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March 13 - March 20, 2023
We have reached a point in the world of technology startups where the fervor for building a company with a billion-dollar valuation — the elusive startup unicorn — is overshadowing the creation of real value.
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Business is not about software or hardware, but the people who create value.16
Nobody loves business software or the companies that build it. They tolerate it. People love consumer goods and services, but not software. Software is a necessary evil.
Lovability is the metric that nobody in business talks about but that’s obvious in hindsight. Lovability — the capacity to earn genuine, heartfelt love and loyalty from customers — is the secret ingredient that propels a select few organizations ahead and leads not only to consistent growth and profitability but sustainable happiness for everyone involved.
Companies are not brands, buildings, or technology. They are people. A corporation does not do anything; its people and customers do.
“The product is the complete experience and the relationship you and the customer share.”
83 percent of U.S. consumers prefer dealing with human beings over digital tools to solve customer service issues. Fifty-two percent have left a service provider in the past year due to poor customer service, at an estimated cost of $1.6 trillion.
Customers pay for it a month or a year at a time. If you understand that, you are more likely to think about delivering it like an ongoing service instead of a one-time sale.
The seven components of the CPE are . . .
Your customer experience is your product, and that experience depends on how effectively you align the technology, people, processes, and information that encompass it.
“If you want to create lasting value for that customer — and lasting value for your business — you must maintain a mutually beneficial relationship.”
A customer might choose you for your software’s eye-popping features list. However, that customer will stay with you for the long haul instead of switching to one of your competitors. They may even enthusiastically send you dozens of new customers. Why? Because you give them an experience that makes them happy while offering reassurance that you will continue to deliver even more happiness in the future.
I suggest that you think about your customer’s journey as a unified experience that has three key phases: motivation, education, and adoption.
Data can tell you what a customer is searching for and what thousands or even millions of others like them are looking for, but it will not tell you why they are searching.
Your brand is an outcome — a result of your values playing out in the experiences of your customers. Your values drive your decisions and daily interactions. Those — not packaging or marketing — tell customers what you care about and stand for.
Profit is the outcome of a well-executed CPE, not its purpose.
Not only can a product have a purpose, a lovable product must have one. Without purpose, your product is nothing more than a collection of atoms or bits. If your product is that shallow, your customer relationships will be, too.
Great businesses have a greater purpose that their customers rarely ask for but always want — to make things better and better and better.
Your deliverable is a lovable CPE The seven components of the CPE are: marketing, sales, technology, supporting systems, third-party integrations, support, and policies.
Every product has a purpose That purpose is to help the people who use it achieve something that is meaningful to them in a lasting way. Fulfilling that purpose should be every company’s guiding star.
It employs “scenario planning” to create immediate action plans for a range of incidents both plausible and implausible
“It’s better to have 100 customers [who] love you than a million customers [who] just sort of love you.” In other words, if you have 100 people [who] absolutely love your product they will tell 100 people, and then they will tell 100 people or even 10 people — and then this thing will grow.
The challenge is distinguishing between an idea that has no future and an idea that you have just not executed properly.
Spin doctors know they want customer love but find it easier to focus on the perception that they are delivering it instead of making it so. Many well-funded startups fall into this category. They heavily hype their products and then the results disappoint. Expectations are high but unrealistic, and there is a lot of finger-pointing when things go wrong.
Desperation provokes compromise and bad behavior. You rush to market because you are told that you can iterate and even pivot if you need to. You try to add customers at any cost. This breeds internal strain when it proves to be harder than anyone thought.
The growing debris field of failed startups is collateral damage of the venture capital world’s home-run mentality. Because venture investors’ raison d’être is to find the next unicorn, their interests and those of entrepreneurs rarely align.
Despite CB Insights findings that of more than 19,000 startups that raised angel, seed, or Series A funds between 2008 and 2014, fewer than one-half of 1 percent reached a billion-dollar valuation,
according to Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Referencing data he “stares at all the time,”4 Wilson noted that the amount of money raised by startups in their seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success. You read that right — less money means more success.
The question is not if or when you take other people’s money; the question is what expectations do you set and what do you do with the money if you do take it.
If your customers love you, they will not only remain fiercely loyal but become your most powerful marketing asset. Lovability is the greatest predictor of business success.
Lovability is an inspirational state in which your Complete Product Experience (CPE) exceeds expectations to such an extent that your customers feel deep affection for what you provide them and actively work to contribute to your long-term success.
It is the most important organizational metric, because customer love runs downstream to create loyalty, retention, profitability, and growth.
A lovable product solves a real need.
a lovable product meets and exceeds customer expectations.
lovability is backed with integrity
Integrity means building an environment where people not only feel comfortable expressing moral or ethical concerns because they feel they’ll be taken seriously, but where they are taken seriously and provoke meaningful change.
lovability is a journey.
satisfaction is experience-specific and precarious.
Your solution must deliver as promised every time in this early stage, or your relationship with that customer may end before it can begin.
As Barry Schwartz pointed out in Why We Work, if you do not have a good reason why you do what you do, you will not care about doing it well or making a difference.1
“If one customer is reporting a problem, assume there are a hundred more who did not report it. Never underestimate even the most trivial bug.”
Attacking bugs immediately helps us avoid “technical debt,” which occurs when you delay fixing problems for so long that it becomes impossible (or prohibitively expensive) to catch up. Above all, solving problems builds trust.
“Your culture, attention to detail, desire for excellence, commitment to people, and innovative spirit ensure continuity for customers.”
Since any paid advertising is regarded with increasing suspicion, word of mouth and unsolicited enthusiasm on social networks or review sites like Yelp are more influential than ever.
The more building blocks of lovability your product delivers, the greater the odds that your customers will find it lovable.
Hope, Satisfaction, Care, Confidence, and Trust are your foundation. You cannot have lovability without them. Scale, Sustainability, Motivation, Fun, and Halo are required to earn the kind of passion and lifelong loyalty achieved by the world’s top brands.
If you inject delightful experiences in the middle of a painful workflow, it can come across as disingenuous and actually make things worse.
Love comes from providing extraordinary value, being responsive, and nurturing relationships.
