Category Archives: Customers

The Real Ryanair, Please Stand Up

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Branding, Customer Experience, Customers, Management

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Ryanair

Mike and the Customer is a very good blog about how to improve things for the customer. One of Mike Bird’s recent posts caught my eye: Ryanair: kings of the customer experience. I prepared the following as a bit of conversation between Mike and me. If you’re interested in following along, please read his Ryanair article too. Ryanair is a low-cost Irish airline.

Mike, I really enjoyed your post and I’ve reread it a few times. Considering solely what’s in it, something seems a bit off to me in terms of emphasis. I don’t think the most interesting observation is, “Customer experience is not about being nice, it’s about meeting strategic goals.” Rather, I prefer something closer to, “Ryanair succeeds precisely because it is one of the few companies to have understood exactly the customer experience that it needs to compete strategically…”

My take is it’s about Ryanair understanding what its customers consider value. As you say, they value, “…Low cost, on time, with bags, that’s it.” From this perspective I read the story as a triumph of understanding the customer and driving the organization to deliver what they value without compromise.

To me, Ryanair hasn’t, “…Designed a customer experience to compete strategically.” Their customers don’t care about it and they know it. Instead Ryanair has chosen a low-cost, high-efficiency strategy vis-à-vis their competition to meet the needs of the utilitarian traveler. In that space customer “service” is all that is required and an experience isn’t a consideration. That being said, I do love the Michael O’Leary quotes you use (CEO Ryanair). He obviously knows how to promote his brand through the Press. Making fun of “Mother” is much more memorable than some dry statistic about on-time rates for take offs and departures.

Jim

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The Three Most Important Management Tools

20 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in Customers, Management, Shared values

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George Zimmer, Men's Warehouse, Lucavia Consulting

Have you played the game where you ask your friends, “If you could only have three ‘albums’ on a desert island what would they be?” We’re so used to having nearly unlimited variety that narrowing down our favorite music, is a strange mixture of fun and irritation. (Today’s answer: Bob Dylan, Biograph; Jovanotti, L’Albero; and The Beatles, Beatles VI.)

With business news all around us everyday, I think it would also be fun, and instructive, to think, “Out of all the management practices we know, which three are the most fundamental?” Of course, there’s probably no single right answer but I’ll argue for these:

  • Know your purpose.
  • Know vision.
  • Constantly communicate these to your customers, team, and partners.

Reading the news about George Zimmer leaving Men’s Warehouse didn’t seem very interesting at first glance. I’m not a customer and their easily recognizable ad campaign (“I guarantee it”) didn’t move me. Their stock is near its 52-week high, revenue and net income are up, and even the category is coming out of its slump. So what’s up? The speculation is that Zimmer, 64, had a tough time letting go of power after relinquishing his role as CEO in 2011.

Then I read this, “Over the last 40 years, I have built Men’s Warehouse into…a company with amazing employees and loyal customers who value the products and services they receive…” Zimmer was noted for his colorful personality and his progressive values, e.g., putting Deepak Chopra on the Board, backing recreational marijuana use, and refusing to do background checks on employees stating, “Everyone deserves a second chance.”

With these clear indications of Zimmer’s impact on company culture, it’s incumbent on the Board to get past the veneer of how to update their advertising campaign and get to: What does this key personnel change mean for our purpose, our vision, and how we communicate these to our customers, team, and partners?

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
lucavia.com
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Habit Formation

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Customers, Innovation

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Nir Eyal, Habits, Innovation

In June 2013 I attended a seminar by Nir Eyal a noted author, speaker, and consultant. His thinking around, “Business models that require habits can use a pattern intended to help them form better product hypotheses and increase odds of success,” is important to share. Here is a link to the author of Hooked.

Jim

Lucavìa
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lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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Not Too Big To Fail

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Branding, Customer Experience, Customers, Shared values

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Orchard Supply Hardware, OSH, Customer Service, Lucavia Consulting

As a “Radical Do-It-Yourselfer” (R-DIY) I’ve been a regular same-store Orchard Supply Hardware customer for 16 years. In all but a handful of visits I’ve shopped at OSH because it’s about half as far away from my house as the big box stores. In other words I only shop there if I’m in a hurry or if I’m already nearby. As a result, I only buy the small inexpensive items where paying an extra 10%-30% won’t break the bank. You know; screws, nuts, bolts, and minor plumbing supplies.

Why? It’s convenient. And. That’s. It. Being in a neighborhood gives a brand many advantages. However, none will overcome if people only visit you for fill-in purchases—while spending 95% of their budget elsewhere. So, after 16 years of not one OSH clerk or manager taking the time to learn my name, or to even recognize my face with a smile or head nod, it came as no surprise—and, yes, a bit of schadenfreude to read of OSH’s demise.

The irony is I’ll be able to reuse this post in just a few years. Lowe’s management is buying the locations—not OSH culture. Without a commendable customer service culture of its own to inject into OSH it will only be a matter of time before the same cycle repeats itself (Sears bought-and-spun out OSH 1996-2011). One day, Lowe’s will look back and wish they hadn’t simply purchased the locations without doing more to make OSH worth the few percentage points customers would willingly pay to patronize a community resource: Where the staff looks up, smiles, makes eye contact, and says, “Hi Jim. Nice to see you.”

Seriously, all the management firepower that could be brought to bear to make this acquisition succeed pales in comparison to this one friendly human touch.

Jim

Lucavìa
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(925) 980-7871

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Reverse Showrooming

14 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Customers, Innovation

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myrunway-logo-icon

There are endless communities of people who gather on line and in person to exchange ideas and socialize. One of the most popular ways to participate in these communities is through meetup.com. I recently attended a meetup held in Palo Alto at SAP, hosted by First Thursday Silicon Valley Marketing Professionals. In my experience, nowadays the word “marketing” usually refers to ways of using the Internet to get customers to engage with brands—in other words, promotion and sales. Be that as it may, and completely by surprise, I learned about an intriguing new SAP social app called My Runway that evening. Rather than a product review, I’m taking a look at SAP’s My Runway from the point of view of innovation.

In an earlier post, I discussed how entrepreneurs don’t innovate by just creating something better; they create something different. My Runway is hardly alone in the space serving up social fashion apps. Nonetheless, these apps are doing something very innovative, they’re turning the tables on the trend toward showrooming. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve showroomed at least once, that is, you went into a bricks-and-mortar business to see, touch, or try on a product that you ended up purchasing on line. My Runway turns this behavior upside down by letting its community follow, fav, and wishlist products from their favorite brands and direct them locally to where in-store purchases can be made at the moment.

By taking responsibility for their customers’ total experience SAP, well known for backend ERP software, gained a valuable insight. Had they concentrated solely on the past, SAP would never have looked at ways to help their customers’ customers on the frontend. Instead, with My Runway, they not only help their customers build great products, they help them sell-through to an engaged online community.

Jim

Lucavìa
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(925) 980-7871

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Two Lessons for Every Entrepreneur

14 Friday Jun 2013

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Bassett Ears

In the 1700’s Edmund Burke said something you’ve heard many times, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” In my opinion, much of the business press exists to exploit the fact that we learn important lessons—and then quickly forget them. Much is known about management, entrepreneurism, innovation, etc. but we somehow forget in our pursuit of the latest meme or in our rush to be busy instead of creating results.

In the 1800’s J.B. Say defined the entrepreneur as “…Shifting economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” Starting in 1939, over seven decades, Peter F. Drucker became the most influential management writer and thinker of all time as he codified the practice of management in over 30 books. And yet, we have an insatiable appetite for relearning what we already know.

In my local Sunday paper two articles caught my eye. One quoted Paul Santinelli of North Bridge Venture Partners. When asked the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make he answered, “…I was always enamored with what we were building…Had I listened to our VP of sales and realized, ‘Hey, the market doesn’t want X, they want Y and are willing to pay for it,’ I might have been able to move faster to a more acceptable solution.” In the other article, Curtis Carlson CEO of SRI, a company well known for sustained innovation, says he, “…Preaches, literally to every SRI employee [that]…each researcher must be able to explain the need s/he is trying to fill, why a new method would be better than what’s already available, and what benefit the new idea would bring to a potential customer.”

So, no matter where or when you learn it the two top lessons for entrepreneurs are:

  • Listen to your customers.
  • Discover what they need.

Jim

Lucavìa
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lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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R.I.P. Customer Experience

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in Customers

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rip

Customer experience is dead! I’m not talking about businesses that only give lip service to creating a valuable experience for their customers. Or about those that put their own interests ahead of their customers’ or even those that treat customers as transactions instead of individuals. Although, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, all of this is often true.

What’s on my mind is something our greatest living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, points out here. Apparently, each of us has an experiencing self and a remembering self. The experiencing self is the one who lives in the present moment—the one who is reading this sentence. The remembering self is the one who is in charge of memories—and it’s the one who is the boss with a B. Kahneman observes, our memories are all we get to keep from experiencing life so our only perspective is that of the remembering self. But its power doesn’t stop there. The remembering self also makes the decisions about which future experiences we’ll choose. The way it does that is by evaluating our future experience options and then simply selecting the one that’s likely to produce the best memory.

This knowledge has profound implications for business. It compels us to adjust our attention from creating and marketing “the customer experience,” toward creating what I’m calling, Memory Marketing.

I am creating Memory Marketing to help my clients develop memorable customer experiences. This opens up new perspectives for businesses and gives them new ways to transform their customers into loyal advocates.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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