Be Different or be dead

October 31, 2016

6 promising ways to genuinely appreciate your customers

Source: Unsplash

6 promising ways to genuinely appreciate your customers.

Customer Appreciation Days don’t cut it; they actually contribute very little nothing to expressing a ‘thank you’ to loyal customers for their business.

You can’t make people feel appreciated by doing an occasional tribute to their importance. And you can’t do it by holding an event; a often crowded cheesy affair with free coffee and muffins. Or by offering them good prices one day a year.

Customer appreciation should be a continuous event; making making them feel special every time they touch your organization.

These are some of the proven and practical things you can do to warm your customers’ hearts to you 365 days a year.

Assign caring employees to appreciate — Put caring people in customer contact positions.

If you’ve successfully followed my suggestion to recruit people who have a proven track record of successfully serving others, you should have a stable of terrific employees to draw on and assign to customer-facing jobs.

A customer contact employee who doesn’t like human interaction, and all the complications that arise from it, can’t appreciate them. If you don’t have employees who are born to serve, an appreciative environment can’t be created and customers will continue to receive hit-and-miss feedback.

Respect differences — Appreciate each of your customers differently because each one of them has unique appreciation wants. Applying a boilerplate approach to all assumes that everyone likes to be thanked in the same way. Not true.

Everyone is different and the challenge is to find the way they, specifically, like to be recognized for their loyalty. Many organizations use common ‘trash and trinkets’ promotional items and other gimmicks to say thank you and hand them out to everyone.

Notwithstanding the fact that some marketing ‘experts’ claim they’re effective, my experience is that they are cheap and impersonal and should be avoided in favour of a more personalized approach.

De-escalate — Organizations have systems of rules and policies to control operations and to minimize risk (at least that’s what they claim they’re for). And most are quite inflexible when it comes to permitting a frontline employee bend the rule to accommodate a specific customer need. The employee is required to escalate the matter to a supervisor who makes the call on whether or not the rule should be bent or otherwise handled.

Appreciative companies allow frontline employees to have some degree of decision making authority when it comes to such matters; referring the customer to a supervisor is not required and the employee can take care of the customer in real time.

Shock them — People have come to expect a certain level of service business generally. They know that they more often than not need a receipt to return a product and they know that some companies provide in-store credits rather than cash refunds.

This level of expectation is a great opportunity to surprise someone with an act they don’t expect. This isn’t about sending a birthday wish to someone automatically every year, it’s about doing something spontaneously in the moment that shocks them because they are expecting something quite different.

Surprising someone and delighting them with the result speaks volumes about how you really feel about and appreciate them.

Guidelines not orders — Appreciativeness is governed by how well an organization tailors itself to each of their customers; this can be a challenge when it comes to administering its internal policies and procedures which as I’ve stated numerous times are typically written from a control point of view.

The problem is, of course, that if a customer feels suffocated by a policy because it doesn’t work for them, they will not only feel unappreciated, they will be upset and might leave you for a more friendly environment.

To be more appreciative, try and lighten up on your policies and procedures; see if you can use them more as guidelines as opposed to uncompromising rules.
If you do this and allow your frontline folks the power to bend one of your policies occasionally in favour of a reasonable customer request, you’ll not only find an appreciative customer you’ll also get a more engaged employee.

Dumb rules reduce your currency with people and forces them away.

Offer deals to loyalists first — Take a page from The Grateful Dead’s playbook; offer any special promotions and deals you come up with to your loyal fans first, before the general public.

Most organizations use promotions — ‘join me and get 3 month’s free service’ — to acquire new customers by luring them away from their competition.
The problem this strategy creates is that a customer who may have been loyal for 10 years doesn’t qualify for the special deal feels unappreciated — aka is really really pissed — when they find out they can’t get it.

By all means, use promotions to attract new business, but don’t miss the opportunity to use the strategy to show your appreciation to your existing customers first.

Put your customers first if you are serious about showing them your appreciation.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.31.16 at 02:22 am by Roy Osing
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