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Duck Tales

May/June 2003

Focus on the Customer

Leafing through my usual business journals and periodicals, I recently realized that there’s not much being said about the customer these days. Whatever happened to “the customer is always right,” and “the customer is king”? Have these old adages fallen by the wayside? You can bet your tail feathers they haven’t! These days, we just have other more pressing concerns like security issues and the economy. The customer is still king, so let’s honor his royal presence in this issue of Duck Tales™!

Making Dreams Come True

How well does your product or service reach your customers? If it’s meeting your customers’ needs, your product or service is fulfilling some basic requirements. But to surpass the competition and enhance customer loyalty, you must be ready to meet your customers’ dreams. That doesn’t mean creating luxurious products or services just for the elite. It means foreseeing what excites your customers and exceeding their expectations. It means moving beyond mass-production to individualized products that customers remember for a long, long time. Here are a few ways to fulfill your customers’ dreams:

Individualize. While change is ever present today, some dreams are timeless, like power and knowledge. Be ready to adapt a product to meet the individual needs of customers. Capitalize on more than appearance; incorporate as many senses as possible.
Sell it with style. Fulfilling dreams requires more than simply providing a product or service. It involves creating an image and a campaign that excite customers as well as educate them. Extend as much effort in launching a product as you do in creating it.
Choose wisely. Focus on “great” customers. Great customers look for more than value. They’ve saved on other things so that they can splurge on their dreams. Don’t count on them to be faithful until you’ve surprised them, pleased them, and fulfilled their dream.
Invest in creators. Knowledge is becoming readily available in today’s society. True “creators” can foresee customer needs before knowledge becomes apparent. Use these creators to interpret your customers’ dreams and create products or services based on their intuition.

Customers Helping Themselves

The passive customer is almost extinct. Today’s activist customers not only know what they want, they expect value, service, and quality to be a standard part of an organization’s way of business. And they expect expediency in all of these elements. Businesses that want to serve today’s customers should consider digital technologies that give their customers nearly everything they need to do business with them. From e-commerce, to 24-hour telephone help lines, to self-service kiosks, activist customers depend on technology to provide them with superior value and service.

Companies not using digital systems should consider how many of the following digital activities their customers can do themselves:

Can they find detailed information about your products and services?
Can they place an order themselves?
Can they check on the status of an order?
Can they make comparisons among products?
Can they find answers to their technical questions?
Can they read what other customers say about your products and services?

The more questions that you answered no to, the greater the chance that both you and your customers are suffering, due to inefficiency and frustration. While you don’t need to convert to an entirely digitized operation, many simple programs can help your customers help themselves.

Designed by You

Many companies today are listening to their customers, but few are asking the right questions. As a result, their focus groups, surveys, and other customer query methods fail to generate answers that lead to better products and services.

One of the most effective ways to engage customers in improved product development is known as “design by users,” and it can yield major advances for businesses. Businesses ask customers to roughly design an ideal product or service without any concerns about the costs or implementation issues associated with the design. The home-furnishings retailer, IKEA, chose the design-by-users method to create a new IKEA store in Chicago. Nine groups of a dozen customers each were asked to design a new IKEA store from scratch. The groups created designs that fulfilled all of their wishes for an ideal store, including easy-to-locate departments, similar products located nearby, and streamlined checkout processes. IKEA took their ideas to heart.

The results? The new Chicago IKEA had sales twice of what the store initially anticipated. Over 85 percent of customers who shopped at the Chicago location rated the shopping experience excellent or very good. The Chicago store had more return visits, and shoppers spent an average of one hour longer than they did in other IKEA stores.

Speed It Up

The company that hesitates, loses. This play on the old adage is right on target for today’s organizations. Customers no longer wait patiently for a business to come along with a better deal. They want instant replies, instant sales, and instant service. As Aetna’s CEO Ronald Comptom explains, “Be quick or be dead” (or as we ducks like to say, “sink or swim”). Here are a few ways companies are learning to be faster and more flexible in today’s marketplace:

Get organized. Develop new ways to deliver goods and services to customers. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina, for example, used a workflow analysis by Xerox to cut their production time for a benefits booklet from 45 days to five days.
Focus on your future. Stop analyzing the competitor and redefine and reinvent the way you do business. If you focus only on your competitors, they’ll be forging ahead while you’re merely studying their tactics.
Recognize failure. The more quickly a business admits something isn’t working, the faster it can focus its time and resources on new processes, products, and services. Every company should analyze its activity for at least the past six months. If goals aren’t being met, or profits are down, the organization could be out of business in no time without some fundamental change.
Think “flexibility.” Companies today must be ready to move quickly—whether it’s to modify a process or introduce a new product or technology. Look at everything in the organization in a new light, asking yourself and your employees, “How can we do this better?” or “How else could this be used?”

Thanks for Your Loyalty

With competition among companies at an all-time high, more businesses are relying on loyalty marketing programs to help retain customers and boost an organization’s image. Loyalty programs offer a number of benefits. Customers who are rewarded for their buying behavior are more likely to explain why they buy a product to a company representative. They also tend to enjoy the special recognition a loyalty program offers, which entices them to remain with an organization.

To be successful, a loyalty program must include two elements: tangible benefits of economic value, and soft benefits that have emotional and recognition features. Loyalty marketing programs should be based on purchase data as well as conversations with customers. The programs should also feature continuous customer development.

One of the oldest and most successful retail loyalty programs is through Neiman Marcus. Shoppers using a Neiman Marcus credit card earn points for each purchase. The points entitle them to receive gifts; the more points they earn, the more lavish the gift. The soft benefit aspect of the program notifies members about exclusive events and promotions.

Winning the Gold

When the Olympics come to town, the world is your customer— literally. Such was the case in Salt Lake City in 2002, as the town hosted the XIXth Olympic Winter Games. So how do you train 26,000 volunteers in the fine art of customer service? Olympic officials left nothing to chance. Along with specific job training, officials concentrated on customer service techniques that would have the world complimenting them long after the Olympic flame went out.

Experts trained the volunteers using the acronym CHARGE, which stands for Committed, Helpful, Adaptable, Respectful, and Gracious. In addition, volunteers learned how to deal with the toughest customer challenges. Olympic volunteers were taught to be willing to help even when situations became difficult and to immediately acknowledge any concerns of visitors and guests. They assured visitors that they would deal with their problems immediately and restated the concern to show that they understood the problem.

In addition, the volunteers always thanked the visitors for their patience and understanding in finding a solution. While the volunteers have long since disappeared, their attention to the needs of the individual is a long-lasting lesson in treating the customer right.