How can we achieve customer engagement?

This question is more involved and is a multi-step process. But we want to share with you a simple way to get your staff of the same page – and getting them to elicit the above three value-creating customer behaviours.

When we take this approach, we need to slay a sacred cow or two – the first one being to forget trying to manage your employees’ behaviours – either through competencies or micro-management. Instead, we’re going to share a simple & powerful framework just about anyone will be able to understand (bear in mind simplicity is essential when you’re managing an Emerging Market workforce).

That approach is for your staff to have first of all a crystal-clear idea of which customer behaviours they need to elicit at which point.

The SAY behaviour is the behaviour of communication, that leads to the relationship of advice & partnership.

The STAY behaviour is the behaviour of comfort, relaxation and fulfilment of self image.

The SPEND behaviour is the behaviour of excitement and immediate need fulfilment.

Know which notes to play

A customer experience is no different from playing a piece of music. It’s important to play notes in a certain sequence.

With each business, the first thing your staff need to know about creating a customer experience is the order of these notes. Is the priority to make the customer feel comfortable or special? Or to take the order and deliver it straight away? Or to ask lots of questions and listen patiently? In the first case it’s likely that the service provider is a hotel, in the second a fast food establishemnt, in the third a hospital.

This may sound common-sense. Creating and fulfilling these behaviours does not give you customer engagement – it only gives customer service (which is a commodity and expected by the customer as per the graphic in the post here).

Customer engagement is achieved when your staff understand the combination all three (with the key customer behaviour at the end). Here is an example of how the path to customer engagement would look in 4 different industries:

How to create your Customer Experience

Once you are clear about this path, you then need to fill in each section with a compelling customer experience. Basically, you need to identify the emotions that invoke each behaviour, and be clear abou the medium that will create those emotions.

The medium of the customer experience are Stage, System and Service. We’ll look at the specific emotions that evoke the above behaviours and Stage, System and Service in a future post.

In the meantime, if you like what we Say, why not subscribe to our emails following the link here? Subscription is free and guarantees you will receive all our updates!

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Talent Technologies. Producing Change.

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This neat graphic (below), provided by kissmetrics.com, summarises in one simple chart how to calculate Customer Lifetime Value.

Customer Lifetime Value (also covered in more depth in our Customer Experience Maximisation training programme), is critical to understand for the following reasons:

• It helps you calculate how much you can really afford to spend on your marketing budget
• It enables you to work out how much low customer engagement is really costing your business – and how much you can invest to solve it.
• It is the most essential tool for customer segmentation – basically, how to work out the customers you most would like to attract, or create.

The graphic is self-explanatory – what do you think? (Feel free to leave your comments below).

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• Customer engagement defined, and
• How to achieve customer engagement

Customer engagement defined

Customer engagement is really simple (well, except for those who sell books and who wouldn’t get anywhere without a complex and long-winded explanation). Really, it’s simple.

We need to start with a question – not any question, but a magic question – the one question that will ultimately get the same answer no matter if we ask a hotelier, department store manager, car dealer, lawyer or accountant. That question is:

What do you want your customers to do?

It’s at this stage that we get a whole shopping list of answers (‘I want them to buy steak when they come here… I want them to sign up for our loyalty card… I want them to use our spa… I want them to say good things about us to their friends…’) and so on. Now do you see why understanding customer engagement can be considered difficult?

And after all the conversations, questions, consulting time and discussions, the answer will ultimately always be the same, no matter what your business.

Ultimately, you want your customers to add value to your business in any way they can. And there are only three ways a customer can add value to your business, no matter what your business. Those three ways or behaviours are as follows. He or she can:

• SAY - Say good things about you, your staff, or any aspect of your business, product or service to friends and acquaintances.
• STAY - Continue to select you or your business for repeat purchases / custom, and…
• SPEND - Simply spend money, or more money with you.

There are no other ways. And, given that it’s so simple to understand customer engagement in this way (and most importantly explain it to customer-facing staff), we wonder why so many companies cling to their complex and unnatural models including competencies and procedure manuals. But that topic is for another day… Right now, we’re going to have a look at the second question we need to ask, which is…

How can we achieve customer engagement?

This question is more involved and is a multi-step process. We promise to cover it in depth in a future email.

In the meantime, if you like what we have to Say, why not subscribe to our emails following the link here? Subscription is free and guarantees you will receive all our updates!

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Talent Technologies. Producing Change.

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And yet… these failings do not overly impact Apple’s customer experience. Why could this be?

The failings listed by the ICS article (such as how Apple software manages iTunes) seem to reinforce the post we wrote here describing the 2 drivers of customer engagement.

Those two drivers are (1) the customer value proposition and (2) customer experience. As we discussed there, the first factor is hugely overrated by companies yet the 2nd factor is largely neglected.

Which of the two is more important? As Apple has shown, the customer experience, and by far.

What Steve Jobs really focusses on

Many Apple watchers will swoon at this or that technology breakthrough or this or that new product, yet, in many cases, new Apple product is actually behind its comparable competitors. For example, the first iPad did not have a camera and also did not have high data storage capability – value propositions that, in a competitor’s product, would have led to an underwhelmed customer.

Yet Steve Jobs understands that value propositions by themselves matter little – what matters above all is the customer experience that Apple can create. Take this Apple mission statement:

We provide beautiful, easy to use products that are integral to your everyday life.

What is important is not technological advancement by itself then, but (1) the relevance and use of these advancements to a person’s daily life, (2) their ease of use, and (3) their aesthetic beauty.

What Apple does differently

Companies that focus on bottom-line quarterly profits would find it challenging to replicate this formula. What, exactly, is beauty? Too many companies have corporate cultures that simply wouldn’t hear that word in any meeting room all year round.

Where Apple really excels is being able to take this mission statement and apply it consistently, across multiple touchpoints, day in day out.

Citibank recently tried to copy the Apple formula and believe that by designing their banks like Apple stores, they will get similar levels of customer engagement.

But in doing so, they have not understood how to create a compelling customer experience. This is more than physical environment but instead looks at all customer touchpoints and creates a controlled customer experience at every one.

This, more than anything else, defines Apple’s success: creating and delivering a controlled customer experience.

Don’t copy, create!

If you would like to discover the steps to creating a controlled customer experience, then why not run our one day Customer Experience Maximisation programme at your company?

Highly interactive, the programme takes participants through the critical steps of creating a compelling customer experience, and through that gaining Apple-like customer engagement!

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Find out more about Customer Experience Maximisation here >>>

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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With feedback from over 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, the message is clear: more creative people are essential for company’s future success.

Time for the creatives?

The last 20 years has seen a management supercycle of efficiency, operational excellence and ‘inside out’ focus. Getting these factors right have propelled some of the world’s biggest companies to their biggest profit margins ever. But with global instability looming, is that all about to change?

The IBM study seems to suggest so.

Instead of hiring leaders who more naturally drive operational excellence, companies need to hire those who are customer-focussed and creative. Innovation, not operations, will be the source of competitive advantage going forward.

But this is easier said than done. The challenge many companies face is not only that they have emphasised the more operational aspects of their businesses, but, more alarmingly, that they have turned their businesses into a place where many creatives do not want to work.

In other words, in their drive for cost leadership and process implementation, a long process of ‘creative genocide’ has taken place, depriving these companies of being more innovative and customer-centric any time soon. It’s the people, not the words, that matter. The team, not the strategy. Or, as Jim Collins put it in Good to Great, ‘First Who, then What’.

The drive towards operational efficiency has created companies that attract clones of a narrow talent set who find the structure operational efficiency creates as desirable.

However, this has also created an ‘us and them’ scenario where a whole company’s corporate culture becomes identified with this talent set – leading to anyone no ‘fitting in’ to the talent set are also seen as not being able to fit in to the company’s corporate culture – thuse leading to the silent genocide spoken of earlier.

What companies can do now

To change this, companies need to become a whole lot better at understanding the nature of talent, identifying it, and helping their people identify it.

This will blow away many of the talent management blind spots that exist. Doing so also hugely promotes engagement as this one factor is considered by Gallup to be the #1 employee engagement driver – with clear links to team and financial performance.

Having done this, companies then need to communicate the importance of hiring on talent – not individual preference (non-creatives tend to regard creatives with mistrust as this article has shown), with an emphasis on attracting more creatives.

They need to create an employee value proposition creatives will find attractive.

And they need to engage creatives with a greater focus on customer engagement, not the bottom line.

These factors will dramatically help companies retain more creatives, innovate more effectively and meet the challenges described in the IBM study.

The first step is giving your people the capability to identify talent. One highly effective way of doing that is through the world’s only objective talent identification tool – the Highlands Ability Battery details of which can be found following the link below.

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Find out about the Highlands Ability Battery here >>>

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

Delivered by Talent Technologies’ MD Nicholas Henley, the presentation gave a brief overview of how to create fantastic customer experiences every time through the media of Stage, System and Service.

Mr Henley gave Rotary members a sneak preview of his forthcoming book, co-authored with Prof. Kritika Kongsompong, Three Little Diamonds.

The slides for the presentation can be downloaded here.

A brief summary of the presentation can be found in Rotary Bangkok South’s Southwind newsletter here.

If you are interested in finding out more about how you can create magical customer experiences in your company, why not run Customer Experience Maximisation, or find out more by following the link below!

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Request more details here > > >

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The process was based on WOM they gave to others, and WOM given by others to them. Is each company’s brand in Thailand really as strong as we would expect?

The results may surprise you…

Products, brands or service with highest positive WOM:

‘The Winners’

1. Blackberry

2. iPhone

3. BMW

Products, brands or service with highest negative WOM (1 = worst):

‘The Sinners’

1. True Corporation

2. Thai Police Force

3. Bumrungrad Hospital

Which brands are your Winners and Sinners? - We’d love to hear your thoughts – just add a comment below!

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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Due to popular demand, we’re delighted to say that Talent Technologies will be launching Sales Talent! in Thailand in early 2011. Sales Talent! is a hands-on, two day sales training workshop delivered with Thai and English options.

Sales Talent! is the ultimate sales training workshop, with a selection of the most powerful sales techniques from top salespeople including Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar, among others. It’s modern, designed specifically for selling in Thailand and South East Asia, and participants can expect to be fully engaged in the programme with exciting, hands-on activities.

With sales skills more important than ever, companies will benefit from this sales training programme as it covers the following critical sales skills:

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	Prospecting for success
	Motivate yourself and overcome emotional roadblocks of fear, low confidence and complacency
	Make compelling sales presentations based on the customer’s emotion and personality type
	Handle objections with ease
	Close the sale decisively

Join our priority list now!

If you’re interested in finding out more about Sales Talent! simply contact us following the link below and we will send you full programme details when they are produced:

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Request more details here > > >

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So wrote Peter Drucker in perhaps the greatest book on management of all time, The Effective Executive.

Yet fast forward to today and it’s surprising to see the bias among so many organisations is to ignore Drucker’s advice!

Nowhere is this more clear than in company’s customer experience – now regarded as the defining factor in business success.

The Customer Experience really = wow me!

One of the reasons businesses are unable to deliver an outstanding customer experience is because they start out with a mindset based on eliminating weaknesses.

Instead of selecting and motivating frontline staff with a minimum of clear and compelling ways to woo and wow their customers, so many companies still give their employees manuals of processes and behaviours, many of which tell them what they mustn’t do.

It’s like asking an actor to go on a stage, and giving them a script with a list of things not to say. Does it help? You bet it doesn’t!

Yet companies continue to do it. This ‘script’ is often called ‘competencies’ though comes under a number of different guises.

Folks, it just ain’t that way!

Take a look at the image below. Here we see the four key elements that form a customer’s reaction to his or her customer experience.

First of all, we have the Basic elements which include core functions of a customer experience. For example, if you go to a restaurant, you may expect to have salt and pepper on your table.

Next, we have Expected elements. This may include ‘service with a smile’ and your steak to be cooked exactly the way you want it.

Both of these elements may include dozens or even hundreds of features and it’s amazing that many companies can’t even get these right on a consistent basis.

They are both below the ‘red line’ in the image above, and essentially, non-value add items. Getting these right consistently won’t ensure your customers will be advocates, loyal, or spend more money with you (Say, Stay, Spend – the only three behaviours you want your customers to have).

The elements above the red line, however, certainly will create these behaviours in your customers if you can perform them consistently.

The Desired elements are those that a customer would like in an ideal world. In a restaurant, this could be a sensational recipe, or service personnel who makes the customer feel just great.

The Unanticipated elements are those that really do add a lot of value. These happen when you pleasantly surprise a customer. For example this could include a welcome drink and a serenade, or it could be something as simple as hearing a kind of music that you didn’t expect, but is really ‘you’.

Yet here’s the rub: while companies can achieve the Basic and Expected elements by managing away weaknesses, they can only achieve the Desired and Unanticipated elements by building strengths!

Satisfaction is for losers!

This is why studies have found customer satisfaction to be so ineffective. By chasing customer satisfaction, companies are really saying that they do not want to differentiate themselves, as we saw in a previous post here.

Instead, companies need to be focussing on creating outstanding customer experiences.  The most successful companies realise they can only achieve this through their people – and by building on strengths, not minimising weaknesses.

The customer experience is, in other words, something created at every touchpoint, as opposed to an approach where customer service is simply a process of avoiding complaints from happening. It is proactive, not reactive.

What we can learn from Nordstrom

Nordstrom is America’s most successful high-end retailer where the sales staff regularly earn over $100,000 p.a. in commission alone.

When the sales staff are so well remunerated, you can be sure that a company that has been in existence for over a century is onto something.

When sales staff join, they receive a grey card that simply tells them this:

Welcome to Nordstrom

We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

And that’s it. No long-winded procedure manuals, no competencies, no rules and regulations with ‘Dos’ and ‘Dont’s’ written in great detail.

The point here is that Nordstrom is able to deliver an outstanding customer experience by building on the strengths of its people – by actively creating each customer experience to the best of each employees abilities rather than trying to manage away their weaknesses.

As that company’s bottom line profits show.

What you can do now

If you would like to simplify and maximise your customers’ experience with your company, then why not ask us about how Customer Experience Maximisation can help you… simply follow the link below and we will send you an information pack.

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Click here for more details > > >

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High levels of customer engagement is something every company wants – who wouldn’t? – yet how to achieve it remains a mystery to many.

Talent Technologies has simplified customer engagement into three measurable behaviours. Customer Say – or advocacy; Customer Stay – or loyalty; and Customer Spend.

Few companies target the behaviour they would like their customers to have, thinking that Customer Spend somehow magically also achieves Customer Stay and Customer Say.

In this article we look at the importance of customer behaviours and why companies cannot afford to ignore Customer Engagement when building their brand.

Customers are tuning out

Peter Drucker wrote that the objective of a business is ‘to make and keep a customer’. Yet, in spite of the most advanced techniques being used by companies ever to achieve these goals, customers are becoming increasingly jaded and left disenchanted by their so-called brand experiences. Why?

The answer can be found in the second part of Drucker’s statement. Companies may be throwing more money than ever before at customers in an effort to make them, yet when it comes to keeping them, in most cases they fail abysmally.

Time and time again, customers are only too ready to defect when faced with a better price, promotion or product feature from a competitor. They are, in other words, disengaged.

Making a customer is often down to what we call in marketing the ‘Customer Value Proposition’, while keeping a customer is down to the ‘Customer Experience’.

We look at the impact of both of these drivers on customer engagement:

Driver #1: The Customer Value Proposition

Most companies see this happening and respond to the ‘fickle’ nature of consumers by scrambling to ‘offer a better deal’ in order to win them over from competitors, or to keep them loyal.

So supermarkets offer so-called ‘loyalty cards’, banks give points for credit card use, and hotels offer special deals on room rates.

Yet with many of these businesses, a large number of consumers are bored and even disillusioned with the need to switch providers constantly. It’s not the deal that entices them, but the poor level of service, experience or relationship that drives them away.

The tactics companies use ironically make customers more disloyal. Companies are unwittingly evoking the very behaviours they are trying to avoid – yet they blithely continue to do so, at huge cost not only to their customer engagement levels, but also their bottom lines!

Driver # 2: The Customer Experience

Thankfully, research that makes the case for building an outstanding customer experience a business priority is in. This research tells us that Customer Experience is more highly rated by almost all consumers than the Customer Value Proposition.

We pick up on just two studies in this growing body of evidence that companies avoid at their own peril:

The Marketing Forum in the UK conducted a landmark study into the brand-person relationship, and in almost every category (categories including industries such as financial, automative, media and retail), emotional factors trumped rational ones.

In another huge multi-year study conducted by Tuck Business School  in America, of eateries in metropolitan New York, the old adage that success was down to the three factors of ‘location, location, location’, was well and truly torpedoed. Location was only a small factor in price differential between the different establishments. The price variance between each eatery was accounted for as follows:

• Location                                        2.5%
• Quality of food                          3.5%
• Customer Experience            73%

(n=1,700 restaurants)

In other words, establishments that evoked high levels of Customer Stay and Say through their customer experience were the ones that were most profitable!

What you can do now

If you would like to gain this kind of pricing power through your company’s customer engagement levels, then you may be interested in our Customer Engagement and Customer Experience solutions, or contact us for more details  following the link below.

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Click here for more details > > >

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