Month: March 2013

It was my first-ever cricket match. India versus West Indies, 31 December 1966 – 5 January 1967. I was nine years old. And my life was complete.

It was a glorious West Indian team in a glorious context. Conrad Hunte, Robin Bynoe, Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, recent debutant Clive Lloyd, Seymour Nurse, the inimitable Gary Sobers (who captained the side), Jackie Hendriks, the formidable spin of Lance Gibbs and the then-brutal speed attack of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith. Every one of them seemed ten feet tall and incredibly powerful.

And they were to meet an Indian team full of Eastern promise and magic. Led by Mansur Ali Khan, the one-eyed Nawab of Pataudi Jr (who would go on to marry local film star Sharmila Tagore), the team included the spin trio of Venkataraghavan, Bedi and Chandrasekhar for the first time; in fact Bedi was playing his first Test. Rusi Surti, ML Jaisimha and Abbas Ali Baig were all mystical heroes by then, but not quite in the class of the Nawab.

The West Indies won the toss, it was an engrossing day’s play, and it ended with the visitors clearly in control. So we went home and returned the next day.

As did a hundred thousand other people, maybe more. We went in early: my father wanted to try and avoid the crowds, for my sake. It appeared that everyone else had the same idea. We were National Cricket Club members, so we had seats in the pavilion, and our entry was relatively simple. It wasn’t going to stay simple. Soon it became apparent that there were many more people in the stadium than there were seats. Fraudulent tickets had been sold. And so a riot was had. In true riotous spirit seats were torn up and smashed until they resembled firewood. It was only going to be a matter of time before firewood and fire, fast friends normally, made their acquaintance again. In those days riots in Calcutta were relatively common, as were the “lathi charges” that followed, as police sought to quell the crowds using horses and batons.

Our only way of getting out of that place involved our going up the stadium, away from the fire and rioting, and then jumping down into the crowd milling below. My father told me he would jump down and then wait to catch me. He jumped. I jumped. He caught me. And that was that.

I have no idea what height I jumped from; when I visited the stadium a few years later, the place I think I jumped from seemed to be 40 feet up. I suspect it was half that.

The point of this story is not the cricket, nor the riot. But about my trusting my father. He said he would catch me, and he did. And I didn’t doubt him. I trusted him. In fact I trusted everyone I knew. I was nine years old.

Over the next five years I would learn about being let down, being betrayed, being lied to. I would learn about doing the lying myself, and how awful letting other people down felt. I would learn about the pain of loving and being loved, as only a teenager can. By the time I was 15, I was a full-fledged member of the angst club, moon-faced, moon-eyed, wallowing in the emotions I needed to write abysmally bad poetry. If you’ve ever been there, you know what I mean. And my generation had an advantage, many advantages. You get to a different class of wallow when your music tastes are heavily influenced by Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Now that was wallowing. Sublime.

Like many others of my generation, there were times when my mood was close to the philosophy contained in Paul Simon’s I Am A Rock. “I am a Rock/I am an Island/And a Rock feels no Pain/And an Island/Never/Cries”. The idea of detachment was not new to me, given its resonance with a culture that didn’t believe in things material.

What was new and hard for me was the idea of distrust. I wanted to be detached without having to distrust. I didn’t like the very idea of distrust; some part of me felt, innately, that if I distrusted someone then I would somehow restrict my ability to feel happy when that person was around.Now I’m talking about being a teenager at a time when being a teenager was like taking a roller-coaster ride through a New Age playground, whether you were into peace, love and revolution or sex, drugs and rock’n’roll or for that matter could even tell the difference. Pop philosophies were a dime a dozen, every one of us had our own personal way of viewing things.

When it came to trusting, the model I built for myself was based on (get ready for it) a guitar string. I was that string. The string could be pulled in two directions, one called happy and one called sad. Anyone who could make me happy could also make me sad. The more a person could make me happy, the more he/she could make me sad. People who were close to me could pull me in either direction without limit. And then there would be a gentle falling off, where I limited the person’s ability to make me feel happy or sad. Until finally there was a class of person who left me untouched, unmoved.

Childish? Possibly, even probably. I was fifteen.

And yet. Yet.

These past few weeks, as I think more about how customers and companies engage with each other, images of that guitar string kept flashing back.

Today, and for some time now, the world has been awash with terms like customer advocacy, net promoter scores, earned advertising.

At the same time, companies are fearful about “letting go”, about letting the customer have the power to say things about their company or product or brand.

I have some good news for such companies, those who find it hard to let go. Fear no more.

There is no need to let go; because there is nothing to let go. Your reputation, your brand, is in the hands of your customers.

And yes, they can say bad things about you. If you do bad.

But much more importantly, they can say good things about you. As long as you do good.

Most importantly, you have a choice. As a company, you can make it easy for your customers to share their experiences of you, your products, your services. Or you can make it hard.

There is a difference, an important difference. Life is not always as symmetrical as my guitar-string metaphor.

If you do good, they can share, but only if you make it easy for them.

If you do bad, they will share, whether you make it easy for them or not.

It’s up to you.

Today people in the UK celebrated Mothering Sunday, what passes for Mother’s Day in these parts. Our children came home to see my wife; her mother visited as well. And a splendid family lunch was had.
My wife did all the preparations despite it being Mother’s Day; all I was asked to do was to weigh the leg of lamb, work out how long it needed to cook, and to lay the table.

When that was done, I was at a loose end; my wife was busy with the meal; everyone else was busy getting ready; and I’d already read the weekend papers. Idly I sat down in my favourite armchair, warmed by the fire my wife had lit earlier, I took a look at Twitter on my iPhone. And saw this:

 

The Dimes followed me. Hmmm. I had no idea who the Dimes were. And I’m not one to want my follower numbers to rise with bots and spam. So, sitting in the armchair, warmed by the burbling fire,  I took a look. And this is what I saw.

I like Fleetwood Mac. And my son had recommended Iron and Wine to me. So I thought to myself, definitely worth a listen. Still sitting in the armchair, by the warmth of the fire, I went over to their site. And this is what I saw:

I could try out their music, choose to pay what I wanted, even get myself the vinyl if I so felt like. And I’m a valve amps and vinyl kind of guy. I liked what I saw, liked what I heard, continued to explore this band. Still in armchair, still warmed by the fire.

I looked a little closer. I could listen to the entire album if I wanted. And even download some of the tracks for free. I liked their music; more importantly, I really liked the way they went about their business, how they engaged with customers. I wanted to know more about them.

Quentin Tarantino. Not my usual music critic, but I have enjoyed the soundtracks from many of his films. NPR. Allmusic. I liked the Dimes’ music, I liked the way they went about business, I liked the way the site worked on my phone, I even liked some of the people who liked them. I was now quite likely to buy. And then I saw this:

I’d “followed” them and they’d DMed me access to the track. I was still in my favourite armchair, still by the warmth of the fire. Lunch was a few minutes away. I resolved to do something about the Dimes soon after lunch.

Which turned out to be this:

And then I wrote this post.

In 15 minutes before lunch, a band had managed to connect with me, let me check them out, get me to the point where I went and bought their music in my preferred vinyl (along with a free copy in the more “shareable” digital format). Every step of the way they ensured I only did what I wanted to do. Nothing forced. First, I wanted to know who had started following me, I don’t like spam followers. When I found out they had 6K followers, they followed a similar number and that they hadn’t tweeted since December, they looked authentic enough to me. [I wondered how they chose the people they followed; at first glance everything looked real and normal. I haven’t figured out why they chose to follow me, but somewhere in my digital footprint Fleetwood Mac will figure, and that may have been enough].

Once I found out who they were, I could listen to them. As much as I wanted. Committing something far more valuable than the 99 cents of yore: my time and my attention. And I did listen. To quite a few songs. And then I could gather more about them, and have a simple and convenient way of signalling my interest. By following them back. And then, as I was musing over doing something more, they sent me a DM with another free track, pointing to their bandcamp site.

Simplicity and convenience. At my pace, in my time. Where and when I wanted to. Giving me the free right to listen and not pay. If I chose to buy, to pay what I felt like paying. Thank you The Dimes. [If you want to delight me even further, start taking a look at disruptions like Neil Young’s Pono format].

The music industry recently reported that overall music sales were up year-on-year for the first time since 1999. Apparently they’ve begun to work out that making music available digitally pays. It is even possible that, in decades to come, they might discover the lessons that the Dimes have discovered already:

Empower your customers. Give them the chance to try out your stuff. Let them share their experiences. Go where they are. Be part of their culture. Let them pay what they feel like. [I feel an Amanda Palmer TED Talk reprise coming on. Must-watch!]. Make their every interaction simple and convenient.

Yes, it is possible that in decades to come, they might discover all that. But in the meantime, people like me will have moved on, listening primarily to people like the Dimes.

Yesterday, when writing about The Mind Of The Customer, I touched upon why the practice of bundling irritates, even angers, customers.  Bundling comes in many forms, not all of them enforced, not all of them intrusive.

It is normal and natural for a company to try and sell that which is on the truck, as it were. Where it becomes unnatural is when companies work hard to include products and services they know the customer does not want, by creating artificial “bundles” that contain their “most wanted” goods with their least wanted ones.

Bundles can and do offer choice. Some of the consequences of bundling are less than savoury. For example, in the early days of mass mobile, some telcos practised designing “out-of-bundle” products. Wait for it: the bundles were designed not to be used. The most egregious example? “Inclusive” minutes and texts you couldn’t get at. So customers would have predictable “out-of-bundle” costs, using products designed to capture that market. Still sends shivers down my spine when I think about it.

It’s easy to understand why these things happen. Often it’s as a result of incentives that militate against the customer. Private companies tended to focus on profit maximisation, and owner-managers understood the importance of customers for life. As they scaled up (and often went public) the focus moved from profit maximisation to revenue maximisation, and the idea of a lifetime relationship with the customer began to fade. Large public companies, focused on “shareholder returns”, often worried even less about churn: they’d either hold on to their customers via pseudo-monopolies and regulatory capture, or just not care: many were paid for revenue, not profit.

So the very idea of a “customer for life” weakened, even though numerous studies have shown that it is far more profitable to engage with an existing customer than with a new one.

It must have been sometime in the 1980s that I started hearing the term “stakeholder returns”, suggesting that people other than shareholders had the right to expect some return. Staff. Partners.

And customers.

In today’s environment, the customer is more than just a customer; more than just an “advocate”; she’s a channel, creating leads by recommending your product or service to her friends; she’s your partner, suggesting improvements to your distribution and supply chain; she’s your co-worker, trying out new products and giving you quick and accurate feedback.

If you’ll let her.

And if you don’t, she’ll find someone who does.

[Incidentally, the recent Economist Schumpeter post on restoring faith in firms is worth a read in this context: Companies’ moral compass: Some ideas for restoring faith in firms].

Back to bundling. The least intrusive form of bundling is when the company sets its salesmen sales quotas with specific product/service mixes. You can sell all you want, you’ll always make the base commission, but if you want the multipliers and to make the “Club”, then you’ll have to hit targets for the mix of products. Sensible, you say? At least the incentives are less likely to militate against the customer. But sometimes these structures can have hilarious consequences:

At one firm I worked at, we were slowly exiting the production and sale of calculators. Large, desk-based, industrial strength, calculators. So some bright spark decided to include a target for calculator sales in the product mix for “Club”.

First, the salesmen sold them to customers.
When they ran out of customers who’d buy them, they started giving them away, eating the costs out of their commission.

When the customers started saying “No more” to the free calculators, they started making up customers to “sell” the calculators to.

When their partners objected to the stockpiling of calculators, still in their packing, in their garages, something had to give.

I was present the day the City of London police called on our offices in Dominant House, Queen Victoria St (It’s now called Senator House, and it’s still opposite the Seahorse pub). Apparently they’d found a very large number of calculators in the Thames, and wondered if we’d been burgled. The calculators were found just off the pier near the Samuel Pepys, the favourite watering hole of the company’s City salesmen.

Strange, that. No burglaries known. Just hundreds of calculators in the river.

Incentives.

Introduction: The Mind of J. G. Reeder

 

I must have been around 8 or 9 when I contracted jaundice. It was awful. I can still remember the horror of watching my eyes and skin go yellow, watching everything I touched stain yellow,  feeling feverish all the time, unable to sleep, unable to relax. I have no idea how long I suffered from the disease, but it felt like months to me. To make matters worse, I wasn’t allowed any fried food, any spices (not even salt or pepper), any traditional sweets, any fats. All I can remember eating is boiled vegetables and a despicable skimmed-milk dahi. Yecch.

And of course I couldn’t go to school. Or see anyone or play with anyone. I had one regular visitor, an old crone who came in to the room I was quarantined in; she would come in, pour hot water into a silver bowl my mother gave her, drop some needles into the water, add some red powder, swoosh it around, mumble something completely unintelligible and then disappear until the next time. And that was meant to heal me. Hmmm.

No school. No friends. No food worth writing about. TV hadn’t made it to India. We had radio, we had a gramophone, but the supply of electricity couldn’t be relied on.

No nothing.

My dad, realising I must be crawling out of my tiny skull, gave me a break. He offered to bring me back as many books from the Calcutta Club as I wanted, every night; all I had to do was to give him the list. And so a habit was born. I read every day, all the time, sometimes nine or ten books in one day. Sleep was not easy in my condition, and I craved mental stimulation.

By then I’d already covered the traditional “child” spaces of Richmal Crompton and Anthony Buckeridge and Enid Blyton and Frank Richards et al; I’d already delved into the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw, the poetry in Palgrave, and most of what passed for modern classics then: Cervantes, Swift, Carroll, Twain, Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Hardy, the Brontes, you know what I mean. He then introduced me to the world of mystery/thriller/detective fiction, and I fell in love, starting with Chesterton’s Father Brown and Edgar Wallace’s Just Men. Phillips Oppenheim, Sayers, Baroness Orczy, Charteris, Christie, Creasey, Spillane, Erle Stanley Gardner all awaited me. Once I was through them, I could move further afield into humour and even adventure, and the family “holy trinity” of PG Wodehouse, Max Brand and Rex Stout. So no Alistair Maclean, no Hammond Innes, no Nevil Shute, not as yet. And a long time before I could be allowed to appreciate people like Guareschi’s Don Camillo, or Carter Dickson’s locked room mysteries. Before I could discover Ross Thomas and Ross Macdonald and Donald E Westlake. The list is endless.

Father Brown was fabulous, I can still remember reading about Flambeau’s dairy operations as if it were yesterday. And Edgar Wallace was brilliant. It was Wallace who introduced me to Mr John G. Reeder. Here’s an excerpt from a Reeder short story, The Poetical Policeman:

 

 

John G Reeder had the mind of a criminal. He quietly went about his way solving the most outlandish crimes because he could think like a criminal.

I’ve heard talk about companies becoming customer-centric for decades now, and most of the time it’s been lipstick on a pig; too often, people find it hard to put themselves into the shoes of their customers.

To think like a customer, to have the mind of the customer.

 

 

The Mind Of The Customer

 

As a customer, there are two big things that are designed to discomfit, irritate, alienate, frustrate, sometimes even anger me.

The first is when a human being acts like a machine; and the second is when a machine acts like a human being.

There is nothing more frustrating than having to deal with a human being who quotes rules at you. Not regulations or laws. Rules. How often have you been faced with a situation where the person “serving” you goes all jobsworth on you: “I’m sorry sir, rules are rules. You will notice it is one minute past eight, and I stop serving at eight. If we make an exception for you, where is it going to stop? No sir, rules are rules.” [Usually said while inspecting fingernails, no eye contact, usually when there is no one else waiting to be served, and usually when the person could have served you faster than the time it took to spout the rules.]

Almost as frustrating is when machines act unpredictably. Like when the ATM dispenses cash to one person, chews up the card of a second, then reverts to business as usual after that. Or when the IRIS machine at Heathrow works/stops working/works.

Next on the list is the bundle.

What a delight. Not. This is where the company looks at what it’s got, knows what the customer wants, and more importantly, knows what the customer doesn’t want. But they need to sell what the customer doesn’t want. So what they do is they make a new thing, one which contains both. A bundle. You want to fly to Istanbul for the Champions League Final? Yes we have flights, but only ones that come with hotel rooms. You’re OK with that? Great, here are the flights. And five nights hotel accommodation. Yes, five nights. All our one-night packages are sold, sorry.

And finally, the Gold-Paved Cowpaths.

This is a particular modern specialty, where advances in technology are used to protect and fossilise historical business models. The best example I can think of is region coding on a DVD or game disk. Take what you did yesterday, and enshrine it by corrupting today’s technology. There was a time when there were different video standards in operation around the world, and it was not possible to play the videos of one region in another. PAL and SECAM and NTSC and all that jazz. The DVD threatened the way the industry worked, and so the industry chose to invest in technology to mimic the old world by creating new, artificial, constraints. Pave the cowpaths indeed. With gold. Pfui.

These are simple examples. In each case, try and think of the customer who would want what was being provided. A rule-bound human. An unreliable machine. A basket of products containing some stuff you want. And a lot of stuff you don’t want. Constraints placed on how you use stuff in order to prevent constraints on how they sell it.

Too often, people start off trying to think like customers, but soon they revert to their traditional ways of working and thinking and acting. Which is why historical monopolies find it hardest to think like a customer. And why airlines and banks and telecoms organisations struggle with engaging their customers.

If you want to understand something about the mind of the customer, then go read the Cluetrain Manifesto. It may be 14 years old now, but it’s a great place to start. [Disclosure: I have a chapter in the 10th Anniversary edition, but without any financial interest]. Here’s a quote from the book:

 

A coda: Amanda Palmer and the Art of Asking

 

Some of you find it hard to engage with me when I write long posts. So I’m going to stop here. Instead of carrying on, I’m going to link to the video of Amanda Palmer’s talk at TED recently. She says more about engaging with people in one video than I could in a lifetime. Thank you Amanda, thank you TED.

 

I’ve been thinking about the mind of the customer for years now, and trying to do something about it; it’s part of what attracted me to Cluetrain in 1999, part of what attracted me to what Doc Searls and crew started doing with VRM, part of what attracted me to the Maker Movement and to open source. It’s part of what attracted me to Marc Benioff and to joining salesforce.com.

More to follow, sometime over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, please let me know what you think. Where do you see companies “thinking like customers”? Why do they succeed where others fail? These are the kinds of questions I want to tackle over the next few months here.