customer service representative be willing to take the risk of abusing their power for personal gain or using their power for personal gain when their boss can see it?

The activity bypasses the merchants who bear the costs and directly rewards the customer service staff who place the orders. This not only infringes on the interests of the merchants, but also brings potential risks to the customer service staff.

After the event ended, 23 customer service representatives who were eligible to redeem the 5-yuan phone bill did not come forward to redeem it. In addition to the low value of the 5-yuan phone bill, the fear of being considered as "abusing public power for personal gain" was probably also an important reason.

We should tie the behavior of customer service when placing orders to the interests of the merchants. Choosing our platform to place orders can enable merchants to obtain more benefits. If customer service staff are given cash coupons when placing orders, they will naturally be willing to participate, and merchants will also be more willing to ask customer service staff to place orders on our platform.

5. Functions supporting activities are short-term and used once

Since the activity incentivizes the customer service who places the order rather than the merchant users, the carrier of the incentive is points. In order to support the development of this activity, the platform has built a new task points system for ordering customer service in addition to the merchant account system.

The project proposal should at least include the following:

• Record customer service information for each order;
• Record the order records of each customer service who placed the order;
• Record each customer service points reward and bind it with the order record;
• Records information about customer service redeeming prizes.

The entire project involved 1 product manager, 1 designer, 2 developers, and 1 tester to complete product design and development and launch, which took 3 weeks. The event, which was originally planned to last for a month, ended in just a week.

The functions developed by the team with great manpower cost cannot be reused by other activities or modules. The requirement that took three weeks to develop was only used for one week and served less than 1% of users.

3. Experience Summary

The planning of B-side operational activities should start from the purpose of the activity, clarify the target users of the activity, and avoid conflicts of interest between the interests of the activity participants and the cost bearers as much as possible.

At the same time, it is necessary to set attractive and common-sense activity rewards, control the cost of participating in the activity, and let users clearly understand the costs and benefits of the activity so that they can subjectively control the behavior of participating in the activity, so as to attract more users to participate in the activity and achieve commercial value.

Author: Product Thoughts

Source: Product Thoughts