Your Customer Rules!

Delivering the Me2B Experiences That Today's Customers Demand

Bill Price, David Jaffe

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118954829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

What you need to know about your customers

Now more than ever, every interaction you have with customers is critical. Customers today have unlimited information at their fingertips—and can influence the purchase decisions and behaviors of millions of others. With this comes a shift in the balance of power, and every company must come to terms with the fact that the customer is in control. Interacting with customers in the way they want is an essential business strategy and in many industries, the key to business success.

Executives still refer to B2B and B2C business models, as though companies control demand by going to customers with products and services. But as Bill Price and David Jaffe (authors of The Best Service is No Service ) show, a new business model is emerging in which the customer directs the relationship. It is becoming a world of "Me2B"—one in which the customer, not the business, dictates the terms of engagement. In order for your business to thrive, you must create positive experiences to fulfill a range of customer needs.

Though the mediums for customer engagement continuously evolve, Price and Jaffe show that customer needs remain unchanging. In Your Customer Rules!, they define a critical hierarchy of seven needs that your company can meet and apply as a methodology.

Throughout this practical guidebook, Price and Jaffe share examples of companies who succeed by meeting these seven needs, including Amazon, Apple, IKEA, Nordstrom, USAA, Shoes of Prey, Vente-Privee, and Yamato Transport, as well as those that didn't. Your Customer Rules! offers tailored advice for companies at every stage, from nimble startups to legacy firms with established customer service practices—and everyone in between.

With a simple, elegant solution for driving lasting value for customers, Your Customer Rules! is a clear guide for strengthening customer relationships and competing on more than price. It is essential reading for executives at all levels—business owners, marketing managers, and anyone who works directly with customers.

Chapter One
From B2C to Me2B

Customer service today gets slammed by customers right and left. While technology offers the promise of highly customized, seamless customer experiences at limitless scale, few companies have fulfilled on that promise. Consumers seem to share the impression that service and sales interactions are getting worse, not better. In many industries, customers are complaining more, with Internet-enabled breadth and speed. To pull a few recent headlines:

1. “Complaint-to-Compliment Ratio of MBTA Tweets Remains High.”¹
2. “Npower Ranks Top for Moans: Customer Complaints Against Energy Giant Soar 25%.”²
3. “70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter.”³

In the utilities industry in Australia, for example, the volume of complaints to the central complaints body (the Ombudsman) has risen dramatically despite no significant change in customer numbers—doubling in five years, four times the rate of population growth. Similar complaint bodies in other countries such as the Office of Communications in the United Kingdom show complaint rates rising over the same period.

Despite billions spent to win customers' affection, we are only just exceeding the levels of customer satisfaction reported in the early 1990s. In addition, customer switching between providers is on the rise, often prompted by a poor customer service experience.⁴ The companies that are lagging in customer experience perform poorly compared to customer experience leaders across a variety financial data points. For example, a Watermark Consulting study compared the six-year stock performance of customer experience leaders and laggards against the S&P 500, and found that leaders exceeded the S&P by 28 percentage points while laggards registered a 33 percent decline in stock value.⁵

As we all wait endlessly on hold with customer call centers across the world, only to keep repeating information to agents that we've given elsewhere in the purchase process, who can resist yearning for the good old days when mom-and-pop stores offered personalized and knowledgeable service? Perhaps selection and store hours were more limited, but at least business owners knew their customers as well as they did their products and were excited by both. Perhaps you can still remember going into the corner grocery store with Mom, watching with delight as the owner pulled out something special that he had ordered for her, along with a treat for you. Reconciling past and present creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that recalls a scene from the iconic '80s film Back to the Future, in which Michael J. Fox, transported via a plutonium-powered DeLorean back to 1955, stops dead in his skateboard tracks as he watches customers being waited on at the old full-service gas station.

What Used to Work, Doesn't Work Anymore

So what happened? Have our needs changed over the years, bringing customers and businesses out of sync? Or are companies today simply failing to deliver on the needs customers have always had?

Certainly, the landscape has changed. Today's businesses are bigger and incredibly more complex. Scale may have produced efficiency and economy, but it has distanced executives and management from their customers and from their frontline employees. Not only are businesses now headquartered in cities many miles from their customers, in an era of global operations the top executives may be in another country and speak another language. Senior management rarely spends time talking with customers, listening to their calls, or asking customer-facing staff for their take on what customers are saying. The bottom line is that scale has dissolved intimacy, and many organizations have forgotten the importance of moments of truth that required one-to-one interaction and connection.

Adding even more complexity, today's customer service operations have many moving parts that don't communicate with each other. The range of interaction channels, such as contact centers, SMS, co-browsing, the Internet, and social media, has proliferated. The net result is the omni-channel dilemma. While customers have clamored for new ways to deal with organizations, for example, via text messaging to take advantage of their always-at-hand smart phone, and while organizations have pressed ahead to open new channels, few of these channels have been integrated. This only increases customer frustration—and on top of that, support costs—a lose-lose scenario.

The Accenture Global Pulse, a study of customer attitude and behaviors across the world, reveals how frustrating this disconnect is for consumers.⁶ On a scale from 1 (“not frustrating at all”) to 5 (“extremely frustrating”), 23 percent of customers choose 4 and an incredible 66 percent choose 5 to describe their reaction to having to repeat the same information to multiple employees of a company or through multiple channels.

Customer relationship management (CRM), widely in practice today, is a flawed methodology that isn't working. Those who promoted it pushed technology solutions to control the relationship with customers. The very name customer relationship management reveals the heart of the problem. The organization should manage the relationship, the theory went. But customers were never asked if they wanted to be managed by organizations. And who would have asked to be managed? We'd argue that no one should manage a relationship; relationships are shared rather than managed. CRM has been flawed from the start, but is even more at odds with today's business climate.

The outcome of all this? Businesses continue to do stupid things that upset customers, like the ones captured in a U.K. survey: “Sending standard letters when I write an individual enquiry about something specific,” “They make everything so complicated,” and “Offering you the world when you're a potential customer and then treating you like crap when you're an existing customer.”⁷ Sound familiar?

Welcome to the Me2B World: Now Your Customer Rules!

Unsatisfying, clunky customer service experiences pose an even more serious threat to businesses' survival than they would have ten years ago. Today's customers have significantly more power. The Internet, social media, mobile access, and all the other recent dynamic changes have moved us far beyond the command-and-control era, when organizations could tell their customers what was best for them—while really aiming to increase short-term profits.

For many years, people have largely categorized businesses in two models, B2B and B2C. B2B organizations sell to other businesses; B2C organizations sell to mass-market consumers. (There's also the more complicated third model, B2B2C, where an intermediate business such as a reseller or broker sells to the consumer.) These models suggest that the business controls and directs the relationship: They go to the other business, or to the consumer. They hold the power and direct the relationship.

Meanwhile, in the past decades, we've seen these sweeping global changes:

1. Social networks via the Internet have forever changed the way organizations operate. Customers, whether individuals or businesses, have access to limitless information about competing goods and services. And for the first time customers now have the opportunity to influence thousands, or even millions, of other customers; they are helping each other, often trusting their peers instead of the companies themselves. We call this C2C communication.
2. We have entered the mobile age, where information travels with us and is at our fingertips. Customers can be anywhere and access Internet-sourced information, impacting decisions straight up to the point of sale.
3. Internet-enabled transactions, the cloud, Big Data, and other technologies are transforming business models. Whole industries are being disrupted, in many cases significantly lowering the barrier to entry. The handful of upstart companies that have created new ways to operate and are successfully delivering scaled, personalized omni-chan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for Your Customer Rules!
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter One: From B2C to Me2B
• Chapter Two: You Know Me, You Remember Me
• Chapter Three: You Give Me Choices
• Chapter Four: You Make It Easy for Me
• Chapter Five: You Value Me
• Chapter Six: You Trust Me
• Chapter Seven: You Surprise Me with Stuff I Can't Imagine
• Chapter Eight: You Help Me Be Better and Do More
• Chapter Nine: What Drives Me2B Leaders
• Chapter Ten: The Foundations of Me2B Success
• Epilogue: Don't Wait to Act
• Glossary
• Recommended Reading
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• More from Wiley
• Index
• End User License Agreement