Be Different or be dead

December 7, 2020

How to be amazing at learning about your customers

Source: Pexels

Customer learning is an essential component of ‘customerization’, the practice of creating packages of value for a select targeted group of customers as opposed to the more traditional marketing approach of pushing products and services to mass markets.

Customer learning is beyond common periodic market research studies that are still conducted by many organizations, even though digital marketing technologies are now very effective in obtaining customer feedback with each customer engagement.

Real time technology-enabled customer feedback notwithstanding, there are still significant opportunities to gather valuable information on the people you do business with, using employees.

In fact I would argue that AI information gathering systems still have a long way to go to be highly effective marketing tools for one simple reason: at this point in their evolution, they are unable to probe like a human; to use the answer to one question to ask another.

Programmers do their best to develop algorithms that anticipate the detailed requirements of customer engagement, but they simply cannot accurately program what humans do naturally.

How was yours last experience with a Chatbot? Were you able to get your needs satisfied? My experience is that if you only want to provide information with little or no interaction then this tool isn’t bad.

But the moment you need some personal attention rather than the attention programmed into the Chatbot from the behaviour of a population you’re in trouble.
AI doesn’t work and you go looking for…….. a human to take care of you.

Customer learning is a continuous process of learning about customers and therefore a combination of tools should be used. Sure, use AI as best you can, but ALWAYS have your human platform ready to step in and finish the job.

Build your customer learning platform with humans as its foundation with AI as the entry point. As AI gets better at creating the right engagement experience with people, let it take on more responsibility.

Employees should be used as the primary instruments to do the learning work.

To implement customer learning in any organization, these activities are designed to create the appropriate behavior:

Communications — constantly communicate to employees the strategic importance of continually learning about what customers desire.
And while you’re at it, distinguish learning from traditional market research to stress why learning is a strategic matter while research is a tactic.

Core competency — build customer learning as a core competency of the organization that will determine its success or failure.

Strategy sessions must confirm that the way you intend to differentiate your organization from the competition is to be the ONLY one that captures customer secrets on a real time basis and use the information to build relationships and create unique offers.

Performance management — incorporate the learning responsibility into the performance management program of the organization.

Clarify the expectation that learning what people - fellow employees and customers - is an integral part of everyone’s job. If people ‘on the inside’ learn about one another on a consistent basis then you can bet they will practice the behaviour consistently with customers.

Develop specific learning objectives to be a critical component of the annual performance plan for every employee. I used to include an objective like ‘Roy will make customer/colleague learning an integral part of his daily duties and will document and report on his learning results every 6 months.’

Recruitment — hire individuals with the intrinsic ability to relate to people and develop credible relationships with them.
This is critical because if people don’t naturally understand the importance of learning it will be tougher to convince and train them to do it.

Look for people who have had some experience in gathering information on people ‘on the run’ and who appreciate its strategic value. Revise the interview questionnaire to include questions that expose their learning competence.

Recognition — constantly recognize those who perform their learning responsibility in an exemplary manner.
Customer learning ‘heroes’ should be honored in front of the entire organization; it’s a great way to reinforce the strategic importance of the learning activity and the behaviours expected of everyone.

Learning events — hold regular employee learning events for employees to share what they have learned about customers and to discuss how the learnings have been turned into marketing opportunities for the organization.

This is another key idea. It’s one thing to learn something about someone but it’s another thing to leverage the information and convert it to added economic value for the organization. It’s what you do with the learning that’s the real important thing; the intelligence itself is merely the means to the end.

Learning about your customers continually is a critical element of the organization’s strategic game plan and, particularly, in determining how to achieve sustainable differentiation in a highly competitive world.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 12.7.20 at 05:17 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink