Recently there was much ado in Australia as the Federal Government slightly reduced (less than 10%) the amount of money that it gives to new parents: the so called Baby Bonus. The reduction in this grant has caused a lot of dissatisfaction in the community. Could your customer delight program cause a similar backlash?

Customer Delight can be counter-productive

Introduced about 5 years ago the $5,400 baby bonus was given to parents on the birth of each child and was seen as a true bonus by families who had no prior expectation of receiving it. However, that was when the world economy was not on the financial edge and Federal Government finances were flush. At the time, at the Federal Government level, Australia had a net government surplus, i.e. cash in the bank. Almost unheard of in the Western world.

Well times change and in the November mini-budget the government cut the amount to $5,000 and the media was full of unhappy people: it’s just not fair they shouted in chorus. “How dare the Government take my money”. How did we go from voters delighted at an unexpected windfall to voters decrying the government taking what is “rightfully mine”?

Now it’s fair to say that there may have been a level of media beat up in the response to this announcement but it doesn’t mean that there was no impact on the perception of government.

The problem that the Government faced is very similar to the one that many customer loyalty programs suffer. One you get a customer used to a certain level of service or functionality it is very difficult to reduce that level without backlash and dissatisfaction.

If you give them a Gold Card with exclusive benefits because they travel X thousand miles a year they will love you but try taking it away when they change jobs and only travel twice a year.

What is the solution?

I think that the current mantra to delight the customer is over rated and most organizations are unable to convert the idea into a reliable process [1]. More importantly delighted customers have their basic expectations upgraded and are less satisfied and loyal if you try to return to the previous level of service.

Even though I do not subscribe to all the points made in “Stop Trying to Delight your Customers” I do agree with the concept that delivering your core offering efficiently, accurately and consistently is key to long-term success.

Why do I buy from Amazon: because they deliver on the core requirements and make it easy.

If I want a book I can be 99% sure that Amazon will have it. When I find it I know that I can buy it with one click and have it delivered in hard copy in a few days (I live in Australia) or instantly via Kindle. Total time to complete the task, maybe  30 seconds. Really, there is no delight in the process but there is loads of competent, easy to use, service offering.

Customer delight may seem like a good idea but you are more likely to generate long-term, loyal customers by consistently delivering your core offering and making it easy for your customer. Plus it is a lot easy to implement than customer delight.

More Information

Customer Loyalty Program Health Check

Even the best and most effective customer loyalty programs need to be monitored and assessed on a regular basis to ensure they are operating at peak effectiveness. See our Customer Loyalty Program Health Check for a check-up on your program.

[1] If you can’t convert an idea into a process it has no place in business. While it’s nice to believe that every employee is an individual and can star in their own right and in their own way, it’s not practical, scalable or fair. How can it be fair to exhort staff to delight customers but not give them any way to reliably to do it or measure their success?

By Adam Ramshaw

When examining any type of customer feedback, one issue that you will come up against is that the feedback people give is not like the feedback you get from a thermometer.

If you want to know what the temperature is you need only consult a thermometer of the correct type and it will tell you that information to any level of accuracy required. However, the feedback you receive from customers is not quite so neat and tidy.

Ask a customer to provide feedback on a particular touch-point and you are likely to also get information on other areas of the business. You will also get halo affects and other human based biases. They will miss key areas, include unrelated items, score you based on one bad experience three years ago and ignore perfect performance since, etc. In short the data that you receive will be messy.

But that doesn’t make it useless

Clients will often cite the lack of accurate data as the reason that implementation can’t progress or that a decision cannot be made. Messy customer feedback is a prime target for this excuse.

Unfortunately people often overestimate how accurate data needs to be in order to make a decision. This is because there is a prevailing attitude that data must be very accurate in order to be useful. This is simple not true.

Let me provide a quick thought experiment to prove my point. Imagine for a few seconds that you are standing on the side of a road. Just as you step out to cross, from the corner of your eye you perceive something moving towards you. You look quickly, see that it is a car, and jump back to the kerb. Safe.

If I saw this happen and asked, “Before you jumped back did you calculate how heavy the car was, check how many passengers were in the car, determine the make, model and speed?”, you would look at me as if I was mad. It was a car and moving towards you so you jumped out of the way: end of story. But without a highly accurate set of data how could you decide whether or not to jump back?

Patiently absurd, yet this is how many organizations go about the decision making process. Very often, before people are comfortable making a decision, far too much accuracy is demanded in the information inputs. In my example you only needed two pieces of low fidelity information to make a decision: the object was likely to be heavy and coming towards you, the rest was superfluous to the decision.

Data can be messy but also useful

This whole area of how accurate information needs to be is covered in greater detail in an excellent book: “How to measure anything” by Douglas Hubbard. Much of this book is dedicated to helping companies, and people, to determine how accurate information has to be before a decision can be made. Critically it looks at the idea of the value of increased accuracy and how to trade that off against the cost of obtaining that accuracy.

If the value of increasing the accuracy is less than the cost of obtaining that information then you should not expend energy in collecting the data. In our thought experiment above: the value (“how badly am I likely to be hurt if I don’t jump now”) was much lower that the cost (“I am going to be hurt if I don’t jump now”) so you don’t bother to collect any more accuracy.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has to make or recommend decisions based on data, i.e. everyone in business. After reading it you will never look at data accuracy and the need to be “really sure” the same way again.

Back to our customers

So the data that you will receive from your customer feedback process may be messy and somewhat inconsistent and generally not perfect. That’s because people are messy, somewhat inconsistent and generally not perfect. However, that data can and will be better that no feedback at all and used correctly will be the basis for solid decision making.

More Information

Download our free report: How to implement an effective customer feedback system for more information on how to run a great customer feedback process.

By Adam Ramshaw

I wrote recently about how engineers in process plants are never happy with the status quo. They are always looking for improvements and tweaks to the manufacturing process that can drive incremental improvement in profit and efficiency.

This post is about how you can use Transactional Net Promoter Score to do the same thing for customer loyalty, through its key driver; customer experience.

Two types of innovation

Lets start by identifying two key types of innovation: discontinuous and incremental.

Discontinuous innovation creates whole new genres or products: think T-Model Ford replacing the horse, the Sony Walkman creating a whole new product category, the IBM PC. Discontinuous innovation generates major leaps forward but is relatively rare and risky.

Incremental innovation slowly but surely improves a product or category. Incremental innovation is how the car went from the T-Model Ford to the F1 racing car we see today. All the key features of the T-Model are present in the F1 racing car, they are just much, much improved. A million small incremental innovations over 80 years has generated a product that is essentially the same but completely different.

The simple truth is that while discontinuous innovation is sexy, it is also risky and rare. Incremental innovation is less exciting but very low risk, and generates enormous value day in and day out.

Driving incremental customer experience innovation

So how do engineers drive incremental innovation? Not by focusing on the whole process but by breaking it down into sub-areas areas and focusing on the worst performing areas first. To identify the worst performing areas, and how to fix them, engineers then use systems that collect thousands of measurements from all over their manufacturing process.

This very same process can be used to drive incremental innovation in your customer experience. Simply swap the industrial manufacturing process for the customer experience (where we manufacture customer loyalty) and the Transactional Net Promoter Score process for the engineer’s temperature and pressure sensors.

From a practical perspective you can achieve this by breaking your customer experience down into distinct touch-points and sub-processes and then apply Transactional Net Promoter Score to collect data at each of the touchpoints.

Start with the worst

Now you have a series of customer experience manufacturing steps, each with it’s own customer experience sensor to collect data about what works and does not work. Using NPS you can now rank the customer experience manufacturing steps from best to worst; highlight the pain points and focus on those areas that most need attention first.

Put simply; the touch-point with the lowest NPS will be the one that is performing the worst, and the one that you need to start work on first.

If you have implemented Transactional Net Promoter Score correctly you will also have a range of other diagnostic information to let you know what is wrong with the touch-point and how to fix it. It is then up to you to apply the current quality system toolkit that your organization uses (Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, etc) to take this information and drive change.

Customer Experience a Process not a Project

Once you have improved the worst touch-point you can move on to the second worst touch-point and repeat the process. Now you can see that customer experience is not a project but a process. It is a never ending cycle of incremental innovation that can and will move you a long way from your Model-T customer experience to a Formula 1 customer experience.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

It seems to me that many customer experience initiatives are deeply flawed. They start out well intentioned but lack the right process improvement mindset to drive long term change.

The customer experience strategy that seems to be best practice at the moment is:

1. Do some research on what people want: ask a focus group, run a survey, etc,
2. Design “the best” customer experience based on the research.
3. Test it in a limited way –asking people what they think, doing some usability testing (i.e. watching what people actually do either actually or via analytics) of your systems.
4. Roll-it out.
5. Relax

The critical part is that the design process (steps 1 and 2)  is run only once. Then, having agreed that it is perfect just let it run. This is wrong.

I spent 10 years working in the industrial process control industry. Let me describe how a completely different type of business runs a very similar process in a completely different way.

Consider a manufacturing plant, say an Oil Refinery. In many respects it goes through the very same process:

1.  Do some research: engineers gather information about the industrial manufacturing process based on relatively well known chemical and physical processes.
2.  Design the plant: based on the specification and the research, design an appropriate plant.
3.  Test it in a limited way: often for a new types processes a smaller pilot plant is created to test the idea.
4.  Roll-it out; Build the full scale plant and start manufacturing. This is often a long and complex task, especially in the case of an Oil Refinery.So far it’s all the same.
5. Relax Start the work of improving the design of the plant. As soon as the plant is up and running, engineers are looking for ways to improve performance. They have banks of feedback data from sensors all over the plant. Using that data and starting on day one they are trying to work out how to improve production to more than 100% of rated capacity.

This last step is missing in many organizations working on the customer experience. They may design and build lots of different areas of customer experience but this continuous improvement piece is missing. There are two issues that prevent the last step form occurring:

• The lack of a continuous improvement mindset
• The lack of real-time feedback data.

Continuous improvement mindset

Engineers are trained to look for problems and fix them. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” just doesn’t apply. Continuous, improvement within the process parameters that currently exist, is the order of the day.

You can think of it as a giant test and learn process. You wouldn’t think of running your next direct marketing campaign through a one off design and go approach so why are you trying you do it for your customer experience.

No, instead you constantly test different copy, layout, offers etc.. It should be exactly the same for the customer experience. Never be happy, always be looking for an extra 1% improvement.

In truth this can be hard to do in a customer experience process because of the lack of real time feedback data.

The lack of real-time feedback data

Engineers have access to an extraordinary array of feedback about the manufacturing process. Every pump, valve, heater, switch, etc is monitored in real time and it’s history tracked by the second. That is literally thousands or tens of thousands of separate measurements and history with which to work.

In customer experience what have you got: an annual survey of a small proportion of your customers and a few paltry complaints.

[You also have contact centre reports, sales figures, and web logs but these are indirect measurements.]

At least that was what you use to have. Enter Transactional Net Promoter Score. The customer experience equivalent of all those sensors.

Transactional NPS allows the customer experience professional to get a real time view of the quality of the product that is being manufactured, sorry customer experience delivery, sorry loyalty of the customer. In this case the product being manufactured is loyal customers.

Transactional Net Promoter Score As Your Customer Experience Strategy

But TNPS is more than just a measurement it is also a continuous improvement process. Yes the “would recommend” question is the most well known element of NPS but there is also a full change management, continuous improvement element present in best practice Net promoter implementations.

This means that Transactional Net Promoter Score can be the Customer Experience Strategy for your business. By implementing TNPS you get your customer experience strategy included. No extra charge.

In a future post I’ll expand on exactly how to use Transactional Net Promoter Score to drive business improvement.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

The idea that a picture is worth a thousand words relies on the picture being clear and meaningful. Presenting data in a way that tells a clear, unambiguous, story is on-going trek for me and this article is another step along the path.

This post over at Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik provides some good insight into making that picture clear and meaningful.  If you have to present data to others, and that is basically everyone in business, jump over and have a look, despite the heading this is not about salaries.

Data Analysis 101: Seven Simple Mistakes That Limit Your Salary

It’s been a busy six months.  You’ve rolled out a best practice transactional customer feedback process using Net Promoter Score as your KPI of choice.

The whole thing is going great with customer feedback comments flooding in.  You’re driving tactical service recovery processes and starting to look at strategic customer experience changes.

Then it hits you, even though you’re identifying customer advocates like never before, you’re doing nothing to directly drive new sales with that information!

Day in day out customers are putting their hand up and saying, in no uncertain terms, “I really, really, like your company”.  So why aren’t you helping them to spread the word?

Customer advocates can be a powerful sales driver

Working with your customer advocates can drive enormous value for your business.[1]

• You don’t need to pay customer evangelists – most of the time you just need to get out of their way.
• It’s effective – I shouldn’t need to convince you that customer recommendations are an incredibly powerful sales tool.
• It’s fun - How much better can it get than working with people who love your product or service.

How do you find them?

That part is easy.  If you already have a transactional Net Promoter Score process up and running using, say, CustomerGauge, then everyone who scores you a 9 or 10 is likely to be a customer advocate.

If you haven’t implemented transactional Net Promoter Score perhaps you may have another customer feedback process or even a loyalty scheme that you can analyse for high rate purchasers who may also be advocates.  Or you may even have a social media monitoring process that will let you know who is saying great things about you.

Whichever approach you use, try to link it back to the person’s contact and purchasing history.  With that information you will be able to drive the most action.

How do you help them to help you?

Step 1: Segment

Just like the rest of your customers, not all advocates are the same.  You have to be craft an offer that will appeal to them in order to be successful.

Look to the segmentation approaches that have been successful for your business  the past and see if they are applicable in this program.  Perhaps you can create value sensitive programs for low value customers or custom programs for high value customers.  In short, start with what has been proven to work for your business.

Step 2: Craft your offers

Your first impulse may be to send your customer advocate a standard “refer a friend” or discount coupon offer.  Don’t. While these work in other situations, for your customer advocate they are a slap in the face.

Stop and think about it for a moment.  This person has indicated that they are an advocate for you.  If you send them a “refer a friend” coupon you become just another company wanting to use their good graces to grab some more sales.

Try a different approach 

How about an offer that goes:

“We really appreciate your recent feedback.  In it you indicated you were a strong supporter of our company.  Thank you. If you do recommend us to a friend or colleague please have them use this special telephone number/access code/restricted portal.  This is our priority customer line and will ensure that they get the very best service when they contact us.”

Why this works

1. Acknowledging the person’s feedback in a sensible way.  Do this and their already high perception of you will go up.
2. They feel special: almost like a Platinum Frequent Flyer but without the overhead of all those gate lounges.
3. They are reassured that their friend will get a great customer experience so their innate fear that their friend might have a bad experience and think poorly of them is abated.
4. They will want to pass on this special privilege as quickly as possible.

Of course you have to be able to deliver on that priority service experience, but that’s a given.

Step 3: Do it now

The program you see here is a classic triggered marketing program.  As in all such programs; speed of the essence.  In fact: speed beats perfection every time.

If you already have a transactional Net Promoter Score process then you probably already have the data source and initial processes you need to get this up and running.

More Information

If you’re looking for a transactional Net Promoter Score system check out CustomerGauge NPS data collection and reporting system (full disclosure: we sell the CustomerGauge system in Asia).

If you’re new to trigger based marketing why not download our free “Implementing Trigger-based Marketing to Drive Customer Loyalty” presentation.  It includes lots of success statistics, case studies and is a good introduction to this valuable approach.

For a full presentation of these ideas check out the full webinar: Harvesting you Company’s Advocates

[1] Adapted from Forward to the book, Creating customer evangelists, by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

You may find it hard to believe that there is any way that grounding every plane in the Qantas fleet could improve the customer experience but I think it will.

All of the usual pundits are saying that the recent three day grounding of the Qantas fleet has done immeasurable damage to their brand and reputation.  That’s to be expected and in the short term it certainly has caused enormous upset to the tens of thousands of customers, their families and associates.  In short it’s a customer experience nightmare.

But it could have been worse.  Consider the alternative scenario.

For months union strikes have been causing uncertainty and inconvenience for the travelling public and Qantas.  Short union strikes of an hour to a few hours at strategic airports, and often on a Friday, have disrupted the plans of thousands of travellers.  As recently as last Friday (28 October) a short strike in Melbourne and Sydney disrupted the travel plans of people travelling for the Melbourne Cup.  Before that it was the Grand Final plans of thousands of football spectators.

These short strikes had relatively little impact on the people taking the action, just a few hours wages, but a huge impact on the travelling public and Qantas. This imbalance of impact would have allowed the unions to continue the process indefinitely.

Bad enough for the customer experience in the last few months but now let’s look forward to the next 6-8 weeks.  This is the crucial Christmas holiday period where Australians travel the across the country to be with loved ones for the summer holiday season.   Union action in that period would cause enormous uncertainty to the travelling public and still be without an end in sight.

Television images of families sitting in airport terminals on Christmas eve; sombre parents with crying children telling the cameras how sad their kids are not to see Grandma on Christmas day would be all over the evening news.  That’s a customer experience and brand impact that no airline wants.

This is what Qantas could foresee but which the travelling public and pundits were blissfully unaware.

So Qantas pulled the pin, grounded their fleet and forced the matter to a resolution.  From what I understand (I’m not an industrial relations lawyer) no further industrial action is permitted by either party and a resolution must occur within 21 days.  It’s all rather like pulling of a Band-Aid in one quick rip.  It hurts more but just for a few seconds and then it’s over and done with.

Did it work?

It’s impossible to tell whether this short, very painful, action by Qantas is less painful overall than the alternative scenario.  I tend to think that it is.

What it has done is given the travelling public (and Qantas management) much greater certainty that their Qantas flight to see Grandma will not be subject to last minute delays and cancellations.   The long term customer experience has been improved even if it has been very painful for a couple of days.

By Adam Ramshaw

Today’s post is a little bit different from our normal posts. This Colloquy study: “The 2011 COLLOQUY Cross-Cultural Loyalty Study” caught my eye. It’s a good study and looks at the different views of customer loyalty in different countries.

The Colloquy guys focused on the differences between the emerging economies (Brazil, China and India), and developed economies (Australia, Canada and the U.S.). However, what hit me was how Australia looked at the world, not to the world, but at the world.

There are two charts in particular that I found to be an interesting comment on Australia and its perspective.

The first one, below, asks the question “Competition from foreign companies is a good thing.” I was surprised or perhaps disheartened to see Australia rank the lowest of any country. Turning this around it says that Australians would prefer no external competition.

It is not clear to me where this perspective comes from.

For many years Australia was far removed from the global competitive arenas due to the “tyranny of distance” but that was 20 or 30 years ago.  Perhaps this is a legacy of that time but in the current global market place this idea must surely be past it’s use by date.

More troubling to me is the apparent rejection of external competition by Australian consumers. A strong competitive market drives innovation, value for money and diverse options. There are constant calls for increased competition across a range of sectors in Australia but it seems that consumers only want local competition.

I find this a strange reaction from a country that prides itself in punching above its weight in many areas on the global stage from mining to biotech to Olympic medals.

The other chart that caught my eye examined optimism for the coming decade.

If the first chart was disheartening then this one is worse.  Australia is the least optimistic for the coming decade of all the countries shown and well below countries in arguably a much worse economic position. We have enormous mineral wealth, a good economy by global standards, low unemployment, and good opportunities for most people. Yet we are caught up in pessimism that just does not seem to be justified.

Perhaps the U.S. is so much more optimistic because they are in a worse economic position at the moment and people there can’t, and don’t want to, imagine that it will get worse over the next 10 years.

On the other hand perhaps the bruising political debate here in Australia over the last two years has really taken a toll on the Australian psyche. If that is the case it is a pity because the “she’ll be right” attitude that Australians have been so proud of, and famous for, in the last 100 years seems to have been tarnished in the process.

Next week back to our normal programing but these two charts seemed too important to skip over.  What do you think they represent?

By Adam Ramshaw

Recent analysis of Net Promoter Score data from one of our clients indicates that NPS is almost three times more sensitive at predicting customer churn than customer satisfaction. In addition, Detractors are 1.5 times more likely to terminate than Promoters.

nib health funds is one of Australia’s leading and fastest growing health funds.  As an organisation, nib has embraced the Net Promoter Score process.  They have integrated transactional measurement of NPS into the Customer Care Centre and other key customer touch points using the CustomerGauge NPS data collection and reporting system (full disclosure: we sell the CustomerGauge system in Asia).

As a company, nib uses daily feedback from its NPS survey to coach Customer Care Centre consultants, perform service recovery and drive improvement in products.  In short, nib is working hard to listen to its customers and deliver the best possible service.

During this process we wanted to look more closely at nib’s data and see exactly how NPS linked to business outcomes for the health fund.  A couple of months ago nib generously agreed to provide us with some de-identified data that included customer response scores and termination information. This gave us a great opportunity to test the link between NPS and customer retention.

Background

Private health insurance is an interesting industry because you essentially pay upfront for a service that you hope never to use.  In Australia we also have a system where health insurance companies are not allowed to “risk rate” their pricing.   In simple terms it means companies must provide private health insurance cover and charge the same premium irrespective of your age and sex. All this means that the most important customer facing driver of business success in health insurance is customer retention.  While the idea of upselling to a higher level of cover does exist, keeping customers longer is key.

Results

With data from 20,000 Transactional NPS surveys and 12 months of termination history for those accounts we had a great set of information with which to work.

Also, the nib survey is a little different to the standard Transactional Survey in that it includes a “Customer Satisfaction” question as well as the “Would recommend” question. This made it possible to for us to look at the effectiveness of each question.

In summary we found that:

• A one point increase in “Would Recommend” score results in a decreased of risk of termination by 7.8%
• A one point increase in “Customer Satisfaction” score results in a decrease of risk of termination by 2.9%

This means that as a predictor of customer attrition the standard “Would recommend” question is 2.7 times as effective as customer satisfaction.

We also found that:

• The risk of attrition for Detractor respondents is 1.5 times that of Promoter respondents

I don’t really have to spell out why this is important. You can see that Promoters are linked much more strongly to retention success.

To us this was great confirmation that the NPS approach works. For nib it means that they must keep delivering a great service for their customers, secure in the knowledge that NPS is a great way to determine which customers are happy and which are not.

We would like to acknowledge the support of nib and thank the health fund for allowing us to publish these findings.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

“Capturing Customers”, “Luring Customers”, “Attracting Customers” and “Keeping Customers” are all terms used daily in marketing departments.  They invoke images of carefully prepared fly patterns, practiced casts and the adrenalin of a good strike, ending with the satisfaction of a catch of the legal size, a ‘keeper’.

Many organisations view customers in the same way that the fishing industry viewed Atlantic fish stocks.  Stay with me I’ll make this work.

Some marketers, (not you gentle reader) allow various product managers to fish the same customer waters day in day out.  They use nets, lines, perhaps even explosives,in fact  any technique they can to catch all the fish they can for their product line. Large fish, small fish, dolphins and seals, no matter, the sheer weight of fish is all that matters, catch them and the folks in accounts or risk management can sort them out later.

But it can’t go on forever and interesting things happen as fish stocks deplete.

The fish get smarter, other fishermen take too many fish, whatever the reason; basically the fish get harder to catch and the expense per fish climbs. Successful fishing campaigns become rare and marketing more superstitious as ‘luck’ starts to play an increasingly important role in determining which Product Manager gets the good haul. Internal competition for access to the schools of customers increases and increasingly intense fishing worsens the yields.

Sometimes marginal species are harvested in a, short-sighted, effort to keep the canning lines busy; the aquatic equivalent of aggressive discount programs.

Product Managers lobby for increased and more elaborate fishing rigs as they range further and further, perhaps even targeting species considered commercially marginal in the past.

If we are lucky, at some point, governments, alarmed by the threat to their fishing industries, step in. They appoint a governing body to preserve breeding stocks by limiting:

• the number of product managers allowed to chase the fish,
• the techniques they use and
• the times of year they can operate.

Old and inefficient ships are mothballed, replaced with more efficient technology that reduces collateral damage to the customers.

As a group they legislate the number of campaigns allowed and the quality of the fish allowed in a catch.

Importantly they crack down on rouge product managers with “exciting new ways to catch fish” because the problem is not acquisition as much as it is sustained, quality yields. Poaching can ruin decades of planning so all parties sign treaties and help stop uncoordinated campaigns to unsuspecting customers.

They do NOT do this by relying on the self-restraint and self-regulation of individual ship-owning fishermen (product managers). Each and every one of who will insist that the other fishers show restraint first.

Enough fishing

Who “owns” the customer interactions in your company, who makes the rules that govern who does what to whom and when? Marketing? Sales? Accounts Receivables? Branch or Store Managers?

The real objective of defining customer ownership inside the organisation is to allow the enterprise to treat its customers rationally. If your answer is “all of the above”, you run the risk of looking irrational to your customers and overfishing your customer base.

There is nothing rational in offering me a credit card upgrade that is not available when I call the toll-free number provided. It is irrational to offer me a home equity loan and an increased credit card limit in the same mail delivery.  There is nothing rational about writing to me to combine my gas and electricity accounts into one with you when I already have. But I have received these within the last 30 days.

Customer Governor

So the question is; who is ensuring that you act rationally with your customer base and you don’t ruin your long term business?

One answer is establishing the role of Customer Governor, a person or team that researches your customers.  Your organisation needs to understand:

• customer needs and behaviours,
• the level of fishing they can sustain before costs exceed the value of the catch and
• how to profitably sustain the long term relationship between them and your company.

And then sets rules defining customer interaction that are understood, followed and enforced within the company.

The Customer Governor takes on this role and ensures that long term value for the company is maintained and built over time, not squandered.

Customer Experience Management

If you’re looking to implement a customer experience management project why not start by downloading our free 4 Steps to Great Customer Experience Management report.