It begins with the customer

We belong to the Luxury Marketing Council, a consortium of luxury brands organized by the peripatetic Greg Furman, and Tuesday evening I found myself in the Wedgewood Room at The Pierre, a locale close to my heart (our big gala at the end of this month will be there).  The topic was customer service, and the kick off came from Kristen Hamerling at The Harrison Group with some shocking statistics: their research of the top 10% economic demographic shows that high end consumers trust the internet more than sales persons, and that they trust user feedback on the internet more than expert feedback.  For those of us trying to educate and motivate our audiences the bar is getting higher and higher.  These trends apply to retail, financial services, and all other spending areas.

The Harrison Group’s profiles of high-end consumers are an invaluable source of insight, as we learned last fall during our Innovators Forum.  Check out especially Harrison Group Jim Taylor’s amazing profile of the upper income theatre goer here

https://vimeo.com/user8875928/review/31864071/ee461f9405

Coming back to the Pierre, these bombshells from Harrison were followed by several leaders in customer service from banking, retail, business to business and the nonprofit sector, who outlined strategies to circumvent these trends:

1)  Focus on saving time and building trust.

2)  Build customer confidence  by educating them about your offering

3)  Never “profile” a customer by their dress, accent, or behavior.  Most high end individuals were born in the working and middle class (only 3% inherited their wealth), and they know when they are being scorned or patronized.

4)  Treat your front line employees as your best source of information about your customers.  The days of the “mushroom” approach–keep them low, keep them in the dark–are over.  Train, staff, and communicate as well as possible. This is a highly risky area to try to cut costs.  Conversely, senior management must make every effort to stay in touch with the “sales floor”, wherever it is: phone room, front of house, parking lot.

The internet as an information and filtering tool is still in its infancy, but look what it has done to publishing, electronics, travel, and entertainment.  Adapting to all this is a battle, but it’s only a battle.  The war is the overall customer experience, and we must not lose sight of the old-fashioned standards, too.

What have been your wins and losses in customer service?  Are you audiences viewing you more favorably than before?  If so, do you know why?

Every Challenge is an Opportunity

I have had discussions with senior executives at two financial services firms recently and a common thread emerged: they have sustained and in some cases grown their support for arts & culture over the past three very difficult years; they are facing unprecedented public pushback over entrenched problems and past mistakes; they can’t figure out how to tell the story of their philanthropy to the angry public and government officials.

This is a very sticky wicket for all of us. Carrie Perloff’s eloquent Huffington Post story, below, raises so many relevant points.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-perloff/arts-bank-funding_b_1194141.html

But we should connect the dots. No, we do not want to impair our own integrity and public service role by seeming to be shills for major contributors. But are we looking for appropriate, targeted opportunities to sustain our relationship with these long term, committed supporters by letting the story of our relationship be told?

I remember a public utility once relating how a local community center had generously offered them use of their facilities during a black out so that the utility had a place to help its customers deal with the outage. That was one grantee the utility remembers well every time renewals come around.  Not only did the nonprofit help a key supporter, but like our theatres, together these two organizations helped their community.

No one at the financial services firms I spoke to tacitly asked for us to help. Rather, like a good friend, they were sharing a frustration they were trying to solve themselves.

This is our opportunity: to be grown ups, to retain our integrity, and also to build these critical relationships even further so that together we can serve our communities better. No one is served if we are clumsy or unskillful in doing this, but the right time, the right story, and our staunchest, most committed supporters will be helped to survive, and their teams will understand why we are partners worthy of their loyalty.

Isn’t that the best thing we can do for our community?