Product Love Podcast: Chip Bell, Author of Inside Your Customer’s Imagination

On this week’s episode of Product Love, I sat down with Chip Bell, author of Inside Your Customer’s Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions. Chip has been a customer service consultant at several impressive companies such as like DHL, Marriott, and McDonalds where he’s helped them with their product strategy.

On this episode, we talked about value unique. His interest in areas around innovative service, which differentiates from value added. It’s centered around creating customer experiences that reflect on ingenuity, creativity, and creating a story that they’re eager to share.

Every company on the planet knows they’re supposed to add value and reward customers for being loyal. Classic examples include being upgraded to a nicer room if you’ve been a loyal customer to a hotel chain. To Chip, that’s just value added. There’s nothing unique about that, especially since the expectations of the customer will continue to grow.

He focuses on making that value unique. It’s about creating a special experience that has an element of surprise. Chip goes on to share how the pinnacle of customer loyalty is advocacy reflected as a story, not as a recommendation. So, his philosophy is to create stories that customers are excited to share. We all know stories that, “You aren’t going to believe what happened to me…” are always the ones worth listening to.

Check out the episode below to learn how to create these stories for your product.