Customer Communication and the Story of Company B

Company B is a well-known brand, a company that was once feted for going from good to great but that let its customer communication strategy dissipate and has suffered greatly as a result. Most observers would agree that Company B slid from great to good a few years back and has continued to slide toward mediocrity and eventual dissolution. The CEO stepped down and his replacement is routinely lambasted on stock watch message boards for failing to right the ship. The stock price has plummeted.

From Great to Good

What did they do wrong? Did Company B put out bad products? No, their product and service quality are ranked just as high now as they ever were. What they did wrong was communicate poorly. A few years ago the company hired a CMO that read the latest books about branding and decided to embark on a single-brand strategy despite the fact that it’s customer base was a disparate collection of enterprises, corporations, small businesses, sohos and government departments, each with unique needs and requirements, each with different product lines and services targeted to them, each with a different business unit attending to those needs. The quality of none of these products and services has suffered. The rankings they get from surveys have remained high. And yet they are hemorrhaging customers.

Different Constituents Have Different Needs

By eliminating the differences in how it communicated to those many different constituencies, the company lost touch with its base. Feeling neglected, they sought alternative options and competitors thrived while Company B suffered one bad quarter after another.

Company B decided on one re-alignment after another, as if shifting businesses around would somehow create a magical synergy that would right the ship. They re-branded and came up with a corporate mantra, “We Put Customers First” but almost simultaneously drafted a mission statement that said that they would “…create shareholder and customer value…” clearly putting shareholders first and customers second.

Superficial Changes Don’t Work

They pulled the customer communicators from the various business units and called them a Corporate Center of Excellence, and hired new corporate communication people who were charged with explaining their company to an increasingly indifferent Wall Street at great cost and with an enviable budget, at the cost of communicating directly with their customers. And their customers continued to migrate to their competitors.
Company B never seemed to understand that generating customer value would in turn create shareholder value and that they had gotten the equation wrong. Company B now has a share price that is a fraction of what it once was when it moved from Good to Great.

There are many lessons to be learned from Company B, but the most important is this: Never Stop Communicating with your Customers. They want to share your glory. They want to be proud of their choice to be your customer. If you neglect them or communicate poorly the result would be the same as it would be if you delivered a bad product or service time and time again: you lose your customers and you lose your business. It’s as simple as ABC: Always Be Communicating.