Did the earth move for you? ... How far?

Imagine your intimate relationship being driven by measurements, little scorecards with smiley faces portraying emotions from suicidal to orgasmic scoring the welcome home kiss, the supper, the children’s behaviour. Little boxes of scorecards on the sink, at the front door and on the bedpost. You couldn’t measure your relationship like this can you? You measure it by tummy flips, by the warmth and by the passion.

Customers are people too, people who have invested time and effort into their purchase, ok maybe not for the tube of toothpaste but mostly.

What is your mindset, do you treat your customers as a means to an end, a wallet to plunder or do you treat them like people with whom you would like to have some type of a relationship.

Customer satisfaction is the positive comparison between expectation and experience. Expectations are created by the brand image, what the advertising has said but also about what else is happening in other product categories and markets. It’s a constantly changing benchmark and you have to make sure that you are measuring the things that actually are important to the customer, not just things that you think are important.

To make it even more interesting is the fact that the experience changes from week to week day to day and in fact at different times during the day.

Consider this instead of the normal approach:

1. Instead of your research taking a snapshot of customer experience you take a movie.
2. That the movie is a travelogue and during the trip instead of staying on the highway you take diversions– if they appear interesting, and explore them.
3. That instead of only measuring you engage your customer in innovating their own experience.

Consider this thought what if people actually don’t buy products, people buy services, products have utility, they work, but even so they only have value in the service they deliver. There is no value in watching an ice cream melt, the value is in its eating. Services have emotions and feelings. Products either work or they don’t and you can measure how well. Relationships are different, relationships have feelings and passion, they make you feel happy, sad and excited you feel angry and destructive sometimes, you may even be driven to take revenge. Lover's Revenge

The principle underlying this all is the conversation. All relationships start with talking. In our consulting we have the innovative methodology to do these measurements to take the movie, to explore the diversions, fixing what is important and innovating.

Today you can talk to thousands maybe millions of customers. Modern social media technology has allowed us to engage in this conversation, customers are connecting with each other and we can connect with them day to day.

A niche luxury car manufacturer told me a story last week about a salesman who had sent out an email to 50 customers, forgetting to use the BCC feature. The one customer without thinking just sent reply to all and inadvertently set up an email discussion group. So a customer pressure group known as the Pretoria 47 came into being. Does that scare you, It excites me.

It excites me because in an era of user generated discontent we can move our relationships with our customers from mere statistical representations and bar graphs to what actually makes relationships work. Trust, Transparency and Talking.