The Vendor/Client relationship — in real world situations

Walls of Separation

I know the whole Tropicana is old news but I should’ve posted this last month:

Today as I watched a video of Peter Arnell describe the rationale behind Tropicana’s rejected package design, I had a bit of an epiphany. Many companies, brands and organizations are inadvertently building walls between themselves and their customers. It’s unintentional, happened over time—but ultimately in this age of empowerment, customers feel more connected to each other than they do to your business or brand. Maybe it’s always been this way—but it seems to me that it’s getting worse, not better.

The Best Way to Understand Your Customers

Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz is now writing a column for Harvard Business Publishing:

Recently, Sprint Nextel announced that in Q4 2008, they lost 1.3 million customers. It’s tempting to blame the recession, but then how do you explain AT&T Wireless gaining 2.1 million subscribers, and Verizon gaining 1.4 million? Forrester’s 2008 Customer Experience Index suggests a reason. Sprint Nextel was far and away the worst-ranked of the wireless service providers. Out of all the companies (from a range of industries), Sprint Nextel ranked 108 out of 114. Verizon Wireless ranked 59th, and AT&T 64th. It’s in difficult economic times that customer experience matters most — you don’t want to make it even easier for your customers to walk away because they’ve been so frustrated working with you.

Disney’s $100,000 Salt + Pepper Shaker

“You’re probably familiar with Randy Pausch. If not, you should go and familiarize yourself with his story. Randy is both a a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon, a scientist, a husband and father. And he’s dying of cancer. His last gift is for all of us, in the form of a video that’s made it’s way around the internet—as well as a precious book titled “The Last Lecture”. There are many stories worth talking about which Randy has put into words, but I wanted to take a moment to highlight one of them as it’s helping me think through the idea of “Micro-Interactions”.

The $100,000 Salt & Pepper Shaker

The story is simple. At 12 years old, a young Randy Pausch was exploring Disney World with his family and he and his sister decided they wanted to show their parents their appreciation for the trip…”

Top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong

“Let me get this straight: The company will side with petulant, unreasonable, angry, demanding customers instead of with me, its loyal employee? And this is meant to lead to better customer service?”

Kevin Kelly: 1,000 True Fans

“The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist’s works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans.”

Customer Service is the New Marketing

“A one day summit in San Francisco, February 4, 2008. Learn how smart organizations are turning customer service from just a cost center into an engine for building culture and creating evangelists. This conference brings together innovative business leaders from several industries to share tips and suggestions about how they got their own organizations to do customer service differently. Confirmed speakers include Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos; Alex Frankel, author of ‘Punching In’; Michael Murphy, head of customer service for Virgin; Robert Stephens, founder of The Geek Squad; and many more…”

The Long Wow

“The Long Wow is a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again. Going a step beyond just measuring loyalty, the Long Wow is an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating it.”

I Heart Zappos

“…out of seven pairs, only two fit. Not bad considering she’d never been this thin, so I was winging it, and the return shipping is free. The rest were here waiting to be returned. Because of various circumstances — lost label, my mom being hospitalized and me being away, the shoes were never sent back. There’s a time limit on the return of 15 days. Remember this. When you do a return to them, they pay the shipping, but you have to get the shoes to UPS yourself. Remember this, also….” (Thanks Signal vs. Noise!)

Customer Anthropology: The Art of Observation

“One of the fastest-growing disciplines in business goes by several names, but it’s all about observing customers (and potential customers) at work as a means of discovering unmet needs that your organization can fill. You won’t read much about it on the Web because it’s still competitive-advantage stuff: What I know about the science of it I cannot disclose under a confidentiality agreement, and most of the companies doing it (Steelcase, Intel, Volkswagen, Microsoft) aren’t talking about it much. Mostly it’s called cultural or corporate anthropology or ethnology, but I prefer the term Customer Anthropology — the study of your customers’ people and behaviours in their ‘natural habitat’.”