Customer experience

Grant Leboff: Shaun, one of the things you talk about in the book which I really like, really resonates here with me is making your customers part of the story. Can you tell us a little bit more about that for the viewers?

Shaun Smith: Yeah. Increasingly brands that are able to involve their customers in helping to tell the story and to market the brand and to be part of the experience are just becoming incredibly successful. One which is very innovative which comes to mind is a product called Sugru. If you go online and Google for Sugru you’ll find it. It’s a fabulous product. It’s actually sort of a rubber which sets hard. You can use it for fixing things or making things, whatever. It’s almost like a dough, a child’s putty if you will. It’s used for making things. If you go online you’ll find that there are hundreds of videos and photographs of customers who have uploaded how they use Sugru. It’s not just a toy, it’s not a play thing. For example, the UK Olympic fencing candidate for the Olympic games made his grip, his full grip out of Sugru. It’s got some serious purposes as well, but there’s fantastic, and you go on to the website, you’ll find so many different examples.

Another example is Giffgaff, which is the telecommunication company which is a subsidiary of O2. Giffgaff is a SIM only product, so you buy the SIM and you only pay for it if you use it. Giffgaff is a Scottish word meaning ‘mutual giving’, so the whole brand is set up around the notion of the customer community running the organization. They make advertisements, they decide on the pricing. They even man the technical chat and help service to other customers, and in return they get credits and so on and so forth. The customer community is actually part of the experience of the brand and helping to promote that to others.

Grant Leboff: For a lot of company this thinking is so different from anything they’ve done before and increasingly necessary in this digital age. How does a company even start to approach the idea of involving their customers and making them part of their story? If it’s not something you’ve done in the past where do you start?

Shaun Smith: The best place to start is to be really clear about the kind of experience you want to create and how that creates value for your customer. Then by focusing on those customers who are your advocates, who are your most loyal customers? In any organisation Pareto rule would probably suggest that eighty percent of your profits are coming from twenty percent of the customers or thereabouts. If you’re going to identify who those valuable customers are you’ll normally find that they care about you, whether it’s a hotel, or whether it was an airline, these are the people who go out of their way to give you their business. If you approach them in the right way and say to them, we’d love to know more, and it isn’t just one of those boring questionnaires that they send you. If you involve them in the right way and say we’d love to involve you in getting your view about your products and services and your innovitive in about how you do that.

For example, Lego invites some of its super champions, ambassadors, they call them, to a workshop where they bring them together in a nice hotel somewhere, and what they’ll then do is to brainstorm new ideas for toys, new ideas for products and then they’ll turn those into those new products. The customers are part of developing innovation.

Grant Leboff: For you the best place for any business to start who’s watching this right now, is to start with the customers, get the customers involved, start talking to them, having dialogue with them, and out of that, you will start to be able to create something.

Shaun Smith: Yeah. Go about it in a way which is about being collaborative. Don’t just send them a questionnaire and say what do you think about us, whatever. People are bored with that. It’s about getting together with them and creating some mutual value by involving them in something and in return asking for their views or their contribution to how you might develop the business going forward, and creating that kind of community can be very powerful.

I mean one example, which is an extreme one, which is Nissan, started something called the GT Academy. They recognized that there were a lot of young people who liked to play on their PlayStations playing GT4 racing games, whatever, so they started a competition for people to compete using PlayStations in races. Using this virtual world they had some winners. They then took those winners to a race track and gave them proper driver training on race cars, and they then started a race series using these people. One of them, Lucas Ordoñez, is now a fairly well known racing driver. That was an example of taking some customers, if you will, who wanted to be involved and then actually taking them to another level.

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