Customers are the lifeblood of your business, so it makes sense to look after them. You already offer a great product and service and do the best you can when interacting with them, but some things still slip through the cracks. Is your customer really getting the best experience?
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You cannot start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it.” Steve Jobs, Apple. 19967
They key to Steve Jobs quote isn’t work out what product you want to sell, but work out what is it that your customers want to solve their needs.
There are always articles encouraging the adoption of a customer service mindset or being a Customer centric organisation. Commonly used are also terms like customer service, customer experience and customer engagement which have been frequently overused, losing context and meaning about how to actually interact with customers to ensure they keep coming back.
Customers expect certain things
Customers want certain things when they interact with your business. The product or service you sell needs to be suitable to meet their needs and at a price they are willing to pay. If it’s a product that you sell, then the product needs to have some specific attributes that the customer can identify how it will meet their needs. This can be achieved through providing some convenience or efficiency, price or function, or that it provides some experience that helps them.
Engagement leads to trust, Trust leads to loyalty
So what happens if you meet their needs? Is that enough? Sadly, in a lot of circumstances it’s not enough to get repeat business, and the customer still walks away dissatisfied. Why, because meeting their functional needs might not be enough to have them return, the key and sometimes sole trigger to happy customers is to remove the obstacles and reduce the amount of work they need to do to interact with your business. This can take many forms, by simplying the number of steps, improving the quality and clarity of instructions or just providing a window to the future of how you will interact and the actions that will be required of them.
Happy Customers are repeat customers
If you remove the obstacles that your customers may experience in dealing with your business, and provide them with a sense of control, empathy and fairness, you will find that your customers will become your greatest advertisement. They will happily tell their friends of their good experience and making this experience repeatable and measurable is the best way to grow your business.