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?
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”.
