Steve Gillmor's Attention conversations.) The pitch:
Old scarce resource: Shelf space
New scarce resource: Time and attention
In this context, Hagel gave his "Three A's" of Attention:
- Attract - have customers seek you out
- Assist - how do you assist customers, pre and post purchase?
- Affiliate - mobilize complementary resources to deliver more value
The winners, Hagel argues, are the organizations that have the ability to orchestrate large array of resources.
He also argued the "brand promise" change that is occurring:
- Old brand promise: "We have a great product," or "We are a great vendor"
- New brand promise: "I know you, better than anyone else. You can trust me, and us."
A very interesting insight...customers have an attention deficit as well. In other words, attention cuts both ways. Not only does the vendor desire the customer's attention, but it's critical that the customer can get the vendor's attention as well. (Case in point? Think about the last time you tried to "pound out" of an interactive voicemail system and wanted the attention of a real person...)
I was fortunate enough to facilitate a session as part of the talk, and our group came up with four key insights:
1) We discussed the attention between vendor and customer is not always symmetric. In other words, there are times when a customer is giving a great deal of attention to the vendor ("I have a critical issue and need to fix this right now!") and the vendor is giving little or no human attention to the customer ("Thank you for your call...your call is very important to us...your average wait time is '10' minutes...fade to Girl from Ipanema...").
Based on (4), above, we hit on the big idea of the day. Our group hypothesized that when there is an attention gap between the attention being given by the customer to the vendor vs. the attention being given by the vendor to the customer, the customer gets frustrated and becomes dissatisfied with the relationship.
Does your organization give as much attention to its customers as they give to it?
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Web | Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.
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