Learn to Listen to Your Customers
Your Customer will Tell You Everything you need to Know
Overview:
We all know that the reason for being in business is to make a profit. Some of us know that to do that,
you have to make having profitable customers who stay with you a long time the main thing today. But how do you do that? What do you have to do to persuade your customers to:
a). - Do business with you rather than your competitor?
b). - Pay you the price you’re asking?
c). - Want to come back again and again?
d). - Tell everyone else how great you are?
The answer is easy – so easy in fact that it’s almost like cheating.
All you have to do is listen to your customers. They will tell you everything you need to do to succeed. You just have to:
1. Turn staff into customer advocates. - Every day, customers tell your staff useful things about their needs and how they like the way you run your business. They make compliments about things they like. They complain about things that go wrong. They make suggestions for how things could be done better. And they ask questions about things they don’t understand.
2. Capture and use the information customers volunteer. - Encouraging your staff to be advocates for your customers is just the first step. If you’re really serious about learning from your customers you will:
a). - Make it easy for them to talk to you
b). - Set up a process to make sure they are heard.
c). - Learn from what they are telling you.
d). - Act on what you’ve learned.
3. Systematically learn. - You don’t have to wait for your customers to tell you things. You could ask them.
4. Bring customers into the workplace. - The only way that employees working behind the scenes are going to be able to put themselves in their customers’ shoes is if they see customers occasionally. Therefore, one of the key tasks of a manager is to bring the world of the customer into the workplace. And one of the best ways of doing that is to invite customers to come and talk to staff on as regular basis.
5. Find out how you’re doing. - Some companies do spend large sums of money on customer satisfaction surveys but these results are often of questionable value. Most people don’t put a lot of effort into answering such surveys and in any case, even satisfied customers defect so knowing that you have satisfied customers may lull you into a sense of false security.
6. Learn about their business. - We all think that building relationships with customers is important. And it is but only if (a) having a relationship with you makes it easier for your customer to do business with you and (b) you use that relationship to learn more about your customers.
In this competitive market, it is not enough to service your customers, or even to satisfy them. You must aim to make your customers successful. But it is very hard to make your customers successful unless you understand what they are trying to do. In other words, you need to understand your customer’s business.
7. Find out what your customers value. - Business is the activity of creating value. Therefore, those who understand what their customers value will proper and those who do not will fall by the wayside.
Value is not what people want or even what they expect. Value is what people are prepared to pay for. Most companies do not understand what their customers are prepared for. They do research to find out what customers would like, and then often they are astounded to find that customers are not prepared to pay for these things when the company provides them.
Read the full article at: ianbrooks
Patty Block, President and Founder of The Block Group, established her company to advocate for women-owned businesses, helping them position their companies for strategic growth. Charting the course for impactful, sustainable, profitable businesses, the beacon is control: of your strategic direction, your money, your time, your staffing, and your ability to bring in business. The Block Group brings together the people, resources and ideas that build results.
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