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The question leads to a practice I am following and knows as "Customer engagement: The Next Business Battleground to Win the Battle for Customer’s Heart & Mind". Have a read the following post I published earlier.
The passionate pursuit of customer loyalty isn’t about pricing, or perfectly performing products. It’s about gaining the love, respect, trust and commitment of the customers
For many years, companies have been focused on building customer satisfaction, trust and loyalty. While important to the organization, satisfaction is fluid in nature, meaning a customer can be satisfied today, but as a result of one bad experience, be dissatisfied tomorrow. Yet, for many firms, developing deeper levels of trust and loyalty among their employees and customers remains an elusive and perplexing process. That is because firms frequently neglect the most important ingredient: the “heart” or “emotional bond” of an organization’s most important assets with its customers. This bond, called engagement, goes beyond a single moment in time and is defined by the enduring behaviours, attitudes, and heart – an enduring emotional connection if you will – of its customers.
Engaged customers are more than satisfied and more than loyal; they are emotionally connected to you. They go out of their way to show their association with your company, they become an active promoter of your business, and support you during good and bad times. In the end, they make you more money.
The advancement of satisfaction to loyal to engaged. For example, a satisfied restaurant customer means the service and food were adequate. A loyal customer means they will come back to your restaurant sometime in the future. An engaged customer means they tell their friends about your restaurant and come back to your restaurant most every time they eat out.
When you engage your customers, you draw them closer to your brand, your business, your organization. And that’s when the magic starts to happen. Customers who are fully engaged represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, and revenue and relationship growth compared with the average customer.
Customer Engagement Best Practices That Will Dramatically Boost Your Business
Customers have a much better memory than companies do. The better you are at putting yourself in their shoes and having empathy to see what the entire customer journey looked like for them, the more successful you will be. The customer who was extremely excited and waited in line for hours to buy the new iPhone is the same person who tweets and blogs about it when it breaks. Those two moments are connected, and you must connect the dots.
Not every relationship is created equal. Some friends are great to meet up with at the bars, others are lifelong friends you keep in touch with despite differing geographies, and others simply wave when you pass by. The goal is to have the right relationship with each individual – and being able to speak to each person in a language that resonates with them. This requires becoming skilled at reading people. Figure out how to accept and improve the relationships you have, and say “no” when a customer relationship is unhealthy.
People like talking to humans, not robots. Back in the day, when we were first starting out with the company, we tried making fancy emails that were perfect and without typos. No one responded. Then we decided we would change it up a bit. We’d craft more personal and unique opening sentences. We added spelling errors. Soon, we realized that we were getting a higher response rate. Once our customers saw that there was a human being (and not a robot) writing all these responses, they were more willing to write us back and interact with us?
If you asked any customer to choose between a “bot” that worked behind some virtual customer service desk versus a real, smiling, human being, of course they would choose the latter. It is not just a “nice to have” when it comes to having a personality as a company, it is vital, when customers have so many other choices in the marketplace. Many companies don’t succeed because they forget to be human.
Companies should always encourage the employees to act like people. This means giving them the freedom and room to be who they are – listen how they would listen to a friend – or solve a problem creatively, with their special touch. Once customer get upset send them some sweets with the words “I’m Sorry” spelled out in Cream. I am sure your customer would appreciate this much more than a canned “I’m Sorry” email. Little mistakes or inefficiencies will inevitably occur when you allow people to make their own decisions, but the business can embrace these as the very things that make the business easier for customers to relate to – and ultimately, more human.
Once you lift the veil between you and your customer and they see that you are being real with them, you’d be surprised how much more empathy you will get from their end. People relate to and appreciate organizations that are open and honest. It’s not a perfect world, and sometimes you will not be able to serve up a solution on a silver platter in exactly the way they would want. Give them all the information you have – good or bad – and in a timely manner. We are up against years of people feeling like companies are not on their side and that they are out to get them with hidden fees and confusing return policies. The only way to build the kind of trust that lasts is to show your cards.
Remember the quote from Don Pepper:
“The speed of business and of technology has increased dramatically in recent years. It’s difficult for a company to maintain a marketplace lead through product innovations for long…Engagement is a much more durable asset.”
Well, this is the main question that we all the time debate how to make it better or different.
In my opinion, the most important when we are selling something (product or service) is sell "benefits" and not characteristics implied on those.
If these befits usage are well deep in clients mind, being understood, advantages recognised, for sure our work it will be easier and will give better results sooner.
Of course, first of all, we need to consider that we have a competitive product/service, with good and known differentiation terms, that there is good associated quality , competitive prices, and so on.
There are several methods that can help make it happen.
For example there is the SPIN Selling method.
This is a sales technique that divides the negotiation and the sales it self in4 processes:
S - Situation
In this stage the most important is you analyse the ambience, the financial power, the desires/needs, the purchase type and level, etc , of your buyers.
P - Problems
Recognise, analyse, identify which are the problems of your buyers; that can develop any kind of conflict or block he sales process.
I - Implications
After identifying the problems in the previous stage, the most important is to involve ourselves in the solutions demanded by your client. Show solutions for those concerns.
N - Necessities
Based on the "implications" stage, we need to identify the needs and be ready promptly to give solutions satisfying them
These four stages when well applied and controlled, and well connected between them, can generate better results in sales (and also, in my opinion, in other functional areas of a organisation).
Of course, no matter how better we can use this or other methods, our competition is also using these or other methods!
The most important, in my opinion, is conjugate the strategic mind in the several areas of the organization: Sales, Marketing, Logistic, and so on.
Be innovative, answer quickly for the market demands, be close to your clients, communicate constantly with the market/clients, offer new solutions, improve the company infrastructures, a good and performance distribution channel, constant training to the workers, usage of new communication techniques, build an realistic team according with your market, and other examples can be helpers to we be ready to face those unfair competitors.
first i will try talk to him or she,and makes her or he to calm,and then try to talk to him or her by accepting your mistake because always the client is always right.then after that accept your mistake and apologise to him or her,then u can start over and bring back her mood
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