Tonight on the Bob Pritchard Radio Show live from Mexico City, is a great interview with Genevieve Morrill, the CEO of West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce who is an extraordinary community leader. If you believe in supporting your local community, this is one interview you should not miss. I’m in Mexico to give a couple of speeches. It is a fabulous city.
You should really love your customers. After all they are the people keeping you in business. It’s up to you to build powerful long-term successful relationships by simply showing them you really care about them and their business.
As in any relationship, the need for conversation, frequent contact, the personal touch and empathy are the attributes needed to forming a successful, long-term relationship. These things are tangible. It is what happens when you genuinely care and show it with every customer.
In order to gain and keep customers, you’ve got to do more than introduce them to your brand, business or product. You’ve got to make them fall in love with it, become advocates for you. Creating this relationship with customers can help you spread positive word-of-mouth about your business.
Start out by addressing customers by their names and focus on delivering a personalized service. Customers especially want you to feel their pain and to acknowledge their feelings. People are remarkably forgiving if you acknowledge how they feel and give them credibility. Don’t just talk to disgruntled customers, talk to delighted ones as well as they share their experiences too. It’s a crucial part of the relationship. Building the relationship is a big part of creating loyal, faithful customers.
The perfect example of stellar customer service and building dedicated customers is Amazon. Their goal is not to simply make a sale, it is to make every person absolutely delighted with them and they are completely devoted to making sure that happens with every interaction with every customer, every single transaction, period!
Their financials continue to show that by providing this level of commitment to their customers, their customers have in turn made them the number one company in the world. They love their customers and the feeling is mutual.
Here are 3 ways very successful companies achieve their absolute loyalty from customers. They are successful because this is how they are trained, this is how they work, this is how they talk, this is how they treat each other, and more importantly this is how they treat customers every single day.
Extraordinary Service—Part of building lasting customer relationships is offering top-notch service in every scenario – from the purchase experience to customer support, easy return policies to expert advice. The best companies to do business with make the experience memorable and pleasant for the customer. They are accessible. When a customer has a problem, they want to be heard by a human. Make sure your customers can reach you and your staff to share their likes, dislikes, wants, needs, etc.
Believe in the product or service—the best companies stand behind their products and service because they believe in them and they support their customers because they truly want to help them. When businesses are interested in helping their customers (not just taking their money), the results are more profitable in the long run.
Listening to the customer—Part of providing awesome service and creating loyalty is listening to feedback from your customer and actually responding to it. They want to share their experiences not only with family and friends but with…you. Therefore, talk to them as often as possible and never leave this opportunity to cultivate the relationship. Be genuine and retain your humanity. That’s how you compete.
Only when a company knows exactly what kind of service its customers expect, delivers on those expectations 100 percent of the time, at a price that customers are willing to pay, while still getting an acceptable return, can the company claim to excel in customer service…and get the customer to love them.
I said, “I love you so much. I could never live without you.”My girlfriend giggled and asked, “Is that you talking or the beer?”I said, “It’s me talking to the beer…