The term customer is the flavor of the decade – customer experience, customer service, voice of the customer, customer-led, customer-centric and so on. As a single word it implies to me, a singular perspective of a customer being a unit of one.
I know we are aiming for personalisation to treat each customer as a unique individual, but I don’t think we have considered the term customer broadly enough on a daily basis (or patient, user, subscriber, member, consumer, whatever).
What if we stretched the word customer as some-one having their own little world? That they are part of their own eco-system which impacts their everyday behaviours, their actions, and actions which occur around them.
As a customer, I have three facets when dealing with products or services:
1. Choices – the choices I make in purchasing or using goods and services. Such as buying insurance.
2. Services – the choices I don’t get to make and occur around me regardless and in blind faith. Such as an ambulance if I break my leg.
3. Relationships – the people around me, I care for, support and interact with regularly. Such as my partner needing an ambulance.
As a customer, I would hope these products and services worked equally well for my entire eco-system, not just me!
We do uncover this broader eco-system when doing design thinking, customer journeys and empathy mapping, however, to stretch our everyday thinking of customer and within your organisation, ask yourself each time:
How do we impact the customer’s choice, the services it connects with and the relationships in that customers world?
Still reading? Awesome, here’s a recent example in my world … travel insurance.
Heading off for our European vacation we purchased travel insurance in my partners name as he had an existing relationship with the provider. We added a condition and upped the premium so I took time to read the PDS carefully, all good to go!
Two days beforehand my partner was hospitalised with pancreatitis (all good, think like appendicitis sort of) anyway, vacation cancelled and a week in hospital for him. Suddenly, his Choice of travel insurance became my responsibility being I had the travel Relationship. I had no idea if I was also covered, a few phone calls confirmed all good, although why didn’t I know this amidst panic?
One week later I started the claims process. Four weeks and 72 emails later from the airlines, accommodation bookings, train tickets, Doctors, hospital, more Doctors and hospital we were able to file all those Services around us into the claims process.
Still not complete and some way to go, but get my point .. my partner was more than just a single person customer!
His choice impacted the relationships around him and required connectivity to the services around us.
The customer eco-system.
I had a similar concept on an earlier post I did regarding healthcare eco-system here if interested … Disruption in healthcare, maybe we should try putting it in the hands of consumers.
