CHAPTER 1
YOUR CUSTOMERS HATE YOU. GET USED TO IT!
Imagine youâre 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 youâre both getting hungry for dinner. Because youâre in an unfamiliar area, you donât 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.
âUghâthereâs no way weâre eating there,â you say. âI hate that stuff. I want real food.â
The next one is a chain pizza place.
âNope,â says your companion. âTheir pizza tastes like cardboard.â
âHereâs one,â you say. âMomâs Home Cooking. Good food and spirits.â
Your companion agrees that you should have a look at Momâs Home Cooking. After driving for fifteen minutes, you pull into the gravel driveway of the restaurant.
âUh-oh,â says your companion. âThis place is scary. Look at all the motorcycles parked here! I think Mom must be a member of a local biker gang. I donât think this particular establishment is for us.â
You get back on the highway. The sun is nearly gone and youâre really hungry. You scroll the list. âThereâs a seafood place a few miles up ahead. Fisherman Joeâs.â
âIt looks okay in the photo,â says your companion. âLetâs check it out.â
You drive another fifteen minutes and pull up in front of Fisherman Joeâs. 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, âDo you smell that rancid odor? Thatâs a bad sign. They cannot be selling fresh fish. We need to get out of here.â
You turn around and get back in the car. By now itâs dark and you flip on the headlights. âIâm starving,â you say. âWhatâs the next choice?â
âPasta Garden,â says your companion. âFour miles ahead.â
With your stomach growling, you drive to Pasta Garden. You park and hurry from the car. The menu is posted outside. You read it. âTo be honest, I donât want pasta,â you say.
âWe have no choice,â says your companion. âWeâre going inside. You can have chicken or veal.â
You go inside. The place is pleasant enough. âInoffensiveâ would be the best term.
âWeâve got to eat,â your companion whispers. âHow bad could it be?â
âIâm sure weâll survive,â 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.
âHow was your chicken?â asks your companion.
âLike rubber.â You shrug. âBut it was food. Letâs get going.â
Letâs 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, youâd be happy to never set foot in the place again as long as you lived. There was plenty about the business that you hatedâit was boring, had rubbery food, mediocre wine, and unexceptional service. The only thing you loved about itâif I can use the term looselyâwas that the food was edible, it filled your stomach, and it didnât 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 restaurantâs lovepoints just barely outnumbered its hatepoints. While itâs better than the alternativeâbeing totally hatedâthis 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. Hereâs why: While the owner of Pasta Garden may think he owns his market and neednât 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. Youâve 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 emergesâwhich it always willâthe 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 coinâthe fact that consumers hate many businessesâshould 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:
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 didnât 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, âI need to clean my floors, and my vacuum cleaner is old and broken. I need a new one, and Iâm ready to pay five hundred dollars for one with all the latest features.â At that moment, the perfect vacuum cleaner would appear in the supplies closet, and five hundred dollars would disappear from the customerâs 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.
Thatâs 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 hateâand 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 itâs never attained. Weâre 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, thereâs always some friction. People make mistakes, machines break down, the weather prevents shipments from arriving on timeâthere 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. Donât be offended, because âfirst bestâ is perfection in the ideal marketplace. No customer can have perfection. Because they canât 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:
- 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.)
- 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! Youâll haveâor keepâyour customer, at least in the short term. If the scales tip in favor of hating your company, then sorry, youâll lose the sale and the customer.
Company leaders who accept the reality described earlier are one step ahead of the deniersâbut theyâre 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, âOkay, 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.â
To support this view, theyâll 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 naĂŻve viewpoint completely overlooks the customer experience in its totality.
HOW DO I HATE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS . . .
Letâs dive deeper into the many ways your customers can rack up hatepoints against your company.
Your Product or Service
As weâve agreed, we live in an imperfect world. This imperfection extends to your product or service.
Okay, Iâll concede that if youâre in the business of selling sand and gravel, a commodity that hasnât changed in ten thousand years, you might be able to claim that your product cannot be improved and is therefore perfect. But youâre 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:
- 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 crashesâLion 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, Americaâs peanut producers lost $1 billion between sales and lost production.
- Products become obsolete. In this book, Iâm 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 thatâs 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...