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Create Your Own Customer Strategy
Most if not all SMEs are aware of the need to acquire a customer focus,
to make the business more customer-centric, and to really get to know
their customers. Businesses know
they need a strategy to harvest the full crop of potential returns from
their customers but how can they go about creating it?
The interesting thing about the answer to this question is that the best
source of background to use for developing a customer strategy is your
base of existing customers and your team members who serve them. They’ll
gladly tell you how to satisfy customers, how to generate higher returns
from them, and even how to get more of them; all you have to do is to
ask them the right way.
1. Talk to Customers About how They See You
Select a sample of from five to ten of your ‘best’ customers. This will
be those who have dealt with your business long enough to have formed
opinions about your business, from the way it treats its customers to
how accurate your monthly invoices are. You’re looking for all opinions,
both good ones and bad ones.
Talk one-on-one with everyone who can provide insights into how your
business is seen by those who support it. Why do they buy from you? What
happens when they look around for other suppliers? You want to find out
what you’re doing well and what needs improving, and these are the
people who can tell you what you need to know.
2. Talk to Your Customer Service Team
Review the feedback you get from customers with the people in your
business that interact with them. See where perceptions match up and
where your customer service team’s opinions differ from those of the
customers themselves. As with the customer interviews, do this
one-on-one with your team. This will ensure you get everybody’s thoughts
instead of just those who are willing to speak up in a group.
3. Assimilate the Intelligence You’ve Gathered
Organize the information you’ve gathered from customers and team members
into positive and negative segments. From all this material some clear
lines will emerge that can become the basis of your customer strategy.
You’ll see problems that need to be corrected and you’ll also see where
you’re doing things right and can build additional success from there.
4. Design the Ideal Customer Relationship
What have you found that represents the ideal relationship to have with
a customer? You should have enough information to know what will
optimize your relationships with customers in such a way that both of
you are satisfied and want to sustain the connection.
This will involve considerations of people and processes. What kinds of
people serve your customers best? What processes need to be added or
corrected so that customer satisfaction is created or enhanced?
5. Create the Customer Strategy Your Business Needs
Look into every aspect of your own organization that impacts on customer
relationships and see what it would take to have this ideal relationship
with every customer. It might be achieved through training or other
staff educational programs, through the acquisition of a CRM system -
probably through a combination of many actions.
Your goal is to replicate the ideal customer relationship across all
customers of your business. How you do it will be the content of your
strategy. Write down a plan of action that will structure your business
in such a way that it has this ideal relationship with all customers.
Whatever it takes, you have to do it.
6. Get Your Team On-Side
When a business undergoes a process of self-examination and has to
confront every aspect of its operations, both good and bad, it can be
unsettling for team members who might feel threatened by confirming that
all isn’t perfect in what they’ve been doing. An important part of your
strategy has to be getting the team to accept the changes needed and to
see the strategy’s goals as their own.
Give them opportunities to provide input into how the strategy will be
implemented across the business. Don’t rush through the process of
creating your ‘ideal’ organization; move toward the goals carefully and
monitor progress every step of the way. Keep team members informed so
they continue to feel a part of the evolution.
7. Keep on Top of Things
Now that you’ve learned how valuable customer intelligence is, develop a
plan to obtain it on a regular basis. This will be the best possible way
to see if your strategy is working so that you can fine-tune it as
needed.
Every time you hire a new team member be sure they will accept and work
within the businesses’ customer strategy. Initiate refresher training
courses that keep all team members’ customer relationship skills at a
high level. A customer strategy is ongoing and needs to be maintained as
carefully as any of the company’s equipment.
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