CHAPTER 2

BRING HOME THE BACON:
THE VALUE OF CUSTOMER TYPES

Beliefs are the essence of a customer type—those things people really love and really hate. When you reach the point where you understand people at this emotional level, you will have discovered where your power lies. You will have discovered how to make your customers feel special and relevant in their relationship to the service and/or product you provide. In turn, they will remember you and give you more business, all the while referring your product or service to their friends.

This concept may seem simple and not particularly profound. You may wonder why I am even stating it, but the truth is the overwhelming majority of organizations talk about customers as if they were a “monolithic demographic” to whom they deliver products and services. The essence of my message in this book is that hypercompetition mandates that we do a far better job of identifying our customer types so that we can invent better and more relevant human experiences that will enable us to keep their support.

Once you identify customer types within your customer base, you will no longer attempt to provide customer service based on something as lame as simply targeting a thirty-year-old, affluent, Hispanic female. It’s an insult to thirty-year-old, affluent, Hispanic females to assume they all have the same likes and dislikes. They might have similarities by virtue of their age or income or ethnicity or gender, but that fact alone is not enough if you want to create exceptional and—most important—relevant customer experiences.

Identifying customer types helps you move from what your customers are to who they are. The best companies in the world understand the loves and hates of their customers. They understand the different customer types and invent a range of exceptional customer experiences across these types. As a result, they’re kicking butt.

When you understand your customers by what they love and hate (their types) and not through their demographic characteristics (such as skin color and wallet size), you begin to provide relevant and memorable human experiences. One of the most common mistakes organizations make when it comes to the customer experience derives from their erroneous belief that delivering what the customer wants is good enough. In the days of the customer service–industrial complex, that was fine. But in today’s connected economy, where customers have more choices, we have to go above and beyond what they expect. The key to customer experience is the difference between providing what the customer expects versus what you deliver. When you go far beyond what they expect, you have given them a memorable customer experience. By doing so, you will achieve unprecedented levels of profit and growth because your customers will be talking about you.

Walk into an Apple store and the first thing the sales representative does is find out what kind of customer you are. Are you the transactional type, who just wants an iPhone cord? Or do you want to fiddle with the latest laptop? Is price your thing, so you are looking for the most gigs for your buck? Once the rep finds out what matters to you, they send you on a relevant journey and deliver what you are looking for.

I recently spoke with a real estate agent who had gone to a car dealer to purchase a new car. In her business, specializing in luxury homes for successful baby boomers, she serves a bold clientele. What she wanted more than anything in her new car was a luxurious back seat, one high enough to make it easy for her clients to get in and out of the car. Instead, the salesperson talked about the engine and suspension. He not only didn’t deliver what she wanted, but he didn’t even hear her. Needless to say, she walked away without buying a car from him.

If you identify customer types and act upon that knowledge, you move from providing exceptional customer service to only a small percentage of your customers to providing exceptional and customer-appropriate service across an entire range of customer types and therefore to a much larger percentage of your customers.

BECOME A CUSTOMER SERVICE STANDOUT:
TWO EASY-TO-APPLY FORMULAS

I’m a simple man, so in writing this book I wanted to create something that was easy to understand and—most important—easy for my readers and clients to execute. Correspondingly, I developed some simple, easy-to-understand formulas, which I will be drilling down on throughout the book. The two key formulas are the Power Shift Insights Formula and the What Customers Crave Innovation Formula. The first formula is designed to help you learn what makes your customers tick so you can fully understand and identify your customer types. The second formula is a four-step process that allows you to invent world-class customer driven innovations, which I call CDIs.

The Power Shift Insights Formula:
H + L = CT

Knowing what a customer Hates (H) and knowing what a customer Loves (L) equals their Customer Type (CT).

That’s it. I told you it was simple.

In my town, we have the most amazing burrito restaurant called Burrito Bandito, which makes the world’s most delicious burritos. They’re so popular that they often have a long line. Even though I love their burritos, I won’t go there because I hate standing in lines. My wife, however, loves the burritos more than she hates standing in line, so she goes there. My wife and I are different customer types: If she loves something, she’ll stand in line, while I’m the opposite.

The What Customers Crave Innovation Formula:
N + O + D + E = CDI

After three years of research, I discovered a four-step process to create customer driven innovations (CDIs) that allows you to deliver the best experiences to your customer types. This simple formula begins with Navigating (N) to where the customer is, then Observing (O) what the customer hates and loves, and then Designing (D) new experiences that will amaze them. Last, you need to Execute (E) aggressively and be able to measure the results. Implementation of this process makes it easy for you to achieve customer experience superstardom. Figure 2-1 depicts the What Customers Crave Innovation Formula.

Figure 2-1. The What Customers Crave Innovation Formula.

THE ROLE OF MARKET SEGMENTATION

In the past, market segmentation has been a sales tool, used to figure out how to sell more stuff. In both the digital and non-digital world, of course, segmentation still has a role to play. If, for example, you are appealing to a Hispanic market, you probably should include information in English and Spanish on your website. If you’re appealing to physicians, you might use a certain vocabulary and set of resources.

What no longer works is using this marketing methodology to try to gain insights into how to design exceptional and relevant human experiences. Understanding your customers doesn’t work that way. Unfortunately, in the past we either saw customers as one market segment—a thirty-something, affluent, Hispanic female—and failed to dissect that segment into customer types to truly understand their different loves and hates, or we attempted to further define them but used an easy-to-characterize statistical driver that didn’t really get to who that customer was.

Sometimes I am asked if there is overlap between segmentation and customer types. My answer is always “Yes and no.” Here’s an example. A client in the funeral business learned that war veterans were a segment of his consumer base. My client had been marketing to this group just as he marketed to any other. He asked me to find out if veterans had unique characteristics and needs that he was missing when marketing to and serving this group.

My team found huge differences in what veterans were looking for compared to other customer types. For example, there were unique ways to celebrate a veteran’s life as well as in what the funeral service should look like, the specific vernacular, and even in the way loss was communicated. So my client created a range of materials that spoke specifically to the veteran customer type.

AVOID A “ONE BUCKET” CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND
MAXIMIZE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

The best way to fail in the hypercompetitive marketplace is to attempt to deliver a one-size-fits-all customer experience. We all serve a market segment, but within our market segment there are customer types who want to engage our products and services differently based on their hates and loves.

Take Southwest Airlines, for example. In order to be profitable in the airline industry (one of the worst and most competitive markets on the planet), you need to be able to deliver services to a large customer market, i.e., people who are flying. However, within this large market are “micro markets” representing a range of customer types.

I fly Southwest regularly as a business traveler, and the airline has designed a customer experience for just my type of passenger. By paying a bit extra for my ticket, I get to be one of the first fifteen passengers on the plane, guaranteeing me a place to stow my carry-on. As a business traveler I cannot afford canceled flights, and Southwest’s predictably on-time schedule addresses my need to show up on time for client meetings and speaking engagements. Where other airlines struggle, Southwest is rarely late.

Southwest knows that to succeed it has to reach a broader market with different needs than mine, so the airline has developed a pricing strategy to make flying affordable for everyone. Southwest is also surgical in choosing which cities it flies to and in its choice of planes to fly, which helps reduce service costs.

The airline also developed a way to accommodate travelers with disabilities. Such travelers don’t have to present a doctor’s note or other proof of disability. Instead, they get to board first just by saying they are disabled. It’s simple, elegant, and painless. Southwest also treats young travelers like royalty. They get wings pinned on them and get to meet the captain. For many kids, it may be the most memorable experience of their young lives, and it distracts those who might be a bit frightened. Southwest knows its customer types and has something unique in its quiver for each.

There’s much more I could say about what Southwest Airlines has done right, but for our purpose, it’s important to understand that the company’s success comes from first identifying its customers by type. Having done that, the company invents relevant and exceptional experiences for each and every customer type. Had Southwest gone after only frequent fliers and other more profitable customers, I doubt it would be leading the airline industry as it does.

The takeaway here is to:

•Look at your micro market.

•Identify the ranges of customer types.

•Invent perfect experiences across all these customer types.

Why the Mainstream Gurus Are Wrong

If you were to talk to the customer experience experts born from the customer service–industrial complex, they would disagree with everything I just said. They would argue that you should identify your most profitable customers and only develop experiences relevant to them. If you’re like me, though, you’ve got to be thinking, “Why would I eliminate any customer who delivers potential profit to my business?” You are also probably asking yourself, “Why don’t I come up with a way to make those so-called ‘nonprofitable customers’ profitable?” If that’s your train of thought, you’re on the right track.

I don’t want my gravestone to say “Here lies Nick, a 100-year-old, affluent, white male.” It’s almost impossible to imagine!

I don’t think any of us wants to be identified that way on our gravestone or anywhere else. It’s not who we really are. If we want to sell our products and services to human beings, and if we want to make emotive, relevant connections as we deliver excellence, then we need to understand people. We need to understand who they are, not just what they are demographically.

Let’s look at a different example. I run every morning with a group of guys. We’re all men in our mid-fifties, affluent, and white. However, one is politically conservative and another is liberal. One is super religious and another is an atheist. We’re all from the same one-dimensional market segment, but we have very different loves and hates. If our customer service experiences were identical—based on gender, age, income, and race—it would work for some of us, but not all; our loves and hates are very different. However, if our experience was based on customer types where our loves and hates were identified, our customer service experiences would be different. Done correctly, incredible and relevant customer experiences can be delivered that appeal to different types across all five touchpoints.

Take running shoes, for example. Based on the same demographics of gender, age, socioeconomic status, and race, my running friends and I should all like the same running shoes, right? Of course not. What’s more important is whether we run or walk, if we have injuries, if we are experienced or new to running, and so on. You can’t use empirical data to determine what we hate and what we love because it’s impossible to create exceptional experiences based on this information. Exceptional means relevant, and that’s different for each of us. Religion, for example, doesn’t matter when it comes to selecting the right shoes. You select shoes based on how you use those shoes. CRM data doesn’t give you that information.

INNOVATION SUCCESS VS. FAILURE:
A SIMPLE STRATEGY

As a management consultant and successful inventor, I’ve been involved in the innovation space for more than a quarter of a century. After wasting millions of dollars developing really bad and irrelevant products for consumers (as I’ve mentioned previously), I finally learned something that was literally life-changing.

“Inventing is EASY . . . Knowing what to invent is really HARD.”

What I learned from researching the best innovators of all time is that they were extremely judicious in choosing what they wanted to invent. Most people invent customer products and technology that are missing something. They make assumptions about a need or problem, and then they invent the item based on those assumptions. What they’re missing are real insights about what the customer hates and loves. Consider that of the thousands of patents issued for new products and technology over time, only 2 percent are successful. The technology might be great but the products are irrelevant to the customer.

Other people created a great product based on their potential clients’ loves, but they didn’t check in with those end users soon enough to prevent disasters. Crayola is a fabulous company. It’s really well run and delivers great products. I can’t say enough good things about Crayola. However, even the best companies don’t always hit home runs. Crayola came up with a way to make colored bubbles. Conceptually, the idea was sound: Kids love blowing bubbles and love colors. Put these two together and you create this great experience for kids, right? It was a disaster. Turns out those colorful bubbles stained everything they landed on—carpets, curtains, tiny faces, you name it. Although they’re still on the market, the social media ratings are terrible. Crayola would have avoided the staining colored bubbles had it tested the product on parents and kids. Crayola is one of the best brands in the world, but when you innovate, mistakes can happen to any of us.

As I’ve said, all great innovations come from understanding what customers love and what they hate. You must experience what your customers experience. The more you know, the more you can create relevant experiences.

So here’s the obvious question: How do you know what to invent? The answer is simple: Identify your range of customers by the things they emotionally love and hate. Crayola knew what kids love; they’re experts. Unfortunately, this time the company delivered a fractional experience by not experiencing what its customers did.

Take a look at the consumer packaged goods industry. Great companies like Procter & Gamble are experts at knowing what consumers love and hate so they can create relevant, inexpensive, and effective products. They created complete industrial categories within the consumer packaged goods sphere to address those loves and hates. They are really good at going from inconvenient to convenient.

Consumers hate cleaning toilets, so the Clorox Company came up with a range of toilet cleaners based on customer types, because not everyone hates cleaning toilets for the same reason. For example, some consumers were interested in a toilet that felt sterile, so P&G devised products with high germ kill rates. Other consumers were more concerned about odor, so a range of products emerged to address that preference. Still others hated physically cleaning the toilet, so no-touch solutions like the Clorox ToiletWand^® were created to insulate them.

The best innovations and best human experiences are created based on exceptionally good consumer insights. As you will discover, when we identify a way to serve one customer type, we typically provide a new benefit for all customers.

VALUE STACKING: THE SECRET WEAPON FOR
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE SUCCESS

When we get very granular about what a range of customer types hates and loves, layering occurs. As we invent better experiences, we stack the value through different customer types—what works for one customer type also works for other customer types—and that’s how we get to perfect human experiences.

If a fast food restaurant creates a great burger but has a long line, it is able to sell burgers only to customers who love burgers and don’t hate long lines. The options are to create a shorter line by hiring more staff or to design a more efficient system for producing a great burger. The best organizations, however, do both. They learn what customers hate and what customers love across a well-defined range of identifiable customer types.

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER TYPES:
CREATE AN IMPACTFUL MESSAGE

I have a full speaking schedule every year. When I get up on stage, I’m not worried about what I’m supposed to be talking about. Instead, I’m thinking about the people in front of me in the seats. It took me a long time to realize that the words themselves don’t matter. The only thing that matters is the people in the seats and how I can make my talk reach them in a way that truly has meaning. Every person in that room—not just some of them—needs to be moved by my message in a way that fulfills them intellectually and emotionally.

I learned this the hard way a few years ago when I gave a talk for physicians and caregivers at a large cancer hospital. In planning it, I assumed the audience wanted to hear a somber story about overcoming cancer. I had no evidence for this; I just assumed it. So I delivered deep, heartfelt content that was as serious as, well, cancer. And it bombed.

The next speaker delivered absolutely no content, but he made the audience laugh. He delivered humor and was rated the event’s top speaker. I, on the other hand, was rated near the bottom.

I hadn’t taken the time to really understand who the audience was and what they wanted from me. They knew all about the horrors of cancer, of course; they lived with it every day! What they wanted was to laugh. Had I made the investment in time and energy to type my audience, I would have been a success because I can make people laugh. This is a mistake I’ve never made again. Today, there is no speaker on the planet who spends more time than I do prior to an event getting to know the customer. I learn who my audience is and what they want from me, and I devote all the energy and time necessary to it because in the end that’s what matters.

The foundation of an exceptional human experience is making sure that what you design is relevant.

If I’m looking for the latest and most powerful smartphone but the salesperson shows me the cheapest and smallest model, that’s not going to be a relevant experience for me. If it’s not, it’s not going to resonate for me.

Relevance is the prerequisite for exceptional.

Apple is excellent at building an exceptional consumer experience journey. The company politely probes to find out what a customer loves or hates, and then invents and communicates a relevant experience for that particular customer type. When an experience is relevant, the exceptional part comes automatically. Relevance is the cornerstone of an exceptional human experience.

YOUR SELLERS ARE ALSO YOUR CUSTOMERS,
AND THEY ARE NOT ALL ALIKE

I discovered an excellent example of the importance of understanding who your customers truly are while working for the luxury automobile manufacturer I mentioned in Chapter 1—the one with 632 touchpoints. While in the discovery process, we unearthed an important layer of customer types.

This is an enormous company with a household name, and with half a million or so employees worldwide. The company executives spend tens of millions of dollars on trendy analytics. However, despite all the data pooling and Excel spreadsheets, they missed a very basic yet tremendously important concept: They hadn’t thought to dissect their dealer types. They weren’t communicating in effective and relevant ways to the individuals who were selling their cars. Instead, there were simply “big dealerships” and “small dealerships.” This was a big mistake.

When we interviewed the individual dealers and began learning what they loved and hated, we found three distinct dealer customer types: the Evangelist, the Pragmatist, and the Pessimist. These three highly relevant types were dispersed pretty evenly between big and small dealerships. It quickly became obvious that the size of the dealership didn’t matter nearly as much as the type.

There may be more than one layer of customer types in a company. In this case, for example, there may be dealers, suppliers, senior managers, middle managers, low-level managers, wholesalers, retailers, and so on.

The Evangelist customer types loved everything about the car brand. They drove it, they wore the logo on their shirts and jackets, they bought their spouse brand trinkets for Christmas, and they let everyone in the neighborhood know what they did for a living and how much they loved it. They were drinking the brand’s Kool-Aid. They embraced whatever the marketing arm pushed out.

The Pragmatists were a different sort altogether. These dealers were businesspeople who saw the car brand as an object on the shelf. The Pragmatists’ reason for working at this company was to transmute the physical car into a profit. That was it. Done. The Pragmatists liked the brand to the extent that it sold well, that the margins were good, and that the company was spending money to help drive sales. Their interest was practical and operational. If the brand made them money, they liked it. If it didn’t make them money, they didn’t like it. They weren’t in any way emotional about it.

The Pessimists were the third and biggest customer type. These individuals saw the car manufacturer as a bully who was always pushing them to sell more cars, to have more prominent logos, to spend more money on local advertising, and to do this and that. The Pessimists thought the company had unrealistically high expectations of them and provided little support to back them up. If customers didn’t come in and spend their money, the Pessimists would leave and join another company.

The one hard and fast rule about customer types is . . . there is NO hard and fast rule.

No one set of customer types fits across all companies. So throughout this book, I’ll show you how to build out new types specific to your product, service, and market.

The downside is that you must roll up your sleeves and go deep. It takes time and energy. Identifying customer types requires strategic listening, contact point innovation, and understanding the Soul of the Customer (all discussed later in this book). Through this process, you learn how to design exceptional and relevant human experiences across the customer journey.

Previously, the company had communicated with and treated each dealer customer type as one. After my team and I explained the different dealer customer types and showed management what each loved and hated, they understood that the company needed three different approaches, not one, to reach each of them. What would work for an Evangelist would fall flat or worse with a Pessimist. Until then, the company had approached its dealers in a one-dimensional way with marketing, company programs, and even financial incentives. The company was wasting tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in spillage using this inaccurate and damaging dealership communication.

We then helped the company build three different messaging programs that would speak to each customer type in a relevant way:

•The Evangelists loved the brand. They wanted to learn all they could about the new models, the features they could share, and the ways they could help their customers become evangelists too. Their entire universe was their love of the brand and their desire to share its benefits.

•The Pragmatists only wanted to understand the math: how the product related to their customers and what the financial upsides and downsides were. They needed the details about return options, any mechanical issues that had come up, and other practical information.

•The Pessimists, on the other hand, needed evidence. They wanted the company to prove its programs wouldn’t hurt them and would ultimately be beneficial. They wanted statistics and data to support everything.

By truly understanding what each type loved and hated, we were able to invent exceptional and relevant experiences for each group.

WHERE TO BEGIN:
HOW TO UNCOVER YOUR COMPANY’S CUSTOMER TYPES

To identify your customer types, you can’t take a set of generic customer types, slap them onto your consumer experience strategy, and then expect to provide your customers with relevant experiences. You must begin at the beginning with your own customers.

To illustrate how to go about identifying customer types and designing relevant, exceptional consumer experiences across various touchpoints, using both digital and non-digital channels, I have created a fictional company—a car wash called NeoWash Auto Spa. The process begins with three simple steps.

Step 1:
Brainstorming Session

Ideation is a $2-word for brainstorming, the process of forming images or ideas—definitely a good place to begin. So start by asking yourself what commonly known attributes of the human experience might impact the customers of your car wash. For example, you can anticipate that in a car wash, some people are primarily interested in fast service, others in high quality, and still others in cost above all other traits.

Once you have come up with a range of theoretical customer types, you must test and refine these types using two things:

1.Digital analytics—tools used to assess qualitative and quantitative online data about your current and potential customers

2.Contact point innovation—inventing at the point at which the experience is being delivered rather than in boardroom or laboratory, far away from where customers actually experience the service or product

In other words, bring your team to the car wash’s parking lot and start by seeing how the cars enter and exit.

I remember learning about an architect who built amazing buildings and then planted grass all around them so that there were no obvious paths leading to the entrances and exits. Weeks later, he poured concrete pathways into the dirt trails that had been organically made by people walking to the doors. This is contact point innovation.

You then refine these types as they engage in the five contact points across your company. The net benefit is that the new experiences you invent across each contact point and customer type will be relevant across your entire range of types. If your customers are transactional, meaning all they want to do is get in and buy what they came for, make that experience as amazing as possible. On the other hand, if your customers are experiential, if they want to fiddle with the new gadgets and gawk at the amazing displays, then provide that for them. If price is their issue, show them what’s on sale or how to save money by downsizing the product. Different customer types want different things. As we’ve seen, Apple does this really well.

As I’ve already told you, I hate waiting. My wife, being an amiable customer type, can wait for hours. You could type me as an impatient, detail-oriented, customer-experience snob; my wife would be the opposite type. In either case, if the loves and hates are shared, that type could also include a thirty-something Hispanic female, a twenty-something rapper, and a low-income retired schoolteacher. If you design an exceptional and relevant experience, each of us will respond to it, although our demographics are very different.

Step 2:
Listening Posts and Contact Point Innovation

The next step is to refine your customer types through listening posts and contact point innovation, both critical in designing the overall customer journey. A listening post literally means having someone listening to your customers. This can be accomplished in different ways—for example, physically, as in standing in line with them, or digitally. Dell Computers created the Alienware Command Center, where Dell can listen to thousands of keywords in different languages all over the world to help determine what’s trending and what’s not.

Contact point innovation helps you:

•Clarify and refine your customer types

•Begin to design exceptional human experiences for these customer types across the range of five contact points via digital and non-digital channels

Contact point innovation means experiencing what your customers experience at each of the five consumer contact points. You do this by setting up listening posts at each point through both digital and non-digital channels.

At the NeoWash Auto Spa, you could begin by experiencing the pre-touch contact point, which could be either digital or non-digital. This is the very first time the potential customer has contact with your business.

Digitally, you might Google “best car washes” in your town and see what came up. Let’s say Google shows seven ratings for NeoWash with an average of 3 out of 5. This is death in the online rating world. You might then go over to Yelp and see five ratings with an average of 2 out of 5. Confirmation of death. Then, you could read the comments to find out what people hate about NeoWash. Go to other bulletin boards and blogs, as many as you can find, to learn why people think the car wash sucks. Most important, by doing this, you are experiencing firsthand the digital pre-touch contact point.

Not everyone’s first contact with NeoWash Auto Spa will be digital. An eighty-five-year-old might not have the same first experience, because he might not be as digitally savvy. He might not even know how to access these influential social networks. Instead, he might drive past your car wash. This is the first non-digital contact. What does your car wash look like? What first visual impression does it give? Is there a long line of cars waiting to be washed? Are the windows clean? Is the sign clear and does it look new? Do the homeless people sleeping on the corner make the place look half abandoned?

The important takeaway here is that these first impressions are critical, and once you know what they are, you can invent new and amazing first impressions across the range of your customer types.

Step 3:
Repeat the Process: Undergo the
Entire Customer Experience

I wouldn’t stop at the pre-touch experience. Each of the five touchpoints needs to be assessed from the perspective of a range of customer types. Remember, the disruptive innovator looks at the universe from the perspective of what she can create. She’s designing new ways to create exceptional human experiences. She’s going to invent ways to solve each broken touchpoint.

Therefore, your next step at the NeoWash Auto Spa could be to sit in the car wash for days, watching, listening, and asking questions. What sort of people are coming in? What are they experiencing? By doing this, you refine what your customer types love and hate. You might also identify new types or combine types. You will be able to identify broken systems and opportunities to improve them by inventing human experiences that are more relevant for each customer type. For example, you might learn that church gets out at 11 AM, and that’s why people show up at 11:15. Talk to your customers. Ask them where they’re coming from and where they’re going. Learn from them.

You also want to experience your employees’ perspectives, which as we’ve seen is critical to excellent customer service. What do they need that they don’t have? What’s their day like? What do they love and hate about their work? When and how do they interact with the customers? What can you see about your employees through your disruptive innovator eyes? Employees want to deliver exceptional service, but maybe there are policies or systems in place that don’t allow them to do this. Maybe they’re lacking the resources that would help them get their jobs done better. Listen to them. Talk to them. See firsthand the quality they can deliver.

Through this process, you will begin to understand and dissect your customers and therefore customer types by what they love and hate about both their digital and non-digital journeys. You will then be able to identify ways to add layered value across the five touchpoints to the entire range of types. Remember that when you drill down on any individual customer type, you probably create layered value across all the other types. For example, if you increase the speed of service at the car wash by using time motion data, it would obviously please customers whose prime interest is speed. But all your customer types benefit from faster service. And when you increase the quality of the car wash for the customers who are primarily looking for that, all your customer types likewise benefit.

Identifying customer types increases your ability to gain the insights necessary to drive disruptive and breakthrough innovations. If you collapse the value of one customer type while inventing for another, then you’re not finished inventing. All innovations should have a neutral or positive impact across all the other customer types.

The brainstorming session, listening posts, and contact point innovation helped me find four distinct customer types for NeoWash, as shown in Figure 2-2: Sparkly, Speedy, Thrifty, and Touching.

Figure 2-2. NeoWash Auto Spa’s four customer types.

Sparkly

I’ll call the first customer type Sparkly. This is a group of people who actually don’t care what they pay. They don’t even mind how long they have to wait. Their primary love is leaving with a perfectly clean car. They want quality; they hate having to wipe away missed spots and smudges. They’re the ones holding up the line, pointing out imperfections to the final detailing guy.

As a disruptive innovator, you realize the quality control system at your car wash is broken. You are going to fix that broken system to please the Sparkly customer type. You are going to hire a senior citizen. What? Yes, I mean that. You put him in a bright orange quality control vest, and his only job is to do the final inspection of each car before it’s released to the customer. He will be the final quality assurance person. Maybe you even put candy canes in his pocket for the kids.

Designing human experiences is a term you’ll see throughout this book. When you identify customer types, you design these experiences better, because you’re identifying not just what people are, but more important, who they are and how they wish to experience a range of touchpoints across digital and non-digital channels.

Speedy

I’ve named the second customer type Speedy. He has one priority—speed, obviously. He hates waiting; he loves fast service. He’s busy and digitally savvy. Some days he has a good experience at the car wash, but on other days he has to wait far too long and leaves dissatisfied. As you identify this customer type, you also identify another broken system: reliably fast service.

Throughput analysis, or fast track methodology, has been in use for years. You can apply this same methodology to the NeoWash Auto Spa. You can identify time inefficiencies throughout the entire process—from on-boarding a car through delivering it spotless and clean at the other end. If you get even more innovative, you could hire a NASCAR pit crew to give you their insights, and you could develop an app that would allow Speedy to book his time slot in advance.

This would completely change Speedy’s relevant experience. With a reserved time slot, when he arrives he drives past the other cars straight to the “Fast Track” lane, which has been designed to look like a NASCAR pit stop. Speedy now knows exactly when his car will be washed, and because it is prescheduled, it will all be done reliably in half the time.

As a byproduct, because you used fast track methodologies and time motion studies to significantly increase the throughput of cars, you are able to reduce labor costs. So while you were providing a relevant experience to one customer type (Speedy), you are now able to offer lower-cost car washes to other customer types (those who are willing to wait). Chances are all your customer types will appreciate fast service at a fair price. Remember stacking values? That’s exactly what this is.

Thrifty

Not surprisingly, one of your customer types is primarily cost conscious. These customers’ loves and hates revolve around price, so I’ve called them Thrifty. For this type, do a price sensitivity analysis. Talk to customers, look at your competitors’ prices, and see what you can do to become more relevant to your Thrifty customer type.

Part of the magic is that as you helped Speedy, you might be able to help Thrifty, who might also want a faster car wash. This is the beauty of stacked innovation. As you identify ways to deliver value and relevancy to one customer, you create a byproduct that allows you to deliver benefits to another customer.

In the process of using fast track methodologies and time motion efficiency analysis to help out Speedy, you reduce labor costs by increasing efficiencies. This allows you to deliver the most competitive price package to Thrifty. Undoubtedly, other customer types will appreciate this as well.

You could also look at the days and times with the slowest business and offer Thrifty a $5 discount if a wash is reserved for those times. This is a good business move for the company and great value for a type who’s looking for cheaper car washes.

Touching

I call the final customer type Touching. This is the person who sees going to the car wash as an experience. It could be the stay-at-home mom or dad or a retiree wanting to get out of the house. For them, it’s about the touch, the experience, and the emotive qualities. What does the car wash smell like? Sound like? Feel like? Is there a friendly person there to greet them and a place for kids to play? Is there a nice merchandise area?

As a disruptive innovator designing human experiences for Touching, you invent a sensory emotion across each contact point. You get their shoes polished and have espresso coffee and fresh croissants for sale in the morning. Touching loves the actual experience, so give them an exceptional one. They may not always have the time to linger, but it’ll be an option.

You might even create a Clean Concierge Club. For club members who get their car washed twice a month, the espresso and croissant is free, and there is a separate area with cushy leather couches just for them. They can sign up for the club online and can accumulate points to be used on extra services.

Every time I’ve seen a company identify its most profitable customers and place most of its resources there, I’ve found that these customers were the most profitable because they were subscribing to what that company was doling out.

How about making nonprofitable customers profitable? Understand your customers across all your customer types. Walk around, be disruptive, and look at what you can create that’s new and relevant by looking at what you can destroy. This is the best way to come up with disruptive ideas and turn nonprofitable customers into profitable ones.

Do you think you’d find these layers of value if you used only market segmentation? I know you wouldn’t. Identifying customer types and delivering relevant human experiences across their entire range creates exceptional, layered value. Do this throughout each contact point and via digital and non-digital channels and you truly will be designing exceptional and relevant human experiences.

To identify and understand your customer types, you must experience what your customer experiences, identify what’s broken, and invent relevant new experiences both digitally and non-digitally. Remember to Navigate where your customer is across the customer journey. Observe what your customer loves and hates. Design better experiences across all your customer types, and then Execute the innovations that your customer loves.

You’re not going to die if you get this wrong the first time. You can’t even break it. What you will do is start the process of inventing an amazing range of new value you can deliver. It’s a new way of looking at your customer, which creates the seed of thought for driving the next big idea.

It takes courage to look at what you’re currently doing and say it’s bad. It takes courage to turn what you’re doing on its head and try something else. But the downside is to do the same old thing and get your butt whipped by the disruptive innovator down the road.