Customers now have unprecedented demands of companies. They are better informed, act faster and expect the benefits of complex systems for free. Companies are assumed to know the context, history and location of customers even as these change moment to moment. Some customers are ready to return value through co-creation. Some have already started the co-creation cycle without a company’s awareness.
To use the terminology of the “jobs-to-be-done” community, customers “hire” products that companies provide and quickly fire them when they do not help achieve desired outcomes. Customers expect companies to manage their experiences across physical and digital channels, effectively turning every company into a software company.
Customers don’t think in terms of B2C, B2B and B2E systems. Customers see these channels as one: the B2Me channel.
If you have customer-facing responsibilities, the following questions are imperative to understand how to create value through customer engagement.
The Customer Journey
1) Is your relationship with customers about your product or the outcomes they desire?
Customers want companies to help them achieve outcomes more than they want to purchase a company’s product. Customer needs and wants have not changed in hundreds of years. They’ve always wanted outcomes. As Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt said, “People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”
What is different now is the amount of control, power, and influence they have that makes it possible for them to accept anything less than a product that helps them achieve their outcomes.
Christensen implored marketers to understand the outcomes that customers desire when developing a marketing position for a product or service. But companies that use software to engage their customers should also start projects by understanding the outcomes that customers desire. Summa recognizes that software delivers experiences that blur the lines between attracting with marketing, selling and servicing, so we approach customer engagement with a variety of methods to understand the outcomes customers desire.
2) Your customers are co-creating—are you ready?
Customers now expect companies to equip them with digital tools and data so that they can create products and services to realize the outcomes they desire. In the past, the stigma of “self-service” was that companies were not willing to help a customer. Today, customers want companies to provide data-driven services to generate value for themselves. Once this data relationship is established, companies can analyze data resulting from product interactions with customers to make discoveries that were impossible only a few years ago.
Coke’s Freestyle allows customers to create any number of varieties of drinks to their taste, and allows Coke to discover opportunities for new products by analyzing the usage data.
Summa collaborated with a national bronze manufacturer to design a tool that grief counselors at funeral homes and cemeteries could offer to family members to design unique memorials to remember deceased family members. The application supported co-creation and was integrated to back-end manufacturing, pricing and partner management systems to ensure that designs would work within known manufacturing and business constraints.
3) Can your company compete for customers’ share of engagement?
When consumers have excellent experiences using something like a mobile app, they come to expect the same of every app on their phone. The negative consequences of not meeting these expectations is dire. Gone are the days when this only applied to the young, tech-savvy or the B2C space. Everyone expects consumer-grade applications with the polish of Amazon or Google. The ubiquitous use of consumer-grade applications has forced every company to realize being a leader in their category requires them to become a software company.
Companies used to think in terms of “share of wallet”, but are now beginning to shift focus to “share of engagement.” Customers have a finite time to interact with brands to achieve outcomes. No longer are companies only competing with others in their industry, but also with every other brand vying for share of engagement. The companies most prepared to deliver experiences that customers value will win the day. Value is measured by customers in the scope of context, history, intent, location, social graph, sentiment, short-term and long-term needs.
4) Can you afford the cost of reacquiring a customer?
It is commonly stated that it costs five times as much to acquire a customer as it does to retain a customer. In terms of immediate sales, research has shown that companies have a 60-70% chance of repeat-selling to an active customer vs as low as 20% to a customer who has left them for another brand (Griffin and Lowenstein, 2001).
For digital customers, the effort and cost of switching providers is decreasing daily. Costs are growing rapidly for companies that battle to overtake a competitor who has ownership of the most critical real estate in the consumer world—a phone’s home screen. The change wrought by mobile has caused a tectonic shift of power between customers and companies and quickly placed the customer in control of the relationship with companies and their brands. The companies that refuse to respond to this change appropriately won’t exist for long.
Summa has been at the front of these shifts for the past 18 years. Cross-functional project teams that include our Designers, Solution Architects, Strategists, Technologists and Agilistas help customers to “build the right solution and build the solution right.” Specialists in the area of mobile and customer engagement can build systems that provide the insights to retain customers in the engagement economy.
5) Can you present the “next best action” to individual customers?
Your customers expect you to know what they should do next, even before they do. Effortless experiences require more than highly-usable interfaces. To create value through customer engagement companies need to develop a discipline for using insights derived from context, history, location, social, sentiment and mountains of unstructured data to proactively serve up the next task to individual customers. Customers are most engaged when companies offer experiences that demonstrate an understanding their individual needs and values.
For example, when a belt needs replaced in a car, it may be an early indicator of additional service required in the future. Agents with the proper data and context available to them can proactively prepare customers how to address these anticipated service needs before they arise.
Usability and usefulness are now the table stakes required to be in the game with your customer. The winners at the table will build systems designed to anticipate a customer’s next need—qualities that require a continuous and deep understanding of customers.
6) Do your systems allow staff from sales, marketing and service to guide customers?
Organizational charts matter little to customers, so data collected by different organizational units must be available for the next employee or partner who will render care to customers. The B2E, B2B and B2C systems that were previously the property of major organizational units that had little incentive to cooperate now must work together to meet the needs of customers.
Consumers now expect consistent, but not identical, experiences across all channels. Each successive touch point with a company should show awareness of all of their previous interactions: what those interactions were, their mood when they shared those experiences on their various social networks, the buying habits of their social circles, and their current jobs to be done. This forces companies to handle large sets of unstructured data to gain insights to guide customers.
7) Is your customers’ movement between digital and physical channels seamless?
Opportunities abound for those who are agile and can master technological and organizational gymnastics required to satisfy increasingly demanding customers. In 2014, Forrester found that only 12% can provide a seamless handoff between channels. The difficulty for making seamless experiences is often organizational—not only technological. The organizational structure that made operations scalable and delivered efficiency now often inhibits cohesive customer engagement.
Companies must now deliver on their marketing promises through experiences that are mediated by software. A customer who has seen a television commercial for hotel and then booked a room with a mobile device projects themselves into the real experience in advance, as though they were walking into the television commercial. When the physical experience does not meet the expectations created in digital channels, customers are quick to publicly voice their disappointment through social channels. Assessing customer-facing systems against the Principle of Least Astonishment is a good place to start when determining if your customers will be able to use the tools you’ve made available to efficiently complete their jobs to be done.
For most companies, customer engagement platforms must help them develop and deploy effortless experiences for customers who interact through digital and physical channels that they choose. Summa maps the customer journey through attraction, selling and servicing. We think critically about the outcomes customers seek and use a variety of ethnographic and analytic techniques to build a rich understanding of customers. Summa’s agile project management practices enable continuous delivery of valuable software that can be validated with client in actual use.
8) Are you listening to your customers or just hearing them?
Data from customers often lack context so companies must use other methods such as leading user innovation, contextual inquiry, participatory design and co-creation to assemble insightful responses to customer needs. Mobile and social channels paired with data analytics allow companies to continue to add pieces to the context, but only if they are building systems and cultures that allow for it. Companies that want to grow in the engagement economy must always be searching for ways to shorten the cycles of Input to Insight to Action.
Have you had a conversation with Summa experts about creating value with customer engagement at your company?
Contact us to arrange a meeting with our solution architects, designers, engineers and projects managers about your customer engagement initiatives.
