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Fundamental Truths That Define How Organizations Treat Customers - Law #2: People Are Instinctively Self-Centered

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Apr 9 2009

Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research speculates that customer experience is impacted by six tenants or laws, which he tongue-in-cheek equates with the three laws governing physics. The laws are as follows:

  1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction.
  2. People are instinctively self-centered.
  3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment.
  4. Unengaged employees don't create engaged customers.
  5. Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated.
  6. You can't fake it.

Last time I focused on the first law so today I'll move on to: "People are instinctively self-centered."  Temkin points to the basic truth that customers have their own frame of reference when they interact with a company; they want their own needs and desires to be met. They don't care how companies are organized, what internal processes are in place, what the latest marketing strategy is or how sales reps are compensated.

Complicating a company's interaction with its customers is the fact that employees also have their own individual frames of reference. For example, they know some products better than others, they are invested in some strategies and/or policies more than others. Each employee has a bias and if not recognized, they can make decisions based on their frame of reference rather than customer needs.  (Or worse yet, an organization can adopt a strategy based on its own internal imperatives or needs (higher profits, lower costs) without considering the impact on customers.)

So what happens when these two differing perspectives collide every time a customer interacts with a customer-facing employee or a self-service mechanism like a web site? Most likely than not, it results in less than satisfactory customer experiences.

As someone who has evaluated customer experience at a variety of organizations, I've seen this time and again. In essence, customers see the organization as a whole and don't understand why, for example, the information they get from a call center rep is different from the information they get from the company web site. Or if they phone a call center, they expect the representative to talk as long as it takes to provide the answers or information they need or process orders for the products they want. They certainly don't care whether a Call Center rep is incented to end a call within 60 seconds or whether internal processes dictate that a certain type of call be transferred to another part of the organization.

So how do companies address this particular challenge? Temkin urges companies to "make the shift from self-centeredness to customer-centeredness" and offers approaches companies can adopt to make this shift occur: 

  • Look at all communications through the eyes of the targeted customers. (Will they fully understand what is being communicated?)
  • Don't sell things, help customers buy them. (Infuse the voice of the customer into your internal processes.)
  • Don't let the organization drive experiences. (Don't make your customers jump through hoops to get what they want or need.)

Does your company utilize any of the strategies Temkin recommends to improve customer experience? If so, has looking at your company's communications and/or interactions from a customer perspective resulted in measurable improvements in customer experience?

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