A Better Customer Experience, part 1

Since start­ing this com­pany, I get asked two ques­tions more than any others.  The first ques­tion is, “What does your com­pany do?” This is fol­lowed up by “Why com­bine a mar­ket­ing con­sul­tancy with a design firm?”  My answer has evolved into this: Cus­tomers want to be inspired.  They actively pursue, pro­mote, and remain loyal to the prod­ucts and ser­vices that tran­scend the imme­di­ate needs they meet.  But cre­at­ing such a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence takes hard work and a lot of attention.  That’s what we do.  We pro­vide the hard work and atten­tion to help com­pa­nies create great cus­tomer experiences.

To create a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, you need to be able to iden­tify your cus­tomers, use the information  to reach them with inno­v­a­tive cam­paigns, inspire them with pow­er­house cre­ative, and mon­i­tor the results to improve and sharpen the experience.  This post deals with the first step of these four steps, iden­ti­fy­ing your customers.

Iden­ti­fy­ing your cus­tomers
My car dealer knows me well.  Knows that I started a company.  Knows the names of my children.  But more impor­tantly knows my car.  I drive an older model BMW and she knows to check on the left strut each visit even if I don’t remem­ber to ask her.  Tells me the pri­or­ity of repairs if I don’t want to get them all done at once. Even rec­om­mended a dif­fer­ent repair shop to fix some­thing cheaper than I could have at her dealership.  The foun­da­tional step of any great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is know­ing your cus­tomers and being able to iden­tify them consistently.

Know­ing your cus­tomers starts with learn­ing as much as you can about them.  Their ages, indus­tries, gender, edu­ca­tion level, annual revenue.  Are their busi­nesses grow­ing or strug­gling? Do they need your ser­vices after a sig­nif­i­cant event? What is their core demo­graphic information?  Once you begin to answer these ques­tions, you’ll under­stand more about who your cus­tomers are.  Next is deter­min­ing why they buy your products.  What are the deci­sion cri­te­ria behind the pur­chase decision?  What are the emo­tional and ratio­nal rea­sons why they buy?  What bar­ri­ers to they need to overcome?  Who needs to approve the budget for your products?

Once you under­stand your cus­tomers, and assum­ing you have more than one, you need a way to keep track of them.  Unfor­tu­nately this is where com­pa­nies and con­sult­ing firms con­fuse tech­nol­ogy with system. Tech­nol­ogy is fun.  You can buy it.  It’s new.  It can be installed and learned.  How­ever, like a chain­saw, it’s dan­ger­ous unless you know how to use it to your advantage.  Often what’s miss­ing is a sys­tem­atic way of work­ing with customers.  Foot­ball play­ers call this a play book.  If the team needs get a first down, every­one knows what do to beforehand.  Oth­er­wise it’s called a “busted play” and it’s chaos.  Mar­ket­ing sends incen­tives to cus­tomers who already own the product.  Sales reps are vis­it­ing the same customers.   Customers opt out of the mail­ing list and receive an email two months later.  The exec­u­tive team can’t tell how many cus­tomers they have or who pro­vides the bulk of their profits.  Chaos.  Iden­ti­fy­ing cus­tomers is about build­ing a system that can track them and their needs con­sis­tently across the organization.  It also means having one place to put the sugar.

Grow­ing up in Baton Rouge, my grand­mother loved to cook.  Most Sun­days she’d have us over and cook so much food that we’d still be eating Sunday dinner on Tuesday.  My grand­mother was too social to spend all day in the kitchen, so she learned to be efficient.  And that meant things were always in the same place  within reach.  In the twen­tysome­thing years we ate at that house, the sugar was always in one spot.  Once she used it, it went back to that same spot.  Com­pa­nies today do the exact opposite.  Cus­tomer data is never in one spot.  It’s in 14 dif­fer­ent spots.  Mar­ket­ing has a couple of databases.  Account­ing has another.  Sales reps keep their own.  A great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence starts with being able to iden­tify your customers.  In one place.  It takes hard work and con­stant atten­tion to do this, but having the sugar in one spot means always know­ing where to find it.

This is the first of a 4 part series on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Check back later for part 2 where I’ll dis­cuss using your cus­tomer infor­ma­tion to reach them with inno­v­a­tive cam­paigns. You can also sub­scribe to our strat­egy RSS feed here so you’ll be instantly alerted when new arti­cles are pub­lished.