Part 2/3: Core elements you need for your customer communication quadrant

In my previous post, I introduced the concept of the customer communication quadrant, representing the four core reasons for a customer to interact with a business, and the four business levers this impacts. I walked through the level of importance for the business levers on the first two factors, Connect and Resolve, so this post will cover Surprise and Feedback.

Surprise: A business event that your customer did not expect but does appreciate

It's not often that a business invests in delivering a Surprise to customers. We are not referring to marketing swag (no-one values mugs, caps and pens with your logo on), nor tacky member-get-member promotions. Your happiest customers don't want to be sold at, they want to get to know you better, and deepen your relationship. Because Surprise needs a business to be personal, Cost and Efficiency don't figure highly - and in fact, are often the main drivers for businesses to step away from activities to Surprise their customers.

Quality has to effect Loyalty - a change up or down influences the way customers perceive your business. There's an emotional element to this too - as quality can often be linked to status. Surprise can be used successfully to reinforce the perception of status and value by highlighting quality. But Surprise is most influenced by and influential toward loyalty. The customer, in most cases would prefer to stay loyal, and introducing the Surprise element to the customer supports the nurture and humanising of the business relationship. Far from being high cost and extravagant, Surprise and the associated up-tick for Loyalty are much more human - to make a customer laugh or shed a tear takes a lot more planning and effort than most marketeers realise.

Feedback: A customer's decisions to share their view on their experiences with you

Despite the overwhelming sense of survey fatigue and frustration from customers when businesses ask for comments and feedback, Feedback is still a significant factor in the overall customer experience. In a similar way to Surprise, when a customer choose to share Feedback (prompted or unprompted), there is a business cost to receive and process this feedback. Although many businesses don't bother to do so, there is even more cost associated with responding to the feedback. This may or may not be worthwhile spend (reducing churn, addressing issues, showing appreciation for information shared.) Efficiency is also a variable business lever when it comes to feedback, because what our customers say, what they ACTUALLY want and how we respond is complicated, time-consuming and sometimes a fruitless exercise. A strong Feedback channel cannot guaranteed increasing Efficiency.

On the other hand, companies that are seem to respond to and act on customer Feedback often see the uptick in Loyalty. The bond between business and customer becomes tighter when feedback is treated as a dialogue, not just a necessary cost. There is a feel-good factor for both business and customer when Feedback results in dialogue; it's a strong loyalty indicator, because positive emotions go a long way in a relationship. In a really slick Feedback structure, the business lever that can be most influenced is quality. Whether you hold a monthly Voice of the Customer meeting, have seniors in the business interviewing customers, or you tech teams run regular hackathons to fix customer bugs, smart business use the feedback they receive to improve quality. Even smarter business ensure they shout about this successful engagement with customers. Where Feedback is easy to deliver, acted on and an update provided, you also dramatically increase the probability of future feedback, and thus quality improvements.

Having explored the four customer communication elements and linked then to the four business levers, in the next post, I'll be suggesting the metrics you might use to track this approach, and what 4 metrics would fit in the customer communication quadrant. In the meantime, share your thoughts on what you think in the comments below.