So this made me wonder what the total value proposition is of Terminal 5 at Heathrow.  Here’s my customer experience based on my latest trip to Sweden last week, and I’d really like to know if yours is similar or very different from mine at T5 or any other travel hub.

The Wonderful Pod

Directions and parking at T5 business parking was easy.  Once out of the car I then spotted The Pod, a marvellous looking little purple people carrier.  With much childish glee we pressed the buttons and got into our personal transport device and got whisked along the track to the terminal building.  Here’s Helen in the pod.

Little did we know that this was to be the highlight of our entire travel experience.

Security Shambles

So, into the terminal we go, still buoyed by the delight of the pod and, boarding passes in hand, we head straight for security.

Now, I know that Heathrow is the largest passenger hub in the world but having travelled to many countries with very large populations of travellers, why is the security experience at Heathrow always such an undignified shambles?  Shoes on?  Shoes off? The signage doesn’t correspond with what the staff told me to do, so the expectation setting is wrong.  Then loading my bags and laptop into a tray to watch them disappear into the scanner independently of me going through security, then waiting while about 10 people go ahead of me and craning my neck trying to watch my belongings the other side of the security control, makes for a very anxious time as I’m wondering if someone is going to steal my bag or my laptop.

Then one security woman asked me what I was looking at. When I told her I was checking my belongings were still there and hadn’t been stolen, she told me very abruptly that I should have made sure that I went through at the same time as my belongings. I explained that this was impossible because the security staff members are managing the tray flow and the people flow and that these are not linked. I could see the irritation on her face and decided not to pursue this angle as clearly this is not her fault.  It’s down to inadequate process design and staff training or, as I was always taught, proper alignment of people, process and systems.  The whole experience seems to not have any process planning behind it in terms of best way to manage people flows and processes.  The result is a very stressful experience for everyone concerned.

Retail customer experience

In the press release that went out when T5 was opened in 2008 said,

“T5 took 18 years and $8.5 billion to build, is home to 112 shops and restaurants…is revolutionary in terms of its design and the retail experience it offers… brands will jostle for supremacy within a retail and leisure complex that is at the heart of the building’s design… brands were encouraged to provide evidence of innovations in their service or store design concepts that would make traveling from the terminal a unique experience.”

All I can say to this is:

It’s :
Over heated
Over lit
Over noisy
Over smelly – (perfume, air fresheners etc. nothing bodily!)

It was a full-on sensory assault course designed, I can only imagine, with teenagers in mind, not mature adults (I class myself in the latter category).  It made me want to run out screaming and find the refuge of a sensory deprivation chamber.

Interestingly I spoke to a number of the staff and commented on what I thought, and guess what? They agreed.  They said they get too hot, and the constant noise, music and smell gives them a headache by the end of their shift.

All the tills are in front of this video wall, shown above. Can you imagine working in front of the hot, noisy video wall all day?

The gate

At last, the thought of escaping this mayhem and going to the gate was very appealing….until I got close.  It was squashed in a corner between the shops and a corridor. There was a huge advertising hoarding blocking the entrance to it. There weren’t enough seats for even one third of the plane load of people.  The whole experience felt as if I was in a human battery cage waiting to be despatched.  Again there seemed to be no process or people flow design. In a word…awful.

Value = very poor

So this was the result, all in all using our value equation of Value = Benefits – Costs² for the whole experience it was:

Benefits (the good experience) = The pod

Costs (the bad experience) = security + shopping + gate (to the power of 2 at least as the emotional and physiological effects of negative experiences stay with us much longer than those of positive experiences due to the brain’s cortisol receptors outnumbering serotonin receptors by 5: 1)

Not scientific but I think you get my point.

What experience have you had a T5?  Was I being exceptionally bad tempered that day or have you had similar experiences, not just at Heathrow but any travelling experiences?

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In the vanguard of this value experience ‘revolution’ we find the corporate colossus, Tesco. It would seem that Tesco has finally been forced to rethink its self-service checkout strategy and start hiring people again, with CEO Philip Clarke acknowledging that maybe they’d gone too far in cutting people costs.

We at Futurecurve believe passionately that value can only be delivered if the customer says it is. This means that company value propositions can only be created when informed by the customer and, surprise, surprise, retail customers like having a good experience when they are actually shopping – not just being dazzled by wonderful advertising and celebrity promotions. And now hard evidence is backing this up. A study by Wharton Business School in the US has found that every dollar spent on hiring customer-facing staff led to between $4 and $28 in new sales. Another study, from Starcom MediaVest, has found that shoppers engaging with a supermarket brand on social media are twice as likely to shop there. And yet another study has found that because shoppers are increasingly tailoring their choices on the web, they’re expecting to be treated like an individual in-store too; no longer susceptible to traditional, static promotional discounts and offers. They’re wanting to connect and communicate with their choice of brands in a variety of ways which means businesses are going to have to understand customers’ value motivations and how and when they are open to connecting with the brand.

In other words, it’s all about people and relationships, not just static promotional discounts and BOGOFs. Extraordinary, isn’t it? A positive customer value experience leads to increased spending and greater loyalty.

Understanding what the customer value experience truly is (and not just using buzz words like customer-centric), and marketing-with versus marketing-to customers, is shaking up the way we do business and the way we expect to do business. Having a value process is going to be critical to success from now on.

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Train overcrowding has become one of the hottest topics of the moment.  A recent report published by the UK Public Accounts Committee has clearly highlighted the problems with unclear responsibility for making the UK’s railway network efficient and effective.  The report puts the spotlight on the fact that there is no legal requirement for the train operating companies to supply extra capacity without additional taxpayer support.  Instead, the PAC said, taxpayers are having to provide funds to Network Rail to carry out upgrade work and Network Rail is more interested in railways than customer service.  We hope that the new £6billion investment in Thameslink, announced today, may make a change to this. However customer service and customer satisfaction appear to be bottom of everybody’s agenda because the pure provision of service takes precedence.

The same is also true in B2B.  Lawyers are interested in law, consultants in consulting, engineers in engineering etc. All will have a view on customer service and most will agree it is important but very few will know much about what constitutes really good and differentiated customer service.

Let’s take a look at the legal profession.

A survey done by The Law Society in 2000 suggested that winning a case was the best way to lose a client! The reason was that lawyers assumed that winning the case was all that was required and that the client would be very grateful. Therefore no further action on the lawyer’s part was required. What lawyers overlooked was that clients expected to win the case.  After all, that was what they were paying huge fees to achieve.  As a consequence clients felt let down and ignored because the lawyer provided no ‘client care’. Comments like, “the lawyers have moved on to chase the next cheque, they don’t care about me or my business” summed up the outcome. Ironically if a case was lost then there was a post-mortem with the client, the lawyer showed genuine remorse, plans about what to do next were formulated. The client felt that the law firm was keen to put things right. As a result the client was more likely to stay.

This gets right to the heart of the matter, what customers value most are not the things they expect, it is the things that they don’t expect that they value most.

Clients expect an architect to design and build on time and on budget; they expect marketing programmes to work and they expect consultants to make things more efficient and more effective. What they don’t expect is architects to build something that genuinely nourishes the soul, that employees will take a pay cut to work in, that is much more than the sum of the parts. Clients don’t expect marketing programmes to become a global phenomenon which propels the product to icon status overnight. Now achieving those kinds of result, whilst being generous in your praise of others and not forgetting the contribution to success that the client made, is what constitutes good and differentiated customer service. In this case you have served the customer in ways she values greatly but did not expect.

Customer service is absolutely not about “being nice”, answering the phone promptly, being good at your job or working collaboratively with your client. That is just doing what is required and expected. Why do I buy my TV from John Lewis? Because for years they have offered a 5 year guarantee and they will deliver and install my TV at no extra cost. Now that is customer service I don’t expect. Try getting that out of Dixons.

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What has emerged is a sort of norm for customer service levels in different areas.

Online

Take online in the utility, banking or software market for example. If I am going to get the standard model of customer service online I will be directed to the frequently asked questions page. Here I will find a box into which I can type my question and wait in the hope that the person responding actually answers the question in a timely manner.

Telephone

Alternatively I can ring the helpline. Here I will listen to some bad music if I am lucky and if I am unlucky I will be told to “please hold, your call is really important to us….” Of course the best route is to ring the sales line which is answered immediately and then pretend you rang the wrong number and get them to put you through to customer service which may help you jump the queue if you are lucky or land you back on hold and more bad music if you are not so lucky.

Call backs

Now imagine for a minute that customer service actually answered the phone immediately. It has happened to me a couple of times and because it happens so rarely that I’m really impressed and my perception of the company changes instantly. I may even forget I am paying for the call! Frankly, I would rather pay for the call and get it answered. British Gas has worked this out and now promises to answer your call in 60 seconds or call you back. The trouble is that I have never had my phone answered in 60 seconds and I get called back just at the time I am in the middle of doing something else. Nevertheless, in the land of the mediocre the call-back is king. If you are an online retailer or service provider let’s be honest – the customer service bar is set pretty low.

Three things you can do to raise your customer service game:

1. Give some visual indication online as to how quickly my call will be answered should I wish to pick up the phone.

2. If I am to fill in the email box to have my question answered it should be faster than the alternatives, not slower. What is the point of using a less effective medium? Microsoft offer to respond to emails within one working day. I assume it won’t take me a day to get through via the phone.

3. Provide a time box and a day that customers could use to book a call online. If I can do this for deliveries, why can’t I do this for a mere phone call to customer service?

If you are an online business, small things such as the points above can move your customer service from the mediocre to the better and differentiating level.

A frequent complaint levelled at customer service is that it is costly and that exceptional customer service is often only experienced if you have a problem.

However customer service can be a reason for purchasing from you in the first place. Companies that do this well are Amazon, John Lewis and The White Company. These companies all have a value proposition where a key component is their customer service. Consumers buy from them because of their customer service not just because of the product. Each uses its customer service offering to add value in slightly different ways. Amazon adds value by having a vast range of goods, delivered fast and most important, a no quibble, simple to operate returns policy. John Lewis will install your TV, not just deliver it and offer a free 5-year guarantee. The White Company treats you like part of the family, nothing is too much trouble and call centre staff really know their products. They are empowered to make decisions there and then without the need to refer to a higher authority.

If staff members believe in the company then it shows and, as a consequence, so does the customer. At a time when customers have more choice it pays to remember that customers are human beings and if you go to the trouble of being accessible, helpful, efficient and friendly those are things that can help you stand out from the crowd. It is not enough to simply go through the motions. Customers can spot a phoney, so if your staff tell customers to “have a nice day” they had better mean it, otherwise customers will see it for precisely what it is – an insincere platitude and will generally react with a level of cynicism that will hardly win you a new fan.

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The implication of this research for business is that it may be possible to manipulate our biochemistry into persuading us to buy more or establish a greater degree of trust in a brand. While this may sound far-fetched, to some extent this occurs already. Have you ever wondered why the fresh bread counter in a supermarket is always at the back? Or why the fresh fruit and veg is always at the front? It is because the smell of fresh bread and appetizing fruit and veg stimulate hunger and research shows people will buy more food if they feel hungry.

This is all very well but there is little point in stimulating my oxytocin unless your product or service has some value to me. It is important to support the stimulation with some degree of evidence. Essentially Professor Zak’s research confirms what we already know – understanding the emotional context in which you are selling to the customer is vital. For example, if the customer has had a bad experience with your product in the past, your approach and message getting them to buy from you again should be very different from the approach and message you would use to someone who is very brand-loyal. In both cases you are trying to establish desire for, and trust in, what makes your brand ‘special’; what is its value (both rational and emotional) to the customer. Oxytocin is stimulated by emotion not, it would seem, by rational thought so you may wish to place more emphasis on what the product or service might prevent the customer from losing rather than what the customer might gain. We tend to be more motivated by ensuring we keep what we already have rather than what we might be able to gain (see previous post How To Quantify Value which is all about Loss Aversion).

So when thinking about value, the basics still hold true: you’ve got to deliver a good product or service and a good overall customer experience. However, what this research shows is the relative importance of what channels you use to deliver your customer experience. You can’t afford to ignore social media anymore, as much as some of us might like to!

Now please Tweet this article, become a fan on our Facebook page, connect with me on LinkedIn….now you know it’ll make you feel better:-)

Cindy

Fast Company: “Social Networking Affects Brain Like Falling in Love”

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Do customers view the quality of customer service as a key factor in deciding whether to do business with you?  

The answer may surprise you.

Too many businesses still view customer service as a cost of doing business rather than as an opportunity to do more business. Consequently they outsource their customer service call centres to India or the Philippines, bury their customer helplines and encourage customers to view their frequently asked questions pages on their websites for answers. They incentivise their call centre staff to up sell at every opportunity whilst encouraging them to deal with calls in the shortest possible time.

Strangely this attitude is most prevalent in industries where the differences between one brand and another is least pronounced. Examples that spring to mind are utility companies and ISPs, computer hardware and software retailers but there are plenty of others I could mention. If you dig through the sales literature of any business, quality of customer service is nearly always one of the things quoted as something that differentiates the business from its competitors and yet these same companies are quite happy to place their reputation in the hands of another company. Of course when the margin on products are wafer thin and sales appear to be defined by price not service it is tempting to ‘minimise operational costs’ like customer service. There is another way however, as Harvard Business Review’s (July-August 2010) feature by Tony Hsieh, CEO of shoe retailer Zappos shows.

A different approach

A different approach that views customer service as a marketing activity not a cost centre On the face of it selling shoes on line even back in 2000 didn’t seem like a great idea. If Zappos had taken the view that the internet was a way of maximising revenue whilst minimising cost it probably wouldn’t have been.

Fortunately Zappos took a completely different approach. They made excellent customer service a priority for the whole company. They didn’t view customer service as necessary evil but as a marketing activity, preferring to build business through positive word of mouth not traditional advertising. Zappos built their value proposition around exceptional customer service in the belief that this would create an exceptionally loyal customer base where the lifetime value of a customer could be grown if the customer had sufficiently positive associations with the brand.

Measure customer delight not process

Zappos initially experimented with outsourcing aspects of the operation such as warehousing and dispatch but quickly came to the conclusion that the level of customer service they required necessitated managing anything that impacted on customer service in house. They managed their own call centre even though only 5% of sales happen by phone because they realised that their customers phone at least once at some point. Zappos found that if they handled the call well they could create an emotional impact and a lasting memory which in turn led customers to recommend them to others. As a consequence their Customer Loyalty Teams were not judged by traditional call centre metrics that were driven by productivity and speed of resolution or confined to carefully crafted but cold and impersonal scripts. Instead Zappos don’t hold reps accountable for call times, their longest customer call lasted almost 6 hours! Reps don’t up sell because customers don’t like it. Reps have no scripts so that their personality comes through and this enables them to form a more emotional connection with each customer. Reps are judged on whether they go above and beyond for every customer.

Customer service is personal and individual, you can’t achieve this if customers can’t talk to you At Zappos customers who purchase online are actively encouraged to call if they wish. The phone number is prominently positioned on every webpage.

Personal contact with a rep is key to establishing customer loyalty at an emotional as well as a rational level. To that end most of the customer service effort goes on after the sale. Zappos have extended the returns policy from 30 days to 365 days with free return postage, they give surprise upgrades to overnight shipping, even when the customer chose the free ground shipping option. The warehouse is open 24/7 which is expensive but enables orders arrive more quickly, a key source of satisfaction for e-commerce customers.

Customers are happy but does it pay?

It was not all plain sailing for Zappos. Even though sales went from zero to $70 million by 2003 for most of that time cash had been short as they struggled to cope with growth. In 2008 customers returned 37% of purchases representing more than a third of gross revenue which was just over $1 billion, but Zappos realised customers will buy more and be happier in the long run if they could take out most of the risk from shopping at Zappos.

By the end of 2009 gross revenue had reached almost £1.2 billion and the range has extended beyond shoes to include clothing, housewares, cosmetics and other items.

Whilst ‘going above and beyond’ in customer service may have worked for Zappos, not everyone is convinced that this is a wise strategy. A recent piece of research carried out by the USA based Customer Contact Council to examine the links between customer service and loyalty concluded that “telling reps to exceed customers expectation is apt to yield confusion, wasted time and effort and costly giveaways. The study covered more than 75,000 people who had interacted over the phone with contact-centre representatives or through self-service channels such as web and e-mail as well as hundreds of structured interviews with customer service leaders across the world. This research concluded that exceeding customer expectations during service interactions for example by offering a refund, a free product or a free service such as expedited shipping makes customers only marginally more loyal than simply meeting their needs. 20% of ‘satisfied’ customers on the study said they intended to leave the company in question and 28% of ‘dissatisfied’ customers intended to stay. Worse still although customer service can apparently do little to improve customer loyalty poor customer service can do a great deal to undermine it. Customers are four times more likely to leave a customer service interaction disloyal than loyal. Loyalty eroding factors include, 56% of customers having to re-explain an issue, 57% report having to switch from the web to the phone, 59% report expending moderate to high effort to resolve an issue, 59% report being transferred, 62% report having to repeatedly contact the company to resolve an issue.

So how can one reconcile these two apparently contradictory positions?

On the face of it Zappo’s successful approach is completely at odds with the findings of a very comprehensive piece of research. Zappos believe that ‘going above and beyond’ has been the whole basis of their success. The Customer Contact Council research suggests it makes little difference.

Zappos believe that talking to a rep increases customer loyalty, the research suggests the reverse. As ever the devil is in the detail. What differentiated Zappos was the realisation that its value proposition, was not just its products or its route to market but its whole customer experience and the realisation that customer word of mouth could replace ‘traditional’ marketing activities. I can see how talking to a rep who has little authority, is based in another country, who is clearly reading from a script, where the glossy advertising that showed such promise is suddenly at odds with the impersonal if well meaning service, could do little to boost my loyalty. What is more being showered with upgrades and free giveaways at this point would most likely lead me to conclude that the company realises that this customer experience isn’t what they promised in the glossy advertising so they hope a few bribes might persuade me to come back.

Contrast this with Zappo’s approach to customers service. First I probably heard of Zappos via recommendation on the basis of what that recommender experienced and liked so you can be fairly sure that my expectation is aligned to what I will get. Second I talk to someone who isn’t reading from a script and goes to enormous lengths to empathise and meet my needs. Third they are from the same country so they understand not just what I say but also what I mean. The rep has the authority to do whatever is required to meet my needs so does not have to refer me to someone else. I am not told about the free upgrade at the time so it is a nice surprise when the item arrives sooner than expected so it doesn’t look like a bribe. In short I am made to feel like a valued friend to the business not a number who has been greeted by 5 minutes of bad music whilst being told how much the company values my business, who is only talking to the rep because I couldn’t get the online system to work or I was seeking to return the item I purchased or trying to get the item I had already purchased to work.

7  Ways to Achieve Exceptional Customer Service

 1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department.

2. Empower your customer service reps.  They shouldn’t have to escalate a problem to a supervisor.

3. Fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your staff.

4. Don’t measure call times, don’t upsell and don’t use scripts.

5. Don’t hide your phone number. You want to talk to customers.

6. View the cost of handling customers’ calls as an investment in marketing, not an expense.

7. Celebrate great service by telling stories exceptional stories to the entire company.

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“The unpalatable truth, say critics, is that for decades the most well-funded, professionally organised and disciplined Tory campaign has come up short. Disaffected MPs have identified two early scapegoats: Andy Coulson and Steve Hilton. Mr Coulson, unfairly insist some, is being blamed for allowing Mr Cameron to be trapped by his own rhetoric in the television debates. The decision to give Nick Clegg a platform was a grave blunder, as even Mr Cameron has come close to acknowledging. Mr Hilton, meanwhile, shoulders responsibility for crafting a message that failed to connect with sufficient force. Behind-the-scenes anecdotes are starting to emerge. One records how Bill Knapp, the US political consultant hired to help Mr Cameron, had a simple question on the eve of the vital second television debate. What research had been done into what voters thought of the Tory campaign’s key theme of the Big Society? The answer was an embarrassed silence. When results from a hurriedly convened focus group detailed a negative reaction at a subsequent meeting, Mr Hilton is said to have stormed out.” – The Times, 8 May 2010

Cindy

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A former Design Council chair once remarked. We seem to be great in the UK at innovation but not so good at bringing ideas to market and making a profit.  Why are we so bad at commercialising innovation?

I think there are 4 main reason gaps for this –

1. Culture gap

Unlike the US we fear failure more and take rejection more personally. Maybe we need to learn to accept failure more as part of business and stop being so risk averse. Recognising that the US sets the standard for entrepreneurship, the UK government and the Kansas City based Kauffman Foundation have set up scholarship programmes for British innovators to learn from American entrepreneurs.  Some of the participants have been struck by the level of altruism among successful, self-made Americans. The participants say that in the UK people are more reticent to help in an altruistic way. The American mentors will give their time for free and open up their Rolodex and give them contacts.

2. Skills gap

Commercialisation for many inventors is a barrier as they have little experience of the commercial world and an adverse nature towards spending money on bought in expertise. Some view commercial assistance with hesitation and mistrust due to the blood sweat and tears that have gone in to creating their baby. Why should they just hand their baby over to someone else and also pay them to look after it? Sales and marketing is deeply mistrusted and misunderstood. Any new money that comes in will be used for more R&D, as this is their comfort zone.

3. Valuation gap

Inventors are often cash-strapped, good ideas people or academics with a major inability to communicate with business. Often inventors try to use money spent already on R&D to value their equity stake which just doesn’t cut it with commercial investors. They’ll over value their ideas and are reluctant to give up any of their ‘asset’ when it comes to wanting finance to move towards final development or commercialisation. They are largely adverse to releasing equity or control to attract further investment, preferring to own 100% of nothing as opposed to 50% of something.  We see this all to often in the Dragon’s Den!

4. Funding gap

Funding is often available from seed funds and grants to get the idea to a point of final development and to prove a first version. However after that time, any funding is given through a different scheme with its own specific sets of criteria which the companies are not at the right point yet to comply with. There is therefore a funding and assistance gap from final development to commercialisation.  Even before venture capitalists went into hiding, they only invested a fraction of their cash in early stage UK technology (£200m out of £34bn in 2007) and commercialisation capital often falls below minimum venture capital levels.

James Dyson was rejected by the UK government under the previous technology grant SMART scheme 6 times. His project was deemed commercially unviable as they could not see how he was going to take on the current market incumbents. However he did and sold 64 million units in 2008. Why was he rejected? Dyson spends around 11% on R&D per annum. A much higher average than others in the UK I would bet.

So what can be done?

Government – needs to look at more funding towards strengthening the link between R&D and business, as opposed to putting it all into R&D itself. After all, what is the point in inventing something if nobody gets to reap the benefits?

Market test early – the sooner you can bring a prototype to market, the sooner you’ll get good market feedback and the sooner you’ll be able to launch. Never underestimate the power of early customer experience feedback in helping to design a product or service that will be a market winner.  I have known too many inventors who polish their diamonds for years and years before even engaging with the market. Ideally build your value proposition from the beginning and refine it regularly with customer experience. My experience of working with early stage companies suggests that if they build their value proposition early in this iterative way, they get to market much faster and start generating profits much faster than companies who don’t.

Build whole-brain teams – innovators are often discerning, thoughtful and meticulous and have a certain intellectual snobbery about their creations. They are often not the best people to bring their creations to market and sometimes view sales and marketing with suspicion, even contempt.

Recognise that there is a need to bring the detail, rational types together with the more relationship focused, doer types into whole-brain innovation and commercialisation teams.

Some of the best innovation and commercial marriages are between the so called left brainers and right brainers. The Pixar director Brad Bird and the producer John Walker are “famous for fighting openly”, Bird has been quoted as saying, “because he’s got to get it done and I’ve got to make it as good as it can be before it gets done.”  (the CTQ tool can be used to help profile people to create whole-brain teams)

What are the other key ingredients to making the UK better at bringing ideas to market?

Cindy

With thanks for input to this article from Ian Heywood, UK Grants Ltd.

Acknowledgements to The Design Council’s ‘Inventing a Profit’ paper and the Harvard Business Review article ‘Innovation in Turbulent Times’.

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Everyone who answered this question mentioned relationship building and communication as being key for sales people but I don’t think that’s enough without the ability to really listen, really hear what you’re being told and to be creative with what you’ve heard.   This is always the starting point to building your value proposition as this is the customer experience part of the process,

As we become even more polarised from transactional selling (where the buyer knows what they want) to consultative selling (where they don’t know what they want), the merits of a good consultative sales person become clearer and clearer.

A good consultative sales person will translate what they’ve heard into some in-the-moment innovation crafting and keep offering this back and forward with the client until they have a starting point of a solution. I deliberately chose the words innovation crafting rather than solution crafting for consultative selling as it must be co-created with the buyer rather than a fixed solution the sales person has in their mind. This needs innate creative ability as well as good listening and relationship skills.

Really listening and building a good relationship over time also means dropping your ego.  You may not make the sale today, tomorrow or next month and you may not sell what you wanted to sell, so let that go.  In consultative selling the relationship with the buyer over an extended period is key and it can’t be faked, they will see straight through that.
My 8 tips to building a sales person’s value proposition are:

1. Listen, really listen
2. Hear what you’re being told
3. Replay what you think you’ve heard back to your buyer
4. Use your creativity for innovation crafting
5. Drop your ego
6. Build good, real relationships
7. Ask for commitment to you early in the process, but not too early – it’s like dating!
8. Stay for the long game

As we continue to move more and more towards automating transactional (often commodity) sales then I think this aspect of consultative selling for more complex products/services will become even more important. It’ll be one of the few differentiators left.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Cindy

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As strange as Paris Syndrome may seem, I thought this also illustrates different cultural attitudes to customer centricity. As much as I love France, as a frequent visitor I am no longer surprised at the almost total absence of what I perceive as good customer service.  So how very customer-centric, I thought, of the Japanese embassy to respond in a pre-emptive way to Japanese visitors to Paris.

The perennial problem with gathering customer experience is what to do with it.  You can use it tactically, as the Japanese embassy have done, and respond to particular issues that were highlighted.  And you can use customer experience strategically and look at what the whole experience is telling you and implement holistic changes to the structure, process and people – the whole value proposition.

Customer experience is one of the new business buzzwords, a bit like value proposition. Everyone wants to know what their customer experience is, but once captured (and it should be captured on a regular basis, not once!), few people know how to use it, other than implement a few tactical changes.  The Value Proposition Builder™ is a holistic framework that takes you step-by-step through how to create your value proposition from your customer experience.

So the next time the Japanese embassy get a call from a distressed tourist on their hotline, I was thinking about offering to help them create a value proposition for Japanese tourists visiting Paris.  My ‘flu has clearly been giving me delusions of grandeur, so I’ll just send them a copy of the book instead…once it’s been translated into Japanese, of course.

Cindy

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