Standing Out From The Crowd

Stop right there!

If you were looking for some “how to improve your love life” article, you came to the wrong place. Rather, I would like to explore how the emotions involved in customer relationships are strangely similar to those you have with your loved ones.
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Well, customers may be willing to share the object of their affection with a couple million other people, but the difference ends there… Like in romances, customers will become jealous if you favor others over them. If your company sees more value in acquiring new customers than in keeping a current one, the current one will leave.

Take for example wireless companies. To get into the proverbial bed with you, they lie and say they’ll treat you right. They offer you free phones, cash back, gifts and promise to take care of you and make you happy forever after. However, as soon as the sun comes up, or you’ve signed a two-year contract, you are tossed aside and simply added to the list of their many conquests. You, as an individual customer, don’t matter anymore.

Being treated this way is bad enough but then, adding insult to injury, the company continues to flirt with others right in front of you; making the same empty promises they made to you.

If your girlfriend or boyfriend treated you this way, how would you respond? Exactly!
Now, how do you think your customers will respond?

Oh sure, you may be able to fool a few and keep them with you for a while. But, as soon as the competition starts making its move and offering better perks, your customers are as good as gone.

Long romance or one-night stand?

Does offering all these perks to attract new customers really pay off when you treat them like that and they leave you in two years? Why not reward loyal current customers by giving them special offers or at least the same advantages as new customers when they renew their contracts. Better yet, why not offer them incremental benefits throughout the years?

It costs six times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.¹

So, investing in customer retention not only saves your company money, it also leads to loyal, life-long customers and a higher return on investment.

In simple language: Set the right expectations, and be ready to invest as much in retention as you do in acquisition!

After all, one of the most basic rules of relationships is that if you are happy with what you have, you will be less tempted or willing to risk your relationship for instant gratification.

Is it time to break-up?

SPRINT has taken a somewhat unique approach to the customer relationship; they’ve flipped the table and are dumping their unhappy customers, (SPRINT is starting to cancel customers’ contracts when they call customer service too often).

I wrote an article about this topic last year (Bad, Bad Customer… No Soup for You!), explaining how companies were starting to identify customers who don’t measure up or are deemed too high maintenance.

I am not taking sides on this matter², but you can bet that outraged high maintenance customer is going to tell everyone she knows about your service and your company has a lot more to lose in brand awareness and public image than she does.

Having said all this, I ask again: Is it worth losing the one you’re with?

^{1 - Stevens, M. Extreme Management: What They Teach At Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. Warner Business Books, March, 2002.
2 - You can read views of both sides on Seth Godin’s Blog “Treating different customers differently” and “The first thing“, and also at the consumerist.com.}

Originally published at Vox Inc Customer Experience Articles

If you lived your whole life in the U.S., you may be oblivious to some curious everyday situations that I, as an outsider, can’t help but to find amusing.

For example, everyday I tear money apart.

No, I am not saying that I spend more than I should on a daily basis. I am stating that I LITERALLY tear money apart.  EVERYDAY!

Before you start cursing some made up foreign habit of throwing money away, let me explain: Given that all my normal written communication with friends and family is done through the Internet, every time I check my mailbox I rest assured to find only bills and direct marketing. Additionally, I frequently find marketing pieces disguised as money.

Some are checks for pre-approved loans that I didn’t ask for, some are checks to transfer debts to one of my credit cards, and finally some are checks for refund on the first month fee of a new bank service that I don’t want to sign-up for.

So, after the revision of delivered mail, I often pick the bills to be paid and immediately tear apart all the  “checks”, before I feel an urge to credit any of them.

That said, I can’t avoid the sense of wrongness when I think how I dutifully send my money to pay others and, at the same moment, I am throwing away any money that others send to me…

Maybe I am just crazy, but it helps me to think that if the global economy usually doesn’t make sense to me, why my personal one should? In any case, now I can understand a little bit why so many Americans are always in debt.

What are website tweakers?  According to Seth Godin, they are professionals capable of increasing a website results by improving its pages just a bit (or, better yet, with just a little tweak.)  He posted a call for tweakers on his blog and got tons of responses.

So, if you are in need of tweakers for you website, you may want to check out Seth Godin’s new Squidoo lens on Tweakers.

The company I work with, Vox, is listed there and now has joined Seth’s Tweaker Group (a pretty good fit, given our focus on tweaking the customer experience to increase retention and revenue).

But don’t take my word for it, stop by to see all members and take your pick.

I always understood that it can be difficult to please a customer, but I never gave much thought about why. Seth Godin has some curious insights though on that matter in two of his recent blog entries: What People Want and The Thing About the Wind.

My two cents to companies: Listen very carefully to your customers and understand them as if you were in their shoes. Without that, you may be catering to your customers’ every whim without ever giving them what they really want.