customer knowledge
It all comes down to one thing: what is valuable to your customers?
I was browsing through McKinsey Quarterly this evening and came across this report on Maintaining Customer Experience from December 2008.
I quote… ‘How can consumer businesses make necessary investments in service while facing the pressure on revenues and costs? Our review of the companies with the best customer service records in ten industries suggests that one key is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of satisfaction. Specifically, companies should challenge their beliefs about service and test those beliefs analytically. Many will discover that long-held, but seldom-reviewed, assertions about what customers really want are wrong.
Sophisticated companies that figure out what matters most to customers, eliminate the investments that don’t matter, and finance the ones that do, will thrive—and may find themselves, when the economy returns to normal, with fewer competitors.’
I have a moment of deja vu here. Isn’t that what I posted on here yesterday?
The role now of all purveyors of goods and services is to find out what those [customer] values are and to adjust to provision of them accordingly. Those companies that cannot fulfil the values of its customers will fall by the wayside. Those that can and do, will thrive. Whether in nature or in business, the fittest survive and the weakest do not.
One of the most rewarding things about the work we do at The Best Organisation is the ability to show clients where they can save money and get a better return on their ROI, by understanding what is important to their customers, i.e. those ‘drivers of satisfaction’. It’s also rewarding to know that the authors of that McKinsey report (Adam Braff and John C DeVine) are singing from our hymn sheet too.
What has John Sergeant and customer knowledge in common? Everything!
We’ve watched with growing interest and amazement this week as the storm in a teacup over John Sergeant’s less than twinkling toes, has become a maelstrom of media activity. While the BBC could not have planned a better PR campaign for getting Strictly Come Dancing splashed across the news (even Newsnight devoted a 10 minute piece to it on Wednesday - the day Sergeant announced his retirement from the show), does it hide an underlying issue? On the ‘other side’ ITV are having a similar but much less public conundrum on the X Factor, where the public vote is saving the underdog at the expense of the better performers.
Where the decisions over who stays and who goes are made by public vote, it is a very clear indicator of customers’ preference. But what is the real motivation? Do the TV companies truly understand what internal emotional levers are being pulled when their customers feel compelled to pick up that phone and vote? Since the BBC had to shut down the Strictly message boards last night because of the overwhelming number of people posting their comments on this week’s revelations, we rather suspect that they don’t!