Oh, Behave! |
I’ve been doing more speaking recently, particularly around the idea that customer satisfaction is, in so many words, b.s.
While I explore the full concept in an article that was published in marketingprofs.com recently (with a copy on our site here), the gist is short and sweet. There are three reasons you can’t trust satisfaction research results: 1) people don’t speak up; 2) when they do talk, they often lie (sometime just to be polite; other times to avoid confrontation); and 3) customers can’t tell the truth even if they wanted, since they (and we) are all irrational.
And the more I discuss this – as well as what our company does – I keep coming back to the same thought. All of this – figuring customers out, attempting to create a certain type of customer experience, all of it – revolves around one principle: behavior. It’s not by asking that you determine how a customer will behave in a certain situation. The answer, instead, is looking at the past and current behavior of your customers. And it’s not by trying to figure out how to make a customer feel a certain way that you’ll meet your business goals, it’s figuring what specific behavior you want to elicit.
Obviously, if your business goal, for example, is to get a customer to buy an additional product from you, you must create certain emotions that lead to that action. But the emotions and the “soft stuff” then becomes a requisite of the business goal. It’s inherent in the strategy and execution.
Let’s let that idea simmer for awhile. Feel free to tell me if you think I’m full of it.
