To Delight Customers Requires an Appropriate Value Proposition

Doug Leather
Member

Posted 08-Jul-2004 07:37 PM
I note with interest the discussions about customer delight. I prefer to make reference to Customer Experience which really deals with the combination of the way a company performs across all touch points and the emotions that are evoked as a result there-of. A 'wow' experience leads to delight!
I'm interested in comment and examples of relevant Value Propositions that you may know of that align with the delivery of the 'appropriate' customer experience. We know of Club Med not being about having a holiday, rather being all about re-inventing yourself and Harley Davidson providing customers with a 'rebel lifestyle' rather than selling motorbikes.
A 'customer based' value proposition is key because it sets the expectation that client has of company and, equally important, it sets the behaviour standard of staff in engaging with customer. What "best practice' examples can you share?

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 09-Jul-2004 02:49 AM
Doug

Take a look at the excellent book, 'Uncommon Practice: People who deliver a great brand experience' by Shaun Smith and Andy Milligan.

The book looks at the people behind the ideas behind the household names of Virgin, Pizza Express, Banyan Tree, Oxfam International, Midwest Express Airlines, Harley-Davidson, Pret a Manger, Tesco, easyGroup, Krispy Kreme, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, RBC Financial Group, The Carphone Warehouse, Manchester United, Harrahs, John Lewis, Richer Sounds and
Amazon.com.

These examples are of companies who already have strong brands and that have developed experiences that matches the brands. They invite customer to EXPERIENCE THE BRAND.

There are however, far more companies whose experience does not match the brand's communicated promises (90% according to one survey). Just think of your typical financial services or telecoms company! And there are also far more companies who offer very good experiences, but who have not yet developed an equally strong brand. These last two groups should focus on alignment of the two but through BRANDING THE customer's real EXPERIENCE, rather than the other way round.

These two contrasting forms show the importance of the brand-experience-customer connection in business today. The glue that binds them all together is understanding how value flows between the customer and the company's brands along the end-to-end customer experience.

Building a superior customer experience is much more than just a brand-led activity as so many in branding would have you believe.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist
Advisory Board
Member
Picture of Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist

Posted 16-Jul-2004 05:00 AM
Doug

I agree with your comments on the customer experience. Unfortunately, the concept of "experience" is being rapidly overused and runs the risk of becoming yet another casualty of the jargon-filled world of CRM. My view is that the customer experience consists of virtually all aspects of the customer's interaction with the firm. Thus, there are rather ordinary components of the experience as well as potential "WOW" aspects. Many companies seem to be equating "experience" with entertainment or over-the-top service. So, my first point is that companies must also pay attention to the rather mundane aspects of the customer experience before they can move on to "WOWing" the customer. If these are not done well, we can forget about delight.

Secondly, we should be considering the concepts of experience and delight in the context of customer expectations. If expectations are low, it's relatively easy to impress. However, as competitors and our own strategies lead to increasingly impressive customer service, the proverbial bar gets raised and the customer expects more. I don't believe we should set out to "WOW" the customer every time. If we do, the bar will be raised fairly quickly and we are unlikely to be able to deliver on the implicit promise. Rather, I believe that firms should strive to meet expectations on a regular basis and to educate their employees to look for opportunities to impress every now and then. It's the unexpected events that create the "WOW", particulartly when they are delivered in what appears to be a spontaneous context. By definition, we don't expect to be surprised!

Finally, on to the notion of the value proposition. This is a more complex concept than many seem to believe. In my mind, it consists of virtually everything that a firm offers its customers, from tangible products and core service, to how we answer the phone, to the attention we pay to indiviudual customers that leads to the emotional response to which you refer. Thus, there are rather basic "table stakes" aspects of the value proposition, that include product quality, on-time delivery, functioning web sites, etc. But there are also emotional aspects that are largely delivered by people—how we talk with customers, how we respond to their requests, and the feelings that are generated as a result. These latter examples refer to what I call the "soft" side of the value proposition. Companies should take a more holistic view of the value proposition so that they look for ways to make the emotional connection with the customer. The "hard" side is expected and is unlikely to create much of an emotional response.

Cheers

Jim Barnes

Jim Barnes specializes in Customer Strategy as a member of the CRMGuru Advisory Board. For more information, please visit Barnes Marketing Associates.

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 19-Jul-2004 08:00 AM
Jim & Doug

Reading through Jim's response it is hard to do anything except nod in full agreement. Life is usually much more complex than it seems on the surface. And as Jim suggests, it is in ensuring that all the business basics that underlie the sensed, felt and thought about aspects of the customer experience that companies need to be focussing upon today.

However, there is an important difference in the value proposition that customers experience during touchpoints along the end-to-end experience and how the value proposition is communicated. And that difference is in the details. You just cannot communicate the wealth of detail that sits underneath a experiential value proposition through words and pictures alone. So you have to settle for a potted summary to bring customers in and then communicate more and more aspects of the value proposition during the experience itself.

Few companies seem to have thought deeply about how they communicate the value proposition during the experience itself, relying upon the experience itself to do the talking. But that is tantamount to simply abandoning the customer to their own devices once they start the experience!

Getting business basics right is table stakes. So is communicating a simple value proposition to bring customers in. More and more added value is now to be found in designing 'cues' into the experience to communicate and reinforce the value proposition being experienced.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Exchange Synergism
Member

Posted 10-May-2006 02:11 PM
WOuld you believe maybe we should think a wee bit more about the value the customer receives ? We found a great (academic) article about this by Tony Woodall that we think is cause for pause...

Read the exec sum here http://www.mscforum.com/kb.php?mode=article&k=25—there's a link to full text (free) there as well.

This is an overarching value proposition analysis framework rather than looking at experience or relationship per se, which are components of the value that the customer ultimately is acquiring.

This may be out of scope for this forum, but we feel value TO the customer is a sadly under-discussed concept.

David McNab
Exchange Synergism Ltd.
http://www.mscforum.com

George R
Member

Posted 11-May-2006 09:55 AM
A user-centered approach for leading customer experiences and relationships can be found in the CRMGuru article http://crmguru.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/crmguru.cfg/php/end...adp.php?p_faqid=1464

An extension of this is the "Cycle of Engagement" which can be freely accessed at http://thankingcustomers.com/engagementcycle.html

George Reavis
http://thankingcustomers.com

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 13-May-2006 05:44 AM
David

You are so right. Companies have invested an enormous amount of time and effort into working out how they can extract value from customers, but a whole lot less time into working out what value they must provide to customers in return. And customers are not happy about it. This is the difference between strip-mining customers and farming them. And we all know how barren the landscape is after strip-miners have finished with it.

The whole notion of what academics call "Customer Perceived Value" is not new—the first book I read on the topic was "Know Your Customer: New Approaches to Understanding Customer Value and Satisfaction" by Woodruff and Gardial back in 1996.

But there is a growing interest in CPV in business right now, driven largely by increased commoditisation of business' offerings, increased information available about them and the growing power of customers to decide their own purchasing fate. Slowly but surely, power is migrating from the hands of businesses into the hands of customers. The Internet has greatly speeded up this process and has become one of the most used and most trusted sources of product & company information available to Joe Public. And mostly for free.

Faced with this change in the balance of selling power, smart companies are starting to look at how customers perceive value and how that changes the nature of the products they offer and the end-to-end consumption experiences in which their products are embedded. And the smartest companies are now starting to involve customers in product innovation (P&G, Eli Lilly, Fiat, etc), in the marketing of their products (Mercedes, Mastercard, Converse, etc) and in customer self-service (British Airways, Vopdafone, Tesco, etc).

This is the new Internet-enabled "Customer2.0" world. In this world, the customer really does have a chance to become king.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

PS. There is a summary of the academic literature on CPV at the University of Tennessee's Castomer Value/Marketing Strategy Forum at http://bus.utk.edu/IVC/customervalue/readings/index.htm#JournalArticles