In today’s competitive market place it is vital to stay close to your clients if you want to hang on to them. Customers are more knowledgeable, discerning and decisive when it comes to knowing what they want than ever before. This article explores how to win new customers and keep existing ones.
They can be loyal to you and to your competitors at the same time – perhaps maintaining preferred supplier lists that allow them to choose between a number of different providers of the same product and service. As Don Peppers and Martha Rogers say in their book Return on Customer, “customers are a company’s most scarce resource” and “companies lose value the instant a customer changes their mind about them”. Without any doubt customer retention is an area that every business ignores at their peril.
According to Tony Cram in his book The Power of Relationship Marketing the role of the company is to create a difference and convince a set of customers that this difference exists and is relevant to them. He argues that there are two areas where it is possible to differentiate. One is hard and the other soft – hard being about products and services, and soft about people. A competitor can often quickly replicate the features of a product but the quality of the relationship between a company and its clients depends on something far less tangible – its people and this is affected by the organisation’s culture and attitude to customers.
In principle the solution is simple – build a close relationship and stick with it – but getting close to customers and staying close requires effort and an ability to respond to changes in what clients want and need. Once you’ve identified a shift in customers approach or thinking you need to be prepared to change what you do and respond rapidly.
This sounds simple but often the most challenging question is “How do I keep close to what my clients really think?”. Many organisations measure customer service but few know how to predict which clients will ‘sing their praises’ and which will soon ‘walk away’. Deep insight™ provides a great way of doing just this. It is an innovative assessment tool which measures customer experience in a different way. It goes beyond traditional customer satisfaction surveys around brand quality, product benefits and service quality and measures trust and relationship commitment too.
Staying in touch with your customers will help you to retain them but the real work comes in placing the needs and concerns of your customers at the heart of everything you do. In his book Hug Your Customers, Jack Mitchell describes this approach as customer-centric. He says that most businesses pay lip service to this. They say the customer is important but their actions don’t support their professed intention. He argues that you can’t be truly customer-centric until all parts of your organisation “passionately embrace the customer”.
All of this good advice may make sense but where do you start when you have limited resources and a lot of customers to satisfy? A first step can be to find out precisely what your customers think and then identify the gap between what they want and what you deliver. The next stage is all about change and improvement. If a process is convenient for you but doesn’t work for your customers you will have to ‘bite the bullet’ and alter it. If there is a deeper issue to address you may need to transform the organisational culture by adjusting your customer strategy and re-training the workforce.
One thing is certain – he who hesitates is lost. The competition is here to stay and it requires vigilance, insight, innovation and a willingness to change to stay ahead of the game.
http://www.speak-first.com
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