I’m always very pleasantly surprised when Andy McCaskey of Slashdot Review send me a shout out in his Podcast. I’ll be going along in the car or in the gym and hear him mention August Jackson, and I’ll be like “August Jackson!?! His name is like my name is named!!”
But the last time Andy gave me a shout this past Friday he was talking about the posting I had made on Customer Input on Product Design. Andy commented that Church of the Customer was on something of the same theme, so I thought I would go take a look.
The team behind Church of the Customer are focused on leveraging your most loyal customers as evangelists for products. Probably the most well-known example of this are all of the Apple fanatics.
As I was reading through the articles on the site I was reminded of an article I had read in the Harvard Business Review some time back. A quick search on the web reveals that the article was actually from the December 2003 issue and was authored by Fredrick Reicheld. The gist of this article was that the best measure of a company’s true traction with customers was not their general satisfaction levels, but rather a customer’s likelihood to recommend the company’s product or services to a friend. The idea behind this was that companies with high percentages of such numbers had achieved a much greater depth of relationship with their customers, such that customers would actually tie their own reputation with friends and relatives to recommend the company.
I think the Church of the Customer and the related concepts are very interesting, and I remember being blown away by the HBR article when I first read it.
Many thanks to Andy for bringing the Church of the Customer to my attention. It speaks to part of what I think companies need to do with customer bloggers as part of their PR and Competitive Intelligence practices. Another key element of the process is to make sure these customers insights are listened to and considered for future product enhancements or revisions to business practices. Id also suggest that companies need to take into consideration what some of their most vocal critics say. Once you get past the vitriol that may be present theres valuable insight to be had there as well about things companies need to do better.
