From: andyhanselman, 4 months ago
A practical guide to creating competitive advantage and improving business performance. Forget customer customer satisfaction. Go for 'devotion'. Heres how....
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Jack Welch on Customer Loyalty
Inspiration for this post -
Customer Loyalty's New Rules - BW Podcast - The Welch Way
Some of Jack Welch's insights from this conversation on the topic -
- Rules of customer loyalty has changed - there is a paradigm shift
- Its moving beyond cost, quality & service (the traditional value engines) - which are nice, but is assumed to be a given now & not sufficient for building loyalty
- Welch suggests - earn loyalty by making yourself indispensible at an intellectual level
- Its all about your customers winning. To earn loyalty, a supplier should think about ways to provide customers a competitive advantage that no one else can
- It requires a different mindset - always thinking about how you can make your customers more competitive in their markets, ways to make them win, etc.
- Its all about getting into an intense partnership with your customers ..if you don't, someone else will.
Customer Centricity Survey
There are many utilities that claim to help you find out how customer centric your organization is. Here is another one sruvey from Round (UK) Limited.
The questions in the survey do point in the right direction & help in defining a customer centric organization. Do check it out.
PS: A UK firm using baseball to explain something!
The questions in the survey do point in the right direction & help in defining a customer centric organization. Do check it out.
PS: A UK firm using baseball to explain something!
Bose delivers customer delight
Just came across this post on the Fast Company blog about how Bose is delighting their customers individually one after the other w/o the hype & hoopla around product recalls.
My thoughts on this incident -
- Anyone rooting for companies to be more customer focused should be spreading the word about such positive actions taken by any company.
- What Bose has done here is to introduce an excitement factor (from Prof Kano's Customer Satisfaction Model) into their customers experince. They proactively took reinforcing action that most customers wouldn't have expected. Any organization focused on their customer initiatives ought to be treating product shortfalls as opportunities to try the excitement factor & thus increase loyalty.
- Bose not only replaced free of cost the product short coming, but have also promised additional goodies to make up for the initial pain. Now how many companies that we regularly buy from would do this!! Good gesture - but they have to deliver on their promise. If they don't, this would be a good example of someone digging their own grave.
Also check an earlier post with more information on the Kano Model.
Customer Service in Professional Services
I have come across very little documentation regarding customer service in the professional services sector - IT services, law firms, hospitals, audit firms, business consulting, etc.
Some characteristics of these sectors that might set the sector apart in this respect -
- driven primarily by knowledge workers
- services delivered are complex & highly customized
Having taken on the responsibility of the customer centricity program in my IT services organization, you should be seeing more information on this subject here. Watch this space.
Get the basics right
Had a McD experience that I had to share.
Being just about 2 weeks old, I guess the staff at this McD outlet were pretty new to the systems. The agent who was taking my orders wasn't conversant enough with the combo offers. I was pleased when a supervisor quickly stepped in, took control, showed the agent how she could group items in my order to reduce what I had to pay & gave me a smile too. Reason enough to be impressed.
Got home, told my wife about how McD had just delivered a great experience. Soon though, we realized that my take away had one item missing & a milkshake was half filled!
The experience they had delivered was all of a sudden questionable. If the basics of what needs to be delivered is not delivered, all the additional effort to get it right just gets washed away.
Being just about 2 weeks old, I guess the staff at this McD outlet were pretty new to the systems. The agent who was taking my orders wasn't conversant enough with the combo offers. I was pleased when a supervisor quickly stepped in, took control, showed the agent how she could group items in my order to reduce what I had to pay & gave me a smile too. Reason enough to be impressed.
Got home, told my wife about how McD had just delivered a great experience. Soon though, we realized that my take away had one item missing & a milkshake was half filled!
The experience they had delivered was all of a sudden questionable. If the basics of what needs to be delivered is not delivered, all the additional effort to get it right just gets washed away.
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