Our Methodology:

Our SMART CUSTOMERS STUPID COMPANIES methodology allows us to help companies identify specific pain points that customers are experiencing, as well as the best opportunities to add smart touchpoints that will enable a “sense and respond” business strategy.

Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff consult to both leading companies and aggressive startups, helping them develop customer experience strategies that establish defendable competitive advantages.

We accomplish this through a mixture of three types of services:

Assessment: Management and customers often have vastly different views of the customer experience. A Bain & Company research study showed that while 80% of managers thought their firm was providing a superior customer experience, only 8% of those firms' customers agreed. We go directly to customers, to gather their perceptions of your firm's customer experience performance.
Workshops: We personally lead workshops that bring together key members of your team to re-think the way your firm serves its customers. This process typically reveals new opportunities for revenue growth, and it often highlights a number of “quick wins” that you can implement immediately.
Strategic Consulting: Both Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff consult directly with executive teams to help them avoid – or close – the growing chasm between customer expectations and company performance.

We offer dynamic companies a set of powerful tools to help grow their market share and delight their customers.

Connect with MICHAEL:

Call: 1-415-526-2651
Email: michael@smartcustomers.com
Web: mcorpconsulting.com
www.linkedin.com/in/mhinshaw
www.twitter.com/michaelhinshaw

Connect with BRUCE:

Call: 1-203-341-9448
Email: bruce@smartcustomers.com
Web: nowpossible.com
www.linkedin.com/in/kasanoff
www.twitter.com/nowpossible

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How smart are your customers? If your company is like most, they’re likely smarter than you realize. How smart, you ask?

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It is not a sustainable strategy to act dumber than the customers you wish to serve.

At the same time, everything and everyone has become or is becoming interconnected. Customers have smartphones loaded with apps that let them check prices, compare service agreements, read reviews, and check in with friends (and strangers) even as they examine your offers and products, and those of your competitors.

Consumers and businesses alike research, connect, and purchase online and over their phones without a second thought.

With these tools come radically higher customer expectations. Higher expectations of experience. Greater demands for personalization and customization. Lower tolerance for mistakes, for running through inane hoops, or for interactions that require mindless repetition (“... What is your account number ...?”).

In short, the world has changed dramatically, but many companies have not. Forget about innovation, they’re not even sure how to keep up. This is the challenge that your company needs to confront.

Companies that can’t pass basic tests of memory, flexibility, responsiveness, and innovation will die.

Among the many disruptive forces that are making it impossible for firms to survive with outdated strategies, four in particular are changing the basic ground rules for business competition and are the focus of this book: Social Influence; Pervasive Memory; Digital Sensors and The Physical Web.

Together, these forces will bring customers more choices, better information, and stunning new services. They are already providing individuals with tools more advanced in many cases than the most sophisticated commercial enterprises had just five years ago.

Put another way, they’ll continue to make your customers even smarter.

We’re just at the tip of this revolution.

For reasons that will become crystal clear as you read this book, established firms will need to reinvent themselves and disrupt their own industries to stay alive. With thousands upon thousands of very bright developers and entrepreneurs working around the globe to provide your customers with ever better, ever more disruptive tools, it’s a certainty that innovation will be coming to your industry if it hasn’t already.

Those companies who react slowly or tentatively will be increasingly marginalized, until finally, they’ll wither away. It may take five, ten, or even fifteen years, but eventually, these companies will be smothered by the competition and the growing demands of their ever-smarter customers.

INTRODUCTION

We are not talking about trivial change

ONE: SMART CUSTOMERS

Digital innovation is leaving companies behind

Customers start gaining superhero powers

Companies can’t be competitive if they can’t
stay ahead of their customers

Smart customers expect smart customer experiences

Key Takeaways

TWO: INTELLIGENCE IS EVERYWHERE

Beyond 1to1 to 1toEverything

Identify anything, anywhere, anytime

A framework for infinite opportunity and innovation

Innovators look through the eyes of their customers

What your customers could do with a pair of smart glasses

Technology is magic your customers need to trust

Key Takeaways

THREE: A PERFECT STORM OF
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION

The four disruptive forces

Disruptive force number one: Social Influence

Disruptive force number two: Pervasive Memory

Disruptive force number three: Digital Sensors

Disruptive force number four: the Physical Web

Disruption favors the smart customer

Key Takeaways

FOUR: STUPID COMPANIES

Does your company behave stupidly?

What happens when smart customers meet
a stupid company?

Why CRM hasn't helped

Does this mean the end of loyalty?

Many managers don't care – and aren't paid to

Guess what? Your customers don’t care either

Dumb touchpoints anchor your performance to the past

Key Takeaways

FIVE: GET SMART

A five-step system for acting smart and growing faster

Getting smart: a simple system you can use

Segment your customers by needs and value

Modularize your capabilities to increase your flexibility
and responsiveness

Anticipate your customers' needs

Reward your employees for win/win behaviors

Transform touchpoints (and make them smart)

In summary: It really pays to get – and act – smart

Key Takeaways

SIX: CRITICAL STEPS

“If anyone disrupts this industry, it's going to be us.”

Welcome to simultaneous change

Be smart enough to learn what your customers really need

Start making your company smarter, now

Key Takeaways

AUTHORS

Acknowledgements

Michael Hinshaw

Bruce Kasanoff

INDEX

SOURCES

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Popular Highlights:

“Only the most “intelligent” companies will be able to respond to – and profit from – these radically greater customer expectations.”

“The world has changed dramatically, but many companies have not. Forget about innovation, they’re not even sure how to keep up. This is the challenge your company needs to confront.”

“Established firms will need to reinvent themselves and disrupt their own industries to stay alive.”

“Look out your window. Nearly everything you see – cars, office buildings, people, the weather, birds, restaurants, or billions of other possibilities – can and will be identified and differentiated on your behalf by applications that are already flooding onto the market.”

“Customers can now be incredibly insightful, spotting patterns in data and emerging trends, because they have immense computing power at their fingertips and because they can immerse themselves in this data in dozens of different ways.”

“In a world in which memory is everywhere, it is inevitable that human beings will resist having their lives reduced to a series of data points under the control of – and mismanaged by – others.”

“The profit incentive exists for venture capitalists to fund aggressive startups who see the immense potential of giving customers full control over their data. The majority of established companies don’t use customer data to benefit their customers.”

“New competitors will surface that possess truly customer-focused cultures. These cultures will invent new services that no inward facing, self-absorbed, siloed enterprise could imagine.”

“Anyone 20 or younger has never known a world without the Web. The oldest of this generation are now adults, and they are already potent consumers, buying music, games, clothing, and other items in large numbers.”

“For the next few days, try this: wherever you go, imagine everything being collected to the Web. Imagine that by clicking, touching or perhaps just looking at an object, you could know everything about it.”

“Social Influence means that the opinions and experiences of countless other people comebetween your firm and its customers.”

“Pervasive Memory makes it inevitable that companies will begin to profitably leverage the data generated by the trillions of interactions and transactions made through digital devices.”

“Digital Sensors expand exponentially the scope of actions, events, and behaviors firms can sense…and to which they can respond. ”

“The rise of the Physical Web has begun. Today, we are linking people, devices, places and locations in the real world like we do on the Web.”

“We are confronting a fundamental shift in the ways that companies interact with – and serve – their customers.”

“Smart customers can now tap into sensor networks that used to be available mainly through large, established firms who were often using proprietary systems.”

“We are burying sensors in our gardens, embedding them in our bridges and roads; they are floating on the seas and sometimes in the air. They are being used in warfare and research. Each creates more data, more information, and more opportunities for innovation.”

“Your company can introduce products and services that were not conceivable five years ago. A retail store could recognize and greet customers as they enter the store; not a clerk, mind you – the store itself.”

“Physical Web technologies will solve small but frequent problems like losing your keys in your house, your car in a parking lot, or your kids outside playing.”

“Companies structured in operating silos with performance metrics and reward systems at odds with other departments deliver a customer experience that can be discordant at best, jarring and off-putting at worst.”

“As the Physical Web rises, pretty much everything a company does for its customers will become more interactive, dynamic, and open to scrutiny.”

“It’s stupid to be so obviously oblivious to your customers. They can tell that they’re not seen as individuals, and that their wants and needs are neither addressed nor understood.”

“A typically stupid company is much more likely to send a printed direct mail piece with an offering that’s irrelevant, unwanted, and/or annoying to the 98 percent or more of customers that don’t respond, in hopes of an incremental sale.¹”

“What happens when smart customers interact with stupid companies in a free and open market? Change starts in pockets, coming from the edges of an industry, ultimately becoming a wave that threatens mainstream competitors.”

“CRM has not worked because it does not actually track relationships or experiences; it tracks transactions. It doesn’t take into account the customers’ views of the company, and doesn’t capture what they want or need.”

“Your customers and their expectations of experience are changing. Your touchpoints should be changing, too.”

“Companies will have the ability to leverage “sense and respond” touchpoints to better manage relationships, supply chains, and distribution.”

“Massive disruption is coming, and the only question is whether your firm is going to profit from it or fall victim to it. Disruption is not easy, either to create or to confront.”

SMART CUSTOMERS STUPID COMPANIES

Our Methodology:

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