#34 Fairy Tale reactions, customers just want to be remembered

Thank you for the many reactions I received on my ‘fairy tale‘ about strategy development. Several people told me they appreciated the Beatles references, though only one person correctly guessed where it was all going before the final blog post. One email was particularly entertaining. Here is what Vijay Nagasubramanian told me:

“That was fantastic ‘paperback writing‘. When I started readying your more than elaborate blog ‘yesterday‘, I got a feeling I was on some ‘long and winding road‘. Nice sketch by Peter FitzGerald. Everyone portrayed in the sketch seems to be saying ‘I am the walrus‘.

To start the customer experience day celebrations, I landed at my customer’s office this morning. The HPE theme for this year’s celebration is Customer First, and true to that, my customer and I decided to ‘come together‘. It was nice to pick his brains on his take on customer experience and the things I heard from him and you are valid ‘eight days a week‘. With the kind of start we had celebrating CX day, ‘I feel fine‘! Happy Customer Experience day to everyone ‘across the universe‘.”

I regularly say that I think the most important thing I have learned about customer experience over the years is simply that customers want to be remembered. I had two experiences in the last week that reminded me of that point.

I had lunch with one of my daughters in Lausanne. It was an unusual burger place. I had never been, but she has been there several times. My burger was great. She ordered a vegan burger. We both then ordered coffee. As often happens in Switzerland, our coffees came with a little chocolate. Hers was a dark chocolate, and mine was a milk chocolate. She quickly said “Hmm, I wonder whether they brought me the (vegan) dark chocolate because I chose a burger that happened to be vegan.” I said “Wow, that would be great customer insight.” We were quickly disappointed by the arrival of normal milk for the coffee, rather than her being offered the choice of soy milk (which they had). So close.

At my own end, I had the experience of Amazon not remembering its customers. Any of you who have Kindle hardware or software may have noticed that there is a ‘Look Inside’ feature on Amazon’s website for Kindle books. You can look at the first ten or so pages of a book. Amazon changed the software they use for the ‘Look Inside’ feature some months ago, but did not tell authors they had done so. The new software does not respect the CSS style sheet functionality used by the .mobi and .epub formats they accept for Kindle books. The books still work perfectly, but the Look Inside loses almost all of its formatting, probably for about half of all books. This had been happening for three or more months before I noticed. I had to log a case, and they fixed the previews instantly. It should be obvious that they should have written to their tens of thousands of authors to advise them of the change and what to do. They still have not done so. Disappointing.

	Use direct marketing techniques to improve survey response rates Like most people, I receive lots of survey requests by email. Unlike most people, I don’t just delete them all. I want to learn. What I usually learn is that many people sending surveys don’t know the basics about how to get decent response rates.
	Can you cut your way to greatness? Yes, providing you only mean great for shareholders As a retired HP person, I have been reflecting on ‘cutting your way to greatness’. There are not too many examples of success. Let’s look at Yahoo, then go on to understand the situation more generally.
	You don’t need a customer experience strategy – You already know what to do (A modern fairy tale for CX day) Don’t bother wasting time developing a customer experience strategy. You already know what to do! Well, most of us think we do. Including me. We all have lots of ideas…