Category: Musings

Customer perspective during the downturn

The Think Customers 1to1 Blog is carrying a nice post by Brent Leary – So YOU Want to Improve MY Customer Experience?

During the downturn in economy (and always ..but especially so now), all businesses ought to be thinking about what works for their customers. 
  • How have the macroeconomic factors affected our customers business & life?
  • Should we be offering a different value proposition to customers now?
  • What is it that we can do for our customers that no one else will possibly do? 
  • Everyone’s expenditure has come down …so has our customers’. How can we ensure that whatever little they spend is spent on our products / services?
  • Is there a way we can make our customers feel special ..w/o spending too much?
All valid questions even during normal times. But businesses do have extra time now ..so might as well think about customers!

The Ultimate Question – NPS

A few months ago I started off on a NPS adoption journey. All though I have gone through some of the continual negative press on the topic, I have not heard or read anything compelling enough to drag me away from the simplicity & basic idea of NP. 

We have started really small & getting together the mechanism to capture responses to the NPS query. 
Some questions that I am searching answers for are :
  • What does one do with the NPS score?
  • How can NPS help develop & sustain a customer centric culture?
  • What have been the past experiences (anything specific?) of NPS implementations in B2B situations?
  • What have been the main grouses against NPS?
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From the Blogosphere

Today, hundreds of companies around the world have subscribed to the Net Promoter philosophy. But many of them still don’t understand the true meaning of NPS and what Reichheld meant the question to become: an organizational discipline that transforms your business around the customers.
….
Reicheld admitted that companies cannot be driven by scores; it’s what they do with the scores that matter most and getting the people in the organization to treat customers the way they’d want to be treated.
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Until companies can move beyond getting their organizations to reach high Net Promoter scores, and help their CFOs to understand how to quantify and increase the number of promoters, then they won’t find success with NPS.

Read the complete article at Think Customers: 1to1 Blog. 

Product centricity to customer centricity

(Photo Courtesy: Purdue University)

In her blog today, Patty Seybold shares a commentary about where organizations go wrong in the journey from product centricity to customer centricity. In Graham Hill’s own words –

“The stages start with pure product-centricity. This typically evolves through the development of internal networks of colleagues who need to work together to deliver the value proposition; to cross-functional teams that formalise the collaboration of the internal networks; to a customer segment coordinator who takes on formal responsibility for collaboration across different teams; to a matrix organisation with nascent segment teams reporting to both product and customer management; and finally to bona fide segment managers responsible for all aspects of segment experience delivery. The vertical silos of product-centricity have given way to the more connected, more collaborative customer-centric organisation.”

The key phrases (for me) from the above are :
  • work together to deliver the value proposition (ought not to loose sight of this)
  • formal responsibility for collaboration across teams (in the absence of a culture that fosters team work)
  • responsible for all aspects of segment experience delivery (key enabler – accountability)
As important as the end result is, the journey & the milestones involved are as or more important in ensuring effectiveness & sustainability of the end state. 

Quality – The Customer Centric Type

Intangible Quality: Engage in the Third Quality Revolution
(Courtesy: www.istockphoto.com)
Found this interesting article on Intangible Quality on RocketPosts – nice read. 
Some of my take aways –
  • Want to create products that meet the subconscious wants and needs of our customers. We want the customer, upon experiencing our products, to say, “This is exactly what I always wanted. This is what I have always needed. I cannot imagine what life was like before I had it.” 
  • Seeking quality that pleases the customer in ways he never before even imagined.
  • It is a concept of quality that falls into an almost spiritual realm. It means creating a product, or providing a service, that profoundly affects the customer. It is not only defect-free, but it is exactly what the customer has always desired.
  • Intangible quality requires a new model of customer awareness— one that includes continuous, meaningful contact, and a spiritual connection with a customer’s needs. In effect, you must become a virtual employee in your customer’s organization—seeing what he sees, understanding what she understands. Then, you must use this knowledge to develop possibilities of which the customer has never before dreamed. In a world where Six Sigma is commonplace, the goal of profoundly affecting your customer is the next quality battleground.
Some of the examples quoted in the article allude to concepts O’Reilly uses for the Web 2.0 definition (usage of data to improve customer experience – eg. Amazon, usage of CRM, etc.