In part 1 of this series, I mentioned in order 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. Part 2 discusses understanding customers and attracting them through innovative campaigns.
My friend Paul used to repeat a message during college that “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” At first I thought this was trite and silly because it was too well crafted to be true. But as my experience in CRM and marketing grew, I’ve come to think it is the hands down best strategy for reaching customers. If customers understand that you care about the problems they are trying to solve and have a real solution that exactly meets their needs, you’ve made a sale. You’ve also made a genuine relationship. And it didn’t require one of the ridiculous closing techniques.
Having a solution that exactly meets a customer’s needs starts with understanding their needs. How do you gain understanding of a customer’s needs? You ask them! Like Stephen Covey said, Seek First to Understand, then Be Understood. By taking the time upfront to understand what problems your customers are trying to solve or what results they are trying to achieve, you begin to understand why they need your product in the first place. And often it’s not because you’ve just released the newest version or are having a price break. Ask them and then remember it. Here’s a way I learned to get at the root of why customers are looking to buy our product and services:
1. Stop Talking About the Product
CUSTOMER: “Our company needs a blog.”
SALES REP: “That’s great, we sell blogs”
CUSTOMER: “How much do they cost?”
SALES REP: “How much were you looking to spend?”
CUSTOMER: “About $50,000, we want it to be first class”
SALES REP: “Great, we have just the blog you need, I’ll create the proposal”
Have you ever experienced a project like this? In my 17 years as a consultant, I’d say most projects are started this way. Replace Blog with CRM, Sales Force Automation, Forecasting, Call Center, you name it. Someone at a company decides they need X, gains budget approval, hires a firm to implement it, and then sits back and watches as the project drifts into mediocrity or worse, complete failure. Solutions only derive value if they solve specific problems or provide specific results. Without that projects spin in place until money, time, or interest wears out and it’s back to business as usual.
The best way to prevent this from the very beginning is to stop talking about the product. Until you understand why it’s being bought, don’t talk about it. Don’t mention the new features in version 3.1, the licensing structure, or platform flexibility. And please don’t mention the security and reliability. After all, your company may make the best drums in the music business, but if your customer needs a guitar, no amount of configuration, tuning, price breaks, or customer service is ever going to make that customer happy. Once you and the customer agree to stop talking about the product, the next step is to uncover the real issues. You do this by acting like a six year old.
2. Uncover the Real Issues
Six years old is a magic year. It’s the year you learn how to read. You start school. You learn how to ride a bike. All of these experiences culminate in an unquenchable thirst about the world around you. And like my six year old daughter, you also learn to ask why?
“Daddy, why is that man smoking?”
“Why can’t I stick my head out of the car window?”
“Why did Van Gogh cut off his ear?”
“Why? Why? Why?”
It takes this same genuine desire to understand to gain insight into why your customers need your products. “What problems are you seeing in your company that you’re hoping a blog will solve?”
“How do you know that’s a problem today?”
“If the perfect blog was implemented, what results are you hoping to see?”
“What are the objectives we are trying to achieve?”
“How will we measure success?”
Drilling down on these questions will provide the understanding of exactly why your customers need your product. The next step is to incorporate this insight that into your overall customer experience.
Note: This approach works well in the B2C arena too by grouping customers together with similar needs. These segments can then be targeted by tuning the customer experience for each segment. To keep from fragmenting the customer experience over disparate segments, we typically recommend selecting a primary segment to focus the efforts, then tune slightly from that primary segment to address the issues of the other customer groups.
3. Tailor the Experience to Meet Customer Needs
Customers don’t buy products first. They buy the company first and then the product. What I mean is that your company is the product customers are buying. Their customer experience is the product being sold more than the actual goods exchanged for money. Customers are complex emotional people who interact with your company in non-linear and irrational ways. By understanding as much as possible about who they are and why they need your products, you are able to use the information to build the customer experience around those needs. Tailoring the customer experience centers around 3 key areas:
Marketing experience (lead generation and conversion, facilities, equipment and uniforms)
Product experience (project implementation, order fulfillment, user interface, etc)
Management experience (invoicing, meetings, customer service)
By orchestrating these three areas to be in sync with the same message, customers feel as if they are watching a seamless presentation throughout the process. If these steps contradict or don’t sync up with each other, you can end up looking like this:
This is the second part of a 4 part series on customer experience. Check back later for part 3 where I’ll discuss inspiring customers to act through creative design. You can also subscribe to our strategy RSS feed here so you’ll be instantly alerted when new articles are published.
(special thanks to Mahan Khalsa at SPG for sharpening my thoughts).
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