To paraphrase Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 paper on consciousness, “What is it like to be a bat?”, I want to instead ask the question, “What is it like to be a customer?” Nagel’s argument was geared at refuting reductionism - the philosophical position that a complex system is nothing more than the sum of its parts. Such a materialist approach omits the essential components of consciousness (“emergent properties” we would say today): an actor with motives and feelings and a personality. We typically approach the customer in the same fashion – our hypothetical target consumer is typically nothing more than the sum of our data and demographics combined with our own products and services.
I want to digress for a moment to illustrate and highlight this important point about “being like something”. What is it like to be you? I don’t mean you in general, I mean you right now, your thoughts, feelings, attention, concerns, pains, stresses – the particulars of being you at this very moment. Now I want to ask you to imagine “what is it like to be someone else”, perhaps someone special to you like your spouse / significant other. Not how they spend their day in general, but what is it like to be them right now? What are they thinking and feeling wherever they are, whatever they are doing, right now? Or how about your child? Remember your own childhood, not the generalities, but the specifics, the very moments, thoughts and feelings of what it was like to be a seven / ten / sixteen year-old eating lunch with friends at school and then imagine them in the same situation right now.
This is hard, isn’t it? In fact, I’d guess it’s so hard that most of us don’t do it, can’t do it, don’t even attempt it. We take the complexity and the self-importance of our own inner life for granted, yet generalize, overgeneralize, about what it’s like to be someone else, even those close to us whom we love dearly. If you are having a conversation with someone, consider what it is like to be them in that conversation, as subject of their own conversation, not the object of your conversation.
Even if our imagination fails us in the short term, this exercise in empathy can’t help but improve our day-to-day personal relationships by putting ourselves in another’s shoes. If you are having trouble imagining their inner subjective self, then ask them, have that conversation: What are you thinking, feeling, what is it like to be you? This could be a bit awkward, uncomfortable and intense, but be open to the possibilities of truly understanding another person.
So it’s no wonder that when it comes to the commercial world where we’re marketing to consumers unseen and unknown that we’d overgeneralize to an even greater degree. We tell ourselves that the state of the art has matured from mass marketing to mass customization to one-to-one marketing, but that one-to-one effort is still largely targeted at a segmented but generalized ‘consumer’, not a person with a complex inner life and awareness that manifests and changes from moment to moment.
Yet we can hardly be blamed, either – as I said, this is hard, and there are practical matters to consider, the first being that we know much, MUCH less about this nameless, faceless consumer than we do about our spouse. And while our customer data is getting better all the time, it is still often siloed across disparate systems that don’t share or interact with each other: demographic data, personal data, billing info, purchase history, open orders, shipment status, service history and social media.
Where to start? My suggestion might seem a bit counterintuitive, but I recommend starting at the end with customer service. Why? Because this is both where we know the most about our customer and where the interaction is the most personal: the problem/complaint call into the call center.
This is where and when, as a customer, we most want to be recognized and treated as a person. We want our problem to be taken seriously – we don’t want to be treated as being stupid because we’re having this problem with your product – and we really don’t want to have our problem dealt with via a script by staffers who actually have no clue what your product does or how it works. Neither do we want to be treated as a cost to be minimized, and forbid that we ever get a whiff that the call center is being measured on how quickly they can end the call (i.e. the “How many customers did you hang up on per hour” metric).
If you are doing it right – your customer data integration and customer analytics – this is where and when you will have the most information about your customer. If you can’t get it right here, then getting closer to the customer at the front-end through segmentation or omnichannel marketing or whatever is not going to happen. Effective, outstanding one-to-one marketing and customer engagement is going to first require developing a Culture of the Consumer, a culture of the consumer as a real person, as the subject of their experience and interaction with your product / service, not as an object of your business processes. Building this Culture of the Consumer is going to take practice, and as with learning any new task or talent, you should start with the easier challenges and work your way up.
You are collecting and analyzing more and more customer-related data all the time, and rightly so: being data-driven is the necessary foundation. Putting all this data to effective use is the worthwhile challenge. Putting it to use first in the customer service arena is the best way to then learn how to later apply that knowledge to your maturing but more complex front-end, one-to-one marketing endeavors.
By Leo Sadovy, EPM Channel Contributor, from: http://blogs.sas.com/content/valuealley/2015/09/15/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-customer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ValueAlley+%28Value+Alley%29
Leo Sadovy handles marketing for Performance Management at SAS, which includes the areas of budgeting, planning and forecasting, activity-based management, strategy management, and workforce analytics, and advocates for SAS’ best-in-class analytics capability into the office of finance across all industry sectors. Before joining SAS, he spent seven years as Vice-President of Finance for Business Operations for a North American division of Fujitsu, managing a team focused on commercial operations, customer and alliance partnerships, strategic planning, process management, and continuous improvement. During his 13-year tenure at Fujitsu, Leo developed and implemented the ROI model and processes used in all internal investment decisions—and also held senior management positions in finance and marketing.Prior to Fujitsu, Sadovy was with Digital Equipment Corporation for eight years in sales and financial management. He started his management career in laser optics fabrication for Spectra-Physics and later moved into a finance position at the General Dynamics F-16 fighter plant in Fort Worth, Texas.He has an MBA in Finance and a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing. He and his wife Ellen live in North Carolina with their three college-age children, and among his unique life experiences he can count a run for U.S. Congress and two singing performances at Carnegie Hall. See Leo’s articles on EPM Channel here.