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By clicking on a category heading you will see a brief introduction
to each article. To print articles please use the link in the top
right hand corner. For emailing an article to another person a link
has been provided in the bottom right hand corner.
I hope you will enjoy this selection of what I consider poignant
articles. Since I plan to add more as I come across them I suggest
you come back at times to see what's new.
If you would like to discuss any customer-focus issues related
to these articles or your organization contact me for a Free,
No-obligation Phone Consultation.
CUSTOMER
FOCUSING
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CUSTOMER SERVICE & EXPERIENCE
CUSTOMER LOYALTY & CRM
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Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty and Profit - Understanding
the Links |
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Customer Retention is not Enough |
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Six Principles of Loyalty |
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Twelve Laws of Loyalty |
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Eight Insights Into Butterfly Customers |
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Five Ways to Turn CRM into Customer Loyalty |
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Seven Golden Rules for Successful CRM |
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CRM - Buy-in from the Top is Still Lacking |
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Loyal Customers Help Improve Price-to-Earnings Ratio |
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How To Dump Your Customers – When Saying 'No' Can Help
Your Business |
PEOPLE
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People First |
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Nine Ways to Engage Staff and Please the Customer |
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Employee Loyalty: Why People Stay |
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The Secrets to Finding and Keeping the Best Employees |
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Seven Ways to Find and Keep Good Employees |
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Ten Things People Want Most in Their Jobs |
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Seven Reasons Service People Fail |
CUSTOMER FOCUSING
Over the past three years, four-fifths of America’s fastest
growing companies have initiated important new programs aimed at
customer expansion, customer retention, and/or customer profitability.
And, as if this significant involvement were not enough, a majority
is planning to either greatly enhance an existing customer initiative,
or launch a new one over the next 12 months. There is an important
payoff to this reaffirmation: those planning new customer-focused
programs have achieved 46 percent faster revenue growth than their
peers over the past five years, and are projecting 35 percent higher
growth over the next 12 months. These are highlights of the latest
PricewaterhouseCoopers "Trendsetter Barometer," released
recently.
read more >>
•Price-to-Earnings Ratio is Higher
•Market Value is Higher
•Profitability Increases
•Dissatisfaction Siphons $$
Analysis of the PIMS data base concludes that businesses rated high
by their customers for service grow faster and are more profitable
than businesses rated low.
read more >>
Do companies which manage customers well actually achieve better
business performance than those which do not?
read more >>
In keeping with the biblical theme of the 10 Commandments, I have listed below the key “thou should do…” activities that empirically have the highest leverage in terms of delivering a customer based strategy. There are 11 - you have received one bonus commandment. You will note they are equally internally and externally focused.
read more >>
What makes a successful customer-based initiative tick? When a company launches a successful customer-focused initiative, it's likely to be characterized by the following traits:
read more >>
Successful companies today are the ones that revolve their business
around their customers. They focus on adding value by designing
processes such as technology, training and employee compensation
systems to support a strategy of customer-centricity that penetrates
all areas of the organisation, resulting in a concerted effort towards
providing superior value. There are seven typical barriers to
stop this happening.
read more >>
read more >>
I have often observed the following organizational manifestations
of a lack of focus on customers. If you observe any or several of
these in your organization, I would suggest that your customer-focus
is lacking or slipping.
read more >>
It's rare that any one firm can be all things to all customers.
Not every enterprise considers a customer focus part of its core
competency, but that doesn't mean that such enterprises can't benefit
from a customer strategy. The fact is, every customer
wants three things from the companies she does business with: a
great product, good value for the price and good service. That's
why every company needs a proper balance of the three core competencies
defined by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema in their landmark work,
"The Discipline of Market Leaders”: Operational Excellence,
Product Innovation and Customer Intimacy. Whichever discipline gets
the larger focus sets the core competency for the firm. But they
all require a customer strategy fundamentally designed to grow the
value of the customer base.
read more >>
Customers are the heart of your business. A customer centric
goal orients the efforts of your company around the buying desires
of a specific segment or market. In order to operate your
business in a customer centric manner, you must understand the measures
of success for your business.Here are several tips to develop your
own measures:
read more >>
Customer Complaints and Service Recovery
A Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiative should give voice to things that the firm would not normally hear. It should allow a firm to hear, straight from its customers, insightful things that do not surface through conventional marketing research.
read more >>
If you want to manage your customer relationships, you need to understand their perspective. Voice of the Customer (VOC) research provides a structured means of doing so that can be used wherever you have significant contact with your customers. If you are interested in fostering customer loyalty, VOC can provide a critical feedback loop at almost every touch-point that you have with your customers. As such, VOC encompasses a host of different research techniques that center on one primary question: What do our customers need? Determining what customers need is no simple task. Here are five critical guidelines for the "big picture" that will help ensure the success of your VOC program, regardless of where you apply it.
read more >>
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CUSTOMER SERVICE &
EXPERIENCE
If more company presidents and their senior managers asked themselves
this question, taking the view of their customers, many would answer
"probably not." The reason? Customer service.
read more >>
or download
pdf file
Problem solving, cross selling and quality assurance are identified
by a new research study as the top three skills customer service
representatives must have in order to build customer loyalty, increase
sales and lower customer acquisition costs. Additionally, the report
shows that providing customer service has become increasingly complex
over the last decade, and identifies the biggest challenges faced
by service providers and their managers.
read more >>
What makes a company successful over the long, long term? What
characterizes the service relationship between companies and customers
who do business together for decades, even centuries?How can your
company stay close to your customers even as times change, technologies
change and expectations keep steadily rising?What can you do to
ensure that your company's future offers are relevant and valuable
in the market?One step you can take is to explore your customers'
future needs and interests through cultivating "Service Encounters
of The Third Kind".
read more >>
Ten Demandments for turning the most demanding consumers into the most delighted customers. Beyond all the hype about delighting customers by meeting and exceeding their expectations, is the simple reality that most businesses just don't come close to knowing what customers care about. Today's consumers expect more and tolerate less, in part because they have so many options. With the ever-expanding explosion of information readily available and easily accessible via the Internet, modern consumers are able to research and comparison shop an endless array of both products and services from the comfort of their own homes or offices. Welcome to the age of the demanding consumer.
read more >>
Creating a product or service that is unique in the eyes of the customer is becoming increasingly difficult in today's competitive environment. Therefore, more companies are relying on service to achieve competitive advantages. Outstanding service companies share some basic similarities, but they also customize systems, structures, management styles and employment practices so suit their strategic goals.
These 10 fundamentals will help create a culture of continuous service improvement. Companies must define success for everyone in the organization as continually improving everything -everyday. Nothing less will do.
read more >>
What Customer Experience is your company delivering? These
Seven Philosophies explain how you can use the Customer Experience
as a competitive weapon and critically how you can simultaneously
improve your Customer Experience and save costs.
read more >>
Customers are an organisation's biggest asset. There's much written
and spoken about customer care, customer service, even customer
'delight', but what does it all mean? How does it relate to your
business, your people, and most importantly, to your customers.
Here are a few tips to help you look at your own business, and identify
some steps to improve the service experience you create for your
customers and delight them.
read more >>
Any good organization must have an inspiring, shared mission at
its core--and it must have capable leadership in place and in development.
Assuming these two factors are present, the following eight traits
define a healthy corporate or organizational culture.
read more >>
'UGRs exist in all workplaces, although staff do not always talk
about them.
They create a culture that governs everything employees and managers
do'.
Why do so many so-called ‘customer centric’ strategies
fail to make an impact?
Why are work cultures so intransigent?
read more >>
The Awesome Customer Challenge is to stop merely satisfying your
customers and build a consistent and repeatable process to start
delighting them. Delighting customers will fulfill the dream of
creating a new customer or experience economy in which customer
loyalty, deepened customer relationships, stronger brand, and solid
differentiation can be achieved. Anything less will fall victim
to your own competition.
The only way to meet the Awesome Customer Challenge and create
loyal customers is by becoming an experience-based organization.
This means that your organization must start with the belief that
the customer is its most valuable asset, customer loyalty is important
and the organization will do everything in its power to encourage
its customers to take an active part in their own experiences. Experience-based
organizations let their customers tell them what is relevant, what
is valuable, and what they most want in their customer experiences.
read more >>
Customer Experience Management (CEM)
CEM provides the means to retain valued and long-standing customers.
It takes a forward-looking view of what customers expect of their
suppliers. CEM directly captures the voice of the customer, so that
all parts of the organization work towards the common goal of meeting
the customer's needs and protecting against customer defection.
download the
pdf file of this article
While there's a clear reason to become a staunch supporter of CEM, there's a great deal of confusion over what it really is. As more individuals get on board the CEM bandwagon and build services, confusion seems to be increasing. It's time to demystify the hype. When we look at the nature of Customer Experience Management, there are essentially five key areas that CEM practitioners or "Experience Architects" examine.
read more >>
Eighty percent of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of their customers agree, says Bain & Company. Here's how to repair the disconnect.
read more >>
Which customers should you target? If you say "the most profitable ones," you're only half right. It's also important to attract buyers who will act as your company's growth advocates, encouraging others to buy from you. By assessing customer profitability and customer advocacy, you can tailor your strategies—and your investments—by segment.
read more >>
What we put our customers through if they wish to do business with us’.
read more >>
How to get customers to tell a lot of people about their experience with you; to act as customer evangelists?The obvious lesson is the importance of creating a distinct experience. People want to ‘do’ things rather than just ’buy’ things. They’re highly conscious of consumerism and don’t want to just consume and then die. They measure their life in experiences.
read more >>
There’s a lot of hype around at present regarding Customer
Relationship Management (CRM). And if you were to believe much of
it you could easily think that CRM is something new. But it obviously
isn’t. People have been attempting to do their version of CRM
for as long as there have been suppliers and customers.
read more >>
Has your organisation what it takes to stand out from the crowd,
that little bit of magic that attracts and keeps customers? Attracting
and keeping customers is at the heart of business survival. This
isn’t news. Or at least it shouldn’t be – yet so
many companies ignore this fundamental truth. They treat customers
as if they weren’t important. Despite all the customer focus
of the last twenty years, despite the clear message that excellent
customer service is a superb differentiator – and differentiation
brings competitive advantage – survey after survey has shown
decreases in customer satisfaction.
read more >>
For years it has been known that customer retention was a cheaper
option to acquisition. Early research suggested it cost ten times
more to acquire a new customer but today it ranges from two to 20
times depending on the industry. It therefore makes sound economic
sense to raise the profile of Customer Service and to use these
guidelines to position and resource the dual roles of service recovery
and customer feedback as positive contributors to future organisational
performance.
read more >>
"Satisfaction guaranteed" has been a mantra of many companies'
march toward "customer-centricity." And as more and more
companies have adopted the principles of CRM, they have made significant
investments in measuring and monitoring their traditional gauge
of customer performance: customer satisfaction. But despite these
investments, many companies will find that they provide little real
understanding of their customers, no insight into why these customers
stay or defect, no better understanding of how their business is
truly performing, and little direction for impacting growth or profits.
Why is that?
read more >>
Almost as quickly as CRM rose to the top of corporate
agendas it has come under fire – too much pain for too little
gain, critics scoff. Even if that was true, there is no turning
back now.
read more >>
Customer Complaints and Service Recovery
A customer who complains to you should be valued – many of your dissatisfied customers will take their business elsewhere and not even give you an opportunity to respond. Bill Gates has stated that: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”.
“I really care for you and I want us to stay together.
Do you really want end this relationship?”
“Why don’t you speak to me?”
“Why do you find it so hard to say sorry?”
“Why can’t you acknowledge my hurt?”
“Why don’t you care?”
Comments from a marriage counseling session?
read more >>
Despite the headline, complaints management is serious business. Organizations spend huge budgets on compensation, without really learning why their customers have cause to complain, or, more importantly, how their frontline teams are best equipped for this most influential of loyalty effecting contacts. Back in 1999 the legendary US business guru Fred Reichheld exclaimed "It is not how satisfied you keep your customers, it's how many satisfied customers you keep."
read more >>
The quest for 100% customer satisfaction is like the quest for most forms of perfection - a little unrealistic. Problems often happen because the environment in which your business operates changes with the changing wants and needs of customers, market regulation and so on.
Any business should put processes in place to identify customer satisfaction, put problems right, deliver quality services and products and build better business relationships. The best will invest in effective complaint handling processes recognizing the return in terms of fully understanding the needs of customers, increased customer loyalty and retention, positive word of mouth advertising and free notification of potential service problems, product failures or non-compliance with regulations and legislation read more >>
Most organisations spend a lot of time and money trying to identify customers who want to buy their products. Here, Roger Cartwright explains that complaining customers are offering themselves up free!
Many people become defensive when dealing with complaints because this is a person’s natural reaction to someone who is angrily criticising their organisation or department in the case of an internal customer complaint. Organisations seek to instil loyalty into their employees but complaint situations are times when employees need to be honest and objective. Within the bounds of commercial confidentiality it is counterproductive to not be honest with the customer.
read more >>
Service recovery is a foreign concept to many businesses. They don’t understand it, so they don’t practice it. As a result, they are struggling to survive. Simply put, service recovery is putting a smile on a customer’s face after you’ve made a mistake. It’s solving a customer’s problem or complaint and sending him out the door feeling as if he’s just done business with the greatest company on earth. It is bringing a customer back from the brink of defection—and doing so in 60 seconds or less.
read more >>
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Internal Customer Service
How Poor Internal Customer Service Negatively Impacts External Customers.
While companies focus thousands of dollars on external customer service in hopes of wooing and retaining customers, little attention is being paid to the effect poor internal customer service has on customer satisfaction. It all starts within your organization! Sooner or later the ripple effect reaches your customers. To really walk your service talk, make sure your commitment to internal customer service matches your company's external focus on customer care.
read more >>
CUSTOMER LOYALTY &
CRM
As a thought for those that are still unconvinced about the concrete
benefits of making your customers satisfied and loyal consider this:
markets are becoming more and more competitive, and consumers are
getting more demanding. If you’re experiencing high customer
turnover, but your competitors are locking in customers by targeting
loyalty, you’re soon going to run out of prospects to pour
in at the top of the bucket.
read more >>
Defecting customers are far less of a problem than
customers who change their buying patterns. New ways of understanding
these changes can unlock the power of loyalty. read
more >>
or download
pdf file
“Loyalty, what loyalty? Don’t expect loyalty from customers
or employees. They will give you commitment, but not loyalty. Loyalty
is unthinking. If you want loyalty, get a dog.” Fashionable
thinking has swung against loyalty in recent years, suggesting it
is dead. All those loyalty programmes and CRM systems haven’t
helped, as they give the impression you can buy loyalty instead
of engraining retention in the way you do business. But, when Fred
Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect and Loyalty Rules, was asked
if customer loyalty is dead he, not surprisingly, he riled a little.
read more >>
1. Build staff loyalty.
It’s a fact: Firms with high levels of customer loyalty have also earned high levels of staff loyalty. It’s darn near impossible to build strong customer loyalty with a staff that is in constant turnover. Why? Because customers buy relationships and familiarity. They want to buy from people who know them and their preferences. Key rule of loyalty: Serve your employees first so they, in turn, can serve your customer.
2. Practice the 80/20 Rule.
In building customer loyalty, the 80/20 Rule is alive and well.
read more >>
Eight insights into Butterfly Customers to help you re-focus on the whole loyalty issue.
read more >>
These five tips are a start to getting your company
on the road to recovery from any CRM hangover that you may be experiencing.
The key to better customer retention and stronger customer relationships
is to create a constant focus on building a loyalty marketing discipline
in your organization, and then projecting that focus outward to
your customers.
read more >>
Heard the word on the street? 75 percent of CRM projects
fail within their first year, resulting in lost productivity and
wasted corporate investments in software, services and time. The
greatest irony of this statistic is that most projects fail because
the cornerstone of CRM - relationships - is overlooked. Today's
economic climate only intensifies the need for proven solutions
that actually improve the relationship between employees and customers.
What follows are the seven "golden rules" that CRM projects
should follow to guarantee successful delivery.
read more >>
"I do believe that CRM, as a business strategy,
is the true path to success for enterprises. But as often as I and
many others emphasize that CRM must be understood and adopted in
the boardroom first, I don't see it happening enough."
Business strategy is established in the boardroom.
The success of Six-Sigma as a core dimension of GE strategy was
led by Jack Welch. TQM at Motorola started at the top. And Herb
Kelleher drives the relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction
at Southwest Airlines
read more >>
Loyal Customers Help Improve Price-to-Earnings Ratio
Focusing on customer relationships is an investment you can take
to the bank, according to Satmetrix Systems, which develops systems
for monitoring and improving the customer experience in real time.
Based on the survey's 27,000 respondents, the Mountain View, CA-based
firm discovered that companies with loyal customers have a price-to-earnings
ratio that's 9 percent higher than your average product-centric
company. Of the 746 companies that panellists said they'd used most
frequently within the past year combined, those that ranked highest
in terms of customer loyalty and best practices (for instance, making
customer satisfaction part of employee performance reviews and compensation)
had $930 million more in additional market valuation than competitors
in their same vertical segments. Why? "The bottom line is,
these organizations really center around customer-thinking,"
says Laura Brooks, chief methodologist. "This paves the way
for customer loyalty, and business success."
Successful companies choose the customers that they
want to work with, others supply anyone who will let them - they
are busy, but not always busy making money.
Too many sales people find it impossible to say ‘no’,
and end up taking on work that is non-profitable, proves difficult
or impossible to deliver, is time consuming, and causes hassle to
everyone in the business, as well as the customer. Add to this,
the fact due to limited resources, this non-profitable stuff actually
stops them looking for and working on the profitable work, it’s
easy to see how many business managers find they are being ‘busy
fools’.
So, what can be done? read
more >>
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PEOPLE
Creating a powerful customer experience requires the full and continual commitment of the people responsible for making it happen. People make the difference. If you concentrate on creating a great environment for your employees, they will focus on creating a great experience for your customers.
read more >>
Mounting evidence suggests that the more engaged employees are in what they do, the better their performance and the higher the rewards will be for customers, employees, and the whole organization. The key is to have managers who are skilled at creating employee engagement, and who understand that to provide the best service for your customers the employees must believe that what they're doing is important, feel appreciated, and do their daily work with passion and purpose.
read more >>
Over 3,000 people from diverse roles and industries
reflect upon a time when they stayed with one organization for a
while – and then write down the top reasons why.
read more >>
"You can tell a lot about a company by the people
it keeps."
It's true: The best companies keep their talent in-house.
What's less apparent is how they manage to keep their people.
Retention is about more than throwing the most money
at talent. It's about creating a climate and culture that honours
talent and temperament. It's also about building allegiance to the
company over time through developing mutual trust.
So how is it done? It's done in ways both big and
small. Here's a quick overview of the primary components of employee
retention.
read more>>
1. Develop a ‘talent mindset’
2. Create extreme Employee Value Propositions (EVPs)
3. Build a high-performance culture
4. Recruit talent continuously
5. Develop people to their full potential
6. Be ruthless with non-talent
7. Re-recruit your top performers
read more>>
With the free market determining the labor costs (salaries)
in most products and services, the most important value-added component
a company can offer its people increasingly will be job satisfaction.
Extensive research has been done on what's important to us in our
jobs. The conclusions of most studies are that the following ten
points are the main components of job satisfaction.
read more>>
Put away that blame culture. Unless your hiring practises
are seriously flawed, your people are not usually to blame when
something goes wrong. Here are seven reasons people at the front
line fail to perform.
read more>>
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