Sweeping a Path to Profitability

Computerworld - Your typical executive doesn't think much about self-service. This is a costly mistake. My colleagues on the marketing faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley claim that the most strategic initiative in the enterprise today - and by far the highest payback activity of the modern marketing department - is creating a customer communication channel that delivers a service experience so exceptional you can charge, that's right charge, customers for the privilege of interacting with your enterprise.
Remember Tom Sawyer charging his friend an apple for the opportunity of whitewashing that fence? To migrate to a point where customer service makes you money instead of losing it will require a total executive mental repositioning. The cerebral housecleaning is well worth the effort. Making executives smarter is always a high ROI activity.
Step 1: Clean the basement We have to fix the mental foundation upon which high-payback self-service is based. Executives have to respect the intelligence of the customer. One of the most important "aha" moments associated with Dell's brilliant direct-to-customer self-service sales model was its belief (unlike everyone else in the industry) that customers are smart enough to configure and order PCs themselves, by phone or online.
Step 2: Paint the front Door, sweep the walk, light the path We need to teach customers about how they will be better served by serving themselves. Old-think executives seriously underspend on customer education initiatives, feeling that customers - lacking Mensa-level cleverness - are untrainable. This is a global problem: Australia's environment minister, Iain Evans, is contemplating legislation that would make it illegal to pet white sharks. The government seeks to "protect people too stupid to protect themselves." Many of these safety-challenged people are smart enough to teach themselves how to use the Internet. Is your organization smart enough to make self-service attractive and to teach customers to serve themselves - and to pay you for it?
Step 3: Place microphones in your yard so you can hear what customers are saying Walt Whitman in "Song of Myself" wrote, "Now I will do nothing but listen." Corporate America spends $5 billion a year for market surveys. They have outsourced listening. A self-service model drives your "listening costs" to zero, if the company captures the information.
Step 4: Let the customer design the house Active listeners are hearing their customers say four things: "I want to talk to someone who listens to me"; "I will only buy products or services that are personalized for me"; "I wantto know that our 'conversations' are secure and private"; and "When I trust that you know who I am, can keep my information safe, and can use what I tell you to delight me, I will turn over my purchasing decisions to you."
Despite being born in an age when we don't have to hunt for our own food, sew our own clothes or cart away our own waste, we aren't strangers to self-service. Deep down, we even like the concept. We just have been underwhelmed with its execution. ROI