The emotionless world of the customer

Have you ever noticed how unemotional an experience spending money is? You get the same service almost everywhere and, even worse, it’s predictable! Where can we still find the unusual? Where is the variety that is the spice of our life as a customer?

Increasingly, the retail trade is facing the problem of what it will have to offer its customers in future. We can choose between umpteen different TV channels, spend whole evenings zapping through the various forms of entertainment offered, only to go to bed at 11 o’clock, frustrated because we haven’t really watched anything properly.

Or we are considering buying a new car and have to choose from a huge selection of colours and more than 40 different interior designs. Then we buy a car, and after only a year we face the frustration of seeing that there is already a whole new variety of innovative products and services available. Instead of better service, what customers are getting is a greater and greater number of interchangeable products.

Yet marketing managers spend a lot of time gathering information on their customers, information that, unfortunately, is seldom analysed and even more rarely put to any practical use to improve the service to the customer. This field of activity is called Customer Relations Management (CRM) and is implemented with the aid of a great deal of money and even more time in many companies. But what is the use of gathering all these data and storing them if they are not used to provide an even better service for the customer?

Your health insurance company is perfectly well aware that you broke your leg in a skiing accident. They even know what hospital you are in. Yet none of its 5,000 employees sends you a ‘Get Well Soon’ card. When they do write to you, the first thing you will see, right at the top of the letter, is a multi-digit number. That number is you. A long, impersonal, meaningless number. And the letter doesn’t start, ‘Dear Joe Friedmann, We wish you a speedy recovery’ and it isn’t signed, ‘Your health insurance team’ either. No, it’s a standard letter that begins, ‘Dear customer’ or even, ‘Dear Sir/Madam’. And this is a company you may have been insured with for over 10 years! Yet another example of the failure of CRM.

So you see that although we are inundated with information and options, few companies ever seize the opportunity to offer an emotional experience, which to me is a very simple way to amaze your customers. It is no longer the product that is important, but how you handle it.

Customers are really hungry for those pleasing little experiences when they spend their money, and although everyone complains about unfriendly service and moans that businesses should be more customer-oriented, the situation doesn’t really seem to be improving. And this has negative consequences, both for the customer and for the provider:

Most consumers don’t enjoy spending money any more. They go shopping because they have to and not because it’s fun.

Firms provide a service that leaves no lastingly positive impression with the customer. The consequences are fatal, since the customer defines you via your product and not your performance, and you can bet that the customer can get that same product from any other firm on the market in the same quality and at the same price.

I took a closer look at why we customers are only offered experiences that are devoid of any emotional component. In the following pages, I would like to share my insights with you.