XtremeASAE Blog

Heresy you say?

You could argue that it's just a matter of semantics, but Scott McKain, author of What Customers Really Want, suggested that associations with member service departments are underperforming and will not find long term success. Rather than member service, McKain argued for member experience.

It's true that the word experience is starting to get overused -- think "paradigm shift" or "robust functionality" in the 1990s. But let's look at the experience vs. service issue. McKain noted that an organization can have excellent customer service -- the organization is competent, prompt, and all the other things that go along with really good customer service, but in the end, that service does not build loyalty. Strong service is expected, bad service leads to the customer voting with her feet as she walks away. Loyalty happens when your members get emotionally involved in their interactions with your organizations. His definition of an experience is an action that makes an emotional connection with a customer. How do you do that?

Here are McKain's three steps to creating the types of experiences that will make an association a success.

1. High Concept - a short powerful phrase that will interest and involve your audience. Examples:

Your pizza will be delivered in 30 minutes or it's free.

Absolutely, positively overnight.

We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.

Just do it.

You undoubtedly know exactly which company each of those phrases refers to. McKain didn't using the term, but it's branding. You make a promise that matters and you deliver.

2. Power of Story - The goal of most association communications should not be "effectiveness;" it should be "persuasiveness." You don't want to inform only, you want people to take action, and that happens through good storytelling. Then McKain broke out his little ninth-grade literature lecture. Telling a story involves three parts: (1) introducing character and conflict, (2) the varied efforts where characters try to resolve the conflict, and (3) heroic resolution of the conflict by the characters.

McKain said the fundamental problem with association communications is that they start at the second part - they skip ahead to all the wonderful products and services that can help resolve the conflict, but we don't know what that conflict is, and we don't know who the characters are or why we care about them.

3. Ultimate customer experience - associations get so focused on the transaction and the processing that they do not pay attention to the experience. One thing you must do to create the experiences your customers want is to ask them. But be sure to ask the right questions.

The example he gave was a bus line that transports major personalities to concerts and such. New owners of the line planned a complete refurbish of the buses to be even more luxurious than they already were - that must be the way to attract these stars who have astronomical expectations. They could have asked the stars what features they'd love to see in the bus - marble bath tubs or massively huge high-definition television. Instead, they asked what was the most important thing to them about their transportation by bus. The answer? Good drivers. It makes sense - the drivers had to be flexible enough to get along with Metallica and Britney Spears, they had to represent these acts well to fans, who see the driver as an employee of the group, not the bus line. They need to make the acts feel secure when it's two in the morning and there's a driving hail storm.

What the bus line owners learned is that the most important part of the experience is the people involved.