Customers don’t want relationships
- never have, never will

Are you treating your customers with the ‘human touch’? John McKean drives a spike through conventional theories of relationship marketing.

The juggernaut of CRM has had a strong run for almost a decade. But a barrage of CRM bashing has become all the rage, making CRM’s fate as a viable approach deeply questionable. So, instead of slinging more mud, let’s be fair and evaluate CRM (good and bad), as history will reveal it as simply another stage in the evolution of business toward a more complete understanding of and approach to customers.

To its credit, CRM brought us the explicit realisation that customers are individual consumers. We thank the CRM gods for that earth-shaking idea, but unfortunately this original premise ballooned beyond the boundaries of validity. Extensions to the original premise produced two follow-on fatal assumptions with expectations that eclipsed the legitimacy and merit of the founding premise. These fatal assumptions will ultimately grace CRM’s epitaph.

The evolution of thought went something like this:

Assumption #1: (True) Customers are individual consumers...

Assumption #2: (False) …who want relationships...

Assumption #3 (False) …who will buy more if we have relationships.

Our three-year research study of how customers as people choose to buy from one company versus its competitor revealed that people’s buying behaviour is determined by much simpler human mechanics than the word ‘relationship’ implies. Simply put, we look for the best products at the right prices. And how do we choose from whom to buy? When faced with a choice between companies with similar products and prices, we choose the one that treats us the best. In competitive markets, 70 percent of customer decision-making is based on how we are treated, with only 30 percent being determined by the product itself. Yet surprisingly, only 10 percent of company resources are invested in how ‘humanly’ they interact with customers. Instead, businesses are riding the merry-go-round of manipulating easily copied product features and prices.

Over 80 percent of customer relationship initiatives are focused on how to ‘sell to the customer better’ through matching products to customers, rather then investing resources in ‘treating customers better’. Resources applied to selling to 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 affect on successive campaigns.

Businesses make little effort to truly differentiate their treatment of customers as people. This perpetuates the natural response of customers to leapfrog from one company to the next in their fruitless search for that unique company whose treatment of customers stands out as remarkable.

Part of the confusion is that businesses believe they are addressing the ‘treatment’ of customers as people with customer ‘relationship’ initiatives. They have been sold the fallacy that if they develop customer ‘relationships’ they’ll sell more. The truth is that customers don’t want, and have never wanted, what the word ‘relationship’ implies — i.e. closeness, intimacy, sharing their privacy. Customers simply want to buy the product that suits them best and to be treated as human beings in the process. For customers, being treated with the ‘human touch’ means three primary human buying needs are met: i) Acknowledgement, 2) Respect and 3) Trust. The latter must be two-way — the company treating the customer with trust and the customer trusting the company to uphold product quality, delivery and integrity.

When examining business pursuit of the ‘relationship’ illusion, it becomes clear that the majority of expenditures centre on matching individual customers with products, while relatively little effort is dedicated to ‘human’ treatment of customers. While knowledge of customers as individuals is important, it only addresses 30 percent of their decision to buy because it focuses on ‘what customer will buy what product’, but doesn’t address what company the customer will buy the product from’. While expenditures of this type create a short-term improvement in profits, the initial returns quickly diminish because product demand is created for both the company and its competitors.

The diminishing returns of this approach coupled with the rising level of customer expectations has prompted a growing number of early ‘human touch’ practitioners to usher in a new era of customer fulfillment. It is the natural evolution of business’s understanding of customer needs and behavior.

It is ironic that the art of the ‘human touch’ has always been second nature to top sales, marketing and service individuals. My book captures the most effective approaches used by the world’s best ‘human touch’ practitioners to implement this intuitive art as a consistent, company-wide science. It then provides a pragmatic guide to enable any business to start implementing these common sense approaches at the speed and sophistication that best suits them, ranging from simply communicating more humanly to more rigorous process and technology oriented approaches.

If every company dissected the behaviours of its top sales, marketing, and service individuals (not as a profession but as human behaviours), they would find the unspoken driving force behind what they are able to do better than their competitors.

HUMAN TOUCH AS AN INDIVIDUAL ART (ACKNOWLEDGEMENT,

RESPECT AND TRUST)

I treat my customers as people by-

A. Acknowledging

·        Their existence
·        I know them
·        Their importance
·        Their feelings (good and bad)

B. Showing respect for their:

·        Dignity and worth
·        Right to Choose
·        Diversity
·        Time
·        Space
·        Privacy

C. Building trust

First in our products and services and our ability to deliver them
Secondly, in our honesty, ethics, integrity, openness and knowledge

While practising the ART of the human touch at an individual level is effective, it is naturally limited to the individuals who practise it and remains random and inconsistent when viewed over time and across business functions. Our research found that to make it consistent over time and function, the most successful human touch practitioners first needed to gain an understanding of how their human interaction behaviors affected customers as people. They then needed to apply one or more of four sciences to embed their human touch interaction attributes beyond individual practitioners.

SCIENCES OF THE HUMAN TOUCH:

1. Science of communicating ‘humanly’

Understand and develop the skills to create the most human communication with customers. This involves becoming a better listener as well as a better communicator, both verbally and non-verbally.

Example: One department store manager, emphasising traditional merchandising, instructed employees not to initiate communication with customers. When a new manager stressed the importance of warm greetings and courteous service, the store’s sales jumped by 10 percent with no changes other than this more human approach.

2. Science of consistency across business function

View the human touch as a series of interactions across all business functions. These series of interactions should be measured by a hierarchy of human needs, their weighted importance, and linked to the supporting business processes.

Example: A customer’s series of interactions with Wal-Mart is one humanising experience after another. A friendly, smiling greeter welcomes customers. All employees are easily identified, helpful and knowledgeable. While shopping, price rollback notices and competitive comparisons educate customers, building and reinforcing trust, i.e. Wal-Mart ‘Sells for less’. Employees acknowledge and respect the customer’s importance and dignity by walking with a customer to help find an item. Efficient cashiers who make eye contact and smile acknowledge the customer’s importance to Wal-Mart and respect their valuable time. Plus, when returning or exchanging an item, customers are not treated with distrust or irritation but receive the same courteous, friendly, efficient service as always, reinforcing the building of a two-way trust.

3. Understand and map ART as a store 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 helps to isolate activities that dehumanise.

Example: The best example of the human touch as a process is from the hospitality industry. Ritz-Carlton addressed their number one complaint of slow room service as a process, with all defects having a root cause. They traced the root cause of the room service complaint to the fact that when the hotel was initially opened three years before to save money, the founder ordered too few bed linens. As a result, bed linens were constantly shuffled between floors, chronically tying up the elevators and forcing room service staff to wait 20 minutes or more for an elevator. While the solution was simple, discovering the root cause took some effort and focus.

4. Apply technology to humanise interactions

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 are — enabling convenience and control, anonymity, and simplicity of life, plus 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.

Example: Barnes & Noble has a picture of every book they sell online because whether shopping in a physical store or online, the visual representation of the book has a major impact on whether the customers actually purchase the book. Barnes & Noble.com found visual processing such a critical issue for even used books to sell effectively that they installed scanners at their receiving desks and loading docks. For new books, publishers provide a high-quality image of each book for display on the web-site. As they found from tracking human behaviour on their website, if people are going to buy, they need a picture.

The biggest challenge moving forward for companies will be to explicitly recognise that something so simple is at the core of every great sale and service initiative. The journey toward a greater human touch can start with something that costs nothing — an added smile — and extend to sophisticated implementations of human touch sciences. It is the future of differentiation for every company. It has been and always will be the DNA of business success.