The customer service revolution and the madness of "owning" the customer

The mindset that believes that “owning the customer” is a prerequisite of running a successful business is stuck in a time-warp.  There; I’ve said it.   Personally I think that the concept of owning the customer is an idiotic, dysfunctional, deeply anachronistic and patronising idea that is as misplaced and unwelcome in the 21^st century as slavery.  But wait – many of our leading businesses are still acting as if they believe that “owning the customer” is an “a priori” truth that must be adhered to.  This blog sets out to debunk the myth.

Over the last few decades most businesses have come to terms with the fact that they don’t necessarily need to “own” their own equipment and property (leasing/renting) or own their own workforce (outsourcing) and are now coming to terms with the fact that they don’t necessarily need to own their own IT (Cloudsourcing) but they are still struggling to come to terms with the concept of not owning the customer. 

For those of you who haven’t got your heads around this concept yet here’s where a “we need to own the customer” mindset comes from and here’s what it does.

Its roots are in corporate insecurity and fear and strongly linked to the desire for control.

Firstly if you don’t have full faith in your brand(s), product(s) or service(s) you will constantly be looking for ways to “capture” customers with gimmicks and offers that keep them loyal.  You will spend large amounts of money trying to create a loyalty that your services don’t naturally generate.   You will be very conscious of the price of customer acquisition and customer churn and will have big programmes in place to manage customer complaints.

Secondly you will be happy (and by happy I mean impelled) to sell to “your” customers products and services (e.g. PPI, Horsemeat etc) that are profitable in the short term but do not have your customers best interests at heart – this is of course justifiable as it is your right to make money out of your customers since you worked so hard to ensnare and own them in the first place. 

Thirdly you will be paranoid about your customers experiencing a “better experience” elsewhere so you will spend vast amounts of money to build and “own” an end-to-end experience that means that none but the most inquisitive and/or frustrated of your customers will bother to go elsewhere.

These actions will all provide you with an apathetic but relatively stable base of “punters, wallets, schmucks or muppets” that you can efficiently control and extract money from over a period of time and enjoy the fruits of your labours despite your inability to create a brand and product set that stands up for itself and serves the real needs of its customers.

Unfortunately, in the words of a paraphrased reprise from Scooby Doo, for a worryingly large number of UK Plc’s senior executives “It would all have been OK if it wasn’t for those pesky kids and that new fangled internet”.  Welcome to the 21^st century.  We the customers do not want to be owned and will, over the next few years, find new digital means to circumvent businesses increasingly expensive and desperate attempts to control and own us.

Yes, global connectivity, openness, social sharing and a bit of a financial crisis are turning the old world order upside down – whether it be politics (see Arab Spring & MPs expenses) or business (see Financial Services scandals, Press Scandals, Horsemeat etc) or even public services (see NHS death rates, police scandals etc).  We the customers can and will communicate, share and demand real change and higher behavioural standards.

So what should I do as a business leader when confronted by this new reality?

Unsurprisingly I’m going to recommend the following five heresies.

1.      Redirect spend away from schemes that “con” your unsuspecting database of contacts and customers into buying products and services they neither want nor will benefit from and instead spend money on creating a brand, product and service set that you can be truly proud of.

2.      Seek out new ways of “freeing your customers” from your own clutches.  Actively seek to showcase your services through shared delivery channels where you appear alongside your competitors and other service providers.  This will freak out your CMO but delight your liberated customers.

3.      Discourage the use of any internal language that seeks to diminish the personhood of your customers (e.g share of wallet, muppets (see Goldman Sachs)).  They really are people and want to be treated as such.

4.      Stop talking about how you are going to become more customer focused – nobody believes you anyway and they certainly don’t believe that a treatise on heightened customer focus has anything to do with altruism and real customer benefit but has quite a lot to do with your business making more money.

5.      Embrace corporate openness and the tools of the digital revolution and work to build corporations that honestly and openly provide their products and services to customers in a way that enables the customers to feel they are making a good and real choice.

And in the afternoon we could give world peace a go.  I can’t help myself – I’m still an idealist who believes that there are better ways of doing business that benefit all of us, our planet and the future generations.   After all we did decide slavery was a bad idea once upon a time.  So take what you will out of this.  There is a revolution in customer service coming and it will be fought on the battleground of who owns the customer.  My money’s on the customer winning.