Ten myths about your customers: Strategies for creating customer loyalty

Who Stole my Customer? Winning Strategies for Creating and Sustaining Customer Loyalty

Excerpted with permission from "Who Stole my Customer? Winning Strategies for Creating and Sustaining Customer Loyalty," by Harvey Thompson, Copyright 2004. Published by Prentice Hall, 2004, ISBN 0131453564. For more information about this book and similar titles, please visit www.prenhallprofessional.com.

Chapter 8: What They Want: Ten Myths About your Customers

The Ten Common Myths

OUR CUSTOMERS:

1. Want the lowest price -- period
2. Other key wants are known by us
3. Cannot envision what does not exist
4. Do not want to be telephoned at home -- always
5. Do not want to be sold to when they call us
6. Do not want to provide us personal information
7. Hate to be transferred when they call
8. Won't accept an apology, so don't do it
9. Are unique, and so are their needs
10. Their needs (not wants) are known by us

Consider how to attract and retain customers on a value proposition other than price: What about their purchasing process? Their accounts payable process? The service they receive? The valueadded expert advice that can be given to help the customer better use that product? In many cases these can be leveraged to provide great value to differentiate a firm or product and can often warrant your higher price, although your competitors offer a lower price.

Myth 2: We know what our customers want (or don't want).
Perhaps the greatest inhibitor to go beyond "Have a nice day" service platitudes is the belief within a firm that its prior history and years of experience result in perfect knowledge of what customers want and do not want. Virtually every firm at one time has felt it could skip the development of requirements via "customer visioning" and go straight to implementation of new processes and channels for customers. After all, the firm has been in that business for (insert number of decades here) and no one knows their customers better than they do.

There is, in fact, someone else who better knows what the customer wants -- the customer! In order to develop an ideal, customer-defined future vision of the firm, there is no other substitute.

That does not mean that the company has no valuable information at all. Front-line, customer-facing personnel can be a valuable source of information regarding the performance of current processes, channels, and product or service offerings. Customer complaints and customer service contacts provide excellent feedback on what's not working. The important thing in those cases, however, is that the information still come directly from the customer, not from your intuition due to years of "being in the business."

However, over time it can become less clear which of your beliefs regarding customers is actual, literal customer feedback versus intuitive beliefs formed and reformed over the years. The result can be a strongly held set of beliefs, such as those of the bank contact center, that are rigidly driving the wrong actions. Even if you once knew exactly what your customers wanted, in the current environment of rapidly rising service levels, those desires are fast-changing and if you have no formal vehicles to monitor these, then you do not know them.

Finally, while front-line employees may know what customers like or dislike about current products and services, they often lack the ability to place themselves in the customer's position to envision creative new offerings and interactions that would appeal to deeply hidden or newly emerging customer value systems. By probing directly with the customers why they want things -- and understanding how customers get value/benefit from the things they want -- it is possible to jointly envision and develop creative, new breakthrough ideas. Which brings us to the next customer myth.

Download the chapter to find details on the other top ten myths, as well as exercise questions to help determine how you can better build customer loyalty.

Read the rest of this excerpt and download Chapter 8: What They Want: Ten Myths About your Customers

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