Your reality today as a small, growing company is that your customer doesn’t care about your internal battles, cash constraints, political hurdles, or competitive landscape. She doesn’t care about your struggle to retain top talent as a startup or your troubles scaling a culture unified around core values while continuing to hit the quarterly earnings numbers. Nor does she care why, at different touch points along the customer journey, you can’t seem to deliver the same brand promise she bought into on the front end.
As a matter of fact, she could give two craps about your issues and is – like all of us – no longer loyal to a brand. She is loyal solely to her need for a solution to her problem at the moment she has it. She grades you only on how you deliver against it and how consistently you can meet her evolving needs over time.
So what is the lesson here???
To realize that just because you have satisfied customers doesn’t mean you have happy ones. Satisfied customers are best defined as those customers who continue to pay for the service you provide because they have not yet found another way to live without you.
Think about that for a moment.
It makes sense but it is hardly aspirational as an offensive strategy. It merely serves as a temporary defensive one that can fool you into complacency. It is a mental trap that doesn’t currently violate the universal Law of Compensation.
“There is a universal Law of Compensation?” you ask?
Yes, there is. There are only three factors to earning the majority of the market share at any given time, and the Law of Compensation is governed as follows:
- The need for what you do,
- Your ability to fulfill that need consistently, and
- How difficult or easy is it to replace you.
Satisfied customers are not secure customers in tomorrow’s marketplace, and you are vulnerable because of the false sense of security you feel as it relates to number three in this law.
The reason is simple. If your customer is merely continuing to pay you because you fulfill their need consistently (taxi cabs fill the need for rented individual transport) and you are difficult to replace (2007), then once Uber/Lyft and so on get to scale (2010), your satisfied customer becomes your equally disruptive competitor’s happy one.
Then the cycle starts all over again. Almost every business is a commodity today and the only true differentiator that creates a strong barrier to replacement is your customer experience. Build and operationalize customer experience from day 1 or now to gain the winning edge.
Get them to #Heart you at every step of the customer journey because then they won't be able to live without you! We even made a tee about, like to see it? Here it is!
By the way we LOVE you too and I made a video message just for you below. Thanks for being part of our community!
