Rules to Break & Laws to Follow

“Because customers now communicate so freely with each other, it is more important than ever to focus your business on earning their trust. Customer “word of mouth” is doubtlessly the oldest medium in the world when it comes to spreading the news about good (or bad) products and services. But with the new technologies powering today’s customers-to-customers communications, everyone seems to have simultaneously discovered the possibility that customers might talk about you just among themselves, which of course they do.”

“Honeybees are social insects, and communicate with each other all the time in order to exploit the food sources that individual bees discover in their explorations. When a foraging honeybee comes across a promising food source, it returns to the hive and does a little “waggle dance” to tell the other bees where to fly in order to find this bonanza. The honeybees dance has been shown to be sophisticated enough to communicate the direction of the food source from the beehive relative to the sun, its distance from the hive, and its overall attractiveness, as well.”

‘So imagine, for a moment, that you are a food source for honeybees. (This means you are a flower.) With your bright colors and sweet scent, you have no trouble enticing a wandering honeybee to fly over for an on-site inspection. But when this bee gets back to the hive, it’s going to do its dance for all the other bees only if it has judged your nectar good enough to merit the return trip.”

“ Moral to the story: If your customers rarely talk to each other, then advertising rules. Bright colors will get any single bee to zero in and take a look. But if your customers talk to each others, then what really counts it the customer experience. The customer experience will determine whether your honeybees or stage a sit-in”

“Because your customers communicate with other customers the experience you give them is more important than the message.”

“Since customers talk to each other, it’s important to recognize that a customers can crate (or destroy) value for you even if he never joins the checkout line at your store again. Simply by recommending you, or denigrating you, or commenting in any way positively or negatively about you in discussions with create or destroy real value by affecting the lifetime values of other customers and prospects, driving them up or down. In fact, the economic impact, positive or negative, of a commenting customers can often dwarf whatever future business the customers
himself might or might not do directly with you.”

“customers-to- customers communication clearly changes the dynamic of business, not only enforcing fairness and good behavior but also crating interesting opportunities.”

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in Rules to Break & Laws to Follow
www.wiley.com