How to Make Customers Feel Valuable - Essay Example

HOW TO WIN CUSTOMERS” Abstract: Businesses today are getting more competitive, daring, innovative and sometimes surprisingly unaware of the people’s needs. They instead focus on wants which can dissolve the standard of providing quality product and diminished good customer service. Losing grounds with the customer is the most terrible thing that could happen in a business. What is more intriguing is losing the interest of those who receive bad information about your trade. There are always 2 factors in having a good business. First is getting customers to buy your product or services considering the varieties of cheaper products in the market today, and second is keeping customer’s loyalty so they stick to your product. How to neutralize negative attitudes of the people is also considered one of the hardest aspects in keeping a business. Probably losing credibility as a trader will provide you lessons to ponder so you can amend ways to improve your products or change your style towards providing quality customer service to customers. In this paper, we will discuss ways and means, methods and styles and even innovations to gain customers’ interest and put you in the proper business. Not with compromising your livelihood. Perhaps having a business is the most natural way of knowing different people – their interest, background, aspiration, preference, likes and dislikes and even predicting their needs which when summed up together will make up a single word, customer. It is not just earning the bucks in a business. It is earning people’s trust, sympathy and satisfaction to your product or services. If you have that, you are doing some great business there. Change the way people see your product and you will be fine. Change their attitude to believe in your enterprise would be most beneficial. It is hard fact but it is real and you have to follow the rules of a good merchant. Here we gather some information from different sources as to where, when and how to deal with potential and old customers, gaining their loyalty, winning them back and probably changing the attitudes of the people towards you and your product in a positive way. To get a more positive evaluation of how certain products can insulate itself from bad publicity and attitude by the consumers, a research was made based from attitude challenge matching and consumer alignment and judgment. Incorporating the research based from these factors, the authors found out how enterprises can protect themselves from bad publicity and how clients can identify brands per se according to the publicity. The result of the study stated that brands which are already popular and have large followers tend to deflect any bad publicity in the market while unpopular brands are more prone and easily affected by bad publicity (Pullig et al., 2006). This is now putting more challenges to the new businessmen. As a neophyte businessman, if somebody wants to do business with you but is hesitant and uncomfortable, have the courage to ask them what would make them comfortable with you. You must understand their hesitations because not just money is involved here but their families, lifestyle, livelihood, recreation and personal interest. You can make amendments according to how they want to transact with you and do business. Their trust and confidence is most needed and your new business is depended on them. Try to get feedbacks from them as well as from your new prospects (Needleman, 2007) To negate people’s attitudes on certain products, most successful business styles are broadening their selection of the products to have a narrow focus for the costumers. The product would be lesser but more concentrated with usefulness and dependability. This is one way of how other marketers do to engage in opportunities and deepen relationships with the loyal and stable customers before they target other new customers (Markey et al., 2007). But how do you improve your product to get back old customers and increase attention to potential customers? Attractive but useful product designs and quality is considered one of the best solutions to this. Customers who are used to your product tend to expect more as time passes. This is following the trend in the business. Well designed products are earning high quality standards and are always on demand on the market. Small and new enterprises must greatly consider this option. If we are going to put the best assets of a product it must pass over the average on its - 1) functionality; b) aesthetic appeal; 3) easy to produce; 4) high safety standard; 5) Product performance; and 6) Perfect quality appearance (Kakkad, 2005). There are different kinds of customers and each customer has his own preference over the other customer. A customer can be defined as anybody who receives that which is produced by an individual or group and that has value. And customers vying for products or good services are astoundingly increasing. There is hardly any more brand loyalty today because of the competition that has infiltrated the market because people now have so many choices. It is not necessary that a product must be rated to assume its quality but only what people think its functionality. An excellent customer service will result in better customer retention and bring back more profits. Still, the loyalty of customer is a major contributor for the growth of profit. To attain success in a customer service oriented business you must provide full satisfaction to your clients. A good customer service can be identified first with the employee’s satisfaction with their job, customer satisfaction and loyalty and growth of the company. If these are all link together then a company is bound to last long. Unfortunately, mature companies still get lost with their customer-service oriented policy. They sometimes lost their focus on their customer’s needs and only watch for their performance and their competitor’s. When these companies cannot have their chance to reassess and reorganize themselves, this attitude can create opportunities for young, smaller companies to copy and innovate from them and steal loyal customers from these mature companies. The main objective of a business is to make profit by keeping customers patronizing your products and services. If a business creates a trend and costumers are kept intact this means profit and the business will thrive further. But for any reason it did not attract clients it will have losses and eventual bankruptcy (Tracy, 2007). Whatever product or company you are involved with, there should always be employee-customer interaction to enhance customers’ attitudes towards you and your goods. For example if you are on a service business, you have to provide your customer what is due to your customer. You also have to take information from them, ask them what they prefer and deliver services precisely Friendliness that emanates from every employee is being felt by the customers. In effect, the customer treats you with same respect and courtesy. There is nothing like building relationship with the customers. As you, the provider of customer service must always ask the customer their needs and provide assistance to enhance the value of your service. In other words, the company must be aware of the customer’s personal choice. This could be done by the front-line employees. Development of front-line employees in terms of providing excellent customer service will further strengthen the interaction of business to people and people to business enterprise (Coffman and Gonzalez-Molina, 2002) Research and theories were already made with regards with predicting customer loyalty. A survey of 324 respondents who were patronizing several outlets were all interviewed to gather the result. The result shows that customer service is given more importance than the value of the product in predicting customer loyalty. The study also shows that female customers and respondents who are earning higher income are more particular with good customer service (Leung et al., 1998). How to make customers feel valuable? Take note of the following: 1. Encourage Face-to-Face Dealings – meeting customers face to face may seem to be scary because you can expect lots of complaints. But experience tell us that it is rather motivational for the company and the client to work better if they discuss matters up front to be able to know the expectations of the customers. 2. Respond to Messages Promptly & Keep Your Clients Informed – even it eats lots of your time to type and wait for responses which is annoying, enough time must be given to provide the customer with what they want from you through correspondence. 3. Be Friendly and Approachable – people who answer telephone calls for complaints or inquiries could easily tell how angry or happy the person is on the other line. It is just too important to remain calm to neutralize an angry client. Listen and understand the situation, remain courteous and make the client feel important. Do any possible thing to help that person. 4. Have a Clearly-Defined Customer Service Policy – make sure your customer could connect to you if there is a problem that must be resolved. You don’t need to pass the client from person to person or wonder whom to pass the complaints. Have a definite customer service policy and quickly attend to it. Training is necessary with this situation. 5. Attention to Detail – your customers are your best assets in a business so pay attention to their details. Sending a happy birthday through email or even calling them on a telephone won’t hurt and it will show that you care and value them. 6. Anticipating the needs of your clients and do something to give a hand – give your customers simple things which they can be of great use. Here, you are trying to show your appreciation to them. This way you are trying to build friendship and loyalty. 7. Honour Your Promises – this may be the most significant point in the business, precise delivery. Pay attention to project delivery dates because clients hate it when their expectations fall short because of your tardiness. Opportunities are missed even for a few minutes late. If there is the possibility of late delivery, call the client beforehand and ask for apology. But promise to deliver the goods in an agreed time with few refunds. This would show how sincere you are in providing good service to them (Thompson, 2002). But what about customer dissatisfaction? Corporations from every sector spend lots of money in an attempt to improve customer service. Training programs and seminars are of no contribution to enhance improvement in customer service. So what do they really need to improve their customer service? Empathy. If only the employees will be properly trained to empathize with the customers and given the authority to act in their behalf during complaints, customer dissatisfaction could be avoided or gradually reduced. Customers only wanted to be treated as a valued customer. Though most customers have more than enough patience, they can have a long memory of poor customer service from you. What is the remedy with it? Proper customer service is easy to provide. Train your employees on how to understand the customer’s feelings when things messed up with your product or service. Teach them to empathize as they are also customers. Then take the training further. How? Empower your employee to make decisions when there is no supervisor or management to help. The main point here is building customer loyalty (Frances, 2006). Why do we have to measure customer dissatisfaction? There is a saying on business that if you want to have success, you must ’’focus on the negative with the purpose of arriving at the positive ‘’ If we can evaluate customer satisfaction scores and invert it, we can find what percent of customers are dissatisfied with the service they receive. This represents a way to develop the overall experience for our customers. According to the statistics on customer satisfaction if a customer is happy with the service he would tell it to three other people. If he is unhappy he would tell to nine other people. And if he was really unhappy and left, the company should spend much as twice to get another customer just like the unsatisfied customer. In this manner you are not only throwing your potential profits from your previous customers but also with potential customers as well. So this means that customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction corresponds to customer’s attitude toward your product or service. A customer’s agitation with your service can have a great impact with every business. Therefore, it should always be understood why a customer is unhappy and as a part of the company you have to do drastic changes to improve the outlook of your business. Even if you belong to Fortune 500 Company or just a small enterprise, you have to look at the dissatisfaction of the customers in many ways. Here are the seven steps to check: 1. Improvement thru Identifying Opportunities - know your customers view with your business. Try to become a customer yourself, shop for any product/services, etc. Identify each events that make it up with your experience. 2. Directly Validate Information - conduct preliminary qualitative research. This research are in several forms like customer surveys or interviews, people on sales, onsite or online, with paper forms or by calling them. Ask the people what good points about your product and what specific thing that they are dissatisfied with it. 3. Make a List - based from your gathered information, make a list of the customer’s main points. Include both positive and negative points towards each customer’s experience. A survey form could help you with this. 4. Make a Quantitative Research - conduct quantitative research to know how customers rate you. Let customers grade their satisfaction level with each statement. Again, ask open-ended questions in your customer surveys to acquire detailed accounts of their experiences and also be able to discover new problems that were not involved during your preliminary research. 5. Make an Analysis of the Results - when results are tabulated, analyze them such as focusing on the percent favorable. Or look at the Distribution of Negative Responses (DONR) for every item. Then choose which must be prioritized. Using inferential statistics analyses if used together with the identified problems can easily spot the main problem. 6. Implement Organizational Change - when top categories are identified, plan an internal action with planning teams to solve these issues. Find solutions with these problems and discuss improvement. If there is a need for change make sure those changes have positive impact on the customers. The team should be heard of any solution as well as listening to their experience. The main idea here is to eliminate customer dissatisfaction. 7. Continue to Check the Pulse - after identifying customer dissatisfaction and made a plan, make another survey incorporating your added improvement with the questions. Are they enough to provide satisfaction if these will be implemented? Always validate. This is not a simple process. But many companies in America are discovering that knowing the negative attitude of the customers and potential customers are an efficient way to provide satisfaction to the customer. If you can provide satisfaction to a customer, you are not only making a single loyal customer in the process but a person who will be a secret asset to your company (NBRI, 2007) According to survey of 1000 customers, the companies do not understand the magnitude or the power of referrals or negative referrals. The company does not know that almost 14 percent of their revenue is at risk as a result of poor customer service. The reason was when customers experience an inappropriate challenge while trying to purchase a product they would say they won’t be coming back in that place again and they don’t. To be specific, the most frequent problems that deals with a bad customer service was having to wait in line for so long, problems with parking, waiting for the staff to help to find a product, etc. Some companies defended themselves saying such experience with customers is sometimes unavoidable because of valid reasons. They are cutting back on expenses because of the volume of commodities flooding the market with cheaper goods and sold on the streets. As a result they lose personnel which are really needed for the job. Customer service is the first to suffer. Customers according to the survey don’t usually complain because accordingly there is nobody to complain to. What they do is just leave and look for other place to do business. Thus, the need for a major attitude adjustment with business organizations especially the frontline employees is a must. As an enterprise, you should reduce the possible problems that your costumer might have. Encourage them to contact you given any problem. Set a clear channel between you and them and establish rapport. Listen and ask then provide options for the solution (Johnson, 2007) There are approaches to model the impact of emotions on satisfaction and subsequent customer’s behaviors. Based from sampling of 900 customers, it was found out that emotions have a direct impact on the behavior and stress of the customer which is what we simply call dissatisfaction. High emotions and regrets beget dissatisfaction (Zeelenberg and Pieters, 2002) Now that we are in the internet business, the global trade and the digital economy, any knowledge with this technology is an advantage and can support a company in innovating products and making critical management strategies. Product development must connect to technological competence such as engineering and its process to meet the customer’s needs and secure market acceptance. To tackle the significance of the customer’s needs in product development there must be an important task of conducting an online survey to possible knowledge into explicit knowledge. This means that the need for a survey using online services could be a great factor in innovating products that are already known globally. Examples of these are appliances, gadgets, computer hardware, and other modern equipments and tools (Su et al., 2005). MARKET RESEARCH As a market manager you must know the market of your product as well as be particular with what your customer needs. Knowing also who will be your competitor, the kinds of service they provide and how their product is different from your product could really help in determining your status as a competitor. There are always facts and figures that have to be considered why their product is being patronized and have a good market value. All of this can be done if you religiously conduct a market research. Market research can be defined as gathering information of people, their organizations and the study of the information from a business point of view. You can now monitor yours and their position in the existing market and find an entrance to the right direction. Research is used to evaluate the degree of wants and needs of a potential customer. Just remember that needs and wants are different on a certain level. Usually the levels of needs are low which are considered basic such as food, shelter, drinks and safetiness. The high levels of needs are satisfaction, status and acceptance of people while people’s wants is when what people’s needs exceed to what they really need. Supplying the market with your products is not enough. Constant research will make sure what the customers and non-customers get from your product when they want it and where they wanted it. Changes in the market are fast than what market predictions usually say. Usually there is no time for quick change or modification of your product that is why continuing research and survey must be made at all times (Council, 2006). In conclusion, now that we know how to interact with customers in order for them to have a positive attitude towards your product you must consider strategies to further up your connection and be known. Let us consider these options. Networking – it find ways to know people’s needs and how you can provide it. Use creative marketing designs and methods and always engage with a customer on how they think of your designs and approach. Engaging them through your business card, emails and voice mail can help you finds ways to get in touch with them. Innovate and experiment with minimal cost (Gitomer, 2007). References: Read More