“Don’t satisfy the customer, delight the customer” __Jeff Bezos
Listen to the blog.
What does it mean to be customer obsessed?
Give customers what they love and strive to delight them at every touchpoint. It’s that simple, harder in practice. For example, Amazon knew that customers love free delivery, no one likes to pay for shipping. Amazon came up with the idea of Prime to address that customer want, to make shipping free. Apparently, Prime customers spend $1300+ per year, nearly twice the amount spent by non-prime members.
“The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service, the mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money. Paradoxically, it’s usually the missionaries who make the most money.”
Jeff Bezos
Strategies and tools to be customer obsessed?
How can one delight their customers, by giving them what they love. How can we give them what they love? Understand what they love. How to understand what someone loves, get closer to them, go through a day in the life of your customer, shadow them, really, genuinely try to be useful to them. Create routines, rituals that will assist you to be in constant touch with the customer, not automatic emails or text messages that spam them but personalized messages, meet-ups, calls.
What about the money?
Amazon’s prime service drew ire for being “too good to be true” and helped underline the idea that Amazon is too inexpensive to be profitable. Jeff Bezos’s mantra was to delight the customers and not bumping short-term gains on the bottomline. As Bezos puts it, “paradoxically, it’s usually the missionaries who make the most money.” when you work to delight the customer, in the long run, money comes naturally. The lesson is to delight the customer and money will take care of itself.