8 April 2014
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.“
— Steve Jobs
Traditional factors that have influenced buying decisions for long have lost their sheen. All the celebrity endorsements, product placements and splashy multi million-dollar ad campaigns are just 140 characters away from becoming a big dud. Over the past few years, customers have taken control of the conversation from businesses.
No matter how big of a brand you are, customers are actually in the position of power. They don’t get carried away by all the pre sales blitz and are more focussed on what happens post sales. Brands that invest in offering customers a better experience get instant mindshare and a major chunk of the market relatively faster.
To begin with, you’ll have to understand the difference between a customer focused and a customer centric business. The former model does cater to its customers pleasantly as long as there is some monetary gain for them in doing so. Customer experience management isn’t their top priority.
Repeat sales, extended warranties, referrals - there has to be a quid pro quo for these businesses to go out of the way to make customers happy. Such companies rank better than their competition, but they believe in using band aids to heal all ailments.
On the other hand, customer centric businesses believe that happy customers are the bread and butter of their business. Delivering fabulous customer experience is in their DNA no matter where people fit in the sales pipeline. In fact, you can see every member in the company scramble to assist when a customer needs a helping hand.
The euphoria around customer centric business models has reached such a peak, it’s actually possible to build profitable businesses focussing only on keeping your customers happy and nothing else. Here’s how:
Not every company is Apple. A business cannot succeed without inputs and feedback from its customers and prospects. Case in point - Microsoft (Windows 8.1 anyone?), Samsung, GM, LG etc. Apple used to be an oddity, but the tides are changing real fast.
We have already discussed the benefits of active listening in detail. Expand it to a wider audience and you have got yourself a nice feedback loop. Beware though, you’ll need a better understanding of your customer profiles to get meaningful and actionable insights.
Face to face meetings are not mandatory either. Use personalized emails to seek opinion, try using surveys, embed forms in web pages - make it absolutely easy for your customers to reach out to you.
Price tags aren’t stumbling blocks to close deals any more. Spray and pray advertising isn’t helping. Undercutting the competition is not a winning strategy either. So, what strategy does work? Apparently, making it easy and pleasant for customers to do business with you is!
Take for instance Rackspace. There are thousands of web hosting providers out there and they offer better, cheaper plans (atleast on paper). But, if you have some experience hosting sites and getting email servers setup, you’ll know that things get out of hand at times.
From opening a live chat window to getting the issue fixed or seeking some information, it hardly takes five minutes. Their support really is fanatical and considering how many back and forths it would have taken with any other hosting provider, their costly price tag isn’t a deterrent at all.
Besides, every market is crowded with numerous choices and there is no more uniqueness to products or services any more. Outsourcing and economies of scale have moved production lines to low cost destinations. Customers are smart enough to understand that badges and labels hardly matter any more.
When I am buying a hard disk or motherboard, I know for a fact that it’s manufactured either in China or Thailand. And, I know that the sweat shirts and towels in the fancy storefront are sourced from either Bangladesh or Sri Lanka.
In fact, it’s not uncommon for vendors from outsourced destinations to fabricate products of competing brands from under the same roof! Automobiles, electronics, consumer goods - brands across all verticals are starting to look the same.
On the technology side, the cloud has empowered us all. Almost all apps are built on top of open source tools and languages, and the solutions are hosted on AWS. The very first thing a competing solution does is getting their features on par with the competition. For every “unique” app out there, there is a handful of worthy competitors.
So, it’s easy to win people over if it isn’t cumbersome for them to interact with your business. If your response to their query is lukewarm or downright indifferent, rest assured, you are doing your competitor a big favor.
To build a customer centric business, you’ll have to care about your customers. There is no way to fake it and if that’s already in your organizational culture, it’s easy to build on top of it.
Since it’s not hard to duplicate or clone what you are doing, go for something that cannot be copied or matched by your competition overnight. As Paul Graham puts it - do things that don’t scale. Delivering flawless customer support is one thing that fits the bill just right. As a matter of fact, call it customer experience management if you will.
Whenever I have to contact any customer support, I spend a couple of minutes weighing in if it’s worth the heartburn or not. This happens everytime when I have to call my bank or credit card company. I’m sure their fine print will justify all the frivolous charges and penalties. So, why bother and add some insult on top of the misery?
However, it is a necessary evil and I need to build a credit history and to transact online. So, I keep this as a benchmark when I’m planning to make a purchase. Are they going to treat me with respect? Do I have to run from pillar to post get my issue resolved? Even if I don’t get a resolution at the earliest, I do respect the effort.
Zappos broke a lot of myths surrounding customer support. Their incredible and at times crazy efforts at making their customers happy have made it clear that it’s very much possible to delight customers even when running a business of such massive scale. The size of your operations doesn’t give you room to ignore the responsibility any longer.
After sales service and support have always been a part of the buying decision. But, customers have bumped them up all the way to the top of the shortlist of things they expect from your brand. One quick glance at Yelp, Twitter or Facebook is all it takes to scratch you off the list.
Thankfully, people don’t expect you to have an army of people sitting in front of phone banks waiting for support calls. They want their issues resolved and the quicker, the better. It doesn’t matter to them if there is a representative from your company helps them fix things or if you educate them to fix it themselves.
Make self service simple and comprehensive. Build a knowledgebase that educates the customer about your offering and walk them through common troubleshooting steps. If online isn’t your thing, ensure that the help manuals fill that gap.
Use your blog and social channels to publicize and maximize the usage of self service outlets by your customers. Once your customers see how painless and quick it is resolve issues on their own, they get a better understanding of how things work.
Thinking beyond case studies is tough. A two page PDF file is not an endorsement of how good you are to your customers. Showcase how you have solved real life problems and if possible, how successful you have been in transforming lives.
At the very least, offering tremendous value and an excellent customer experience will keep your customers from leaving you for the competition. Even in the case of not being to able to attract new customers through genuine care and support (very unlikely, I should add), your existing customers won’t leave you for your competition.
Taking into account how steep customer acquisition costs have become and the lifetime value of the customer, that is a profitable outcome as well.
In my experience, I have seen this happen to LastPass. It’s very much understandable that not everyone would be jumping on board a service that allows you to store all your passwords and sensitive data in third party servers. They stuck around, created multiple plugins and apps, supported them all fervently with their tiny team and made me a believer.
It’s not like I use all the privileges of a premium account, yet, it makes me proud to be their customer now that they’re getting the well deserved critical acclaim. And, I do not waste any opportunity to gush about how LastPass has wiped off my fears of losing my online identity to hackers.
Evernote, Dropbox, Wunderlist - the list of such customer centric businesses is growing real fast. In fact, the Evernote Ambassador program is a great example of turning loyal customers to brand ambassadors. It’s tough to attain such success even if your business is willing to pay people for it!
Customers are changing organizational cultures and the way businesses work. Do you believe that brands can succeed by investing their resources in delivering better customer experience? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
