Maximize profits by understanding the needs of your customer
Imagine you are at a dinner party and a stranger next to you starts a conversation. It only takes a few
minutes before you realize: “This guy is completely self-absorbed.” No matter how hard you try, every topic
leads back to him. Soon, you find yourself making away. Guess what? You can find the same thing on the
web sites that are egocentric, what means that companies are more interested in talking about themselves
than solving customer problems. However, unlike the dinner party situation, your escape from a self-absorbed
website is quick and painless.
So, to get success in business you will have to be an owner of an attractive, unique and above all, customerfocused
website. I believe that customer focus is the essence of the web economy. The web changes the
dynamics of the relationship between the organization and the customer. The customer is more empowered,
more in control. Most organizations aren’t focusing enough on the customer. Their marketing material might
talk about how important the customer is, but the culture of most companies is organization-centric—they
focus on themselves. The problem with this approach is that organization-centric websites fail. The customercentric
websites are the ones that succeed.
Being customer focused is not some ‘nice thing to do.’ Customer focus is about hard-edged business.
Customers are hugely impatient on the Web. They don’t need to hang around a website that is not directly
focused on them. Customer focus is the beginning, middle and end of a successful web strategy in order to
create value for the customer. It means how useful the site for a particular user goal is. The way the website
is put together is critical in achieving this objective. In order to create value for the customer our primarily
attention has to be focused on content and customization. To heck with product benefits or helping prospects
and customers solve their problems – the narcissistic website dwells on the company’s spectacularly
engineered offerings, their superior manufacturing techniques, the brilliance of their people, the company’s
offices. Is there a place for bragging? Sure, but it’s secondary to the customer’s issues. Too many websites
forget this.
When you consider that the average visitor has an attention span measured in seconds, and that he scans the
web instead of reading every word, a narcissistic website has the same effect as a narcissistic tablemate: it
turns people off.
In contrast, an intelligent website doesn’t leave a visitor stranded, searching for the customer benefits of the
company’s products or services but it:
• Provides clear statements that are customer benefit oriented
• Supports its claims (often using customer and third party support)
• Proactively addresses potential objections
• Ushers the visitor into a dialogue
• Let’s look at a very simple before-and-after example
Let’s assume we are at the website of a paint manufacturer of interior and exterior residential paint. Behr
paint is known for their extensive range of available colors (over 1800 colors are represented in their paint
swatches and samples with over 4000 colors available overall). Their target market? Home Builders. The
homepage leads off with:
“Since 1947, Behr paint has manufactured more than 4000 varieties of colours. What’s the Behr difference?
State-of-the-art technology – including the latest techniques of producing ecological paint – along with
superior raw materials to ensure the highest quality.”
Sound good to you? Where does the customer fit in?
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“Want a new look for your home? BEHR enjoys great brand presence and a reputation for unparalleled
quality, innovation, value and performance. BEHR was recently awarded “Highest in Customer Satisfaction for
Interior Paints” by JD Power & Associates. People know and love the BEHR brand.”
“Whether you are looking for red for your living room, green for your frontage or purple color fitting your
new bathroom, no other company offers a wider selection, higher quality or more ecological-friendly paints
than Behr.
“Independent tests show that using Behr paint you do need as much as 35% less paint, while significantly
increasing the duration of a fresh look of your newly painted walls.”
Download a white paper with the detailed test-results. There is also a white paper on the impact of paint on
the health of humans available.
This time, the copy speaks to the interests of the customer. Customer problems – and Behr’s solution – stand
front and center. Note, I still referred to the Behr’s superior product quality. The difference here is that the
reference is now linked to customer benefits.
Imagine a paint buyer visiting two sites: one with the first copy, the other with the second. With the first site,
the buyer learns a little about the company, but not enough to differentiate it from the competition. And not
nearly enough to understand, and appreciate, the benefits of doing business with the firm. At the second site,
the buyer learns about the company’s wide selection, fast delivery, exceptional production speeds and lower
defect rates. All strengths he can quickly grasp. What’s more, the white paper provides third-party support –
validation – for the company’s claims.
A Survey of Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center of Georgia Technology Institute showed that
the provision of quality information is the most important attribute of a vendor’s site. In addition, the greatest
cause for customers to leave a site is not being able to find the information they are looking for. While
prospects and customers care a lot about the companies they deal with, they care first and foremost about
their own needs. In this instance: “How will Behr Paint solve my problems?”
The evaluation of product information is not about passively viewing product blurbs. Instead customers seek
out information and interact with web sites, and a business, to find out what suits them best. Useful
interactivity focuses on the questions what the product offers them, how much it will cost, and how easily
they can get it. The more usefully interactive product information is, the more the customer will use it.
Mortgage calculators provide a good example of useful interactivity. To my mind, content is rich, when it
provides something that other channels can’t. Often this means more detailed, in-depth information to
support the buying process or product usage. However, often online product catalogues simply replicate what
is in offline catalogues without adding extra information, images or example applications.
Behr initiated a trial visualization project, named “ColorSmart”, to help in-store customers with their color
selection. The goal was to provide consumers with an easy-to-use, ‘point and click’ kiosk-based application in
the retail environment that allowed customers to pick colors and experiment with recommended coordinating
colors in photo-realistic room scenes. Their key objective was to help improve the overall in-store buying
experience for customers, allowing them to make a much faster purchase decision, with satisfying results. In
solving this visualization problem, Behr hoped to increase paint sales, shorten the selling cycle in-store, and
reduce customer purchase anxiety, promoting sales and customer satisfaction. The Linux/PC-based kiosk
application lets customers choose colors and apply them to walls and ceilings in photo-real room scenes. In
addition, it recommends other coordinating colors and sheens, provides lightening or darkening of color
tones, and then allows customers to print out the results. The application lets customers experiment with
paint products in millions of combinations – in real-time. All visuals both on the monitor and printer are colorcalibrated
to achieve accurate photo renderings. The kiosk currently features Behr’s Premium Plus paint
brand, which is sold exclusively through Home Depot stores with over 4000 colors, 5 interior rooms and 5
exterior rooms. Behr plans to continually update from this baseline with new rooms, alternative lines and
products, including stain and faux finishing programs.
Results: The 6-week pilot produced results far exceeding expectations – recommended paint coordinates
were tracked to purchase. They proved out that paint customers (and in-store staff) not only used the kiosk
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but enjoyed it! Most importantly, customers were purchasing recommended paints as specified by the
application. Behr then has also launched a web-based ColorSmart application that allows customers to
research color selections from home and print out visual summaries to take into their local Home Depot store.
Color Smart improves the overall buying experience for consumers, by making the paint selection process
easier and faster by enabling the customer to make confident color selections for his home decorating
projects. (Winner of the Web award 2004 for outstanding achievement in website development.
The underlying concept is simple and an underlying marketing communications truth. The most effective
marketing communications puts your customers and prospects first, not your company. By focusing on
customer and prospect needs, you are more likely to fulfill your company’s needs. As obvious as this
statement would appear, it is similarly obvious that many marketers don’t really follow it.
A Quick Check-up is going to help you to find if your company website is a narcissist one:
Pretend you are a customer visiting your company’s website for the first time. Write down five key concerns
you have related to purchasing these kinds of products or services or choosing a company that you feel (or
marketing research indicates) reflects the key concerns of your target market when researching companies
like yours. Spend up to one minute at your website. Close the browser. How many of your five key concerns
were addressed? How well did they address your concerns? A brief amount of copy addressing a key concern
and a link to more detail is fine; no mention of these concerns is not. Did the web page copy get to the heart
of your concern or was it focused on the itself instead of the prospects needs? Use what you have learned to
further test your website in front of real prospects and customers. Find out their most important problems
they are hoping your website will help them answer and re-design your website around helping them.
In order to be successful in the future, companies have to find out what their web visitors want and start
thinking of their web site as a communication tool, rather than a printing press. In do so; companies are well
on your way to true online customer centricity. It’s your choice: propaganda that only ends up stroking your
company’s ego or profits.

Find me here at the conference.

Steve