Why do customers do what they do?

Recently, I was reminded of a passage from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. The answer to the question of life and everything is: 42. That in itself is the source of a plethora of questions... but that is another story in itself. 

This got me thinking though about the golden question about customers... "Why do customers do what they do?". Like the age old question about "life and everything", this one also does not have a clear and finite answer. You can pick up a number or a reason from the air, so to speak, and try to explain customer situations to those numbers. I say "try", because they will not always be explainable... many times you will attribute them as "outliers" or "special conditions". 

Bottom line is that, the customer psychology is a very complex being and not something you can define in terms of mathematics or logic. There is a lot of emotion attached to any action that a customer takes. 

Traffic Jammed Customer Service

How many of us have endured endless wait times when calling customer service numbers? Or suffered through long lines at a POS counter? Or even waiting for a website to load and log you in for online self service. All of these are cases of "traffic jams" in the customer services of an organization.

Is your organization "human"?

Relationships are personal. Some more than others, but none-the-less quite personal. Similarly, buying decisions can be personal. It is not necessary that I will go out and purchase the cheapest and most positively reviewed product. I may spend a few more dollars to get the product from a local store, or a store where I like to visit, or an online store that accepts my PayPal account. The reasons are un-ending, the irrationality behind the reasons is constant though. But I digress, I will surely touch on this in more detail in a later post.

Quality of Customer Experience

In a recent discussion in Gary Lemke's blog posts, the aspect of speed of CRM has been the center of attention. In today's post, the concept is linked to customer delight. Though I appreciate the perspective of the speed of the customer interaction being important to the whole customer experience, I believe that there is something more important than the speed that in a lot of cases results in more satisfied customers.

360 Degree View of an Organization

In CRM, we have all heard of the 360 degree view of the customer. While reading a recent post by Gary Lemke, Over Surveyed and Under Heard, I was amazed at the statistics regarding sharing information with the customer. Only 1 in 20 organizations respond to the customer about the feedback they have given. For a customer oriented organization it is as important to share results of the feedback with the customers as it is to gather the feedback in the first place.

Customers Response to Change - A Behavioral View

How does a customer react to change? What is the impact on the customer when a change in product or service confronts him/her? These are a couple of the questions which spawned the thoughts around Customer Change Management (as I started to call it). There are various studies ranging from behavioral to business best practices which tell us about how people react to change. The one I found suited a typical response to a change in products/services by a customer is based on “The Stages of Change Model”. This model was originally developed by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente at the University of Rhode Island back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Can Organization Silos Be Beneficial?

A while back, I had written about the disadvantages of organization silos and the detrimental impact that they can have on an organization's ability to understand the customer and build a single view of their products and services. Recently, I challenged my idea about silos.

Preempting Services… Is this the next step?

Traditionally, we wait for our customers to reach out to us for services. Customers go to our self service websites, contact us on social networks, call our call centres or even walk into our service centres to get their queries answered. This is as I term it “Reactive” services. We wait for the customers to come to us. While this works great in a lot of cases, organisations need differentiators.

Employee Satisfaction is directly proportional to Customer Satisfaction

“He who would govern others, first should be master of himself.” – Philip Massinger. We must have hear similar sayings though-out or lives, be it by our parents (explaining to us how we can succeed in life) or our bosses (explaining to us how to lead a team). I have however, thought of putting this in context of Customer Satisfaction. This is how I would say it: “He who wants his customers satisfied, first should satisfy his employees”.

Business Vs. IT : Who owns the CRM Strategy?

It always amazes me how often this question comes up in discussions with customers. In fact, there are times I discuss this topic even with my fellow consultants. My position has always been the same: “Business Owns the CRM Strategy”, but the debate almost always gets interesting.

Customer Loyalty... where does it come from?

(This is an article that I had written quite a while back, but it seems to be a good starting point to get the thoughts rolling for this blog. So here it is again...)



Customer Loyalty is also commonly referred to as ‘Customer Satisfaction’. However, these are two different aspects of Customer Relations. Customer Satisfaction helps you build Customer Loyalty. Customer Loyalty is an important part of all business strategies in the current marketplace. However, before we begin to build Customer Loyalty, we need to identify who is the customer for a business. The ‘customer’ is any person (internal or external to the company) who interacts with the company to purchase products or services from them.