Customer Strategy Consulting

Customer Strategy Consulting

I am an experienced strategic consultant with senior management experience as a marketing director and can help any size of organisation or organisational unit develop their business, marketing or customer management strategies and plans. I spent much of my time doing this between the mid 80's and 90's within Merchants for a wide variety of clients, but particularly in financial services, ICT, business and consumer services. Having spent the balance of the last 7 years focusing on my organicational change consulting, I have recently got back into customer management strategy through a series of client assignments. I am well placed to help clients link strategic and organisational issues and develop well integrated implementation approaches.

I can help with a broad of topics and client requirements, including:

Customer strategy

Customer analysis and segmentation

Customer value proposition

Branding and positioning strategy

Customer channels strategy

Customer service strategy

Customer service proposition

Service quality improvement

Customer service operations

Contact centre strategy

Contact centre development

Contact centre strategic options

Contact centre implementation strategy

Customer management strategy

Customer relationship management

Customer value management

Customer contact strategy

Customer information

Customer focused change management

For a summary of my recent customer management assignments, have a look here.

Aubyn's writing and matrial on customer management

For topical discussion, views, rants and ideas about the evolving field of customer management, visit Aubyn's customer management 'blog'.

I am happy to make the following material available:

Aubyn's introduction to customer management - frameworks and models

Aubyn's introduction to contact centre strategy- frameworks and models

The following article was written for the Customer Management Quarterly Digest
Summer 2006. To find out more, go to: http://www.customerconsulting.com

‘The Ultimate Question?’

Every once in a long while a book comes along that really helps shift the way businesses relate to their customers. Treacy & Wiersema’s ‘Disciple of Market Leaders’, Pepper & Rogers’ ‘One-to-One’ series and Frederick Reichheld’s ‘Loyalty Effect’ did this in the 1990’s. I believe ‘Reichheld’ has done it again with the rather grandiosely titled ‘The Ultimate Question’ (published March 2006).

The appeal of the book is in the simplicity of its message – that companies should learn to distinguish between good profits, which are fuelling long-term customer growth, and bad profits, which are creating detractors who could be dragging the business down. The Ultimate Question is to ask your customers ‘how likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague’, and from your customers’ answers to this you can determine your Net Promoter Score (NPS).

The book examines some of the technical and practical issues of how to do this effectively and rather unsurprisingly suggests that less is more when it comes to asking questions in customer satisfaction surveys. This is welcome news to me, having recently grappled with large amounts of National Passenger Survey and Tarp data on behalf of some of our train company clients.

Although benchmark surveys have their place, there is often greater value in asking less but more incisive questions of customers (including the main reason for the score given in response to the ultimate question). Reichheld espouses a simple principle as being the key to creating promoters rather than detractors, which is to ‘treat your customers as you would want to be treated yourself’, the same principle around which we help our clients develop their customer strategies. You also need to go a step further and apply the principle to your own people.

My only gripe with Reichheld is that he makes it all sound so eminently sensible that one wonders why everyone doesn’t read the book, see the light, and just do it. He glosses over the cultural and leadership issues underlying why so many companies are addicted to bad profits and why even shining examples of great service can lose their way over time through being inflexible or complacent.

The deeper truth is that businesses and their leaders don’t act as rationally as they would like to make out and that a complex mix of organisational issues needs to be addressed to bring about lasting behavioural change. Meaningful change involves a process of emotional engagement, which is never easy. This is why customer strategy always needs to walk ‘hand in hand’ with change management and why you always need someone outside of your bubble who doesn’t have your attachments, to help you see what’s going on.

(Review on Frederick Reichheld’s ‘The Ultimate Question’ published March 2006 written by Aubyn Howard, CCL Senior Consultant)

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Aubyn

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