624 Posts Found

Companies need to treat the execution of routine tasks and customer interactions as opportunities for learning. Standardizing tasks or offerings becomes counterproductive since it suppresses variance, which is the grist for new ideas. Instead, firms need to leverage their digital presence and use learning algorithms to capture and process lessons from each interaction.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Adam Job, Martin Reeves, Mihnea Moldoveanu | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Organizational Behavior

Hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too — and a lot of companies either don’t know how or forget to act on it. Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond on the customer service side, people … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Stewart Butterfield | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Customer Related

If there’s one pitfall that companies fall into, it’s that they focus on the why for the business instead of the why for the users.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jiaona Zhang | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Management

Line up 30 meetings with potential customers before you write a single line of code. You get much better at your pitch after the first five meetings. After the first 10, you start to see patterns. After 20, you really understand segmentation of the market. After 30, you have a really good understanding of what it is that you actually need to go build.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Sippey | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Market Research, Marketing / Sales

When you can understand and articulate your customers’ goals and struggles and anxieties in simple, precise language, your developers and product teams will not have to guess at what to build.

Content: Quotation | Author: Matt Lerner | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation

[Raymond] Loewy … believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”—maya. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Derek Thompson | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Unfortunately, many dissatisfied customers opt not to complain. Over the last three decades, ACSI data show that 12.8% of customers formally complained to companies but, in reality, 30% of customers complained more informally about brands on social media. These non-complaining but disgruntled customers instead leave the company and buy substitute products. The takeaway is that it is often better to have customers complain than not … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: G. Tomas M. Hult | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

Every interaction between a company and a customer is an opportunity. For the company, it’s a chance to reinforce brand quality and value with the goal of achieving customer satisfaction and loyalty. For the customer, it’s a chance to provide input on their needs, satisfaction with previous experiences, and expectations for future engagements with your brand.

Content: Quotation | Author: G. Tomas M. Hult | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

We believe very firmly that there’s something foundational about cohorts. When we say “cohort,” we mean a group of customers that were acquired in a period, whether that’s a monthly cohort, a quarterly cohort, or an annual cohort. The 2021 cohort is a group of customers who made their first purchase in 2021.

What’s powerful about a cohort is that the membership of that group never … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Ross | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Customer Related

The opportunities to use customer analysis to change behavior go way, way beyond what is in the marketing domain—it goes to how we think about profitability, how we align channels, how we align the service propositions, how we align the operational experience, and how we understand which elements of products or categories are good for acquiring and retaining customers.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Ross | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Customer Related

Understanding the time between first and second purchase is incredibly helpful. It is a very good discipline to understand, “Why do customers only buy once? How can we get them to come back? How can we get them to come back faster?” That drives a lot of very good behaviors.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Ross | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

When you look at a distribution of customer value, you will often see that a high-value customer—what we’d call a top-decile customer—can be worth 40 or 50 times a low-value customer. The notion of an average customer may be mathematically true, but it doesn’t really exist in practice or is extremely unrepresentative of a customer base.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Ross | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Customer Related

Every business does some customer analysis. That’s a truism, but what I think is missing is a systematic, structured audit that consists of a set of foundational analyses that leave nowhere to hide, and that allows you to understand at a very deep level how customers are behaving.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Ross | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Customer Related

If you want to maximize someone’s satisfaction with a choice, don’t give them unlimited options. Instead, as my colleagues and I have shown, you should give them some choice but with clear constraints. This added structure is crucial for picking a desired option with confidence.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

Global consumer strategist Aparna Bharadwaj shares a fascinating glimpse at under-the-radar affinities that transcend cultures and borders — from the way people snack in China and Saudi Arabia to how people shop for clothes in the US and Russia. “There are patterns where you least expect them,” she says – and paying attention to them just might bring the world a little bit closer.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Aparna Bharadwaj | Sources: Boston Consulting Group (BCG), TED Conferences LLC | Subjects: Customer Related, International, Marketing / Sales

For the past three decades, the business mantra has been “customer first.” Yet focusing on retaining and expanding an existing customer base often results in finer segmentation and the greater tailoring of offerings to better meet customer preferences, which will likely lead companies into too-small target markets of an existing industry.

The blue ocean strategist’s mantra is “noncustomers first.” By looking to noncustomers and building on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Mi Ji, Renée Mauborgne, W. Chan Kim | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales, Strategy

Thanks to the increasing availability of AI, including machine learning algorithms, deliberately creating customer data feedback loops is now possible for most products and services. This means that as a firm gathers more customer data, it can feed that data into machine learning algorithms to improve its product or service, thereby attracting more customers, generating even more customer data. For some products, it is easy; … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Andrei Hagiu, Julian Wright | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

Personalization based on customer attributes and behavior is a familiar concept among marketers, and artificial intelligence is making it increasingly effective. AI-based hyper-personalization employs both sophisticated methods and far more data than previous methods and is far more precise as a result. Thomas H. Davenport discusses the role of AI in personalization as well as the growing backlash against personalization fueled by data privacy concerns. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Thomas H. Davenport | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Customer Related, IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales

When is the last time you took stock of your customer base? Two marketing and data experts say it’s due for a systematic review.

Content: Article | Authors: Anita Balchandani, Michael Ross, Peter Fader | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

In an excerpt from their book ‘The Customer-Base Audit,’ Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross ask critical questions to help you gauge how much you really understand about your customers’ buying behavior.

Content: Article | Authors: Bruce Hardie, Michael Ross, Peter Fader | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Customer Related