April 9, 2009

BE DiFFERENT Practices #9 and #10 - Renew your Organization

BE DiFFERENT Practice #9 - Dazzle your customers

Just as it is essential to Customerize your marketing efforts, the need to enhance the customer experience is equally essential in cutting through the competitive clutter to attract and hold loyal customers.

First of all, change your orientation to reflect a concerted focus on customer service. If you service customers, change your attitude to serving them. Accepting that customers are in the control position is healthy and naturally orients you to the ‘survival’ position.

On the other hand, continuing to service customers with policies that you have developed to serve the organization will hasten your demise. Each customer is an individual; no two are alike (if you don’t believe this, you haven’t looked closely enough).

It then follows that you need to vary the way you serve each one - serving them all in the same way and the level of customer satisfaction will vary; serving each one in a different special way and customer satisfaction will reach dazzling levels.

There are four BE DiFFERENT ways to create a dazzling customer experience:

- hire human being ‘lovers’ in frontline positions: people that don’t like humans can’t dazzle anyone!
- allow people to bend your internal rules on the customer’s behalf: enforcing internal rules will enrage customers
- kill ‘dumb rules’: get rid of policies that don’t make sense to customers
- create a service recovery culture: fix it and do the unexpected is the major source of customer loyalty

If you are dazzling customers they will have no reason to leave you for another offer. If you’re not, they will leave you in a heartbeat—especially in a down economy.

BE DiFFERENT Practice #10 - Sell Intimate Relationships, Don’t Flog Products

The one thing you don’t want to do when times are tough is decrease the amount of time you invest in preserving strong relationships with the customers you have decided to serve.

Flogging products make you like everyone else and eventually reduces to a price game where customers win (but will go elsewhere for even lower prices) but you don’t. Not Fair!

In combination with the other BE DiFFERENT practices we have discussed here, ensure you deepen the relationships with your customers: help solve their problems, create unique solutions for them, be available 24/7 to help, follow up constantly with them, show then that you honestly care about their issues and be a partner to them, not a supplier. Return on this investment is huge!

Oh, and will you generate revenue as a result?

How many times have you personally rewarded a company for their caring attitude, superb problem solving and high quality solution by buying something from them? I rest my case.

There you have it: Ten BE DiFFERENT practices that will definitely not only help you successfully meet challenging economic times, they will also put your organization on a growth trajectory for long term success.
Stay tuned for more.

Cheers, Roy Osing

Blogs in the BE DiFFERENT Practice Series:
Introduction
Practice #1 - Renew your Strategy
Practices #2, #3 and #4 - Focus, Modify Business Processes and Cut the Crap
Practices #5 and #6 - Be Anal about Execution and Set Cost Objectives
Practices #7 and #8 - Plan on the Run and Customerize your Marketing
Practices #9 and #10 - Dazzle your Customers and Sell Intimate Relationships

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Posted 4.9.09 at 05:15 pm by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment