What Do Customers Really Want?
Every interaction with the customer is one more step towards strengthening your brand. Whether you sell ice cream cones or treat patients in a trauma center, each of these people is purchasing goods and services from your organization, and each step towards excellence in customer experience is another opportunity for brand strengthening.
Overall, there are three truisms about customers:
1) They don’t care about your problems.
2) They don’t understand ‘quality’.
3) They expect a controlled customer experience
Let’s look briefly at each of these points:
They Don’t Care About Your Problems
Sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer once said, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Customers expect your product or service to be delivered as promised with no excuses. By and large, customers are not your friends. They don’t care about what is happening in your world. They don’t care about how your supplier let you down and now that snafu is being passed on in shoddy service or delivery. All they care about is that you said the sale would happen in a specific order and that’s what they expect. Period.
They Don’t Understand ‘Quality’
Excellent customer service and excellent products go together like wine and cheese. While what might be a top quality product to one is subpar to another, everyone knows good customer service when they receive it. Especially with sales of goods and services via the Internet, people cannot touch or feel the product and must therefore gauge the quality of the product based upon other indicators, such as the look and usability of your web site, the strength of your guarantee and return policies, and the excellence of your customer service. The experience that surrounds the sale is often the only information upon which customers can base the quality of your product. In other words, it’s the overall customer experience that really counts.
They Want a Controlled Customer Experience
The manner in which your customer service people handle your customers from the outset can grow or smother your brand. And yet customer service people are among the most poorly paid in many companies. Think about it. Doesn’t it make sense for a company to hire the very best and brightest, with pay to match, to handle the task that is probably the most important of all? Customers want to spend money and they want you to make it easy for them to do so. But they also want clear and obvious buying steps. And they want you to predict their questions and concerns and stand ready to provide clear answers so they can get in and get out.
Bottom line: Control the customer experience by knowing what your customers need and meeting that need, and watch your business grow.
Tags: Customer Experience, customer satisfaction, customer serivce