Posts tagged as:

customer experience

Three guidelines for business clarity

by drm on April 13, 2010

Google marketing principles
Image by niallkennedy via Flickr

A few weeks ago I read an article in the McKinsey Quarterly that used observations from behavioral economics to recommend simple guidelines for marketers. The conclusions were striking in how strongly they resonated with our thinking about how we approach our products and markets.

  • Make a product’s cost less painful
  • Don’t overwhelm your customer with choice
  • Position your preferred option carefully

The first is a basic rule of getting your product accepted. The ultimate cost of the product or service isn’t the amount that is paid; it’s the financial cost plus the time and energy that your customer has to commit to use or integrate your product. And, your customer always has the choice of doing nothing.

In many cases, the easiest way to get a customer to chose or switch a complex product is to do the work required to get the product up and going. We forget this sometimes as we use technology to put tools in the hand of the customer. If working with those tools simply accomplishes the transfer of work from the seller to the buyer, then the tools are ultimately of no value to the customer.

A good, counter-intuitive example is Google‘s customer experience for AdWords. Think of AdWords and you think of a self-serve model that reduces Google’s sales and service costs.

When you use AdWords, however, you discover that the tools enrich your understanding of your market…that, in fact, the automation of the AdWords system reduces that amount of time that a customer needs to spend to create and implement an advertising program on the search engine.

The second guideline speaks to the importance of keeping your product or service as simple as possible. When you adhere to simplicity, you create the opportunity to build strong and lasting relationships with your customers. Think of simplicity as a simple definition of what you do that makes complete sense to your customer. “I create qualified business leads for you.” “I provide easy-to-access business intelligence for you.” “I create great marketing experiences for you.”

The simplicity should be a filter that lets you take away unnecessary choices from your your customer. It’s too easy to keep adding new features, or to build functionality into a service that is unrelated to the core promise.

The final rule admonishes to know what we want to sell. In our business, we should always have a preferred option, a product or service that we offer that we know we can delivery effectively and profitably.

Businesses too often fall into the trap of believing that having a broad menu of options, or a wide array of choices, creates more activity from customers. The McKinsey monograph argues that this complexity runs counter to our ultimate goals.

You can find the article here; the full article is behind a subscription wall.

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Our experience with brand service

by drm on July 1, 2009

A couple of weeks ago I ran a short poll on this blog asking whether our experience with customer service had changed during the economic contraction.

The question was prompted by an experience I had with American Express that seemed very contrary to the brand promise of the company.

The results of this admittedly unscientific poll are below:

Do you feel that major brands (like American Express) are providing customer service consistent with their brand promise during this economic contraction?

  • I've never felt like the customer service I experienced was consistent with the brand promise (41%, 12 Votes)
  • I have seen a notable fall-off in customer service. (34%, 10 Votes)
  • Customer service has actually improved ... I can tell that they want to keep my business. (14%, 4 Votes)
  • Customer service is at the same high level I've always experienced (11%, 3 Votes)

Total Voters: 29

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75% of you seem pretty unimpressed with customer service:  34% feel like customer-service has fallen off recently and another 41% feel like customer service has never been consistent with the brand promises.

That’s a pretty unsatisfactory outcome.

In this period of economic challenges, customer service is a powerful point of differentiation that is within your control.  So much of customer service is about accessibility, culture and attitude.  With all of the communications challenges available to us today, we can create multiple points of contacts with consumers.

Customer service doesn’t mean that you resolve each issue in favor of the person who has reached out.  It does mean that every issue is resolved in a timely and personal fashion.

That way, customer service becomes a foundation element of the customer experience.

My orientation of customer service is rooted in my first experiences in business.  We had a small boutique newsletter and consulting firm that specialized in the impact of technology on the content business.  This is the mid-1980s, after the breakup of AT&T and during a period of innovation and expansion in the microcomputer industry and the business information industry.  All the change was driven by harnessing the power of micro-processors and shifting the channels of distribution for information.

Our business depended on high-value interactions:  A newsletter subscription was about $400 and a report sale was at least $1500.

Every single phone call mattered.

As a result, everyone answered the phone.  Every phone call an opportunity:  to learn some bit of information, to handle an order inquiry and, most importantly, to deal with a customer service issue.

If the phone rang more than 3 times and didn’t get picked up, we knew that we were doing something wrong.

Every person was required to get a name, title, company, address and phone number every time the phone rang.  We put this information into one single database — a rudimentary Professional Pro spreadsheet — and tracked it against orders and renewals.

The essence of our customer experience was engagement, curiosity and resolution.  Every single time.

That’s my expectation from a customer service organization.  At our company, with our 35,000+ customer relationships and the millions of pieces of content that we process and distribute every single month, I hope that we’re able to achieve some of that experience of customer service.  We believe that our culture gives people the opportunity to resolve issues and to feel satisfied with what they’ve been able to do.

Can I attest that we accomplish that consistently?  No.  And the very act of writing this post makes me think about ways that we should set out these expectations more clearly and measure more effectively.

That’s how you improve your customer experience.

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