Category Archives: Customer Insight

3 reasons why customer centricity’s time has come

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

The world of business has rapidly transformed over the past 15 years. From a world where businesses controlled supply, controlled the message and could dictate terms to customers to one where customers have a much louder and more influential voice.

While we have always been advocates of businesses that act in the best interests of their customers, it seems market forces are now compelling all businesses to behave this way.

So why do we believe 2015 is the year for Customer Centricity? 3 reasons.

1. Customer Feedback Systems are going enterprise wide.

Companies have been measuring customer satisfaction levels for many years. Often these surveys have been conducted once a year, presented and then forgotten about. This type of survey methodology is rapidly changing, becoming real time and supported by great technologies to get the right feedback to the right person at the right time. In fact technology is enabling enterprise wide feedback mechanism that were never previously viable.

While this is a great positive trend for companies that realize they must become more customer centric, it is not enough for these to remain only the domain of customer service or marketing.

Being customer centric is a way of doing business that is not only about sales, marketing and customer service. It involves every department understanding their role in creating a great customer experience. Many forward thinking CEOs recognize this fact and are working on transforming their organizations to meet this challenge.

2. Convergence of customer experience and employee experience.

Today there is a recognition that employee experience impacts customer experience. If employees are not given the opportunity and tools to change the way they work, the customer experience will suffer. Being customer centric means understanding that every interaction with customers allows them to form an impression, good, bad or indifferent. It truly requires everyone in an organization to be engaged in delivering great experiences.

The bottom line here is that you cannot create truly engaged customers without truly engaged and passionate employees.

3. Recognition that Customer Centricity is a Leadership Competency.

Being customer centric, requires leadership that is customer centric. Leaders need to be engaged with customers first hand. Leaders need to immerse themselves in the customer’s environment and experience what customer’s experience. I wrote about Telstra’s (A $20billion telecommunications company) Executive team engaging in this practice previously here. We are seeing this become the norm in many other large businesses around the world.

There is also increasingly a realization that leaders of all disciplines need to develop their customer centric thinking and leadership competencies.

We were recently honoured that our Book, the Customer Culture Imperative was nominated as one of the Top 20 and later short listed after a public voting period to the final 5 for the Marketing Book of the Year – 2015. Perhaps some further proof that Customer Centricity’s time has come!

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, Customer Insight, Customer Metrics, Customer Satisfaction, Telstra, Voice of the Customer

Tagged customer centricity;strategic alignment;customer centric culture; customer centric leadership

How Zappos makes sure customers get a great experience everytime

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 1 comment

You see countless articles every day that claim improving a single part of your customer service strategy is the “key” to something. Experts promise how listening to your customers, delivering more timely service, improving employee training and many other things offer a path to providing a better customer experience.

The reality is that your customer service is like a machine with many moving parts. These parts include your call center’s hold times, your field sales teams’ ability to make an emotional connection, the helpfulness of information available on self-service portals and more. They all need to function well, and – most importantly – function well together in order to offer an amazing customer experience and rank among the best names in stellar service.

Ultimately this requires a customer culture (read more in our new book here) The most well-known companies in customer service have earned their reputation by recognizing and executing against this reality. This is demonstrated in call center reviewer Ashley Verrill’s recent article, which examined how Zappos perfects quality assurance (QA) management for a better customer experience.

QA is not typically showcased as a big part of the “machine,” but the Zappos strategies she highlights do more than improve the accuracy and fairness of agent scoring. They also involve the voice of the customer and service reps to improve the experience for all parties involved:

Quality Assurance and Customer Service Reps Join Forces: Each QA team “advocate” is required to spend at least five hours on the floor, taking calls. This helps them stay connected to the real challenges and opportunities reps face on a daily basis and promotes active participation between the two groups.

Scoring Weighted to Reflect Zappos’ Values: (which you can view here): The scores that have the greatest impact on the overall quality assurance score are those in categories that do more to deliver the “Zappos Experience.” The most important factor for Zappos is forging a personal emotional connection with every customer. Also important is the solution to the issue. Knowing what’s most important to your company helps you evaluate your reps based on what matters most.

Self-Check Sessions: Every six months, Zappos evaluates its QA form and asks agents to grade their own calls. This not only helps continue the improvement of QA evaluation – it also empowers agents to voice opinions and innovative ideas.

Involve the Customer: Zappos manages call quality using traditional methods such as traditional Net Promoter Scores, as well as more unique strategies including “sharing great calls” and “customer props.” Again, this empowers the agent to tout an exceptional connection they made with a customer and also gives a voice to the customer, who is invited to give his or her take on the experience.

Custom Coaching with a Clear Path of Progression: Although Zappos has certain standards in place for measuring QA, team leaders are encouraged to personalize training exercises to best fit the learning style of the rep. Providing customized coaching optimizes the agent’s learning potential, interest levels and excitement. Zappos’ leaders take it a step further by outlining exactly how reps will move to higher-tier roles – creating an incentive for reps to continuously be improving their service quality. You’ll find a pattern with the majority of Zappos’ tactics for quality assurance management: they are constantly creating opportunities for feedback. Whether that feedback comes from the customer, the agent, the QA team or management, all suggestions are welcomed as vehicles for innovation.

It doesn’t matter which part of your customer service “machine” you’re working to improve – when you incorporate viewpoints of all parties involved, the closer you get to providing stellar customer experiences.

Want to know how customer-centric your organization is in comparison to the best in the world? Find out more about our Market Responsiveness Index (MRI)

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Posted in Customer Experience, Customer Insight, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity

How DollarShaveClub.com created a disruptive customer experience

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

If you think about what’s happening in the men’s shaving razor market it’s a little like a cold war era arms race. Each year more and more blades are added to the humble razor. The giants of the industry Gillette and Schick continue to add more and more features to their products but are they creating more value?

Michael Dublin from DollarShaveClub.com doesn’t think so. In a mere 12 months he has built an online subscription based razor business with more than three hundred thousand customers.

How? Michael recognized three major pain points for men when it comes to buying shaving equipment. Firstly razors are expensive! and they keep going up in price. Rather than getting more for less consumers are getting more for more…. Secondly the experience of buying a razor is far less than ideal (to put it politely). Razors a usually locked behind a plastic cage at the back of a Walgreens store and it take 20 minutes to get someone back there to let them out! Finally who really needs 5 blades? How close a shave do men really need?

How about a world where razors are bought online at low cost and sent to you each month – a just in time subscription model. Not only that but they are provided by a company with a sense of humor, that doesn’t take things too seriously (apart from disrupting the existing business models).

A great value proposition is worthless if no one knows about it so to overcome the inherent challenge facing any new business or new idea, Michael developed a video to communicate what dollarshaveclub.com is all about…

While it certainly is not a video that will appeal to everyone, it does a great job of speaking directly to his target audience – men fed up with spending a fortune just to keep up with the latest shaving technologies.

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Posted in Customer Experience, Customer Insight, Customer Satisfaction, Value Propositions, viral video

Tagged customer experience; viral video;dollarshaveclub.com;customer insight

The Customer Insight Lab of the Future

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, like other large organizations has a powerful research, analytics and insights hub. Liz Moore, who heads that group in Telstra says

“You need deep seated curiosity to develop insights.”

So she has hired people with those characteristics and developed an operating model that links the data supplier with an “insight manager” and the stakeholder (decision-maker) to solve a particular customer problem and gain real insights into current and future customer needs.

This group provides insights from customer value analysis, churn analysis, market share changes, communication effectiveness of the company and its competitors’ marketing campaigns, financial modeling of key competitors as well as analysis of qualitative customer feedback.

Liz says “In research we have changed from the rear-view mirror to headlights” and with access to a panel of 15,000 consumers whose behavior is tracked, she can put together focus groups within a day of the request. Her group proactively shares analytics and insights on customers and competitors throughout the company using weekly bulletins. It also reacts to requests from decision-makers in the business to research, analyze and develop insights on particular customer and market situations.

Above all this group is action oriented. Liz says “We don’t build anything unless there is a pathway to execution and measurement.”

This really is a great model for the customer insight lab of the future. Rather that seeing this as an isolated research function, forward thinking companies are building a multi-disciplinary team of people focused on using deep customer insight to help move business forward.

Does your organisation know more about customers than your competitors?

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Foresight, Customer Insight, Customer Metrics, Market Culture in Action, Telstra

Tagged telstra;customer insights; future; understanding customers;customer culture

Get more customer insights with these 5 questions

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 2 comments

If you want really insightful information from your customers, try asking these 5 open-ended questions:

What is the one thing you think we do really well?

This question will help you identify what customers really like about doing business with you. You may have your own opinions on this, however more than likely you will be surprised by customers’ opinions on what they consider as your biggest differentiator.

What is the one thing we do that you think needs improvement?

This enables you to get real feedback on areas of your business that need improvement from a customer perspective. Some of the customer responses might be unexpected, but this is truly valuable insight for improving your business relative to actual customer experiences.

What is the one thing we do that we should stop doing?

Companies rarely ask their customers this question. The problem is that many businesses do things because they think that’s what customers want or because they’ve always done it. This could be something that a company spends resources on but has no or even worse negative value for customers.

What is the one thing we don’t do that we should start doing?

Your customers have done business with many other related and unrelated companies and have seen good and bad business practices for how businesses deal with customers. These answers can provide great ideas for improving the experience for your customers and developing stronger competitive differentiation.

Would you recommend us to others?

This question will tell you whether or not your customer is someone that will help drive positive word of mouth.

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Posted in Customer Advocacy, Customer Insight, Voice of the Customer

Tagged customer survey;customer insight;customer questions;

Driving high value – low cost customer experiences

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 1 comment

A friend of mine travelled last week from Bangalore to Dubai on IndiGo Airlines. She said it was low cost, with seats that would lean back giving a feeling of more space, along with great customer service. She travelled coach class and yet was addressed by name by the flight attendant.

IndiGo placed its first order of 100 aircraft with Airbus to start its business as a domestic airline in India. The size of this order ensured low operating costs, full maintenance support from airbus and the latest aircraft technology and comfort. In 2005, when other low-cost carriers were working with older, leased aircraft and battling a reputation for inferior service, Indigo inked a deal to buy 100 new A-320 jets from Airbus, purchasing at volume to ensure a lower price and a partnership-type commitment on maintenance. IndiGo’s investment in the training of its staff and its [aircraft] fleet killed whatever difference might have existed between a low-cost carrier and a full-service carrier by offering equivalent service. By 2011 Indigo had neatly 20% of the rapidly growing Indian domestic market. In September 2011 it introduced its first international flight to Dubai.

Indigo turned regular business travelers into loyal customers because it never acted like a budget airline. From the beginning, its purchase of all new aircraft helped it avoid maintenance problems, and superior planning helped it to match or exceed the on-time performance record of its full-service competitors — even though rapid turnaround of its planes was the key to the company making money.

But it also went beyond the basics to reinvent the first-time flyer segment. When Air Deccan, acquired by Kingfisher in December 2007, was struggling to fight the impression that their planes operated like public buses with wings, IndiGo pushed best practices even when there was no compelling reason to do so. In a country where other carriers shared passenger-stair vehicles and the top airline still had to have disabled passengers carried up the staircase to plane height by ground crew, for instance, Indigo brought in larger, handicapped accessible passenger ramps from day one.

Similarly, the company equipped check-in staff with hand-held scanners that allowed passengers without baggage to avoid the dreaded scrum at the counter. And at least in the beginning, flight attendants manning the beverage carts addressed even lowly economy class passengers by name (with the aid of the seating chart).

The strategy paid off: Since 2008, when the company booked its first profit even as high fuel prices and the economic downturn ravaged its competitors, IndiGo’s net income has grown more than five times — from a shade under $20 million to more than $120 million.

With Boeing forecasting that Indian air traffic will grow 15 percent a year over the next five years and that India will require more than 1,000 commercial jets over the next 20, according to the Wall Street Journal, that may just well make IndiGo the fastest growing airline in the world’s fastest growing aviation market.

IndiGo President Aditya Ghosh says India is a hugely under-penetrated market. We have just one commercial aircraft for 1.9 million people. The United States has one plane for every 50,000 people.”

The airline, which earlier ran role specific training programmes like any other airline, decided to merge training into one central operation with three segments: one, functional skills training aimed at specific roles like that of pilots, in-flight crew, ticketing attendants, baggage handling, among others.

The next segment was coaching for customer service and soft skills.

The last came leadership training at all levels.

This last segment of training, designed to encourage all employees to take ownership of customer issues, Ghosh insists, has really helped the airline develop a strong loyal customer base.

Do you have the right skills sets in your organization to drive high value at low cost?

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Competitive Advantage, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Values, Customer Culture and Profit Link, Customer Experience, Customer Insight, Customer Service, Customer Value, Customer-Centricity, Empathy, Employee Engagement, leadership, Market Culture in Action

Tagged customer centric culture;IndiGo Airlines; Customer Focused Leadership; Aditya Ghosh;customer service;high value low cost

Customer Centric Leadership Practices – Lessons from “the HP way”

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 1 comment

Source: GIZMODO

In recent weeks I have met several ex-HP employees who told me about the great times they had at HP when the culture embedded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard prevailed – a culture of innovation, customer focus and respect for individuals as flesh and blood people.

One told me of his early days as an engineer working in one of the R&D labs in the Test and Measurement Division at Palo Alto. While working on a project at his bench he was expected to watch his colleague working on the next bench and through observation and discussion to see what he was struggling with – then to see if he could solve the problem. If he could, there just might be a lot of other engineers in the marketplace who are struggling with the same problem – and this solution might create a new market.

This practice, or cultural discipline, heightened the awareness of engineers at HP to be looking for problems that their engineering colleagues had that created a sensitivity to the potential needs of their “engineer’ customers. In effect, it made the R&D employees at HP customer focused.

Imagine if accountants in CPA firms or in financial services firms adopted the “next bench” theory. Or IT technologists in IT service firms practiced it. Or HR professionals in large corporations did it. We might just see stronger customer focused cultures emerging organically.

What are the opportunities for “next bench” thinking and practice in your business?

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Posted in Case Study, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, customer focus, Customer Insight, Customer-Centricity, innovation, Market Culture in Action

Tagged hewlett-packard;next bench; customer centric practices;walk in the customers shoes

Customer Centric Lessons from the Rock Band Van Halen

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 2 comments

CREDIT: PHOTOSTATION IMAGES/LARRY MARANO

Van Halen was particularly big in the US during the 1970s and 1980s. David Lee Roth was their lead singer and also somewhat of an technical operations expert.

In fact Van Halen was a pioneer in many ways for touring rock bands. They were one of the first to take a really big action-packed rock concert to smaller cities and towns across America. In one year they did more than 100 concerts across the US. The technical set-up for these concerts was on a massive scale, Van Halen would haul 9 semi trailers worth of equipment to each venue.

Although they had their own road crew much of the initial set-up had to be contracted out beforehand. As part of that process they had developed very detailed specifications to denote the way the stage and surroundings needed to be set-up. David Lee Roth actually described the document as the size of the Yellow Pages. It’s is not the sort of detailed work you would expect from a lead vocalist in a rock band, particularly one that had its fair share of Rock Diva bad behaviour.

In fact they not only threw a TV out the window from the suite of one of their hotel rooms but they had enough extension cable to ensure the TV stayed on all the way until it hit the ground!

Another bit of folk lore from the time was the band’s requirement to have a bowl of M&Ms with the brown M&Ms removed. In fact in the contract they had with venue suppliers it stipulated if this bowl of M&Ms was not available back stage they had the right to cancel the show with full compensation. Many people explained this away as Van Halen making ABSURD demands just because they could. However the truth of the matter is a little different. The clause, called Article 126 was written with a very specific purpose.

If the band arrived at a venue and David Lee Roth saw a Brown M&M in the M&Ms bowl he would demand a full check of the entire production. He believed it was a guarantee there were errors in the way the technical elements of the stage production were set-up as clearly they had not read the “yellow pages sized” instruction book!

David needed a way to check that people were paying attention to the details of his requirements as a customer. So he add this little test as a cue.

In fact as customers we all use cues to determine whether something is good or bad, high quality or low quality and what we might expect in terms of service.

In the airline business, the airlines know that if there are stains on the trays people feel nervous about the quality and safety of the aircraft. So the good airlines pay attention to these details because of the broader message it sends about safety and airline quality.

Do you have customers like this? What cues are your customers using to assess whether you will live up to your promises?

Do you have the type of organizational culture where people are tuned into these customer cues?

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Posted in Case Study, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, Customer Insight, Customer Satisfaction

Tagged van halen;david lee roth;customer cues; customer centricity

2 secrets of Salesforce.com’s success at attracting customers

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

Jamie Greney, a long standing employee says “In my ten years at salesforce.com, I think one of the most important elements to our success has been the corporate culture. We’ve had a consistent vision regarding the end of software. Three of our top values have been trust, customer success, and innovation.”

Alyson Stone, another company employee says “Depending on how you look at it, resolving a customer’s problem is the beginning or the end of a journey. Companies who decide to put the customer at the center of all business strategies and activities are making a commitment to engagement, yes. But more than that they are making an assumption that each customer is a long-term investment with a high rate of return.”

It is clear that Salesforce’s customer culture is embedded in the business and has been central to its ongoing delivery of value to its growing customer base. Salesforce is on Fortune’s 2012 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For ranked number 27.

In a report titled “Salesforce’s happy workforce”, David Kaplin describes what happens inside the company.

“There are plenty of reasons Salesforce is cool to work for: its downtown San Francisco vibe, its matchless end-of-the-year revelry, its embedded philanthropy, and its idiosyncratic leader.”

He quotes Marc Benioff, the CEO, “We achieved our market position by being born cloud,” Benioff writes in his book titled Beyond the Cloud, “but we are being ‘reborn’ social … We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook and other social sites like Twitter have changed the consumer conversation and created incredible loyalty — and love.”

Kaplan reports that Salesforce’s new social-networking app, Chatter, functions much like a Facebook inside a company — and helps enhance office culture. Whether on a computer or mobile device, Chatter is dynamic and collaborative — e-mail, by comparison, is static and private. In open groups or news feeds like Finance or Sales, multiple employees can share ideas in real time on projects, analyze data, and compare drafts. “I learned more about my company in a few months through using Chatter than I had in the last three years,” Benioff says.

At Salesforce itself — where there are about 3,000 daily Chatter posts, and internal e-mails have decreased 30% since Chatter went live — there are groups designed to get employees across departments and rank talking to each other about work life, including Tribal Knowledge and Airing of Grievances. Kaplan says you can’t post anonymously, so complaints and queries are rather tame. But it nonetheless generates a degree of cooperation unseen at large organizations.

When you think about it, by providing business software on the web as its core mission, the collaborative model that the company has with its customers engenders cross-function collaboration within each customer as they use the Salesforce software.

Success has many elements, but there are two secrets underpinning Salesforce that stand out:

1) A Customer Culture as noted at the start of this post, is fundamental to Salesforce’s growth and profitability.

2) Collaboration across functions and with customers fuels trust and innovation resulting in a happy workforce and more value for customers.

How strong are these cultural attributes in your company? What could you do to strengthen them?

If you want to build this capability in your organization check out our MarketCulture Academy.

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Chief Customer Officers, Culture Change and Social Media, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, customer focus, Customer Insight, Customer Obsession, Customer Satisfaction, innovation, Innovative Thought, Market Culture in Action, Strategic Alignment, Trust

Tagged salesforce.com;customer culture;collaboration;customer success;mark benioff;customer centricity;strategic alignment

How to attain premium pricing in a discount world – Lessons from Starbucks Steel Card

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 1 comment

How do some businesses manage to attract premium prices while others struggle to get sales at any price?

The answer is a combination of branding, customer loyalty and the creation of customer value.

Companies that invest in creating a brand that stands for something and delivers on that are able to attract high prices Why? Customers trust those brands, they connect with them emotionally and feel comfortable working with them. They will pay more for the feeling they get from doing business with those companies, in short they are getting more value and are willing to pay more.

Who would pay $500 for a steel card that only buys $450 worth of coffee? 5,000 loyal Starbucks customers did just that – all within 24 hours. In fact Helaine Olen reported that a card sold for $1074 on ebay soon after.

What drives this behavior? Certainly there is an aspect of “exclusivity and conspicuous consumption” but more than that these are customers that have connected with the value Starbucks offers. Starbucks is part of their lives, it has connected with them on a level beyond a simple business transaction.

Great companies that create unique value for their customers consistently and have a culture that really values customers will attract premium prices.

What can you do to create an emotional connection with your customers?