Customer Service Reader

Zaltman on creativity

Notes from How Customers Think, Gerald Zaltman

80% of all new products or services fail within six months, or fall significantly short of forecasted profits. The reasons boil down to a failure to understand how customers think, and how we think about how customers think. Our mental doors are stuck, and we have to pry them open.

To understand our customers, we have first to acknowledge that they do not necessarily understand themselves.

Their motivations are often beneath the surface; 95% of decision-making goes on subconsciously.

We should also understand and develop our own habits of mind. These habits help us be more creative about how we discover what customers want, and what to do about them.

Restlessness. We should make our own work out of date, and view conclusions as beginnings, rather than endings. Ask “what makes me restless,” and make sure you have plenty of whatever it is that does.

An appreciation of the irregular, and an eye for the odd. Welcome the unexpected. How can I better detect anomalies? How can I create anomalies?

Reasoned but visceral stubbornness. Have cool passion. Be more committed to the process of creating ideas, than to the ideas themselves. Seek knowledge from other domains. Maintain the courage of your convictions. Tolerate those who disagree. What foreign fields are most interesting, enjoyable, and important to visit?

Wide peripheral vision. Ask generic questions. Avoid premature dismissal. What makes me curious and nosy? What tempts me to break things that work?

See also:
Lou Carbone, What makes customers tick

What Makes Customers Tick?

Excerpts from What Makes Customers Tick?
Lewis P. Carbone, in Marketing Management

Most businesses have no idea why customers behave as they do 

• There's never been a better time or a more compelling reason to get to know your customers. Given the challenges facing business today, it's not surprising that the Marketing Science Institute lists "greater insight into the customer experience" as one of its top research needs. Increasingly, we have the means to achieve that end. Innovative new approaches and research tools are now becoming available to help businesses expand their view of customers and dig deeper to understand what truly makes them tick.
• The practice of going directly to consumers to find out what they think about a product, service, or experience is a basic foundation for business decisions every day. Implicit in this practice is the assumption that customers will accurately report their thoughts and desires. Yet time and again companies engage in painstaking and expensive research to guide new initiatives, only to find that consumer behavior in the marketplace bears no resemblance to what their research indicated.
• Marketing has always been based on taking consumers at their word - on grilling them for insights about their tastes, buying habits, and brand attitudes. Yet approximately 60%-80% of all new products fail. Why? Because traditional research doesn't take into account how the consumer mind works.

How the Brain Works

Up to this point, much of the effort put forth to understand customers has dealt with how they behave and what they have to say. What has not been developed -- in large part because the capability hasn't existed -- is a deeper understanding of why customers behave the way they do.

• Most conventional market research assumes customers understand how they develop preferences and feelings about their experiences. However, we're learning that the conscious choices consumers make are determined almost exclusively through unconscious processes.
• By relying on consumers to accurately report why they act the way they do, popular research methods like focus groups and surveys very often force customers to develop "intellectual alibis" -- to make sense out of things that they simply aren't able to articulate due to their subconscious origins. Instead of the real reason for buying or not buying something, these conscious-centered approaches result in rationalizations based on how people think they ought to be motivated.
• The good news is that in the last decade neuroscientists have learned more about how the human brain works -- how people process data, both consciously and unconsciously -- than in all previous centuries combined. Because of this, we can now begin reaping valuable insights based on how customers formulate their thoughts and preferences about a product, service, or the total experience.
• In particular, modern neurological research shows that people don't think and draw conclusions in linear, hierarchical ways or in exclusively conscious ways. Instead, they glean cues and bits of information from all the senses, above and below awareness, to form a composite experiential impression that becomes a basis for preference, loyalty, and advocacy.

What Customers Can't Say

• Opinions, even though they are conscious expressions, seldom tell the complete story. Science is proving that the unconscious dynamics of customer thinking provide the richest understanding of attitudes, behavior, and loyalty tendencies. Studies in neuroscience have revealed that as much as 95% of all thinking occurs in our subconscious, which means it is also the starting point for conscious action.
• It's that dynamic linking that explains the failure of conscious-focused research activities to correctly predict consumer responses in the marketplace. Like the tip of a very large iceberg, the rational reasons consumers give for their buying decisions and preferences are highly influenced by the mass of information below the surface of consciousness. By the time people become aware of a decision on a conscious level, it has already happened in their unconscious mind.

Choose Your Tool

• New approaches are emerging that provide windows into unconscious consumer thinking. And "experience management" perspectives and techniques are making it possible to translate that information into more relevant day-to-day interactions.
• In How Customers Think, Gerald Zaltman states that the foundation for understanding customers is to "draw on research from an array of disciplines to extend managers' comfort zones." Those disciplines may range from musicology, neurology, philosophy, and linguistics to the more familiar fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Combined, Zaltman notes, they give marketers powerful new tools to help them "better understand what happens in the complex system of mind, brain, body, and society when consumers evaluate products and the experiences they have with them."
• What follows are some examples of innovative approaches in the areas of interpersonal, observational, and linguistics research. From them, it will become more obvious how drawing on an array of disciplines offers marketers expanded options for putting together a more complete picture of consumers.

Thinking Metaphorically

One of the most productive of the innovative research strategies pioneered by Zaltman is the study of the metaphors that consumers use to express their thoughts and feelings (the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, or ZMET for short).

• A metaphor is a way to understand one thing in terms of something else. For example, the metaphor of "being in good hands" has nothing to do with being physically touched or held, but the meaning is clear.
• Neuroscience has revealed that humans think more in images than in words. For this reason, metaphor elicitation researchers rely on visual images chosen by respondents in one-to-one customer interviews to help surface metaphors. When recognized and probed for the thinking behind them, metaphors are considered reliable vehicles for transporting unconscious thoughts to conscious awareness.
• This is enormously useful information because, as Zaltman states, "no matter what the characteristics of a product, experience, or brand, it will always be initially perceived by consumers in some organizing framework or metaphor." What's more, universal metaphors are often revealed after probing just a handful of interview respondents. Once surfaced and recognized, these metaphors become an invaluable form of shorthand for understanding how offerings and experiences fit into people's lives. And those insights often become the basis for new product designs, communications, or experience designs.

Learn by Observing

Most businesses rely on that hard data in lieu of observing consumers in their natural settings -- and often miss important insights as a direct consequence. But companies are discovering that simply observing customers offers a wealth of information they cannot get with traditional research methods. With enhanced technological capabilities, watching consumers in their natural settings is becoming an important part of the expanded research mix.

• During development of Quicken, its top-selling accounting software, Intuit brought users into labs and even sent engineers into people's homes to see how they used the product. This took engineers a step beyond what customers verbalized and enabled them to see how clients physically used the product. "This type of observation gives you a depth of understanding beyond which customers can articulate," says Craig Cunningham, CEO of Customer Integrated Solutions, a consultancy that helps companies create client-driven initiatives. "It gets you past what clients think they need and helps you see what they really require."
• Paco Underhill, a retail anthropologist, has done considerable research documenting the "science of shopping." Through video observation and customer interviews, he has observed more than 1,000 distinct shopping elements, everything from how shoppers negotiate department store doorways on a busy Saturday to how often they touch the merchandise before buying and the intricate ballet of product placement on the shelf.

The Right Words

When an organization understands the effect of certain words in specific contexts, and is able to cue metaphors where possible, the impact of its communication can improve exponentially. The fast-deepening science of linguistics offers marketers exciting ways to understand customers and communicate more effectively with them.

• Charles Cleveland, founder of Communications Development Corporation (CDC) and former director of the Academic Computing Center at Drake University, has developed patented conversation analysis software that can make ultra-fine distinctions in the human communication process. It does this by comparing the language of one context (or group) to another and recommending the necessary language shifts to move to the desired context.
• To see the power of even simple nuances, consider this example from "The Little Words in Life," a paper delivered by Cleveland in 2000 as part of the University of Toronto Distinguished Fellow Series. Imagine you are renting a car at an airport. And you're in a hurry. The agent at counter A says, "I'll have a car for you soon." The agent at counter B says, "I'll have the car for you soon." Which car agency would have the edge in making you feel most confident that your need was understood and it would be met? Most likely rental counter B because the words its agent used, "the car," imply it has a specific car picked out, creating an impression that the vehicle is being readied just for you and will be brought down in a minute. At the other counter, "a car" left a more general impression -- it's even possible someone might still be out searching for a car in the lot.

The implications for how customers experience businesses in the years to come are profound. Organizations that develop expanded approaches for understanding their customers will gain powerful competitive advantages. It's the difference between trying to make judgments from a single snapshot or having an array of perspectives from different vantage points that offers a far more holistic and truthful picture. The ability to play back a video, assess body language, gain insights from verbal contexts, or surface meaningful metaphors will lead to far more relevant connections with customers, which will lead to greater differentiation, loyalty, and value for all concerned.

Read: Lewis Carbone, Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again
Hear: Lou Carbone & Chuck Feltz, Experience As A Value Proposition
See also: Gerald Zaltman on Creativity

What customers want

This summary of factors is a work in progress, derived from various articles in this Category. It is rendered in table form in the Customer Service article in Wikipedia.

Good People

• Friendly, helpful, courteous
• Empathetic
• Knowledgeable, accurate, thorough
• Able to recommend solutions
• Able to anticipate needs
• Resourceful, empowered
• Efficient
• Trustworthy, authentic
• Reliable
• Responsible
• Appropriate appearance and demeanor

Good Offering    

• Good selection
• Good quality
• Available demos
• In stock
• Clear descriptions & pricing
• Competitive prices
• Financing, deferred payments

Convenience    

• Convenient locations
• Long hours
• Available help, fast service
• Signage that facilitates self-service
• Fast checkout
• Shipping/delivery
• Installation
• Phone/web support
• On-site repair
• Hassle-free returns
• Quick resolution of problems

Good Environment    

• Clean
• Organized
• Safe
• Low pressure
• Energy level appropriate to clientele

Easy to surprise

Excerpts from Dazzle Me! By the editors at Dartnell. Writer: David Dee

Deliver surprisingly superior service

“Go the extra mile for customers” is another way of saying, “surprise customers by doing something extra for them.” If you make a personal commitment to surprise your customers, you’ll have gone a long way to providing service that far exceeds the service average reps provide.

Here are four ways you can achieve this simple personal goal:

1. Surprise customers by always being courteous.
2. Surprise customers by doing more than they ask for.
3. Surprise customers by taking pride in your work.
4. Surprise customers who have come to expect the worst by being professional in your bearing and manner.

Commitments to yourself

1. To always maintain a professional manner and appearance.
2. To greet customers warmly and to always make them feel welcome and comfortable doing business with you and your organization.
3. To always be prompt, courteous, and friendly in serving customers.
4. To always adopt a problem-solving attitude when you handle complaints and inquiries.
5. To carefully assess each customer’s needs and recommend specific products or services that will provide the highest level of satisfaction.
6. To find the right answers to all customer questions and to keep up-to-date on the products and services your company offers so you can pass the correct information on to your customers.
7. To be familiar with all organizational procedures and policies so you can handle every customer transaction with minimum error and delay.
8. To follow up on inquiries from customers and ensure their satisfaction.
9. To know your company’s promotional campaigns and to support these efforts whenever you deal with customers.
10. To turn new customers into returning customers by providing the kind of service they expect and are entitled to.

The Golden Mean

Who love too much, hate in the like extreme,
And both the golden mean alike condemn.
- Alexander Pope, in The Odyssey of Homer

Although I am a customer service radical, I do not believe in such platitudes as the “customer is always right”. The customer can be wrong, or worse, insane. So I do not believe that you should always give them what they want. A revolution based on such unrealistic claptrap sows the seeds of its own destruction. You will not be able to stay in business if you give away the store.

Many companies that are renowned for customer service - such as Disney, Nordstrom, and Ritz-Carlton - can afford to do almost anything to appease their customers, even when they’re wrong. That’s because their margins are so high. You cannot afford to be so liberal when you’re competing in a low-margin industry.

And a lot also depends on the cost of the accommodation. It’s easy enough to give away a free day pass, or a free pair of shoes, or a free night’s stay. Not so easy to give a plasma TV away.

Too often I have seen companies swing from one extreme to the other. For example, they’ll start with a liberal “Satisfaction Guaranteed” return policy. They eventually notice that returns are hurting their sales, and that mountains of rejects are piling up on their floors. They panic and swing the other way. No returns past 14 days. 15% restock on open-box product. Eventually they notice that their customers abandoned them for the store next door, and that their employee turnover went through the roof because people just couldn’t take getting screamed at anymore. And back they swing again.

The right thing to do is, of course, somewhere in the middle. If you’re a low-margin business, you must have policies that are competitive – not much better or worse than your competition. Then you must give your people the power and the training to bend the rules. Here’s the principle: The policies are there to protect the company from bad customers. Your people are there to protect good customers from the policies.

Such a balanced approach requires that you hire people with experience and judgment. If you can’t afford to hire such people into front-line positions, you must define specific guidelines within which your people can play. If you think that hiring the right people and training them is just too much trouble and expense, enjoy the swing.

Setting delivers service

Excerpts from Be Our Guest, Chapter 4: The Magic of Setting
Disney Institute

Setting is the environment in which service is delivered to customers, all of the objects within that environment, and the procedures used to enhance and maintain the service environment and objects. More simply, setting is the stage on which business is conducted.

• If you ask the typical businessperson how their company delivers service to customers, they will surely mention people and processes as primary delivery systems. But the idea that an organization’s setting can somehow deliver service is more obscure.
• Setting can deliver both the physical and psychological aspects of service.
• All organizations, knowingly or unknowingly, build messages to their customers into the settings in which they operate.
• Picture a luxury car dealership and a used car lot. Now, a theme park and a carnival. And now, a designer clothing retailer and an outlet store. In each pair, people are buying similar products—cars, entertainment, and apparel. But, in each case, the setting in which they buy these products is communicating a great deal about the quality of the products and services customers can expect, not to mention the price they are willing to pay.
• A good exercise to better understand the messages sent by setting is to visualize a store that you patronize or better yet, actually visit It. Drive up to the front entrance and look at the signage and landscaping. What impression do they convey about the business within? Enter the business. Look at the entryway. Is it clear how to proceed? Is it clean and orderly? What does it tell you about this organization? Continue to observe the setting throughout the process of making a purchase. At each step, think about what the setting is telling you. Now, return to your own organization. Approach it like one of your customers and repeat the exercise. What does your setting tell customers?
• The simple fact is that everything, animate and inanimate, speaks to customers. Not only does everything speak, it also acts upon customers. The messages delivered by setting change customers’ perceptions about the products and services that we sell.
• As R. Buckminster Fuller aptly said, “You can’t change people. But if you change the environment that the people are in, they will change.”
• The point of all of this is that setting is a critical element of the Quality Service Cycle and it is vital that settings be designed and managed to effectively communicate and deliver service to customers.

The Components of Setting

• Architectural design
• Landscaping
• Lighting
• Color
• Signage
• Directional design on carpet
• Texture of floor surface
• Focal points and directional signs
• Internal/external detail
• Music/ambient noise
• Smell
• Touch/tactile experiences
• Taste

Setting also includes the work of maintaining and enhancing the environment and the objects within it. Even the best-designed setting must be continuously maintained and improved. A poorly maintained setting is just as telling as a poorly designed one. Maintenance means more than just keeping the setting clean. It also means protecting it from damage, and repairing wear and tear.

A lot of work

• Telling a story through setting means getting the details right. An organization can’t send customers a believable message regarding Quality Service unless every detail of setting supports it. An overflowing trash basket or a dead plant can undercut a message about the quality of your product or the care for your customers in a single glance. A sign with missing letters or misspelled words tells customers something about you.
• If it all sounds like a lot of work, it is. For all of its success, the Disney theme show is quite a fragile thing. It just takes one contradiction, one out-of-place stimulus to negate everything. Put up a brown-paper-bag sign that says “Keep Out” . . . take a host’s costume away and put him in blue jeans and a tank top . . . replace that Gay Nineties melody with rock numbers . . . place a touch of artificial turf here. . . add a surly employee there . . . it really doesn’t take much to upset it all.
• What’s our success formula? It’s attention to infinite detail, the little things, the little, minor, picky points that others just don’t want to take the time, money, or effort to do. As far as our Disney organization is concerned, it’s the only way we’ve ever done it . . . it’s been our success formula. We’ll probably be explaining this to outsiders at the end of our next two decades in the business.

Service processes

Excerpts from Be Our Guest, Chapter 5: The Magic of Process
Disney Institute

• Take a process orientation to service delivery. Roughly three-quarters of service is delivered via processes. Processes are the policies, tasks, and procedures used to deliver service.
• Collect and analyze combustion statements. Combustion statements are indicators of service issues that need to be solved. Listen to and study your guests to identify and optimize those issues before combustion points become explosion points.
• Optimize guest flow throughout the service experience. Create the perfect service flow by optimizing the operation of products and services, allowing guests to self-manage their experience, and effectively managing unavoidable waits.
• Equip your cast to communicate with guests. Fielding questions immediately is an important component of customer satisfaction. Provide your cast with the right information in the right manner, at the right time.
• Create processes for guests who need service attention. Identify guests who need service attention, such as children, international customers, and people with disabilities, and implement processes to ensure they get a positive experience.
• Debug service processes continuously. Make an effort to continually improve your service processes at every opportunity. Fix design flaws and oversights. Adapt new technologies and techniques, and solve your customers’ problems before they ask for help.

Three elements of magical service moments

Excerpts from Be Our Guest, Chapter 6: The Magic of Integration
Disney Institute

There are three features of great service moments to keep in mind. They are high-touch, high-show, and high-tech.

• High-touch refers to the need to build interaction into the guest experience. For the most part, we humans enjoy connecting with each other. So, if we create service solutions that give guests a chance to participate, make choices, and interact with the cast, they will connect more intimately with the experience and the organization that is providing it.
• High-show refers to the need to build vivid presentations into the guest experience. When we choose service solutions that are high-show, guests enjoy colorful, memorable experiences - the kind that they will talk about to others for months and perhaps years to come. High-show is a quality that is closely aligned to the delivery system of setting. So be sure to think about how to build it into designs for your organization’s physical assets. 
• High-tech refers to the need to build speed, accuracy, and expertise into service solutions. When we do a good job of creating high-tech service, we give guests the gift of time, build products and services that approach the cutting edge of the possible, and often, maximize our own profits. Processes are particularly well suited to deliver high-tech, so as you create and improve processes, think about how they can be made more efficient and entertaining with technology.

Bell on magnetic service

Excerpts from Seven secrets of magnetic service
Chip Bell, in Executive Excellence

The discovery of our seven secrets of magnetic service came through intense study of several brands that elicit cult-like enthusiasm. We interviewed managers, employees, and devoted customers of well-known brands, looking for patterns or practices that yield customer devotion. Whether the company was posh or penny-pinching, the difference between remarkable and run-of-the-mill lay not with the price the customer pays but rather the value the customer felt privileged to experience.

Secret 1. Make trust a verb. The rock-bottom principle on which magnetic service is based is trust. It comes, in part, from a belief that a great service experience was not serendipitous. While customers may be infatuated by an enchanting fluke, their ongoing allegiance is anchored to the pursuit of experiences they feel can be replicated.

Trust starts with authenticity - we trust others when we perceive their motives are genuine or credible. Trust comes from a track record of promises made, paralleled with promises kept. Trust emerges as a result of demonstrated competence that leaves customers assured they are dealing with someone with the capacity to perform.

Secret 2. Focus on customer hopes, not just needs. Magnetic service providers know that under the surface of the obvious customer need lies the customer's hopes and wishes for what might happen. Tapping into this reservoir not only enables firms to earn the customer's loyalty, it ensures that they solidify that loyalty by anticipating future needs.

Secret 3. Add "charisma" to the service mix. Establishing customer devotion requires taking a position that is exciting, bold, and somewhat daring. It’s not just more than what the customer expected, but something different from what the customer expected. The nature of the engagement is personal and moving. People are favorably attracted to service providers when an emotional link is created with that person. And, when that link is profound without being violating, purposeful without being manipulative, and done without presumption on your part, it makes doing business with you a treasured activity.

Secret 4. Engage the customer's curiosity. One way to appeal to the customer's curiosity is to create a path for participation. The allure of customer participation arises not from the fact that they require that customers actually join, but rather from the fact that they offer the option for doing so. It is the potential for inclusion more than the enrollment experience itself that sparks the customer's innate curiosity.

Secret 5. Give customers an occasional miracle. We have all experienced or heard about those magnetic service moments in which someone pulled out all the stops. Whether we are recipient or witness, such unexpected, out-of-the-box experiences remind us that service miracles can still happen. Miracles cannot be regular fare; but the special gesture communicates not only a desire to serve, but also a yearning to enchant. Service miracles leave customers more emotionally moved than simply delighted; more blessed than blown away. They leave customers uplifted and eager to discuss what happened with others.

Secret 6. Empower customers through comfort. Customers feel empowered when they experience psychological comfort, and magnetic service provides psychological comfort by offering reliability and predictability. We abhor dissonance and the kind of ambiguity that makes us feel out of control. Our aversion to unpredictability means that for a service moment to be magnetic, it must be congruent with the customer's notion of what ought to happen.

Customers are also empowered when service renders physical comfort - the kind that reflects a smooth operation. This means that the experience is not just hassle-free; it is noticeably comfortable, strikingly reliable, and surprisingly seamless. It requires establishing processes and systems that ensure a customer's need is met without anxiety or negative surprises. Think of it as providing service without any drag.

Secret 7. Reveal your character by unveiling your courage. Magnetic service should reflect a deeper purpose or destiny befitting of the vision and marketplace strategy. Service with character also has a sense of innocence, naturalness, and purity. It need not be completely obvious to the customer, but it must not feel manipulative or devious.

Magnetic service works when it emerges from the service provider's natural joy. Such service is not only clean and ethical, but it is also considerate, kind, and thoughtful. It can be subtle, but if it is devoid of a childlike purity and honesty, the customer will feel they have been the subject of a ruse rather than the target of a reward.

Bell on customer needs

Excerpts from Customer Love: Attracting and Keeping Customers for Life
Chip Bell

• Make me smarter.
• Help me do it myself.
• Make the response fast … but don't sacrifice quality—quick and rushed aren't the same.
• Help me customize the experience like I want it.
• Anchor your offering to a cause I like and believe in. Good works sell.
• Entertain me. Make the experience bright, shiny and memorable.
• Don't invade my privacy; never let me worry about whether you know too much about me.
• Respect my time by making your offer super easy to deal with.
• Anticipate my needs.
• Treat me with respect when things go wrong … not some cheap, generic atonement that is unmatched to the incident.
• Never take me for granted. I will drop you in a heartbeat.
• My time is as important as my funds … maybe more.
• Help me integrate … link stuff together to increase the efficiency of my life.
• Life is complex: Make service simple.
• Life is harried: Make service calm.
• Life can be shallow: Make service have resonance and depth.
• Life can be painful: Make service joyful.
• Life is too fast: Help me keep up.
• Life can be lonely: Make service a value connection.