It’s been said, it’s not “what you know, but who you know.” I take that wisdom a bit further to say, it’s not what you know or who you know, but what you know about who you know. This is particularly true when it comes to what you know about the customers that you want to know you.
Understanding the wants, needs, and desires of your core customer segments is a core competency of a world-class customer experience business. To achieve this level of understanding, I recommend two different but related approaches—customer segmentation strategy and the evaluation of unique customer need states.
To help distinguish these tactics, I will use my son Andrew and myself as examples. Andrew is 27, a software engineer, and the father of a newborn little girl. As you might guess, I am considerably older, a customer experience consultant, with no children or grandchildren living in my home.
Andrew and I represent very different consumer segments. Depending upon the business that is segmenting us, Andrew might be placed in a cohort with labels like “Young Professional,” “Digital Native,” or “New Parent.” In my case, the segmentation labels might be “Empty Nester,” “Pre-retiree,” or “Grandparent.” While my son and I are genetically similar, we value different things based on our stages of life and the cultural influences that have shaped us. We also read different things, consume information differently, interact with technology in wildly diverse ways, and generally have different wants, needs, and desires. Other people with similar life circumstances to Andrew are more similar to him than I am—thus, we represent different customer segments. For those reasons, brands should design their customer experiences based on the core segments they are seeking to serve.
Notice earlier that I said Andrew and I generally have different wants, needs, and desires. That is the pivot point for the distinction. In specific situations, Andrew and I have identical need states. Sometimes when we interact with a company, we are both in a rush. Sometimes neither us want to engage a salesperson and expect a self-serve option, and other times we want a well-trained person readily available. Our need states can be identical, even though we come from different customer segments.
In my recently released book, The Airbnb Way, I describe the importance of reading unique customer need states by highlighting the work of Danny Meyer. Here’s a brief snippet from the book:
During an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes, Danny Meyer, legendary restaurateur and author of the book Setting the Table, emphasized that “everyone is walking around life wearing an invisible sign that says, ‘Make me feel important,’ and your job is to understand the size of the font of this invisible sign and how brightly it’s lit. So, make me feel important by leaving me alone. Make me feel important by letting me tell you everything I know about food. It’s our job to read that sign and to deliver the experience that that person needs.” Danny Meyer’s invisible-sign analogy encapsulates the refined art of customer experience excellence—reading the cues of your customer.
So, the moral of the story is we all need to learn about the demographics, psychographics, wants, needs, desires, and purchase drivers of our core customer segments. At the same time, we need to teach our team members to read (in Danny Meyer’s words) the invisible signs that mark the need states of the customers in front of them. This multi-level approach will help you know a lot about the people you want to know you (your core customer segments).
About the author
Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D. is a professional speaker and chief experience officer at The Michelli Experience. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, Dr. Michelli and his team consult with some of the world’s best customer experience companies.