Success in the current marketplace involves connecting with customers. This new connection economy begins with understanding who your customers are and what they are looking to achieve. Developing a superb value proposition and creating innovative methods of expressing your company values and delivering value proposition is key to building sustainable relationships with loyal customers.
In this article, we take a look at how to connect with customers and how to understand the connection that they should have with your goals.
Customer goals defined
You should have some specific goals in place that outlines exactly what a happy customer looks like. By understanding your customers, you can then create a 100% satisfaction guarantee model that means you don’t have to keep selling to customers because they keep coming back. Excellence involves meeting the needs of every single customer in a timely fashion. Your customer shouldn’t be left waiting and shouldn’t feel like they could’ve received more from your service.
Know your customers
You need to understand exactly who your customers are in order to set your goals and set your parameters for success. You can find out more about their income, hobbies and interests, pain points, what they’re looking for, shopping patterns and demographics. Armed with this information, you can target customers at the right times, with the right information and materials, and you can provide solutions that will actually help them.
At no point providing solutions to customers that you don’t attract and not being able to help those that you do, you need to make sure the full lifecycle of your customer fulfilment process is geared towards the people you actually attract, and that goes back to understanding who they are and why they are engaging with you.
Superb customer service
You need amazing customer service at every touchpoint to ensure loyalty is fostered. You must meet the needs in every possible way, and if you can’t, you need to explain why and provide them with action points to find what they want. Customer service has and always will be focused on going the extra mile and guaranteeing satisfaction. This means pleasant customer interaction experiences and that issues are resolved as fast as humanly possible (and by robots, if appropriate in your industry). Customer service should be at the centre of what you do even though we live in a digital age.
Solving customer problems
Everything should be around solving problems customers have for the products and services that you provide and addressing any concerns the customers have after the sale has been made and create a win-win situation. This means understanding the customer’s problems and how you are adding value to your proposition.
You need to listen to customers on the social media, on the phone when you’re talking to them, and to incentivise surveys, if relevant, so that you can gain more meaningful information.
Spend more time on improvement, and you will have fewer complaints and higher levels of satisfaction – even if you have to refund customers to please them when they do not get satisfaction from your product and services. Of course, this may mean making some loss, but in most cases, your business insurance should safeguard against such business losses.
Measure how satisfied customers are
Repeated studies have shown that over 90% of unhappy customers never come back. By having metrics that measure customer satisfaction you can ensure that you are ahead of the curve solving problems before they become dissatisfied customers.
You can use online surveys, or you could just ask customers how happy they were with the service they received. Perhaps the biggest way of measuring customer satisfaction is how many people are coming back for more products or services. If people are not coming back and your surveys are saying they happy, then you need to work out what is going on.
Create emotional connections with your customers
We live in an era of a very tech-savvy and informed online marketplace, and so you need to be able to create emotional connections with customers for your products with great customer service and user experience on your social media account and business website. You will likely experience a boost in revenue if you can connect with them emotionally around their wants and desires by creating a brand image that they find appealing.
Final thoughts
You should always make sure that your customers are at the heart of your business as they are the lifeblood of your sales. You need to go the extra mile in your customer service, but, first of all, you have to develop a whole culture around understanding and to service your customers. The old adage of putting your customers first really does work, and probably never more so than in the digital age in which we live.
Use all of the data metrics that you have at your disposal and talk to your customers to gain more information. Then build your strategies and implement plans based on the information that is most poignant and point you in the direction of success.
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Interesting article, related to this theme: “What is customer service?”