Most businesses would describe themselves as ‘customer focussed’. What organisation, irrespective of its size, doesn’t have the mantra ‘the customer is at the heart of our business’? But what if we’re missing a step towards customer centricity that’s so simple it’s often overlooked?
Here’s the one thing you can do (whatever your role) today, to improve your customer centricity. It’s really obvious, but we simply don’t do it often enough. Take the journey your customer would take, the journey which you (or someone) likely designed months or years ago. Buy the product, sign up to the service, go into the store, browse the website, download the white paper – whatever it is, just walk the journey, walk it frequently and walk it with a curious, honest and open mind.
Let me bring this to life with a true story:
I love many things about the coffee shop on the way to the train station. The coffee tastes great, they sometimes recall what I want before I order it, they have a loyalty scheme which I don’t understand but which means my coffee seems to get cheaper each time I go. What’s not to like?
Unfortunately for me, a fundamental part of the customer journey is not to like…
This wonderful coffee shop has decided to use a data-capture system whereby it is impossible to order a coffee without giving them your email address every time. It’s not an opt-out system (or so the guy behind the counter has been told – let’s call him ‘John’).
Picture the scene, it’s 7am, I need to get on the 7.14am train, but I really want an Americano (black, with hot whole milk). I’m second in the queue and I get my order in. John remembers my order but not my email address. I have to awkwardly spell out my email address phonetically. I ask if we can please skip this step. John always says no, it will only take a minute. It’s a small part of my day but it’s painful. I mean, who wants to spell out a 31-character email address at 7am!
I’ve now started to vote with my feet, to avoid this pain and pave the way to the shop’s competitors. They serve me coffee quickly with minimal fuss and confusion. It’s not as good coffee, but it’s coffee and that’s the trade-off I’ve made on this occasion.
There are a few important marketing morals to this story:
Don’t prioritise your business’s needs over the consumer’s
The coffee shop wants my data. Maybe they want to have me on their CRM system, they want to understand the frequency of my visits and my average order value – I really hope they are using all of these data points! They even want to send me an email offering me a free coffee when I’ve not been in for a while. It’s all really good stuff; win – win. Textbook marketing: data driving better customer experience and loyalty.
Except it’s not. As a customer in a hurry, I’m just not willing to go through this experience. So I go elsewhere. Coffee is a low involvement purchase and my needs as a consumer have been deprioritised over the coffee shop’s.
Consumers will make a pleasure / pain trade off when choosing your brand
Consumers carefully weigh up the pleasure / pain equation before making any purchase. Complete bargain trousers in sale – pleasure. Queue is too long – pain, leave the shop empty-handed. Online banking is super convenient – pleasure. My bank’s interface is dated and full of bugs – pain, I switch banks.
Walk a mile in your consumer’s shoes
Understand the context of the consumer at the time they interact with your brand. A 7am coffee mission is going to involve a bleary-eyed consumer in a hurry – in fact, the coffee order may well be the first words they have spoken that day. That’s important context to consider.
Encourage your staff to give you feedback on customer journey blips, and even better, empower them to change it intuitively
No customer journey is ideal, and every customer journey could be optimised. Train your front-line staff to give you feedback, rather than follow the rule book 100% of the time. If John was encouraged to give feedback on how the customer journey was working, he almost certainly would have relayed the pained expression on my face combined with my protests. Even better, if he was empowered to change the experience, he would have waived the data capture for me rather than persuading me to comply.
Use your eyes as well as your data
Interestingly, the fancy data capture system hasn’t flagged that I haven’t visited for months, but sometimes when I’m walking past the coffee shop, I see John setting up the outside tables. We sometimes say hi. He never asks me in for a coffee or puts a feeler out for why I no longer visit. What a missed opportunity.
So what?
As a brand owner, company owner or anyone who controls customer experience – take note. A tiny blip in a badly-engineered and under-examined customer journey can be an unnoticed, misunderstood poison which turns people off from your brand and ultimately drives a hole in your profits.
Consumers will naturally avoid pain and go towards pleasure. Work on your customer journey relentlessly to remove the unnecessary pain points in the experience and balance your value equation. Brand loyalty becomes fragile when the experience includes pain points and other options exist. Go back to basics and stay there until you have an experience worth sticking around for. Your profits will thank you.