photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives

It’s Memorial Day in the U.S.A., which means most of us have the day off of work, although many of us (ahem) are working anyway. Either way, it’s still Monday, which means a new week, which means new motivation. In honor of Memorial Day (and in no way meaning to trivialize what is truly being memorialized on this day), try asking yourself:

What have you done lately that’s worth remembering?

What interactions have you had with customers that they’re likely to talk about to colleagues and friends? And what will they say?

People tend to remember and talk about the amazingly good interactions they have and the really bad ones. The ones in between don’t really merit remembering, let alone retelling. If you want people to talk about you, you have a choice.

How will you be memorable this week?

photo credit: jchatoff

Once again, Seth Godin gets it right:

If a prospect walks into your dealership and you walk up and say, “Please pay me $200,000 right now for this Porsche,” you might close the sale. But I doubt it. More likely than not you’ve just pushed this prospect away, turned the sliver of permission you had into a wall of self-protection.

So much of traditional business is about interrupting, asking too soon, presuming a preference that isn’t there. Or isn’t there yet. So much of business could be improved by simply taking it a bit slower, building a relationship with a client, a customer, a partner.

It could even be considered an investment, if we were of the mindset to view anything other than money as investments. It could be measured, tested, proved, and improved.

Or it could just be accepted as a better way to do business.

photo credit: Mac Babs – Bárbara Bessa.

How much money does your company spend on advertising? On marketing activities overall?

And how much customer trust does your company lose from allowing deceptive practices to get in the way of a long-term relationship with customers?

Most of what constitutes branding is about defining the ideal customer experience and seeking to embody it in every way possible. How many executives would actually go through the exercise of defining the company only to put it in terms of “deceptive” or even “hoping for apathy?”

Seth Godin makes a lot of great observations in his books and in his blog, but this one from last September is one of his best on how customer trust can be (and so often is) eroded little by little:

My car insurance bill has been steadily rising, year after year, despite the fact that I have a clean record. The logic, I’m sure, was, “well, let’s raise it a little and see who quits…”

If revenue increases enough to make up for the few who quit, you come out ahead. So, quarter after quarter, year after year, repeat the same process. Raise it a little, check to see if revenue rises in aggregate, and repeat.

I’d get the bill, sigh about the fee, consider the hassle of switching, pay the bill and move on.

Until last week. Last week the number was too high. Something in my relationship with the insurance company shattered. After all, it’s not like they had done anything for me, not like I knew anyone there. It was just momentum. And the number was suddenly enough to make me take action.

19 minutes later, I was at Geico.

The problem for my insurance company is that a whole bunch of people will do this at once. When you hit the breaking point with one person, it might be 1,000 or 100,000 people who do the same thing at the same time. And you don’t get a second chance. They’re gone.

Some magazine companies do this. They start subscribers out at low introductory rates, only they don’t call them that, and then gradually step up the pricing for the subscription each year. Of course the best case scenario for the company is that the customer doesn’t notice, but even if the customer notices, the company is counting on laziness or apathy, but as long as the incremental revenue is greater than the cost of attrition, they consider it a winning formula.

But how can you know the true cost of attrition?

Are these companies factoring in the ill will these customers now bear towards them, and the possibility that they will tell their friends, and the possibility they will cancel multiple magazines (in this scenario) at once when the tipping point comes, and the possibility, ever more likely, that they will post their experiences on a blog or on Facebook or on Twitter where dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of customers and potential customers will read what a sneaky practice the company employs?

They may be factoring all of that in. There may well be valid metrics that can be used to measure the effects of each of those considerations. But it’s kind of like the adage that telling the truth is easier than lying; the effort expended to track those considerations seems far more difficult than simply doing right by the customer. And doing right by the customer has all kinds of upside, measurable and less so.

I once heard Jon Luther, Chairman and CEO of Dunkin’ Brands, speak about transforming that company from an outdated brand to a leader, and he emphasized customer experience. Everything from their recognition of the importance of coffee in the brand to the remodeling of their stores was drawn from an understanding of customer preferences and experience.

No matter what the business, it is entirely possible and highly recommended to get feedback from the customers. At a loss for how to get feedback? Listed here in alphabetical order are several tried and true ways of getting customer feedback.

Advisory Board

On the OPEN Forum, a recent post discussed the nature of advisory boards:

Advisory Boards have many benefits. First, there’s an inverse learning curve for board members. With time, they become more knowledgeable about the company. Second, people will often serve on Advisory Boards for lower fees than they’d want as a consultant. An important point is to not take advantage of Advisory Board members, especially in professions like law and finance, where advice can be binding and carries risk. It’s OK to ask for an opinion, but not a binding judgment. That is what they get paid to do.

I’ve served twice on an Advisory Board. It’s a fantastic experience for the customer, and even as a participant it’s a great reminder to look to your customers for input.

Analytics

Using business intelligence and web analytics tools can help you uncover patterns of customer behavior you might never have noticed in day-to-day operations. Maybe the majority of customers use only a portion of your product, but which part? And how does their loyalty change when they use more of the product? It’s no exaggeration to say that insights gained from savvy use of analytics tools can make the difference between profitable operations and unprofitable ones.

Blogs

See Social Media.

Customer Support Records

Of course you probably have a goldmine of customer data already in the form of customer support contacts. Customers that complain are your best asset; they provide in-the-moment feedback about the usefulness of your products and services, and how either can be improved. If your company isn’t set up to store these records in a searchable database, it probably makes sense to make this a priority.

Eye-Tracking Studies

See Usability Studies.

Facebook

See Social Media.

Focus Group

A focus group can be a great way to get live, interactive feedback from customers on a set of issues. The topics can range from strategic to tactical, with the caveat that the more abstract the questions, the more likely the answers are to be a bit arbitrary. Like most of us, when asked to articulate thoughts on topics we’ve had no reason to think deeply about before, customers will usually struggle, and will sometimes say the first thing that comes to mind, whether or not it would hold up under further scrutiny. Your job, or your moderator’s job, is to suss out the patterns that emerge from all this and determine what’s actionable and what’s just on the periphery of usefulness.

Social Media

Pay attention to what’s being said about you on Twitter, in blogs, and all across the web. You simply can’t afford not to.

An easy first step is to set up a Google Alert with the name of your company and the names of your products, and watch what comes in. You might be startled. As soon as you see negativity, make sure you’re part of the conversation. But the objective is not, of course, to silence the negativity; you want to harness it. Make it known that you want to hear feedback and you appreciate the effort customers are putting in to making their voices known. Promise to do better. And then do better. This will go a long way towards changing the minds of anyone who was negative or skeptical about the quality of your company.

Surveys

Surveys are one of the most familiar methods for getting customer feedback, but they are also one of the most abused. Too many surveys are constructed without a clear objective and with confused purposes in the questions.

Your best bet is to know what you want to accomplish with the survey, but avoid including questions that are too leading.

As for tools, you can get pretty far with tools like Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey, or if those don’t suit your needs, there are certainly heavier-weight tools on the market including enterprise applications.

Twitter

See Social Media.

Usability Studies

Usability studies entail placing a customer (or potential customer) in front of a product and asking them, step by step, to perform the actions a customer would normally perform with the product, asking for feedback and watching for trouble signs all along the way.

The difficulty, as with focus groups, is that when asked, most customers won’t be able to elaborate on why they do some of the things they do, so it’s not always meaningful to ask. Sometimes just observing user behavior is enough to realize a product’s flaws without needing elaboration.

Another difficulty in usability studies is that users can end up feeling that they, rather than the product, are being tested. This can be overcome with reassurances and a completely non-defensive attitude about any of the customer’s feedback about the product.

If you want an easy way to start, I recommend the book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. It will help you get oriented to the concepts in usability testing, and how to execute them on the cheap.

User Conference

I was part of organizing a user conference once early on in my career at a start-up software company, and it was a fantastic experience. We invited customers from around the world to come take part in a two-day series of discussions about the product suite, the roadmaps, and where we could improve as a company, as well as opportunities to share tips and tricks with the other attendees. The generosity with which customers responded was amazing, and the humility with which my coworkers accepted critical feedback was equally impressive. If this is an option in your business, it might be worth considering.

* * *

Of course, there are low cost and higher cost options for implementing any of the options listed above, and the difference will mostly come down to experience and quality of execution. If no one in your company has ever conducted, for example, a usability study before, it will probably make sense to hire professional consultants or an agency to perform the first set, at least. Or depending on the size of your organization, you may consider hiring someone, or building a new group, to conduct all of your user research.

Now it’s your turn. What have I missed? What other methods do you use for gathering customer input about your business or your products or services? Let me know in the comments.

(via GraphJam)

There’s a great article today in HarvardBusiness.org by Bob Lurie about aligning customer value with green value. Lurie points out that companies that hesitate to develop green practices and market green offerings to customers for fear that they won’t pay a premium for it, particularly now, are missing the point:

Focusing on whether or not customers will pay a premium for green products brings with it a number of constraining assumptions: 1) that green products do not have any tangible benefits for customers other than making them feel good about helping the planet, and 2) that green products are more expensive to produce than non-green products.

Both of which, he says, are potentially faulty assumptions.

To the corporate idealist, it may sometimes seem that this hesitation is everywhere, and it isn’t limited to green products and services. Doing more than the barest minimum demanded by the customer requires leadership that is insightful enough to recognize when something of lasting value is being created. That isn’t common, and it gets less common during times of economic difficulty, when taking chances would seem to mean the life or death of the business.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that taking the risk of going above and beyond will actually put the business above and beyond the competition, and that customers will notice. Apple products are famous for being pricier in general than competing devices, but that hasn’t stopped swarms of customers from adopting iPods and “switching” from PCs to Macs.

Sometimes the only way to rise above the stormy waters is by sticking your neck out enough to see over the waves.

Now it’s your turn. What examples have you seen of companies thriving by offering more value instead of more discount? What counterexamples do you feel compelled to point out? Have your say.