Over the past several months there is one comment I have been hearing consistently from top executives, middle management and marketing professionals. They are all telling me, “We don’t “really” understand our customers all that well and what motivates them to be loyal. In fact, we aren’t really sure what experience we can offer that would create loyalty and as such we aren’t very focused in our efforts.”
At first this surprised me but then as I started digging into what each organization meant, there was tremendous commonality between all of them. Mind you these were comments from $3M to $30B in size so it was interesting that regardless of size and industry, this was one of their top concerns.
At the core of the problem there are three things that stood out to me and I wanted to share these with you our readers. They were:
- Most information is collected in a very old, archaic method – standard customer satisfaction survey’s. These instruments have proven to be less and less effective over time and customers almost resent them in today’s world. The surveys tend to be the kind that asks you to check off the boxes from 1 – 5 about certain things, many of which are not of concern to your customers. They simply don’t care and as such, either don’t fill them out or don’t provide any real valuable information.
- Most information is only surface information – nothing deep enough to capture the real “gold” of the relationship. Much of this comes from sales people, surveys or other sources that are not designed to get at the real heart of what promises the customers want the organization to keep. As such, many organizations stop “drilling” before they hit the “gold vein” and only get the “fools gold” as information.
- Most organizations either don’t know or are not sure of how to take any “gold” they get and turn it into an improved experience – thus generating more loyalty. They are stuck in neutral and not sure which way to go with it – so they either do nothing or continue to collect data. Both of which lead to unhappy customers as they see nothing being done to improve the relationship and build loyalty.
Or, the worst case of all – the organization does nothing to find out what the customer really wants in the experience. So in the end, the customer is looking for ways to communicate to organizations what promises and triggers they feel would allow them to build a stronger, more trusted relationship with the organization and ultimately achieve a level of loyalty but the organizations are not allowing this to happen – very sad. Customers are actually quite willing to tell organizations what they truly want – but only if asked in the right way and only when asked with sincerity. We do a lot of customer interviews and it is clear that what they tell us is very different than what they communicate to the company itself. Why? I feel it is because we are an outside objective source and we know how to get deeper, richer information. No fault of the organizations, just reality.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog as I will tell you what we hear back from the customers in regard to these issues and how they feel about organizations information gathering and use of this information to improve their experience. It is pretty interesting – stay tuned…
Blaine
