Who’d have thought it could happen so quickly? From the carmaker with a reputation for manufacturing the most reliable products in the world, constantly topping JD Power customer satisfaction surveys, to the laughing stock of the industry.

From first to last

Toyota has a UK advertising tagline expressly designed to make its customers feel smug and superior – ‘The car in front is a Toyota’. Now, how do you feel as a Toyota owner when the words popping into the head of the driver behind you whose eyes travel to the ‘T’ symbol on the boot of your car (and our eyes always do, don’t they) are the latest popular addition to the tagline? ‘-because the accelerator is stuck and the brakes don’t work!’ In the US, the tagline – Toyota: Moving forward – is open to exactly the same adaptation.

Watching the launch of Apple’s iPad, I was struck by the fact that Steve Jobs famously doesn’t pay too much attention to customer research. (“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants,” he said recently).  And yet – or should that be because of – this refusal to pay much attention to what customers say they want, Apple has become the ultimate game changer.

Whether the iPad – a giant version of the iPhone, more or less – is as big a success as Apple’s last two blockbusters – the iPod and iPhone – remains to be seen.  If history repeats itself we will be asking ourselves in two years, “How did we ever do without the iPad?”. Jobs’ determination to carve his company’s own path to innovation is an example of why you need to be bold to win in business today. And that includes how you listen to customers.

Shaun Smith previews a major talk he is giving on February 1st in London, by outlining what it means to be bold, with a little help from Picasso and Apple. This will be the first preview of new findings from Shaun’s new book:

Bold is an attitude of mind, but it’s measured by how you behave.  As we emerge from the recession it is becoming evident that those brands that have stayed true to their purpose and focused on differentiation are those that are gaining and sustaining market share.  A perfect example of this is Apple that has continued to gain market share throughout the recession and now earns about twice as much per customers as it rivals.  But Apple is not driven by making money but making a difference. As Steve Jobs once said ,

We are currently researching leading brands for our forthcoming book ‘Bold brands-how to be brave in business and win’. There are some obvious examples that we shall include but one brand that is causing us to pause for thought is Ryanair, the low cost airline.

Our research and experience of working with many leading brands suggests that those organizations that have a crystal clear view of their strategy and communicate their value proposition to target customers will outperform their sector. We also believe that the more focused organizations are in creating a customer experience that delivers their brand promise the more likely it is that they will win share of mind and ultimately, share of market.

Marketing is all a-twitter with the opportunities represented by web 2.0 and social media for sharing consumer word of mouth – both good and bad. But the reality is we have always had the ‘twitter’ effect, with reputations made and broken by consumers sharing their experiences with each other. Take the example of a ladies’ lunch I overheard the other day in the restaurant of a Malmaison hotel – (incidentally, Malmaison are a great example of how to craft a distinctive customer experience. Their latest hotel in the UK is Oxford Castle, a former jail. The cells have been converted into bijou rooms).

How to turn customers into terrorists

Books can be like buses. The ones you want are conspicuous by their absence, and then two that you want come along at the same time.

Here are two recommended reads from us here at smith+co , both of which are just published.

I Love You More Than My Dog

Jeanne Bliss is the author of Chief Customer Officer, having honed her own senior level ‘customer officer’  skills at Lands’ End, Microsoft, Mazda, Coldwell Bankers and Allstate. Her latest book looks at how to become a beloved company. At the core of I Love You More Than My Dog is Jeanne’s central premise that “Your decisions reveal who you are and what you value“. In the book, Jeanne says that there are five decisions that dictate whether you can become a loved company like IKEA or Virgin…or not. Beloved companies, says Jean, decide:

Photo copyright (c) istockphoto. Licence purchased.

Janine Dyer writes:

I like my postman. He’s always polite, cheerful, smart and delivers my DVD rentals without nicking them. I also empathise with him.  He has to get up at 5 o’clock every morning and deliver not only my mail, but also the Royal Mail brand values of “expert, proud, together, trustworthy and hungry”. Not so easy. (As an aside: hungry? Since brand values are ideally designed to be lived by staff every day, as they deliver those values through the customer experience, what exactly does that mean? That as well as getting up at 5am, my postie isn’t allowed breakfast before he delivers?)

I think it’s time to put down a marker and outline how we can avoid CEM (Customer Experience Management) technology investment repeating the same mistakes as the last decade or so of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) investment. Hence this post. Here goes…

Gartner, the information technology research and advisory firm, has reported that the global customer relationship management (CRM) market grew 12.5% in 2008 to $9.15 Billion from $8.13 Billion in 2007. Yet one study found that 55 percent of CRM installations drove customers away and diluted earnings.

We have no excuse for this. SEVEN years ago, in the Harvard Business Review article, “Avoid the Four Perils of CRM” (February, 2002), the authors, Frederick F. Reichheld, Phil Schefter and Darrell K. Rigby, suggest that the main reasons for this failure are:

1. Implementing a CRM system before creating a customer strategy
2. Installing CRM technology before creating a customer-focused organization
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I was speaking at a Customer Experience conference recently and was asked by one of the delegates "So what comes after CEM?" We have grown up on a diet of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) first being exhorted to embrace TQM, then BPR, through CRM, CMR and now CEM (Customer Experience Management), so it seems perfectly reasonable to ask about the NBT (Next Big Thing!).

But to do so runs the risk that CEM will follow a path of being a fad rather than a sustainable route to achieving competitive advantage and customer growth. My answer was that I don't believe there will be a "next big thing," rather we will find more rigorous ways of implementing CEM across new channels and employing innovative new ways to satisfy customers. I can't conceive of a time when customers or what they experience will ever become obsolete.

CEM has become well established in the US and UK markets and is becoming increasingly a "hot" topic in the newer emerging markets. Unfortunately with so many consultancies jumping on the CE bandwagon it is not always implemented with the level of rigor needed to achieve significant business results.

(c) Photo copyright istockphoto . Licence purchased.

The Sunday Times of the 9^th August published a letter from British Airways in response to a complaint from a Mr Rae. The passenger had purchased business class seats for himself and his wife as a special treat when flying to their son's wedding but were disappointed by a series of menu choices that were unavailable and wines that had run out.

Now, the nature of air travel is such that not every menu choice can be stocked for every customer – there is simply not enough room on the plane, but nevertheless the passenger seemed to have a legitimate complaint so it was interesting to read B.A's response. I am showing it here in full in order that we might learn from it. This is what they said:

"More than three-quarters of our Club World customers say they are either extremely or very satisfied with the meal services onboard. We can only apologise for the fact that, on this occasion, the food didn't match the expectations of the customer."