Surely you’ve experienced this before: You get an unsolicited e-mail from a mortgage provider offering you a discounted home loan. To you, this may be just an annoyance. You are probably just going to delete it and check your spam filter. The sender likely expects that only 1 in 5000 people will respond to it.
To me, that e-mail is a violation of Watzlawick’s third axiom of communication.
Wa-who? ... Gesundheit.
Paul Watzlawick, Austrian-born psychiatrist and communication theorist at Stanford University, defined 5 axioms (self-evident truths) in the 1970s about effective communication between two people. I’m not going to list them here, save for claiming that they are all applicable to B2C communication in very specific, quantifiable ways.
The third axiom states: The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners’ communication procedures. This is very similar to “rapport”, every sales person knows about this essential communication component. If you break the rapport, you violate the unsaid contract between two communicators, and the other person is free to break it off.
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So, correct messaging and listening are important. Who knew. Trick is, how to manage a large volume, complex business process towards zero defects in communication events? How do you maintain rapport through communication channels?
What we’ve come up with is a discipline to manage this process: Know about the customer, analyze what the customer wants or needs, communicate this result and listen to the response. Repeat for success.
Knowledge: Who is this person, where do they live, what are the econometric or geo-demographic circumstances? What is the buying history, what has this person said in the past, what are the issues with the products/services this person has? What communication channels does this person prefer? Gather all the facts about this customer.
Analysis: Based on this (hopefully complete) knowledge, what is this person likely to do next? What is our intent, how do we formulate that?
Action: Communicate your intent in the the preferred channel on the preferred medium. Listen for the response and fold the response data into your knowledge base. Start over.
Apply this cyclical management framework to commercial B2C communication processes, and dramatic improvements in customer loyalty and satisfaction will result.
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Let’s return to that mortgage solicitation e-mail. If the mortgage company had done their homework, they would have taken the time to understand who you are and what your circumstances are. Perhaps they would have determined you have an ARM loan. They may have determined your loan is maturing, or that interest rates are going up. They may have found out that you’re a technorati of some sort, and that you live in a high income area.
This means you don’t like spam, you probably want to stay where you are, and you might want to get control over your mortgage payments.
So they write you a highly personalized letter, in expensive, heavy paper, explaining the offer to help you out of the ARM, with possibly a linked, media-rich, personally addressed e-mail as a follow up.
This more sensitive and respectful approach may still have not swayed you, but they would have not destroyed their brand in the process. And their response rate would be more like 1 in 200.
Understanding the dynamics of multi-channel, bidirectional communication (including Watzlawick’s axioms) is vital to B2C business success. The KAA framework is the management model that will help businesses make that happen.
