While angry customers can quickly wreck a business, indifferent ones kill it more slowly. To survive, the most successful companies toss out the status quo, tap into customers’ desires—and deliver experiences that resonate with every type of customer.

They do it by asking two simple questions: What do customers love? What do they hate? What Customers Crave helps you find the answers, and reinvent how you engage with people both digitally and nondigitally. The tools, examples, and insights from an innovation thought leader show you how to: Discover who your customers really are and what they care about

* Engineer exceptional, relevant experiences for each customer type

* Connect across all five touchpoints

* Co-create with customers, and much more

* When you learn to provide your customers with exactly what they want, they not only buy—they come back again and again . . . and bring their friends!

Nick Webb is one of the top Customer Experience and Customer Service experts in the world. He has been awarded the "Global Gurus Top 30" designation for Customer Service, for seven years in a row. Nick is the CEO of myLearnLogic.com, a Customer Experience Training and Advisory Firm that works with some of the top brands to help them build world-class customer experiences. As a technologist, he has been awarded over 40 US patents for consumer and technology products. He has served as an Adjunct Professor for a Health Science University where he also led the Center for Innovation. Nick is the author of multiple number one best-selling books, in the area of Business Innovation, Customer Experience and Leadership. Nick is also one of the top Keynote Speakers in the area Business Growth, Innovation, Future Trends and Customer Experience.

Contact the Author

Nick is always excited to learn about how his readers have applied his methods to drive world-class customer experience in their own organization. Nick can be contacted through his consulting and training firm at www.mylearnlogic.com or for speaking engagements contact him at www.nickwebb.com

What Customers Crave

How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint

AMACOM

Contents

THE ADVENT OF "CUSTOMER EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE

Let's face it: Today, most customer experience programs are a disaster.

Don't blame yourself, because it's not your fault that these programs are failing you. Most organizations were sold the promise that if they used the right software, analytic tools, and processes, they would be able to manage their customer relationships and deliver what their customers wanted — every time.

This approach sort of worked for a while. We understood our customers through segmentation and who the customer was — white, black, male, female, affluent, not so affluent, in their thirties, in their fifties — thinking demography was the key. We believed the Voice of the Customer (VoC) was the answer and that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) alone would be enough to engineer exceptional experiences across the customer's journey.

The problem today is that this approach is almost always wrong. Yes, wrong. We cannot continue to apply old-fashioned models in today's hyper-linked and hyper-aggressive environment. In fact, even when an organization has built a reasonably good strategy, it virtually always fails in execution. According to some excellent research conducted for the software company Oracle, 93 percent of executives say that improving the customer experience is one of their organization's top three priorities in the next two years, and 91 percent wish their organization was considered a customer experience leader in their industry. However, many organizations are stuck in an execution chasm: 37 percent are just getting started with a formal customer experience initiative, and only 20 percent consider the state of their customer experience initiative to be advanced.

A NEW BEGINNING: THE FALL OF THE CUSTOMER SERVICE–INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The term military-industrial complex came into common usage when President Dwight Eisenhower used it in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. Eisenhower used the term to warn the country of the dangerous relationship among the government, the military, and the arms industry. I have adapted it to the customer service–industrial complex — to warn businesspeople of the dangers inherent in the continued use of the canned "customer service" programs still in use today.

For nearly half a century, from the 1950s into the 1990s, customer service was easy. Its approach was authoritarian and it did not directly connect with the consumer. Large organizations simply had control of the media through advertising and publicity and used one-way (simplex) communication to drive consumers to a specific service or product. In this way, they simply told consumers what their experience with a product or service was going to be like.

A great example of current success in our consumer-oriented economy is Uber, the alternative-to-cab car service. In the past, passengers had no control over what they would find when they got into a taxi. Sometimes passengers had good experiences, sometimes terrible ones. They felt they had little recourse but to accept what they got. Then Uber came along with its instant rating system, which let riders know exactly what other passengers thought of and had experienced with a particular driver. By the same token, the drivers could rate the passengers. In this way, both passengers and drivers can choose to not do business with people who have a reputation for obnoxious behavior.

However, in the customer service-industrial complex environment, consumers were practically blind to their choices. Their social connections were limited (when compared to today), so they had no real way of determining the quality or value of a product or service. With few or no other options, they simply got what was dealt them by companies. Purveyors of electronics, sellers of packaged consumer goods, hotels, airlines, and others were all experienced bullies, and there was nothing the consumer could do about it. This continued for decades ... until the Internet arrived.

Consumer bullying still exists. For example, have you ever called your cable company's service department and been told they'd be happy to install your line a week later sometime between 8 AM and 5 PM? This is a classic example of a broken customer experience, and it's only a matter of time until disruptive innovators end this sort of un-customer-centric practice forever.

To be fair, the customer service–industrial complex began with good intentions. Companies genuinely wanted to get closer to their clients as they realized this was the path to more sales. The problem arose because they tried to create assembly-line techniques in the customer service process. In their attempt to drive efficiency and reduce costs, they looked inward — at what worked for them — and became self-focused, not customer-focused.

For this reason, most CRM systems are designed to help companies sell more products or services to customers. They're concerned with identifying profitable and not-profitable customers and using this knowledge to find ways to allocate resources. Information about consumer behavior and purchasing habits is pooled into spreadsheets, and businesses create grand marketing and customer engagement plans based on that data. The problem is that no one along the way actually got to know what I call the Soul of the Customer(r). No one stopped to identify customer types and what people really love and what they really hate. As a result, these systems are a waste of time and painful at best, and counterproductive and destructive at worst.

Can you use CRM to deliver better customer experiences while meeting your enterprise goals? Yes. But I find that most organizations use the systems from the perspective of an experience-bully rather than that of a disruptive innovator best looking to pioneer exceptional experiences across a customer journey.

Disruptive innovators identify weaknesses in competitive customer experiences (i.e., in old school customer service), and then use the systems, methods, and tools of the enterprise innovator to create exceptional consumer value. In...