The value of a company lies in its users, but our goal is not to maximize user satisfaction

• The customer is God;
• 0 negative reviews is the greatest encouragement;
• Everything is user-oriented;
• The only KPI is customer satisfaction;
• Customer-oriented.

These slogans, corporate culture, or the highest KPI settings of the marketing or product departments have made me see that quite a few companies or independently operated departments put user satisfaction at the highest level of company management and department operations, which surprised me.

As a business philosophy, marketing and product design tell us that it is common sense to look at things from the user's perspective. But this does not mean that maximizing user satisfaction is the goal of a company or an independently operated department. Your goal should be maximizing profits. Whether it is the marketing level or the product design level, we look at problems from the user's perspective not because we love users, but because we want to better grasp users. This is like a fisherman who puts himself in the user's shoes in order to catch fish.

Why do users continue to pay even though they are dissatisfied?

Some time ago, the first batch of Michelin restaurants in mainland China landed in Shanghai, which was quite popular. It reminded me of an experience I had in a Western restaurant:

I once had dinner with a friend who works in an investment bank. He mysteriously took me to a Western restaurant and told me that the food there was first-rate and inexpensive, but the environment was very poor. He asked me if I wanted to try it. Curiosity drove me to embark on a unique Western food journey.

As soon as I entered, the whole restaurant was as lively as a street stall. The waiter sat next to me and helped me take my order and collected my money first. Then, he threw the knives, forks, soup spoons, etc. on the table and asked me to put them there myself. Looking around, I saw that the customers seemed to have gotten used to this and had no complaints at all. But when the dish came, I understood the reason. Even though the soup plate was already scarred all over, I didn't care because the taste was indeed extraordinary. What’s more important is that the prices are so cheap that you can’t believe it. You even wonder if you’ve returned to the cafeteria on a university campus.

Although I was extremely dissatisfied with their service, I still became their loyal customer. After that, I often brought my friends who often went to high-end restaurants to eat in this restaurant, and they all became loyal users here.

Why? Don't rush to conclusions, look again:

iPhone 7 was released, removing the headphone jack and replacing it with wireless headphones. Later, various negative factors emerged, such as the iPhone 7's bright black color that only lasted for 3 seconds, constant electrical noise, and no signal even when airplane mode was turned off.

The Chinese news also reported accordingly, with various news such as user dissatisfaction, poor sales, and stock price setbacks. However, I learned from several major e-commerce platforms and Apple fans around me that these dissatisfactions have not reduced their willingness to buy the products. They may delay, but they have no intention of changing their purchasing plans.

There was a pro-XX debate in the marketing community before, which asked: "Does marketing mean loving customers or fighting competitors?" In other words, is it love or war? Both sides expressed their opinions and argued enthusiastically. Some said they wanted love, some said they wanted war, and some said they wanted a win-win situation. I was also amused. How many companies actually have mixed feelings about their users, competitors, suppliers, and distributors ? Among these characters, which one doesn’t want to pay the least and get the most? We are all playing this game .

Nowadays, too many marketers and product people have read various high-level soft articles released by large companies and high-level " dry goods " released by training institutions, which are full of nonsense such as user experience, customer first, and guaranteeing user satisfaction. Just don’t think about it yourself: What is the essence of the company’s existence?

The two examples above, combined with the concept of “maximizing customer satisfaction”, are somewhat ironic. The managers of the restaurant in the former case probably don’t understand what “customer satisfaction” means at all. They just follow the method they have used for years and take the route of “low price and good quality”, but they inadvertently attract and retain a large number of customers, including many people like me who are very picky about service. However, we are willing to endure the poor service there just to enjoy the delicious food.

Why? Western restaurants have grasped the most basic needs of customers who come here: seeking cheap and good food. If there is good service, that's icing on the cake; if not, that's also acceptable. On the contrary, if you are in a restaurant with very attentive service and elegant environment, but high-priced dishes, even if you are satisfied with their service, I believe the chances of you coming back are slim, because they have ignored the most basic needs of your visit here.

Learn to see reality

Discovering users’ real needs and maximizing their satisfaction is not the goal of marketing.

It's simple, because what users really need is: "What they need is free and better products."

If one day your user is really satisfied and tells you that he will never go to your competitor even if your price doubles, what would you do if you were the marketing or operations manager? Since users are so satisfied, you should raise prices or charge a fee, right?

In fact, we only need to make users satisfied enough and ensure that they do not look for competitors' products; on this basis, every increase in satisfaction should be accompanied by an increase in charging prices, which means that our profits should increase.

What’s more interesting and true is that if you succeed in making your users completely dependent on you and have nowhere else to go, then you don’t have to worry about customer satisfaction at all. It may even happen that customer satisfaction works against you.

For example, Microsoft, as a monopolist in the PC era, its biggest competitor in the future business will be its current business. So if Microsoft continues to maximize current user satisfaction, it will lose opportunities for future upgrade business. This is also why the functions of Word are becoming more and more complete, but commonly used functions such as split screen are no longer found. I don’t know which product manager made this decision. If this feature comes back a few years later, I guess we can still say it’s an innovation.

So, remember: the better your marketing, the less important customer satisfaction is.

What is the value of the company?

Whether from the perspective of marketing, products, or operations, once you start from the business philosophy, it is not difficult to find that the value of a company's assets in the Internet era depends on the users it has. Without users, the company's book value is at most a fictitious historical product. This is why it is necessary to manage the company and make marketing product decisions from the user's perspective, because this is the only thing that matters. In marketing and product operations , we all know that common sense is that only with good users can there be a good outcome.

As most companies begin to focus on "customer satisfaction", this has become a basic condition, but most companies have a one-sided understanding of this basic condition. Or they regard "customer satisfaction" as simply "customer service satisfaction", believing that improving service levels and product user experience can attract users and increase revenue. When APPs were popular in the past two years, all kinds of products claiming to be driven by "user experience" have disappeared now. This is the end result of a “good” UX product that doesn’t generate revenue for the company. Because you ignored the users' expectations for the APP, your costs are higher than those of your competitors, but you are passively beaten in the market.

Just like the concept of " user operation ", the only criterion for measuring whether these ideas are truly marketable is whether they can bring greater benefits to the company and increase revenue. The same is true for "customer satisfaction". What is the purpose of talking about "customer satisfaction"? Putting aside all the tender and affectionate words, the fundamental purpose is to help companies increase their revenue: making money. I have no doubt about this ability, it's just a matter of method.

A basic truth that many senior user operations executives understand is: Does every one of your users need your care? The answer now is definitely no, because the company's resources are limited and each user's contribution to the company is different, so we need to use a differentiated approach (treating each type of user differently) to implement the user-centric concept in user operations. Similarly, before talking about "customer satisfaction", we should first understand the purpose of our customers coming to us and what they want to get from me? What are their fundamental needs? Only by using our services and products to meet their needs to the greatest extent possible can we have the opportunity to achieve "customer satisfaction" which is related to increasing corporate revenue.

SAIC- GMAC 's loan interest rates are 1.1 to 1.5 percentage points higher than banks. General Manager Wei Deming said:

We believe that these rates truly reflect the value of our services. Our goal is to bring world-class service to China, and we do not expect to achieve this goal through low prices.

why is that? Because charging is the only way to create good products

There is no good product at a cheap price. This is the most classic summary of the cost-effectiveness of goods. Free service is actually a disguised price reduction. But this is not the most critical reason. The more fatal impact is that if there is no charge for services, there will be no pressure to force the company to make its commitments clear, and it will never care about what the customers need most - I just do what I think of.

I sell whatever clothes are available in my store - this is bound to remain at the lowest level of marketing.

A senior product director in my group bought a mobile phone and had it repaired four times in half a year. Each time, the repair center was very friendly, sending someone to pick up the product and providing a replacement phone during the repair period. But he vowed never to use this brand of mobile phone again. The company invested a lot of resources in service, trying to use service to make up for the shortcomings of its products, but they failed. The company's performance that year proved that this customer was by no means the only one to flee.

When developing a company's marketing system, we must realize that service and products are not in a mutually value-enhancing relationship, but are two equally important aspects of creating value for customers. The two are not complementary but parallel. The value of a product must be solved by the product itself, and the value of a service must be solved by the service itself.

Positioning services as making up for the shortcomings of products is a very terrible idea. I have come into contact with many companies that, while realizing that users are dissatisfied, raise the banner of service, but ignore the fact that products are the center of the strategy and that services and products are the underlying foundation in the top-level design of the marketing system.

I love you, only you

The theme of this sharing actually includes two viewpoints:

1. Businesses need user satisfaction;
2. Enterprises need users with commercial value

Based on these two viewpoints, two marketing practices were produced at the same time:

1. Look at things from the customer’s perspective;
2. Only by charging can we accurately judge the value.

Looking at the problem from the user's perspective, it is normal to not be able to do it.

Sometimes I often joke about some companies in the group and say: Your company culture is that you talk one thing and do another, and live your life as usual. This is just like banks which open after we start work and close before we get off work.

Many company executives actually have no real consumption experience with their company's products (note that this is real). The higher your position, the less likely you are to encounter actual issues that consumers encounter: delayed receipt of goods after payment; slow response from customer service, the telephone system is excruciating, and various after-sales processes are complicated. This means that the higher your position, the less you need to buy your own company's products, and the less you need to pay for usage fees out of your own pocket.

Jay Abraham has a point in "Advantage Strategy Marketing":

If you and your customers live in two completely different worlds, it will be difficult to see what they see.

So, you will find that the industries that apply this idea best are micro-business and sales meetings. There is a famous saying: empathize and feel the pain of your customers.

I have been fortunate enough to have participated in both the micro-business and conference marketing industries, and have worked as a consultant for some good companies in these two industries. So I experienced firsthand what a real business needs for customer satisfaction, and this is what we did at the beginning:

1. See the reality clearly, strip your own products naked in front of your core employees, point out the mistakes bit by bit and correct them.
2. Find the users who have been determined to have left by operations in the CRM system, find ways to contact them, and have senior management take front-line employees to talk to the users.
3. When building a sales team, you can establish a red scarf system (a name for sales). Red scarf sales account for 20%-30% of your overall sales, and these sales come from your users.
4. Community management brings us closer to users while forming our own system, allowing users to manage users.
5. Be your own company’s client.
6. Become a customer of a competing company.

Note: Points 5 and 6 have a lot of implications about competitive product experience, but in the end you want to be a customer, not a competitive product analyst in your company's operations position.

Users with commercial value = users have monetizable capabilities

The reason why current Internet companies are occupying a large number of entrances and accumulating users. This is because the company's operators are well aware that a large part of the company's final valuation or output value comes from our users. But here we need to add a prerequisite that the company needs users with commercial value.

Whether it is the design of a business model for a startup company or the establishment of a marketing system for a mature company, the essence is to find the right market segment and use all the company's resources to meet the customer needs of this segment. Successfully executing a service strategy requires the same.

Therefore, to judge the value of users, we can try to do it from four levels: understanding users, letting users understand us, timely understanding where improvements are needed, and timely improving ourselves. Each step is an important link in the operation system. The final market result should be: if the service is not charged, there will be no added value, and if the service has no added value, it will be meaningless.

Conclusion

With the same Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Disney theme parks remain popular around the world, while Disney chain retail stores perform mediocrely. Why is this? Since Disneyland charges high ticket prices, it has to create unique and rich experience projects. In Disneyland, every employee is called an "actor", Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are performance props, and the employees' job is to use these props to "create joy".

Retail stores don’t charge admission, so they don’t bother designing valuable services. Mickey Mouse is still Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck is still Donald Duck, the service has not brought added value, and Disney retail stores have always been a mediocre competitor.

As an enterprise, satisfying users is the result, and enabling the enterprise to have valuable users is the goal.

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This article was compiled and published by @木良由 (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!