There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.
Laurence J. Peter
The Peter Principle
It recently made business headlines: The most popular brand in the world focused on the experience, not just on their long-famous product. Coca-Cola introduced their “Freestyle” vending machine.1 Their ad copy described the machine as “all packaged in an innovative and interactive fountain experience.” The machine was designed with help from automobile manufacturer Ferrari! Step one, pick your favorite Coke beverage—Fanta, Sprite, Minute Maid lemonade, Coke Zero, or whatever. Step two, pick your favorite flavoring. Want a raspberry-flavored Coke, a peach-flavored Fanta, or coconut-flavored lemonade? More than a hundred combinations are possible. The vending machine fills a plastic cup with ice and your special concoction.
Now, here is the best part. At the end of the day the vending fountain electronically sends all the combinations chosen to the R&D unit at Coca-Cola headquarters. By watching patterns of purchases, Coca-Cola is able to introduce new products tailored precisely to customers’ latest whims. Who knows, a revolutionary new Coke product may be coming to your zip code soon! So, what’s the point? If the Coke vending machine down the street can do that, what will your customers expect next?
Customers gravitate toward service providers skilled at focusing on exactly what they want, when they want it, and the way they want it. This “all about me” at its worst might be pure selfishness. At its most wholesome, it can be as enriching as your significant other remembering your birthday—or your aunt forgoing another tie to give you for Christmas the first edition of a book you have been hunting.
Let’s examine two other service examples. USAA is the highly popular financial services company with a special market niche—active or retired military and their families. They introduced an iPhone application that lets their customers (members) deposit a check anytime, from anywhere. The customer endorses the check, takes an iPhone photo of both sides, and sends it to USAA for instant credit. The catalyst for the new app? Customer input and feedback! Managers listen to all customer voicemail feedback and review all automated customer satisfaction surveys.
America’s e-marketplace, eBay, has introduced a new iPhone app that lets you buy and sell from anywhere using your cell phone. In the first month of the eBay app introduction, there were 5 million downloads and over $500 million in transactions.2 Some guy bought an antique Corvette, probably while waiting in the parking lot for his kids to come out of McDonald’s. “When you have 84 million active users, any time you make a change, someone is going to be upset,” said CEO John Donahoe. “But we listen and we incorporate their feedback with what we believe is best for the collective good of the marketplace.”3
Customer expectations have been rising for years. Customers want service faster, cheaper, and without a hassle. They enjoy the convenience of online self-service. But, they want the experience to feel that it was respectfully designed with people in mind, not just as a cost-cutting measure or for the convenience of the company. Should things go differently than expected, customers want a back-door to a helpful, smart partner to guide them through the challenge.
With the advent of sophisticated computer and telecommunications advances plus just-in-time manufacturing, organizations have taught customers they can “Have it your way.” “We are so used to customizing the world around us … to being able on Facebook to customize our wall and to create who we are, and technology has powered that,” notes Amy Manitis, vice president of marketing at Cafe-Press.com, in a Wall Street Journal article.4 Long gone is the Henry Ford-like sentiment: “Customers can have any color automobile they like as long as it’s black.” The more organizations offer a wide array of tailor-made service choices, the more one-size-fits-all approaches look way out-of-date.
Great service today requires understanding the self-centered customer and rethinking the time-place-process of how you deliver service to customers. BMW took customers’ vanity and their self-centered expectations to new heights with their Mini Cooper. New owners got adoption papers when they plunked down a deposit to buy a new Mini. It came with a means to go online and watch their specific Mini being “born” on the factory assembly line. Lately they have made news with their special billboards in major cities that respond to a radiofrequency identification (RFID) tag or chip embedded in the owner’s BMW key fob. Ride by the billboard and it will flash, “Hi, Susan, nice day for your red convertible” or any other message Susan may choose.5
Consultant and author Ben McConnell shares a great example of how the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas brings personalization to the experience of guests.
First, the hotel has upgraded the lowly swipe card room key and personalized it by putting my name on it. (Well, not my full name—they thought better of the wisdom of a guest’s entire name on a room card.) That’s bound to appeal to guests who love to collect stuff with their name on it, especially if the room key is a memento of a memorable time. Once inside my room, I noticed my room phone also displayed my name. I must be in the right room. Finally, when I turned on the flat-screen TV, there was my name again. Not only did I know I was in the right room (in previous experiences, I’ve had at least two hotels book me into occupied rooms), but I liked how the hotel recognized me several times, but not in a creepy way.6
If you haven’t had the experience of a stranger swiping a key card and bursting into your hotel room, or of you being the one to walk in on someone, the Wynn approach may not hold the significance it does for many road warriors. But we all enjoy being addressed by our name and never seem to tire of hearing it or seeing it. Starbucks does a wonderful job with this by writing your name on your cup and saying it out loud several times in the process of making your customized drink. Customers today love this personalized experience.
As customers, when we look in the mirror we don’t see a narcissistic, self-important person looking back. Yet, let a hidden camera catch us in a store, and we may see someone frustrated with a frontline person who fails to remember our specifics on our second visit. We see a person annoyed if asked to repeat any information already given to the first call center rep. And, we hold suspect any organization that treats us as the “next in line,” someone ordinary or just like everyone else.
Narcissism takes its name from Greek mythology. Narcissus was a good looking dude who was clueless about what he looked like. One day, walking in the woods, he got thirsty and stopped at a pool of water to have a drink. When he saw his reflection, not understanding the mirror effect of water (go figure!), he assumed it was another person and began speaking to the handsome image in the water. Hiding behind a nearby tree, a nymph named Echo, under a curse whereby she always has the final word, was forced to repeat every word she heard Narcissus say to the image in the pool. He thought the reflection was speaking to him and eventually fell in love with it. Unable to attract his love, Narcissus pouted by the pool and was ultimately transformed into the flower that bears his name. So, the word narcissism has come to mean self-love—a moderate amount of which is deemed necessary for effective goal-oriented behavior, but an extreme amount is considered an indication of insecurity.
Narcissism can help us to understand today’s customer. Alter a customer’s capacity to influence the participative side of the co-creation called service and you naturally get a backlash of some sort. Strip out the component of the service covenant that enables customers to monitor or regulate their experience as it is unfolding, and you get apprehension. Relegate the customer’s participation to dependence on an expert and you get a prescription for service insecurity. Isolate the customers from the experience by downgrading their participation to interaction with a machine with no link to a person and, like Narcissus, the customers “pout by the pool” and transform their allegiance into defiance.
But there’s more. When service is personalized, it reminds customers they are still vitally present in the service equation. Having one’s name on it or needs embedded in it informs the customer that they are considered a valued recipient of the offering, not a common end-user.
Think of customer service as being like choosing ornaments for a Christmas tree. If you decorate enough Christmas trees over a long enough time, at some point you discover that almost all of the ornaments on the front of the tree are handmade or have some special meaning. Destined for the back branches are those store-bought ones that looked pleasing to the eye but have no shortcut to the heart. The special ones all have stories attached; the store-bought ones just have hooks.
From the customer point of view, the service experience is a lot like picking out ornaments for the tree. The customer might start out settling for what looks good, what’s convenient, or what is the least expensive. But, sooner or later most customers want handmade service—personalized to their specs—with a story they can share with others. The glitz might not be there but the value surely is.
Today’s customers want it “my way.” Customers in the past were okay with generic, one-size-fits-all, generalized everything. Now customers want more than brand specific—they want “me specific”! Everything should be personalized. Amazon and NetFlix monitor our buying patterns to suggest-sell only what fits what customers like. We abhor junk mail and spam specifically because they fail the monogram test. Business-to-business customers expect all vendors to know their unique requirements and to present only solutions that scratch their exclusive customer itch. We get agitated when the Best Buy geek or Apple genius fails to recognize us on the street or in the store after tampering with our toys.
What has made customers so vain? How did “customerization” make its way into the DNA of service? The reasons are complex. As organizations shifted us away from generalist toward specialist they created a two-headed monster. Specialists are both better-equipped and accustomed to tailor-making our experience. Even manufacturers can put our predilections in the production concoction to yield outcomes and outputs we prefer. We get used to the made-to-order feature of service. We like hotels that remember we like a hard pillow, bartenders that recall our special drink, and hair stylists that remember we prefer they go easy on the hairspray. And we avoid those who cannot, or do not.
But, this specialization has also created distance, tacitly shifting the customer from participant to observer. The energy of the encounter is devoted to displaying expertise, not fostering customer inclusion. Next time you go to a store exclusively devoted to shoes, electronics, coffee, cars, or ice cream, notice how much attention is given to you and your requirements versus their product and its features. Compare the bravado of know-how with the compassion of customer partnership.
Customers start young wanting everything their way. A teddy bear is now a Build-a-Bear workshop. The perennial Barbie doll has become accessorize-Barbie online. Even American Girl dolls now come with matching outfits for “mommy.” Want to decorate your new cell phone? There is a huge after-market industry enabling customization, from desktop stands to protective covers to ringtones. Customers flock to sites like StumbleUpon.com to view only websites tailored to their preferences. Dell Computer built a powerful business on letting customers customize their computers. The filtering capacity of prominent one-to-one companies has made unwanted computer spam even more of an irritant than the proliferation of junk mail customers once tolerated.
One of the hottest entries in the personalization world is an advanced analytics program called RAMP (Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform). It enables an inbound call to be matched with the best customer rep in real time. “It’s the eHarmony of business call centers,” said Cameron Hurst, a VP with Assurant and user of RAMP. According to Kate Leggett, senior analyst for customer service at Forrester Research, “RAMP not only matches agents to callers based on a set of attributes … but is intelligent enough to select the agent best suited to handle a caller irrespective of whether the agent is currently available or not.”7 “It’s the sweet spot,” said Toby Cook of IBM Global Business Services. “We find that people are willing to wait longer if they get the best person.”8
“Personalization is the killer app for business rules,” says Ronald Ross, co-founder of Business Rule Solutions. Business rules are the instructions that inform computers (and people) how to operate consistently.9 Research demonstrates most customers prefer personalization. Personalization has been shown to significantly increase clickthrough rates.10 Another research study found that a content-targeting approach increased click-throughs by 62 percent.11 Personalizing copy in a book offer significantly increased response rates.12
The etymology of words can often be very instructive. Vain, as we have used it in this chapter, means “overly concerned with oneself.” It is the part of us all that wants events to go our way, things to revolve around our needs, and experiences to be crafted to reflect our preferences.
However, vain also means “empty.” Too much “plain vanilla” leaves us bored and drab. Customers are drawn to the carnival side of Whole Foods Markets, Stew Leonard’s Dairy, and Trader Joe’s because they have a stimulating—some might say titillating—quality that awakens the spirit. Hotel Monaco turns an all-too-predictable hotel stay into a special treat by providing zebra-patterned bathrobes instead of hospital white, an unexpected surprise on the pillow at turndown instead of the proverbial mint, and a goldfish to keep a guest company. But the most powerful antidote to “empty” is creating a service experience that is personalized and generous.
Go to
Customers enjoy service that is “all about them.” It requires adding more sizzle to the experience. It might include personalizing the experience. Tool #8 provides tips for serving as an expert. Tool #13 provides an array of ways to add an element of delight or pleasant surprise.
Our friend Shaun Smith, of Smith+co in London, shared with us his favorite Lexus story as an example. A BMW owner walked into a Lexus dealership and announced that he was considering changing automobile brands. He had seen an ad about Lexus’s legendary service. But first he had a service question for the Lexus salesperson.
“Earlier this week I took my BMW in for routine maintenance. In the process they removed the ashtray to clean it but forgot to put it back. When I discovered it was missing, I called the BMW service manager. He said they had indeed found the wayward ashtray shortly after I left and would be happy to hold it up front in the office for me to pick up at my convenience. Now, how would you have handled this situation?”
The Lexus salesperson replied, “Well, sir, it would not have happened since we have a 54-item checklist that includes replacing the ashtray after cleaning. But, if it were to have happened, we would not have waited for you to call us.”
The BMW owner smiled and left the showroom.
That afternoon after work, the Lexus salesperson drove to the BMW dealership, picked up the customer’s ashtray, and surprised him with it at the front door of his home!