Thoughts, ideas, and lessons learned from real-world customer engagements and interactions...
Are your customers going out with the bath water?
25 Aug 2011 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Experience, Customers
The other day we were working with a customer to finalize their CRM strategy. As we were putting together some of the pricing details of our recommended CRM, we noticed that they were offering a special pricing offer that represented anywhere from 30-50% off of their regular price. As always, we checked the fine print and sure enough the special pricing offer was only for NEW customers.
Now, I am sure that everyone reading this can point to examples of this type of promotion that companies put in place to attract new customers during slower times. However, we would like to take this opportunity to challenge companies to resist using this type of tactic which can ultimately devalue the perception of your solution within the market, and can alienate the customers who have already validated your solution with their purchases.
Our own guidelines for using email and surveys in the Customer Development process
16 Jan 2010 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Development
Recently, I have noticed more blog posts and discussions within the Lean Startup Circle and other areas regarding the use of email and surveys as part of the Customer Development process. Email and surveys are fantastic tools, and can add a great deal of value, however in our business we have learned that they are not the ONLY tools to be used in order to gather the vital customer information for our clients.
Email has become a day to day tool used by just about everyone today. Email is one of those revolutionary tools that has helped all of us to communicate in near real-time (with mobile devices) and to open up the lines of communication with companies and individuals from all parts of the world. As email will never replace the power and benefits of a one on one interaction, our team has put in place some guidelines for ourselves on the use of email within our implementation of the customer development process…..
The truth is – well – the truth!
10 Nov 2009 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Experience, Customers
The other day I was watching a program on TV, and a commercial came on for the FIOS cable. You may be familiar with these commercials as it has been a very successful campaign for FIOS and if you do a research you can also see that they have been driving a number of their competitors crazy with this campaign.
If you watch the video, towards the end of the commercial the “underdog” cable guy asks “I was curious why we were listening to customers…seems dumb”. This is a powerful message. It clearly takes a shot at the cable companies portraying that they do not listen to their customers. However, it actually goes a little bit deeper than that. If you think about it just a bit more, you can probably anticipate that the cable guy did not like what was being said about why FIOS is better than their cable solution. He did not like hearing the truth from the customers as to why the FIOS service was better than cable. For this reason, he made an unsuccessful attempt to question the whole process by stating that asking customers was “dumb”.
