Customer Love: A Deep Dive.
... an essay on building products customers will love 🫶🏾
If you only have a few minutes:
The Emotional Side of Business: Understanding Customer Love.
Last year, I wrote an article that remains one of my favourites. In it, I explored the topic of customer needs and how shifting towards a customer-centric approach requires a focus on customer happiness and satisfaction. I also discussed the limitations of commonly used methodologies such as the Net Promoter Score [NPS] and the Customer Satisfaction Score [CSAT] for measuring customer satisfaction, and introduced the concept of "customer love."
Love, like satisfaction and needs, is a simple and complex concept. Defining love can be challenging, but four characteristics are bound to appear in most definitions of love: feelings or sentiments, loyalty, satisfaction, and delight. When applied to customer relationships, these components can be used to understand customers' love for a business and its products.
In the context of a customer's relationship with a business, these four characteristics can be translated into four main components of customer love:
Feeling: How do customers feel about your product?
Loyalty: How loyal are customers to your product?
Satisfaction: How satisfied are they with your product?
Delight: How delighted are they about your product?
But why is customer love so important?
When discussing the importance of customer love, it is helpful to consider the dynamics of normal human relationships. The currency of relationships is value, and this holds true for romantic, platonic, and familial relationships. In any healthy relationship, there is a balance of value exchanged between both parties. In a business context, the goal is to create something valuable that people are willing to pay for, which is the key to maximising profit.
However, an exchange of value doesn't necessarily mean an emotional connection is present. In the same way that an individual may have an impersonal relationship with a high school teacher or university professor, a customer may have a purely transactional relationship with a business.
To create an emotional connection, businesses must go above and beyond, showing care and passion for their products and customers. This kind of dedication can inspire similar feelings in customers, leading to deeper engagement and loyalty.
For example, think of a teacher or professor who went the extra mile to make learning interesting or believed in you when you didn't believe in yourself. Such actions may not be a part of their job, but they will create an emotional connection with you and make you care about the person and subject.
In today's highly competitive marketplace, simply creating value for customers is no longer sufficient. Consumers are looking for more than just their needs to be met; they want to be delighted, have a genuine connection, and to feel that the business cares about them.
Thinking in terms of product strategy, this ties into the DHM model championed by Gibson Biddle, which stands for Delight, Hard to Copy Advantage, and Margin Enhancing. This model encourages businesses to consider the following questions: How will the product delight customers? How can the product be made hard to copy? and What business model experiments are required to build a profitable business?
Asking these questions can lead to creating products that customers love, as exemplified by Netflix. The company has a strong brand reputation, achieved through simplicity, relatable branding, and intentional image building.
One notable example is their decision to automatically cancel subscriptions for inactive users in 2020, which positively impacted their public image and reinforced their unique branding. While this decision may have cost the company $100 million, it reinforced their competitive advantage and was not replicated by other streaming platforms.
Case Studies: Examining the Success of B2C and B2B Companies.
[B2C] Spotify: Delighting Music Lovers Everywhere.
Spotify is another customer-centric company that has built a brand that customers love. In 2017, I switched from Apple Music to Spotify. The details surrounding the switch elude me, but I have never looked back.
Spotify has changed the audio streaming game in the last three years, with its investment in personalisation and delight being a major factor in its success. Spotify's unique features, such as Spotify Wrapped, Spotify Time Capsule, and Playlist in a Bottle, have made its music streaming experience more engaging and valuable than its competitors, which has won the hearts of millions of users.
Imagining Spotify's DHM strategy, some ways Spotify has delighted its users include: personalised choices & experiences, new personalised playlists every day, music discovery playlists weekly, accessibility, the ability to create listening parties with friends, smart recommendations, and engaging experiences like Spotify Wrapped and Playlist in a Bottle.
Spotify has made itself hard to copy in several ways, such as: building a strong and personable brand, unique technology for personalisation, economies of scale and network effect, and high switching costs. Spotify's inclusive pricing model, which was born from various experiments, is also a contributing factor to its success.
Spotify's business model experiments include Spotify for Students, Spotify for Individuals, Spotify for Duo or Couples, and Spotify for Family, as well as a $0.99 subscription experiment, which was discontinued recently.
As of Q2 2021, Spotify dominates the global audio streaming market with a 31% market share, double that of Apple Music, the second largest player in the industry, according to Midia Research. Spotify's success can be attributed to its focus on delight and personalisation, which has helped it build a product that customers love and capture the hearts and pockets of users. Competitors who have tried to mimic Spotify's strategies have struggled to replicate its success.
[B2B] Glean: The Intelligently Designed Work Assistant.
Building a brand that customers love is a key goal for most businesses, and it can be even more challenging in the B2B space. B2B products often solve practical, "unsexy" problems like payroll, communication, and knowledge management, which can make it difficult to create an emotional connection with customers.
Additionally, B2B products are often chosen by decision-makers rather than end users, which can make it harder to get users excited about using the product. However, there are B2B companies like Slack, Loom, and Github that have both a delightful brand and product. However, I will focus on discussing a lesser-known product, Glean, which serves as a powerful search engine and knowledge management tool for companies.
Glean is a B2B product that was recently implemented at my current company. As someone uninvolved in the decision-making process, I initially had reservations about how the product fits into my workflow. However, after several months of use, I have come to appreciate the value it brings to my work.
Glean is essentially a knowledge management tool with a powerful search engine that makes it easy for me to find relevant information, Slack messages, documents, and pages that help me answer my questions. The task of knowledge management is often challenging, and solutions tend to be imperfect. However, Glean has been able to stand out by effectively aggregating information shared across different channels, allowing me to easily find what I need, regardless of the project or team I am working on.
My initial experience impressed me, but my appreciation for Glean has only grown over time. One aspect that stood out to me was their website's clean and user-centred design, which focuses on helping users find information, unlike their competitors, who seemed to focus on other irrelevant aspects. Additionally, their pricing page was transparent and straightforward, which is a characteristic that I highly value in vendors.
Regarding the product itself, I have grown to love the level of personalisation that Glean offers. The seemingly inconsequential microinteractions and features have added to my satisfaction with the product. For example, Glean has wished me a happy work anniversary, provided me with interesting information about my tenure at my company, and even allowed me to view my calendar and join meetings from within the application. This is similar to how Spotify uses data to delight its users.
I have yet to fully fall in love with Glean, but the continuous moments of delight and satisfaction have certainly helped me develop a strong affinity for the product. I anticipate that I will be fully in love with the product in the next six months.
To imagine the DHM strategy of Glean, it's important to consider how it delights customers and what makes it hard to copy. Glean delights its customers by: aggregating data from different tools, training itself to better serve my needs, standing as a hub for everything I need to do my job, acting as a virtual personal assistant, reminding me of important dates, events, and anniversaries at a glance, and seamlessly integrating itself into my workflow to make it more efficient.
In terms of what makes Glean hard to copy: they have built a strong and personable brand, have unique technology for personalisation, have counter-positioned itself with a simple brand, product, and pricing model, and has high switching costs for migrating to another knowledge management tool.
To build a profitable business, one key aspect to consider is the pricing model. Glean has implemented a pricing model that is simple, predictable, flexible, and comprehensive in comparison to its competitors. This approach allows for a clear understanding of costs and value for potential customers.
And while Glean's DHM strategy may not be as flashy as Spotify's, they are still able to effectively meet the needs of its target market and create a sense of customer love. This is ultimately what is important to customers.
Lessons from Glean: Strategies for Building Customer Love in the B2B Space.
Glean's success as a B2B product highlights several key takeaways for companies looking to build products that customers will love:
Simple solutions, when implemented correctly, can be highly effective in meeting customer needs. Glean's straightforward and user-centred design allows users to easily find the information they need.
Personalization can greatly enhance the user experience. Glean's ability to learn from user interactions and suggest personalised content makes it feel like the product knows and understands the user.
Utilizing data in fun and creative ways can create delightful experiences for customers. Glean's small but thoughtful touches, such as wishing users a happy work anniversary, adds an element of delight and personalisation to the product.
B2B products can also foster customer love and engagement. While B2B products may not be as flashy or exciting as B2C products, they can still be designed with user-centred and delightful elements to build a strong and profitable business.
Understanding Customer Love: The Importance of User Research.
Customer Love Fundamentals.
Delight is not love: A crucial aspect of customer love is consistency. It is common to mistake delight for love. For instance, when a customer discovers your product or reaches their "aha" moment and shares it on social media, that is delight, not love. Delight may indicate the presence of love, but it should not be equated with love.
Just because a brand is delightful doesn’t mean that its product is: A brand can be delightful, but the product may not be. An example of this is Salesforce. Despite having a fun and engaging brand, the product itself was clunky and confusing, based on my personal experience with it in 2019.
Love is consistent: To understand customer love, there must be consistency in the relationship. Like a romantic relationship, love is not a one-off event. You do not just love someone when they do things that delight you; you love them even on days when they do not. Love is not a one-off thing; it requires a history of consistent interactions.
Love takes time: Building customer love takes time. A customer's "aha" moment is the realization of the value they receive from your product, not a realization of love. It takes continuous use of your product and consistent interaction with your brand for a customer to build love for a product. There is no single action you can take that will make customers love you; it is a gradual process that requires time and consistent effort.
Love does not require perfection: Achieving customer love does not require a perfect product. Like humans, no product is perfect, and there will always be room for improvement. Achieving customer love means consistently delivering value to customers, providing positive sentiments from their interactions with your product over time, delighting them, and being loyal to them, leading to their growing loyalty to your brand.
The Customer Love Survey: A Methodology for Understanding Customer Sentiment.
The best way to learn about customer love is to observe what customers say and do. One effective method for gaining this understanding is through user research. By conducting user research, you can gain insight into what your customers need and care about. Surveys and jobs-to-be-done interviews are two research methodologies that can be employed to understand and measure customer love.
This post will focus on using surveys to understand customer love.
As defined by Caroline Jarett, a survey is a process of asking questions to a sample of a defined group of people to gather data that can be used to make decisions. This definition highlights three important aspects of a survey:
The target population must be clearly defined.
The responses must be quantifiable.
The results must be actionable and drive decisions, even if that decision is to conduct further research.
Creating a good survey is an art that requires time, effort, and mastery. The complexity of human behaviour makes it challenging to construct a survey that is easy to understand and answer. Additionally, surveys are prone to errors due to the lack of an opportunity to clarify questions with participants.
Furthermore, survey questions must be optimised for responses as the longer the survey, the higher the drop-off rate and the fewer the responses. It is essential to think deeply about how to optimise for all these factors to understand customer love.
The good news is that I recently created and tested the first iteration of a survey that addresses all of these requirements. So, let’s get to it.
Last year I spent time trying to figure out how we could learn more about customer sentiments in a light-touch way, which led to the creation of this customer love survey.
The goal of this survey is to take a pulse check on customer sentiment, loyalty, delight, and satisfaction. I decided to merge delight and sentiment, as I was unable to find a satisfactory proxy for delight.
The focus was on creating a light-touch survey to optimize for ease and the number of responses. Breaking the now three elements of customer love down, I began to explore what one question we could ask to learn about them.
Loyalty:
The most popular measure for customer loyalty is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), but it is often considered a vanity metric for several reasons.
The first being that the science behind the NPS formula is questionable, and the second is that it focuses on likelihood of action and not actual action. For example, someone may say they are likely to order a salad for their next meal, but it does not necessarily mean they will do so.
Therefore, to measure loyalty, I decided to modify the NPS question and optimise it for actual action rather than the likelihood of action, time-box the question, focus on recency and replace the numeric scale with a simple yes or no.
The question asked was: "Have you recommended *insert product name* to anyone in the last 6 months?" with the options of "Yes" or "No."
Satisfaction:
For the satisfaction element, the initial plan was to use the typical Customer Satisfaction [CSAT] question, but upon further research, I found a better way. Satisfaction is all about the comparisons people make.
A study of bronze and silver medal winners found that, on average, athletes who won bronze were happier with the result than those who won silver. It appears that the typical silver medalist tends to compare their result to that of the gold medalist, while the typical bronze medalist is content with simply winning any award. Both are forms of comparison based on "what might have been."
So when making comparisons about experiences, it is essential to determine what the experience is being compared to, as it can greatly impact the outcome.
In attempting to measure satisfaction, we need to consider:
What comparisons are we thinking about?
What comparisons will be meaningful to the defined group of people we plan to ask?
What decisions do we plan to make, and what comparisons will help those decisions?
With this newfound knowledge, I decided to focus on comparing the customer's experience with their needs. By asking what product they would be using if our product was not available, we were able to bucket their use case and understand how satisfied they were with our product for their use case.
The question asked was: "If you were not using *insert product name*, what would you be using instead?" with options of 5 competitor products or categories, and followed by asking "How satisfied are you with *insert product name*’s ability to meet your needs compared to alternatives?" with options of "Very Satisfied", "Satisfied", "Indifferent", "Dissatisfied", "Very Dissatisfied"
Sentiments & Delight:
Finding a proxy for delight proved challenging, and so we decided to merge it with sentiments because delight is a sentiment. To measure user sentiment and delight, the question asked was: "What word or phrase would describe your feelings about *insert product name* while using the product?" with a closed set of adjectives.
In an ideal world, we would have loved for users to give us an adjective from their dictionary, but for analysis sake, we decided to provide them with a list of adjectives. In deciding what adjectives to use, we referred to our product’s value proposition. We picked adjectives from our value proposition and included the opposite of those adjectives in the options. For example, if "valuable" was included in our value proposition, we included "valuable" and "not-valuable" in the options.
We also decided to focus on their feelings "while using our product" because we wanted to separate brand sentiments from product sentiments as much as possible. This allows us to understand how users feel about our product specifically, rather than any preconceived notions they may have about our brand.
Presenting the entire survey.
So the entire survey looked like this:
[Loyalty] Have you recommended *insert product name* to anyone in the last 6 months?YesNo
[Satisfaction] If you were not using *insert product name*, what would you be using instead?5 competitors or competing categories
[Satisfaction] How satisfied are you with *insert product name*s ability to meet your needs compared to alternatives?Very SatisfiedSatisfiedIndifferentDissatisfiedVery Dissatisfied
[Sentiments] What word or phrase would describe your feelings about *insert product name* while using the product? [select all that apply]*give 6 adjectives*IndifferentNone of the aboveOther [please specify]
[Catchall Question] Is there anything else you would like to share with us?
This survey is not perfect, as it is the first iteration. However, I was satisfied with the results, as we had good response rates and valuable responses. People were honest with their feedback, which allowed us to get a pulse check of our overall product. As I improve this methodology, I will update and edit this document.
As I continue to explore the concept of customer love, I have several questions on my mind. One question is whether it is possible to create a numeric measure for customer love. Another question is how to leverage delight signals, such as organic social media reviews, in understanding customer love.
Additionally, I am curious about whether we can use our understanding of customer love to estimate the health of our customers and if there is value in tracking survey responses over time to compare responses. I will continue exploring these questions further this year and share updates as I progress.
Concluding Thoughts: The Future of Customer Love Research.
Based on the information shared, it's clear that customer love is an important concept for businesses to focus on. It's no longer enough to simply create value for customers. They want more than that; they want to be delighted, have a genuine connection and feel like the business cares about them.
In this post, we've discussed examples of companies like Spotify, Netflix and Glean that have been successful in creating a product that customers love and how they have achieved this success. We've also discussed the importance of understanding customer love and the limitations of commonly used methodologies such as NPS and CSAT.
The customer love survey that I created is a useful tool to take a pulse check of customer sentiment, loyalty, delight and satisfaction. However, it's important to remember that it's just the first iteration, and there is still much to explore and understand about customer love.
It's also important to note that creating an emotional connection with customers takes time and consistent effort; it's not something that can be achieved overnight. It's like any other relationship; it takes time to build love and loyalty.
As I continue to explore the concept of customer love, I have several questions in mind. Can we create a numeric measure for customer love? How can we leverage delight signals such as organic social media reviews in understanding customer love? Can we use our understanding of customer love to estimate customer health? I believe there is a lot of potential in this field, and I will continue exploring and experimenting with new methods to understand and improve customer love.
In conclusion, the journey to understand customer love is ongoing, and there will always be questions to be answered. But with the right tools, the right mindset and by focusing on creating value, delight and a genuine connection, businesses can create products that customers love. And businesses that excel in creating an emotional connection with their customers will be the ones that stand out and succeed in today's highly competitive market.
References.
Jarrett, C. (2019). Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys. Rosenfeld Media.
Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful and What UX Professionals Can Do About It. (2022, December 15). https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it/