Thoughts, ideas, and lessons learned from real-world customer engagements and interactions...
Apple aligns itself with the Customer Pulse
4 May 2011 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Alignment
There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple is a leader within the computing industry. As a company, they are consistently recognized for not just understanding…but actually anticipating customer needs, wants, and trends. On the surface it may seem like the company is made up of designers who have extraordinary talents to predict and ultimately design what customers need and want. Not to take anything away from their team of designers, the reality is that Apple has invested significant amounts of time, money, and effort to ensure that they are aligned and in-tune with the customers who consistently line up to spend money for their products.
The Apple Customer Pulse is yet another example of how they view customer alignment as a key ingredient within their overall formula for success, and not just an activity to have customers tell them if they are happy or not. The Customer Pulse program is by invitation only to select customers, and involves soliciting input from these key customers up to two times per month.
The other interesting lesson that can be learned from Apple and this new program is that it is OK to be selective with the types of customers that you solicit for feedback. Not only would it be a huge undertaking to solicit, process, and analyze feedback from every single customer, a more selective strategy allows you to focus on the types of customers that you would ultimately like to replicate. The best way to find more of your “ideal” customers is to engage and collaborate with your current “ideal” customers.
Are you making it easy to get the feedback you want?
29 Apr 2011 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Experience
The other day on my way into the office, I stopped at a local coffee shop to get my morning caffeine fix. As I was standing in line, I noticed that there was a sign that was soliciting feedback from customers. It showed a picture of a coffee and gave the website where they wanted customers to visit in order to provide feedback on “how well are we doing?”. As an incentive, they were offering free coffee for a year.
Although I think that this is a great initiative, and I also think that the incentive of potentially winning free coffee for a year was appealing, however the net result was that I did not make it to the website or provide my feedback. The simple reason being that I grabbed my coffee, went about my day, and did not take the time later in the day to visit the website. Even with the best intentions, and the potential incentive of not having to buy my morning coffee for a year, the company lost me along with my feedback because it was not convenient for me to provide my input at the time that they were asking for it. The success of this program was built upon their assumption that people would go to the website once they went to the office or got back in front of a computer.
Now, if on the other hand the company had skipped putting the picture of the coffee on the poster, and had replaced it with a QR Code which would have immediately led me to their website to gather my feedback, then chances are significantly higher that they would have received the input that they were looking for. I would have simply pulled out my iPhone, took a picture of the QR Code and filled out the survey while I waited in line for my coffee. Also, since I would have provided the feedback right at the time that I was experiencing the service from them, the feedback is likely to be more accurate and relevant to what they were hoping to accomplish.
If you have a system set up to gather feedback from your customers, is it easy for them to give you the feedback, or are you loosing them, and the valuable feedback that they can offer?
Getting clear on your target!
9 Feb 2010 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Development, Marketing
Last week I had the opportunity to once again present the “Accelerating To First Customers” session at the Lead To Win program. As always, this fantastic program had some of the greatest new companies in Ottawa participating.
One of the key things that I cover in this session is how to get crystal clear on the true target market for your product or service. This is one of the core fundamentals of any business no matter their size, maturity, etc. It does not matter if you are a start-up who is going through the Customer Development and Lean Startup processes or if you are an existing company that has some great sales results already on the scoreboard. If you do not get this step right, then the list of potential problems ranging from spending precious marketing dollars on marketing to the wrong audience all the way through to even developing a solution that is not truly needed by the market can present itself. The ripple effect of this core mistake can be felt right across the whole company and the problems will present itself in many different forms.
I have done previous posts on this topic so I will not repeat any of these. However, there are two sources of additional information that I have come across and I wanted to share regarding this topic. First, if you are a follower of the Lean Startup and Customer Development methodologies then you may have heard of Giff Constable who is the CEO of a new upcoming start-up company called Aprizi. If you are not familiar with him then be sure to check out his blog. He just did a recent post entitled Targeting Matters! which I think is worth the read.
