All Posts Tagged With: "customer relationships"
Does Your Company Create Real Value?
According to a recent survey of 50,000 consumers in 14 countries including the US, 70% of the brands we interact with could disappear entirely and we wouldn’t notice it.
The survey also found that 20% of the brands we interact with have a positive impact on our lives.
Which list would your company make? (You can see two Top 10 brand lists at the end of this article.)
Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Labs, explains the difference: “Did this brand make you fitter, wiser, smarter, closer? Did it improve your personal outcomes? Did it improve your community outcomes? Did it pollute the environment? We’re trying to get beyond ‘did this company make a slightly better product’ to the more resonant, meaningful question: Did this brand actually impact your life in a tangible, lasting, and positive way?”
I’ve written before about corporate social responsibility and how companies are embracing it to gain a competitive advantage (here and here), which is one part of the conclusions drawn by the Meaningful Brands survey and Haque. The other part is that companies are creating enduring brands by creating value for their customers, making them “fitter, wiser, smarter, closer,” to use Haque’s description.
This is where integrating the Baldrige model…
10Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Model: How do you obtain information from your customers?
The Baldrige Model: How do you obtain information from your customers?
Item 3.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how your organization listens to your customers. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
Listening to each key customer group and market segment across the entire customer life cycle, to former and potential customers, and to customers of competitors to obtain actionable information
Following up with customers on product/service quality, customer support, and transactions to acquire immediate and actionable feedback
Determining customer satisfaction, engagement, and dissatisfaction
Using data and information about customer satisfaction, engagement, and dissatisfaction to exceed their expectations and improve loyalty
Obtaining information about your customers’ satisfaction with your organization, products, services, and support relative to their satisfaction with your competitors and other organizations providing similar products and services
Best practices to consider:
Using established processes, the organization knows exactly what each of its customer groups and/or market segments requires and communicates that knowledge throughout the organization.
Listening posts are established for all customer groups and segments with processes for collecting, analyzing, and sharing the information from those posts.
Follow-up with customers typically includes relationship and transaction surveys and frequently involves…
16May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Baldrige View of Customer Experience
The Baldrige Criteria ask: How do you create an organizational culture that ensures a consistently positive customer experience and contributes to customer engagement?
Adam Richardson defines “customer experience” as the sum-totality of how customers engage with your organization and brand through the entire arc of being a customer. In “Understanding Customer Experience” (HBR, October 28, 2010), he suggests three layers of customer experience to consider:
- Customer Journey. The journey a customer takes with your organization from first contact to providing a product or service to supporting that product or service and extending the relationship with the customer.
- Touchpoints. All of the points where the customer interacts with your organization.
- Ecosystems. By Richardson’s definition, the integrated ecosystems of products, software, and services that offer more than isolated touchpoints.
Have you ever used Zipcar? It’s the largest car-sharing company in the United States (it’s also in Vancouver, Toronto, and London). Here in the Twin Cities, the Zipcar locations are all in or near the University of Minnesota; college students are big Zipcar customers. Richardson touts Zipcar as a great example of a company that used its understanding of the entire arc of the customer car-renting experience to turn car-sharing into a mainstream business—and help the environment in the…
1Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSeeking Very Satisfied Customers
According to a recent survey by American Express, most Americans are willing to spend an average of 9% more with companies that provide excellent service. The American Express Global Customer Service Barometer survey suggests that not many companies are taking advantage of this opportunity: Nearly half of the respondents said companies are helpful but don’t do anything extra for them, while 21% believe that their business is taken for granted. A little over a third think that companies have increased their focus on providing quality service in the current economy, which is higher than I would have expected considering all of the layoffs and the added pressure that puts on the people who remain.
One of the adages about customer service is that people are much more likely to talk about a bad experience than a good one. The survey contradicts that notion, finding that consumers will talk about a good experience 75% of the time but complain about a bad one 59% of the time. If that’s the case, companies should be investing more in delighting their customers rather than just avoiding a bad experience.
When it comes to your online image, the survey found that consumers put more stock in negative…
28Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCreating a Unique Customer Experience
Like me, you will probably never travel to Bogota, Columbia, but that doesn’t make Andres Carne de Res any less interesting. It’s a restaurant—two actually, one in Bogota and one a half-hour outside of Bogota—that offers such a unique experience that it’s full all the time without promoting itself. You can get a sense of its uniqueness by checking out its Web site here. It’s in Spanish but you don’t have to understand Spanish to enjoy it.
Kaihan Krippendorff wrote about the restaurant on Fast Company’s Web site. He teaches a service innovation class using an 8-P framework that helps companies find the disruptive innovations that will differentiate it from the competition. Andres Carne de Res is a case study in disruptive innovation:
1. Product. Check out the restaurant’s amazing menus on its Web site. It pastes yellow butterflies to its local beer bottles and serves wine in hand-painted bottles. While the products may be different from those of its competitors, they certainly are packaged and presented in unique ways.
2. Price. Krippendorff got a menu that was a metal case about the size of shirt box that had a scroll inside and you turned a handle to roll it up or down…
19Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedFast Food Customer Focus
When Pal’s Sudden Service, a small fast-food chain in Tennessee, won the Baldrige Award in 2001, its president, Thom Crosby, suddenly realized that winning prohibited them from reapplying for five years. “I called up the head of the program and asked if we could decline the award and stay in the system. He didn’t want to hear that.”
Pal’s continues to conduct annual internal assessments because, as Crosby states, “I’m a real big believer.” Like other world-class companies, Pal’s benefits from asking and answering key questions that reveal how the organization works. The snapshot produced by this exercise becomes the engine for change, improvement, and success.
The questions explore all areas that are critical to an effective management system. Many of the questions have never been asked, which means many of the areas they address have never been evaluated. And therein lays their power.
A few years ago I asked these questions of senior leaders at an organization that dominated market share in its industry. One question in particular solicited a variety of responses. The question was: How do you determine key customer requirements and expectations?
Many of the leaders talked about how they interacted with their customers daily. Others mentioned customer surveys, complaints,…
16Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedDo You Trust Your Customers?
Peter Merholz has a great article on Harvard Business review about “What Trust Brings to Amazon, Zappos, and USAA.” His key point: Trust your customers, do something bold that reflects your organization’s values, and your competitors will never catch up.
He offers three examples.
The first is Amazon, which offered honest customer reviews about every product on its site right from the start. Remember, online retail was still a new concept and people were reluctant to buy something they hadn’t paged through or tried on or tested. Amazon trusted its customers to provide honest feedback and they did. And Amazon redefined the retail experience.
The second example is Zappos, which offered free shipping both ways on any shoe purchase with one-year no-questions-asked returns. It knew people would hesitate to buy shoes they couldn’t try on and they trusted their customers not to buy shoes, wear them for 364 days, and return them. And they were right.
The third example is USAA, which I’ve written about on Baldrige.com before. USAA allows its customers to take a picture of their paycheck and “deposit” it by email. Most financial institutions follow policies and procedures that demonstrate disdain for their customers. USAA trusts its customers, and that allows it…
28Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
