are succeeding while others struggle, and to help both new and legacy businesses adapt. We sought out many of these Me2B Leaders, interviewing managers, customers, and vendors and suppliers, adding secondary analyses including social chatter and what we call WOCAS, data showing “what our customers are saying.”
The more we learned, the more our original hunch was confirmed: Me2B customers are still looking for the same things they always have. Fundamental customer service needs haven't changed. What has changed is businesses' ability to recognize and deliver on these needs. Now that your customer rules, delivering to the needs is more important and more complex since customers have more information and more choice for interaction methods.
Me2B Leaders, we've found, are creating experiences that don't just deliver a product but fulfill relationship needs that are fundamental and predate even the mom-and-pop era. They are by no means radical innovations. The innovation the Me2B Leaders have brought is in figuring out how to deliver these fundamentals in today's world of scale and channel complexity and to connect to the customer even with the tyranny of scale and distance that separates head offices from the front line and the consumer.
Customers today still want to be recognized and served as they would have been in their local corner store – but in a digital world, the shape of this service is entirely different. For example, customers who shop an online grocery store expect the website to remember their standard weekly order in the same way that the local butcher could reel off a customer's regular order. The medium is changed; the need has not.
As we studied these Me2B Leaders we saw a pattern emerge in the ways that these companies are recognizing and satisfying customer needs and building lasting relationships. We have called these the Seven Customer Needs for Me2B success. The language we use to describe them takes the customer's point of view:
1. You know me, you remember me.
2. You give me choices.
3. You make it easy for me.
4. You value me.
5. You trust me.
6. You surprise me with stuff I can't imagine.
7. You help me be better and do more.
The challenge of meeting these needs will guide the vital strategies that businesses need to adopt in order to sell and serve in the Me2B world. Over the course of this book we show you what they are and how they connect to fundamental relationship needs. We demonstrate how the Me2B Leaders are satisfying these needs. We also clearly illustrate via examples what success and failure look like and outline the obstacles to success.
The seven customer needs are not created equal. Not unlike Maslow's famous hierarchy, they form a pyramid (see Figure 1.1). The first three (Know Me; Give Me Choices; Make It Easy) are fundamental to most interactions and form the bedrock for all Me2B relationships to deliver great customer experiences.
Figure 1.1 The Hierarchy of Customer Needs.
Companies that fulfill the next two needs (Value Me; Trust Me) are more mature in becoming Me2B Leaders; they truly see themselves in a two-way, meaningful relationship with customers, and they have recognized that customers do, and should, have more control. Those companies delivering the final two needs show greater maturity still. They need not deliver on these needs all the time, just in carefully chosen moments that make a powerful and meaningful impact on the customer and demonstrate a willingness to invest in relationships for the long term.
What Drives Me2B Leaders
As we analyzed the Me2B Leaders we asked why they were different from other organizations. Why did they seem more focused on these seven customer needs than other businesses? We started to look for common strategies driving the Me2B Leaders and began to classify these strategies and the companies into common groups.
Our conclusion was that there are four types of organizations that take different paths to become customer-focused:
● The Naturals
● The Challengers
● The Rebounders
● The Defending Dominators
All the Me2B Leaders had one or more of these types. In Chapter Nine, we describe each of the groups, giving examples of the organizations that fall into the groups and of the strategies that they are pursuing.
The Foundations of Me2B Success
Many of the Me2B Leaders we analyzed have had the luxury of building their organizations from scratch, making it much easier to incorporate customer-centricity into their DNA. However, the vast majority of companies need to transform their organizations from within to respond to the challenge of meeting today's customer needs. Throughout the book, we look at obstacles that existing companies will have to overcome if they wish to change. We also describe some of the foundations that need to be put into place if organizations are to deliver the seven customer needs at scale:
● Streamlined processes.
● Integrated channels.
● Customer-oriented culture that recognizes business is personal.
● Energized, empowered people.
Those companies at the pinnacle of Me2B leadership seek a common bond with customers, the hallmark of true relationships. Me2B companies value customer relationships above all, and recognize financial success and stability is best achieved by rethinking business through the lens of the customer's experience.
Perhaps that's why we've found that recent research into the success factors for personal relationships, even marriages, applies surprisingly well to the business environment. We have built on some of that work in this book. To succeed in the Me2B era, big business is once again becoming personal, and it turns out that all those things that support quality customer relationships matter to employee relationships, too.
Now it's time to start the journey to Me2B success!
Chapter Two
You Know Me, You Remember Me
Customers today demand to be recognized and known by the companies they do business with, throughout every interaction and every stage in the relationship. Companies that meet this need fulfill the first customer need for Me2B success, which makes all the others possible: You know me and you remember me.
Amazon, a customer experience pioneer, is without a doubt the most high-profile, end-to-end example of a company that knows and remembers its customers – and we don't only think that because Bill was Amazon's first global VP of customer service; the company's track record speaks for itself. Beyond fast shipping, low prices, and incredible selection, Amazon is famous for delivering great experiences. For example, unlike many other online retailers today, Amazon has always employed customer cookies (data stored in users' web browsers) to speed sign-in and enable customers to access their accounts with ease.
Unfortunately, despite all the progress in centralized customer databases, repositories, and interaction histories, most organizations today keep their information in separate silos and are unable to recognize their customers across all interactions or channels. In the good old days, the best of the local merchants or bankers or candlestick makers either knew all their customers by sight and by name or found a way to make it seem so. Customers rewarded these merchants with repeat business and favorable mentions to friends and family. Intimacy and personal memory allowed small companies to retain this knowledge of the customer. Even today, many local companies operate this way.
But for the majority of businesses, small has turned into giant, local into global, and personal into unknown, and companies have largely lost the ability to know and remember the customer. As organizations have grown, they have built and maintained customer data in separate repositories, sometimes with different markers that don't let them connect