A Better Customer Experience, part 2

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).