Putting the customer at the center of your business is a hard thing to do. That task takes humility and mental agility to come to the right starting point; and that point is the customer’s own subjective reality. It takes time spent with customers in their own context to empathically understand them; theorizing about them from a conference room will never be enough.
When you see your offering as it really is, from the perspective of customers’ messy lived experience, you recognize how many competing demands that offering is jostling against for those customers’ time, attention and “loyalty.”
If you are to take time to really understand the needs and desires of our customers you will realize that in most of them, behind the appreciation they have, there are clear patterns of that which is broken. If you ask them, they will hint on those broken parts of our customer care that needs mending.
Here are three examples of areas that customers need executed right:
1. “Talk to me like I’m a person.”
Give customers access to all of the information in case they want to dig further into details, but speak in layman’s terms. Be direct, and layer the information so they can learn what they need and ignore what they don’t consciously. Don’t use unnecessary jargon. Remember customers are not technicians of your business.
Sometimes, the problems of technical language are just the more basic mistake of using words when visualizations would be more helpful. This is crucial for opaque or abstract offerings, like insurance, but for tangible stuff it can have enormous value too. Working for a major fast casual food chain, for instance, we learned that the visual presentation of the food on the menu was how customers formed judgments about health and quality.
In terms of text, the right criterion is, How much time and attention is the customer willing to give? Educating customers is impossible if they aren’t interested in learning what you’re teaching.
2. “Prove you know me.”
One-size-fits-all solutions are a thing of the past. Customers’ expectations have changed with the growth of data collection. This applies both to the nuances of who customers are today, and also to how their needs change over time. When we create models, or “personas,” of who customers are, we usually treat these more as modes that people move between rather than as fixed identities. We try to understand when and why people are in different modes.
But in fact people move through different modes based on different needs and/or emotional context. Sometimes, those comprise a predictable linear journey. Customer journey maps can illustrate not just the steps in a short-term transactional experience, but also the arc of a relationship.
People have very different functional and emotional needs at the beginning — the “confidence to start”.
3. “Level with me.”
Information asymmetry is over. Thank the Internet. People can find out stuff on their own, and they enjoy being experts in their passion areas. If they’re coming to you for info, then, it should be specific and exact, customized to their uniqueness. The increase in personalization has led to an uptick in product complexity and human anxiety. People want to know that there isn’t another, better deal out there. Don’t make it hard for them to figure that out.
Most of us might be investing in what is called “bad profits” These are the practices that make money at the expense of customer loyalty. Companies often do what their competitors are doing, so entire industries can suffer from an addiction to bad profits. And these practices show up at the bottom of customer-experience rankings. But customers don’t all respond the same way. Their benchmarks for great service can come from an entirely unrelated part of their lives.
But when customers consider their best experiences, they ignore categories. You don’t get an alibi for delivering a bad experience because your industry has technical or regulatory constraints that make great service hard. People don’t say, “Not bad, for a phone company.” It is not the customer’s job to understand your business challenges.
Does any of this seem obvious? Good. Then you already know what you need to do and have arrived at the next, harder step, which is implementing your strategic approach, in service of a defensible vision. All these customer experience challenges take real work to address.
But they also represent opportunities, because they’re competitive challenges faced by all companies. The work of fixing a broken customer experience creates the foundation for differentiated customer value and growth — to say nothing of a much better place for your business to be in.