Measurement is ruining your relationship with consumers
In this opinion piece Jörn Sanda argues the focus on measuring everything is ruining relationships between consumers and brands.
The Devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape, sporting pointy horns. He comes in everything you measured for.
Brands are failing their potential by measuring marketing, sales, reputation, customer experience, support, etc – as thinking defined by these terms drives a wedge between consumers and brands.
Once upon a time that may have been acceptable, when brands could force themselves on customers.
Today it’s the consumer who is forcing. And wedges force customers elsewhere. Marketing treats the consumer in every possible way to create an intention to buy.
The objective is to pass the prospect into the sales funnel as quickly as possible.
Sales will work the consumer over in every way to convert a transaction. The focus is to process the prospect fast, to reduce the lead time and ‘lock down the sale’.
Reputation looks at protecting how the brand is perceived by the masses. It doesn’t care if people want to buy, or have bought – as long as, in general, the public relates well to the brand, and the brand to the public.
Customer experience will work with customers to prevent them from becoming disgruntled. It’s usually all about eliminating pain points and resetting expectations.
Service focuses on rectifying issues where the customer is hurting, before customers share their pain with others. And it will try and deliver on what was promised in the first place, where possible.
The harsh reality from all this rather expensive effort is that brands, in general, suffer unacceptable customer churn.
Churn is the result of people’s inability to endure the multiple brand personalities and behaviours they experience, while being processed through the customer lifecycle. Moving from marketing on to sales, to experience eventually handing over to support. Whilst reputation appears to be irrelevant in the context of the individual customer.
Yes, brands engage with their consumers in convoluted ways that are messy and quite horrible. And the reason for this painful mistreatment of the consumer is due to measurement. Measurement is ruining the magic that can exist between brands and people.
Our present reality is that brands (or their executives) defend their positions through a world of metrics and data. Multiple metrics and very big data.
Sales reports are drawn on a daily basis. Marketing is quantified through ever evolving measurement. Customer experience is substantiated with regular surveys.
Support is logged and analysed across multiple axes. Reputation’s also got an index.
Plenty of dashboards, charts and numbers quantify the handling of the consumer.
It’s good, because “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” as oft misattributed to Peter Drucker, one of the modern era’s great thinkers on management.
But good is not enough when the consumer has the power of choice. Best is really the only option.
Sadly brands are behaving far from great. They fail with high churn because of their different measurements of the same customer, at different times of the life cycle.
Sales measures; the treatment of consumers by real-time sales metrics; marketing by its ever evolving qualifications; experience by its deliverables; and support by its reports. Reputation doesn’t even care about the consumer; just how the consumer cares about the brand.
The only thing that matters to the consumer is his or her relationship with the brand. Yet there’s no measuring of the emotion and depth that exists between consumer and brand, or the lack thereof.
I’ve not found an off-the-shelf tape measure that indexes the type and level of emotion between consumer and brand. But I’m seeing incremental advances from some corners of the commercial world, and loving the Macgyvering of social media, marketing automation, CRM and mobile – into some sort of relationship-o-meters.
It is easy to count what we all count. And I’m the first to admit the difficulty of quantifying emotion and defining relationships.
By counting that which exists between the brand and the consumer will evaluate the relationship. And beware of the devil that’s in the detail of measuring all the activity you’re doing at the customer.
Winning and retaining customers is hard. Losing them is easy. If you’re committing to a winner, go hard, or else go home.
- Jörn Sanda is story architect at PPR
Measurement is hardly the enemy here. Of course, measurement can be misused or misinterpreted and be implemented in a way that is not conducive to a good customer relationship. That’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. Marketers just need more education on what specific measures to pay attention to and how to apply what is learnt from those measurements in a way that is congruent with the brand and the customer experience.
I would challenge you to come up with even one example of a company that only focuses on customer relationships in the absence a robust measurement system.
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You’re right in saying that you won’t find this in an “off-the shelf measure”. If you want to look at emotions, you can’t just pick a generic tool and force it on an organisation and its customers.
Also, all the problems that the article points out doesn’t show a problem with measurement, it shows a problem with misaligned department objectives (and probably incentives). If Sales only gets paid for making conversions, then that is what they’ll focus on.
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Totally agree with Jeremy’s and Huw’s sentiments. Maybe the headline should be: ‘Simple measurement is easily ruining relationships.’ (My original headline was: Measurement; the Beelzebub tempting failure.’
My intention – and apologies for failing to make that clear – is to suggest that we’re tempted to measure what’s easy to count. And so we start weighing lots of different things that we do to consumers, without checking if what we’re quantifying actually makes a difference to the relationships we’re trying to foster.
And that goers to incentives/ objectives too. I suspect many are developed based on what’s easy to measure.
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Jörn, I completely agree with that comment – often we do end up measuring what is easy rather than what is important. In my experience it is actually the emotional measures that are often the first that are removed because they often cost more to measure and aren’t seen as ‘hard’ metrics, even if everyone around the table agrees that they are important.
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Customers don’t want a relationship with your brand. They simply want a product that you may or may not sell them.
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Leon. Agreed, no consumer gets out of bed with a desperate need to have a relationship with a brand. The reality is that they develop emotions from the experience they have with brands. Just ask any customer support staff… And the culmination of these emotions results in some sort of relationship.
Nobody’s suggesting that a brand means more to people than people and animals do. But I disagree that “they simply want a product that you may or may not sell them.” They also want to be emotional.
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Actually. I’ve just encountered a rather alluring example of Telstra working to measure the relationship through a NPS. Google it, as I shan’t be sending eyeballs from this site to a competing publication 🙂 It certainly looks like a rather significant step in the right direction.
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It’s not that hard really – customer surveys show the relationship between NPS and various product holdings, tenure, age, recent transactions i.e. billing, sales, service, faults etc.
Simply model that out on the whole customer database and whammo – the whole customer NPS landscape. I’ll bet they can predict NPS trajectory based on different interactions too, which will help them improve service delivery.
I’m surprised more companies haven’t done this. The biggest issue is the IT environment. so that’s probably the main constraint.
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@Stevo, maybe another reason why companies haven’t embraced NPS is because there’s evidence that it’s flawed. https://byronsharp.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/net-promoter-score-nps-does-not-predict-growth-its-fake-science/
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