Putting the customer back in focus

One of the changes that Cyberspace has brought about is building a permission asset for your organisation.

It’s the basic principle of asking for permission to approach your customer regarding future commercial opportunities.

We have all seen it before: “May we please contact you regarding the following in future:”. And then follows list with topics such as customer feedback, new product evaluations, Christmas cards, updates regarding your offering, newsletters, blogs and such.

In my opinion, there is intentional permission and circumstantial permission.

Intentional permission represents a genuinely interested customer who evaluates, gives permission and ticks relevant topics. That’s real permission that will deliver response and value.

Circumstantial permission represents the accidental or ‘yeah whatever’ customers who give permission for a variety of reasons such as being in hurry, not understanding the concept, or who just give in due to what I call ‘cyberspace peer pressure’: the fear of losing out on something if you are not in a network or on a list that your peers are or might be on.

Both permission types end up being part of your proudly constructed Permission Asset which no doubt you expect great things from. Finally you have your own tribe, as Seth Godin eloquently puts it.

So next time you get 10% response from customers in your permission asset list, don’t be disappointed. Agreed, if all customers on your asset list fall into the Intentional Permission category, your feedback is really only 10%. Not great, but still valuable to your business. A big permission asset with low response rates.

However, if only 20 out of 100 customers on your asset list fall into Intentional Permission category (the other 80 circumstantial), then suddenly you have a 50% response rate. A small permission asset with high response rates.

The way to manage this is to tailor your CRM setup such that you can capture responses from your permission asset. As a minimum you should register whether or not a response was received, what the response was and an indication of the quality of the response. Register it on the contact person (John D. who works at company X), not on your customer account (company X). It’s the human being that counts when dealing with Permission Assets.

This will help you separate the intentional from the circumstantial permissions, clean up your permission asset and approach both categories accordingly – creating the transparency you need to correctly analyse and action feedback you do receive.

More importantly, you can prevent annoying your circumstantial permission customers, and maybe convert some of them.

Ultimately, it will help you build a quality, responsive permission asset that will deliver real value to your organisation.