Often I listen to professional services business people talk from a position where they think they own and control their customer via some right assigned to them through their education, business or financial acumen.
Seriously, no-one owns the customer. I personally think it’s very disrespectful of the customer. At the end of the day the customer calls the shots via their wallet. Where this isn’t the case there is usually something else at play and it’s often more sinister, something I call intellectual deception. These behaviors are often legal and facilitated by the system and regulations for that industry. In law you see this all to often.
This TED talk by Philip Howard below actually hits on some of these issues (you need to read between the lines). I think Philip may be editing himself. It takes a brave person to do this talk and face off against his peers and industry. It’s not just in the area of Law that you see this. It’s observable in banking, accounting and financial planning.
In business we should have some control over the customer relationship but it must be earned and lay in a bed of respect. If you kill their problems, find ways to save them time and help them get what they want, then you are deserving of their trust. Then your grip will be firm. Quite often customers have faced intellectual deception and they end up “lawyer haters”. So they become careful with their trust. Then as a business you are only as good as your product, advice and possibly the most recent dealing you had with them.
In Alvin Toffler’s world of information overload, our businesses have a constant struggle with diminishing attention offered by customers. To tackle this the creation of a per customer communications profile can help. The metaphor is a pre-nuptial. It specifies how your relationship will exist between your business and your customers. How you create this communications profile can vary from a social unwritten contract like a retailer has with their customer or it might be more explicit like a form your customer fills in to specify when and what correspondence they want to receive from your business.
Every piece of communication you send to your customer demands their time. There is an equation that roughly says the more you demand then the less attention the customer will probably give your demands. If you annoy them too much, they stop listening and reading. So logically you can attribute a cost to each piece of communication. This attention economy is all about treating this attention like a commodity. Every single email, letter or phone call is an exchange of value. If you are selling something and not giving anything then you are spending a large piece of the attention dollar the customer affords you. If you give education then it is lower. If you solve a problem or save their time then you will probably be adding to the attention piggy bank you have with that customer. They will want more.
So you can design this relationship so both you get more attention and the customer gets more value. If you can monitor customer behavior and reaction so as to understand how they would like to relate to your business rather than how much, then you can grow the attention piggy bank. The customer will give you more time because you have created a bespoke or targeted approach to their communication needs, to solving their problems or giving them the actual information they want rather than fire the 12 gauge information shot gun at them. The catch is that this costs time or else money to automate it.
There are many approaches to move to a communications profile model and some very interesting business models are springing up to help businesses achieve this. Companies like Datarati are dealing with medium enterprise in this area using bleeding edge technologies like Marketo. It’s a data driven approach that at the end of the day will have a robustness above the implied or gut feel approach that most business owners currently rely on. Other simple things that can be done by small business are forms that asks customers what they want from your business when they become a customer. Many inexpensive email systems now have features built in to give you insight into customer behaviour so you can provide them with just what they want and when they want it without even asking them.
This is all about the customer deciding rather than the business. Put the customer first, then the business and sales will follow. Listen and watch their behaviour or ask them what they want rather then serve up an overload of communications and information.
All business will be done this way in the future so it really is just about how fast you get there.
Service Seeking is a Saasu customer who’s business is getting businesses competing head to head to try and win work from a buyer. Service Seeking produced a Start Up Online series of videos. Saasu was included in one of the videos – thanks Jeremy and Oliver for the mention!
Saasu use a couple of the tools mentioned in the video (below) which is the third in the series. It was nice to see we think alike. One tool is tech related but the others can be applied to most business models.
Got a video about what technology or services you use in your business? Let us know.
