In his new book ‘Customers Are People... The Human Touch’ acclaimed international author and customer service guru John McKean argues that customers don’t want relationships, they never have and they never will. They simply want the best product or service at the right price and be treated like a human being in the process

Customers are people — first and foremost, just as we are all customers. And how do we choose a product? And how do we choose from whom to buy? We look for the best product at the right price and, when faced with a choice between similar products and prices, we choose the company who best treats us as a human being.
     In competitive markets 70% of customer decision-making is based on how we are treated with only 30% being determined by the product itself, yet surprisingly only 10% of company resources are invested in how ‘humanly’ they interact with customers.
     Most business’s customer initiatives often appear to focus on treatment differentiation under the premise of ‘relationships’ but instead focus primarily on better marketing techniques rather then the primary driver of long-term sales growth... a company’s ‘human touch’. The truth is that customers do not want what the word ‘relationship’ implies - closeness, intimacy, shared privacy. Customers simply want to buy the product that best suits them and to be treated as a human being in the process.
     Without the anchor of treating customers as people, business continues to be caught up in an endless cycle of unprofitable product and price manipulation and the corresponding cycle of fleeting loyalties. Ironically, treating customers as human beings is something that has always been second nature to the world’s best salespeople, marketers and service professionals.
     Over 80% of customer initiatives are focused on how to ‘sell the customer better’ through matching products to customers rather than investing more resources in ‘treating customers better’. The resources applied to ‘selling the customer better’ for specific customer initiatives have little impact on a customer’s future decision to buy during subsequent campaigns — whereas resources applied to ‘treating the customer better’ have a strong annuity effect on successive campaigns.

Three primary human needs
 Customers want and need something more akin to an ‘understanding’ . An understanding has certain emotionally based expectations and exchanges without the implied closeness and meaningfulness suggested by the word ‘relationship’. Research has shown that this ‘understanding’ is based on three primary human needs of customers and the resulting expectations: Acknowledgement, Respect, Trust. How and why customers choose to buy, both initially and follow-on customer purchases is eloquently simple. Here is a snapshot of how customers buy as ‘people’ (through their eyes):

1. Build Trust in me so I feel buying your product is the best decision for me.
2. Acknowledge me and my importance to you
3. Respect me and my needs

     Initial trust is either confirmed and strengthened or is disproved and decreases based on the customer’s experience.

Why hasn’t a business-wide human touch been addressed sooner?
There are many reasons why business is only now beginning to realise that a customer’s buying behaviour has more to do with human behaviour than ‘consumer’ behaviour. In fact, it could be said that consumer behaviour only explains 30% of why people buy whereas people’s behaviour explains 70% of why customers buy.

First, it is a simple matter of the evolution of understanding and approach to customers. When reviewing the evolution of customer approaches, it is clear that business has been evolving toward Human Behaviour - the DNA of business for decades. The chart above represents this evolution.
     Pre-1980s was characterised by a general view of customers as a homogenous group of consumers. The beginning of this era was dominated by the large industrialists’ views of consumers. This view is captured by Henry Ford’s famous pronouncement that customers could have any colour of Ford they wanted, as long as it was black. Today, research shows that roughly 40% of automobile buyers say they would switch core brands if they could not get the colour they wanted.
     The 1980s was characterised by the recognition that an external focus on customers was becoming increasingly important. Applying resources toward an external customer focus instead of a predominantly internal operational focus became necessary. Concepts such as ‘re-engineering the business’ towards customers became popular during this era.
      The 1990s was characterised by the recognition that customers are individuals with distinctive attributes.  Once business realised this, they made the leap of faith that fostering a ‘relationship’ with customers would somehow compel them to buy more products. While the popular term CRM was used to describe this approach, most of the actions focused less on what the word ‘relationship’ implied and more on how to sell more products by matching product attributes with customer attributes. Although this approach provided initial gains, returns are diminishing because it fails to adequately address why people buy a product from a particular company in a competitive market.
      2000+ is characterised by a growing set of early ‘human touch’ practitioners who are raising the bar on their competitors by not only recognising their customers as individuals but creating a primary focus toward treating their customers as human beings in every customer interaction.

Releasing your firm’s humanity is to profitably deliver the best products for customers and do it in a way that acknowledges and respects their dignity and worth as people. The journey to accomplish this begins with the simplest of actions by any single person in the busi­ness. It could start with the checkout clerk who uses more eye contact and smiles more often at customers

Peeling back the onion
This evolution is the result of several decades of ‘peeling back the onion’ on the real reasons why and how customers buy as people. The most significant factor in understanding and verifying the importance of human interactions has been business’s very recent openness to engaging behavioural scientists. This openness has grown out of frustration with conventional customer approaches that contin­ue to yield only moderate improvements in the attempt to create consistent profitable buying behaviour by customers. Interestingly enough, during the time business was evolving their understanding of customers, the underlying human needs, which determine how people buy have not fundamentally changed. It is only the cause and effect relationship between customer expectations and the ever-rising bar of competition that has created the illusion that customer’s buying behaviour has fundamentally changed.
     Throughout this management evolution, the ‘human touch’ has been practiced intuitively at an individual level. Top business profes­sionals in marketing, sales and service have discovered this truth through personal experience and practice this intuitive art at varying degrees of conscientiousness. Most brilliant moments in business can be traced to the practice of this art. Despite this, most firms have not established the art of humanness as a firm-wide science to create a unanimous and consistent human touch across every interac­tion. It has not been until recently that its importance has begun to be explicitly recognised and funded; and once again the competitive bar is raised.
     My research shows that the following leadership behaviours cre­ate the highest probability for employees to be fulfilled as human beings and in turn, fulfill customers as human beings.

Behaviour and the bottom line
These behaviours ultimately hit the bottom line. The correlation between employee fulfillment, customer fulfillment and fluctuations in share price is very high. The chart above illustrates this powerful cause and effect relationship. The trend-line for share price has been manually shifted to the left on the chart by one quarter to more easily illustrate the relationships without the inevitable lag between customer fulfillment changes and share price fluctuations was one quarter. This can be as short as one-week and as long as several quarters depending on how fast the market changes, e.g. sales cycles, speed of competitors.
     These three elements represent the classic behavioural business cycle, i.e. happy employees tend to create happy customers, which positively affect share price and profitability. This particular telecommunications firm actively tracked employee and customer satisfaction for 2-3 years using quarterly summary measurements. The correla­tion between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction was .75 during eight measurement periods. The correlation was stronger than coincidental while the conclusions were intuitive and statistical. The study covered multiple business units that contained more than 50,000 employees.
     To leverage the awesome power of the human touch is to recognise the genius behind every successful business transaction. Now there is a body of documented evidence and experience that will enable businesses to explicitly and purposefully implement the sci­ence of the human touch across an entire organisation consistently.

The human profit factor
Releasing your firm’s humanity is to profitably deliver the best products for customers and do it in a way that acknowledges and respects their dignity and worth as people. The journey to accom­plish this begins with the simplest of actions by any single person in the business. It could start with the checkout clerk who uses more eye contact and smiles more often at customers. The customer service rep who tries to deal with his customer’s service issues as if they were his own. The manager who takes extra care in making sure his small group of employees clearly knows the objectives and has fun accomplishing them. The business unit leader who increases the level at which her organisation couples responsibility with authority to fulfill customer’s needs.
     For leaders, actions focused on creating a vision and culture to actively develop their carefully selected employees will have the big­ger impact on customers as people. Operating within a strong human culture, employees can efficiently concentrate on fulfilling the primary buying determinants of customers: acknowledgment, respect, and trust. The areas of focus for acknowledgment should be a customer’s existence, importance, feelings, and characteristics. In the area of respect, objectives should be focused on respecting the customer’s dignity as a person. Communicating respect begins with simple actions such as using common courtesies and should extend into other areas such as respect for a customer’s time, personal space, privacy, home, and diversity.

No trust no deal
Focus on trust is critical because people don’t buy without trust. Trust in customers is built on a foundation of product quality and operational excellence with supporting actions building trust in how human the business will treat them during interactions. Other supporting actions should promote integrity, openness, and the continuous education of customers as to the business’s relative value.

1. Leading the human firm — leading the human firm is about selecting, developing, and fulfilling employees so they can fulfill the three primary human needs that make the biggest impact on a customer’s decision to buy.
2. Acknowledging customers — understanding how best to fulfill the human need for acknowledgment. Activities should focus on acknowledging the customer’s existence, importance, characteristics, and feelings. It is also important to focus on eliminating behaviours (intentional or unintentional) that create feelings of being ignored and anonymous.
3. Treating customers with respect — understanding how best to fulfill the human need for respect should centre on their dignity as human beings. Sending messages of respect starts with basic common courtesies and extends into such areas as respect for the customer’s time, privacy, personal space, home, and diversity. Equally as important is focusing on eliminating behaviours that convey disrespect.
4. Building trust with customers — understanding the role of trust is key because customers don’t buy without trust. Actions to build trust in customers should be focused on honesty, ethics, integrity, openness, educating customers, and most importantly operational excellence. It is also important to focus on eliminating behaviour that creates distrust.
5. Communicating humanly — understanding and developing the skills to create the most human communication between employee and customer. This involves becoming a better listener as well as a better communicator to customers both verbally and non verbally.
6. Implementing the human touch consistently across interactions — business should view their interactions with customers as a series of interactions that must be consistently ‘human’. The human touch of each interaction of the series should be consistently measured by a hierarchy of human needs, their weighted importance, and linked to the supporting business processes.
7. Understanding and applying the human touch as a process — each human touch can be viewed as one step linked to many other interdependent steps to make up an entire process. Business should focus on human touch as a process that enables not only a high degree of consistency in delivering their humanness but also in helping to isolate activities that dehumanise.
8. Implementing technology to humanise (not dehumanise) — Currently, the implementation of technology in customer interactions humanises and dehumanises in equal proportions. The highest impact areas in which technology will make interactions more human is when it enables: convenience and control, anonymity, simplicity of life, and the sense that the business truly ‘knows’ them. Technology should also set employees free from task execution to focus on the human elements of the interaction.

Equally, if not more important, is eliminating the causes of distrust. Effectively creating feelings of trust, acknowledgement and respect requires specific skills centred on communicating clear signals of humanness and caring and being an even better listener - both verbally and non verbally. These actions should be implemented consistently across all interactions with an understanding of the hierarchy of human needs, their relative importance, and their supporting business processes.
     Each one of these distinct interactions in each area of the business should be viewed as one step in a sequence of interdependent steps that make up an entire process. This will enhance the business’s ability to ensure consistency and effectiveness in their human touch process as well as help identify the steps or root causes of actions that dehumanise.
      Supporting these processes are the enabling technologies and the degree to which they increase or decrease the humanness of customer interactions. Business should focus on the areas in which they have traditionally been weak in enhancing the humanness of interactions. These areas are enabling convenience and control, anonymity, simplicity of life, and the sense that the business truly ‘knows’ them. Technology should also set employees free from task execution to focus on the human elements of the interaction.
     To accomplish these objectives is to create competitive competencies for the new era of customer fulfillment as well as creating a deeper meaning for business success... significance.

AUTHOR INFORMATION
‘Customers are People — The Human Touch’ published by John Wiley and Sons is based on research involving the world’s top ‘human touch’ practitioners. John McKean has created a practical guide to help you turn the human touch ‘art’ practiced by the world’s top individual performers and implement it as a consistent and profitable science across an entire business