Service Relationship Management

The old reliable four Ps worked well for selling products in the brick and mortar world. But times have changed. What buyers respond to when thinking about intangible services is something new, according to Booms and Bittner – service marketing experts we know and trust.

Effectively getting services into the marketplace requires the addition of People, Process, and Physical Evidence to the standard Product, Price, Placement, and Promotion they say. And the essential characteristic that these new Ps share? Quality.

Quality is what lies at the core of services marketing with services success coming from consistent, accurate performance.

Is it going too far to say that great service businesses take more discipline than product businesses because they require greater effort from all employees involved with the consumer? We think that in the current zero defects culture consumers are much more critical of intangible services than tangible products. As the old saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

So what’s the key to creating quality and ultimately, a great service experience each and every time? We think it’s creating a narrow “buffer zone” between two very important concepts.

• What the consumer wants to have occur

• What the consumer believes will occur

Yep, it’s all about expectations. Performance above a consumer’s tolerance level will surprise customers and increase loyalty. It’s a secret Zappos.com has exploited into a billion dollar business! Expectations are just that powerful so it’s in a company’s best interest to make sure that what a customer wants to occur and believes will occur is one and the same (or better). Without customers we aren’t in business so their judgment, not ours, is the sole source of knowing what quality truly means. Do we listen enough?

Think of the traditional companies thriving in this downturn. The Southwest Airlines, and The McDonald’s of the world. Why? We think simplicity is part of the success equation. So what’s working for hot online properties like Amazon or Mint.com? They go a step farther. They’re a new kind of “one-stop-shop” for consumers, allowing them to access whole segments of their lives with one single sign-on.

Amazon’s mission – “To be the earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” – gives you freedom to choose what you shop for online without being locked-in to a specific product, brand, or site. Mint.com’s approach is to connect you auto-magically with all of your banking relationships. The result: bypass of individual banking destination sites, a singular view of your entire financial life, actionable analytics on spending patterns, and better control over the information you get.

Both companies create a Unified Experience relaying the notion that you, the consumer, know best who you are, how, when, and by what means you want your service interactions to work. So while most businesses track customers through a CRM system, these companies flip the concept to that of Service Relationship Management – so at last you control interactions across a spectrum of otherwise painful individual shopping or financial experiences defined ‘about’ you, rather than ‘for’ you.

By embracing connections from SRM platforms, companies inevitably shift some of their control to the consumer in the way Amazon and Mint do. But the big benefit for those same companies is that SRM allows the consumer to get the simplicity they crave in a world awash in user names and logins. The category allows the consumer to decide for themselves what is important in their lives and in their daily interactions.

So are companies hesitant to release control to the consumer? Do they fear a power shift to the consumer will loosen their hold on brand and loyalty? We think innovative firms will respond to consumer cries for simple values in life — more time, more control, and more enablement — and life decisions delivered through simple technologies that un-tether them from computers.

In the end, service experience wins every time, doesn’t it?

Over recent years consumer relationships with the companies that serve them have evolved from simple telephone interactions to complex, multi-channel interactions which are carefully managed, measured by companies that want to get and keep those customers. A whole category of technology – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) grew up a decade ago to serve that need.

Customers today have dependencies on the internet and mobile devices as the modes for managing daily life from bill-paying to investing to instantaneous interactions with thousands of perfect strangers. These technologies have flipped a bit for every-day needs and expectations among consumers. The immediacy consumers have come to expect across the spectrum of their lives has caused companies they do business with to extend CRM interactions through multiple channels. Banks have turned on two-way transactional models for bill payment and credit card alerts using email or text messages and customer portals that allow users to define how they want to interact.

While consumers get what they want on the one hand – easier, faster ways to do business, they pay a price. They now have dozens of interactions from an array of service entities, each with a unique set of requirements for log on, setup, interaction options. The result is a dizzying array of user experiences across a broad range of media that can have the reverse effect of what was intended. The consumer’s life has become more confusing, more complicated, and more difficult to navigate. Read more…

From the outset of this whole operation, I’d been thinking about the similarities in what we were doing to those of Mint.com in the personal financial space. Okay, I’m slow. I’d consistently referred to us as customer experience company, but it just wasn’t triggering the “I get it” type of response I’d hoped for. And it was also being used by a bunch of CRM companies that were trying to break out from the pack. Still an inside-out context.

So one day, as I was doing some writing and included the words “…inverse of a CRM” – when it hit me; we are a service relationship management company. Just like my young GroupTable entrepreneurs we, Mint.com, PageOnce.com and a bunch of others were setting about turning the tables on those who provide services to us. Not in a bad way, but in an extremely empowering way for consumers. Make my life easier, more efficient, more livable. Help me get things done that I need to get done, but am confused by – like all those individual logins – in just one way…. my way… Whether my way means by phone, by email, by text message.

We started testing the grock factor by calling our friends, and analysts, and academics expert in the service field and grock, they did. In fact, Mary Jo Bitner, one of the resident experts at the CSL pointed me straight to a publication in the MIS Quarterly Executive (Volume 4, No. 2) 2005 titled Customer-Managed Interactions: A New Paradigm for Firm-Customer Relationships, where some very esteemed academic researchers foretold this inversion through technology. They called it Customer Managed Interaction at the time. Because technology and market dynamics have changed a bunch in the intervening years some of their predictions aren’t among those that might make sense for today, but the desire and applicability for consumers taking control of their world and how the companies they want to do business with interact with them is more relevant than ever before.

…extremely critical! A year or so ago, I was doing a little work with a company that leads the healthcare industry in clinical interoperability technologies. That company, Medicity, was founded by a super-smart doc by the name of Kipp Lassetter. Long story –short, Kipp asks me what I’m up to and says he has an idea which he described as sort of ‘fastpass’ for healthcare. But along with that he talked about it needing to be backed up by a technology that was like the reverse of a CRM (customer relationship management) platform.

So, I’m not an inventor by any stretch, but I do have a rep as somebody who can take an idea to market. With Kipp’s two concepts in mind I did a little poking around and found that there really was a need for what he was talking about. Mint.com was doing something like it after all. When healthcare was thrown into the mix, the recognition that it is a customer experience wasteland became immediately apparent. More than that, there isn’t even a concept of customer relationship management there. And while the dynamics in healthcare reform drive responsibility for healthcare… Read more…

As I’ve grown busier – and oh yeah, older – I’ve noticed how much the technology of the world has changed the way I get through every day. I’m one of those early adopters of things like online bill payment, online travel purchasing and other such stuff as makes my daily life easier to get through.

I was coaching a group of first time entrepreneurs at the University of Central Florida Venture Lab as they worked on development of a collaborative, virtual study group site for the collegiate set called GroupTable. During the process, I began to learn a bunch from these guys about the behavioral differences between Millennials and the rest of us. These young founders were building a business around the busy, busy, multi-threaded lives of college students and the fact that meeting online was as natural to them as breathing – and oh so much more efficient when they only need to come together in short bursts to get group projects done for school. They were taking the lessons of corporate collaboration and turning it upside-down: Collaboration for the good of the individual on a short-term basis vs. collaboration for the good of the entity that becomes part of an ongoing knowledgebase. I liked it.

The whole time the team got me up to speed on their research, I whined about my own time pressures, thinking my problems were no different from those who were my son’s age (I was kidding myself of course, but you know, you try to feel young however you can). So these smart and practical young men introduced me to something I found pretty interesting; Mint.com. I liked it.

It was a fairly early beta. But I’m a startup person, so I’m okay with that. It gave me one place to see a bunch of the financial relationships I had without even having to think about ‘logging in’. Better than that, it automagically reminded me of little things like when credit card payments were due. Mint also gave me some interesting tips and pointers along the way and began to use some intelligence to compile what looked sort of like the budget I once tried to formulate in Microsoft Money. Very interesting….