The Customer Epic #5 — Review
Let´s make a little retrospective here:
#1. We understood that customer journey must be unified within the Commercial Funnel. Marketing, prospecting, sales and customer service must be a single funnel. Then, we have to understand the customer journey within the project in order to reach a integrated customer journey: the customer epic!
#2. We built the Commercial Funnel. We stopped at customer service because there is the interconnection with the project and we have to better understand the project view of the customer.
#3. We found that the project view of the customer is… NONE. Project management simply does not address it. Treats the customer as any minor stakeholder. He is not! He is just the MAIN stakeholder. Embrace it.
#4. We had an overview on portfolio management and found that the customer is one of the key dimensions of strategic planning. There is no sustainable benefit and value attainment for the company if there isn´t any benefit or value to the customer. Ensuring that the customer is taken into account in strategic planning will make us think of him in every decision.
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Meanwhile CXL Institute´s Growth Marketing course is quite interesting. Among the other lessons, I really found the Landing Page Optimization and YouTube Ads lessons very insightful and nice to watch.
Yeah, I just dumped A/B Testing Mastery for a while. Goddammit, that guys is really annoying, yet he knows what he is talking about.
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Got stuck. Creative blackout. Infinite laziness. In front of the giant amount of work I need to do and understand I rather take a beer.
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Still have to write 500 words tonight. So, beer in hands, let´s restart.
Dissection of the issue: immediate available project management knowledge base do not address customer. Must research on academic field. Hate those pricks. Having graduated in a Brazilian public school exposed me to them in a very disadvantaged position. Do not do that if you can.
I really don´t know what customer service is about. I had a commercial establishment and that was the closer I got to it. The business broke so I guess it have something to do with that.
Good, we have a door.
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This thing never reaches 500 words. Enter the door.
Who really was in touch with customer at that time was Fernando, a partner who to took care of the store attendance. He used to spend a lot of time just chatting with customers. The relationship I see is that of an authority. They really rely on him about what we were selling.
My wife was a partner too. Big trouble.
At that time she was taking care of company´s relationship with suppliers, government leeches and accounting people. Now she is working in a major Brazilian electronics and furniture retailer in… customer service.
I´ll have make friendship with her again.
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To make that a 500 let´s just establish what we are going to do next.
- talk to wife;
- think about our service back then, while reexperiencing the shitty experience it was;
- come up with something.
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Well, I´ll talk to her latter.
Let´s get back to the time I owned a shop. All the customers wanted from us is that, being the authority on the subject, we would help them go trough their journey. It´s always that way.
The customer rely on the company believing we are able to show him the path, remove any doubt or barrier and deliver the result he wanted. As we know, he may even not know what exactly he want. He may need us to help him discover it.
So that is the objetive of any person having a relationship with any company: it is that of a mentoring!
In order to happen at first place there must be credibility. That´s why companies spend lots of money in branding. To build it up.
It may sound very obvious all that stuff, but we really get kind of submerged under the business processes streams and most of the times forget why we are doing something, just because it really works without we being aware of the big picture.
Assume you are just a intern in your first job. You will be taught a bunch of processes in order to fulfill your tasks. You may not have any idea what for, but you may get quite good at that. You manage to be hired and goes up in the department ladder, always improving, and still not knowing exactly why you are doing that. Some business bigshot established these processes and you are following what was established, just that.
People even retire (with good money) without realizing the whys.
In a organizational level it happens too. Everyone is so caught in routine tasks while the company is growing that they forget what it is all about.
It´s all about the customer. It always have been.
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Back to the very center of the business we remember that our mission is to be credible enough for the customer choose us as their mentor through his buying journey.
But we are really talkin about the customer epic! It is not just any journey. It is the whole sh*t.
In an epic we have a hero — the customer — who must fulfill a great mission through many obstacles — buy something — and is helped by a mythological being — the company — to accomplish an extraordinary feat— buying right.
This mythological being can both help or spoil his journey.
I like these analogies because they help us to put everything together. Now we have the roles and the plot.
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The big problem I´m trying to address since the beginning is that, in most cases, in a purchase that requires any level of customization and therefore demands a project to be done, while the company is executing the project the customer stays out of the play.
For him what is happening now is a black box. That is the point when issues starts to arise within the project and are “solved” without the customer´s perspective being taking into account.
Meanwhile he is pulling out his hair because he doesn´t know what is happening with the most important thing: his money!
Is the company doing the right thing? Is it really what I´ve purchased? Why do they don´t talk to me?
The customer have committed his money and do not have the right of even being communicated about what is going on?
According to the general level of business maturity, NO.
