The Corporate Woman

There isn’t one best way to best understand your customers but whatever you choose, it really needs to start with understanding their behaviors.  For example, your customer has decided to leave and you have a way to capture the reason why.  When they say price… do you accept that?  Or do you realize that price really means something else – such as “Budget – something in my life has changed and I need more money in my budget, so this has to go or I need a cheaper price” or “Value – I just don’t see the value in this vs. what I have to pay”.  Neither of those are actually price – they are root causes of the price top level statement. 

So being able to dig into the behaviors of your customers and understand why they do what they do is incredibly valuable.  In this way, you can really flesh out customer segmentation and work on developing personas or mental models that can actually give you actionable customer insights to drive decision making and strategy development.  And this part of a customer experience program can be very fun – I always enjoying digging in and understanding customers.  How about you?

Tags: Customer Experience, Customers, Loyalty

I’ve been reading a great deal on customer satisfaction this and customer loyalty that here lately.  Working on a reimagining (so to speak) of my function and purpose within the customer experience realm.  Here is a challenge for you – how do you inspire a company to become more customer centric?  It’s the holy grail right now – a new version of the field of dreams.  I see it as two things – inspiration and engagement.  You can inspire but if action doesn’t follow (and shortly) then engagement drops off and you have less credit than when you started the whole thing.  I say… let’s break the mold and stop worrying so much about the numbers and start worrying far more about the people – our people and our customers as people.

Tags: Customer Experience, Customers

It’s been an interesting year for those of us in the customer experience realm.  Lots of passion on both sides of the fence regarding the Net Promoter Score has resulted in positive good overall – it has raised awareness of the era of customer choice.  The more aware a company and its leaders are regarding their customers and their customer needs, the better opportunity that company has to grow organically.  Having used a number of the methods espoused by the various experts, I can see the pros and cons of each of the methods.  What I find the most interesting is not what method but why they choose the method.  Surprisingly, many times that choice is made without actually looking at how their market works and how their customers behave.  Looking their first really helps narrow down the field of what methods will work best for measuring and driving customer loyalty.

Tags: Customers, Loyalty