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Customer the new CEO? Careful now

TLC Marketing UK

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May 13, 2015 | 5 min read

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It’s fantastic to see companies finally delivering on the radical notion of putting customers first.

With NPS fast becoming the go-to index of marketing ROI for CEOs – and other three-letter abbreviations on the march – it’s about time.

British Gas actually refer to NPS as being their “religion” and their (yes…) DNA. Metro Bank claims a 100% customer focus, citing profit as “the by-product of amazing customer experience”. Their aim is to “create fans not customers”. (Insight taken from Marketing Magazine’s CX Edge Conference).

Another encouraging example regularly arrives in my inbox from (wait for it…) TFL, who are “turning big data into customer experience” by asking intelligent questions of the pearls Oyster hides in its insight-rich shell. Bethnal Green tube now sees 5% lower footfall in the busiest times because this insight was translated into action – as in, “Dear Tim, we’ve noticed you tend to tap in around 08.12. If you could bring yourself to arrive a bit earlier, say 07.49, you’d find you actually get onto the first train through.” That 5% translates into a lot of gruntled travellers.

So yes, we’ve moved a long way from feudal to democratic, with positive results on balance. But to claim that this makes the customer “the new CEO” is still something of a stretch. If every customer tries to have the final say on brand strategy, innovation and operational efficiency then we’ll be left with a) some pretty glacial innovation (see H Ford’s “a faster horse, please”) and b) a scramble for the corner office / best parking space – where some quickly become more equal than others (see Napoleon the pig v poor old Boxer) - and before you know you either have brand petrification or brand anarchy. If you’ve ever experienced an un-moderated UGC campaign you’ll know how challenged the general public are at providing amusing or appropriate content. Someone has to have a hold on the tiller, even if the consensus is allowed to navigate. The task is to steer a middle course.

So what we’re talking about is a benign baron, less addicted to squeezing taxes out of the peasants and instead genuinely concerned for their welfare – but not opening the castle gates completely.

And, as the mediaeval analogy suggests, none of this is actually new. Metro bank are saying exactly what First Direct said in a pre-internet 1989: no-one wants to queue to bank in their lunch hour when half the staff are also on lunch. How do we solve this “limited space in branches” conundrum? Hmm, let’s see. How about… an entirely remote service built on a genuinely 24-hour call centre? Within months they were claiming to be “the most recommended bank.” Still are. And back in ’89, guess when the biggest spike in calls came? Dec 25th. They didn’t want to check a balance. They did it just to see how deep it really went. That’s how thrilled people are by having their needs met first.

It’s all just a modern version of the basic truth of enlightened business: you can get anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. It’s a concept which is centuries old, but a penny that still hasn’t dropped with boardroom bread-heads light on emotional intelligence and heavy on short-term personal greed.

Emotional intelligence translates into Charles Handy’s Level Five leadership; a level of humility, giving genuine respect for the people who fund their BMWs and pension schemes, instead of effective but cynical exploitation (Level Four, where you may be rich but will only ever have customers not fans – unsustainable these days). TLC’s own Loyalty division takes a similar Kennedy-style view: ask not what customers can do for you, but… you can guess the rest.

So in short, we don’t want customers to be new CEOs if they act just like the old ones only worse: see Animal Farm / Stalin, J. But if they’re more on the JFK side of the equation, well, yes. Bring it on. Open the convertible. Just watch out for LHO on the grassy knoll.

LOL.

Tim Lawler, Global Strategy Director, TLC Marketing

Tel: +44 (0)20 7725 6012

Email: lets.talk@tlcmarketing.com

Web: www.tlcmarketing.com

Twitter: @TLCMarketingUK

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