"It's Not What You Like, It's the Consumer"

Call Center IQ has drawn from successful series like "How I Met Your Mother," "Seinfeld" and "The Walking Dead" in deriving valuable lessons for customer service and marketing professionals, but it is from the most unlikely of entertainment sources that one of the most valuable bits of wisdom stems.

As a comedy film, "Joe Dirt" bombed with critics and moviegoers alike, scoring just an 11% Fresh Score on Rotten Tomatoes and generating a tepid box office haul. But as a customer management teaching tool, it contains one of the most simple—yet notable—guidelines of all-time.

"It’s not what you like, it’s the consumer," David Spade’s titular character tells Kickin’ Wing, a down-on-his-luck fireworks vendor whose love for "snakes and sparklers" is not shared by his explosion-loving target audience. It is not until Kickin’ Wing learns to sell "the good stuff" that his business encounters success.

As painfully simple as it might be, "it’s not what you like, it’s the consumer" reminds customer management professionals that they are not in the business of satisfying or appeasing themselves. While they might want to use the resources of a major business and the cultural impact of a major marketing budget to legitimize their own interests, if they want to truly connect with customers and truly succeed, they must divorce strategy from their own preferences.

What matters is not what they want or what they like but what the customer base demands.

Clearly and most commonly associated with product developing and marketing, the advice also has significant relevance in the customer service space. It is also within that space that businesses most traditionally fail to adequately apply it.

Articulated perfectly by TELUS International’s Jeff Puritt in an interview last year, businesses too often make the mistake of marrying customer service to the Golden Rule. They "do unto others" as they would have others "do unto them."

"The old adage is, ‘treat customers the way you would want to be treated.’ In our experience, that is completely wrong," explains Puritt. "You should treat customers the way THEY want to be treated. There is a profound difference between [that and the Golden Rule]."

While it is nice to see so many businesses coming around to the notion that investment into customer service is worthwhile, that trend is meaningless if businesses do not go about such investment from the correct standpoint. If they focus on chasing unrelated industry success stories or achieving their own conceptions of customer service, in the process creating their own preference for a customer experience and thus doing unto customers as they would have customers do unto them, they will miss out on the opportunity to truly connect.

Though stories of fun corporate culture strategies, intriguing new metrics and interesting multi-channel initiatives might attract superficial excitement inside and outside of a given business, they do not carry any intrinsic value for the customer. Customers are not going to get excited because a business adopted trendy metrics or launched a lucrative incentive program for agents, but they will get excited when they feel a customer service offering has been designed, implemented and refined specifically for their needs.

Preferences are an irrefutable aspect of humanity, and it therefore can be hard to ignore feedback from peers and, especially, from oneself. When one focuses on the launch of a new social customer service initiative or of a more intuitive IVR, he will naturally concern himself with whether he—and peers, stakeholders and customer management consultants—would find value in the offering.

As difficult as those perspectives might be to ignore, they are ultimately meaningless in the evaluation. If the initiatives are not designed with the customer in mind and then measured in terms of their compatibility with customer preferences, they are failures, no matter how objectively impressive and "customer-centric" they seem from the boardroom.

No conversation of a new customer management technology or strategy should emerge devoid of connection to specific demands from the business’ specific audience and proof that the connection will translate into results.

If your customers demand Roman Candles and Screaming Mimis, do not market to or serve them with snakes and sparklers, no matter how cute and charming they may be. It’s about what your customer likes and what your customer wants rather than what you—or anyone else outside of your specific audience—thinks is right.