CX Blog

Let’s not pretend the four P’s of marketing are dead, useless, or outdated.   They aren’t.  You still have to price your product or service and promote it in the right places.

These age-old marketing corner stones are as important today as they ever were to your operations.   What they don’t do, however, is provide you a compass to help guide strategy and insure your success.   For this, you need new age P’s and Q’s that will orient you, and serve to infuse both a predisposition toward “customer centricity,” and help you take pragmatic actions with customers for balanced marketing.

In truth, customer centricity is simple to achieve.  Give customer what they want.  What’s difficult is to do this and run a growing and profitable business.  To thrive in the digital age of the consumer you need a measured approach to a variety of factors.

So think about the below P’s & Q’s, and practice them to achieve balance when you plan and perform your marketing:

Four P’s

1. Preference
2. Personalization
3. Performance
4. Pervasive & Persuasive

Preference

Instead of centering your marketing on your products and simply spouting off about all its attributes, concentrate on understanding customer preferences first.   Regardless of your business, this is a better approach.  Sure, there are times when customers can’t easily articulate a need.  Consumers weren’t breaking down Apple’s doors demanding an iPod, yet they clearly wanted portable music.  So even in these cases, if you understand their behavior and fundamental need, you’re more likely to fit an offering to an expressed or latent requirement.

If you understand the market you are in, and what the customers really want in that market, and you hear them out, then you are on the right path.  If you can’t pinpoint them, and you rarely do research and gather data, you probably aren’t actually listening to your target audience.  Get to know your customers.  Listen to them.  Live in their shoes.  Learn from them.  When you do this, you will uncover huge opportunities to serve them better.

Interface with customers on many levels.  If you sell jets, listen to and understand more than just the airline buyer, but also the infrequent & frequent passengers, pilots, flight attendants, and maintenance crews.

Personalization

Make personalization self-service.   Figure out how to allow your customers to self select the marketing they receive.  Make it a dialog and give plenty of options.  Then, use that data to customize your marketing activities and the product and services you promote.  Often, the same offering will fit different customers, yet make it so because they selected it as opposed to they had no choice.

Performance

You can listen, and you can configure, but unless you can deliver, your marketing is the noise before your defeat.  Put time & effort working with your product teams, your operations, your fulfillment, your service staff, and your training folks.   Once you get a sale, make sure the customer is not subject to old school mentality where the post-sale devil appears and declares, “Oh all those promises were for when you were a prospect, now you are my customer.”

Pervasive

Get your message out – everywhere you can where your target audience is.   Nowadays, there is a lot of marketing clutter, and you are going to need to work hard to get reactions to your impressions.  You don’t always have to spend traditional marketing dollars or use classic methods to do this, because you can growth hack.  For example, consider using “Contextual Incremental Marketing” as a methodology to sustain your message in digestible chunks more likely to sink in over time.  Leverage your customers as a marketing channel – when they have success, they are your most credible spokespersons.   Spend a portion of your marketing efforts teasing out their accolades and distributing their stories.

In addition, leverage social influencers, blogs, crowd sourcing, partners, affiliates, analyst, review sites, and local community efforts to spread your word.  In other words, use the digital network effect to your advantage.

Four Q’s

1. Quality
2. Qualification
3. Quantification
4. Quicker

Quality

A new adage I’ve heard that I totally disagree with is “Speed trumps Quality.”  It’s a sad commentary on society in general, but specifically for Marketing and Products, it’s a problematic long-term strategy.   You will erode your customer trust if you don’t have quality marketing, sales, and products.  Strive for high quality, and take the extra time to get it right – the alternative of sloppy or mistake-ridden output is unacceptable to your customers.   Find me a brand that has stood the test of time, and I will show you a brand with quality at its core.  So measure twice and cut once.

Qualification

Don’t be afraid to qualify with whom you do business.  You have a business to run, and if you did a strategic business plan (I hope you did – if not – go directly to jail and do it – do not pass Go – do not collect $200) – you have a specific market and customers you are focusing on.  If you stray outside that, using the same plan, it’s a recipe for failure.

Consider customers that aren’t properly qualified for your existing products as a potential future opportunity for another adjacent market with another product.   Then, study it and make a deliberate decision of whether to enter that market segment.

Quantification

If you aren’t measuring it, you aren’t managing it.  Moreover, if you aren’t managing it, you can’t improve it.  You need to commit to sustained measurements so that you can adjust dynamically.   Consider this – if a police officer pulls you over and asks you why you were doing 60 mph in a 35 zone, and your answer is that you didn’t think you were speeding because when you checked a week ago, you were going 35 mph – that argument won’t hold weight, and it doesn’t hold weight in your business.

Quicker

You need quality, but you also have to be quicker than you were before, and certainly faster than your competition.  This means speed in detecting changing market conditions and agility in adjusting your messages and product to that new dynamic.  You must be real-time in your ability to use customer context, and factor it into your decision-making, using a next best action approach.

As a consumer, I’m often disappointed when companies don’t get the little things in Customer Experience (CX) right.  For example, I frequently stay at hotels, and I always ask for a room away from the elevators, but they never remember it, and I can’t note my preference.

CX professionals and Marketers can benefit by reaching the first level of being “Customer Friendly”, and doing this with consistency and meaning.  Small things matter, such as knowing someone has children, what products they already own, and promoting what is relevant to them.

Sounds really simple?  Yet to do that – if you aren’t a small business – you need coordinated mechanisms to record customer preferences, common history, a standard set of rules, and then a way to surface key information and recommended actions to all customer facing staff and systems.  Functionally it’s not that intricate, still today many companies don’t do this well.

Why is that?  I think it’s because they aren’t seeing the cumulative value, and as such can’t envision or measure the overall benefits derived by connecting these dots.  Simple improvements to customer experience – applied one step at a time – build upon each other.

Everyone agrees that having institutional client memory (a 360 view) is valuable – and great entrepreneurs relish it, but large organizations struggle to build and provide it, for a variety of reasons. Constant acquisitions, distributed staff, legacy technologies, and silo systems – or worse, simply losing sight of customer centricity.  As the excuses build up, competitors swoop in with new technology and agility, and fill the customer experience vacuum.  Although these players may be disruptive, usually they aren’t employing earth shattering methods or technology.

As pressure builds, large entrenched players are forced to take stock.  They reflect on expensive efforts that didn’t meet ROI promises, such as failed Data Warehouse and CRM efforts, and it taints them with an overly jaded mindset.   If this describes your corporate culture, pull an alarm bell, ringing for an attitude adjustment.  The message is clear-cut.  We have to fix this – pronto, and it shouldn’t take millions and years.  Find the CX “No-Brainers” and execute on them.

All the rage these days is about Personalization.  And personally, I love it.  And it’s so easy.  Just make sure to remember all the little things about customers, particularly the things they share, and make them feel special.   And that, my friends, in a nut shell, is Personalization.

Here are 5 examples of No-Brainers and likely outcomes.  Literally hundreds more can spring from these:

• Getting little things like names right is really important. My name is Vince Jeffs – not Jeff Vincent (in fact, where I work at Pegasystems, there is a Jeff Vincent, and you can only imagine the fun that creates).  If you call me Jeff repeatedly, my sense is you don’t know me and don’t really care.  Record children and/or pet information also.  If they tell you something about them (like their names), record that.   Make sure you use it wisely, when it counts and with class.  If you do, it matters in a massive way.  For instance, if you sell Pet Supplies, you think this might be important?

• Document product interest and purchase activity, whether based on search, surfing behavior, or traditional conversations and transactions. Incorporate that knowledge into your near term marketing efforts.  Customers will love when you send relevant offers.

• A customer shares when it’s their birthday or anniversary. You remember it, and on that special day, wish them well.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone complain about being wished a Happy Birthday.

• Demonstrate you remember their business, and show appreciation for it. Keep RFM statistics (How Long/Recent, How Frequent, How Much), and use it astutely.  A staff member saying, “For 10 years we have had the pleasure of having you as a customer.  Thanks so much!”  Again, you think that might make a difference?

• Remember something really unique about each customer, use it judiciously, and make them smile. Don’t try to infer this, by appending 3^rd party data.   You aren’t clever trying to deduce I’m a cat lover because I subscribe to Modern Cat.   However, if I mention I love Blues Guitar, and you cater to that later by recommending shows in the area, there is no way that won’t tickle me, even if the shows aren’t that interesting.   At times, you will have no choice but to put prospective customers into segments, because you otherwise can’t reach that audience.  Yet once I’m a proclaimed customer, ditch the mass segmenting and assumptions, and go instead with my stated preferences.

Your goal is to do this at scale, while executing like the corner bakery.  There is no reason why you can’t put an initial Customer Decision Hub – An Always on Customer Brain into place in 90 to 180 days; regardless of the size of your firm. This is why I entitled this post “… (Almost) No-Brainers” because you need this brain, but what it initially thinks about isn’t that sophisticated.

True, it will take time to connect to more data sources and customer channels, but in less than 6 months, your foundation will be in place.  In mega firms, there will be 100’s of people telling you it can’t be done.   In spite of this, I’ve seen it done.   Start with one or two channels, a single business purpose, and build decision strategies that are driven by a customer profile.   Assemble a library of actions associated with the business purpose.   Then rank these actions and execute on them.

And here is the really amazing thing.  Implementing subsequent no-brainers entails very little incremental cost.   I’m not a fan of fuzzy math, but this is a case where 1+1 does equal 3.

Note:  These views are my own, and not that of my employer

A slight re-vamp of my last post taking out the holiday twist…

10.  Really get to know your customers. Make sure every customer facing person and system has access to your knowledge.

9.  When you have the privilege of interacting with your customers, listen to them (that’s context) and adjust your message, actions and offers accordingly. Provide them value, and get to the point fast.

8.  When they need help with their buying decisions, make it easy and convenient for them. Use your knowledge of them wisely (e.g., location, which buying stage they are in) and they will love you for it.

7.  Work closely with your product and engineers to ensure your product is indeed awesome. Bring them your innovative ideas and ideas from your customers.

6.  Tell them stories about your fantastic products, but more importantly have your best customers or someone they trust tell these stories.  That’s right – like it or not – they trust them more.

5.  Make sure you entertain them with these stories. Nothing is better than some humor and excitement to get attention.

4.  Treat each and every interaction with your customer as a “Moment of Truth.” It may be your best and it may be your last.

3.  When they get to the point where they are really interested, don’t sell to them – help them buy.

2.  Always respect them. Respect their privacy.  Listen to their concerns.  Try to understand their needs.

1.  Evaluate every action you want to take as a marketer, and ask yourself one simple question. Will this improve Customer Experience?