The world and the internet moves on, at least for customers if not for many suppliers…how do you develop strategies which remember that customers are in control?

As customers we feel bombarded by messages we don’t believe, we know from experience that few suppliers deliver on their promises and are sufficiently trusted to be recommended to friends.

We trust more in peer to peer recommendations than in supplier promises, taking charge of our own decisions and finding alternative routes to get the information we need. By the time we approach our short list or supplier of choice we’ll be well-researched and may even have decided precisely what we need and why. We increasingly expect (or perhaps hope for) our current knowledge and needs to be taken into consideration by the supplier we approach, as we become ready to make a decision.

We aren’t treated like adults

As customers we all know how bad most call centre experiences are these days, in fact recent market research by More Th>n insurance suggested that before a customer calls a service centre, they may already expect to be disappointed with the experience and outcome. Not a good place to start from!

Too often we feel that we are being talked to as children, in an attempt for the ‘parent’ call centre to direct the conversation for their own purposes. In response we may take the parent role and treat the call centre operator as a child, as we become frustrated with their unwillingness or inability to listen to our personal needs or to make a reasonable attempt to respond.

Are we really asking too much of suppliers here? In our personal relationships we expect to be treated as equal adults, being able to express our needs and opinions. Increasingly customers believe that in return for information shared there should be some attempt by suppliers to understand, negotiate and deliver a suitable outcome for us.

We would hope that suppliers listen and observe more than they do, facilitating conversations rather than trying to control them, even delivering on the promises they make through their marketing materials and individual conversations with us.

Sense and respond

A year or two back Professor Merlin Stone and I wrote about an approach which can be used by suppliers to think through and address these issues. We referred to this approach as ‘Sense and Respond Marketing’, which you can read more about in the book ‘Marketing Revolution’ published by Kogan Page.

The academic theory behind the sense and respond marketing concept goes back many years to the study of Transactional Analysis, which considers the development of successful relationships between people of different ages and approaches. Transactional Analysis is claimed to be one of the most accessible theories of modern psychology. Transactional Analysis was founded by Eric Berne, and the famous 'parent adult child' theory is still being developed and applied today.

At that time we piloted the sense and respond concept with members of an informal customer management group (including high street banks, mobile phone companies and loyalty schemes) and started to develop strategy and training materials for users and even video examples of good and poor practice, with Quarto Consulting.

Companies that demonstrate integrity in their approach to facilitating adult to adult relationships start to understand and align themselves with the benefits and outcomes expected by their customers, whether in the B2B or B2C worlds of marketing, sales and service. Those that pretend to listen, but don’t use new knowledge to help their customer, will find they had only one chance to demonstrate their ability to deliver on their promises.

When benefits-led companies are successful in meeting the needs of their customers ‘the money drops out of the bottom’ of the business model. The business can become better-rather-than-busier with a continued focus on integrity and customer benefits, rather than on short term revenue and profit targets.

Integrity demanded

The web has become a powerful tool for buyers to research the experienced reviews of other buyers. An increasing number of websites now allow buyers to post ratings (perhaps on a 1 to 5 scale) with their personal comments. While many reviews are rated highly by potential buyers as being useful in their buying decision, there is increasing doubt whether product and service reviews really are as unbiased as they often appear. The consumer website www.ehow.com even publishes seven step advice on ‘how to decide whether to believe online product reviews’.

Buying risks can be substantial

It doesn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility for those who can gain from increased product sales to encourage, write or post favourable reviews, or for those who want to damage a product or service to write poor reviews. Evidence is starting to emerge that this may have been happening for some time without much general public awareness of the problem.

An unreliable recommendation may not be such a risk when you are considering buying a book, a DVD, or even a DVD player, but we still tend to rely on trusted personal recommendations when we need a plumber, builder, solicitor or financial adviser. We know from experience that the stakes are much higher and a poor supplier decision can be very costly when more substantial buying decisions are made. When we move home or look for a supplier outside of our friends’ experiences, how can we find and rely on an internet directory service that will find a local supplier with the professional skills and personal integrity that we need?

A choice to be made?

UK directory service www.thebestof.co.uk pride themselves on their innovation and relevance to the buyers and sellers of local services. Thebestof.co.uk have recently started to plan and pilot an independent assessment scheme in partnership with www.thehaloworks.com , an approach which is approved by the Market Research Society as benefits based, unbiased and reliable. In another sector where poor decisions carry big risks for the buyer, directory schemes for independent financial advisers are starting to look at the same issues of integrity and approach.

To improve and assure the integrity of a directory the customers of listed suppliers would be contacted at random and requested to complete an online survey, results would be consolidated under customer benefit headings such as Efficiency, Enthusiasm, Support and Integrity with ratings published against each online supplier listing. Survey management can be relatively automated to manage the high volumes required, but an audit process also needs to be in place to ensure that surveyed customers really have been randomly selected and have completed the survey themselves and without bias.

The result would be a directory service that could be trusted by buyers. Isn’t this what we expect when we use such services as buyers, rather than the jaded approach to directories where the companies with the biggest advertising budgets get the most space? – and where the directory service is motivated to sell services ‘off the page’ without any accountability for the customers experience and buying result?

Some companies clearly believe they have to sell-at-any-cost to be successful, others demonstrate confidence that if they listen to their customers and deliver with integrity then they will be successful. As both buyers and sellers we need to recognise these options and consider what approach we (and our businesses) will be taking to create the future we want to live within….

Bryan Foss is an independent board level advisor and non-executive director working primarily in B2B situations, also founder of www.FossInitiatives.com.