customer-centric

Sarah Worsham / Mar 26, 2009

What Type of Experiences Are You Providing For Your Customers?

friendshipbbjee Traditional marketing focuses on product features and benefits. But your customers are more interested in the experiences they can have with your products. Usually when a customer decides to purchase a product it’s not because of the features it offers, it’s because of what they can do with the product. For example, we purchased a flat screen HDTV not because of the number of pixels or brightness or refresh rate, but because it looks awesome when you’re watching a movie or sporting event. The experience we’re interested in is how the picture looks when we’re watching TV… the features of the TV just help fulfill that particular experience.

What about online? It can sometimes be difficult to figure out what types of experiences customers are looking for on your website. It helps to think in terms of tasks instead of products or features or benefits. What are your customers trying to accomplish when they come to your website? There probably are many different types of tasks – browsing, searching, contacting, support, purchasing, etc. The trick is to try to make all these tasks as easy as possible on your one website.

Now, instead of thinking of these actions as tasks, think of them as a chance to interact with your customer. What would you do if you were in-person? What types of interactions would you want with a company? Think of each of these interactions as an opportunity to build a relationship with your customer – or add to a relationship. Try to think of website visitors as individual people with their own stories and emotions and opinions.

Now, how would you design your website differently to interact with your customers and build relationships? What do your customers say about your website? They may have some great insight – if you just ask.

(photo by bbjee @ FlickrCC)

Technorati tags: usability, design, customer experience, customer-centric, experience centric, business, strategy, marketing

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Sarah Worsham / Mar 3, 2009

Empower Your Employees to Help Your Customers

Yesterday Jason Falls over at Social Media Explorer wrote a post about whether brands were playing favorites on social media. The problem is that many customers have problems, but often it seems that people who are influencers – who have a popular blog or twitter feed – will get responses from companies that normal people can’t seem to get through normal customer support channels. I commented that right now many of the people monitoring social media at companies are higher up and actually have the power to fix problems.

Why is this exactly? Why do people have to complain on Twitter or their blog or to their influencer friends to get their problems solved? Most of us have had an experience with a customer support system where the employee had to follow a script and wasn’t allowed to make any kind of decision. You usually have to try to get up to a manager or another department and even then there’s no guarantee that you’ll get any kind of decision.

What would happen if you allowed your customer support employees to make decisions? You’d have to provide them with some guidelines, obviously, but what if they could actually help your customers? Many years ago I used to work a few hours a week at Bed, Bath & Beyond (ok, mostly for the discount). They allowed their employees to give up to a 5% discount to any customer for any reason (usually having to do with a flaw in the merchandise). Do you know how happy it makes a customer when they come up to you to show you a flaw in a product, ready for a fight, and you just give them a 5% discount without arguing? How many of those customers were repeat customers? I’d imagine quite a few. I’m sure BBB made up the 5% discount with increased sales from happy customers.

All the employees at your company will influence your brand and reputation. If you give them the power to make decisions that help customers, it will only help your company in the long run.

(photo by dan taylor @ FlickrCC)

Technorati tags: brand, brand reputation, brand strategy, business, customer service, customer-centric, customer support, marketing, strategy

Aaron Worsham / Feb 26, 2009

What were they expecting?

Succeed at managing your customers expectation and you can never fail. Fail to manage your customers expectations and you can never succeed. ~ me

This is one of my all time favorite universal lessons I have gleaned from business. There isn’t really any part of my life that involves other people which doesn’t benefit from the practiced art of managing the expectations of those I’m interacting with. When another human knows exactly what they can expect from you, on your terms, and when you consistently meet or beat that expectation on their terms, you have set the stage for a powerful ally in business; trust.

The reason this is so important is because people on a whole are very self-referential, which means they see their own perceptions and actions within the conversations and interactions they have with other people. Imagine two people talking business over lunch. The speaker could say ‘it will be a short project that we can deliver with limited resources and for a reasonable amount of money’. The listener will build context around the statements with their own assumptions, drawn from their own experiences of what is short, limited and reasonable, that will ultimately create very different picture than the speaker meant to convey. At that moment, an expectation was set in the mind of the client that may or may not be ironed out in the contract negotiations but will greatly influence the customers satisfaction when the project is completed.

I worked with a fantastic colleague on the team that had a very bad habit of responding to challenging technical requests with an automatic ‘Not sure yet, but that should be doable’. What he meant to deliver was ‘It SHOULD be doable, but of course I won’t know until I work on it” and what the customer heard was “That WILL be EASY and there is no reason it won’t be done on time”. So when said colleague moved heaven and earth to deliver on what turned out to be a very difficult task, the customer was unimpressed. They had already expected it to be done without effort and was maybe a little disappointed that the colleague didn’t work on some of the other, less important features. This is what I would call a ‘Technical win and an Expectation fail‘

Here are some tools and tricks I use when working with other people to help set the expectation

Pictures and mockups. When you are working in the web industry, their really isn’t an excuse to not mockup what you are seeing in your mind for the customer. A tool I like to use is Balsamiq, which is a Flash based web mockup framework that is quick and easy to use
Agile Development. The agile process focuses on rapid delivery of code, typically every two weeks, that gives the customer something to wrap their head around. I think Ill do a full post on agile tomorrow
Closing summaries. When I talk with customers, I have developed a technique of always closing out a conversation by saying ‘So, what I understand you want is…’ and just re-summing everything you’ve been talking about. Etiquette might frown on dragging on a conversation past what the listener wants to endure, but I almost always find mismatching expectations in the closing summaries.

What do you do to manage someone’s expectations?

photo attributed to polandeze

Technorati tags: software, software development, software management, agile, agile development, customer-centric, customer service

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