G. Tomas M. Hult
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
G. Tomas M. Hult
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
Michael Ross
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
Michael Ross
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
Michael Ross
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
Michael Ross
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
Michael Ross
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
Sheena S. Iyengar
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
Hidden connections that transcend borders and defy stereotypes
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.
W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne, Mi Ji
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
To Get Better Customer Data, Build Feedback Loops into Your Products
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
Hyper-Personalization for Customer Engagement with Artificial Intelligence
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
Author Talks: Peter Fader and Michael Ross share their playbook for customer centricity
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
What Do You Really Know About Your Customer Base?
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
The Four-Letter Code To Selling Just About Anything
When Raymond Loewy arrived in Manhattan, U.S. companies did not yet worship at the altars of style and elegance. That era’s capitalists were monotheistic: Efficiency was their only god. American factories—with their electricity, assembly lines, and scientifically calibrated workflow—produced an unprecedented supply of cheap goods by the 1920s, and it became clear that factories could make more than consumers naturally wanted. To sell more stuff, … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Derek Thompson | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales
The Death of the Customer Service Hotline
Need to call Facebook? Frontier? Good luck.
Content: Article | Author: Emily Stewart | Source: Vox | Subject: Customer Related
Jane Davis
When you’re adding new features, the question shouldn’t be, “Is this potentially useful to someone?” Instead ask, “How does this contribute to our users achieving their goals?” It’s very easy to “value add” your way straight out of product/market fit.
Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Innovation
Jane Davis
Understanding how a person wants to view themselves is actually incredibly valuable. It tells you a lot about how you can mirror that feeling back to them with your product while still satisfying their actual preferences.
Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research, Market/Investment
Jane Davis
Understand the why and the how behind user behaviors, identifying which ones actually demonstrate value and which ones are potential leading indicators of a broken experience.
Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research
Ryan Glasgow
There’s typically about eight different steps in the customer jobs flow of someone starting and completing an action. You can really apply that framework to any product that you’re working on and look at the steps that you’re solving today. Look at the steps that you’re currently not solving and think about how you can solve other jobs that are ancillary to your core product. … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation