Tag: customer service

Broken trust

Fabrizio2 Comments

Trust is given, trust is built, trust is broken.

And when it is broken, it needs repairing.

A great way to go about this is to start with “I am sorry”. And honestly stop there. At the very least until the other party signals that they are ready to move forward, under a tacit agreement that trust will not be broken again.

A lazy way to go about this is one of the infinite variations of “it’s not my fault”. For sure, you were busy, a pandemic hit, the circumstances were exceptional, the end of the quarter was around the corner. A wide array of ways to simply say: “listen, I can’t commit, trust will be broken again.”

A bad way to go about this is to pretend nothing happened. To go about your day as if everything was fine, as if no break needed repairing, as if the other person would not be telling you over and over again that there is a problem. This does not lay the ground for any type of future relationship. It is just a loud and clear: “I do not care”.

Levels of understanding

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When is the last time you felt good about somebody trying to outsmart you?

Probably, never.

Yet, most B2B marketing feels like a run at outsmarting the customer. Obscure language, unclear pricing, absurd experiences, inconsistent services. And that is mainly because at some point the company decides that their product is better than anything else, and it is the customer’s job to pay attention, put in the effort, understand the ins and outs, and be wow’ed.

It might indeed be that your product is good. But as a marketer, your role is to remind yourself of the challenges you faced when moving from somebody who knew nothing about it to somebody who knows enough to tell about it.

From somebody who is on a 2 to somebody who is on a 7 on the scale below.

10Is world’s leading expert on the idea.
9Can ask expert questions and generate new information/data on the idea.
8Can answer expert questions and reconcile contradictory thoughts about the idea.
7Can answer any layman’s question and forms independent thoughts on the idea.
6Can answer any layman’s question and forms intelligent opinions on the idea.
5Knows about the idea, and can discern inaccurate statements about the idea.
4Knows about the idea, and can explain what’s been learned in one’s own words.
3Heard of the idea, and recites what others have said about it.
2Heard of the idea, but doesn’t know anything about it.
1Never heard of the idea.
Tim Urban’s scale of levels of understanding (full article at First Round).

Marketing is not a competition. It is not about outwitting your customer, finding smarter ways to express complex concepts, putting on display all the knowledge you have.

Marketing is about going back to your journey across the scale and bringing some customers along.

If you succeed in this, you succeed in marketing.

Patches

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Many organisations mistake customer centricity for customer support or customer success.

Yet, having the customer at the core of what you do is not about being there when they need help and collecting high scores on a satisfaction survey. It is actually more about aiming at getting rid of those things, because when the customer is embedded in the business, you know already if they need help and when, whether they are happy or not, what they want to see in the product next and how their businesses are developing.

You actually know, in many cases, before they do.

So, instead of putting patches on the relationship with those who determine your (organisation’s) success, start investing time and resources in crafting the relationship. Listen. The rest will follow.

The distance

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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.

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.