Marketing
Put yourselves in the shoes of your customers for just a moment...
Would you be delighted with the service that you were receiving? I hear a resounding YES! and that’s wonderful. But is there room for improvement? We’d all have to answer YES! to that one as well.
Thinking that there is no way you can improve your services to your customers can be very limiting — it doesn’t allow you the scope to grow and improve if you want to.
Once you’ve defined who your customers are, the whole business needs to become involved in the never-ending job of understanding them. And smart businesses understand their customers as well as, indeed even better than, they do themselves.
Challenge yourself constantly with these 4 questions:
1. What are our customers’ needs and expectations, and which of these needs and expectations matter the most to them?
2. How well are we meeting these needs and expectations?
3. How well are our competitors meeting them?
4. How can we go beyond the minimum of ‘customer satisfaction’ to truly delight them?
The most basic step is simple: ask them how well you’re currently serving them. Give them a chance to tell you what they want, where you’re lacking and where you’re succeeding.
Conduct a customer survey and ask a third party to find out exactly what your clients want and what their perceptions are of you.
Businesses that do this consistently and act upon their findings reap massive benefits.