While you may be thinking the best products or services at the lowest cost, what customers want most is personal reinforcement of their values. According to a recent Cap Gemini Ernst & Young CEO position paper, “The expectations of consumers, what they equate value with, has changed radically in recent years.”
Titled “Consumer Relevancy, Connecting with the 21st Century Market,” the paper said, “Consumer relevancy means the ability to see business through the customer”™s eyes and conduct business on terms that the customer finds personally meaningful.” People are searching for meaning in their lives and their buying decisions are one of the few ways in which they feel they are in control.
Values have changed. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that seldom do families eat together, and even when they do, they barely talk to each other. Quality time between fathers and children has fallen to six minutes a day, down from an average of 45 minutes in the 1960s. The business opportunity lies in you and your people knowing that customers need to feel authenticated and desire a relationship with others.
According to a recent Research and Markets survey, U.S. suicide rates now top murder rates. Annual sales of antidepressant drugs top $10 billion and depression is our second largest medical problem exceeded only by heart disease. Our workforce is far more stressed than previous generations and needs training in order to cope and do their jobs well.
Well-trained people know that consumers are besieged by an incomprehensible and dangerous world. In this chaotic environment, when a customer needs a product or service, they want their values respected and crave clarity, ease, certainty and trust. Ask, “How can we deliver products and services consistent with the values of our customers?” Anthony W. Ulwick, author of “What Customers Want,” says, “To do this, companies must know what outcomes customers are striving to achieve and figure out which technologies, products, and features will best satisfy the important outcomes that are currently underserved.”
Consumers like to know that somebody in the company is thinking, and thinking of them. Take the way airline tickets are sold. The most valuable customer is the business traveler who may travel 100,000 miles a year. The family vacationer, by contrast, usually travels infrequently.
Logic would dictate that the business traveler deserves the best treatment. Although the business traveler may gain admittance to a comfortable lounge and preferred seating, the vacation traveler, who has bought a ticket in advance, often receives an 80 percent discount for the same flight. The best customer is actually punished by paying the highest price.
In grocery stores the casual shopper, with only a few items, is given a short line and the serious, repeat customer, with a huge cart full of groceries waits in a long slow moving line. If the message is we respect our customer and their values, how can we demonstrate more of that to our best customers?
We must start by taking the time to get to know our best customers and what they truly value. Next we must make everyone in the organization aware of those values and train them to constantly ask, “How can we add more value from our customer”™s point of view?” Consumer relevancy is the ability to see business through the customer”™s eyes and conduct business on terms that they find personally meaningful.
Joe Murtagh is The DreamSpeaker, an international keynote speaker, meeting facilitator and business trainer. For questions or comments, Joe@TheDreamSpeaker.com, www.TheDreamSpeaker.com or call (800) 239-0058.
