Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us? How do we fix it?

People don't judge you on the basis of your mistakes—they judge you on the manner in which you own up to them. In my experience, most companies do a terrible job of taking blame. They lob press releases. Or they apologize for the inconvenience. Resist that temptation and say you're sorry like you're apologizing to a friend. Be good—and your customers will be good right back to you.

How do you maximize the experience that customers have in the value zone where they meet your company’s work? We think the answer is for management to see itself as an enabler, and for employees to see themselves as “doers” with a great deal of accountability and autonomy: the ability to choose much of what they do. In this way, we create organizations in which employees are aligned with the customer.

Psychological studies have consistently shown that it’s very difficult to compare and contrast the attributes of more than about seven different things. When faced with the cognitive demands of choosing, people often become overwhelmed and frustrated. As a result, they may forgo the choice altogether, reach for the most familiar option, or make a decision that ultimately leaves them far less satisfied than they had expected to be.

Don’t marketers have to give consumers what they want? Yes and no. We should give them what they really want, not what they say they want. When consumers say they want more choice, more often than not, they actually want a better choosing experience. They want to feel confident of their preferences and competent during the choosing process; they want to trust and enjoy their choices, not question them.

[Companies] typically ... never take time to do an ecosystem scan to see whether the tribes that they might want to engage with are already congregating somewhere else. If your tribes already have a home, trying to get them to move (no matter how good the web design/site) is akin to focusing your whole go-to-market strategy on switching customers who use competitive products. It can be done if your competitor is offering subpar products, but it is rarely a successful stand-alone strategy. Similarly, trying to get an existing community to move to the site you’ve provided is not likely to be successful. Companies that are open to the possibility of partnering with other communities will have a Hyper-Social advantage.

Too many companies are addicted to bad profits, profits that come at customers’ expense and drain the value out of customer relationships... Bad profits come from unfair or misleading pricing. Bad profits arise when companies save money by delivering a lousy customer experience. Bad profits are about extracting value from customers, not creating value... A company earns good profits when it so delights its customers that they willingly come back for more and not only that, they tell their friends and colleagues to do business with the company. The right goal for a company that wants to break an addiction to bad profits is to build relationships of such high quality that those relationships create promoters, generate good profits, and fuel growth.

Your customers and prospects won't understand or appreciate a value, or a bargain, or a service, or a benefit, unless and until, you first educate them to appreciate it. Merely offering a product or service at a specific price (even the best price) doesn't compel excitement, or a response, until you tell people what they're getting, what a value it is compared to other products and services, and why you can offer such value.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that
there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.

A lot of marketers call the Internet an “attention economy.” They are looking for consumers who will pay attention to their product, and they try to calculate consumers’ propensity to purchase. They think that attention means intention. But it doesn’t. The reality is, people don’t go online to give attention, but to get it. They don’t want to be part of the audience. They want to perform and to be heard, to be present. It’s an almost biological urge.

People spend a lot of time online not looking for something, or at least not for something that can be bought or sold. Marketers need to understand that the Web is not about them; it’s about us. Marketers and media sites keep thinking, “Well,if we can only tweak our banner ads right, we can get the same success rate as Google.” But they can’t, because a banner ad is usually shown to someone who is not looking for the item advertised.

I believe CRM is built on a fallacy because customers don’t want a relationship with their bank or their grocer or their supermarket.

Tesco does not have a CRM programme. Tesco has a loyalty scheme and what this is saying is, ‘we get your data for giving you money back, and with the data we will give you a more relevant experience in our shops because you choose to shop there’.

Much of the hype surrounding CRM overlooked the customer. There was nothing in it for the customer. CRM became a means of doing things more cheaply - such as introducing a paperless relationship and offering the customer a £5 discount for signing up online. And many customers were underwhelmed by such propositions.

In many systems, the whole is not the sum of its parts. The system takes on its nature by the interactions of its parts.

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

Loyalty is not necessarily an emotional connection to the brand. True brand evangelists—or even potential evangelists—are at best rare and possibly non-existent. Companies need to recognize, develop and manage more than one kind of customer loyalty: conditional, emotional and passive—using more than one kind of strategy.

An organization must, at the outset of considering using a CRM system, decide whether the main goal of the CRM system is to guide future behavior of the employees of the organization to shape the future (increase sales, number of satisfied customers, number of new leads generated, reduced turnover of key sales personnel, etc.) or to predict future sales so that the company can position itself appropriately to meet the expected demand. For a CRM system to provide both types of services (predicting the future and helping shape the future) a huge undertaking must take place and one that understands that these two uses of CRM are separate. Using CRM in both of these ways at once, (predicting and shaping the future of sales for the organization) may even require separate, but integrated planning teams to pull off this type of "daily double."

One way to generate a precise customer value proposition is to think about the four most common barriers keeping people from getting particular jobs done: insufficient wealth, access, skill, or time.

The central challenge of a segmentation strategy isn't how to develop one—a variety of approaches work—but how to make it useful and integrate it into a company's ongoing planning and performance-management efforts. The segmentation must explicitly link corporate financial objectives to the behavior of people in a segment and to customer experience goals. This linkage allows general managers and marketers to understand how the experiences of valued customers influence behavior and how behavioral shifts drive core product or service objectives. It also provides predictive (as opposed to static) measures of customer profitability.

Abundance has satisfied, and even over-satisfied, the material needs of millions—boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning.

Most large companies have a foundation of fact about their customers in their data warehouses and business intelligence systems in the form of structured data: purchase history, coded responses to surveys, service ticket types, and so on. This foundation, however, lacks critical customer information, which floats above the fact plane. Call-center notes, open note sections of surveys, emails, weblogs, chat rooms, online forums, product reviews—and more—must be incorporated into the intelligence-gathering and analysis functions of a company.

Many companies are learning that the only way to be customer-centric and to have a customer-driven business strategy is to leverage this feedback across the organization methodically, comprehensively, efficiently, and effectively.

[In sales] we talk about acquisition, penetration and retention. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be acquired. I certainly don’t want to be penetrated, and I don’t want to be retained. When you think about the language we use—targeting an audience, launching a campaign, capturing a market—what does that have to do with relationships?

The studies we’ve conducted are 100% conclusive: customers who’ve had an issue that was resolved effectively became more loyal than those who experienced trouble-free service! Why? Because until a problem occurs, the customer doesn’t get to see us strut our service.

A lot of our energy and drive as a company, as a culture, comes from trying to build these customer-focused strategies. And actually I do think they work better in fast-changing environments, for two reasons. First, customer needs change more slowly—assuming you pick the right ones—than a lot of other things. Second, close following doesn't work as well in a fast-changing environment. The strategic value of close following is in not having to go down all the blind alleys. You let smaller competitors check those out, and when they find something good, you just quadruple down. If you're following close enough, and the arena is slow-moving enough, the fact that you're not first down that path doesn't hurt you much.

In the past 20 years, American companies have perhaps learned too well a lesson they had long been inclined to ignore: Businesses should be customer oriented rather than product oriented.

...At last, however, the dangers of too much reliance on this philosophy are becoming apparent.

...The argument that no new product ought to be introduced without managers undertaking a market analysis is common sense. But the argument that consumer analyses and formal market surveys should dominate other considerations when allocating resources to product development is untenable. ...Customers may know what their needs are, but they often define those needs in terms of existing products, processes, markets, and prices.

Deferring to a market-driven strategy without paying attention to its limitations is, quite possibly, opting for customer satisfaction and lower risk in the short run at the expense of superior products in the future. Satisfied customers are critically important, of course, but not if the strategy for creating them is responsible as well for unnecessary product proliferation, inflated costs, unfocused diversification, and a lagging commitment to new technology and new capital equipment.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that's pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren't studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently - in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the "best" of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

There's nothing wrong with these tendencies. Ultimately, we're all social beings, and without one another to rely on, life would be not only intolerable but meaningless. Yet our mutual dependence has unexpected consequences, one of which is that if people do not make decisions independently - if even in part they like things because other people like them - then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually impossible, no matter how much you know about individual tastes.

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called "cumulative advantage," or the "rich get richer" effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors - a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous "butterfly effect" from chaos theory.

Popular metrics such as customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention have turned out to be very poor indicators of customers' true perceptions or the success of marketing activities. Often, they're downright misleading. High overall customer satisfaction scores, for example, often mask narrow but important pain points-areas of major dissatisfaction-such as unhappiness with poor customer service or long wait times. They can also mask backsliding against competitors; while gently climbing satisfaction scores may be reassuring to management and the board, if competitors' scores are increasing faster it should be a cause for alarm. Acquisition rates may be robust, but if old customers are abandoning ship as fast as new ones are coming on board, strong acquisition can give a deceptive picture of marketing performance. And what, exactly, should the board make of stable customer retention? If customers are staying on because they're held hostage by a contract, good retention may be obscuring the truth that customers will flee the instant they can.