Outside Innovation

How To Provide Customers with a 360-Degree View of Their Context

By Patty Seybold

We need your help! Ronni Marshak and I are revising our book, Customers.com, which was published in 1998. We’d like to “crowdsource” this next generation edition. Every few weeks, we’ll offer you a new chapter or section. We’d like your help in making this a truly useful “Bible” for everyone engaged in designing their businesses from the customers’ point of view. Here’s how:

1. Read the chapters that interest you as they appear and add your thoughts, comments, and criticisms here. 

2. Contribute your own suggestions about companies or organizations that would provide great examples for each chapter—we’ll do the research.

3. Contribute your own ideas—either customer-centric principles you adhere to and/or lessons you’ve learned that you’d like to share. 

In the original Customers.com, the fourth of our eight critical success factors for “Making it easy for customers to do business with you” was “Provide a 360-Degree View of the Customer Relationship.” That mantra has become a holy grail for virtually every organization’s CRM charter. But we think it’s wrong!

In today’s customer-driven economy, customers demand more. They want to drive. They don’t want you to gather information about them in order to sell them more stuff. They do want your help in getting things done.

So Ronni Marshak and I have changed that critical success factor to: Provide a 360-Degree View of Each Customer’s Context. In this chapter, Ronni describes what we mean. We welcome your reactions, feedback and ideas! We are also seeking good examples of at least two case studies to go with this chapter. We welcome your ideas!

How Amazon Could Keep Our eBook Business, Even If We Switch to the Apple iPad

By Patty Seybold (and Clients & Colleagues)

 
It’s not often that we’re faced with the dilemma of choosing between two exceptional customer experiences. The advent of Apple’s iPad poses that dilemma for me. I’m almost certain that once I start using Apple’s iPad, I will use my Amazon Kindle less and less. And that means that my impulse buying, not just of digital books, magazines, and newspapers, but also of digital music, movies, TV shows, and games will move to Apple. Why? Because the iPad is seductive. It embodies the incredible Apple “i-”user experience and I’ll be able to enjoy crisp black and white reading, brilliant color reading, and interact with my content, my friends and colleagues, and the world while relaxing in my favorite leather armchair or lying in my hammock.

This troubles me. I am seduced by the iPhone, but I’m still in love with the Amazon customer experience. Amazon has made my life easy since 1994. I entrust most of my purchases to Amazon. They rarely let me down. I’ve had great customer experiences. I act on many of the recommendations they give me because they know what I love.

Seeking Advice When Torn between Two Loves

So, this week, I sent out an SOS to my family, friends, and my smartest customers—Patty’s Pioneers and Patty’s Visionaries—the people who are my role models—the lead users who break new ground in customer experience and business innovation. I asked them for advice: Advice for me and advice for Amazon. Here are a few of the things they recommended for me, for other loyal Amazon customers, and for Jeff Bezos at Amazon to consider:

According to my clients, Amazon should:

1. Make it easy to buy digital goods FOR all platforms FROM all platforms.

2. Sell easily portable content

3. Provide the best digital library and back-up services

4. Continue to offer the Kindle Reader software across all devices

5. Support color and better graphics on its e-Readers

6. Sponsor an Open Source e-reader platform

7. Embrace ePub and other E-Book formats that are publishers’ standards

8. Provide competitive commissions; but compete on price

How to Make It Enjoyable for Customers to Get Things Done!

What’s the one thing you can master that will win you more happy customers? Identify the things that customers want or need to get done, notice the context they’re typically in, and design an experience that will make it enjoyable for them to get those things done. We call these Customer Scenarios.

Most customer-centric executives have an innate ability to identify customer-critical scenarios. For example, many retailers design streamlined experiences for the “grab and go” customers. “I just ran out of something and I need it fast.” Staples rearranged its stores to put the printer supplies right at the front so that people who just ran out of ink or toner can run in and get what they need. They worked with manufacturers to ensure that you can quickly find the supplies you need for your particular printer. The paper is right next to the ink and toner. Staples also streamlined the rebate process to make it easy for customers to get a good deal. Staples’ “That was Easy” branding is all about making it easy for customers to get things done.

There are entire industries designed to support particular customer scenarios, like planning and taking a trip (travel agencies and aggregators), investing for retirement (brokerage and mutual funds), and launching a new product (PR firms).

We’ve been using customer scenarios in our consulting practice for over 20 years. We’ve been teaching others how to engage with customers to co-design them for almost as long. Yet we often assume that people know what we mean by customer scenarios and why they’re an important basic tool for any customer-centric executive.