Dude, where’s my customer?

by Erasmo Hernandez

The following piece presents a prespective on how to prevent your organization from living the horror story of watching your customer leaving and not coming back without knowing why. Humbleness, inquiry, analysis and positive thinking are a few of the key words you should keep in mind when making decisions on how to stay relevant for your customer.

There are two possible answers for the question posed in the title of this article, either your customer is coming back soon, and you’ll be pleased to see him/her again and make another sell, or he/she is across the street buying from someone else. If you are asking yourself this question, it is most likely that you already know the answer because you have noticed that the customer has not come back yet, the reason is that customer demand is lower and every time you lose one customer it is more noticeable.

Let’s go back to that moment when you didn’t need to ask yourself that awful question. The moment when customers needed to come through your business doors to buy your product or ask for the service you offered, what was happening then? You provided a product or service that either wasn’t available in the proximity or it was available, but it didn’t have the characteristics in terms of quality, price and value that yours had. The customers felt the need to come to your business to get the characteristics that they perceived more valuable. So, the answer is very simple, you were offering value to your customers, and what exactly was that? I don’t know, did you ask them?

Now, let’s move on to the scenario when you started wondering what happened to your customers. The answer is very simple, and yet quiet complex too. The simple part is that you stopped offering what your customer considered valuable; whether it was quality, price, availability or service, someone else made your customers a better offer and now is winning the market, brutal isn’t it? The complex part of the answer is figuring out what is that concept everyone talks about but very few can grasp it with their hands and explain it in a simple manner, VALUE!!

The reason why so many successful businesses forgot about identifying what their customers appreciate as value, is precisely what made them successful in the first place, the customer kept coming and sales didn’t decrease, until they did. For example, the failed strategy of a successful activist investor, Ed Lampert, to increase Sears value. His strategy of turning around a business that was supposed to be a retailer that depends largely on the flow of new customers into the stores and loyalty of old ones, focused on the wrong side of the spectrum. He focused on how to create value for the shareholders, not for the customers or even employees. Keeping that in mind, he decided to avoid investing in capital expenditures, new stores and upkeeping the existing ones was out of discussion in this new strategy. The idea was to consolidate some stores, reduce overhead and capitalize over the real estate assets the company has. At the end of the day, Sears is a 132 years old dying icon whose value has decreased about 85% since 2004, trying to fight in complex market in which brick and mortar has been virtually replaced by e-commerce and other business models.

One thing that requires humbleness and focus is to analyze and question yourself about your decisions even when everything is going great, leave a little space in your mind where doubt can fit so you can dedicate time to analyze which self-created conditions made the success possible, what went well. David Cooperrider created Appreciative inquiry to help organizations run planning exercises based on positive thinking focusing on “what works” and moving forward from there to create a new reality. The “bread and butter” of an organization should always be asking to their customers: “what are we offering that you really appreciate as value?” The answer to that question is what will make your offer stand out against the competition.

Money invested in understanding the market, the client and the consumer is more likely to produce a reward. There are always challenges in analyzing data that requires to develop specific capabilities and putting in place enablers to face them. The amounts of data that a successful e-commerce site produces are immense and cherry picking what is useful to make decisions could turn into a migraine very easily. That is the reason why advanced analytics and highly efficient data bases are two things that nowadays you can hear about repeatedly in large forums organized by Software companies. The application of analysis methodologies to business processes is now a great “intangible” asset that companies are integrating to their capabilities. Not only to assess consumer or market behavior but also applying it to the rest of the value chain processes, because you cannot properly execute a value offer if you don’t have the correct processes in place aligned with the market needs, can you?

Prevent yourself from getting to the point when you are alone seated in a meeting room asking yourself where your customer went. Besides the positive planning mentioned above which is intended to capitalize over what you are doing right and those data analysis capabilities you should consider, there are customer journey mapping methodologies that will help your organization identify which part of the complete customer experience the company should invest in, based on what your customer appreciates the most.

To summarize, practicing humility by allowing yourself to question what your customer considers valuable, and putting in place the tools to answer that question are the key to stay relevant and focused on the one thing you cannot afford to lose, your customers. 

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