Today it is critical to respond to this new world, or to anticipate it and get ahead of the pack. We decided it was time to write our next book. We no longer believe that B2C or B2B are accurate terms to describe the way companies and customers relate to each other. We now see only a Me2B model: The customer directs the relationship, and businesses need to think first and foremost from the customer's point of view.
At the same time, we've seen a trend toward poor consulting in the customer experience space, creating the risk that important insights that could help companies adapt and grow would be improperly dismissed as a flawed or trumped-up fad. The average customer experience consultant seems to be focused on repeated research around detailed change journey mapping and an obsession with measurement and monitoring. Others home in on culture or measurement and feedback systems to the exclusion of everything else.
We have nothing against customer feedback surveys, research groups, or analysis of the customer experience. Yet our observation is that the industry of customer experience is starting to be dominated by those with a vested interest in only one or two solutions. We believe that meeting customer needs in this new era where your customer rules requires a holistic and integrated approach, and that companies can save time and money by not making this a “research and customer feedback” problem. We suspected that there were some underlying principles to the customer experience that had never been clearly articulated but whose guidance was needed. So we set out to prove that companies could put these new principles into practice.
Our first book focused on simplifying, automating, and eliminating customer interactions, and at the end offered ways for organizations to maximize the positive effect of interactions when they occurred. This time we wanted to dig a lot deeper into what was required to deliver a great experience at every point of contact from pre-sales through using the products or services. Both of us run cross-industry forums where members seek out customer best practices and bring them into discussions as case studies. We knew that few organizations, even those with great reputations, rarely do everything well for the customer. Our goal was to bring all those stories together to define what the ultimate customer experience – and the theoretical company behind it – might look like. With help from our global LimeBridge partners, we interviewed organizations that seemed to be doing things well and tried to distill out their “secret sauce.” The more we researched, the more we observed dominant patterns, which we ultimately boiled down to the seven key customer needs we describe in this book.
We present both good and bad stories that illustrate these seven needs. We have no hesitation in naming the good companies or good stories. However, we have deliberately not named the protagonists in what we have called the bad stories. This is because some of them have been clients of ours and therefore we are restricted by contracts and confidentiality. Rather than name some and not others, we thought it fairer to leave them all unnamed and we hope you enjoy trying to work out who they are.
Our Unique Process
This remains a very unusual collaboration. We live on different continents and are usually sixteen hours apart: David in Melbourne, Australia, and Bill outside Seattle in Bellevue, Washington, in the United States. (David always tells Bill what his next day will be like!) We only got together once in the same room during the writing of this book. Everything else was done using Skype, shared Dropbox files, and other tools. The fact that we're able to work this way reinforces that, as in global business, incredible partnerships no longer need to be local.
We hope you enjoy exploring how your customer rules and the seven Me2B needs with us, learning from the many examples both good and bad that we've assembled here so that you can then build your own path to greatness.
Chapter One
From B2C to Me2B
Customer service today gets slammed by customers right and left. While technology offers the promise of highly customized, seamless customer experiences at limitless scale, few companies have fulfilled on that promise. Consumers seem to share the impression that service and sales interactions are getting worse, not better. In many industries, customers are complaining more, with Internet-enabled breadth and speed. To pull a few recent headlines:
“Complaint-to-Compliment Ratio of MBTA Tweets Remains High.”1
“Npower Ranks Top for Moans: Customer Complaints Against Energy Giant Soar 25 %.”2
“70 % of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter.”3
In the utilities industry in Australia, for example, the volume of complaints to the central complaints body (the Ombudsman) has risen dramatically despite no significant change in customer numbers – doubling in five years, four times the rate of population growth. Similar complaint bodies in other countries such as the Office of Communications in the United Kingdom show complaint rates rising over the same period.
Despite billions spent to win customers' affection, we are only just exceeding the levels of customer satisfaction reported in the early 1990s. In addition, customer switching between providers is on the rise, often prompted by a poor customer service experience.4 The companies that are lagging in customer experience perform poorly compared to customer experience leaders across a variety financial data points. For example, a Watermark Consulting study compared the six-year stock performance of customer experience leaders and laggards against the S&P 500, and found that leaders exceeded the S&P by 28 percentage points while laggards registered a 33 percent decline in stock value.5
As we all wait endlessly on hold with customer call centers across the world, only to keep repeating information to agents that we've given elsewhere in the purchase process, who can resist yearning for the good old days when mom-and-pop stores offered personalized and knowledgeable service? Perhaps selection and store hours were more limited, but at least business owners knew their customers as well as they did their products and were excited by both. Perhaps you can still remember going into the corner grocery store with Mom, watching with delight as the owner pulled out something special that he had ordered for her, along with a treat for you. Reconciling past and present creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that recalls a scene from the iconic '80s film Back to the Future, in which Michael J. Fox, transported via a plutonium-powered DeLorean back to 1955, stops dead in his skateboard tracks as he watches customers being waited on at the old full-service gas station.
What Used to Work, Doesn't Work Anymore
So what happened? Have our needs changed over the years, bringing customers and businesses out of sync? Or are companies today simply failing to deliver on the needs customers have always had?
Certainly, the landscape has changed. Today's businesses are bigger and incredibly more complex. Scale may have produced efficiency and economy, but it has distanced executives and management from their customers and from their frontline employees. Not only are businesses now headquartered in cities many miles from their customers, in an era of global operations the top executives may be in another country and speak another language. Senior management rarely spends time talking with customers, listening to their calls, or asking customer-facing staff for their take on what customers are saying. The bottom line is that scale has dissolved intimacy,