February 4, 2012

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Announcing my first book: The Hidden Power of Your Customers

May 5, 2011 By 13 Comments

I am so excited to share the news with all of you that I have a book coming out in July! And it is thanks to you, my faithful Customers Rock! readers, that it is happening. The book is called The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers, being published by John Wiley & Sons. The hardcover edition will be released on July 20, with eReader versions to follow.

This book has actually been a long time in the making – not so much from the perspective of how long it took to write it (see The Story below) but from the perspective that I have had this book in mind since before I began this blog in December of 2006. In fact, one of the reasons I started Customers Rock! blog was that I wanted to see 1) whether I enjoyed writing (I do) and 2) whether anyone else would enjoy reading what I wrote (you do!). So in a sense, this book has been over 4 years in the making!

This book is also one of the main reasons that I have been so quiet on my blog the past few months. I have definitely missed writing for all of you, and many of you have been encouraging me to get back out here and post. I am finally ready, and what better way to start back up than to introduce you to my book.

The Book

The Hidden Power of Your Customers is a book about how to focus on your current customers so that you can lengthen and strengthen your business relationship with them, thus bringing about increased customer loyalty, customer advocacy, and ultimately increased referrals. It is not a social media book (more on that in The Story below), but social media is woven throughout the book (as it should be woven throughout a company’s marketing and customer service strategies). It is also not a customer service book (but that is an important tenet). It is a book about growing your business through one of your company’s best assets – your existing customers.

Here is a short excerpt from the introduction:

It has been my experience that many companies spend most of their time and budget focusing on selling to new customers and end up neglecting their existing ones. This might work in the short term, but eventually these companies will find themselves losing more customers out the back door than they bring in through the front door. Additionally, the onset of social media is driving a major change in customer behaviors and habits, making it highly risky not to focus on existing customers. Social media has brought the customer experience to the forefront of discussions, so it is important for companies to be more vigilant than ever before.

As a result, some people will tell you that you need outstanding customer service. But customer service is not enough. You also need marketing that connects with your current customers. In fact, you need to consider the entire customer experience, and support it with a customer-centric culture, one that promotes an equally exceptional employee experience. And, of course, you do need outstanding customer service.

The Hidden Power of Your Customers is based around the principles of Customers Rock!, and the sections of the book follow the ROCK acronym:

R: Relevant marketing – Organizations need to market to their customers in a way that is relevant to them, including recognizing them as customers, using their language, and meeting their needs.

O: Orchestrated customer experience – Every place a customer interacts with a company needs to provide a consistent, planned experience for the customer that is beneficial to both parties. We can’t leave the customer experience to chance.

C: Customer-focused culture – We can’t just expect that a company will become customer-centric because it hires a few great customer service personnel or states that it cares about customers in its marketing. We need to ensure that customers are part of everything that our company does so that customer-focus becomes part of the company DNA.

K: Killer customer service – Companies need to take customer service to the next level, and it needs to be an integral part of the customer experience. Customer service is where the rubber meets the road, as many buying and renewal decisions are based upon this critical touch point. It has to ROCK.

The book is also supported with many case studies (based on personal interviews I conducted with company leaders), lots of practical tips, and fun personal stories – all written in the Customers Rock! style that you are familiar with here on this blog.

The Story

This past summer, at the end of my Marketing via New Media class which I teach at UC San Diego, my students were encouraging me to take what I know and write a book. I told them I had a book in mind already, I just hadn’t made any inquiries about it yet. I went home that evening and tweeted out that I was thinking about writing a book. Less than a week later, I received an email from an editor at John Wiley & Sons. In it, he said that he was interested in working with me on my book. He said he enjoyed this blog and felt that I had good material, and good credentials, to write a book. I actually had already written a book proposal the year before but hadn’t tried to do anything with it. I asked the Wiley editor whether this should be a social media book, and his recommendation was no, it should not be; he felt there were already quite a few of those out there (and I agree).

So, after giving Wiley’s offer some thought, I agreed and signed the contract. The book was off and running!

I then spent the next four months doing interviews, pulling together information, and writing the manuscript. It was completed on February 1 (I think I missed out on most of the family holiday activities this past season). Since then, I have been working with Wiley on a few rounds of edits, approving cover artwork, seeking “blurbs” (endorsements) for the book, and getting a top-notch thought leader to write the foreword (Thank You, Brian Solis – author of Engage! for being so gracious).

The book is now just about ready for prime time, so I felt it was high time to share about it with you all. The attendees of my recent session at SugarCon got a sneak preview of some of the concepts, and I will be giving more talks in the next few months before the release where I will have the opportunity to sign some pre-release booklets and get the word out about the book.

Will You Help Me Share About It?

I am thrilled that the book releases in just a few months (July 20), and I plan to continue blogging, speaking, and sharing about it on my social networks. Will you help me? Here are a few ways you can get involved in sharing the Customers Rock! philosophy that is in The Hidden Power of Your Customers:

  • Share about the book on your own blog or social networks. Here is the link to the book on Amazon.
  • Go to the Amazon page and click Like (right under my name, at the top of the listing)
  • Pre-order the book
  • If you are in San Diego, come to one of my Book Launch Parties (more info on these as it gets closer)
  • If you are not in San Diego, you can help sponsor me for a Book Signing/Event in your city. I will gladly come to your city for a signing if you help arrange the event; please contact me for details.
  • Submit to write a review of the book on your blog! I will be reaching out to bloggers for reviews to take place in early July; please leave me a comment or drop me a note at becky at petraconsultinggroup dot com if you are interested.

Again, thank you all for your support, encouragement, and loyalty over the past 4 1/2 years of this blog. Customers DO rock, and I can’t wait to show you more about that in the book.

Let me know what you think!

 

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer loyalty, Customer Rock Stars, Customer service, Customer strategy, Customers Rock!, social media, Voice of the customer Tagged With: , , ,

The Importance of Customer Listening

April 26, 2010 By 9 Comments

curiosity(Note: This post is a reprise of an earlier Customers Rock! blog post, and one that was very popular with my readers. As customer listening has become a common topic recently, I felt it would be helpful to post it again, especially as it discusses NON social media listening. Important to listen via all channels!)

Are we putting up walls between the enterprise and its customers?  Or are we putting up walls dedicated to its customers?

I was in Santa Barbara and had a chance to see how one company shares their customers’ voices.  Citrix Online hosted a tour of their facilities for me.  Besides being very employee-centric (one whole wing of their campus was dog-friendly!), Citrix Online is very customer-centric.

My hostess at Citrix walked me past their Voice of the Customer wall.  On it were three large groupings of many signs, each sign a verbatim quote from a customer.  Each quote was also directly attributed to a customer.  These customer quotes were divided up by Citrix’s main product lines, each grouping a different color.  It was in an area near the employee break room which gives the opportunity for many to stop and read “the writing on the wall.”

I love this idea of keeping customer comments visible to all in the organization.  It was inspiring to see the feedback plastered all over the wall!

Do you listen to your customers enough to get these types of quotes?  Or do you aggregate your customer feedback into several large categories so the true voice is lost?

In one of my previous posts, I asked you what other companies do to listen to their customers.  Kevin Hillstrom of MineThatData shared his experiences with some major apparel companies:

  • At Lands’ End, professionals had to help out in the warehouse, or on the phones, during the holiday season and during bad weather. You learn a lot about customers doing that.
  • At Nordstrom, we had to physically work in stores, or take orders over the phone, during major sale events.
  • At Lands’ End and Nordstrom, we learned a lot about customers, by actually spending some time being close to the customer. Both brands are well known for their appreciation of the customer, both brands require professionals to have some interaction with the customer.

When I worked at HP, we learned about the “Day in the Life of a Customer” concept, which was very similar to ethnographic studies.  HP researchers would go to a company which was a customer of HP’s and video tape their business for a day.  HP would then analyze places where they could help make that customer’s business processes easier.

Lego’s customer service team shares customer feedback from the front lines, support, with the rest of the organization in their regular internal newsletter.  The information helps product teams improve their designs as well as highlights any potential issues.

Some companies tend to hold customer information within their own corporate “silos”.  By this, I mean that departments are not always good at sharing what they know or learn about the customer with other areas of the company.  This kind of knowledge-is-power attitude cannot exist if one wants to create a Customers Rock! company.

Companies like Lands’ End, Nordstrom, HP, Lego, and Citrix get close to their customers and share the verbatim “voice of the customer” within the organization to improve products, processes, and ultimately the customer experience.

Where can you improve your customer listening?  Go find a spot to make your “customer wall”, and start the conversation! (Note: original comments here; worth reading!)

(Photo credit: sazonov)

Filed Under: Voice of the customer Tagged With: , , , , ,

Expert’s Corner: Delivering Voice of the Customer

April 14, 2010 By 7 Comments

listen wallRecently on Customers Rock! Radio, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Richard Owen, CEO of Satmetrix. We had a great discussion around listening to customers, gathering social media feedback and turning it into action inside of a company, and of course we talked about the NetPromoter score and how to use it strategically.  You can listen to the 12-minute segments here (Segment 1), here (Segment 2), and here (Segment 3).

Richard’s colleague, and CMO of Satmetrix is Deborah Eastman, and she is our guest blogger today. Deborah shares with us about considerations when listening to customers, whether online or offline, and how technology plays a part.

Delivering Voice of the Customer to Enable Customer Delight and Financial Gains

I hope we can all agree that delivering a positive customer experience is the key to building customer loyalty and achieving financial success. Countless reports and case studies have proven this linkage. A recent report that caught my attention is Watermark Consulting’s 2007-2009 performance analysis, which examines Forrester’s 2007 Customer Experience Index and shows how customer experience leaders outperform laggards in the stock market.

Now, it’s likely that the CEOs of customer experience laggards will tell you that their companies strive to deliver an outstanding customer experience. However, understanding the principles of customer experience and actually delivering them do not necessarily go hand in hand. In 2008 Bain & Company found that while 80 percent of companies believe they deliver a superior experience to their customers, only 8 percent of those companies’ customers report having such an experience. Similarly, a CMO Council study found that fifty-six percent of technology vendors perceive themselves as being extremely customer-centric, compared with only 12% of their customers.

There is a clear disconnect between the experience companies think they deliver and what customers experience, perceive and – more importantly – desire. It’s not about what you think… it’s about what your customers think.

In order to determine whether you are disappointing, meeting or exceeding your customers’ expectations, you need to continuously listen. And it’s not as easy as it sounds. It goes far beyond monitoring the chatter on Twitter and other social media platforms or performing your annual customer satisfaction survey. It requires soliciting customer feedback on a regular, ongoing basis at multiple touch points, and closing the loop to address issues and understand root cause.

You should know what your customers are experiencing every time they interact with your company. Take, for instance, a bank. You must consider your customers’ experience when they open an account, deposit or withdraw funds, overdraw their account, receive quarterly statements, use your online banking tools, request technical support, purchase savings bonds, apply for a mortgage, refinance a mortgage, and so on and so on….You get the picture.

My point is that your customers’ experience at each touch point will form their overall impression of your organization, resulting in a financial impact in terms of retention, repurchase and recommendations. In order to improve, you need to continuously listen and deliver real-time data to empower employees to take action. To gain sustainable competitive advantage, you need view data in a way that reveals trends and helps you to identify structural areas in need of improvement (i.e. policy, process, pricing, products, etc.).

So, as you can see, managing your customer experience means monitoring multiple customer interactions, aggregating and analyzing a plethora of data, and distributing role-based information across the enterprise in a timely manner.

It’s harder than it sounds. No matter how well you understand these concepts, you can’t make them work to your advantage without the help of technology.

And yet, a December 2008 study we sponsored with the CMO Council reveals that most organizations have not adopted the technology necessary to support their customer experience programs, and therefore have major deficiencies in the way they respond to customer feedback. In fact, only 23 percent of the senior marketers surveyed said they were using enterprise technology to engage, listen and respond to customers in real-time.

First-rate technology can and should:

  • Bust organizational silos and provide an enterprise view of the customer experience.
  • Capture information from multiple touch points and distribute it in real-time to initiate required action.
  • Provide sophisticated, interactive analytics and role-based reporting that allow you to quickly identify and act on performance gaps.
  • Allow you to segment data to identify trends and performance gaps across business units, customer segments and product lines.
  • Incorporate your CRM and financial data to provide a big picture view of the direct correlation between customer experience and business performance.
  • Be user-friendly. Employees will be more likely to embrace the system if it is intuitive and integrates seamlessly into their everyday tasks.

Developing and maintaining a customer experience platform demands time and resources, but there is little doubt that it will pay off. One example of this pay-off is Experian, a company we have worked with for several years. They successfully leveraged voice-of-the-customer technology and processes to identify key loyalty drivers and improve the customer experience resulting in increased wallet share in a highly competitive market. Experian’s customer experience efforts were so successful that they were awarded a Forrester Voice of the Customer Award in June of 2009. If you’re interested in other case studies of companies achieving business results by focusing on customer experience, visit satmetrix.com or netpromoter.com.

(Image credit: TommL)

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer strategy, social media, Voice of the customer Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Putting Customers First

November 16, 2008 By 2 Comments

Whether we are focused on social or traditional media, one of the most important things I tell my students (and which I shared last week at the San Diego Social Media Breakfast) is to listen to customers before doing anything. Sometimes, we all need to take a step back and hear what our customers are telling us, and each other, before proceeding.

I will help you, my readers, do that over this next week. I am blogging at the NACCM Customers 1st Conference, being held at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA. You can follow me daily via live Twitter updates, this blog, or on the Customers 1st blog. I will be attending both the conference as well as the “outside the walls” sessions which take place in the Disney theme parks, and I will share with you the best nuggets from the conference and its speakers. One of the sessions focuses on creating the “next generation customer experience” for consumers who are spending a lot of time on social networks and with social media. Stay tuned!

I will also be spending time with some of the guest speakers in one-on-one interviews, so let me know if you have any questions for any of them. You can find the list of speakers here.  They include dignitaries from the customer service industry, authors, as well as customer-focused executives from many large corporations across a variety of industries.
Come follow me around the Magic Kingdom this week and learn about putting customers first!

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer loyalty, Customer service, Voice of the customer Tagged With: , , ,

Rockin’ Customer Feedback: SuggestionBox.com

August 4, 2008 By 14 Comments

There are many, many times here at Customers Rock! where I highly recommend that companies listen to their customers as often as possible.  The best way is to take note of the verbatim words customers use, rather than read from aggregated “survey results”.  This becomes even more important as organizations try to decide the best way to implement social media marketing tools.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with BJ Cook, CMO of SuggestionBox.com (they are based very close to where I am!).  SuggestionBox.com is a place where customers can easily send ideas, complaints, or feedback to companies via the web.  Customers can then sign up to track those ideas, while companies can respond and connect directly with customers.  This is a very cool and easy way to not only listen to customers but also show them you are taking action! 

I asked BJ to share with my readers a little bit about SuggestionBox and how other companies can improve their customer listening plans.  Enjoy!

Interview with BJ Cook of SuggestionBox

Becky: Tell us how the idea for SuggestionBox came about.  And why now?

BJ: SuggestionBox is the result of an online search for a place where our founder, Jeff Whitton, could leave feedback for a company he had an experience with. He couldn’t believe that a Google search for “suggestionbox” would take him to a parked domain. So the light bulb went off and he had a vision for the place that you could submit your ideas to any company around the world and then track them. Think of it as your own Idea portfolio and communication tool for all of the companies you interact with each day. For companies it would be a place to capture feedback, connect with customers and build better relationships. Right now as a customer you’re presented with 6 page surveys, URLs’ on receipts, online surveys and other ways that are intrusive and force you into answering questions that may not be relevant to the experience you just had with that company. So enter SuggestionBox. We’ve simplified the feedback process, by focusing on the field in the feedback form that means the most to the customer; the open textbox. This is what can we improve and why? The company wants to know what and the customer may want to give them some of the background on their suggestion. That’s all. This keeps the incoming feedback focused for companies to easily categorize it and open enough for customers to feel like they can share their story.

Becky: The economy right now is difficult for many.  How can SuggestionBox help companies weather the storm?

BJ: With the state of customer satisfaction and being in an economic downturn, placing emphasis on your customers is crucial. SuggestionBox is that bridge between a company and its customers. We want to be the tool that helps you Build Better Relationships with ____. The reason there’s a blank is that feedback and ideas go beyond your internal and external customers. The blank can be vendors, partners, investors, friends, family and so on. It’s a relationship building tool that just so happens to be able to make capturing insights simple and responding to those Suggesters efficient. Focusing on your existing community and asking them what you can improve lets them know you’re listening and you care. What’s better than feeling like it’s a two-way street? What’s even better is that you can avoid missed opportunities by having a tool setup to listen and be able to get back in touch to support goals like loyalty, retention and word of mouth. SuggestionBox gives companies, nonprofits and events a way to respond to people, keep them in the loop and directly have a positive effect on multiple areas of their business like sales, marketing, customer service, PR and even HR.

Becky: How would you suggest that a company/organization fit SuggestionBox into their existing customer listening plans?

BJ: Depending on what stage a company is in with their current customer listening plans, SuggestionBox can be a value-add tool if you’re just starting out or are already using forums, online surveys, focus groups or your blog. The thing to keep in mind is the communication benefits of “keeping people in the loop”. I’d like to cite a line from the book Raving Fans:

“Listening to customers is powerful, responding to them is dynamite.”

There are so many tools out there to listen to customers, but how many of those tools are just one-way? If you’re given the ability to let a customer know 1 month, 6 months or 2 years out that their idea was actually implemented, you may have them for life - and their kids and their kids. The relationship and bond that is created at this level can last through generations. By changing the current expectation, that I’m going to submit this piece of paper or email to this company knowing they won’t respond, can be the spark you need to becoming dynamite.

Becky: Are you using social media to help promote SuggestionBox, and if so, how?

BJ: Yes. It’s all top secret. I would say that SuggestionBox falls into the whole social media realm. We’re essentially helping companies and brands create online customer communities that they can then engage and communicate with. We are heavy users of community-based platforms like Twitter, Facebook, 12seconds and others. We’ve found that by really embedding our team in various conversations around customer feedback, customer relationships, social media marketing, we begin to build these relationships and lifelines with real people. By focusing on reaching into these various communities, we’ve met some amazing people who not only share their insights with us, but we’re able to share and add value as well. It’s taking the time to really engage with each community that’s so important about social media. I would say that the community is helping us to shape our company from the product roadmap to our outreach to even our hiring. The idea of being social plays a part in every role in our organization and something that we’re all passionate about. SuggestionBox is being defined by our community of Suggesters and customers.

Becky: Anything else you want to share with the readers of Customers Rock!  ?

BJ: With so many great tools out there in this space, you need to start off by asking yourself, “Is our organization customer-centric?” And then evaluate each area of your business to see if that is really being applied from a holistic point of view. Then go out and choose the tool or tools to show customers you’re listening.

Think about all of the businesses you interact with each day and when you have an idea, come see if they are on SuggestionBox. If they are not, you can create their SuggestionBox page simply by being the first to suggest.  We also love feedback, so submit away!

Becky: Thanks, BJ!

To my readers – You can set up an account on SuggestionBox.com for free and submit ideas to any company; SuggestionBox will deliver them for you!  BJ has also set up a code (twomos) where you can get a complimentary two months of a corporate SuggestionBox.  You might want to give it a try and see how you and your customers like it.  Here are some companies that are doing it already: TurboTax (part of Intuit), Southwest Airlines, Addison Avenue Credit Union, Trackur, and Zappos (among many others). 

Look for one here at Customers Rock! soon, too.  I would love to get your suggestions, in addition to your comments!

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer service, Voice of the customer Tagged With: , , , ,

Tell 3000: The Voice of the Customer

July 9, 2008 By 3 Comments

I always encourage my clients to listen to their customers using a variety of mechanisms.  One of the best ways, however, is to listen to or read customer verbatims.  In other words, listen to customers tell stories about your company in their own words.

So of course, I am very interested in this new project put together by Pete Blackshaw.  He is doing it to help promote his new book, ”Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000″.  Over at his book’s blog, you can find a series he is starting up showcasing consumer interviews .  These feature various consumers talking about both good and bad experiences from companies.  I listened in on a few, and here is a line I liked from a recent consumer interview about Southwest Airlines.  Mike, the consumer, said this about one of the reasons he likes Southwest:  I feel as though they see me as a person, not just as a ticket and a way to make cash.  Prompted by the interviewer, Mike then goes on to share a story about a Southwest employee that went out of her way to help him feel better about a certain situation at the airport.

Pete, this is a great idea!  I would love to see this sorted by good vs bad experiences, as you are doing with your feedback.  We all need to hear more good experiences -that’s why this blog was started over 1.5 years ago!

Check it out, and let Pete know what you think (and tell him I sent ‘ya).  Readers, talk to me, too.  How do you best listen to your customer’s pure, unfiltered voice?  Monitoring the internet?  Social media?  Reviewing feedback letters?  Surveys?  Focus groups?  Tell us how you do it either via comments or by sending me email to becky at petraconsultinggroup dot com.

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer loyalty, Voice of the customer Tagged With: , ,

Customer Engagement Online

September 26, 2007 By 6 Comments

conversation.jpg I have talked with many companies who tell me they aren’t sure if they want to start an online conversation with their customers.  Cord Silverstein asks this question in his post Engage customers or die. He says,

Is it a good thing for companies to try to engage their customers online? Does the good outweigh the possible repercussions that could come from it? And finally what are some of your ideas on how companies can engage online with their customers?

Cord’s post and comments start a great discussion on this topic!  I think part of the concern companies have about engaging their customers in conversation online is that they have not already been engaging in ANY conversations with customers.  Rather, marketing and PR have often created one-way communication vehicles (advertisements, press releases, articles/white papers).  Ongoing, two-way interaction with customers is how we build customer relationships.  The online channel, ideally, is just one more channel by which to reach out and build relationships with customers.  It is a great channel to use because it enables immediate, two-way conversation!  Therefore, if your customers are interacting online, you need to be out there talking with them and learning from them in the online space.

With or Without You

Customers are having conversations about companies, with or without the company’s involvement with those discussions.  Someone in Cord’s comments suggested the way to engage with customers online is to have your PR department be new media-savvy and do the correspondence.  Having the PR person be the one to respond concerns me, as I believe customers are looking for authentic responses, not carefully crafted company statements. 

Creating a place on your own site, such as a blog, is a great way to keep the conversation in your backyard – as long as you allow comments and take the time to respond.  Southwest Airlines has done a good job of engaging with customers online, and they use their blog as a feedback channel for ideas, concerns, and questions.  Everyone at SWA takes the time to write and respond, including pilots and the CEO.  For example, their recent business decision on whether or not to assign seats was put to their customers in a few different blog posts; the most recent one elicited over 360 comments!

Check out Toby Bloomberg’s Diva Marketing blog or Mack Collier’s The Viral Garden for more on corporate blogging tips and best practices.

Conversation is Key to Customer Relationships

Think about it.  Can you get to know a new person you meet without having some kind of conversation?  Whether it be in person, over email, or on a Facebook wall, there has to be some type of interaction in order to progress the relationship.

Customer relationships are no different!  It is important to go where your customers are (be that online, at a retail store, in their own place of business), get to know them, find out their needs, and start doing something different based on what you learn.  Customer trust and relationships will build, and the best ones will lead to more customers as they tell others about you.

Start the conversation!

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, Customer experience, Marketing Blogs, Voice of the customer Tagged With: , , , ,

Customer Walls

August 8, 2007 By 11 Comments

happy-customer.jpg Are we putting up walls between the enterprise and its customers?  Or are we putting up walls dedicated to its customers?

I was in Santa Barbara this week and had a chance to see how one company shares their customers’ voices.  Citrix Online hosted a tour of their facilities for me.  Besides being very employee-centric (one whole wing of their campus was dog-friendly!), Citrix Online is very customer-centric.

Tina Long, director of PR and communications for Citrix Online, walked me past their Voice of the Customer wall.  On it were three large groupings of many signs, each sign a verbatim quote from a customer.  Each quote was also directly attributed to a customer.  These customer quotes were divided up by Citrix Online’s main product lines, each grouping a different color.  It was in an area near the employee break room which gives the opportunity for many to stop and read “the writing on the wall.” 

I love this idea of keeping customer comments visible to all in the organization.  It was inspiring to see the feedback plastered all over the wall!

Do you listen to your customers enough to get these types of quotes?  Or do you aggregate your customer feedback into several large categories so the true voice is lost?

In one of my previous posts, I asked you what other companies do to listen to their customers.  Kevin Hillstrom of MineThatData shared his experiences with some major apparel companies:

  • At Lands’ End, professionals had to help out in the warehouse, or on the phones, during the holiday season and during bad weather. You learn a lot about customers doing that.
  • At Nordstrom, we had to physically work in stores, or take orders over the phone, during major sale events.
  • At Lands’ End and Nordstrom, we learned a lot about customers, by actually spending some time being close to the customer. Both brands are well known for their appreciation of the customer, both brands require professionals to have some interaction with the customer.

When I worked at HP, we learned about the “Day in the Life of a Customer” concept, which was very similar to ethnographic studies.  HP researchers would go to a company which was a customer of HP’s and video tape their business for a day.  HP would then analyze places where they could help make that customer’s business processes easier.

Lego’s customer service team shares customer feedback from the front lines, support, with the rest of the organization in their regular internal newsletter.  The information helps product teams improve their designs as well as highlights any potential issues. 

Some companies tend to hold customer information within their own corporate “silos”.  By this, I mean that departments are not always good at sharing what they know or learn about the customer with other areas of the company.  This kind of knowledge-is-power attitude cannot exist if one wants to create a Customers Rock! company.

Companies like Lands’ End, Nordstrom, HP, Lego, and Citrix Online get close to their customers and share the verbatim “voice of the customer” within the organization to improve products, processes, and ultimately the customer experience.

Where can you improve your customer listening?  Go find a spot to make your “customer wall”, and start the conversation!

(Photo credit: elnur)

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, Voice of the customer

Weekend reading

May 11, 2007 By 5 Comments

blog.jpgI thought I would share a few great links to get you thinking over the weekend.  Enjoy!

Demanding Excellent Service

Christy Brewer over at the Quicken Loans blog The Diff shares a frustration many of us share that focus on the customer: we analyze the experience everywhere we go!  Much like the joke about the psychologist constantly analyzing friends, Christy tells the story of how she has analyzed her experiences at the hardware store and at a medical office.  She and I must be long-lost kin, because this paragraph sounds so much like something I would blog:

Providing great customer service is not hard. In fact, the more you do it, you realize that it’s actually easier to be excellent in the first place, rather than trying to fix the experience after turning off a client or customer. Great customer service really does boil down to the simple things. Anticipating needs and then meeting them. Listening like you are doing the talking.  Doing what you say you will do.

Keep the faith, Christy!  We can spread the word and help change the world more quickly than you think.

The Southwest Airlines Conversation

Geoff Livingston of the Buzz Bin has a great interview with Brian Lusk from Southwest Airlines as their blog, Nuts About Southwest, celebrates its first anniversary.  The Southwest blog is truly an ongoing customer conversation where customers have influenced major airline decisions.  Many employees have started to participate as well, both by blogging and by leaving comments.  Here is a quote from Brian about these customer-employee blog conversations:

They simply are conversations you might have with any friend, and we consider our participants to be our friends. But, it builds relationships with our Customers. This is very similar to the relationships our Station and Inflight Employees build with their regular Customers.

The interview also discusses the way Southwest participates in the customer conversation and truly shows their customers Southwest cares about what they think.  An excellent interview! Special thanks to Toby Bloomberg of the Diva Marketing Blog for highlighting this post.

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer service, Voice of the customer

Stacy’s Pita Chips has a Customers Rock! Attitude

April 16, 2007 By 6 Comments

happy-customers.JPGI enjoy finding companies with a Customers Rock! attitude and sharing my findings here on this blog.  Today, I saw something which impressed me on the back of my big bag of Stacy’s Pita Chips (Parmesan Garlic & Herb flavor).  Here is how Stacy’s Pita Chip Co. describes their origins:

We designed a food cart and began serving all natural pita roll-up sandwiches.  They were an instant hit and the lines grew longer each day.  As an incentive for customers to wait in line, we baked fresh pita bread into different flavored pita chips.  Customers loved them so much, they encouraged us to get the chips into stores.  We listened, and that’s how Stacy’s Pita Chip Company was born.

It goes on and continues focusing on customers:

Listening to our customers is also how we continue to grow.  Today, the recipes remain the same… simple, natural, and delicious.

Thanks to all our customers!

I love the way this company gives a lot of the credit for their success to their customers!  But do they really care?  Here is a great post from The Diff blog (a blog from Quicken Loans!) discussing how Stacy’s Pita Chips responded to a concern from someone who had just tried the chips for the first time.  The blogger bought a bag of the chips from the vending machine and was very disappointed with the actual number of chips in the bag.  He sent an email to Stacy’s to express his concern.  They responded saying they would send a replacement bag.  Here is what Stacy’s sent:

They could have just sent the single replacement bag but they sent a boxful.  A snack food company that didn’t want the customer to have a bad impression of them.  To me that was the Diff.

I believe Stacy’s is a customer-focused company.  Their website is very friendly and is as easy to use as flipping through a magazine (in fact, that is how it is set up).  They continue to state on their homepage how they built the company on customer input and feedback.  Flip to the tab labeled “Talk to Us” and find their Guest Book.  There you can read many dozens of positive comments sent in by customers.  (To Stacy’s: one great way to improve the Guest Book would be to turn it into a blog and respond to the comments!)  They also had a fun SuperBowl campaign this year and sent out party kits to over 100,000 people in America named “Stacy” in order to celebrate the brand’s grassroots beginnings and word of mouth enthusiasm of its customers.  Anyone get one?

Stacy’s also has a nice loyalty program to reward frequent customers: you can clip off the UPC symbols from the products and send them in for t-shirts, aprons, recipe books, or lunchbags.  What is so different about this, you say?  Hasn’t this been done for years?  Yes, but the customer-friendly approach taken by Stacy’s is embodied by the word FREE.  The UPC symbols are all that is required (and presumably a loyal customer has quite a few of those); no shipping or handling charges needed!  That is very cool.

I am impressed with the customer focus I have seen from this organization.  Stacy’s Pita Chips Company, you rock!

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer service, Customers Rock!, Marketing Blogs, Voice of the customer
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