Your Customer Rules!. Bill Price
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Название: Your Customer Rules!
Автор: Bill Price
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Зарубежная образовательная литература
isbn: 9781118954829
isbn:
Chapter Two
You Know Me, You Remember Me
Customers today demand to be recognized and known by the companies they do business with, throughout every interaction and every stage in the relationship. Companies that meet this need fulfill the first customer need for Me2B success, which makes all the others possible: You know me and you remember me.
Amazon, a customer experience pioneer, is without a doubt the most high-profile, end-to-end example of a company that knows and remembers its customers – and we don't only think that because Bill was Amazon's first global VP of customer service; the company's track record speaks for itself. Beyond fast shipping, low prices, and incredible selection, Amazon is famous for delivering great experiences. For example, unlike many other online retailers today, Amazon has always employed customer cookies (data stored in users' web browsers) to speed sign-in and enable customers to access their accounts with ease.
Unfortunately, despite all the progress in centralized customer databases, repositories, and interaction histories, most organizations today keep their information in separate silos and are unable to recognize their customers across all interactions or channels. In the good old days, the best of the local merchants or bankers or candlestick makers either knew all their customers by sight and by name or found a way to make it seem so. Customers rewarded these merchants with repeat business and favorable mentions to friends and family. Intimacy and personal memory allowed small companies to retain this knowledge of the customer. Even today, many local companies operate this way.
But for the majority of businesses, small has turned into giant, local into global, and personal into unknown, and companies have largely lost the ability to know and remember the customer. As organizations have grown, they have built and maintained customer data in separate repositories, sometimes with different markers that don't let them connect the dots. For example, they might show Clifford Smith in one database, Cliff Smith in another, and C. G. Smith in yet another. It's true that some companies do manage to cleanse their data so as to combine all three examples as one customer, but many don't know how to do it or don't even bother. Some companies even count these three variations as three different customers!
In the good old days of small and intimate organizations, there was less specialization into departments. People played multiple roles and therefore retained customer knowledge between interactions. Today, specialization has resulted in different employees knowing only certain details about the customer. Organizations today may not even remember the customer from interaction to interaction. They lack short-term memory, let alone long-term connections.
Success with “You Know Me, You Remember Me” goes beyond collecting data. Some organizations have been particularly smart in finding ways to use those data to serve customer needs. Even back in the good old days, not all shopkeepers remembered their customers well or exploited that knowledge. The same is true today.
Me2B Leaders – by no means just Amazon – are finding ways to cut across their departmental and product silos to deliver the consistent experiences that today's customers want. The Know Me, Remember Me need has many different facets, presenting many opportunities to embrace and satisfy your customer, as we'll explore in this chapter. In Table 2.1 we summarize examples when the need is met well and when it is not met.
Table 2.1 The Customer's Experience of Success and Failure
For an intuitive understanding of why this first customer need is fundamental to quality business relationships, simply look to personal relationships. “You Know Me, You Remember Me” is fundamental to life partners, parents and children, and friends. When partners share a mutual understanding of prior commitments, needs, desires, and history, it is much easier for them to connect and support each other in the relationship. Each of us wants to be appreciated, as well, and be able to say, “Thanks, you did what I asked you to do” or “I'm so glad that you remembered X (be that an anniversary or shared story).” In their 1996 research on long-term satisfying marriages, Kablow and Robinson determined that expressions of appreciation and communication were two of the seven crucial drivers of marriage success. Those processes both require knowledge of the partner and the things they are doing. The relationship research shows that knowing one's partner well enough to communicate with them and show appreciation of them is critical to success in relationships, and all these ingredients are needed to sustain customer relationships in the business world, too.
You Know Me Everywhere and All the Time
Whenever and wherever a customer interacts with an organization, Me2B Leaders understand and apply the history of the relationship to each interaction. They know which products and services the customer has today and has purchased in the past. They know the history of touch points with that customer across all channels – retail stores, online, customer care centers, social media, in-person meetings, and any other point of communication.
Tracking customer-initiated interactions is important, but the company equally needs to track its own outreach. Wherever possible, it's also useful to know not just when something happened but the details of the interaction. For example, it's somewhat helpful to know that a customer called yesterday. It's very helpful to know that they called to complain and then declined the agent's proposed solution. It's also important to know if they left a comment online or in a forum or at the hotel concierge desk, and then sent e-mail message about the same unresolved issue.
All of these dots, to use the industry term, should reside in a central information database, but most important is that they are current, relevant, and available during all other touch points along the way. For example, someone who has just spent twenty minutes brooding over an online purchase and then calls the sales center loves it when the sales agent greets them by name and says, “Looks like you've been exploring our new product; how can I help you?” For once, it isn't necessary to start from scratch.
The age of CRM software in the cloud makes it readily accomplishable to “know me everywhere and all the time,” yet many companies aren't set up for it. For example, a leading travel retailer in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia has grown dramatically in recent years through great service and competitive pricing. Despite that success, it has a giant hole in its ability to know the customer: Each store still runs an independent booking and customer database. Change stores and the relationship starts from scratch. This can get awkward since customers can't check on bookings at other stores and each store only knows about its own transactions with this customer. As a result, this model runs the risk of delivering less-than-perfect customer experiences. The disconnected system may be working for the company now, but leaves it vulnerable to a competitor that provides great travel service and knows its customers wherever they choose to connect.
We could list many organizations where the branch, contact center, and Internet channels have limited or even no visibility to each other. For example, when David went into a retail store with the intention of purchasing a phone, he was told that no special offers were available for him. Within twenty-four hours, the same company called him offering special deals on new phones if he renewed his contract. David explored this with company management, who admitted that the offers were not shared across the channels and that the call center had no way to see branch conversations and vice versa. In this company, the channels were so separate that products and discounts weren't available consistently. We have seen examples in utilities, banks, insurers, and health insurers where the offers were different by channel and no one could tell what offers were available elsewhere.