Reinvent The Self!

Moments of Truth

Heard about the 5 moments of truth? Moments are nothing but the opportunities to express love to the customer! This journey starts with stimulus, middles out in knowing and ends in an intimate emotional connect!

Great organizations don’t make anything for the customer. They are made for the customer. The objective of Mindful CI is not to gain information about the customer but to gain the affection of the customer. It’s not about knowing the customer but understanding him. It’s not about showing what you do for him but expressing your love through what you do! They have only one source which inspires them and leads them to arrive at itself as a destination.

  1. Source: An intense desire to love people and make them happy. This will give rise to define your own WHY.
  2. WHY emerges but needs refinement: Now this WHY could be anything. Apple wants to stress their purpose that it’s here to “Think Different”. To Nike, it wants to “Just Do It”. For Toyota, it wants to show their commitment in saying “Let’s Go Places”. For Disney, they want to make a “Happiest place on Earth”. But to me, these all WHYs emerge from one common Source. The idea here is an extension to Simon Sinek who says in his book “Start with Why”, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy WHY you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.” There’s nothing like vision, mission statements to fool anyone!! Only WHY.
  3. Become mindful of What IS: Mindfulness emerges on its own. Organization comes to know about its capabilities (strengths and limitations) and its environment (law, ethics, and boundaries)
  4. Reading customer’s mind – I (requirements)
  5. Just Do It keeping customer in mind: This involves
  6. Establish a culture of affection: People, Practices and Policies (Broad rules we follow)
  7. Build, develop, support customer (not product)
  8. Reading customer’s mind -II (feedback)
  9. Destination merges with Source: An intense desire to love people even more to make them happier

Also, there’s no notion of competition here. Because organization knows only customers.

HBR says that organizations with a strong emotional culture have happier, more engaged employees and customers. Gallup Research has shown that how we interact with customers is more important to loyalty than what we do. One paper in SAGE journal, through a netnography study and survey research in two service contexts, authors confirm the salience of intimacy and passion as two underrecognized components of customer–firm affection that influence customer loyalty. Customer intimacy remains one of the key means and the key end too, in strategic thinking of any organization. The companies which constantly adapt to the changes in the customer’s preferences like IKEA, Maruti Suzuki, Home Depot prove to be resilient and robust.

Great organizations use CI not to “exploit” customers, but to “explore” customers. They don’t want “attention” but “affection”. They don’t want “supremacy” but “intimacy”. Don’t seek “exclusive honor”, but“honor inclusivity”. Don’t focus on “differentiating” themselves, but on “associating” with customers. Don’t focus on “segmenting” customers, but on “cementing” the gap between customers and products. Their “attitude” is replaced by “gratitude”. In return, customers love the organization back! The customer doesn’t love the product without loving the company that makes it. And this is the Source. An intense passion to establish eternal loving relationship between a customer and a company. To transform transactional relationship into a loving relationship. And once you do this, you no longer “sell” the product, service, or experience. You become a space where the customer is “sold”!

The post tries to lay out the true gist or essence of using CI. It’s commonly observed that marketing campaigns are hugely personalized and invade into customer’s privacy. Most companies are concerned about toplines or bottmlines. Customers are often used as objects to achieve company’s goal which is profitabillity most of the times. CI is always about emotions. It’s role is to translate emotions into numbers and vice-a-versa.

I strongly feel that the real pinnacle of CI is when organizations use it as a means to love their customers. It’s not about the contents of CI. It’s about the philosophy behind CI. If used with the same object and objective which is customer, it has a potential to transform the whole transactional world! There’s nothing called transaction. Everything is an interaction, an expression of mutual love, the purchase as well as the sale.