“Don’t find customers for your product. Find products for your customers.” – Seth Godin
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Chances are good that you have seen an invitation to CaringBridge from friend or family member who was experiencing what they call a “health journey,” whether that was a difficult pregnancy, a cancer diagnosis, or an accident. Since it’s founding in 1997, over 740,000 websites have been created across 235 countries and territories globally. From its humble beginnings, it has lived at the intersection of technology, community, and medical incidences, when the founder Sona Mehringwas asked to update people on the status of her friend’s premature baby. “Instead of making dozens of emotional and time-consuming phone calls, she decided to use her computer science background to create a website,” recalled Brigid Bonner, chief experience officer of CaringBridge responsible for all aspects of product development and marketing. The child only lives a few short days, but left a legacy known as CaringBridge to help other families and friends in similiar situations.
This non-profit organization has lessons for other marketers, especially those who have customers experiencing trauma or stress.
Everyone is Battling Something, Be Kind
We have all seen this phrase on bumper stickers or on social media memes, but it is especially true for CaringBridge. “Our customer is anyone, whether it be the patient or their caregiver, who is experiencing a health journey,” said Bonner. This diverse set of constituents can be challenging. “Our service helps anyone, anywhere going through any type of illness or injury - mental or physical, long-term or short term – who needs to connect with their family and friends and receive support.”
Roughly 90% of the several hundred thousand daily visitors to CaringBridge come to visit a friends’ site. “Users tell us, and research has proven, that the value created for both authors and visitors connected to each other through CaringBridge is therapeutic and immeasurable,” reported Bonner. The site has demonstrated that by connecting us at a human level, caring can go viral.
Advice you can use: “As families and friends increasingly live in far-flung places, and with our increased reliance on technology to connect us, CaringBridge is a revolutionary leader in filling a need through the power of community,” said Bonner. Everyone can use community and the more than your offering and customer experience replicates this kind of care, the more it will be shared.
Community Can Be Capital
“Ninety percent of all funding comes from those who have experienced the power of CaringBridge firsthand,” Bonner stated. For people at their most vulnerable time, “a CaringBridge site is literally a sanctuary of communication and helpful support that afford users with privacy controls which determine how, when, and to whom their information is shared, if at all.” Choosing this business model allows them to remain a free platform and to be advertisement-free, which they feel critical for building trust and a great user experience.
Advice you can use: People will support causes, tools, and approaches that make their lives easier. There are a number of different business models that might apply to your organization and that could have been considered by CaringBridge. Finding the one that best serves the mission, honors the customers, and serves the financial needs of the business is critical.
Customer Experience is Everything
“Convenience, control, safety, and trust is at the center of how we design our user experience,” continued Bonner. “Health journeys can cause a huge upheaval in the lives of individuals and their loved ones and the last thing they need is a stressful experience. Coming to terms with the life change they are going through, and the often confusing medical and financial jargon that comes with it is challenging.” At a time when people are reeling from bad news and learning new vocabulary, they don’t want to have to learn a new technology. Setting up a new website in less than 3 minutes, without automatic selections or complicated choices, is critical to making the CaringBridge experience work, without sacrificing privacy and control.
As you might imagine, CaringBridge cares a lot about privacy. Although everything is self-reported, the information that authors are trusting to the organization and the friends they invite to read it is incredibly sensitive. There are multiple privacy features that allow the content to be as private or public as the author wants. They can track visitors, decide the level of interaction they want, and they can change the setting at any time.
Advice you can use: Life is stressful enough, your user experience shouldn’t be. CaringBridge user survey feedback, usability labs, and user testing to refine their experience. Knowing your customers well is the key to simplifying the experience.
The Experience Extends
I recently had an experience where a contact of mine was mentioned for work anniversary in an email from a shared social media platform, when in fact he had died a few years ago. It made me sad and caused me to think about the implications of death in our digital world. Bonner agreed that the remembering or celebrating of “milestones can be delicate, especially for those who may have been in an end of life journey.” As a result, they do not auto-trigger messages on key dates, however, they do let the author (who is in many cases the caregiver of a loved one) determine was those “milestone moments” are and it is their journaling activity that triggers notifications to family and friends. “In this way, we know there is always a substantive update, and the CaringBridge community is still there to offer love and support. Some authors will continue to journal for months or even years after a loved one has passed.” In this way, the experience is extended in duration, along an axis of time.
And the extension of services and care also add breadth to the offering in the midst of the health journey. CaringBridge has a “Ways to Help” area that users can use to coordinate the myriad of other types of help they may need in one convenient place. For example, “users can set up a planner to arrange visit schedules or request meals. They can indicate which medical facility their loved one is in. They can also connect or start a GoFundMe campaign straight through their CaringBridge site for cases where personal financial support is needed to offset medical expenses.” It is this expansion of services that make it
Advice you can use: The community that arises around an experience can extend both in breadth and duration and is powerful. This has implications for other industries or services who can be challenged to think beyond their immediate product adoption or use cycle to extend to other offerings and services.
This article was originally posted on Forbes.com
It’s the holiday season and in the final countdown, it seems everyone is a customer. But in the world of business-to-business commerce, the basic question is oft debated in board rooms and strategy meetings: who is our customer?
I often jokingly respond that the right answer to “who is our customer?” is “yes.” Especially if you sell complex solutions or through channel partners. But who’s voice is loudest in your “voice of the customer” that speaks into your offerings and strategies?
Seems simple enough, but for those of us who sell through channel partners or distributors or have products used by different people than those who buy, it can be a tricky question which requires a nuanced and highly strategic answer. For instance, who is the “customer” of a diagnostic display used to detect cancer? The hospital CIO or the radiologist who uses it every day or the patient who benefits from the early diagnosis. Who is the “customer” of a publisher of a complex enterprise software tool that sell through consultants who add necessary professional services to provide a solution to the companies they find, cultivate, and service? Who is the “customer” of a lighting company who is marketed by independent reps, specified by architects, purchased through distribution by contractors, programmed by lighting designers, and maintained by corporate facilities departments or property managers? Or what about advertising-based models, where the “customer” (who is paying for advertising) and the “user” (who would really rather not have ads) are inherently at odds. The definitions of a customer can be dizzying.
And adding to this confusion is changing market dynamics in many industries. Management consultants will want to analyze profit pools to make channel optimization recommendations, all the while experienced sales people appreciate the loyalty of existing partners while market disrupters disintermediate channels using technology. Integrators, resellers, and dealers are consolidating in many markets. And manufacturers and service providers are left wondering whether their routes to market are efficient enough and capable of serving the needs of the end users effectively. And for strategic reasons, you must be informed by the past, but look to the future.
When you are start into a “who is my customer?” conversation, which can devolve into academic exercises and tribal territory defensiveness, here are three questions that should be asked to provide actionable clarity.
1. Who sees the most value in our offering?
No matter where you are in the supply chain, there is someone out there that appreciates the value that you are producing between your “raw materials” and “finished goods.” So, who best appreciates what your product or services do and sees the productivity improvements, cost savings, or other tangible or intangible benefits of your offering? This may or may not be the entity with whom you are directly transacting. It is often likely to be a specifier or end user, but it could be a channel partner who sees your offering as part of their solution and ability to differentiate against their competition. The answer to this question has huge implications on product management, pricing strategies, and overall business approach. If the people that see the most value, are not in a position to pay for it, then it is difficult to monetize the differentiation you have built into your offering. And, of course, your offering today might not be what you are bring to market in the future and this discussion about who values and can afford the differentiation you are offering is a good input into your product roadmap.
I have lead products whose primary value proposition was to help integrator partners generate more profit with easier installation and easier service features. End users of the system didn’t necessarily have visibility to these features and were not willing to pay more, but the resellers and installers preferred the product strongly and were able to shape demand effectively and maintain a price premium. In other businesses, the value propositions are for the end user, and the channels are just there to fulfill demand created directly by the brand and help the brand influence at the point of purchase.
2. Who best represents independent demand for our offerings?
One of the arguments for supporting channel partners is that they have customer relationships and can influence transactions to the point that they are essentially a customer and can take their business (or more precisely, the business of their captive customers) virtually anywhere they want. When Costco decides that they will only accept American Express, Visa and MasterCard are locked out and Costco members sign up for American Express credit cards. When Dell selects TechData for a multi-year distribution contract, Dell’s customers don’t know or care where their computer peripherals are being sourced. So, if you are PC peripheral brand who sells through distribution, who is your customer? In contract, when a homeowner calls their trusted “AV guy” to set up a home theater, they expect to hear recommendations and purchase product, even from brands they have never seen advertised. And when demand generation budgets are tight, it is very tempting to leverage channels (which you can pay in margin) to build demand that you otherwise can’t afford to cultivate on your own. Some channels are great at creating and shaping demand and others are best at fulfilling demand created by brands or manufacturers.
I have seen incredible wealth created in partnership with channels who can create category and build demand. And I have seen other channels that can’t create demand on their own at all. Depending on your industry and the level of commodification, there may not independent demand represented by your channel partners, in which case you are not selling “to” channels as much as you are selling “through.” This question has huge implications on how demand generation money is invested.
3. Do we transact with the most efficient partners to fulfill the demand?
During the consumer-driven holiday season, the challenges of the “who is my customer” question is well illustrated. In this season, we are consumers, but we are gift givers. We are transacting for others. Purchasing gifts that we might not have specified nor will we use. Your 80-year-old grandmother might not be the best prospect to put on the mailing list of a skateboard shop, even though that is where she purchased a gift for her grandson this year. Even though she technically was the one writing the check. Gift givers are like the purchasing department at a company, who might be listed in the manufacturer’s database as the customer, but in fact, are not actual customers. Or like the role of a reseller or dealer who may just be taking orders and don’t have a real ability to make product recommendations or command any customer loyalty. They might not represent independent demand. They might just be an intermediary. And as an intermediary are they effectively and efficiently playing their role in the value chain? Are you paying a reseller a large margin percentage to transact orders you have cultivated yourself? Are you absorbing service costs because your channel can not service their customers effectively?
These questions might lead you to answer the “who is my customer?” question with more purpose and confidence. The answer might not just be “yes” (ie, end users, channel partners, specifiers, influencers are all my customers), but it might be “no” (that we need to focus on just one or two of these groups to have the maximum impact). In fact, the real test of strategy is what you are saying “no” to and narrowing the voice of the customer and your definition of who you serve is a great place to start.
These are just a few of the questions that I have found most insightful when discussing channel strategies and customer experience approaches. I would love to hear your ideas as well, so leave a comment or engage on my blog (www.atjenniferdavis.com) to continue the discussion. I wish you all a warm and wonderful holiday season!
Cover image is a parody of “Are You My Mother?” book, a classic children's book by PD Eastman.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.