Making Customers Smile

A lot of us know that we do our best work when we are happy. If there is stress or tension, we generally either try to avoid the situation or choose the least challenging avenues to get the work done. Those are not always the best pieces of work, they are generally just mediocre.

The Golden Rule and the Customer

Recently, I read a post from Don Peppers, talking about what it would take to make a genuinely trustable airline.  In his post he refers to the Golden Rule, "Do onto others as you would have them do onto you." That sparked a thought in my mind about how we treat our customers today.

Do we really follow this rule? A bigger question is, do we need to?

How Many of Your Customers Are Your "Friends"?

Lets start with the definition of "Friend" here. That shouldn't be a hard question, but if you ask someone what is the meaning of "Friend", you will find a lot of different answers.

A friend defined by an online dictionary is:
1. a person known well to another and regarded with liking, affection, and loyalty; an intimate
2. an acquaintance or associate
3. an ally in a fight or cause; supporter
4. a fellow member of a party, society, etc
5. a patron or supporter: a friend of the opera

How Customer Centric Are You?

Many organizations tout that they listen to their customers and gather customer feedback. These organizations have a good presence in social media and say they have a good understanding of their customers. If you go and ask them, they will be able to tell you why customers buy their product or services.

But is that really being customer centric? Is just listening to the customer and maintaining a knowledge base of customer buying trends enough? Is just implementing customer feedback sufficient to becoming a customer centric organization.

Organization Cultures - Is yours Customer Centric?

In one of my earlier posts, I discussed that employee satisfaction is directly proportional to customer satisfaction. Recently, while reading about customer loyalty and how each organization considers "loyalty" differently, I started thinking about organization cultures and how employees are a big part of it.

Like each culture has its own set of beliefs and traditions and thus its own way to define faith, similarly we will find that organizations, over time, develop their own culture. This culture does not always come from the top down, it sometimes flows the other way. Whichever direction the beliefs are passed, the culture has an impact on how the customer sees the organization. 

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.

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.

The Journey of Outside-In Process – A Two Way Road

I recently read an interview with Ranjay Gulati published in the Harvard Business School “Working Knowledge” newsletter (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6201.html) based on the reference given by Dick Lee in his blog here. As Dick rightly says it is an interview which will change the perspective that many of us see customer-centricity.