By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon
One of the things that separates people from most machines and systems is their ability to adapt their interactions as the relationship matures.
A tough-as-nails 61 year old grandfather who supervises workers on an oil rig in North Dakota’s Bakken adapts his communication to the recipient when training a new guy to stay alive on the rig, and does so again when chatting with his three year old granddaughter about her Hello Kitty outfit via a Skype video call.
He doesn’t coo at a young buck and he doesn’t growl at his granddaughter. He adapts. It’s common sense.
Our systems, processes and communications don’t do enough of this.
Adapt to the relationship state
Why do our companies, software, processes, communications and systems so infrequently adapt to the state of our customer relationships?
An example I’ve used a number of times: You get mail from a company offering you a great deal “for new subscribers only” – despite being a subscriber for decades. It’s annoying, not so much because someone else gets a better price for a short time, but (to me at least) because they don’t appear to care enough about their existing customers to remove them from a lead generation mailing.
It’s a trivial exercise to check a list of recipients for a new marketing piece against a current subscriber / client list. Why don’t “we” do it?
For mailed items, it would reduce postage and printing costs. It would cut down on the annoyance factor in clients who inappropriately get special lead generation offers – regardless of the media used.
Adapting your marketing (for example) to the state of the relationship you have with the recipient is marketing 101. It’s a no-lose investment.
Adapt to the maturity state
Like the grandfather, most of us alter our face-to-face speaking to the state of the relationship and maturity of the other person.
Sometimes we don’t, but that’s usually because we haven’t had the opportunity to determine the maturity of the other person in the conversation.
Maturity? What?
I’m speaking of the maturity of the customer relationship as well as where the client is with your products and services. There’s far more to this than simply adapting to a client’s intellectual and age-related maturity.
Remember that “tip of the day” feature that was popular in software not so many years ago? The half life of that feature was incredibly small and the value it delivered was tiny when compared to its potential.
Why? Because few software development companies took the feature seriously once it had been coded and tested.
How can I say that? Easy. Did you turn that feature off once you realize the tips were of little value after an hour’s use of that software? Did you turn it off earlier than that because the tips were of no use at all?
My guess is that one or both of those are true. The tips weren’t there for users throughout their lifetime of use with the software. In fact, most of them weren’t very useful beyond the first hour of use. Every time we move the software to a new machine, it’s likely we have to turn it off again. ROI for that feature? Not so high.
The content of these tips was everything (in fact, the only thing) to the user of that software, yet the content in most tip-of-the-day systems appeared to be rushed out as an afterthought.
What does a software’s tip of the day feature have to do with your business? Everything.
Take your time, implement well.
That the tips rarely were of use to new users beyond the first hour or so of use shows a lack of investment in their content.
Imagine if these tips were sensitive to the maturity of the user’s knowledge and use of the software.
Some cars do this. They automatically adjust the seat and mirror locations when Jerome unlocks the car and use different seat/mirror positions when Carmen unlocks it. Adaptation.
What if your systems, products, services, marketing, processes and other client interactions recognized and adapted like this?
Adaptive interaction isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. It can mature over time, as other things do. Take your time, do it right. You tend to get only one chance to break a relationship with a client, but you can strengthen it with every interaction.
Adaptive behavior is all about making your business personal.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.
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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him atmriffey@flatheadbeacon.com. Check out the Flathead Beacon archive of all of Mark’s blogs.