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Forget customer satisfaction, focus on customer delightBy Vincent Obiro Orute,.
Be on target with your marketing The essence of good customer service is good targeting. The message here is very simple "You don’t want to lavish personal attention on customers who aren’t going to reciprocate by being consistently good purchasers of your product or service". Go after consumers who appreciate the benefits offered and who show their appreciation by being willing to pay for those benefits. We should stop thinking in terms of "market share", instead, our attention should shift from "market share" to "customer share." We should also think of how much loyalty and money an individual is willing to spend on what we are selling. Which brings me to the point that, the ultimate goal of personalized marketing should be to boost "customer share" rather than "market share". Let us learn to identify "bad" customers. Customers who only buy your product when it is being sold at a discount, who otherwise buy from your competitors and who, when they do buy your product, constantly complain about it are not worth your time and attention. It’s one thing to identify a loyal customer; it’s another to cultivate that loyalty. To do that, you need to know your customers and understand them. "To win a customer, you have got to know this customer better than any competitor. Here are three tried and true ways to learn more about your customers: (i) Give your customers incentives to share information about themselves. This is what most businessmen do when faced with competition from other outlets. (ii) Talk to your customers in a meaningful way. Making chat and noise is not what I mean. I am talking about getting real feedback. Say to the customer, "Look me in the eye and tell me the truth about my products or services" such feedback, only becomes valuable when it is acted upon immediately. It should not be left in the drawer where it will gather dust. (iii) Use technology to extend your reach. An internet presence can be a powerful and multidimensional customer service tool. In addition to using the web site to elicit customer feedback, business can reach out individually using e-mail. Entrepreneurs seem to be catching on: A 2003 survey of small – business internet use by the Gallup organization found that 37% of the 20 companies surveyed in Arusha had a web site, with more than half of this internet savvy group exchanging daily e-mail with customers. The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to ensnare them in "friendly entanglements" that make switching to a competitor much more difficult. Technology makes it possible for these individual entanglements to be institutionalized across the whole of a company, no matter how many business sites it operates. There is no reason small business can’t benefit from technology as well. There is a lot of technology that is extremely affordable, and there are always ways to improve upon what you are doing. Think of who your customers are and what you need to do to reach them. In delivering the product or service that lies at the heart of the business customers relationship, small businesses are at both an advantage and disadvantage versus larger competitors. "They have more of an opportunity because they have immediate control over everything. They face more of a challenge because they lack resources needed for expansion. "They can have an idea and put it to work without it taking seven years and 42 approvals. The tremendous advantage a small business has, is that it can change the rules until it gets them right. Where employees are concerned in rendering service to customers, the best teacher is the entrepreneur’s own behavior. Being a good role model can have a significant impact. The bottom line is that good customer service is the bare minimum needed today. Customer service that is personalized and delights" your target audience will help your business thrive and see tomorrow.
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If
you think good customer service leads directly to customer satisfaction, then
you have got another thought coming. These days, attention has shifted from
" customer satisfaction" to "customer delight" customer
delight is consumer experience so personalized that an individual’s
preferences and needs are taken into account. Known variously as customer
relationship management (CRM) and one–to-one marketing, personalization is
being practiced by businesses large and small across all sectors of the economy.
For sake of explanation, a personalized approach to customer service can be
broken into three critical steps: Identifying the customer, learning about the
customer, and serving the customer.
