Measurement is ruining your relationship with consumers
In this opinion piece Jörn Sanda argues the focus on measuring everything is ruining relationships between consumers and brands.
The Devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape, sporting pointy horns. He comes in everything you measured for.
Brands are failing their potential by measuring marketing, sales, reputation, customer experience, support, etc – as thinking defined by these terms drives a wedge between consumers and brands.
Once upon a time that may have been acceptable, when brands could force themselves on customers.
Measurement is hardly the enemy here. Of course, measurement can be misused or misinterpreted and be implemented in a way that is not conducive to a good customer relationship. That’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. Marketers just need more education on what specific measures to pay attention to and how to apply what is learnt from those measurements in a way that is congruent with the brand and the customer experience.
I would challenge you to come up with even one example of a company that only focuses on customer relationships in the absence a robust measurement system.
You’re right in saying that you won’t find this in an “off-the shelf measure”. If you want to look at emotions, you can’t just pick a generic tool and force it on an organisation and its customers.
Also, all the problems that the article points out doesn’t show a problem with measurement, it shows a problem with misaligned department objectives (and probably incentives). If Sales only gets paid for making conversions, then that is what they’ll focus on.
Totally agree with Jeremy’s and Huw’s sentiments. Maybe the headline should be: ‘Simple measurement is easily ruining relationships.’ (My original headline was: Measurement; the Beelzebub tempting failure.’
My intention – and apologies for failing to make that clear – is to suggest that we’re tempted to measure what’s easy to count. And so we start weighing lots of different things that we do to consumers, without checking if what we’re quantifying actually makes a difference to the relationships we’re trying to foster.
And that goers to incentives/ objectives too. I suspect many are developed based on what’s easy to measure.
Jörn, I completely agree with that comment – often we do end up measuring what is easy rather than what is important. In my experience it is actually the emotional measures that are often the first that are removed because they often cost more to measure and aren’t seen as ‘hard’ metrics, even if everyone around the table agrees that they are important.
Customers don’t want a relationship with your brand. They simply want a product that you may or may not sell them.
Leon. Agreed, no consumer gets out of bed with a desperate need to have a relationship with a brand. The reality is that they develop emotions from the experience they have with brands. Just ask any customer support staff… And the culmination of these emotions results in some sort of relationship.
Nobody’s suggesting that a brand means more to people than people and animals do. But I disagree that “they simply want a product that you may or may not sell them.” They also want to be emotional.
Actually. I’ve just encountered a rather alluring example of Telstra working to measure the relationship through a NPS. Google it, as I shan’t be sending eyeballs from this site to a competing publication 🙂 It certainly looks like a rather significant step in the right direction.
It’s not that hard really – customer surveys show the relationship between NPS and various product holdings, tenure, age, recent transactions i.e. billing, sales, service, faults etc.
Simply model that out on the whole customer database and whammo – the whole customer NPS landscape. I’ll bet they can predict NPS trajectory based on different interactions too, which will help them improve service delivery.
I’m surprised more companies haven’t done this. The biggest issue is the IT environment. so that’s probably the main constraint.
@Stevo, maybe another reason why companies haven’t embraced NPS is because there’s evidence that it’s flawed. https://byronsharp.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/net-promoter-score-nps-does-not-predict-growth-its-fake-science/