Tag: customer experience

Some things work

FabrizioLeave a comment

Before you set out to change something, make sure it needs changing.

Elevators, for example, probably do not need dramatic improvements. Particularly in their user experience, they work fairly well. You are at a certain floor, you press a button to call the elevator, you enter it, you select the floor you want to go to, it moves and stop, you exit the elevator, done. It is a pretty well oiled dynamic, and trying to make it more efficient – say by asking people to select the floor they are going to at the same time they call the elevator – might create funny confusion and make the process slower.

Similarly, the process of listening to music on a mobile phone was fairly smooth without needing to remove the jack and forcing people to use bluetooth headphones. Of course, improving the user experience was not primary in this case, and so eventually the whole process now feels more clunky and unreliable.

Not everything needs changing, not everything needs improvement. And if eventually your decision is that yes, this thing does really need to be better, put the users first when designing the betterment.

Exceptions and rules

Fabrizio3 Comments

If a customer (or a potential one) shows up with a request that is not in line with your procedures, processes, habits, or even product or service, the generous thing to do is to make an exception.

If that requests gets asked more and more, than you have two options.

Change your procedures, processes, habits, product or service to incorporate the request. You invest time and energy in making a change, as you see that the customers that are asking for it are the ones you want to serve.

Or you say, “thanks, but that’s not what we do.” Not all customers are your customers after all, so it is ok to decide that those asking for that additional feature are not the ones you want to serve.

There’s actually a third option, one you should avoid, the worst one. Not do anything. Keep getting the request, leaving its satisfaction to the moment, juggling about without any clear indication if that’s something that belongs to you or not.

This wastes your time and that of your customers, and time is not something anybody has to spare.

The product in the background

FabrizioLeave a comment

There is a common belief, particularly in business-to-business organisations, that in order to be a good marketer you need to know the ins and outs of the product (or service) you are marketing.

That is a myth.

Much more important is to understand what problem the product (or service) is addressing, how high it is in the list of priorities of your potential customers, and what type of benefit it will bring to them.

Having both (knowledge of the product and understanding of customers) might seem ideal. But I would argue it is not. If you are too much into the product (or service), it is most likely so that the customer is somehow secondary, that your main focus is on how to sell rather than on how to match, and that you are already to far away in your assimilation of product-ese to actually speak in a way that is valuable to those who might find what you have to say interesting.

Focus relentlessly on customers, speak their language and understand why they would care. Keep the product in the background, as something to reference when it is appropriate. This is what being a good marketer is all about.

A beautiful note

Fabrizio1 Comment

The way you treat people that gravitate around your business is as important as the way you treat people that are at the core of it.

This below costs nothing, is caring and generous. It is beautiful, and tells a lot about how this company does work.

You don’t always have to second-guess

Fabrizio3 Comments

Companies invest money and time in attempting to personalise the way they communicate with their customers, both potential and current. If you’ve ever gotten a selection of product or services that was picked “just for you”, you probably already noticed how little they are successful in doing that.

Of course, it is complicated if you don’t ask. You have to second-guess the behaviour of somebody who perhaps stumbled on your website by mistake, just once, and quickly left.

What is troublesome, is that many companies miss the opportunity to personalise when it’s easy. For example, during a customer support conversation.

Here is a different path.

Hi there, it’s great you want to give some friends the gift of learning, kudos to you.

I have to say, at the moment we don’t have gift cards. Yet, I like your idea so much that if you share with me the e-mail address of the friends you’d like to send the gift to, along with a short note, I’ll be happy to set the thing up for you.

I’ll also make a note to our team, as you are not the first to ask for gift cards. I hope we’ll have them by next Christmas, so that you can continue this tradition with your friends autonomously.

Looking forward to help you with this, and in the meantime I wish you a fantastic holiday season.