Christopher Carfi—Cerado, Inc.
Member
Posted 09-Jun-2004 01:03 PM
What Does It Take To Delight Your Customers?
Listen. Analyze. Connect. Repeat.
As a technical society, and despite the significant amount that has been spent over the past decade on customer relationship management (CRM) systems, we have drifted too far away from our customers. We have assumed that CRM systems will sell for us (salesforce automation systems), and market for us (marketing automation systems) and provide customer service for us (service management solutions). But this has not been the case.
These three flavors of CRM systems are merely tools, and these tools can no more build a relationship with a customer than a hammer can build a house on its own. In both cases, the factor that makes a difference is the people involved. If the salesforce automation system sends you a reminder to connect with your prospect on Tuesday and you don’t pick up the phone, where did the breakdown occur? Not with the technology…but it will be the technology that gets blamed.
Ultimately, delighting customers comes down to two components: execution and connection. And this can be summed up in four simple steps:
Listen—Engage your customers. Ask them what’s working…and what is not. If a prospect decides not to work with you, find out why. Understand their business. Understand their goals. And understand where they are “coming from” as far as their frame of reference. Are they “win-at-all-costs?” Are they “I just need this widget?” Are they balancing work and no-work life in a tenuous grasp? Without listening to customers and asking these questions, CRM is doomed to failure.
Analyze—After you’ve listed to your customers (and then listened to them again…and again…), pull back to understand what’s going on, not only within the customer base, but with the broader market as well. Understand the threads and trends that weave through what you are hearing. Use that insight and your experiences to determine an action plan to connect with the customer and help them, on an ongoing basis.
Connect—The best laid plan, or the most “perfect” strategy is worthless if you don’t do something about it. Analysis that is not followed by action is, quite simply, a waste of time. If you want to do an analysis in your room by yourself, and not let anyone know about it, that’s fine. Just be sure to wash your hands afterwards. What’s really required is taking your insight and going back to the customer, and connecting your understanding with their world, background, and experiences. Work on the problems together. Take a stab at a solution, and the do something. It won’t be 100% correct out of the gate, and that’s ok. Learn together, and make the next iteration better.
Repeat—Building a relationship with a customer is not a one-time event. It takes investment in time, energy, and allowing yourself to be, quite frankly, vulnerable at times. In my experience, going to a customer with a well-thought out action plan (with risks and potential outcomes outlines) is far more effective than going in with hubris-laden splendor and six-guns blazing. A good customer, a customer that is interested in building a long-term relationship between the organizations, will see through that kind of activity in a second, and show you the door.
Listen. Analyze. Connect. Repeat. It’s not that difficult.
Or maybe it is.
Christopher Carfi
Graham Hill
Guru
Member
Posted 14-Jun-2004 03:38 AM
Christopher
I am not really sure that we want to routinely delight customers. Not if we want to be profitable over the longer-run.
Research has shown that ‘customer delight’ requires that we significantly over-deliver against the customer’s expectations AND that the customer is suprised by the over-delivery.
Both of these are difficult to maintain over time (they raise the customer’s expectations bar, cannot be repeated and require significant service innovation) and are increasingly costly to do. In short, customer delight could not be considered to be a cost-effective long-term customer management strategy.
That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be practiced on occasions (for example, as a thank you, or to recover a valuable customer from a snafu), just that it should not be attempted routinely to any particular customer group.
Just a thought.
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Vishal Sarkar
Member Council
Member
Posted 14-Jun-2004 06:01 AM
Though I myself subscribe to Customer Delight for many scenarios, yet I think that Graham has put forth a very valid point.
Practicing CRM is always a conflict between delivering customer satisfaction and the cost of doing so. Though we may like to surprise our customers often to keep them excited about our services and offerings and in turn hope for customer retention and profitability, but being in business also means responsibility towards the bottom line.
In short, I still think that customer delight is a very good way for ‘refreshing’ a customer experience and it should be intelligently built in to the overall customer engagement plan, but it should not be the entire customer engagement plan or strategy itself.
Best
Vishal Sarkar
CRM Principal
Ascentium Corporation
www.ascentium.com
President
CRM Association of Northwest
www.crma-northwest.org
Cathy Allington
Member
Posted 17-Jun-2004 05:19 PM
Delighting our customers IS important, and IS sustainable. It can be simply a matter of doing what you say you are going to, when you say you are going to do it. (This is where technology does assist.) And, if we don’t do it on time, to apologise, and admit the mistake. Much the same as we are with friends really.
Having said that, one of the most “delightful” things I have ever done with a customer, was some years ago when I was running a financial planning practice with 3,000 active clients. My PA brought in the mail one morning as per usual. One of our retiree clients had written in advising her change of address. We had all sorts of internal systems and checklists in place to handle this, but never acknowledged the letters! I dictated a letter to my PA thanking the client for letting us know, and advising that we had advised all the relevant investment and banking companies for her. We then included a gift-wrapped tin of Twinings tea, conculding in the letter “Moving home is stressful—you could probably do with a good cuppa! Please accept the enclosed with our compliments”. We earnt another $6,000 in commissions in the next 12 months from a client we thought had no more business to give us.
Most times, it’s the little things that delight. And they needn’t cost that much.
Cathy Allington
Client Relationship Marketing P/L
www.gyob.net.au
V Achuthan Kutty
Member
Posted 17-Jun-2004 09:55 PM
Very often, we think of Customer Delight as doing something which is beyond the boundary of what we have set out to do for the customer. That is not true in most cases. It needs to start with basics: getting promised things done, at the right time, at the right place and in the right manner. Very often the customer experiences basic failures at this stage itself and the opposite of Customer Delight, which is Customer Apathy sets in.
We need to first look at those basics, get the job done right the first time around and only then look to “WOWING” the customer. Otherwise that extra mile will soon look to be just plain window dressing.
There is a lot of truth is the adage (adjusted to suit the context)—A job worth doing is worth doing well the first time around. Sometimes we only get one chance!!!
Regards/V Achuthan Kutty
Graham Hill
Guru
Member
Posted 18-Jun-2004 12:58 AM
The responses from Cathy Allington and C Achuthan Kutty illustrate very clearly the importance of delivering the business basics that satisfy customers, before trying to do more advanced things like delighting them with positive suprises.
Consumer research suggests that 90% of the promises made by branded communications fails to deliver against their promises. The failures are more often that not in the human-side of delivery. Those tricky touchpoints when a customer contacts the company and gets the rounaround, or gets nothing at all. Think back to your last unsatisfactory touchpoint with a company; I bet you don’t have to think back very far. And I bet someone having a bad day played a significant role. That adds up to a lot of unsatisfied customers out there.
But getting the business basics right does not produce delight. It produces satisfaction. It is only the positive suprises that produce delight, like Cathy sending an unexpected tin of tea to a retired customer moving house. And I assume this was very much the result of Cathy’s warm human touch, not the business policy of her company. If customers received the ‘standard’ tin of tea everytime they moved house, the novelty would very quickly wear off and any delight with it.
As Cathy has shown, delighting customers need not cost much in individual circumstances, but it does need to be a positive suprise. For most companies, delivering the business basics that generate customer satisfaction is what they should strive for. Not customer delight.
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Christopher Carfi—Cerado, Inc.
Member
Posted 18-Jun-2004 03:02 PM
Graham, your points are well-taken. We may have a difference in semantics. As you so sagely noted, there is no shortage of “less-than-satisfactory” customer interaction stories out there.
The point of the original post was not around “surprising” customers on a regular basis. It is about the fundamentals, it is about the basic blocking-and-tackling of listening to customers, thinking about what they said, reconnecting with them to ensure that what we *heard* was what they said, making incremental improvements, and viewing this as a process, not as a one-time event.
You stated “…getting the business basics right does not produce delight.” Our opinions may differ here. I would hold that a number of the organizations with rabidly positive customers (NetFlix comes to mind) achieve delight through solid, consistent, repeatable, no-surprises service.
Perhaps the takeaway is that, at least in some industries, the act of doing what you said you were going to do when you said you were going to do it is enough to induce delight. Some may simply call that “satisfaction,” but I would argue that achieving operational excellence consistently and over the long-term from your customers’ point of view transcends simple satisfaction and may, perhaps, even be delightful.
Vladimir Dimitroff
Member
Posted 25-Jun-2004 01:39 AM
I completely agree with Christopher that delight doesn’t have to mean ‘wow’ and can be achieved by just keeping promises, ‘doing what it says on the tin’.
Simple illustration from my oilfield youth: when American oil companies started operating in russia, their exploration engineers found some military-looking geophysical equipment on Russian sites that basically performed the same tasks as their own best-brand instruments. A US geophisicist once told me: ” It doesn’t have all the lights and dials like our instrument, just one button and it says ‘on-off’. You press it—and it f***ing WORKS!” That was said with a genuine ‘wow’ in his voice.
As Graham has discovered in his readings, todays customers are oerwhelmed with unkept promises, ‘doing the basics right’ is all it takes to get them delighted, sometimes even ‘wow’ them (like getting hrough to a call centre without queueing—amazing!).
…
Vladimir Dimitroff
PRISM Consulting (UK)
[email protected]
Graham Hill
Guru
Member
Posted 25-Jun-2004 08:24 AM
Vladimir
Although I find myself agreeing with your sentiments entirely, I can’t help but feel that we do not agree what delight means. And that is a problem.
For me and practically all those involved in the psychology of marketing, ‘delight’ is a well-defined concept that involves over-delivery and suprise. That is a simple matter of definition in peer-reviewed marketing papers.
Delight is not just getting business basics right, and it is not simply satisfactory performance, but it involves conspicuously over-delivering against customers’ expectations. Thus, if you don’t expect anything from Russian scientific products in the oil industry, sometimes even delivering what normally would be just considered satisfactory business basics can actually produce delight. But in any normal business situation, that is a recipe for bankruptcy.
And so is a strategy based upon delight for all. For example, a recent study by Douglas Friedman of industries in the American Customer Satisfaction Index showed quite clearly that delight does not increase loyalty in 30 out of 35 industries. You can draw your own conclusions about profitability in the longer-term.
Individual actions that produce delight may be worth it in exceptional circumstances, but at the broader business level, delight is quite simply an uncompetitively expensive long-term strategy.
We do owe itself to use these sort of words properly. If we loosely-use words like ‘delight’ they quickly cease to have any real meaning. And we will all be the poorer.
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Edwin Setzpfand
Member Council
Member
Posted 27-Jun-2004 02:24 PM
Christopher,
Some thoughts about this subject. It indeed always is wise to listen to your customers and then to analyze what they’ve said. However, I agree with Graham (14 June) that routinely over-delivering in the long run in general is not cost-effective (although that were not exactly the words he used).
There is one aspect I feel is missing in this discussion so far, although one maybe can read it between the lines of Vishal’s 14 June contribution.
That involves the distinction between delighting the customer about the process, the buying experience, on the one hand and delighting him about the quality of the product or service bought on the other hand.
The former can contribute to the latter, the other way around is less likely.
There should be no reason not to try to delight customers about the process as a standard daily practice—employees saying “How can I help you?”, informing customers about what they can expect, following-up to customers if you cannot deliver as promised, or being generous in case a product defect needs to be repaired.
This all is part of the “Human Touch”, a factor that can contribute to the trust that prospects and customers can develop in your product or services (brand).
Developing gained trust into sustainable and profitable customer relationships lies at the heart of successful entrepreneurship.
Where it comes to the product (service) quality, however, structural and significant over-delivery is not a wise strategy. Of course, depending on the prospect or customer involved in certain cases you can choose to add a free night to the hotel stay, offer a more luxurious replacement SUV or reduce the costs of repair by 50 %.
Determining what to deliver extra when to which customers/prospects can be part of a profitable customer engagement / winback plan and therefore can be a good strategy.
Edwin
“Make them smile”
Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist
Advisory Board
Member
Picture of Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist
Posted 30-Jun-2004 04:57 AM
Very interesting discussion, much of which I agree with. Let me try to add a couple of different perspectives. I agree that delight is a value-laden word that implies over-the-top service that is not only difficult to deliver, but is likely not necessary on a regular basis. I am an advocate of surprising customers occasionally, simply because this implies exceeding expectations. Customers are genuinely impressed when positive things happen that they were not expecting. Thus, I coined the phrase “planned spontaneity” some years ago, to deal with the strategy whereby companies should plan to surprise their customers every now and then.
More recently, I have been exploring situations where companies could be doing things that are not part of their value proposition nor part of the value proposition of their competitors. This is a slightly different approach to the subject of surprise or delight, which in its usual context I believe tends to focus on the delivery of customer service or the customer experience.
I am thinking of a different approach that causes a company to think of other services or additions to the offer they could be delivering that customers would be surprised to see coming from a company in this industry. It’s value adding by looking for opportunities to do things for customers or to take things off their plates so that they don’t have to deal with them. It’s the food distributor who offers its restaurant clients a menu planning service. It basically looks for situations where we can say to a customer “let me look after that for you.” It involves a company thinking outside the proverbial box and looking for things that they can take care of for their customers, thereby creating a form of delight.
In doing a series of projects recently on behalf of a large client, I have been struck by how often customers refer to the “little things.” My conclusion is that companies often ignore these little things that customers take very seriously and focus almost exclusively on predictable things like product quality, pricing, and availability of inventory. Don’t misinterpret please; these are of course essential to the success of a business. But they are table stakes. A customer goes into a business expecting to find quality products in stock. What I am referring to here are things that often fall below the radar screen of management but are noticed by customers.
In talking with a large number of customers of a retail client recently, it became obvious just how important the design and equipping of washrooms is, particularly for female shoppers. Women told us that they do notice the cleanliness, but also the quality of soap and toilet tissue used, the lighting and whether there are enough mirrors. Many said they would leave a store rather than use the washrooms. Therefore, companies can impress or even delight customers by paying attention to very routine things and by doing them exceedingly well. It’s part of what I call a “we’ve noticed that” strategy.
Hope this adds to the debate on delight.
Jim Barnes
Jim Barnes specializes in Customer Strategy as a member of the CRMGuru Advisory Board. For more information, please visit Barnes Marketing Associates.
Graham Hill
Guru
Member
Posted 06-Jul-2004 02:49 AM
Jim
It is interesting that companies usually think in terms of selling what they produce in the short-term, but that their customers usually think in terms of what they need to achieve over a longer-time frame through using combinations of their and other products.
This suggests a potential gap for innovative companies to think more like their customers, to think more over the longer term experience that customers want to have and to think who they need to partner with to deliver these.
Some refer to this as ‘buyer-centricity’, or ‘buyer-centric commerce’. There is a big debate going on in the UK around this buyer-centric model and a number of companies have sprung-up to provide offerings in this area.
A number of good books have been written about it, in particular, Alan Mitchell’s books ‘Right Side Up: Brand Strategies for the Information Age’ and ‘The New Bottom Line: Bridging the Value Gaps That Are Undermining Your Business’. And articles too, in particular Chis Lawer and Simon Knox’s Cranfield Working paper on ‘Reverse Market Orientation and Corporate Brand Development’. There is also a website that is stimulating discussion in this area at http://crm.insightexec.com . (Search with the keywords “buyer centric”)
What is also interesting is how little of this discussion seems to be taking place on other CRM portals in the USA! Strange that…
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Edwin Setzpfand
Member Council
Member
Posted 06-Jul-2004 05:17 AM
I think no booklist on branding can do without Marty Neumeier’s superb
The Brand Gap
(c) 2003—New Riders Publishing, 178 pgs
ISBN 0-7357-1330-8
(Edwin)
Graham Hill
Guru
Member
Posted 06-Jul-2004 09:19 AM
Edwin
I think one of the key points from Jim’s comment and my response, is that this is not about branding per se, but about CUSTOMERS!
Branding is primarily about projecting an image to a largely undifferentiated mass of customers. It is about what companies want you to believe about a brand and what it stands for. Many brands today, particularly service brands, do not deliver against their promises. This leads to the obvious reality, (but still one that many branding people struggle with), that a brand is only created in the mind of its customers, based upon many different touchpoints with it over time.
You might like to think of branding as creating the ‘sizzle’.
In contrast, buyer-centricity is about bringing together a consortium of providers that together can deliver against the customer’s broader requirements. Rightly or wrongly, this is usually focussed on customer lifestages. It is about finding companies that can partner together to actually deliver what the customer needs over the longer term.
Rather than being about experiencing the brand, it is more about branding the experience.
You might like to think of buyer-centricity as a ‘three course meal cooked to order’.
The challenge in both of these approaches is to do branding or buyer-centricity in a way that creates the optimum growth in economic value. Although branding has made great strides in this area, much of branding still struggles to demonstrate that it creates value. The old story about 50% of advertising being wasted is still true. And much buyer-centricity seems to be firmly rooted in customer-centricity concepts rather than the hard-nosed world of customer economics.
Hey, but at least we are talking about it…
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Cathy Allington
Member
Posted 08-Oct-2004 09:28 AM
All of this talk about CRM and delight is just that—talk.
How many of us have had a positive customer service experience with a company, and how has this influenced us?
How many of us have had a negative experience, and how has this influenced us?
What can we learn from these experiences and how can we apply this to CRM?
www.gyob.net.au
Graham Hill
Guru
Member
Posted 13-Oct-2004 02:05 AM
Cathy
All this may be just talk, but talking about what delight is and isn’t, is just as important as giving examples of good and bad experiences. It provides the theoretical ‘know what’ that is required to make sense of the practical ‘know how’. The alternative is unintelligent copying of what worked somewhere else, just because it worked… somewhere else!
“I’ve Come to Take Away Your VIP Gifts…!”
The most memorable negative experience for me occured at a Marriot Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. I had checked in at the hotel for a change and as a favour for a friend, a Marriot VIP who was also staying at the hotel on the same long-term consultancy project. She arranged the booking.
Check in went smoothly as you would expect at the Marriot. But I was hardly in my room when there was a knock at the door. A Marriot uniformed man stood there and in a faltering English accent said, ” I have come to take away your VIP gifts!”. “What VIP gifts?”, I replied, looking around the standard Marriot room. “The complimentary fruit and water”, he replied politely. I looked around the room again, but there was no fruit and there was no water. Looking around himself, he said, “That OK, they have been taken away already”, “Sorry to have disturbed you”, then left.
Now I don’t much like the impersonal service at the Marriot, which is why I was only staying there for a friend, but that took the biscuit. I know I am not a VIP at the Marriot but I don’t expect to be told so quite so bluntly. And my friend IS a VIP. I phoned my friend to tell her the story and she couldn’t believe it either. She phoned the Hotel Director and about one minute later, he was standing at my door, apologising profusely. It was all a big mistake he said. The fruit and flowers should have been taken away BEFORE I arrived.
Let’s look at the Marriot’s service failure using a simple three part framework derived from justice theory—the quality of the touchpoint process, outcome and interaction—to see what caused the problem and how well the Marriot recovered.
The service failure was caused by the Marriot’s room management processes being too slow to respond to a non-VIP checking in to what has been prepared as a VIP room. The result was an unsatisfactory outcome for me the guest—I didn’t feel like a valued one. The man who was too late to take the VIP gifts away was perfectly polite and carried out his difficult duty with aplomb. So using the simple three-part framework, the process and the outcome were both negative but the interaction was positive. The Hotel Director’s response just made things worse. First he overdid the apologies (probably because my friend, the VIP, was also present), then he failed completely to turnaround the process and outcome failures. To cap it all, he said he would ‘talk to’ the man who had come to take away the VIP gifts. The only one who had acted competently so far!
All the Hotel Director needed to do was simply apologise, recognise what had caused the service failure and with that in mind, ask me what he could do to make amends. And all I would have told him was that it was OK, mistakes do happen, and that he should simply work to ensure that no more snafus occurred during my stay. He didn’t and I still don’t like the Marriot!
Sometimes a little talk does help to make sense of the bigger picture, before deciding what to do next.
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Cathy Allington
Member
Posted 14-Oct-2004 09:36 AM
Graham:
The example you gave points out why CRM—almost unfortunately—needs to be married with IT—if the Marriot had a decent database which staff were trained to check, then your experience would not have (and should not have) happened.
Without a database of some sort—and staff training and acceptance of whatever the system is they are using—CRM, or in this case—Customer Service—call it what you will—can’t work.
This is where the needs of businesses needs to be aligned with CRM basics—not driven by vendors as you so rightly have said, It’s called education.
I was called in some years ago to consult on a CRM system for our local Convention Centre. They had already received Board Approval to spen $80k on licences for a system which “every other convention centre in Australia used”.
My role was fairly simple in some respects. The first part involved talking to the other Convention Centres—none of whom like the system! Being a Convention Centre, they also dealt with many people nationally and internationally. Mail merge to email was an obvious feature they required. This system couldn’t do that. It quickly became obvious that it wasn’t a good fit for them, and they ended up going with my recommendation—from which I was offered, but took, no other compensation other than my consulting fee.
I know this is out of context in this post, but this experience was part of the reason I went into selling CRM solutions. I was so disillusioned with the service the recommended firm offered, that I was determined to find some products which could meet most needs, and follow through with making them work.
It’s all very well to give an organisation a theoretical solution—far better to then help them turn the vision into reality.
Cheers
Cathy
www.gyob.net.au
Graham Hill
Guru
Member
Posted 15-Oct-2004 01:18 AM
Cathy
On a subsequent visit to the Marriot in Frankfurt (a year later), the same Hotel Director spotted me in the lobby and came to talk to me.
As he had come to talk to me, I asked him if he had fixed the problem that had caused him so much embarassment a year earlier. He smiled and said that he had had his Operations Manager carry out of a review of the back-office to make sure the same thing didn’t happen again.
What did he do? Well, he didn’t introduce any new technology nor did he train people to use what was already there, all he did to fix the problem was reorganise a couple of undocumented working practices to stop actions being triggered at the wrong time—someone coming to my room to remove VIP gifts that had already been removed!
The world of commerce in general and CRM in particular, is much more than just implementing systems and using them. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Systems often only provide a framework that describes how work should be carried out. They don’t prescribe how it will be carried out. Of course there are exceptions—out-bound scripts in a call centre being a good example—but they are exactly that, exceptions. Work is just as much about all the little the things that people do to get their never-ending job done. Many of these things don’t sit in any system function nor are they documented in process work-flows and probably they never could be. They simply exist as unwritten business rules within the work fabric of the company.
Control (through systems and processes) is a convenient illusion for senior management. Sometimes that goes for control over staff almost as much as it invariably does for control over customers.
Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant
