CX & Customer Success resources

Marketing folks having always talked about the 4 P’s:  price, product, promotion, and place.  But there’s a new P in town, and it matters more than any other: Promoters.
Promoters drive growth.  Increasing the percentage of Promoters in your business requires putting the needs of customers first.  Those companies that do this grow faster than their competitors.*
The traditional view of the Ps was totally inward focused.  Those Ps were activities that the company cared about, and not at all what the customer cares about.  In this age of rapid change, word-of-mouth, social networking, and high customer expectations we need to consider the customer needs first, and the needs of the company second. 
So instead of the Ps, let’s talk about our friend EVE:

• Experience, not product.  The product is just one part of the total customer experience.  Do you provide everything – from sales to acquisition to usage to service to repurchase – aligned with customer expectations (that is, marketing and brand) of your value?  Are there any “wow” moments that customers would promote?
• Value, not price:  Customers want bang for the buck.  What’s your value equation?  Side note: the growth leader in most industries is often not the low-price leader.
• Ease:  Is your company easy to do business with?  That is, do you minimize the hand-offs between departments, or at least make them transparent to customers?  Does your company create processes (and policies) that make it easy for customers to acquire your value?

Turn the company from an inward-focus to a customer-focus and you’ll drive profitable growth through retention, referral, repurchase, and recommendation: the 4 Rs of growth! I’ll save that one for another time…
 * Note: If you doubt this fact then you can stop reading.  On the other hand, if you’d like more specific examples let me know… I’m leaving them out for brevity because there’s been so much already written on that topic.