- Stop designing products. Customers do not want to experience products and they care very little about product’s features and functions. Customers do not buy products, they hire products to do a “job”. Ultimately, you need to learn what is the “job” your customers would hire your products to deliver, i.e. what is a desired outcome. That learning is difficult as the customers can rarely articulate their desired outcomes in a way that is useful for writing standard market requirements document. That is why lesser marketers like to declare themselves visionaries, quote Steve Jobs out of context, and rely on advertising to deliver mediocre products.
“Making it easier and cheaper for customers to do things that they are not trying to do rarely leads to success. The job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy”
- While designing for customer experience, it helps to think in terms of delivering the customer’s desired outcome. Customers yearn for simplicity on every step of their journey, from clarity of realization that your product is the best path to the outcome they desire, to simple and trustworthy ways of sharing their experiences with others.
- “Clever” messages are entertaining. Honest communications, in the language that resonates with your potential customers’ experiences, are selling your products and services. Do not try to engage with people you cannot help, because that reveals a lack of competence or authenticity. Both compromise your reputation and undermine trust.
“Without trust, a business cannot grow. Without reputation a business cannot be trusted.”
Every few months I get an invitation to participate in Customer Experience survey from one of the best known consultancy in the field. Every time I am disqualified because my firm cannot be their customer. Every time the new invitation is received I lose a bit of trust that this provider can really help his customers, if they can’t help themselves to do it right.
- Technology can be a very powerful ally in supporting your customer experience marketing strategy. It cannot replace strategy. Regardless of what you hear from your technology vendors. Technology provides efficiency and scale, but most of us are challenged by effectiveness.
If we don’t have the solution to the challenges faced by our best probable customers, technology will help us to damage our trustworthiness at a very low cost per unit.
- Don’t try to control the experience of your customers. Not only is it impossible to do, as customer experience is their perception of doing business with you and cannot be controlled, it is damaging to your reputation to try. The less friction customers experience on their path to realize the outcome they desire, the better is their perception of doing business with the company. From that perspective, removal of any unnecessary steps, keystrokes, questions, interactions, etc. from the customer’s path provides the best return on customer experience management investment.
