Customer Expectations are Progressive: Relationships that Don't Get Better Get Worse
Time has a nasty way of turning even your best assets into liabilities and even your happiest customers have a way of taking yesterday’s “miracles” for granted (or worse – thinking that your products and services are old and tired) and looking elsewhere. They’re always looking for the next new thing and the news media and the competition conspire regularly to stoke these desires for novelty and change.
If you’re there to respond to these ever-expanding requirements and demands, you have a good chance of holding your own. But that’s about it. On the other hand, if you want to grow your business, you need to anticipate these new consumer demands – not simply react to them – and you need a plan and a program to consistently get out ahead of your customers. Relationships that don’t move forward and improve consistently deteriorate. One day, you turn around and the customer is gone. And by and large they don’t give you any real warning; they don’t generally complain; and they certainly don’t ask your permission. They just disappear.
If you aren’t aggressively watching your business and your customers and your competition, this situation won’t be a problem for too long because you won’t have any business to worry about. Suffice it to say, you can’t sell anything sitting on your seat and you can’t learn anything with actively and consistently listening to and for your customers. As you’ll see, even when we try to listen, we often miss the main messages because we tend to listen primarily for what we want to hear – not what we need to hear.
Here’s a quick example about doctors – some of the worst listeners in the world. One of my earliest businesses was Original Research II and our job was to measure customer satisfaction across many different industries. We were asked by a very large group of doctors to determine what considerations were most important to their patients and prospective patients. At the same time, we also polled all of the doctors in the practice to determine what they believed were the main drivers for patients. The results were fascinating and frightening.
Patients’ Actual Priorities Doctors’ Presumed Drivers
Location Specialty
Office Hours Board Certifications
Free and Convenient Parking Technical Skills
Insurance Coverage Referrals – Word of Mouth
A Great Receptionist Insurance Coverage
Needless to say, these results were the rudest of awakenings for the doctors. It was absolutely clear that a concerned and considerate staff was WAY more important than the most highly-trained surgeon on the team.
We did a similar project for bank officers and compared what they felt were important considerations for their customers to the customers’ actual concerns and the primary causes for customer defections. There were a number of issues, but the overwhelming disconnect was that more than 67% of the customers felt that inattention was the worst possible sin and the largest problem – they could live with everything else – but when they came to believe that no one was paying attention to them, they stopped caring and left.
The bank officers, on the other hand, were largely consumed by mechanical and procedural considerations like price, interest rates, errors, credit decisions and paid only scant attention to the fundamental emotional consideration and customer desire of being appreciated and wanted. The only thing that we could say in their defense is that it was probably true that their primary interactions with the customers related to these process issues and that the customers probably felt uncomfortable expressing to anyone their personal feelings about how they believed the bank treated and regarded them. No one wants to be a number.
But here’s the really sad part of this story. Failing to connect, cultivate and extend your relationships with your existing customers means that you are forfeiting the opportunity to harvest the easiest and most cost-effective additional profits available to any business. Spending time and money to find new customers (conquest marketing) is OK, but deepening your involvement with your current customers and increasing their average spend as well as locking them in for life (relationship marketing) is the brass ring.
PP: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”
