The Personal Touch: a different perspective on customer relationships
Fallen into obsessive love with your Blackberry or IPhone? Feel an emotional dependency on your daily Starbucks? Does doing the weekly supermarket shop feel like catching up with an old friend? We all have products we feel a particular affinity with, or shopping experiences where we connect on a deeper emotional level than a mere functional transaction. So how far can the metaphor of personal relationships be applied to interactions between individuals and companies, and what does this tell us about how we can safeguard the company reputation and communicate better with our customers?
As in our personal relationships, we want and expect different things from our relationships with different organisations. Our research shows that customer relationships tend to be "closer" in categories that foster higher levels of involvement (i.e. things that the customer cares about). Very few customers say that their energy company "feels like a friend", for example. Having said that, there is scope for greater bonding in almost any relationship; Virgin, for example, has injected "personality" into lower involvement categories including transport and financial services. The following purely hypothetical analysis suggests some other possible relationships.
What your friendships say about you
At this level of high involvement, our relationships with product and service providers can help shape or reinforce our identity - both our self-identity (how we see ourselves) and our social identity (how we feel others see us). This has particular relevance for aspirational and premium products and services (the car we choose to drive, the designer labels we display, the premium food retailer we frequent).
A different type of aspiration which is growing among consumers is the desire to live a more environmentally-friendly life, and here an increasing number of companies are trying to help their customers to be greener, partly in an effort to get closer to them. Our research shows that, beyond recycling, the public struggles to translate concerns about the environment into concrete action, and there is a clear sense that consumers expect retailers and other companies to help them make more sustainable purchases. This is a complex area, and the right choices are not always obvious - so some customers want trusted retailers to make sustainable choices for them, acting perhaps as a trusted and expert guide. A shared commitment to helping the environment, or shared social values, are ways to give added meaning to the relationship between customers and service providers, with some companies using cause marketing to show their customers that both parties care about the same things, and can act together to make a difference.
Can we still be friends?
Even the strongest personal relationships can experience rough patches - what happens when things go wrong in customer relationships? When problems happen, the strength of the relationship beforehand and how the situation is subsequently managed will strongly influence whether or not the relationship can survive, and in some cases, perhaps even strengthen and flourish. This clearly relates to complaints about customer service, and it can also apply to a company's reputational crises.
Just as we can be let down by a friend behaving in ways we disapprove of, we can also be reluctant to be seen to associate with companies who are environmentally disreputable or socially irresponsible. Through our relationship with these companies, we can feel implicated in their misconduct by association, and it can test our ‘friendship'. Customers can react in several ways to claims that a company they feel close to has been behaving irresponsibly - they could dismiss the claims and defend the company's reputation, intervene to help change the behaviour that is letting down the relationship, or they could simply disassociate themselves from the company, as though extricating themselves from a relationship they now see as inappropriate or undesirable.
The reaction might depend in part on the closeness of the previous relationship, the type of misconduct uncovered and the credibility of the claims and counter-claims. Customer reaction will also depend on the company's handling of the crisis. Here the transparency and speed of response are vital, just as we might be more likely to forgive a friend giving a ready and open explanation for their misconduct - and an apology!
Talking among friends
Many writers and academics have argued that trust is central to customer relationships. Clearly, honesty and transparency are a key element of this - much as we would expect from our personal relationships. One of the key consumer trends over the past 20 years is the growing emphasis on honesty/integrity, which has now overtaken quality of products as one of the most important factors used to judge a company's reputation. As product quality has become a given, consumers have come to demand more transparency from companies, and this is backed up by growing scrutiny of company behaviour from NGOs and campaigners. The internet has transformed the balance of power between companies and their customers, and has helped change what we expect from companies. It has also enabled consumers to collaborate in new ways, thus allowing the upset of a few to become the revolt of the many.
Of course, this communications environment is a challenging one for companies. There is a lack of trust in more formal communication from companies such as statements from CEOs (just 18% of people in Britain say they trust the CEOs of large companies to tell the truth). At the same time, we are becoming more likely to credit messages from ordinary employees, our friends and family, and ‘people like us' more generally. As this peer-to-peer communication becomes more influential, it underlines the importance of credible, impartial advice on companies from our informal social networks. It is also driving companies to utilise more informal communication channels such as blogs and viral marketing - relinquishing some control over the message in order to enhance the credibility of the communication.
And it is not just about the communication channel - as customer relationships become more personalised, we expect this to be reflected in the tone of voice companies adopt in their marketing and other communications. Companies need to use more informal and personal language, and talk to consumers as if they are on an equal footing - an adult-to-adult conversation between friends, rather than the impersonal corporate-speak of a big, faceless institution. Just look at an Innocent Smoothie bottle for a great example of down-to-earth, fun, personalised messages. It's almost as if Innocent is trying to make a connection as a new friend would - inviting us to drop by or call for a chat if we're bored - whatever next!
For further information, please contact: jenny.dawkins@ipsos-mori.com
This article is based on ideas from a longer paper by Alex Bollen and Claire Emes, Understanding Customer Relationships: How important is the personal touch? available to download here.