Ep. 10 | Product v. Customer Centricity
Most companies understand that they need to be customer-centric, but they still operate in the very product-centric way. In this episode, host Allison Hartsoe interviews Jaime Colmenares, the Director of Americas Customer Strategy & Analytics at eBay.
Colmenares heads up eBay’s new customer analytics team that cuts across silos to better understand buyers and sellers and use the knowledge to improve business performance. He provides quick checks to let listeners know their true product v. customer mindset and explains how customer-centric companies behave.
Colmenares shares how being part of the finance department impacts their ability to get and use information. And he explains the different layers of data that eBay uses to bring numbers to life, including how high CLV customers behave versus low, and attribution models.
Podcast Links:
The Essentials of Customer Centricity
Read Full Transcript
Allison Hartsoe – 00:06 – This is the Customer Equity Accelerator, a weekly show for marketing executives who need to accelerate customer-centric thinking and digital maturity. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe of Ambition Data. This show features innovative guests who share quick wins on how to improve your bottom line while creating happier, more valuable customers. Ready to accelerate? Let’s go!
Allison Hartsoe – 00:33 – Welcome everyone. Today’s show is about product centricity versus customer centricity an extremely important topic and to help me discuss this topic, I have invited Jaime Colmenares. Jaime is the director of America’s Customer Strategy and Analytics at eBay. Jaime and I are both big fans of Professor Fader’s customer centricity philosophy, and I am so pleased to have him here today. Jaime, welcome to the show.
Jaime Colmenares – 01:02 – Hi Allison. Thank you for inviting me. It’s my pleasure to be on your show.
Allison Hartsoe – 01:06 – Oh, wonderful. Thank you. Now you know most people think about eBay as a very product-centric company, a versus a customer-centric company. Jaime, tell me a little bit more about your background and how you ended up in analytics.
Jaime Colmenares – 01:21 – Of course, of course, so abbreviated version of my story. I did my MBA at the University of California, Berkeley. After that, I spent two years as a Management Consultant at Bain & Company. Post Bain & Company, I wanted to continue doing the kind of work I did at Bain, and so I landed at eBay Strategy Team, spent two years there and then transitioned into analytics also here at eBay, and I’ve spent the past four years here now.
Allison Hartsoe – 01:50 – I always think it’s interesting that people who end up in analytics rarely start in analytics.
Jaime Colmenares – 01:57 – Yeah, yeah. Well, it certainly was true in my case, and a transitioned into analytics precisely because of my interest in corporate strategy. It is kind of a cliche and kind of an effect that is spoken about often that as there are more mobile phones and there are more devices out there, and they’re connected to the internet, more data is captured about individuals and their behavior, so analytics becomes increasingly important. So I joined analytics because I eventually wanted to become an executive that was fluent in how to use data and how to translate that data into, you know, a more effective corporate strategy.
Allison Hartsoe – 02:37 – I couldn’t agree with that point more. Now, Jaime, a lot of people think about eBay as a very product-centric company, so many products that you have. I don’t even know what the total volume is. It must be in the millions.
Jaime Colmenares – 02:51 – It’s huge. We have close to a billion listings in the last I heard.
Allison Hartsoe – 02:55 – Oh my gosh. Wow. So help us understand the difference between what is a product-centric company versus what is a customer-centric company.
Jaime Colmenares – 03:05 – Yup. Yup. So this is a very important topic, and it’s one that most people in business don’t really quite understand, and it’s, it is a topic that applies to companies of all sizes. It applies to the mom and pop store on the corner as well as applying to your largest in the fortune 500 companies. So product centricity versus customer centricity, most companies have the intuition that is important to understand their customers. And so what I’ve seen is most companies will say to some degree or another, they’ll say that they’re customer-centric. The customer centricity is much more than just putting a line in the mission statement that says, you know, we’re here for customers or customers are first, and so if I were to summarize product centricity versus customer centricity, I would say that product-centric companies focus primarily on the product or service that they produce, so they know their products very well and they know the process of value chain to produce that product.
Jaime Colmenares – 04:06 – They know that very well. Product-centric companies will typically know and understand very well their competitors as it relates to the substitute those products, but in the product-centric view, these companies actually rarely make a distinction between good customers and bad customers. It doesn’t matter to them who is buying the product as long as they’re selling more product. So. So that’s, that’s really kind of a good description of a product-centric company. A customer-centric company, yes, on the other hand, it deeply, deeply understands who that company is. Best customers are who that company’s worst customers are and here, best and worst. I really mean who the most valuable customers are and who the least valuable customers are and this is important because then it gives the company a ton of insights as to who they should be serving and how they should be allocating their scarce resources. That’s a quick definition of product centricity versus customer customers.
Allison Hartsoe – 05:07 – I love this table that comes from Kenneth Galbraith. It’s from his book designing the customer-centric organization, and we’ll link to that in the podcast transcript when we post later on, but in this table, he actually calls out specific differences between product-centric and customer-centric and one of the things I love is on strategy. He basically says what you just said, he says on the product-centric company, you’re looking for your most advanced customer regarding comedy products they’re buying and then in the customer-centric company you’re looking for your most profitable or your most loyal customer, which is a much longer-term view. I always think. And then he goes on to outline different measures, and in the product-centric company he says, people are looking at the number of new products. The percentage of from products, maybe products less than two years old market share,
Allison Hartsoe – 06:01 – these are things that are all really familiar to most product companies, but a customer-centric company is looking at the share of most valuable customers or customer satisfaction or the lifetime value of a customer and customer retention as well. Those metrics are wholly different.
Jaime Colmenares – 06:19 – Completely, completely different. I see it in practice. I see it in practice in the companies I’ve worked at, the companies I’ve consulted for and my colleagues in similar roles when I speak to them, those colleagues at different companies don’t say in very similar thing.
Allison Hartsoe – 06:37 – Now is there a quick test that somebody, somebody confused and they’re trying to figure out, am I customer-centric, am I product-centric? Is there a way for them to kind of understand or ask themselves something to elucidate whether they are
Jaime Colmenares – 06:54 – Absolutely. So, I like to ask people a few questions, and the first one is very basic, you know, you can ask somebody what business are you in or what does your business do, and your listeners should go through the exercise of thinking through this for a few seconds. What would their response be? And actually, their response actually says a lot about the center of gravity of their business. It says a lot about how that company thinks of itself, and I’m willing to bet that most of your listeners, because this is true of most of the world, most of the listeners will say something along the lines of my company produces widgets and these widgets are better than the competitors because of x, y, or z features. But interestingly, that answer reveals how product-centric they are, and it reveals how little thought is given to customers because you’ll notice that there’s no mention of customers in that response.
Allison Hartsoe – 07:48 – Isn’t that funny? Think about what does the business deal. And we automatically default to products. It’s like a habit.
Jaime Colmenares – 07:54 – Absolutely. And then another similar kind of the quick test is if you ask somebody to tell you about their customers when companies do have some data on their customers, people will typically default to giving you answers on quote-unquote the customer or the average customer. So they’ll say, our average customer spends $1,500 every 12 months, and that person buys 27 products a year. But that also revealed that even in the case of the company that has some data via reverting to the default of thinking about the average customer, but the average is actually very misleading because in most companies the 80/20 rule is alive and well and so what you’ll find is that there’s most of the value and most of the sales and profits a company has are generated by a small fraction of their buyers. You can imagine then that the average statistic is understanding the value of your best customers and significantly overstating the value of your least valuable customers.
Allison Hartsoe – 08:53 – Yeah. To me, that sounds like when I talked with Pete, and I guess it was last week, that was Kinda the first step in becoming customer centric, and you know, it also aligns with why you should care. You should care about product-centric versus customer-centric because in fact, let me just put that to you. Why should I care? And then maybe you can go into what started to sound like the steps to get into that.
Jaime Colmenares – 09:16 – Of course, of course. So you should care about this if you’re interested in growing profits as much as you can and for as long as you can, which essentially is every single company
Allison Hartsoe – 09:27 – who wouldn’t be interested in that. Right?
Jaime Colmenares – 09:30 – Exactly. Now, some companies might say that the responsibilities of the business say go beyond just generating profits and those views are legitimate, but my response would be you won’t be able to do those other things with the other stakeholders. Say The community, for example, if you’re generating losses for some considerable amount of time, so generating profits is what makes a company sustainable. So more about why people should care about product centricity versus customer centricity. It’s important to clarify that the product-centric model has worked for some time for many companies and will probably continue to work for some companies for a long time, but what you’ll find is that as a competitive pressure is intensifying between companies and as investors are becoming more demanding. Those companies that can provide a service to their customers that is more valuable will outperform.
Jaime Colmenares – 10:29 – And so even if a company that has done well with your product-centric model, let’s say thinking about remaining or continuing the product-centric model, they might be pushed into being customer-centric because their competitors are looking for ways to help performance. So it might be the case that competitors forced product-centric companies to become customer-centric.
Allison Hartsoe – 10:52 – You know, I always think that product-centric model is people who have a lot of scales, they kind of have a corner on the market, they are the sole supplier or one of the few suppliers of a product, or maybe they just have better pricing than anyone else. To me, that always smells like product-centric.
Jaime Colmenares – 11:09 – Absolutely. Absolutely. If anybody listening is, is kind of a strategy, kind of a geek kind of, I am you. They’ll have read Michael Porter and the, you know, they’ll know that Porter, and I’m going to over-simplify a little bit. Porter says that essentially there are two ways to compete to is cost leadership. The other one is product differentiation. In the cost leadership world, it’s all about economies of scale. If you have a larger scale than your competitors, then that means that you can produce at a lower cost and if you can produce at a lower cost than you can sell those items at a lower price and still make an interesting return on your investment, which then feeds this positive feedback group in which the company that has the largest economy of scale can continue to extend that cost leadership. So in that world, it makes sense that those companies that are very product-centric, all they care about is understanding the product and producing the product more efficiently. But you’ll recall that Porter says there’s another way.
Jaime Colmenares – 12:09 – There’s an alternative way to compete in that is through differentiation and it’s in that world where it becomes really, really important to understand your customers because if in that world you need to produce a product with certain features that are more attractive to one set of customers and the other by definition, you need to understand that set of customers what they want and how much they’re willing to pay for that.
Allison Hartsoe – 12:34 – Exactly, and in fact I think that sounds like a second step, right, so the first step is to understand who your customers are and where that 80/20 rule actually is for each customer, and then the second step is to then get into the needs and motivations of those valuable customers so that you can really, I guess, offer more value to them. Would you agree?
Jaime Colmenares – 12:56 – Absolutely. Absolutely. So this whole customer centricity project begins with understanding the value of your customers, and that exercise of understanding the value of your customers is much more than just in an accounting exercise, or it’s much more than just kind of a prediction exercise. Once you understand who your most valuable customers are and who your least valuable customers are, who actually are often unprofitable and companies don’t often realize that, but once you understand who the two populations are, then you need to understand the differences in those populations, and you need to understand the differences in the needs and motivations of those two sets of customers, which often comes with a set of realizations that are often just kind of eyeopening. They’re often really shocking. The first one is the wide disparity, the wide heterogeneity and the value to your customers.
Jaime Colmenares – 13:54 – Companies are often surprised to find that 80% of their profits are generated by 10 or 20% of their customers and companies are often surprised to find it. You know the least valuable customers are actually unprofitable. So that’s, that’s the first thing,
Allison Hartsoe – 14:10 – Isn’t that amazing? Common sense, right? And yet I think when that happens, when people find that information, there can be a hesitance to accept that because it’s such a shock.
Jaime Colmenares – 14:21 – Absolutely, absolutely. People, in the beginning, are often resistant it because they can’t believe it. It goes against the conventional wisdom that they’ve always been taught and they’ve always believed
Allison Hartsoe – 14:21 – for sure.
Jaime Colmenares – 14:32 – so the next step then after you have understood the value of your customers and after you’ve done the profiling to understand the differences in the needs and motivations, after that step often comes the really shocking revelation that now you have concrete evidence to understand what it is that your company really, really good at and what is the value proposition that really resonates with a certain set of customers, which is often different than what the company imagined in the first place. That provides a whole new found clarity to the vision and clarity to the purpose of the company. Often companies will think that their competitor is company XYZ, but once they understand that their best customers actually don’t consider company XYZ, but actually company ABC, then that leads to the realization, hey, I need to stop benchmarking myself, and I need to start paying attention to this one competitor who I thought was kind of the key competitor. I didn’t really need to pay attention to the southern company.
Allison Hartsoe – 15:33 – Right? They’ve even positioned themselves in maybe in the wrong way. Exactly. Right. Right now, if I’ve only got 20% of my customers that are, you know, and 20% might be generous for some companies that are holding up the sales of my business, how can I create impact out of that small group? How do I leverage that group to create a healthy company in the longterm?
Jaime Colmenares – 15:59 – So absolutely. That’s super, super interesting question. I run into this often when I speak to my counterparts at other companies, and this is very relevant for marketing. Who I understand is that most of your audience can help marketing professionals. Once you understand who your best customers are, who your most valuable customers are, and once you understand their needs and motivations and how those are different than those of the low-value customers, then you can start developing marketing campaigns to acquire more of the buyers that look like your existing best buyers and the company can put in place a set of actions to better retain the existing buyers that are the most valuable buyers. That might bring up the next logical question, which is what do we do with the remainder of the customers don’t fit the pattern of the very valuable buyers, and the answer is by no means do you fire them. You just keep serving them as long as it doesn’t cost you much to serve him,
Jaime Colmenares – 16:59 – but the insight here and the tuition here is sending your limited resources on the customer. They’re going to give you the highest Roi and spend little to no resources on those customers that aren’t giving you that graded and returned.
Allison Hartsoe – 17:15 – I have a great example here of something that happened to me personally with Marriott, I didn’t know it was maybe a couple of years back, and I was just starting to travel more intensely, and I was getting up to speed with my business, and I had a receptionist. She looked at. She must’ve seen something in my record, or maybe they flagged something I don’t know, but she just on a whim, she upgraded me to gold status for a period just so I could try it out and man was that nice because what it is, it gave me a taste of what it was like to be a loyal customer for Marriott and all of the benefits that came behind that and so after that temporary gold period expired, I just went to town. I got the Marriott credit card. I started staying at only Marriott, and now I’m their top tier, so and I enjoy that every time,
Allison Hartsoe – 18:14 – but what was key about that was that somehow, and maybe it was serendipity or maybe it was analytics, but somehow that frontline person was armed with exactly the right information to help a middle tier customer become a high tier loyal customer, and they hit just the right mark at just the right time. I don’t know too many companies that are doing that, that are aiming at you and just the right way at just the right time.
Jaime Colmenares – 18:42 – You’re absolutely right. That’s a great example, and you’re right, one would think that there are more companies doing it because we have more data now than ever before, and yet it doesn’t happen often enough. It happens so rarely that a situation like this is surprising. It’s a delightful experience.
Allison Hartsoe – 19:01 – You know, my other example is with my bag, which I won’t actually say the bank name here because this is not a good example. When I, when I show up at my bag, they actually have a little thing that appears on the screen that says high-value customer and does you know what they do? They pitch me more product. Here’s more stuff you can buy. Have you thought about getting this thing? Have you thought about that? It has nothing to do with convenience or value or making my life better. It has everything to do with shoveling product.
Jaime Colmenares – 19:29 – You’re absolutely right. That’s a classic product-centric view. Absolutely. Those two are great examples. Then they highlight in fact something that it’s very difficult for people to kind of wrap their arms around, which is this intuition or disease actions based on these insights which I described earlier, which really implication is you should focus on providing greater value to your better customers and providing value that is mutually beneficial so that you can capture some of that additional value from those best customers, and so you’re building a stronger relationship with those customers versus the opposite of, Hey, I know this person has spent a lot of money with me. How do I get that person to buy more and just push products down my throat?
Allison Hartsoe – 20:15 – Right? We talked about this concerning the acquisition. What about retention? How do you know? How does this apply to the retention game?
Jaime Colmenares – 20:22 – It absolutely applies to retention. In reality, it’s not just marketing. The whole company should redesign their business model, their products and their services towards better serving their best customers and so you can imagine that once you’ve got one of the great buyers in the door, there’s no point in letting that customer with her and you know how does that customer churn shortly afterward. There’s no reason to do that. You want to keep that customer happy, so it’s the company’s job to create value and provide that value to the customer, so the customer keeps that relationship with your company for a one time.
Allison Hartsoe – 21:00 – You know, if you have people who are who are slipping, and I often see this with companies who say, wow, I have this huge pile of essentially low-value customers. Maybe I should be aiming programs at those people to try to bring them up into higher valued tiers. Is that
Jaime Colmenares – 21:21 – the. I, I hear I hear this often, and I feel it is a very common mistake. In my experience. People had. Companies will see tremendous opportunity in getting low-value customers to engage a little bit more and to essentially become more valuable. And so people often trick themselves with the massive, Hey, I’ve got 50% of my customers have only bought once. If I could only get, you know, a large fraction of rose to buy a second time, I could really, it reignites the growth of the company or I can really accelerate the growth of the company. But the realization that companies need to arrive at is there’s a reason why those were very customers only engaged once or twice. And the reason most likely is because the value proposition and the company is offering them, does not resonate strongly with them. So that often it’s a wasted effort to try to get these people in these low-value customers, uh, to kind of broadly migrate up.
Jaime Colmenares – 22:26 – Now that’s slightly different than a customer-centric company who truly understands who their best customers are. Identifying kind of those diamonds in the rough, that small group of people in that group of 50% or 40% or 30% of low-value customers. And identifying those people that for reasons that that company understands haven’t migrated up and so if they’re very targeted, if the company carries out some very targeted campaigns and very targeted actions towards migrating those diamonds in the rough it up to become high-value buyers, that’s, that’s, that’s doable. But the general proposition of, you know, blankets targeting everybody who is a low-value customer and trying to migrate them up there, that’s a very difficult proposition that’s very, very difficult to, to, to actually execute on.
Allison Hartsoe – 23:19 – Right, right. I mean, if people are going to churn, there’s a reason why and they, they, you know, they’re not going to. There’s something you can’t do to prevent. Something’s changed in their lives or them; they just aren’t your customer anymore. They don’t want to be, you know, a matter of marketing is going to change that.
Jaime Colmenares – 23:40 – Exactly. No marketing is going to change that. And in fact, people in the mark, in fact, the whole company needs to ask, okay, what is the return on investment and targeting this person who is about to turn and, and trying to get that person to reengage. And if the math is that you know, is sure through some incentives or through some other expensive action, they get this person to reengage. The question is, what is the opportunity cost of that? Would the ROI of that investment be higher if I had used those resources to target a more valuable buyer for acquisition or to retain it, a high-value buyer? So absolutely that question needs to be asked, what is the opportunity cost of targeting these, these low-value buyers?
Allison Hartsoe – 24:22 – I love that phrase, Opportunity cost. It’s something we rarely think about because we only look at what we spend. We don’t look at the opportunity for what we could have spent in other places. That’s a good way to think about it.
Jaime Colmenares – 24:34 – And that often happens, by the way, it’d be different teams in an organization have different goals, and so there might be one thing that is given the goal of reducing churn or, or improving retention in a whole separate team, is then given the task of acquiring by this. And so that’s short-sighted because really there are two ways to solve the turn. A retention problem. One is kind of the brute force, then tons of money on that wide and that large group of customers that aren’t engaged and just trying at all costs to get them to engage again, so that’s one way to try to solve at churn after the acquisition, but a smarter way to do that is, in fact, it to solve the problem before acquisition. In other words, target the right buyers in the first place, which means that if you bring those right buyers in the first place, those customers are going to have much longer lifetimes with the company.
Jaime Colmenares – 25:30 – They’re going to spend a lot more, and essentially your ROI is much better. You’re spending relatively less on acquiring those customers and relatively as a keyword in order to get a much higher return and so companies need to stop essentially focusing on what the cost of acquisition is and more they need to start focusing on what the cost is relative to the value that that customer is providing to the company.
Allison Hartsoe – 25:53 – That actually brings me right to my next question, which is if I’ve bought into this idea, and maybe you can speak a little bit to your experience at eBay, and I’m taking the next steps, and I’ve found out, I understand now the value of my customers and I understand who my high and low-value customers are. How do I get adoption within the company? I mean it’s one thing to stand up those programs, and it’s another thing to have different parts of the company rowing and opposite directions. As you mentioned earlier, have you found any effective ways to get programs moving?
Jaime Colmenares – 26:28 – Yeah. Well, so there are two things that are important to mention here. The first one is it is absolutely critical to have buy-in from the company’s leadership because you need to ensure that not only the troops are excited about this, but in fact that the leaders of the company are putting in place the goals and the policies, etc., so that everybody’s aligned and everybody’s rowing in the same direction, everything is going in the same direction.
Allison Hartsoe – 26:53 – Are you saying leadership as in the C levels or leadership as in somewhere else? all the way up?
Jaime Colmenares – 26:58 – Yes. C level all the way up, all the way up because often what I find with people I speak to is that the product-centric conventionalism is the leadership of company is often very tied to that view of the world and so it’s my success or person in my role, their success is going to be limited. If I’m able to convince some troops in the marketing world for example, rather than convincing the C level leaders, so that’s the first thing you absolutely need buy-in from the leaders. The second thing is if it’s difficult to do that, and often that’s the case because this new is challenged that conventional wisdom. If one can’t convince the leaders of the need to view the world this way, then what one can do is at least try to get buy-in for a few experiments to test it out. A few small-scale pilots that won’t hurt the company if the pilots don’t prove to be successful
Jaime Colmenares – 27:57 – and if you do that, and they are successful, then at least now you have some concrete evidence to go back to your leaders and say, Hey, this is something that is worth looking at in more detail and it’s worth considering for larger experiments or retiring to implement in the whole company.
Allison Hartsoe – 28:11 – Is that the same path that you found was successful at eBay? Try some small experiments, gain the data and then convinced.
Jaime Colmenares – 28:19 – Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. It required small-scale pilots that wouldn’t hurt the company if the experiment weren’t successful and then with those first few experiments that were successful, that earned us the right to do slightly larger experiments, and now we’re running on much bigger actions.
Allison Hartsoe – 28:38 – That’s fantastic. Now Jaime and I should’ve mentioned this at the very beginning. You’re going to be on our Wall Street panel at the customer centricity conference coming up on May 17th and 18th at Borden’s campus in San Francisco, and we’re so excited to have you. I think it’s going to be looking forward to going to be a fantastic discussion.
Jaime Colmenares – 28:58 – Yep. I love the topic. As you can probably tell and I’m looking forward to.
Allison Hartsoe – 29:03 – Good now. Obviously, I think the best place to connect with you is going to be at the conference, but if someone wanted to reach you another way or ask you some follow up questions, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Jaime Colmenares – 29:15 – I’d be happy to talk to your listeners the best way to reach you and be LinkedIn or Twitter. LinkedIn. You can search by my name Jaime Colmenares or Twitter. My handle is @jcolmenaresv
Allison Hartsoe – 29:28 – Wonderful and we’ll put that up. Now. I’m going to summarize a little bit about what Jaime is covered, and there’s been a lot of really good rich stuff here, so I’ll do my best to summarize and then Jaime, you could tell me if I missed anything. So what I heard us say in the beginning first about why should I care about being product-centric versus customer-centric is really the power is in the customer’s hands. Now the information has become centralized. It organizations need to think a lot more about creating longterm customer relationships, which means switching the mindset to a, how can I be of service, how can I help my customer instead of how can I sell more product? Then second, what kind of impact can I get the best impact usually comes from, I think it’s almost starting at budget reallocation where you’re targeting around your high-quality sources. Instead of trying to focus on stopping churn, you’re really just looking at how can I get better customers in the door
Allison Hartsoe – 30:29 – and I’m not ignoring the people that I already have, so if they’re gonna leave, that’s okay, but I’m not going to spend a lot of money on them.
Jaime Colmenares – 30:36 – Absolutely.
Allison Hartsoe – 30:37 – And then third, what should I do next? Well, we’ve talked about how you can start by calculating the clv of each customer. A shameless plug, obviously we can help you do that. There is a fantastic tool name Zodiac that can help you do that. We’re going to have an upcoming session with Zodiac, or if you’ve got some really sharp data scientists like Jaime on your team, you could do it yourself and to quote another famous Portland Company here. Basically just do it. Just get started, get the information, look for their motivations, find some small pilots to help you convince your leadership and realign incentives. I mean, did I miss anything along those lines?
Jaime Colmenares – 31:16 – No. That’s a great summary. Maybe just one additional comment that might be helpful is that often all of these things we talk about in data, etc., they sound very daunting, but even a mom and pop store in the corner can do this. That’s essentially the basis of customer relationship management is if you’re a restaurant in the coroner, and you notice that there’s a customer that comes in every Thursday and every, every Thursday that customer spends $300, which is three times the amount that everybody else in and you know that that customer always likes to sit in a certain table. Just make a note of it in a little note card and do the same for all your most high-value customers and start making sure that every Thursday you reserve that table for that customer so there can be even in very low tech ways of doing this.
Allison Hartsoe – 32:03 – You know, I’m so glad you mentioned that because really that’s the charm and the heart of customer centricity is it’s taking what we might’ve thought of as 19 fifties business style where everyone knew everyone else. You automatically knew who your best customers were and you’re operating on a digital scale. It’s the same concept just brought into the 21st century.
Jaime Colmenares – 32:23 – Absolutely. That’s a perfect summary.
Allison Hartsoe – 32:25 – I mean, thank you so much for joining us today. I think the value that you’ve brought to our listeners today is just fantastic, so thank you again for being here.
Jaime Colmenares – 32:34 – Thank you. My pleasure.
Allison Hartsoe – 32:35 – Remember everyone, when you use data effectively can build customer equity. It is not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results.
Allison Hartsoe – 32:57 – Thank you for joining today’s show. This is Allison. Just a few things before you head out. Every Friday I put together a short bulleted list of three to five things I’ve seen that represent customer equity signal, not noise, and believe me, there’s a lot of noise out there. I actually call this email the signal things I include could be smart tools. I’ve run across articles, I’ve shared cool statistics or people and companies I think are doing amazing work, building customer equity. If you’d like to receive this nugget of goodness each week, you can sign up at ambitiondata.com, and you’ll get the very next one. I hope you enjoy the signal. See you next week on the Customer Equity Accelerator.