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Do You Know the "Laws of Customer Experience"?

April 17, 2009 It's all about customer loyalty these days, right? Why always be replacing customers if you can keep the ones you've got? One way to do that is to improve the way your business manages its interactions with customers. The more positive their interactions with your company, the more likely they are to stay customers.

In the free white paper, "The Six Laws of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths That Define How Organizations Treat Customers," Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research describes the way customers interact with marketing organizations. There are some neat nuggets in here that might help you tweak and improve the way you interact with your own customer base.

Here is a condensed version of his white paper in my own words. It's worth the time to download and read the white paper for yourself.

1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction.

In other words, every interaction with your company is personal — it's a human being on the other end of the transaction, not just a dollar sign. This means that, the more you can personalize that interaction to that individual, the more positive that interaction will be. Whether from a print or electronic perspective, know and market to your key customer segments. Use database personalization, if you can. Use customer feedback loops to gather knowledge nad refine that customer relationship over time.

2. People are instinctively self-centered.

Put your customer's perspective at the center of your marketing efforts, not the company culture. Think like a customer. Talk like a customer. No matter how complex your organization, try to present a unified, customer-centric "face." Make the interaction as as intuitive, responsive, and as user-friendly as possible. Make it easy for your customer to do business with you. Make them want to come back.

3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment.

The more you share what you know about customers throughout the organization, the more "aligned" all of the facets of your business will be. This doesn't have to be an institutional or organizational thing. Just an informal sharing of customer trends, customer preferences, and the like can gradually help to develop an understanding of customer needs and behaviors across your business that results in some natural — if informal — commonality in how customers are treated.

4. Unengaged Employees Don't Create Engaged Customers.

If your employees couldn't care less about your customers, your customers will feel it. Nobody wants to do business with someone who couldn't care less. Spend money on training, make it easy for your employees to "do the right thing," and make your employees feel that they are part of something special and important. The more engaged you make your employees, the more engaged they'll be with customers—and the more engaged customers tend to be more loyal customers.

5. Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated.

Clearly define how you want employees to deal with customers (should they be problem-solvers? or minimize the time spent on the call?), then create incentives for that behavior. Make sure you are celebrating, measuring, and incenting the same things or employees will get mixed messages.

6. You can't fake it.

Writes Temkin: "The bottom line: If you aren't committed to the customer experience, you can only fool yourself." In other words, customers ain't stupid.

Have questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at info@digitalprintingreports.com. For more information on primers for marketers and small businesses on digital, 1:1, Web-to-print, and personalized URL applications, visit Digital Printing Reports. You can also keep up with all of my posts on EBS, The Inspired Economist ("Greening Print Marketing"), and other blog sites by following me on Twitter.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on April 17, 2009 | Comments (0)