How To WOW Your Customers

Do you “wow” your customers every time they deal with you? Customer retention is vital to the growth of any business and customer retention is based upon positive experiences with your company. So how do you manufacture these positive experiences with your customers and use them to grow even beyond what retention brings? The answer to that is the successful implementation of Customer Touch Strategies.

Customer touch is the systematic events your company does when interacting with customers. They are the thousands of little things you do that make dealing with your company different from any other company. They include all points where your company touches the customer: anything the customer hears, sees, feels, reads, smells or touches. They include your lobby, the coffee you serve, your marketing materials, phone conversations, e-mails, product displays, sales people’s appearances, etc.

Customer satisfactions are derived from the outcomes and the process of dealing with your company.

In Customer Touch Strategies, the key to realizing the complete lifetime value of a customer is to enhance the experiences between your company and the customer through a customer development process that turns customers into advocates for you.

Moments of Truth
How do you manufacture Advocate Customers? The answer to that question comes by answering another question. Why do customers leave? The answer for 68 percent of companies is “Perceived Indifference.” They don’t feel that they are important or treated the way they expect to be treated. Therefore, to manufacture advocates you need to wow them!

Focus on the business activities that directly touch good customers. These are Moments of Truth. Use them to exceed their expectations, differentiate your firm, reaffirm why they buy from you and make the customer feel important. The problem is that you do not know the standards or expectations that you must meet. Your customer’s expectations for quality customer service may be set based on their experience with other industries or businesses.

Whether we admit it or not, all firms are compared to companies like the Ritz Carlton, Walt Disney and Federal Express. These organizations and others continually set and raise the performance bar for customer service. Your challenge is two-fold:

1. You must understand the expectations of the client, and
2. You must manage and balance those expectations against what you can deliver.

To make matters worse, each client has different expectations and those expectations are changing all the time. If your strategy is to be the low cost provider, you may need only meet minimum expectations. If you want to differentiate yourself as a premium provider you must exceed expectations.

• Invite complaints
• Interview front-line, customer-facing personnel
• Interview lost customers
• Interview lost prospect customers
• Use customer advisory boards
• Listen to comments in social networks
• Survey customers with blank spaces for writing comments
• Ask for testimonials indicating what you did to exceed expectations

Once you understand the Customer Expectation gap, you can work on closing it.

The marketing objective here is to develop a “way of doing business that retains customers and provides so high or unexpected value that a prospective customer will leave a modestly satisfactory relationship with another company to get it.

Many companies, in an effort to keep costs down, spend minimally in customer service. The problem is that the cost of high quality customer service is tangible, but the cost of going the extra mile is intangible. What you can’t see doesn’t hurt, right? Wrong. While profitability is the consequence of high productivity and cost containment, real gains in profit growth over time is only achieved by focusing on attracting and retaining customers.

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