While companies don’t purposely look to alienate customers and subscribers, many do so by inadvertently developing policies and touchpoints that are inwardly focused rather than designed around customer expectations. As a follow-up to my previous posting, and in honor of what David Pogue initiated through his “Take Back the Beep” Campaign, I’ve come up with my own list of practices that companies need to address in order to truly win over customers.

Don’t resolve customer issues
Do your customers dial into customer service and get transferred several times until they get to the “appropriate” person who then doesn’t have the ability to resolve their problem? Consider analyzing the top reasons for transfers and adjust procedures to allow general bank agents to respond to issues without transferring. If it has to be done consider how to use warm transfer hand-offs among key segments, e.g. those at risk to churn or high-value customers.

Only tell partial truths
How upfront is your offer messaging? As a customer there’s nothing worse than when you find out you weren’t told the truth. It makes you feel like you’ve been duped or taken advantage of by someone who says “we appreciate your business.” Strive to reduce fine print by simplifying offers. For cases where it’s not possible, find ways to educate and inform prospective customers upfront. The act of being honest can build goodwill and increase your brand’s equity with both new and existing customers.

Treat customers like a number
What do you do to manage your customers like people rather than account numbers? Some brands provide customers with a direct number so they can call the same service agent, helping to build a personal relationship with the brand. It not only differentiates your experience from others, but you can better track good agents from bad agents.

We’re not advocating you turn the reins of your company over to customers but for many organizations it’s important to break from the status quo. Think about just using the old five “whys” method. As you peel back new layers with each answer ask yourself if you’re prioritizing your organization’s issues or are you taking into account customer needs? The answer may surprise you.

Don’t you ever wish that sometimes you could just simultaneously reply to all of your emails with a simple yes or no?  But what would happen if you did?  That’s what Jim Carrey finds out in the movie Bruce Almighty.  He’s given God’s powers and ends up having to answer everyone’s prayers.  After pulling an all-nighter he decides to reply yes to all of them.  Then all hell breaks loose, no pun intended.

As marketers we face the same dilemma.  Our customers place demands on us and we’re not about to say yes to every request but we need to self-reflect and ask ourselves do we reply “no” too often?  While we all hate to admit to this, we sometimes make decisions that anger customers.  But over time, this anger can swell and drive customers away, or worse, incite revolt against your brand.

We should ask ourselves if we unintentionally design touchpoints that put our internal needs before those of our customers.  What perceptions do we need to avoid in order not to alienate customers and lose subscribers?

Take for example the firestorm that David Pogue of the New York Times recently ignited with his “Take Back the Beep” Campaign.  He simply questioned why customers didn’t have the option to bypass the automated message you hear when you leave a voicemail for someone on their mobile phone.  The post has generated enormous attention and has started conversations again around why companies should listen more to their customers.  One blog posting title captured it really well, “Customers are talking: Why do companies continue to do such dumb stuff?”

For us it shows why analyzing your customer experience from the customer’s perspective and making little changes can go a long way to differentiating yourself from your competitors.

Marketing works to communicate a brand promise to their customers, but if the brand experience does not consistently and reliably deliver on that brand promise, it will not be believed. As we all know, business value is directly linked to customer value - the closer we meet customers expectations, the more value is created. Simple right? So, why does this so often breakdown?

One of the biggest reasons is the disconnect between what a company thinks they are delivering in an experience, and what the customer actually experiences. A study by Bain & Company found that 80 percent of companies surveyed believed they delivered a “superior experience” to their customers. However, their customers only rated 8 percent of these companies as truly delivering a superior experience.

Do you know if each of your customer interactions is living up to your brand promise? Are you providing a more consistent and relevant customer experience than your competitors? Is there a disconnect between what you think you are delivering and what your customer experiences?

In a recent article by CMG Partners, we discuss the importance of establishing a baseline of the customer experience by looking at your business through the eyes of your customers. It is only through active management of your customer touchpoints and deep customer insight that you can begin to close this gap and turn your customers into believers.

It seems there are still weekly if not daily reminders of government bailouts and interventions, which isn’t helping several industries including retail financial services. This has unfortunately further embittered customers as well as eroded their confidence and their trust in financial institutions such as banks, brokerages and insurance companies.

But if you review the latest JD Powers retail banking survey, it appears that banks in particular face the most arduous uphill challenge in mending customer relationships. The results show that just over a third of banking customers are committed to their current banking institution, and what’s worse is that it’s dropped 6 points over the past three years.

In a paper CMG Partners recently published, we make the case that retail financial services should shift their resources to excel at customer intimacy rather than products or operations in order to succeed within this seemingly new paradigm.

But to pursue customer intimacy strategy requires addressing four areas:

1) Shift focus and power from product lines to customer relationships
Too often product groups or sales dictate decisions that affect customers, misguiding firms to emphasize internal benefits such as cost savings that customers may not value. Customer intimacy is about placing customer needs before those of the organization.

2) Make customer insights a primary driver
The best way to become more customer centric is by developing mechanisms that make customer insights a key input for all business areas. More importantly, it’s critical to find ways to activate customer centricity; for example find ways to eliminate red tape and empower customer-facing employees to respond to issues on the fly.

3) Focus on holistic customer-centric messaging
Move towards tailored messaging in order to deliver greater relevancy through marketing communications. A critical component that needs to accompany messaging is an effective customer segmentation scheme such as a lifestage model, but be sure that your bank, especially branch offices can effectively execute against the scheme.

4) Build a seamless differentiated customer experience
Focusing on customer intimacy and ultimately customer loyalty requires a customer experience to support this relationship. This means adjusting and aligning touchpoints to work in accordance with the messaging and segmentation strategies you’ve developed.

The most recent issue of Perspectives, our e-newsletter is now available online and includes several articles:

• How Solid is Your Foundation?  Addressing CMO Tenure
• The Case for Customer Intimacy: Transforming Retail Financial Services
• Rewriting the Rules of PR

You can also read Sparking Transformation within your Organization, recently published by CMO Council in its monthly e-journal, Marketing Magnified.

While there appear to be signs of improvement across financial markets, there is still uncertainty around how long it may take consumers to recover. This lack of clarity has left not only consumers having to make drastic lifestyle changes but also companies.

Is frugality here to stay and how do marketers deal with this potential change in consumer behavior? That was the focus of an article published today in AdAge, and something we’ve spoken about in recent blog postings and published articles.

Knowing your customers is more important than ever given that they may be easily tempted to switch brands, products or services due to shifting priorities. There are simple but effective steps that can be taken to address this:

1) Talk to your customers
It’s critical to better understand how customers perceive that their needs have evolved, how they feel their behavior may shift in the future, and what key factors impact them the most. Comparing these findings to actual performance data can provide insights on whether customer feedback is consistent with their behavior.

2) Adjust your segmentation
Knowing whether your customers have changed can improve the return on your marketing investments by knowing which segments should be allocated more funding at this time. You may also discover that your segmentation scheme requires significant changes, which may affect one or more aspects of your marketing process, including messaging and touchpoints.

3) Develop tailored messaging
Making these first two steps real can start with messaging. More and more companies are moving away from uniform communications because it’s simply more effective to speak to customers when the message is highly relevant to them.

Beyond these steps outlined in this posting it may be necessary to alter relevant marketing elements such as channels and touchpoints. Some channels may be more effective for some messages and some touchpoints may be more relevant for certain customer segments.

Whatever you decide to do, don’t forget that your customers need to come first.

A recent study performed by ANA showed that 71% of marketers report budget decreases for 2009.  Now I’m not an economist nor do I pretend to be one but I would like to think that the stock market’s performance this week is a signal that we have seen the bottom of this economic recession.  Unfortunately due to the domino effect that is taking place in the market, near term demand will most likely continue to suffer and what this means for most marketing leaders is a second, maybe third round of budget cuts is coming down the pipe.

While this is the reality for marketing leaders, now more than ever is the time for marketing leaders to be the voice of reason and truly be the chief customer officer to ensure that investment and cost cutting decisions have your organization’s customers in mind.  If a company is not careful it may perpetuate a business “death spiral” where cost cutting impacts customer satisfaction and demand, which in turn impact top-line revenue creating the need for yet further cost cutting.  As the name alludes to, this downward spiral typically results in difficult position for any business to re-emerge from and can be avoided by maintaining a customer perspective during these trying times.

For more information on common steps that marketing leaders can take to address this challenge check out our article, Go to Battle for Your Customers. 

What an exciting time to be a marketer. Every industry today is experiencing massive change - competitive shake-outs, industry consolidation, or drastically changing customer needs and behaviors. Change can be a launch pad for growth and an opportunity to do things differently, further your competitive advantage, and gain market share by evolving in new ways relevant to customers.

Marketing segmentation is a powerful strategy for companies experiencing significant market change. Matching your unique value proposition to the right customer segments can help you improve margins and gain market share - and on the flipside, changing needs may require you to adjust your value proposition.

Every marketer today should be asking themselves how has their customer landscape changed - what new emerging needs and values are driving customer behaviors, and has your customer segmentation been affected. By re-evaluating your segmentation strategy - which segments do you continue to invest in, which are no longer attractive, and what new segments may have emerged - you can better align your value proposition with the right customer segments. The same old segmentation efforts with the same old products likely will not position you for growth.

It is time for deeper customer insight to question and drive change in your strategy, and better position yourself to adapt to changing customer needs. For example, Saks has a new strategy to meet the changing needs of their cash-constrained shoppers - they are changing the product mix in-store to include more affordable clothing lines and eliminate the dependency on discounts. Saks and affordable were never words I would have used in the same sentence before.

You can’t take a back seat approach. Marketers must be proactive in evaluating their value proposition in the light of change, and ensure it is aligned with their segmentation strategy. It is an exciting time to be a marketer - embrace the change.

A short article in Brandweek recently brought my attention to the next evolution of the New Balance love/hate campaign. As a chronic snooze button addict who shares a dramatic on-again, off-again relationship with running, I couldn’t be happier to see that New Balance is not only continuing the love/hate campaign, they’re taking it to the next level by extending it to the customer experience.

(Check out one of the ads from the first round of the love/hate creative.)

New Balance is launching a “Total Fit” campaign that includes new creative but also features the placement of 275 trained Fit Specialists and point-of-purchase displays in retail locations. While I look forward to checking out the ads that will be launching March 16, I’m more interested to see how New Balance does with the fit specialists.

Specialty running stores offer a buying experience that lures runners in with the promise of talking to an expert who can help you find the right shoe—the one that will lessen pain and make running easier. And it works too (It helped me find my way to the Asics I’m running in now). New Balance is looking to extend this same kind of experience to national retailers like Dick’s and Modell’s. They are placing bets not only on the advertising, but also on the buying process by finding a creative way to establish a presence during the purchase experience.

I’m in the target demographic for this campaign, and it’s obvious this message is grounded in consumer insight and in line with New Balance’s brand and mission. It simultaneously tells consumers something about the company but also something about themselves.

But even as a sometimes runner, I will tell you it really does come down to the shoe and how it feels on your foot. So the real question is, can New Balance tip the love/hate scale and win over runners with the promise of Total Fit? While I don’t know whether I would be willing to leave my Asics behind, I just might be willing to slip on a New Balance shoe and find out.