Category: Customers

Out (f-cking) care the competition

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I just learned last week about Gary Vaynerchuk from Seth Godin’s Domino Project (great post, Ishita), another great example of someone who pokes the box (you mean you haven’t read Poke the Box yet?  What are you waiting for?  It’s a top 100 book on Amazon, for goodness sake, and it will help you see that you don’t need to wait for anyone’s permission.    OK fine, I’ll write a review soon).

Then just yesterday a colleague told me that Gary’s talk at last weeks’ SXSW-Interactive was one of the top three at the whole darn conference.  Besides the entertainment value of Gary’s, uh, colorful vocabulary, (2 minutes and 4 seconds without dropping the “f-bomb”) Gary’s main message was that companies are going to win and lose based on who can “out care” their customers.

Speaking of caring (and not caring), the other night I was at Magnolia Bakery, which helped start the NY cupcake craze and which shamelessly charges nearly $3 for an (admittedly delicious) cupcake.   But service is slow.  The store is set up Disney-land style (pick your cupcakes here, walk down the long counter for the chance to buy more stuff, pay at the register at the end) which might work when there’s a throng of customers but makes no sense when you’d rather just drop six bucks in a jar and walk away with two cupcakes.

I was running late for a show, so I noticed when it took me (and the other six other customers in the store) nearly 10 minutes to buy cupcakes (two cupcakes per couple, so really three customers).  Bad enough, but much worse because there were 8 Magnolia employees chatting, working, and doing everything but notice that their empty shop had a logjam.  I even asked one of them if I could just pay and go, and she said she wasn’t assigned to the register.

“Too cool for school” might be an OK customer service approach when your shop is flooded with tourists looking for a “real NY experience,” but for the rest of us chickens it’s time to think seriously about out-caring the competition.  If you don’t believe me, read the blow-by-blow Zappos story in Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness, and remind yourself again and again: this is a billion dollar company with rabid fans who buy SHOES ONLINE.

While last week’s post about new humanism generated a lot of interest, some comments said that David Brooks’ arguments are old hat.  The ideas may not be new, but they’re certainly not mainstream (in business, in economics, in how we teach our kids), and I think it’s high time that changes.  It’s much more than a tweak to the old models….if you really take it seriously you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and start afresh.

For example, the old way of thinking about customer service says that customers want the best product for the best price, and oh, yes, they want to good customer service too (read: nice-to-have, sort of like “soft skills”…can you hear the derisive sneer?).  The Zappos way of thinking says that creating an off-the-charts customer experience is the ONLY thing that matters.  For Zappos, it’s the end-all be-all.

It may be that Magnolia Bakery can ignore out-caring the competition because they serve up enough sugary, buttery goodness to anesthetize their customers (or, more seriously, because waiting forever confirms the story of cupcakes you flew across the country to try), but for the rest of us, it’s time to start out-caring the competition.

That means real relationships, every time.  It means you actually care, you don’t just act like you care.  It means you put emotional effort into everything you do.  It’s not easy to copy, which is why if you do it with abandon, you win.

Predictably Irrational

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Last week I talked some about the “mental models” we carry around to simplify the world.  One of the most powerful, underlying mental models we carry around is about rationality – that people are predominately rational, and that behave (by and large) in a rational fashion.

While I’m incredibly interested in the field of behavioral economics, I must admit that I still cling to the vestiges of beliefs held earlier in my life, that people are primarily rational with a hint of irrationality thrown in every now and again.

But what if people are primarily irrational and, even more powerful, what if they’re predictably irrational?  That’s the question MIT economist Dan Ariely asks in his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. What’s so fun about this book is that Prof Ariely  takes a simple, objective, experimental approach to see how people really act instead of believing in how they’re supposed to ask.  Here’s an example from early in the book that floored me (my summary, not his):

A few years ago, Dan Ariely received an email from The Economist magazine offering three subscription options:

  1. A year of access to The Economist website for $59
  2. A year of receiving the print edition of The Economist for $125
  3. A year of receiving the print edition of The Economist plus free access to the website for $125

You’ll notice immediately that options two and three both cost $125. Prof. Airely figured the clever folks at the Economist had their reasons, and he wanted to understand them.  So he tested this offer by offering it to 100 of his students.  The result? 16 of his students selected the web access and 84 selected the print + online option.  No one chose option 2 (print only).

Hard to know what to make of that result on its own; maybe option 3 really is so appealing that a rational, value-maximizing decision maker should choose it more than 4 out of 5 times.

To test this theory, Prof. Airely ran the experiment a second time, but with only two options:

  1. A year of access to The Economist website for $59
  2. A year of receiving the print edition of The Economist plus free access to the website for $125

If the students were essentially rational actors, the removal of the option that no one chose (option 2) would have no impact.  How could it matter to remove an irrelevant option?  But it mattered a lot.  68 students now chose the web-only access, and 32 chose print+web.  Removing an irrelevant option shifted the preference for web-only access from 16% to 68% of the students. That’s a powerful result.

Put simply, we’re terrible at ascertaining the absolute value of things; we only seem to be able to hone in on relative value.  So the impact of the irrelevant option was to communicate that the original 3rd option (print + web) was a “great deal.”

Depending on where you sit and what you’re hoping to accomplish, you can use this one insight in lots of different ways.  The first step is to realize that when you’re helping someone make a decision, the available options and what people don’t choose may be as or more important than what people do choose.

Tacky plastic

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Some thoughts for the upcoming holiday season.

A few years ago my wife and I bought my son a beautiful, wooden, ecologically friendly, made-in-Thailand-from-recycled-materials airport set.

Guess who they’re selling that product to?  Me.

Guess who never played with it?  My son.

It took us a while to admit that our kids want the big, tacky, plastic toy with the characters they recognize.  As a parent I get to choose how much I want to try to change this, but my starting point had been getting them what I wanted them to want instead of what they wanted.

How often do we do this with our customers?  Any person who is successful at building relationships, at selling, at partnership will tell you that the key is “good listening.”  The word “listening” causes confusion because (especially to someone who’s not a good listener) it sounds like it’s talking about the literal act of what the person is saying.  To me, “good listening” means consistently hearing what the person is actually saying (irrespective of the words being said).

My kids were saying they wanted Disney or Star Wars stuff with lights and sounds.  Your customers might be saying that they want something other than what you hope they want or think they need.

What are your customers saying?

Swagger Wagon – just for fun

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Mostly, this just made me laugh out loud.  A handful of you – who happen to be the exact people Toyota wants to buy the Sienna – will laugh out loud too, and the rest of you may not which is OK too (or maybe you will since the video has more than 5 million views and counting…).

Think about how well Toyota has to know who their customer is to make this.  Not just demographics but mindset and self-image and shared experiences and values. This is the perfect story that matches that worldview.

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More or deeper?

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

More is:

  • The hunt
  • Acquisition costs
  • Onsite blog traffic
  • Splashy PR
  • Small bets
  • Millions of followers
  • Friends and admirers

Deeper is:

  • Relationships
  • Low churn
  • RSS subscribers
  • Specialized media
  • Big bets
  • 1,000 true fans
  • Allies

Neither is better or worse, but  (there’s always a “but”)…  BUT one of these has to be your dominant strategy if in fact you have a strategy.

(And if your answer is “both” then it’s time to reread Kevin Kelly’s original post about 1,000 true fans, starting with,”To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly.  Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.”  I can think of few things more dissimilar than the actions you’d take to “run out and find new converts” versus “convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.”)

So which one is it for you?  And why?

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Easy, hard

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

You certainly know who your top customers are from YOUR perspective – the ones who account for most of your revenues and most of your profits.

But do you know how many of them consider YOU to be their most important relationship?  How many of them love you best of all?

The first question is easy to answer, the second one is much more important.

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Yesterday’s salad

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Traveling on Monday morning, and hoping to avoid on-board food, I picked up a $9 Caesar salad at the Balducci’s in the Delta terminal at JFK. A few hours later, my laptop dead, I popped open the plastic box to dig in.

The salad looked beautiful, but it was very sad indeed.  The first clue was a squishy crouton. The second crouton also didn’t crunch. Then I picked up a piece romaine, and it had turned a little red from spoilage. So had nearly all the lettuce in the salad. Red, wilted lettuce and soggy croutons for lunch? No way.

It turns out that I had paid, at 9 in the morning, $9 for a day-old salad at one of the upperiest of the upscale food chains in New York.

It’s so easy to convince yourself to sell the day-old salad, to give your customer something other than your best because it is cheaper or easier or because you’re just plain lazy. Plus, you convince yourself, they won’t notice.

The thing is, they will notice and so will you.  The only question is which will happen faster: you losing them as a customer, or you quietly begrudging yourself and your organization for delivering such a shoddy experience?

There’s old salad somewhere in your organization – old reports or analysis or ways you treat people that might have been good enough when they were fresh, but they’ve passed their expiration date.

Throw out the old salad. Today is a new day.

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What the dogs know

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

My dogs can tell the difference between the sound of emptying a clean dishwasher and filling a dirty one.  They can even tell the difference between the sound of doing dishes and of moving food from one container into another (when food inevitably falls on the floor).

Sure, it’s Pavlovian, but it also speaks to how much you can know by honing in on the one thing that matters most to the outcome that you care about.

Do you know what that one thing is for you?  If not, how can you find out?

We’re right over here

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

This afternoon, I found myself standing on line, waiting to spend $4 on an overpriced loaf of sourdough.  As the line grew behind me, from two to four to eleven people at 5:45pm, the bakery’s five employees milled about at the other end of the store.  Two were troubleshooting something at the cash register, one was working on a display, and two talking quietly while they worked.

What a great metaphor.  All the employees are getting the cash register and the display and the plans for the next batch of bread just right – all the internal stuff that feels so important. Yet all the while their customers are lining up, wanting to talk to them if only they’ll walk over to the other end of the store to meet them.

Go on, go talk to your customers.  They’re right over there, and they’re what matters most.

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Satisfying vs. Delighting

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Thanks to a minor flood (that I caused) in my kitchen a few months ago, I had to have my hardwood kitchen floor replaced.  It was a big, expensive job (for which Allstate paid me a few hundred dollars out of the few thousand dollars the repair actually cost, but that’s another story.)

The contractor I hired did a great job.  The floors are beautiful, the work was done while we were out of the house for a week, and they left the place clean.  The price was fair, but it cost a lot of money.

How did I feel afterwards?  Happy.  But being a human being, I couldn’t help but focus on the small stuff – the missing baseboard, the paint that was nicked, the four or five tiny things that were left undone.

Fast forward to last week: I had a leak in my kitchen ceiling.  Same contractor, tiny job.  They came twice, and the second day, without anyone asking, they not only closed up the 1 x 1 foot hole in my ceiling, but whoever did the work took the initiative to go down to the basement, find the matching paint, patch up the drywall…and when I came hope the ceiling looked like new.  No evidence at all of the work that was done.  And no hounding at all on my (or my wife’s) part to make sure the job was done right.

It’s human nature: being delighted is about the gap between what we expect to happen and what actually happens.

Here’s the recap:

Job #1: A big job, the contractor made a good deal of money.  I was satisfied.

Job #2: Tiny job, the (same) contractor probably made no money.  I was totally thrilled.

Which job do you think sealed the deal on who I’m calling for Jobs #3, 4 and 5 in my (very old) home?  Of course it’s job #2.

The lesson?  If you deal with people (customers, donors, partners, family, you name it), you’re missing an opportunity if you just do the big, important jobs.  You also have to look for opportunities to blow expectations out of the water.  That’s your real chance to do something memorable (the assumption is that you’re always getting the basics right).

Some examples: handwritten notes; good customer service by phone; incredibly responsive, personal emails; buying just the right gift when it’s least expected; an impromptu date on a Tuesday night.

Without surprises, you’re just doing what’s expected.  That makes you nice but forgettable.