Lovability shares what Aha! co-founder and CEO Brian de Haaff knows from a career of founding successful technology companies and creating award-winning products: Love is the surprising emotion that product builders cannot afford to ignore. The national bestselling book also reveals the secret behind the phenomenal growth of Aha! and the engine that powers customer love—a set of principles named The Responsive Method.
Redefining Product
In the era when digital, app-based, cloud-based and internet-based products dominate the marketplace, lots of companies are giving into the temptation to turn the customer experience over to technology. On the surface, this makes sense because it limits “costly” person-to-person interactions. That is a grave mistake. Customers want human interaction, and increasingly, they are making it a deal-breaker.
A 2016 Accenture Strategy report, “Digital Disconnect in Customer Engagement,” found that 83 percent of U.S. consumers prefer dealing with human beings over digital tools to solve customer-service issues. Twenty-three percent have left a service provider in the past year due to poor customer service, at an estimated cost of $1.6 trillion. Not enough attention is being paid to managing all customer touch points.It is time that we redefined what we mean when we talk about product. From the point of view of the executive, marketer or product manager, there are two versions of the word.
Product: What the customer thinks they are paying for.
CPE: The totality of what the customer really values and is expecting from a product over the long term.
Today’s customer expects every touch point with the technology and the company that sells it to be a meaningful one that creates value. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) world offers a perfect example: software delivered via the cloud, as SaaS is not purchased but rented. Customers pay for it a month or a year at a time. If you understand that, you are more likely to think about delivering it like an ongoing service instead of a one-time sale. Remember, the last S in SaaS stands for service.
In that world, you do not just make a sale and walk away any more than you would if you rented a house to someone. You form a relationship with the user of your service. If you want to create lasting value for that customer—and lasting value for your business—you must maintain a mutually beneficial relationship. That takes personal contact, responsiveness and attention to every stage of the CPE.
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