CRM - January 2008 - (Page 10)

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY BY LIOR ARUSSY Fix What Works The ever-evolving journey toward exceptional customer experience M U C H H A S B E E N W R I T T E N about the importance of companies understanding and addressing customer needs. The majority of the efforts we have witnessed focused on identifying areas of dissatisfaction, planning to address those problems, and resolving them. As the new period of strategic planning is drawing near, I would like to propose a new perspective: Fix what works, not what’s broken. Focus your strategic planning on the areas customers are most satisfied with—and improve them. No—do not merely improve: Redesign. Move those elements from consistent to exceptional. Why bother, if customers are already satisfied with those aspects of their experience? Shouldn’t we work instead on the areas that dissatisfy them? Well, consider that every organization has a core competency, an innate ability to produce an experience that makes customers keep coming back. Customers appreciate this experience and reward it with repeat business and loyalty. And yet every organization also has areas of FIXING YOUR FLAWS SHOULD NEVER COME AT THE COST OF FAILING TO IMPROVE WHAT YOU ALREADY DO WELL. TODAY’S DIFFERENTIATOR IS TOMORROW’S COMMON SENSE. weakness. Each organization seems to perform well in certain areas—let’s call these experience delighters—and fail in others—experience disappointers. Customers keep purchasing from a company because of the experience delighters—and despite experience disappointers. To put it another way: Your customers are willing to endure the disappointers if you provide great experience delighters. Those experience delighters are your core competency—and they have to stay competitive and cuttingedge. These are the reasons your customers keep coming back. They expect you to excel in those elements. Therefore, your top priority is to make sure your experience delighters remain top-notch and continue to define your industry. That doesn’t give you license to ignore your experience disappointers. In a perfect world you would excel in 10 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2008 them as well. But in the real world, where we face limited resources and time, we may allow them to take a backseat to the experience delighters. The common mistake is to assume that the customer experience is a destination, an action item that needs to be checked off. In this flawed notion, executives assume that what works should not be tampered with, and that they can safely move down the to-do list to the points of dissatisfaction. In reality, though, the experience disappointers most likely represent areas in which they will never excel. At best, the company might be able to plug the leak and establish a low level of consistent mediocrity. But if the price of doing so is losing the edge provided by your experience delighters, you may have to rethink your priorities and your allocation of resources. The customer experience is a journey, not a destination. It is not a single peak to be conquered but a multi-peak, ever-evolving expedition. You can never sit still. Today’s differentiator is tomorrow’s common sense; your current experience delighters are tomorrow’s point of entry. So your top priority is to make sure you stay on top— and differentiated. You are less likely to differentiate based on your experience disappointers; they are not your core competency. Therefore, although you need to fix those disappointers, do not lose sight of your number-one priority: making sure that your experience delighters remain distinct, differentiated, and increasingly pleasing to customers. In this year’s strategicplanning session, aim to fix what works. That’s what customers want most from you. Lior Arussy is president of Strativity Group and the author of several books, the latest of which is Passionate & Profitable: Why Customer Strategies Fail and 10 Steps to Do Them Right! (Wiley). He can be reached at lior@strativity.com. www.destinationCRM.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2008

CRM - January 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Facebook's About-Face On the Scene: Oracle OpenWorld 2007 CRM Market Set to Double Customers, Meet your Makers Required Reading Oh, Behave! Fine-Tuning the Channel Listen Up! The Master Piece Flying High on Customer Service Let's Get Digital The Big Rigs Get Revved Up Putting Asia in Your Pocket Secret of My Success Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - January 2008

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