E a vida do cliente?

 "Every company believes it is customer-centric. However, most of them are product- and service-centric first, focusing on how to enhance their offerings (e.g., adding services to gas stations) rather than putting themselves in their customers’ shoes (and realizing that people want to avoid the gas station altogether).

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Often customers have difficulty articulating the problem they are trying to solve. Therefore, it is critical to dig deeper to understand the root cause of customers’ challenges.

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Understand customers’ problems

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Identify pain points

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Look beyond your product

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Mapping customer journeys has become a norm in the industry. However, almost every company starts and ends its consideration of the journey with its product [Moi ici: Um excelente ponto!] — say a car or a mortgage. This can miss what’s driving customers in the first place, which can be highly useful in understanding consumer motivation and potential opportunities to add value."

A service-dominant logic usa esta figura:

É voltar a Richard Normann e a:

É tão fácil esquecer, ou ignorar a esfera da vida do cliente...

 

Trechos retirados de "Are You Really Innovating Around Your Customers’ Needs?"

Um punhado de pérolas (I)

"There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.
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As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
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A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right.
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Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. “Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.” That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead.
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Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.
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I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey."

Trechos retirados de "2016 Letter to Shareholders"

Não há acasos (parte I)

Um texto sintonizado com uma das mensagens mais importantes deste blogue:

"At its heart, service design is the bridge between strategy and customer experience. It is grounded in your company’s identity, capabilities, and chosen competitive path. It is activated when you rethink, reimagine, and re-create every stage and aspect of interaction between customers and your company, regardless of what is being sold and whether a transaction actually occurs. It succeeds when you delight the customers you have chosen to serve and advance your strategic goals at the same time.
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Great service is not a consequence of good intentions, attentive management, or a supportive culture. Service needs to be laid into the company’s keel, the way performance is built into a BMW or intuitiveness is designed into an iPad. If service isn’t built in, no amount of goodwill can deliver it reliably, and no effort can compensate for the lack of it. In fact, cause and effect are reversed: A company designed for service will naturally display the behaviors — the intention, attention, and culture — good customer experience requires."

Trechos retirados de "The Art of Customer Delight"

"Client-focused, not client-run"

"Client-focused, not client-run.
Having so emphatically made the point that the client and client needs are central to the success of any enterprise, it is important to reinforce the point that client focus does not mean responding slavishly to whatever a client demands, nor just doing what a client asks. [Moi ici: E sem uma estratégia consciente, como é que uma empresa traça a linha entre a resposta que faz sentido e a outra?] The ultimate purpose of an enterprise is to create wealth, so there would be no point in responding to client demands that might result in bankruptcy.

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It’s more complex than that, however. As Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, says: ‘You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.’
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In some circumstances (particularly where new products or services are concerned) clients may not understand whether or not a particular offering will be of value to them. [Moi ici: E referir claramente para quem a oferta não se dirige. Para que ninguém se sinta enganado] In these situations the value proposition approach is far more powerful than old-style marketingspeak, because it enables a new offering to be expressed in terms of the value of the client experience that it will deliver.
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That’s the heart of this entire concept. Clients do not buy ‘things’. They buy the experiences that those ‘things’ are able to deliver."

Trechos retirados de "Creating and delivering your value proposition : managing customer experience for profit" de  Barnes, Helen Blake e David Pinder. Um livro que li em 2010 e que me redespertou curiosidade ao arrumar papéis em caixas para uma mudança.

Acerca da "customer centricity"

"Customer Success has also been used as a proxy for customer-centricity. On it’s surface, companies will invest time and resources to engage the customer with free consulting services in order to lock-in that next sale, or subscription payment. But they are always asking “How are We Doing?” and not the more appropriate question, How are You Doing? [Moi ici: Recordar esta reflexão] And even if they were, again, there is no common agreement around the definition of a customer need.
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The only path beyond this chaotic view of the customer is to understand what they are trying to accomplish in their lives, or businesses, in a clear step-by-step way. After all, we spend a lot of time transforming processes and measuring the the resulting activities. So, why wouldn’t you also want to understand the process a customer goes through to get something done?"

Recordar a série "Parte III - O cliente é que é o Luke" e "Mambo jambo de consultor ou faz algum sentido?"

Trechos retirados de "Is Customer-centricity Dead?"

E o ponto de vista dos clientes?

Ao longo dos anos tenho escrito sobre o tema aqui no blogue:

• Será que os estudiosos viajam de autocarro? (Janeiro de 2007)
• Observar é melhor que perguntar (Junho de 2011)
• Get out of the building (Dezembro de 2011)

Recordo o tema por causa disto "Hospital Bosses Eat Hospital Food For A Week, Then Revamp Its Entire Food System":

"After receiving a complaint about terrible food from the wife of a former patient, the managers and CEO of the Ottawa General Hospital spent a week eating hospital food. They hated it as much as the patient did, so they did something about it.
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This story makes one wonder how many other services might be improved if only the bosses were forced to use them. The tech sector has a term for making its employees use their own products—"eating your own dog food.""

E na sua empresa, como é?
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Conseguem experienciar a jornada, os pontos de contacto entre os clientes e a sua empresa?

Não deve andar muito longe da verdade

Bem na linha de "Just passing through".

Mais importante que o preço e o produto

Um texto que reflecte uma preocupação constante neste blogue e na minha actuação nas PMEs, "Could This Be More Important Than Price And Product?":

"what could ultimately be more important than price and product as it relates to the ultimate purchase decision by a consumer: customer service.
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It cannot be overstated just how vital and paramount customer service is to the overall customer experience. How can it be given the customer-centric world we now live in?"

Ética como mais um truque vs a service-dominat logic

O trecho que se segue, foi retirado do artigo de ontem no JdN, "O vendedor português é mais alemão do que sul-europeu"

"A crise mudou a forma como se vende?Temos de ser franco-atiradores selectivos. Até há cinco anos tínhamos um canhão com grande calibre e uma parede com muitos clientes. Qualquer tonto disparava e conseguia alguma venda porque havia muita procura, boas margens e as pessoas pagavam. De repente começaram a não pagar, há menos financiamento, menos orçamento das empresas, mais penúria financeira nas famílias. Trocou-se o canhão por um fuzil de franco-atirador com três balas: 'agora prepara-te e dispara'. Passámos para uma especialização maior porque a empresa não quer qualquer cliente. Há mais trabalho no escritório para que na rua seja mais efectivo. Com sistemas de controlo, aplicações móveis, controlo de presença aos vendedores, análises de risco do cliente para saber quem devo ou não visitar. E o vendedor, cada vez mais consultor e menos agressivo, deve gerir bem o tempo, saber quem atacar e não disparar à queima-roupa."

Quem segue este blogue sabe que convido as empresas a:

• não quererem servir todo o tipo de clientes;
• a seleccionarem os seus clientes-alvo;
• a adoptarem a postura do consultor de comprar em detrimento da postura do vendedor.

No entanto, não é isso que quero salientar neste trecho...

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O que sublinho é a linguagem utilizada... a mudança da empresa não assenta numa mudança de mentalidade, assenta sim numa táctica. Um pouco o que encontro hoje em "Daniel Bessa: A ética pode ser um factor de competitividade":

"A experiência de Daniel Bessa diz-lhe que as empresas têm vindo a adoptar, de forma crescente, procedimentos éticos. Uma das razões é o facto de ter retorno, pois pode ser um factor de competitividade"

É o mesmo erro... não se deve adoptar uma abordagem ética porque gera retorno e pode ser um factor de competitividade. Deve adoptar-se uma abordagem ética porque sim, está antes de considerações de vantagem competitiva.
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No último livro de Vargo e Lusch "Service-Dominant Logic: Premises, Perspectives, Possibilities" encontro um texto que expõe muito melhor a situação:

"Foundational premise 8: a service-centered view is inherently customer oriented and relational .
A logical derivation from axiom 2, that the customer is always a cocreator of value, is the eighth foundational premise: a service-centered view is inherently customer oriented and relational. The concepts of customer orientation and relationship marketing have become mainstream topics in the patched up G-D marketing management model. However, they became mainstream concepts not because the traditional G-D logic model is inherently customer and relationally focused but rather because it treats the customer as exogenous to the enterprise's value-creation efforts; therefore, the enterprise must be instructed to be customer oriented. Likewise, G-D logic is focused on transactional exchange and thus enterprises have to be encouraged to take a "relational," long-term, customer perspective. This long-term perspective has been facilitated by the development of various customer relationship management (CRM) software and is often used to estimate customer lifetime value (CLV). [Moi ici: Os tais estudos prévios referidos no primeiro texto] Importantly and unfortunately, the CRM and CLV approach to customer and relationship management continues the G-D logic approach by treating the beneficiary actor as an operand resource. The CRM and CLV technologies move the enterprise away from singular transactions to multiple transactions over time, in order to profit from the lifetime value of a customer. Importantly, the result is a "patch" to the shortfalls and limitations of G-D logic, rather than an inherently relational and customer (re)orientation.
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An S-D logic perspective on relationship is grounded in value cocreation by actors instead of the G-D logic, output-producing orientation, in which value is assumed to be added and embedded in the production (and distribution/marketing) of the output. Value is seen as emerging and unfolding overtime, rather than as a discrete, production-consumption event. This unfolding, cocreational (directly or through goods) nature of value is relational in the sense that the activities of exchange actors as well as those of other actors interactively and interdependently combine, over time, to cocreate value. From the S-D logic perspective, relationship is not optional. Cocreation of value and service exchange implies a complex web of value-creating relationships."

Ética como mais um truque, como algo que agora faz sentido porque... não!

Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte IV)

Parte I, parte II e parte III.
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Don Peppers brinda-nos com mais um interessante artigo "Explaining Customer Centricity With a Diagram" que julgo que também se enquadra na série "Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido" e até com "Uma comichão mental..."
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A certa altura Don escreve:

"the financial objective for a product-centric competitor is to maximize the value created by each product, while the financial objective for a customer-centric competitor is to maximize the value created by each customer."

A linguagem, julgo, IMHO, não é a melhor, aquele "each product" não se aplica ao valor unitário de um produto, aplica-se à quantidade total que é possível obter com a venda da soma de todas as unidades de uma referência (SKU). Quando se compete pelo preço e se elege a redução de custos como o vector fundamental para o negócio, procura-se quantidade, volume, market share para maximizar o retorno do agregado daquele SKU. Quando se sobe na escala de valor e se trabalha do cliente para trás, para a oferta, para o produto, aposta-se no aumento do valor percepcionado pelo cliente, por cada cliente. Assim, aposta-se na maximização do valor criado com cada unidade de SKU e não pelo seu agregado. O negócio não é quantidade, não é market share!
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Voltando ao artigo:

"A product-centric competitor focuses on one product at a time and tries to sell that product to as many customers as possible.
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A customer-centric competitor focuses on one customer at a time and tries to sell that customer as many products as possible."

Numa empresa "product-centric" a lógica é: temos este produto, a quem o podemos vender?
Numa empresa "customer-centric" a lógica passa por estudar a vida do cliente e ir desenvolvendo a relação, para ir criando uma sucessão de ofertas relacionadas com ele, com a sua vida, com as experiências que procura e valoriza.

Customer centric (parte III)

"For better or worse, one fact has become increasingly clear over the past ten years: the marketplace is customer driven. The days of customers chanting, “We’ll take what you offer,” have been replaced with an expectant, “Give us what we’d like, with a side order of customization.” (Moi ici: E é esta tendência que está a minar o modelo económico chinês baseado no custo mais baixo, produtos padronizados, iguais e produzidos em em larga escala em unidades produtivas gigantes. Não permite a customização, não permite a rapidez, não permite o desenvolvimento de uma relação, não permite começar pelo cliente e pela sua vida e contexto)
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The power in the buyer-seller interaction has been moving systematically to the buyer. In many industries, global competition and industry overcapacity have given buyers more choice, and they are learning how to use it.
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The competitive game has clearly shifted to one of pleasing an increasingly more global, knowledgeable, and powerful customer.
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By satisfying a customer who wants to use relationships, the customer-centric firm becomes more profitable.
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Studies argue that the most profitable customer is the existing loyal customer. (Moi ici: Se tiver sido escolhido e fizer parte do grupo de clientes-alvo) ... Customer loyalty becomes incrementally more certain as customer-centricity is implemented. With the tight, customized relationships - the “virtuous circle” - established using applied customer solutions, repeat business becomes more and more dependable in an otherwise harshly competitive and fickle marketplace.
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Product-centric companies are structured around product profit centers called business units. Information is collected around products. Business reviews focus discussions around product lines. The customer-centric company is structured around customer segments. Information is collected and profits measured around customer categories. Management discussions are focused on customers. (Moi ici: Tudo começa nos clientes-alvo na sua identificação, na sua análise) There are similar contrasts around processes, performance measures, human resource policies, and management mind-sets.
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Perhaps the most striking difference is that a customer-centric unit is on the side of the customer in a transaction. (Moi ici: A ideia não é empurrar o que se tem na prateleira, ou o que se produz. A ideia não é vender! A ideia é ajudar a comprar a melhor solução que se integrará na vida dos clientes... e cada caso é um caso.)
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(Moi ici: Ah! E desta forma a oferta deixa de ser homogénea e comparável. Assim, o preço deixa de ser "price to market" e passa a ser em função do valor reconhecido, esperado e vivido pelos clientes... a concorrência passa a ser imperfeita. E a construção de um relacionamento especial gera, no limite, uma situação de monopólio informal. Mudar de fornecedor? Custa tanto recomeçar uma relação do zero...)
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Trechos retirados de "Designing the Customer- Centric Organization A Guide to Strategy, Structure, and Process" de Jay R. Galbraith

Customer Centricity (part I)

"a fundamental acknowledgment that not all customers are created equal; a commitment to identify those customers who matter most; and a willingness to dedicate disproporcionate amounts of resources not only to understand what those customers want but to deliver what they want - and by extension, create a stable, lucrative, and ever-more profitable future.
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identify a select set of customers. These are the important ones, the lucrative ones, the ones you should be spending your time thinking about, planning around, producing and working for - the right customers. These are the customers who matter.
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Of course, in the product-centricity world, there are no right customers. There is no dividing line between the important ones and the rest. They are all just customers - the nameless, faceless hordes who gobble up (or ignore) whatever it is Company X is attempting to sell.
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Customer-centricity firms acknowledge the heterogeneity among our customers. More than that, we celebrate it - because we understand that heterogeneity offers us opportunity. In a customer-centric company, weunderstand that some customers do matter more."
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Trechos retirados de "Customer Centricity" de Peter Fader.

Been there, done that and... moved on

Este postal é para iniciados... e receio confundir os não-iniciados.
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Uma das primeiras questões a colocar, para iniciar uma reflexão estratégica numa empresa é:
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Quem são os clientes-alvo?
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As empresas que não respondem a esta pergunta, ou que não são consequentes com a resposta, tratam os clientes como uma média, a miudagem, um perigoso fantasma estatístico (ver marcadores).
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Não trabalhar para clientes-alvo significa um passaporte para o stuck-in-the-middle, significa incapacidade para actuar num mercado polarizado, ou seja, o fim da linha para essas empresas que são incapazes de se definirem e de escolherem os clientes preferidos.
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Até aqui tudo bem e estou de acordo com Peter Fader "Customer Centricity":
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"Too many people think that being customer centric means doing everything that your customers want, and that's not the case. Being friendly and offering good service are a part of customer centricity, but they are not the whole thing. Customer centricity means that you're going to be friendly, provide good service and develop new products and services for the special focal customers -- the ones who provide a lot of value for you -- but not necessarily for the other ones. You need to pick and choose. Some customers deserve the special treatment, and if others want to buy from you, that's great, but they are not going to be treated the same.
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You are not going to ignore customers. You are not going to fire customers. (Moi ici: Depende, basta recordar as curvas de Stobachoff e os números de Byrnes. Ver marcadores) You are not going to treat them badly, but you will treat some better than others. You are going to be really careful about whom you choose to treat that way and what that treatment means. Does it mean you give those special customers absolutely everything? Maybe not. But you're definitely going to give them more consideration than customers who frankly are not worth that much to you.

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A requirement behind customer centricity is the ability to understand customers at a fairly granular level  (Moi ici: O que chamo: olhar olhos nos olhos, olhar na menina dos olhos dos clientes-alvos) and to be able to identify the customers or the segments of customers who are valuable from the ones who aren't. If you can't sort out your customers -- if you can't look at them and know who is good and who is bad -- then you can't be customer centric. That's step one.
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Step two is having an operational ability as well as an organizational capability to be able to deliver different products and services to different kinds of customers. (Moi ici: Construir, adaptar, um mosaico de actividades auto-reforçadoras. Ver marcadores) That's tough to do.

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Nearly every company on the planet is product centric. You look at their organizational chart, and it's broken up by different kinds of products. You look at the incentives. You look at the language they use. You look at the performance metrics that they rely on. It's all based on different kinds of products. The whole business model is based on producing something or a set of somethings in really high volumes and at really low costs, and that's going to drop to the bottom line. (Moi ici: Recordar aqueles postais recentes: parte I e parte II sobre tudo ser serviço e a co-criação)
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That's more or less business as usual. I'm not suggesting that it's easy, and I'm not suggesting that it's going away tomorrow. But I am suggesting that there are alternatives. If you organize the company around different types of customers and have customer segment managers who are just as powerful as today's product managers are -- giving them the right incentives and the right resources and tools -- that can actually be a more profitable way for many companies to go to market.

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(Moi ici: Now, quite a finale!)

One of the things that surprised me in the book is you say that "the customer" doesn't exist. We've been talking about customers all afternoon. What does that mean? (Moi ici: Recordar os postais do Senhor dos Perdões sobre a tolice da homogeneidade dos mercados)

Fader: One of the things that drives me crazy is when I hear managers or entrepreneurs talking about "the customer," doing back-of-the-envelope calculations about what "the customer" will be worth or discussing how "the customer" will respond to this kind of product or that kind of offer.
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By talking about "the customer" or by talking about "the average customer," that doesn't do justice to the vast heterogeneity and the incredible differences across our customers in terms of their propensity to buy, to talk to each other and to respond to different kinds of offers.

(Moi ici: Agarrem-se às cadeiras, mais um promotor de Mongo) Again, step one of being customer centric is not only acknowledging the heterogeneity, but celebrating it; saying, "Wow, all this heterogeneity is a great thing because it lets us pick and choose different kinds of customers!" (Moi ici: That's the spirit. Mais do que reconhecer e aproveitar a heterogeneidade dos mercados, é celebrá-la, é fazer batota para a aumentar, é assim que se torna a concorrência imperfeita e se criam monopólios de facto) When we say "the customer," we are selling ourselves short. I think it's important to not use those words and to always have a plural there."

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Depois de tudo isto, não posso estar mais de acordo com Fader ... tal como estávamos de acordo com Newton, até que apareceu Einstein... depois de identificarmos os clientes-alvo... descobrimos que isso é, cada vez mais, insuficiente!!! And we moved on.

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Temos de equacionar a cadeia da procura... como aqui relatei em alguns exemplos, uma empresa pode criar um modelo de negócio em que quem paga, o cliente-alvo, não é o foco principal. 

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Para lá da customer-centricity, temos de adoptar a balanced centricity, o many-to-many... (aqui, aqui e aqui)