Loyalty, Advocacy and Beyond!

Companies today talk of how customer advocacy is key to the growth of their brand. Loyalty programs are expected to retain customers and push them to advocate their brand to new or undecided customers.  Stopping at this can be enough for most brands but not pushing for something beyond that can be a missed opportunity. Your most loyal customers, quite possibly know your brand and services much better than most employees in your organization. Using this priceless knowledge and mining it to its best can become a game changer for you. The idea that immediately emanates from this is to bring your customer in as an advisor. Use her to help you know your brand from her perspective and give you ideas as to how processes can be improved and customer service in turn, made more efficient.

Restaurants have been known to ask customers for opinions on new dishes being introduced. The risk of asking certain loyal customers for their opinions can lead to skewed feedback which cannot always be translated back into the business. But when a restaurant takes that risk of introducing that dish on its menu with the feedback from its closest customers, it’s not only a tremendous show of faith, it also is a statement of how valuable loyal customers are to them. Companies may not find such a program easy to execute primarily because executing all that these customers ask for, may not be tenable. But even telling them why it’s not possible is a grand gesture in taking the relationship further.

So ask yourselves if you can execute such a program. Ask yourselves what will stand in the way and if the problems seem difficult, think of the value of a small army of your most loyal customers backing your every move. That should be enough reason to get you started.

God of small things?

A brand’s greatest service challenge may actually manifest itself before your customer even walks into your store. A million factors can contribute to changing a customer’s mind from wanting to enter your service environment. This can range from a perennial long queue to a badly located store. The impact of these factors on designing your service strategy is critical. In the process we create an acute condition called ‘unsatisfied demand’ wherein we lose a customer’s business before him ever getting fully introduced to it. So how can the scourge of unsatisfied demand be sorted out with a well crafted service design?

But before you start drilling down to find an answer, you need to understand the kind of incidents and severity of them which are causing the aforementioned, unsatisfied demand. Incidents that will talk about how customers have turned their backs on long queues and in the process a brand. Walking into an ATM with the air conditioning turned to minus 20 and receipts strewn across the floor can leave one scarred about the brand, quite literally. Your day can go quite pear shaped when you spend an hour looking for parking outside that new restaurant while your stomach goes on a disobedience movement, demanding justice and some food. A badly lit coffee shop which is neither romantic or understated but just plain cheap, makes that immense need for a coffee disappear and attraction towards a brand too. The examples are countless yet are so simple and avoidable. These are just the few details brands forget to include in their service design which lead to a very forgettable experience for a ‘could be’ first time customer.

Taking stock of this and then acting upon these situations is not as easy as it seems. Customers can get turned off by very different things and identifying them and tackling them can be the game changer with today’s unpredictable customer. Companies need to ask themselves a couple of questions to get them started down this road. When I walk into my company’s store, is there anything that inhibits my interest to enter? How can I make that first visit as comfortable as possible for my customer? In the answers to these questions, quite possibly lies the key to never losing a customer even before you get to show them what you got.  

Blueprinting the Service Design

When we experience exceptional service, we are instantly taken by the person who delivers it and give some amount of credit to the company. We talk about it to friends and family at tea parties and tell them how a certain guy changed our day with some great service. We talk about it at every opportunity and gradually the story becomes the story of the heroics of one service representative. In the process we often forget to give enough credit to the company who set the right conditions for such an act to be performed. You might just have overlooked a very well planned service design which is in play to provide you that memorable service. So let’s explore this idea a little further.

Southwest Airlines is miles ahead when it comes to a well planned service design. They have manuals and instructions for every action that seems so unique and memorable to you. Southwest has designed things in such a manner including their training formats that allows any newcomer to embed themselves in the Southwest service culture. At no point does a well detailed design take away from employing the right kind of people. But identifying the right set of people in a market where they are in incredible demand makes for a challenge of a very different kind. Building a service design that allows an employee to adapt and deliver can be the key to providing that elusive customer satisfaction your brand is expected to deliver.

A couple of questions you might want to ask yourself as companies are: Do you already have a design in place which is not adequately defined? Do your employees fully understand it and is it being audited from time to time? Are there any loopholes in your design which allows employees to under deliver? Does your service design need a revamp to manage your brand’s current expectations? A plethora of questions, but ones that need pointed answers. Answers that can help you design that memorable service experience that your customer would talk about at that next tea party.  

Standardized Personalization?

In a time when customers have become all powerful, finding a way to please them all individually has become a gargantuan task. Customers know that in today’s networked, ‘Facebook before breakfast’ world they have the option to take companies to task at their discretion. At the same time, they have become extremely choosy about every element of the product. Customization can be blamed and so can companies’ need to impress and retain customers. But the end result is a customer who is exposed to many choices, wants more and wants it now, leaving companies with a very difficult question; ‘How do we build a customer service strategy that is personalized yet standardized and effective?’

Marketers on a daily basis deal with reams of customer intelligence telling them what homogenous sets of customers want from their product and base decisions on this research and deliver a product which is largely accepted. As long as the product satisfies a majority, they have a hit. But customer service is a wholly different ball game. Where a freebie may work for one customer, a cashback and a lifetime supply of the product may still lose you a customer. Standardization of customer service in such an environment is no more an option. 

Delivering experiences which resonate with a customer’s behavior, needs and desires has become paramount.

The need to come up with personalized strategies for all your customers may be an uphill task but at the same time generalizing can be suicidal. So the questions companies need to ask themselves are: Where can your service strategy differ? At what stage in the sales cycle can you affect the change? How do you find smaller sets of similar customers to whom personalized service can be standardized? Where does it all begin? Marketers need to start looking at customers from a very different lens then they used to before, because customers are no more a set of people with similar needs and rights. They are now deciding before you react and demanding before you produce.

So how are you going to deliver a one to one strategy?                                                             

80/20 Service Myopia

Many companies today follow the timeless Pareto Analysis where they believe that 80% of their business comes from 20% of their customers. On the basis of this, companies have become myopic in the way they hand out service to their customers. By providing differential service to their profitable customers they are possibly creating a very dangerous divide. There is no doubt that treating profitable customers differently in terms of incentives makes sense. Loyal customers have to feel the warmth in return. But customer service should be inclusive and doled out with the same consistency to every customer. At the end of the day, customer service is not only a hygiene factor for a business but also a promise made to a customer.

Organisations need to start showing courage in not distinguishing their customers when it comes to service. The condition has become endemic because companies are refusing to see the long term ills of such a move. Bad customer service across industries is the reason for customer migration. The telecom industry, for example, has made Bedouins of normal customers with their appalling customer service tactics. Often frustrating, often numbing, we have reached a point where customers have purely given up on the idea of good customer service. In an environment such as this, to have customers know that they are being treated differently can lead to nothing short of disillusionment.

Many companies especially some in the hospitality industry are very good at providing indiscriminate customer service. If a customer walks through their doors for the first time or the tenth, the service remains a constant because the true potential cannot always be realized in the first few instances. Over and above, a customer’s potential can be increased in time by providing consistently exceptional service. However, a brand that is truly in the business of customer service would never let such a situation ever arise. Don’t forget that as a company you have no clue what the potential of a customer is after his first few interaction with you. Differential customer service on the other hand on the basis of profitability, or a lack of it, can assure you that you will never see the full potential of that customer.

This is what we think, what do you think?

Vendor Stakeholder

Nearly every company in the world pumps in millions of dollars into serving their customers better and even further millions to repair the wrongs committed on them. But very few seem to have the same attitude towards their vendors. So when a company has one strategy to bring in customers and a completely counter-productive strategy towards its vendors, the question really is – Who is winning?

Companies take great effort in understanding the needs of a customer, learn to talk their language and help deliver a product which in turn will bring them revenues. Why can’t they do the same for a vendor too? After all a vendor also helps in bringing in revenues. In fact better relations with a vendor can result in more leads, better support, greater engagement, protection in key accounts, and recognition that can help a company generate more business.

Consequently companies should look at ways and means of building strategies to maintain relationships with vendors as they would with customers. A simple strategy would be to just replicate your customer sales cycle with your vendors and in the process make your vendor, a stakeholder. Such a strategy can only help forge a relationship of mutual benefit that in turn can be routed back to a customer in terms of price, product features and overall service.

And in the process, everyone wins!

Creating a First Day Experience

Chris Brogan, a prolific blogger on the use of new media in marketing indulges us with a very interesting thought. A customer experience idea that seems to have evaded most of us. In his own words:

‘How often do we build experiences such that we’re welcoming of new people? Do we work enough on that? Do we help people get connected and involved? Do we make them feel like we realize it’s their first time and we’re here to guide them?’

Through this he introduces us to the idea of creating a ‘first day experience’ for new customers. New customers join a company somewhere in between the evolution of a company. Customers need to be invited on board with a story that helps them understand the company and feel a part of it at the same time. 

Even though Brogan talks of this idea in an online context (Read more here: Every Day is Someone’s First Day) the power of this idea can truly be tested if it can be replicated in a brick and mortar situation. New customers walk into a store everyday and identifying them no doubt is an improbable task. But if retail stores can find a method to the madness it can create loyalty and in an increasingly congested market, differentiation. 

Stores can explore ideas of putting up the story of their birth, pictures of how the store evolved or even have a ‘First Day’ officer who can help customers with a few additional services. Stores need to figure out what lengths they can go to and the bandwidth available to them. But an endeavor in this direction can be invaluable.

So how would you create a First Day experience for your customers?