Category Archives: Customer Expectations

“Follow me home” is a solid gold gift

First, let’s establish two maxims: one classic, one new.

Classic: The cardinal rule of customer acquisition – it’s not your customer’s job to keep your business top-of-mind, it’s yours.

New: Every year your website becomes less of a destination and more of a distribution center – develop a strategy that doesn’t depend upon prospects and customers returning to your homepage every time they need/want something from you.

It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one – everybody knows that. The bad news is, with all of the mega-corp algorithms, online competitors, and cyber-clutter, keeping the attention of even our most loyal patrons is getting harder every day. But here’s the good news: For every example of how technology makes business more complicated, there is a corresponding tool or application that increases efficiency and productivity. Even for small businesses.

One prime example of how to stay on the radar screen of people who already know you – users, prospects, customers – is to practice what I call the “Follow me home” strategy. Once someone determines they like your business, they’re increasingly willing to give permission for you to “Follow me home” with digital information and content, by email (newsletters), texting (updates), social media (useful content), etc.

“Follow me home” supports three critical elements in 21st-century customer relationships.

Emotional: At the heart of “Follow me home” is trust that a business won’t abuse this privilege. This is a gift – value, protect and perform on this.

Practical: “Follow me home” conveys that you understand people have other options, are very busy, and want reliable companies to help them stay connected.

Technical: Elements on your website that make “Follow me home” easy (“Subscribe to our free newsletter”, “Follow us on Twitter, etc.), score the online hat trick: values, thought leadership and technical capability.

Getting a “Follow me home” invitation from a prospect/customer is good for your business in three important ways:

1.   Prospects/customers have invited you to connect with regular, useful content and appropriate marketing messages.

2.  Since research continues to show that a prospect has to see several impressions before converting to a customer, “Follow me home” becomes a powerfully efficient and effective conversion practice.

3.  “Follow me home” is the first step for users to pre-qualify themselves as a prospect.

New technologies make delivering on “Follow me home” requests easier than ever for small businesses. But, of course, you have to give users/prospects/customers a reason to say, “Follow me home.”

Write this on a rock … “Follow me home” is a buying signal waiting to happen. Are you listening?

Mobile computing will dominate your future

What if I told you that seven-of-ten of the prospects and customers in your market can’t find your business? You’d be very disturbed by that, wouldn’t you?

Now, what if I told you that three-fourths of the calls your prospects and customers want to make to your business are not getting through?  Would I be able to see the veins in your neck as you raise your voice to declare that such a thing would be impossible?

Well, in the past year or so, addressing small business audiences around the country, I’ve asked this simple question: “How many of you have a website that conforms to the small screen – a mobile website?” I’m sorry to report that the number of attendees who raised their hands – across multiple industries – was in the vast minority.

To dramatize how unfortunate this response is, let’s go to the research: During 2018, well over 200 million Americans will use a smartphone. And that number is projected to grow to over 80% in three years (Statista).

So what are all these people – very likely, including you – doing on the tiny screens of these magic wands we hold in the palm of our hand? Besides making calls, texting and sending emails, they are:

1.  Shopping online – making decisions about what they want and who to buy it from.

2.  Navigating to businesses – like the previously unknown business that popped up in a local search.

3.  Buying stuff – and paying for it by touching their index finger to one tiny button on the screen. It’s called “One touch” and customers l-u-u-u-v it.  Whether they know the business or not, they can one-touch with PayPal and Amazon, plus other preloaded credit/debit financial sources.

You may be saying, “Well, duh!” Everybody knows that.” But your protest doesn’t count unless you would’ve raised your hand when I asked about who has a mobile site.

And I can hear you further protesting that customers can do all three of those things on your regular site. But, again, no points. Customers don’t want to do either one of those three things on your regular site while looking at the small screen of their smartphone. And they don’t have to because there are hundreds of competitors – from Amazon to Amy’s Boutique – whose mobile site conforms to the small screen while delivering a one-touch payment option.

If you don’t have a mobile site – not a mobile app, which you’ll probably never need – the news gets worse: when a hungry person speaks these word into a smartphone, “pepperoni pizza in East Peoria,” search engines know what kind of device the request is from, and move non-mobile-ready sites way down the search results. This person wants a hot phone number, big directions on a small screen, and one-touch pay. (Re-read the first two paragraphs.)

It’s been 25 years since you and I first had access to the Internet, and a decade since we’ve had smartphones. In the Age of the Customer, where being relevant to customers is trumping being competitive, a big part of relevance is being fully accessible and high-functioning when a prospect or customer wants to connect with you based on their expectations. And every day, that expectation is increasingly manifesting in the palm of a hand.

Finally, if you don’t have a mobile site, I have good news: You can get one in a few days for a few hundred dollars. You must be ready for mobile primetime. Your prospects and customers expect it.

Write this on a rock … Mobile computing wasn’t any part of your past, but it will dominate your future.

Naisbitt’s Razor: The great small business advantage

On my radio program, beginning in 1998, I started interviewing telecom experts on something called broadband Internet connection. It would be the replacement for dialup over POTS – plain old telephone service. At that point, like the Internet itself, the “big pipe” was so new that less than 4% of households and almost no businesses had broadband Internet connection.

Reporting on this emerging capability, I made the easy prediction that the world would change when broadband became ubiquitous and broadly adopted – which it did. But the harder prediction – which I didn’t make – would have been that the real game-changer would take the form of mobile computing on the tiny screens of magic wands we call smartphones. Today, with mobile networks delivering fourth generation connectivity – 4G – almost everywhere, and 5G on the way, mobile computing has disrupted the marketplace in unprecedented ways by giving consumers exciting new expectations.

But perhaps what caused mobile computing to make a quantum leap is found in this slogan: “There’s an app for that.” Anyone with access to paved roads and/or electricity knows this refers to an application that converts content otherwise consumed with a browser on a PC, to a hand-held devices, like a smartphone or tablet. Mobile apps have proliferated because they’re almost always handier – and sexier – than their website counterparts.

A generation before my broadband prognostication, a real prophet, John Naisbitt, published his landmark book, Megatrends (Warner Books, 1982), in which he prophesied, “The more high tech we have, the more high touch we will want.” I’ve termed that quote, “Naisbitt’s Razor,” and it foresaw a kind of unlikely equilibrium between digital technology and analog humanity. This will be on the test: For a small business to find success in The Age of the Customer, Naisbitt’s Razor must be at the heart of your business strategy.

The bad news is there’s that tension from the unlikely equilibrium between tech and touch – read: difficult to maintain. The good news is, Naisbitt’s Razor is never more elegant than when delivered by a small business. So, how do you maintain that balance in the face of pressure from a marketplace that seems to be in love with tech, like sexier mobile apps? The answer is, not either/or, but both/and.

If you want customers to keep your business at their fingertips wherever they are, there’s an app for that you can buy or build. You must at least have a mobile site. But when a customer relationship calls for a welcoming smile, or prior knowledge, or hands-on expertise, there’s no app for that. Nothing’s more high touch than a smile, which can only be delivered by an analog human, and whenever possible, face-to-face.

If a product tutorial video would help a customer in the field, there’s an app for that. To be able to interpret the troubled look on the face of a customer as a clue that you’ve yet to heal their pain, there’s no app for that.

If customers want to check an order status, whenever and wherever they are, you have to deliver that information in the tiny screen of their smartphone. When customers return over and over because you add so much value when they’re physically in front of you, or your employees, there’s no app for that.

Naisbitt’s Razor – high tech AND high touch – makes it imperative that you blend the sexy digital power of mobile computing, with the compelling humanity of a handshake. The good news is that no one can deliver and maintain that equilibrium as powerfully as a small business. Congratulations.

Write this on a rock … There’s an app for high tech, but there isn’t one for high touch. You have to deliver both.

The velocity of change and new customer expectations

And when I die, and when I’m gone, there’ll be one child born in this world to carry on, to carry on.

— “And When I Die,” by Laura Nyro, performed by Blood, Sweat & Tears.
As we know, change has been the one constant of existence on planet Earth. Each generation gives way to the next, so that over time fire became electricity and the wheel morphed into a computer.
For most of the history of the marketplace, change progressed at a pace slow enough to allow the creator of a model – a product, strategy, skill, etc. — to make a living with it for a lifetime, possibly even passing that model on to his children. But within the past century this paradigm began to shift.
During the second half of the 20th century, the life expectancy of a typical model generation was compressed into a calendar year. So while you were delivering the current year’s model to customers, you had to simultaneously create and prepare next year’s model to be ready to launch January 1.
That was a nice trip down memory lane, wasn’t it? Buckle up.
Since 1993 (the year the Internet became available to the public), an unprecedented confluence of innovations has further compressed the time between model generations. This compression produced high anxiety and frustration for any business that was in love with its model. Indeed, the life expectancy of a model that not so long ago would have been a calendar year was now measured in terms of an Internet year, which is 90 days — or less.
The headwaters of this increased velocity of marketplace change is innovations that are driving new customer expectations. And these innovations have become so seductively elegant and seamless in our lives that customers often don’t even realize their expectations are changing at all, let alone how fast.
But what about your business’s anxiety and frustration? Well, even if customers know, they don’t care. Because they worship at the throne of WIIFM. What’s In It For Me?
I have good news! You can avoid anxiety, frustration — and failure — if you know what your customers’ evolving expectations are, which you can determine by asking them these five questions – every day:
1. What do you want?
2. How do you want me to tell you about it?
3. When do you want it?
4. How will you use it?
5. How do you want it delivered?
Comparing the answer to these questions with what customers told you yesterday will provide all the information you need about current and future products, service and technology, including — especially — your social media and mobile strategy.
Let me put all of this in one sentence: If you want to know what your business should be doing tomorrow, next month and next year, ask your customers. They already know. And if you do what they tell you, you’ll be able to sing these new lyrics without any blood, sweat or tears:
“And when our model dies, and when it’s gone, we’ll produce a new model in this world to carry on, to carry on.”
Write this on a rock … Customers will tell you about their changing expectations – let them.