What Customers Hate

Drive Fast and Scalable Growth by Eliminating the Things that Drive Away Business

Nicholas Webb

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781400236688
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

This book will teach you how to eliminate what customers hate and lead your market and customer satisfaction.

Whether you’re selling to consumers or business-to-business (B2B), perfection in the marketplace does not exist. When making buying decisions, customers are faced with an array of imperfect choices. The best organizations in the world are not only delivering great customer experience, but they’re also taking steps to proactively avoid the things that customers hate. These companies have learned that if you can eliminate what customers hate, you will instantly become the best option in your market.

No company, brand, or service enjoys 100 percent love. There will always be some degree of hate in the mix. Hate is a source of friction, and if there is too much friction, the process of moving products and services— regardless of their high quality—into the hands of customers will grind to a halt.

What Customers Hate will show you how to avoid the common pitfalls that have damaged some of the best organizations, and best teams in the world, and how to change the philosophical view of customer experience so you can learn that customer experience is actually an innovation activity.  This customer experience playbook will give you actionable takeaways that include:

• How to turn an upset customer into a customer for life, in five easy steps.
• Why “haters” will determine your organization’s growth and profitability.
• How to thrive in the “experience economy.”
• The importance of the five-touch journey mapping.
• The impact of hate-love personification.
• How to turn your customers into “Evangelists.”
• The power of: Attraction, Promotion, Retention, and Avoiding Deflection.
• The secrets of the best organizations in the world.

This book is the product of many years of front-line work with some of the top brands in the world and their customers.  Set aside the theories and concepts, this is the playbook you need. You’ll find that this approach will make it fast and easy to drive scalable growth, profitability, and most importantly, customer happiness.

CHAPTER 1

YOUR CUSTOMERS HATE YOU. GET USED TO IT!

Imagine you’re on a road trip, driving from your home to a scenic destination a few hours away. You and your companion have been enjoying the day, but now the sun is setting and you’re both getting hungry for dinner. Because you’re in an unfamiliar area, you don’t know the local restaurants. To find one, you ask your phone for suggestions of eateries near you.

On the screen you see a selection.

The nearest restaurant is a national fast-food burger franchise.

“Ugh—there’s no way we’re eating there,” you say. “I hate that stuff. I want real food.”

The next one is a chain pizza place.

“Nope,” says your companion. “Their pizza tastes like cardboard.”

“Here’s one,” you say. “Mom’s Home Cooking. Good food and spirits.”

Your companion agrees that you should have a look at Mom’s Home Cooking. After driving for fifteen minutes, you pull into the gravel driveway of the restaurant.

“Uh-oh,” says your companion. “This place is scary. Look at all the motorcycles parked here! I think Mom must be a member of a local biker gang. I don’t think this particular establishment is for us.”

You get back on the highway. The sun is nearly gone and you’re really hungry. You scroll the list. “There’s a seafood place a few miles up ahead. Fisherman Joe’s.”

“It looks okay in the photo,” says your companion. “Let’s check it out.”

You drive another fifteen minutes and pull up in front of Fisherman Joe’s. It looks pleasant, so you park the car and go inside.

The moment you step through the door, your companion turns to you and says, “Do you smell that rancid odor? That’s a bad sign. They cannot be selling fresh fish. We need to get out of here.”

You turn around and get back in the car. By now it’s dark and you flip on the headlights. “I’m starving,” you say. “What’s the next choice?”

“Pasta Garden,” says your companion. “Four miles ahead.”

With your stomach growling, you drive to Pasta Garden. You park and hurry from the car. The menu is posted outside. You read it. “To be honest, I don’t want pasta,” you say.

“We have no choice,” says your companion. “We’re going inside. You can have chicken or veal.”

You go inside. The place is pleasant enough. “Inoffensive” would be the best term.

“We’ve got to eat,” your companion whispers. “How bad could it be?”

“I’m sure we’ll survive,” you reply as the hostess ushers you to your booth.

You dutifully order your meals and have a barely drinkable bottle of wine. After dinner, you pay the check and, with your appetite satiated, go back to your car.

“How was your chicken?” asks your companion.

“Like rubber.” You shrug. “But it was food. Let’s get going.”

Let’s step back and consider what just happened. That evening, you spent your money at one of five businesses competing for your consumer dollars. Of the five, Pasta Garden was the winner. They got your business. But should the owner of Pasta Garden be celebrating his victory over his four rivals? Should he think that because you chose to patronize his restaurant that you loved the experience and would go there again, and even recommend it to your friends?

Absolutely not. You did not choose Pasta Garden because you loved it and would add it to your list of favorite dining spots. You chose it because of the available alternatives; you hated it the least. In fact, you’d be happy to never set foot in the place again as long as you lived. There was plenty about the business that you hated—it was boring, had rubbery food, mediocre wine, and unexceptional service. The only thing you loved about it—if I can use the term loosely—was that the food was edible, it filled your stomach, and it didn’t make you sick. At that moment in time, when you were desperate to eat something, your lukewarm love for Pasta Garden outweighed your considerable hate for the place.

On the Net Customer Experience tool, the restaurant’s lovepoints just barely outnumbered its hatepoints. While it’s better than the alternative—being totally hated—this is no way to grow a business! To grow a company, you need to elicit not merely grudging acceptance from your customers but genuine attraction. Here’s why: While the owner of Pasta Garden may think he owns his market and needn’t worry about competitors, his blithe ignorance will be shattered when a new restaurant opens down the street that offers its patrons much more to love and much less to hate. Suddenly his patrons will have a real choice, and Pasta Garden will be on the losing end. You’ve seen this happen over and over again in every industry, from retailing to electronics to automobiles. The complacent business owner who ignores the power of hate may survive from one day to the next, but only as long as he or she faces no competition. When a strong competitor emerges—which it always will—the customers will flee to the newcomer.

Being loved by your customers should be your goal, and every business must be focused on providing value and a superior customer experience. But the recognition of the flip side of the coin—the fact that consumers hate many businesses—should alert you to the very important fact that reducing what your customers hate is just as important as increasing what they love.

PERFECTION IS NEVER ATTAINABLE

In response to being handed this book, a typical business owner might say this:

This book is called What Customers Hate. I don’t understand. My customers are my customers because they love the products and services I provide. If they truly hated my company or my products, they would not be my customers. We live in a highly competitive marketplace, and every consumer has many choices. Therefore, anyone who is my customer must also love what we sell. If they do not love what we sell, then they are not my customer. That’s why it’s impossible to talk about what customers hate—especially my customers.

In a perfect Utopia, where every choice is available all the time, this rationale might have some value. For example, if you manufactured the perfect peppermint toothpaste and could sell it in an instant transaction, and your potential customer wanted peppermint toothpaste, then that person would buy your perfect product. If the customer didn’t want peppermint toothpaste, they would not buy from you. It would be very simple!

This belief is based upon the ideal marketplace, in which every customer can buy exactly what they want, when they want it, and have it instantly delivered into their hands. Another name is frictionless commerce, a theoretical trading environment where all costs and restraints associated with transactions do not exist.

In the ideal marketplace, the customer would be able to say, “I need to clean my floors, and my vacuum cleaner is old and broken. I need a new one, and I’m ready to pay five hundred dollars for one with all the latest features.” At that moment, the perfect vacuum cleaner would appear in the supplies closet, and five hundred dollars would disappear from the customer’s checking account. Poof! It would happen in an instant.

If your company could not fulfill this order, then the person would simply buy from some other provider.

That’s a nice scenario, but it does not reflect the real world, which is much more complicated. All too many times, such as in the story of Pasta Garden, consumers must settle for the solution they hate the least. While driving in search of a place to eat, we rejected the first four restaurants because there was just too much to hate. At Pasta Garden, there was less to hate, and it won. It pays to know what your customers hate—and remove it from their experience.

No company is perfect. Neither are its customers. We live in a world in which we strive for perfection, but it’s never attained. We’re always one step behind what we hope to achieve. At Pasta Garden, the owner may be sincerely trying his best to present a quality product, but there are shortcomings. In every transaction, there’s always some friction. People make mistakes, machines break down, the weather prevents shipments from arriving on time—there are many reasons why even a well-functioning system can be flawed.

The Number One Law of Customer Experience is this: Your customers are always settling for second best. Don’t be offended, because “first best” is perfection in the ideal marketplace. No customer can have perfection. Because they can’t have perfection, they look around for the next best thing.

Having been denied the ideal solution, in the process of settling for what they can get, the customer will look at a company or product from two distinct perspectives:

1. How much do I love this company? As the seller of a product, your goal is to maximize these good feelings. (This is the subject of my bestselling book What Customers Crave.)
2. How little do I hate this company? As the seller of a product, your goal is to minimize these bad feelings. (The subject of this book.)

These questions, and their answers, have equal weight. As we saw with Pasta Garden, your potential customer will be swayed by the sum of the two. If the scales tip in favor of loving your company, congratulations! You’ll have—or keep—your customer, at least in the short term. If the scales tip in favor of hating your company, then sorry, you’ll lose the sale and the customer.

Company leaders who accept the reality described earlier are one step ahead of the deniers—but they’re not yet out of the woods.

The problem is that leaders are tempted to look at the problem of customer hate very narrowly. They think, “Okay, we live in an imperfect world, in which customers must choose between flawed options. Obviously, if our product is superior, customers will love it, and will choose us. Our products will speak for themselves, and sell themselves.”

To support this view, they’ll point to the fact that customer word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool, and if the product is outstanding, then customers will tell each other, and everything will be ducky.

This naïve viewpoint completely overlooks the customer experience in its totality.

HOW DO I HATE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS . . .

Let’s dive deeper into the many ways your customers can rack up hatepoints against your company.

Your Product or Service

As we’ve agreed, we live in an imperfect world. This imperfection extends to your product or service.

Okay, I’ll concede that if you’re in the business of selling sand and gravel, a commodity that hasn’t changed in ten thousand years, you might be able to claim that your product cannot be improved and is therefore perfect. But you’re the exception that proves the rule.

Products and services are designed to solve a problem or somehow change the living conditions of the consumer. Products cannot be perfect for two reasons:

1. We live in a flawed world. The materials and processes that we use to create products are limited in their capabilities. Mistakes in manufacturing happen. Design flaws exist. They can happen at the very highest levels, such as in the Boeing 737 MAX passenger airliner, grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 after 346 people died in two crashes—Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. The problems included poor design of the anti-stalling system and a lack of pilot training. The twenty-month grounding cost Boeing an estimated $20 billion in fines, compensation, and legal fees, and indirect losses in the form of 1,200 cancelled orders valued at more than $60 billion. It also gave Boeing a bad reputation, which it had to work mightily to restore.
   Product defects can happen on an everyday level, too, such as the 2009 salmonella outbreak in peanut products that killed nine people and sickened hundreds. The source was traced back to the Peanut Corp. of America, an obscure, privately held peanut processor in Georgia that supplied hundreds of food brands. As news of the recall spread, wary consumers shunned all peanut butter by every brand, driving down industrywide sales by 25 percent. Peanut Corp. declared bankruptcy and went out of business. The Georgia Peanut Commission estimated at the time that, as a result of the disaster, America’s peanut producers lost $1 billion between sales and lost production.
2. Products become obsolete. In this book, I’m going to talk a lot about innovation and how its pace is accelerating. The product you launch with great fanfare this year may be old news next year. Your customers will hate the product of yours they currently own when they see that your competitor has introduced one that’s better.
   Obsolescence is also a factor in the price curve of new technology. Take, for example, electric cars. The price driver of electric vehicles has always been the batteries. Otherwise, EVs are astonishingly simple vehicles with far fewer movi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Your Customers Hate You. Get Used to It!
• Chapter 2: Touchpoint #1: The Pre-Touches
• Chapter 3: Touchpoint #2: The First Touches
• Chapter 4: Touchpoint #3: The Core Touch
• Chapter 5: Touchpoint #4: The Last Touches
• Chapter 6: Touchpoint #5: The In-Touch
• Chapter 7: Stop Focusing Only on What You Think Customers Want
• Chapter 8: Tough Choices in the Real World
• Chapter 9: Lessons from the Customer Experience Hazmat Team
• Chapter 10: Your Employees Create Lovepoints
• Chapter 11: Customer Experience Innovation
• Chapter 12: Happiness As a Strategy
• Chapter 13: The Customer Survey Is Your Enemy
• Chapter 14: RealRatings: The Customer Survey of Tomorrow
• Thank you for Reading
• Notes
• Index
• Contact the Author
• About the Author