What Customers Crave

Nicholas Webb

• Editorial: AMACOM
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780814437827
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Customer Relations

Think you know your customers? You better be more assured than just thinking you do, because your success depends on it! The best companies in the world first research exhaustively what their customers desire, and then they deliver it in memorable and deeply human experiences--resulting in success previously believed to be unachievable. So once again, how well do you know your customers?In a hyperconnected economy that is radically changing consumer expectations, this vital expectation for any successful business is not always easy. But in What Customers Crave, author and business strategist Nicholas Webb simplifies this critical task into being able to confidently answer two questions: What do your customers love? What do they hate?Jam-packed with tools and examples, this must-have resource helps businesses reinvent how they engage with customers (both physical and virtual). Learn how to: • Gain invaluable insights into who your customers are and what they care about• Use listening posts and Contact Point Innovation to refine customer types• Engineer experiences for each micromarket that are not only exceptional, but insanely relevant• Connect across the five most important touchpoints• Co-create with your customers• And more!It's time to reinvent the ways you engage with your customers. Because when you learn to provide for them exactly what they want, they not only bring along their wallets but those belong to their friends as well!

PART
ONE

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

In What Customers Crave, I focus on the current landscape of customer service—in particular, why it’s so devastatingly different from what it was in the pre-connected economy age. In today’s hyper-connected, hypercompetitive business world, old ways of providing customer service are failing.

As we explore this phenomenon, you will discover how power has shifted, where it now resides, and what you need to do to take advantage of this new paradigm. You will learn to identify your customers by type—rather than through traditional market segmentation. As a business owner, I don’t care about classical market segmentation. I don’t care what my customers’ skin color is or whether they shop at Tiffany or Walmart. What I do care deeply about, to the depths of my marketing soul, is what they love and what they hate. In What Customers Crave, my emphasis is on helping you truly understand your customer types by showing you how to identify what they love and what they hate. These insights will allow you to create exceptional experiences for all your customer types, across all touchpoints, and all channels—digital and non-digital.

I’ll be discussing—and asking you to really lean into—insights and tools that will help you embrace this new digital world. I will show you how to delight your customers and how to begin creating experiences for them—experiences that will turn them into social media mavens on your behalf.

What I’m asking from you in return is to lean into this information and be open to the new ideas and strategies involved because it’s worth it—plain and simple. Your reward will be a more successful business, higher profits, and happier customers.

CHAPTER 1

THE ADVENT OF “EXCEPTIONAL”
CUSTOMER SERVICE

Let’s face it: Today, most customer experience programs are a disaster.

Don’t blame yourself, because it’s not your fault that these programs are failing you. Most organizations were sold the promise that if they used the right software, analytic tools, and processes, they would be able to manage their customer relationships and deliver what their customers wanted—every time.

This approach sort of worked for a while. We understood our customers through segmentation and who the customer was—white, black, male, female, affluent, not so affluent, in their thirties, in their fifties—thinking demography was the key. We believed the Voice of the Customer (VoC) was the answer and that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) alone would be enough to engineer exceptional experiences across the customer’s journey.*

The problem today is that this approach is almost always wrong. Yes, wrong. We cannot continue to apply old-fashioned models in today’s hyper-linked and hyper-aggressive environment. In fact, even when an organization has built a reasonably good strategy, it virtually always fails in execution. According to some excellent research conducted for the software company Oracle, 93 percent of executives say that improving the customer experience is one of their organization’s top three priorities in the next two years, and 91 percent wish their organization was considered a customer experience leader in their industry. However, many organizations are stuck in an execution chasm: 37 percent are just getting started with a formal customer experience initiative, and only 20 percent consider the state of their customer experience initiative to be advanced.¹

A NEW BEGINNING: THE FALL OF THE CUSTOMER
SERVICE–INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The term military-industrial complex came into common usage when President Dwight Eisenhower used it in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. Eisenhower used the term to warn the country of the dangerous relationship among the government, the military, and the arms industry. I have adapted it to the customer service–industrial complex—to warn businesspeople of the dangers inherent in the continued use of the canned “customer service” programs still in use today.

For nearly half a century, from the 1950s into the 1990s, customer service was easy. Its approach was authoritarian and it did not directly connect with the consumer. Large organizations simply had control of the media through advertising and publicity and used one-way (simplex) communication to drive consumers to a specific service or product. In this way, they simply told consumers what their experience with a product or service was going to be like.

A great example of current success in our consumer-oriented economy is Uber, the alternative-to-cab car service. In the past, passengers had no control over what they would find when they got into a taxi. Sometimes passengers had good experiences, sometimes terrible ones. They felt they had little recourse but to accept what they got. Then Uber came along with its instant rating system, which let riders know exactly what other passengers thought of and had experienced with a particular driver. By the same token, the drivers could rate the passengers. In this way, both passengers and drivers can choose to not do business with people who have a reputation for obnoxious behavior.

However, in the customer service–industrial complex environment, consumers were practically blind to their choices. Their social connections were limited (when compared to today), so they had no real way of determining the quality or value of a product or service. With few or no other options, they simply got what was dealt them by companies. Purveyors of electronics, sellers of packaged consumer goods, hotels, airlines, and others were all experienced bullies, and there was nothing the consumer could do about it. This continued for decades . . . until the Internet arrived.

Consumer bullying still exists. For example, have you ever called your cable company’s service department and been told they’d be happy to install your line a week later sometime between 8 AM and 5 PM? This is a classic example of a broken customer experience, and it’s only a matter of time until disruptive innovators end this sort of un-customer-centric practice forever.

To be fair, the customer service–industrial complex began with good intentions. Companies genuinely wanted to get closer to their clients as they realized this was the path to more sales. The problem arose because they tried to create assembly-line techniques in the customer service process. In their attempt to drive efficiency and reduce costs, they looked inward—at what worked for them—and became self-focused, not customer-focused.

For this reason, most CRM systems are designed to help companies sell more products or services to customers. They’re concerned with identifying profitable and not-profitable customers and using this knowledge to find ways to allocate resources. Information about consumer behavior and purchasing habits is pooled into spreadsheets, and businesses create grand marketing and customer engagement plans based on that data. The problem is that no one along the way actually got to know what I call the Soul of the Customer®. No one stopped to identify customer types and what people really love and what they really hate. As a result, these systems are a waste of time and painful at best, and counterproductive and destructive at worst.

Can you use CRM to deliver better customer experiences while meeting your enterprise goals? Yes. But I find that most organizations use the systems from the perspective of an experience-bully rather than that of a disruptive innovator best looking to pioneer exceptional experiences across a customer journey.

Disruptive innovators identify weaknesses in competitive customer experiences (i.e., in old school customer service), and then use the systems, methods, and tools of the enterprise innovator to create exceptional consumer value. In this book, I will show you how to do this.

Pablo Picasso, one of the most famous and influential artists in the twentieth century, said, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” He was a disruptive innovator. In order to completely change the way in which painting was done, he had to destroy the way in which people looked at art. Picasso might have done well in today’s business world. This is far different from the incremental innovator, who really doesn’t destroy anything but only adds or subtracts a little bit.

THE RISE OF THE INTERNET AND THE BIRTH OF
CUSTOMER CONNECTIVITY

In the early 2000s, the Internet increased in influence and became available to consumers, causing an irreversible shift. Connection points, such as Yelp and Amazon, sprung up where people could rate their experiences and express their opinions about the quality of products and services. Yikes! No longer did companies get to solely prescribe an experience in a way that best suited their purposes.

The consumer began to take control. The power shifted and customer service will never be the same. Rating systems that cataloged what to buy and what to stay well away from sprouted, and blogs that exposed bad experiences and harmful company practices popped up.

In other words, connection architecture—the ability to connect anything to anything—emerged, and it is having a tremendous impact on the success of companies of all sizes. Nest, for example, is a technology that monitors home energy usage. Based on this information, homeowners can modify their behavior and save money on their electric bills. Netflix’s connection architecture destroyed Blockbuster by allowing users to receive movies and TV shows in their homes via the Internet for only a small monthly charge, with no late fees and no trips to brick-and-mortar stores.

Question: How many completely self-serving, internally and operationally focused companies do you want to do business with?

Answer: None.

CUSTOMER CONNECTIVITY IN TODAY’S
HYPER-CONNECTED ECONOMY

A short two decades ago, most of us didn’t even have email. Smartphones were relegated to sci-fi shows. Notebooks? Only the paper kind. Laptops? Heavy, expensive, and relatively rare.

Today, we are on the verge of digital ubiquity. The spread of mobile technology is so pervasive that it’s rare that a potential customer is not digitally connected. Customers now have unlimited options; they can buy anything, anywhere, anytime, and they can choose from a wide range of prices and quality. Perhaps even more important, they can buy, sell, praise, or condemn with a few flicks of the thumb.

Rather than stick our heads in the sand and pretend consumers don’t have this power, we can instead embrace it by creating exceptional customer experiences—experiences that rise above what a customer “expects” and that demonstrate a deep understanding of their loves and hates. Such experiences are so remarkable that they lead to our clients doing much of our marketing for us. To create these experiences, we have to truly understand the hearts and minds of our customers—in other words, what they love and what they hate. Word of warning: I will drone on about this ad nauseam because it’s the most important thing you can do in your business today.

IDENTIFYING YOUR CUSTOMER:
CUSTOMER TYPES VS. SEGMENTATION

Given the world we live in, we can no longer understand our customers simply by grouping them based on their age, ethnicity, economic status, gender, and geography. This gets you nowhere on a good day and can bankrupt you on a bad one.

To help understand the difference between customer types and segmentation, think back to high school. Where I went to school, almost everyone was a sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old male or female Caucasian from an affluent family. In fact, 90 percent of my graduating class fit that demogr...