My heart goes out to Southwest

When I heard the news this morning on NPR that a 6 year old boy was killed when an airplane slid off a runway in Chicago, I immediately felt sorrow for the boy and his family. When they later mentioned it was a Southwest airplane, my heart sank again and I felt sorry for Southwest and all the Southwest employees. Why did I feel for Southwest? I would not have had the same reaction if it was say United or Northwest. Why was that?

It was because I knew Southwest. I could put a face on Southwest, Southwest represented a group if caring employees that have personalized their company and their brand. Through my experiences flying w/ them, to reading about them in business press, on blogs, and watching them on the A&E show 'Airline', I've gotten to know them at an emotional level and the news that they were involved in such a tragedy made me feel deep sympathy for them. I also envisioned a very personal response to the family and all the injured people on the ground regardless of who was at fault and that all their employees felt some sorrow when they heard about what happened. That is a powerful brand, one that is authentic and personal.

UPDATE: Read Southwest's heartfelt press release on the incident.

The other thing that struck me were my thoughts about JetBlue. I asked myself, "would I have felt the same empathy towards JetBlue?" I love flying JetBlue, I read about them and I think the they are better than Southwest in many ways. However, I don't really 'know' JetBlue. They don't seem to have that personal identity. So if JetBlue was involved, I would not have felt for the company and its employees as deeply as I did for Southwest. I'm not implying other companies wouldn't react sympathetically to a terrible incident such as this, I'm only trying to point out my reaction and the indication that emotions do matter and creating a company w/ soul and personality that can be experienced by consumers is the only was to establish those bonds that lead to loyalty and preference.

So how do you design experiences that create those personal bonds? If you’re an online service and don’t have face time like Southwest, how do you establish a personality? How can you get your customers to say, "I know company x" like they describe their best friend?

NACCM 2005 - OK, we got it.

I just returned from the 2005 North American Conference on Customer Management (NACCM) in Orlando, FL. Well, it's official. Everyone now knows:

• satisfied customers are not equal to loyal customers
• you need to connect to customers on an emotional basis to create loyalty
• you need to know your customers to create lasting relationships
• creating loyal employees will yield loyal customers
• the senior most leadership in your company need to lead the effort to create a customer centric organization

How long ago did Fred Riecheld, Shawn Smith & Joe Wheeler, James Sasser, Patricia Seybold, Lou Carbone, Len Berry, Colin Shaw, and others write about this stuff??? Does anyone read Fast Company, Mark Hurst's Good Experience Newsletter, HBR case studies, white papers, reviews or any books by some of these illustrious folks???? I'll admit, some people put some nice presentations together and did a very good job summarizing the topics but, how many times are you going to cite Starbucks and Harrah's?

The real trick is doing it. It's about getting commitment in your organization to learn about what your customers really want, investing in the tools and technology that will support delivery of products and services that meet, exceed and anticipate customer desires, and aligning business units around serving one master => your customer.

It's tough to pull together all the information that's out there and for a large to medium organization, just figuring out where to start can be daunting but the key is,... to start. You can't learn anything until you start somewhere (and as Tom Peters reminds us you might fail and when you do you'll learn something from it. No great failures, no great successes.) . I have to highly recommend Shawn Smith and Joe Wheeler's book, Managing the Customer Experience , Lou Carbone's book, Clued In and Gerald Zaltman's How Customers Think. In Smith and Wheeler's book there are a set of assessment tools you can use to help understand where you are now in relative to developing consistent, intentional, differentiated and valuable customer experiences. It also includes many tools that you can apply to CEM.

Lou's book will help you understand that an experience is made up of hundreds of clues. These clues make an impression on us that in most cases are only acknowledged by our subconscious and affect the impressions and recollection of all our experiences (see Zaltman's book below). These clues can be identified, designed and managed to illicit the emotions in customers that result in loyalty and profitable behaviors.

Zaltman's book really helps you understand well,... how customers (and marketing managers) think and why traditional market research methods have been missing the boat.

Colin Shaw has done some impressive work but I have to admit, I've only just begun reading his two books. I'll post my thought when I'm finished.

There are many other great books on the topic, but the value you gain or your impressions of them will depend on where you are on the journey to improving your company's customer (and associate) experiences. Please post your reading recommendations, experiences in your CE efforts, and any lessons you've learned along the way and I'll do the same.

Shoot, post anything you want about CE!

Cheers!
- Chris

Welcome!

Well, I've gone and done it. I've created a blog. My intentions for this blog are to discuss and share information on the practice of Customer Experience Design and Management as well as help facilitate connections among professionals exploring this new business movement. I don't have anything pressing at the moment to post, but figured getting this set up would be a start. If not now, when? If not me, who?


Enjoy!

Chris