Читать книгу Blind Spot - Nathan Shedroff - Страница 26

The next step in understanding a relationship is to see what happens to customers as they connect with touchpoints over time. Remember: a single wonderful experience is not enough. You have to make sure your customers have many valued experiences over time to keep the relationship going and that these different touchpoints reinforce each other, collectively. To do this, experiences must happen on your customers’ preferred time frame.

Many businesses have this figured out. Hotel services are usually arranged around their customer’s schedule, rather than what would be best for them. If the hotel had its way, the most efficient path would be to have visitors up, fed, and out the door as early as possible. That way, its housekeepers could come in all at once, in one shift, and do their thing. But the customer may not want that, which is why housekeepers linger with little to do in the early morning. Similarly, it would be best for a fine dining restaurant to get through as many customers as possible in a short time. Instead, they move at their customers’ more leisurely pace. This highlights two ways to organize an experience through time.

• Corporate time. The schedule on which companies can efficiently produce and deliver products, services, events, and promotions.

• Customer time. The continuous engagement customers have with the world as they interact with a company. In other words, they live in the world and that drives the pace they want.

The biggest difference between the two is that customer time isn’t only focused on one organization’s products and services in a vacuum. For customers, time flows along in their lives as they interact with everyone’s products and services (not just one company’s). Designing experiences from the customer’s perspective needs to take into account a much wider set of events. Corporate time usually lurches forward on its internal schedule and only takes into account what happens in the organization. There are campaign launches, product drops, important trade shows, ad schedules, and so on, many of which have nothing to do with what customers want.

A great example of this is how many technology companies approach the release of new versions of their products. A vice president at an enterprise software company tells of the dynamic within his company that governs product releases. He explained how customers aren’t interested in frequent releases to the products they use; in fact, customers don’t want their products to change often. So, their tolerance for change is low, as are their expectations of the need for change. However, the leadership within the company is highly concerned about losing great salespeople who look for the opportunity to resell software in order to earn their commissions and keep their jobs lucrative and interesting. Two years is about all they’ll wait for a major update that allows them to resell to their past customers. In this case, corporate time calls for a release every two years, whereas customer time wants something much more gradual. The two are in marked conflict, and which path the company chooses says something about its relationship priorities.

It’s important to understand and be sensitive to customer time. You can’t merely look at moments when you reach out to your customers. You have to look at what happens at all times. Your customers don’t just live in your world. They have touchpoints with your competitors, partners, each other, and a myriad of other sources. They live in a world that is much bigger than yours, so you should take account of at least some of these other interactions if you hope to build a successful relationship with them. That doesn’t mean you must interact with them all of the time—in fact, you want to stay out of the way when you’re not wanted. But you do need to take their mindsets into account, interact when they want you to, and make them feel better if you can. Remember after 9/11 when movie studios pulled their release schedules for violent films or stalled comedy programs until people were in better moods (or bigger need) to laugh? Those actions were responding to customer time instead of corporate time.

Above all, you should not put customers on corporate time if you can avoid it because it has nothing to do with their lives. They may put up with it, but they won’t love it.