Tag: customer experience

Say it isn’t so

Fabrizio1 Comment

I have always been fascinated and vaguely astonished by the fact that, at times, communication is successful.

We do not put enough emphasis and preparation into it, and we have so many different ways to look at the world and interpret it, that it is quite a thing that two persons can come together at some point and understand each other.

What is your mental image of a tree? Of a car? Of a house? Of course, with such physical objects we often get past the ambiguity. But what with more complex concepts?

What do you think when you hear about honesty? And productivity? And work-life balance? What is your intent when you use words such as “democrat” and “republican”, “conservative” and “progressive” and “liberal”, “capitalist” and “communist”?

I promise you, it is different from how the person sitting next to you thinks about them.

And so, why are we not training for better communication? Why is this not a matter taught in school? Why are we left growing up under the false impression that everyone around us understands what we mean? And shares our same set of assumptions and priorities?

Communication is unorganized chaos for the most part, and when it succeed it truly is a work of magic.

The distance

FabrizioLeave a comment

You have spent resources improving your product with features analysts said are necessary in your category.

You have hired hundreds of new employees and built an organization that can sustain higher revenue.

You have rolled out a new tool because the old one was clunky and not providing enough flexibility.

You have gone all-in on that campaign because your experience and guts told you that was the right thing to do.

You have increased your marketing spend to better feed sales pipeline, investing in ads that interrupt people and are clicked only by robots.

You have changed your management team because the targets were not met.

And in the meantime, out there a potential customer is still wondering how to fix the issue your product is supposed to solve.

The distance between what happens within companies and what happens in the market is often shocking. Organisations and the people they are supposed to serve play in different fields, sometimes in completely different sports. The only way to fill such gap is to religiously do two things over time: figuring out who your customer is and understanding their world better than they do.

It is a strategy, not a tactic. And for this reason the distance continues to grow. And grow. And grow.

Graceful humility

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If your story is about how good you are, how much money you make, how big of a house you own, how many cars you have, how resounding your title is, how easily your product sells, how fantastic your company is, how many employees you have hired in the past year, how much revenue you made last year, how many new features you have released in the past six months.

Why should we care?

Tell us about the challenges instead, and we will be hooked. Even better, we will empathize.

If you cast a corporation as protagonist, do not brag about its size, its reach, its wealth, its influence. If you cast a product as a protagonist, do not brag about its newness, its hipness, its celebrity. The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.

Robert Mckee, Thomas Gerace – “Storynomics”

Converge

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Customer focus is not a marketing thing.

Every day, in every situation, we deal with customers. Sometimes it is people paying us money for a service or a product, more often it is a person we feel might be better off with a different perspective or performing a different action. Of course, calling all of them customers is reductive (and inaccurate), but the point is, you do not need to be a marketer or a sales rep to understand and appreciate the importance of customer focus.

If you want change, you need to read their minds, feel their pains, participate in their efforts, respect their ambitions, and craft your message in such a way as to converge with their world view at the right time.

All that is left is being stuck. And nobody is driven by that.

Hey

Fabrizio1 Comment

Some products manage to make the internet buzz at launch, and that has certainly been the case with Hey.com, the new (subscription based) e-mail service by Basecamp.

I am probably not the right audience for it, and still there are three things they have done wonderfully. Three things marketers (and entrepreneurs) can learn from.

They have started with a manifesto. Hey is not a mere product, it is a way of life. A philosophy, as they put it. And that is just what you need when you are trying to refresh something everybody else is giving up for dead. They have plenty of bold statements in their manifesto (“they let email down”, “you don’t use Hey to check your Gmail account, you use Hey to check your Hey account”, “it’s time to push back”), and by being bold they are carving their own audience.

They present features in a way that is pleasant to watch, read and navigate. The animated pictures leave little to interpretation and get straight to the point. The language they use is easy to understand and relate to (“fix bad subjects withouth busting threads”). They address possible common questions instead of wasting space describing their technology. And you can use arrows to surf through the different features.

And finally, they have made the decision to let you try their product with no barriers (no credit card needed and no automatic charge after trial period). When you trust what you offer, you do not need to resort to tricks to inflate success.

Of course, the most important thing is that all of this (and much more) is consistent with a narrative Hey is building around its product. Other email services are old, clunky, shady, untrustworthy; we are new, simple, honest, empowering. Pick us.

Why not.