Marketing Mavens

Who are marketing mavens?

• are organizations & people in organizations who know that at the end of the day the only that treally matters is securing, retaining & growing customers ...unbelivably customer fcocused

Where are marketing mavens required?

• hopefully most ppl in organizations are marketing mavens
• certainly in service org, many ppl come in contact with customers ...so in these organizations most or all ppl in organizations are marketing mavens ...is infused in the DNA of the organization

Imperatives

• Picking markets that matter
• Selecting segments to dominate and finding the sweet spot in that segment
• Designing the offer to create customer value and secure differential advantage
• Integrating to serve the customer
• And measuring what matters ..pls in organizations do what is inspected of them rather than what is expected of them

Source: The Marketing Mavens: Harvard Business Online producer Steve Singer talks with Noel Capon, author of the new book The Marketing Mavens.

http://hbsp2.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=243563

Ways to delight your customers

For all your cricket lovers there, I don't have to explain how exasperating it is to have the match being interrupted by ads - either immediately after an over or when a wicket falls. The exasperation is a amplied multifold in the 20 over version of the game.

And for all the verbal support that the ESPN Star commentators provide against such a behavior of the channels, I felt they this channel too sold out to the advertisers during the ongoing T20 world cup. Whoever is deciding on when the ads come on is so trigger happy ....

But the channel did come out with a master stroke recently. The second semi-final between Australia & India was a true humdinger ....being decided in the very last balls of the game. Every single moment was worth grabbing on to. And in this situation, the channel decided to skip (I hope this was a conscious decision) ads between the 19th & 20th over of the Australian innings. And even after the win, they continued showing the joyous celebrations on the field off it without showing the ads. ESPN-Star managed to delight me with this.

• They knew exactly what their customer base values the most.
• And they decided to positively affect their customer's experince when it mattered the most.

Customer Service Quotes

Eric Fraterman has listed quite a few customer service quotes. Below are those that appealed to me -

• Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it.It is what the client or customer gets out of it. -PETER DRUCKER
• If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will. -UNKNOWN
• Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify!HENRY DAVID THOREAU
• Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game. -TONY ALESSANDRA
• Our greatest asset is the customer! Treat each customer as if they are the only one! -LAURICE LEITAO
• People expect good service but few are willing to give it. -ROBERT GATELY
• Well done is better than well said. -BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
• To my customer:I may not have the answer, but I’ll find it.I may not have the time, but I’ll make it. -UNKNOWN
• In business you get what you want by giving other people what they want. -ALICE MACDOUGALL
• You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can’t be copied. -JERRY FRITZ

Source: http://customerfocusconsult.blogspot.com/2007/09/customer-service-quotes-for-inspiration.html

Customer Service Champs

Ideas that caught my imagination :

• Rankings & lists do matter, but nothing matters more than having the processes & the determination to do the best for your customers. Case at hand - Jetblue. Though not on the BW top 25 customer service champs list, the first 10 mins of the podcast sounds like a Jetblue promo!
• Disasters happen - how you recover from them is what characterises a company. Work on the foundation!
• Empathy Engine - is the idea that every single person in the organization is really thinking of customer.
• Customer Service leaders don't just want to be best amongst their competitors, they want to be the best in customer service. Period!

Best Practices:

• Remind your employees often about who their customers really are, what is it like to live the customer's life, what is their perspective, what do the customers go through, etc. eg. Four Seasons has a program that allows even a housekeeper gets to stay in a Four Seasons hotel as a guest & experince that life.
• Employee (treat them well), Processes (get the senior management in front of the customer) & Attitude (never be happy with just customer satisfaction)- most important constituents of the foundation for customer focus.

Source:

• Article, Podcast & Slideshow @ http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_10/b4024001.htm

Kano Model - resources

Kano does seem to be in the air! I have come across atleast 4 blogs in the last few weeks bringing the Kano Model to the surface in the context of customer focus.



A few take aways & additional resources (at the end of this post) -

• the model forces design teams to think from a customer perspective & helps bring a balance of what can be delivered & what is expected to be delivered
• like a healthy food diet, service or product design too should allow for a proper mix of threshold, performance & excitement attributes

Such basic stuff ..yet needs to be reminded yet so often.

Resources:

• Kano Customer Satisfaction Model - http://www.12manage.com/methods_kano_customer_satisfaction_model.html
• Kano model on Wikipeida - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model
• A nice 8 minute animated tutorial introducing the Kano Model - http://www.c2c-solutions.com/tutorial.htm
• Kano's Methods for Understanding Customer-defined Quality - http://cqmextra.cqm.org/cqmjournal.nsf/2fff9754b9deecf5852566340064a8e6/489c0fea64a3f1838525684700552126/$FILE/RP02700.pdf
• The Kano Model: How to Delight your Customers - http://www.competence-site.de/dienstleistung.nsf/3397D512929D8241C1256AD8004B0027/$File/kano-model.pdf

Creating Customer Value

Chanced upon this article on 1000Ventures. Some take aways -

• "Being good enough, is not good enough – give customers a reason to be faithful." – Graham Roberts-Phelps
• The Tao of customer value creation --- YIN (passive, accepting side) ETDBW (easy to do business with) ..looking at your business from the customers' point of view, understanding customer perceptions and making it easy for your customers to do business with you. YANG (active, aggressive side) MVA (more value-added) ...giving your customer more than you ever have before and more than they expect from you.
• "The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed." – Henry Ford

Source: http://www.1000ventures.com/business_guide/crosscuttings/customer_value_creation.html