The Customer is King

Rapid changes in the economic, political, social and technical arenas are taking place globally. Along with these changes, most businesses can expect to experience uncertainty, and demanding customers who require the satisfaction of their wants and needs. To build a sustainable competitive advantage in today's market, your business needs to ensure that the customer is at the centre of its design.

So, why this new love for the customer? Actually, the customer has been the centre of much attention for some time now, and business leaders and academics have ascertained that not only is the customer king, but without customers, a business ceases to exist. No matter how important you believe your product, your innovation, your staff or your intellectual property to be, it is your customers that make your business successful.

Customer-centric marketing originated during the direct marketing revolution of the 1960s, and the concept has been largely credited to the marketing guru Lester Wunderman. As direct marketing gained favourability, marketers began to change their focus from reaching the maximum number of potential customers to reaching individual users in the most efficient and relevant way possible through channels like direct mail.

During the 1980s and 1990s, new advances gave businesses the opportunity to monitor the behaviour of their individual customers, while customising their messaging and offers. In the 1990s, the internet and e-commerce gained popularity and created a transformation in the prospects available to businesses for customer-centric marketing. Organisations were now able to gain insight into the purchasing behaviour of individual customers, and a whole new world opened up to marketing professionals, entrepreneurs and business leaders throughout the globe.

The barrier to your business becoming customer-centric is the traditional mindset of product-centricity, which 99% of businesses are still following to enhance profits, despite evidence pointing to the power held by an organisation’s customers. Until recently, it has been believed that a brand offers a business superior value, far more than that of the customer. However, with increasing customer demands and enhanced competition, businesses now need to look beyond their products to create a sustainable competitive advantage, through their customers.

Global customer trends have emerged, including a focus on retaining a business’ high-value customers and a move towards the design of an effective retention programme and a churn prediction model. Organisations are moving towards bundling services and/or products through cross selling and upselling. These bundles can be made up of either related or non-related items, as long as they appeal to the customer segment. Customers are becoming more knowledgeable of their options and buying power, and there is a distinct move towards customer segmentation by 1.) customer values, lifestyles and demographics, and 2.) product expectation levels.

Business leaders are beginning to focus on understanding both the macro-environment and the micro-environment, and from this information, they are able to manage precursors for customer satisfaction (proactive approach). There is a clear move towards agility and innovation, in order to outsmart competitors and deal with customers’ issues quickly (reactive approach).

With the move away from goods-dominant logic to customer-centricity and value creation, business leaders are choosing to develop customer life cycles or customer journeys (per segment), which include various offers/services/communication efforts/customer needs per phase. The focus is on continuous and positive customer engagement in conjunction with customer satisfaction, to increase customer trust.

Servant leadership is popping up all over the place, which directs the mood for how the organisations treat their customers. Effective customer information systems (CRM) and loyalty programmes cater through choices per segment, with the customer’s behaviour determining their category 1.) upon and, 2.) whilst part of the programme.

With all this focus on the customer, how do you align your business with customer-centricity? As a business leader, you cannot consciously make the decision to not follow suit. It is imperative that you choose the customer, not once or twice, but continuously. Your first step is to know who they are.

Get to Know Your Customer

Your customers are one of the most important contributors to the success of your business, so it’s important to understand who they are, and what they need and expect from you. Understanding this information will put you in a great position to add value to your customer, and to respond to them in the best way possible.

To do this, you need to analyse your current and potential customers. This will help you understand your customers’ behaviour so that you can give them what they want, when they want it. This can be a two-stage process. First start by asking yourself and your team the questions below. Then take it one step further, and contact you current customers directly, asking them some of the same questions. You can do this via focus groups, surveys, email, social media channels, or telephone. Whichever way you choose to communicate with your customers, make sure that it’s nonconfrontational and creates a safe space for them to share honest feedback with you. Here are some example questions to begin:

1. Who are our current customers? Make a list of the characteristics of your customers, as well as their typical behaviours. You may begin to notice patterns that you had not picked up before.

2. What do our customers do with the products or services we offer? Look at how your customers use your products or services. How often do they require your services? When is their most pressing need for your products? This will also help you identify complimentary products or services that you can offer in the future in addition to your main products and services.

3. Where do our customers purchase our products or services? Look at how your products or services are distributed. Do you use traditional channels like a retailer, or do you use a website? Do you sell your products at fairs or markets? Is it a combination of various channels and/or venues?

4. When do our customers buy our products or services? What situations lead up to your customers using your services or buying your products? Are your products seasonal?

5. Why and how do our customers choose our products or services? What needs do your products or services satisfy for your customer? What could be the future needs of your customers?

6. Who are our competitors? Keep in mind that your competitors can be alternative products to what you offer and not just similar products. For example, if you sell chocolates, your competitors are other chocolate brands as well as candy brands.

7. Why do potential customers not buy our products or services? Answering this question should tell you why your potential customers are not following through with using your services or buying your products. To be as honest with yourself as possible, contact some of your potential customers who never quite crossed over the finish line when showing interest in your services, and ask them directly why they chose not to use your organisation. A great way to do this is to send them an email, telling them that you are doing market research and that their honest opinion is important to you. When you get their feedback, don’t get upset! Use it as an opportunity to improve. You never know, this might help you secure these potential customers as new customers!

Understanding your customers will give you and your team the information that you need to grow your customer base and to keep your current customers, by appealing to what they need and what they expect from your organisation. Make sure that you and your team ask these questions regularly so that you can keep up with changing trends and your customers’ changing needs and behaviour. This information will unveil new opportunities to grow your business and lead your organisation towards greater success. When you know who your customers are, what they need and what they expect from your business, it’s time to look at your brand to ascertain if it aligns with your customers’ expectations.

Build a Strong Brand

Your brand isn’t just your business logo. It’s the distinct personality of your business, and it is how others perceive your organisation. Building your brand is no easy task, requiring consistent time and effort, cultivating the look and feel that you want your customers to experience whenever they interact with your business.

A great brand is unique, compelling and inviting. That sounds easy enough, but many business leaders fall into the trap of overlooking how important their brand is and what steps to take to make their brand distinguishable from other brands in the market. The market is full of similar products and services, and having a distinctive brand is a powerful way to attract more customers, and gain trust. Here are some things to keep in mind when assessing your brand:

1. Ensure unique brand associations. Brand associations are your business logo, your business colours, font, and the overall look and feel of your brand. Making changes to your brand associations is easy to do if your business is new, however it is a little trickier when your business has been around for a while.

For established businesses, it is advisable to weigh up the risks and benefits of changing your brand associations. Research needs to be taken to understand how recognisable your brand associations are in the marketplace. For example, consumer focus groups are a great way to determine how ingrained your logo, business colours, and look and feel is in the minds of the consumer. If you find that the results of these focus groups reveal that your logo, for example, is easily recognisable, it would be inadvisable to change it. You have put the work in to gain recognition and it has paid off. However, if you find that the results of these focus groups reveal that your logo is not recognisable, think seriously about making the change towards a brand association that will make more of an impact with your customers.

For newly established businesses, when it comes to your logo, colours, fonts and overall look and feel, choose designs that clearly depict your business and the image you want to create. Remember that your logo will be used across many different platforms, like your website, Facebook, banners, and even television screens. Keep that in mind when creating your designs and think about how they will appear on these various platforms.

Certain colours affect consumers differently, so keep in mind what colours you choose to use for your business. Darker colours are more corporate and serious, often used for services organisations, while lighter and more vibrant colours are often used for products. For example, using a green colour in your logo can elicit feelings of freshness and natural/organic ingredients, while using a blue colour may elicit feelings of coolness, trust and freedom. Keep the meanings and emotions of colours in mind when selecting your brand colours.

2. Have a meaningful brand name. It’s important to choose a brand name that is meaningful to you; however, it’s equally important to choose a brand name that clearly depicts what your business does. You want a brand name that is difficult to imitate. You also want a brand name that is scalable. For example, if your business sells handbags at first, but in a year or so you decide to add scarfs to your product range, the name ‘Sophie’s Handbags’ may limit this idea to expand upon your product range.

3. Have brand values. Brand values direct the nature of your business and how you will interact with your customers. It’s a great idea to write down three to five brand values that will guide your brand and assist in business decision-making. For example, if one of your brand values is ‘sustainability’, then your suppliers will all need to fall into the category of sustainable producers.

4. Have a positioning statement. This is a sentence or two describing what your business does. It is usually for internal use and doesn’t need to be shared outside of your business. Use your positioning statement to identify your target market, your products/services, your competitors, your value proposition, and your key differentiator.

5. Be consistent. Once you have finalised your brand’s look and feel, name, values and positioning statement, make sure that you remain consistent and dedicated to these throughout your business. Your website should have the same look and feel as your marketing material, emails, banners and packaging. Your interaction with customers should be guided by your brand values, and your positioning statement should keep your brand on track.

6. Have a great mission statement. A great mission statement gives a business direction and continuity. It identifies what the business is and what it does, it describes the nature of the business’ activities, and it guides the business owners and leaders as to which market opportunities should be pursued. But mostly, a great mission statement describes the business’ reason for existing, who it represents, and the values or beliefs for which it stands.

Often, business leaders create mission statements that are a bit boring. Such mission statements will not go very far in motivating your team, and the power of a great mission statement will be lost in favour of a generic and unexciting paragraph that simply sits on a plaque in the business meeting room. The creation of a great mission statement will inspire, guide, motivate, measure and bring together your business and your team. This is often the difference between a successful business and a business that struggles along month after month, year after year.

By taking the time to create an inspiring mission statement, you can change the future success of your business. A mission statement should consist of four central concepts:

I. Purpose – This is why your business exists and whom it serves. Keep in mind that this doesn’t only imply customers, but also the environment, supply chain and community.

II. Strategy – This is the commercial logic of your business and the distinct skills and abilities that will make it successful in the market.

III. Behaviour – This is the way your business and its people choose to behave towards your stakeholders.

IV. Values – These are your business’ core values that form the foundation of your business itself.

Remember to answer the following five important questions in your mission statement:

I. What is the nature of our business?

II. Who are the customers of our business?

III. What are our customers’ needs?

IV. What are the unique internal resources, skills and abilities of our business?

V. How can our business satisfy its customers’ needs?

Once you have created your mission statement, it’s a great idea to take it a step further and add objectives. For example, you can add sales targets, market share goals, and profit objectives to your mission statement to motivate you and your team. These objectives will help provide direction to your marketing initiatives and help you to measure your efforts and the efforts of your team members. It’s important to note that your objectives may change, and thus the next step towards customer-centricity is to embrace change.

Prepare to Embrace Change

Your customers are value co-creators. Approximately one third of business growth leaders have achieved their growth by appealing to the needs arising from changing consumer behaviour (Nunes, Yardley and Spelman, 2015). These leaders view the disruptions caused by changing consumer behaviour as an opportunity to align their businesses with customer needs. This mindset of embracing change allows these organisations to provide quick innovative responses to these needs, greatly outsmarting their competitors.

Ask yourself and your team the following to assess where you stand with regards to change:

1. How flexible and innovative is our company?

2. Are there structures in place that make rapid change impossible?

3. How fluid and malleable is our organisation to the market’s trends?

Customer-centricity is a deliberate choice and your business needs to introduce dynamic internal capacities to continuously respond to changing customer demands. This will result in your organisation successfully managing change through the intentional and constant realignment of your business and its environment to ensure market competitiveness and customer satisfaction.

With this built-in capacity for continuous change, constant learning is necessary, and your business will become self-designing. In other words, as issues arise, you will be more able to solve them. Changes can then be established as the trends demand, and your business will be prepared and ready to deal with unanticipated issues, while making the most out of novel opportunities.

The implementation of customer-centricity is an organisation-wide process and during the change process a sustainability-based paradigm begins to emerge, encompassing a leaner and more flexible organisational structure that is built-to-change, pushed down information and decision making, decentralised teams, focused and accountable business units, teamwork, and engaging management.

Appeal to Your Customers’ Needs

What does your customer want to achieve by using your products or services? The extent to which a customer finds a service provider’s product or service to be applicable to their needs influences the level of relevance that product or service holds in their mind. However, your product is not the value. The capabilities that your product provides to your customer is the value enabler, but this value is not realised during the sale. It is only realised during the actual use of your product or service, making your customer a very active participant in the creation of the value you offer.

With this in mind, you should not focus on what features can be added to a product that you offer, but rather consider what you can introduce to assist your customer in the creation of value when they are using your product or service. As a business leader, your strategic advantage is not determined by your products or services, but by your intimate knowledge of how your customer can benefit from your products and services, practically and emotionally.

So, in order to continuously appeal to your customers’ needs, you need to introduce new but related products and services. While customers vary in their needs and in the monetary value that they can offer your business, the effective management of customer relationships takes into account the different needs of a customer base, and the products and services that satisfy their core requirements. Products and services that satisfy customers’ needs present higher sales and retention rates, and offer a higher predisposition to pay from customers resulting in higher profit margins. But with customer requirements changing almost daily, new and pioneering services and products need to be designed quickly and with the customer at their centre.

Think about your customers. Do they vary in terms of their needs as well as the monetary value they offer your business? How can you better satisfy these needs? When you answer these questions, I want you to keep in mind that these needs are your customers’ needs and not your own. And the best way to find out the answer, is to ask them.

Many companies make the mistake of trying to sell more of what they think their customers need. A recent study by Grant Thornton indicated that 86% of community bank executives intended to offer new products and services to their customers, but less than 20% followed through with their intentions. Companies are renowned for attempting to sell their customers more of the same products and services that they offer. But a customer will not be motivated to buy your product or service if they do not have a need for it, regardless of how attractive it is.

Go back in your memory to your last telesales call. Did you buy what they were trying to sell you? If you did, it’s because you needed that product or service at that exact moment. But you most likely didn’t make the purchase, and that is because they were trying to sell you something you didn’t need.

In 2014, an interesting study was done by the researchers Park and Han. They discovered that customers who purchased a diverse range of products from one company were more likely to become loyal customers to that company, than customers who purchased more of the same product from another company. The companies that offered diverse products were more profitable and successful than the companies that sold more of, but one product.

As simple as it sounds, introducing a wider range of products or services that anticipate and appeal to your customer’s changing needs can enrich your customer retention. Keep in mind that you don’t want to become the corner café of your industry, but do think about your value chain. Where can you integrate backwards or forwards? For example, if your business focuses on graphic design, can you set up a partnership with a printer so that you can offer your customer a fuller service, before they find it elsewhere?

Customer information can be used to provide highly personalised and customised products to meet your customers’ precise needs. Innovative products and services that are aligned with how a customer perceives their value allows your business to create offerings that are outside of your current comfort boundaries. So, if your customers are the co-creators of the value that you offer the market, then you need to create and maintain concrete relationships with them.

Manage Your Customer Relationships

Customer relationships can be used to understand and influence your customers’ behaviour, resulting in enhanced customer loyalty, retention and business profitability. But customer relationships can also provide you with extensive customer information that can be used to generate opportunities for the upselling of your current products and the cross selling of new products and services to your customers.

Not only does the development of strong customer relationships enable you to focus your energy on increasing the monetary potential of each of your current customers, but engaged customers are satisfied customers. Whether customers remain with you for the long term is determined by the experience that they have with your business. And so, customer retention is not necessarily determined by price, but rather by the way your customer feels when they interact with you.

Customers that are continuously engaged with your business develop an emotional and psychological investment in your business. And customer relationships are created when your company makes your customer feel something in such a way that they are interested in experiencing that feeling again.

It is vital for you to understand and interact with your customers’ social networks, because their behaviour is greatly affected by their social interactions. Positive and negative information about your company can either encourage a new customer to purchase your products or services, or to cancel their services with you. Negative word of mouth has a more powerful influence on customer decision-making than positive word of mouth, and ensuring a positive company reputation within your market is paramount.

Having a clear and deliberate company reputation programme for this is extremely useful. Ensure that service defaults are immediately corrected, and actively communicate your efforts across social networks, ensuring that your customers are acutely aware of why they choose to do business with your company.

It’s advisable to introduce a deliberate customer engagement and service system. Customer service is a serious consideration for any business and the way your business interacts with its customers will determine your market reputation. Great customer service equals repeat business from your customer and referral business. What more could you ask for?

While discounts and special offers will get the customers coming in the door, how do you ensure that they come back, time and time again? The answer is great customer service! Make it a point to always send your customer away happy. If they have a terrible experience with your business, they will avoid you at all costs, and you will lose their business for life, not to mention the damage they can create through poor word of mouth in your marketplace. It’s a great idea to always ensure that your customers walk out your door with a smile on their face, ready to refer you to their friends, colleagues and family.

Customer service is about relationships, so make sure that your business, you and your team take the time to get to know your customers and build a relationship with each of them. Ask them questions about their hobbies, family and jobs. Greet them by name, and surprise them with your recall of their stories and purchase history.

Keep in mind that the fastest way to lose customer respect is to not follow through with your promises, so make sure that you deliver on what you say and gain the trust of your customer with ease. In fact, go the extra mile. Unless you have a service or product that is entirely unique and unavailable anywhere else on the planet, you need to use customer service as a differentiating factor in your toolbox. Always take the extra step when dealing with your customers. Make it a point to do a little more than they expect and watch your customer base grow through brand loyalty.

Loyal customers provide higher monetary value than disloyal customers and they cost less to service. Furthermore, such customers attract future customers through building the reputation of their service provider via word of mouth marketing.

While customer relationship management is the management of an equally beneficial relationship between your customers and your business, such a relationship can be used to understand and influence customer behaviour resulting in enhanced customer loyalty, customer retention and customer profitability. Strategically, customer relationship management can provide your business with an array of customer information in the form of a database and analytical tools.

As your business evolves from a product-centric environment to a customer centric-environment to hold a competitive advantage while satisfying your current customers, customer-centric strategies need to be incorporated into your actual business activities that produce genuine results. One of the core principles of a customer-centric strategy is customer development through upsell, which if managed effectively may ensure enhanced business performance for your organisation. Such an activity is birthed through strong customer relationship management.

Whether customers remain with their service provider for the long term is determined by the initial experience that they have with the brand, therefore it is evident that customer retention is not necessarily determined by price, but rather by the way the customer feels when they interact with their service provider. Thus, the goal of customer retention is the expansion of long-term, profitable and viable relationships between your business and your current customers, which consistently grow and develop over a period of time. Maintained revenue as a consequence of decreased customer churn has a powerful and positive impact and influence on an organisation’s profitability, and this can be easily integrated into your business through great customer relationship management.

Customer-Facing Processes and Solutions (CFPS) include customer relationship management policies, customer engagement and satisfaction policies, and call centres from a customer contact perspective. While these policies are great to introduce into your business, alone they are not sufficient for customer retention. Such relationship building needs to be assimilated into the whole customer life cycle and performance monitoring of CFPS becomes an important concern from A to Z. It is not sufficient to satisfy a customer only once. Defining and tracking customer loyalty throughout their journey with your business is a key element in the retention process, and may be overlooked without you realising it.

The Importance of Customer Engagement

It’s also important to note that customers may be content with your services, yet they may not be engaged with you. Customer engagement is absolutely vital for brand popularity and long-term survival. There is a strong relationship between customer engagement and customer retention, and although some customers may not want to be engaged with you, others may want you to be more intimately involved with them. Doing so enhances their relationship with you. It is, therefore, important that your organisation understands your customers’ perceptions around organisational-customer interaction.

According to research conducted by Fader, Hardie and Ka Lok (2005), the sooner a customer is offered and purchases from your business following their last purchase, the more likely it is for them to remain a customer of your business. Furthermore, the more frequently the customer deals with you, the higher their propensity to remain your customer.

The Theory of Reasoned Action (Engel, Blackwell and Miniard, 1995) and the Hierarchy-of-Effects Model of Consumer Behaviour (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961) note that consumer attitudes are a predecessor to their actions. Brand experience is a vital contributor towards customer retention based on the fact that brand familiarity and brand association lend themselves to positively influencing the loyalty levels of a customer. However, there is no guarantee that a customer may purchase from your business twice regardless of a positive first purchase experience and a repeat purchase is more likely only if your business has ensured that you have been kept front of your customer’s mind through consistent engagement.

Customer Relationship Management and Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction occurs when products and services exceed the customer’s expectations; however, customer satisfaction alone does not guarantee customer loyalty and retention. Your business must ensure that your customers are continuously engaged throughout the process of purchase to repurchase as this creates an emotional and psychological investment for your customer with your brand. Customer relationships are created when your business first touches your target market in such a way that they are interested in experiencing that investment again.

Customer satisfaction is an emotional state derived from your customers’ interactions with your business over a period of time. Frequent purchasing enables your customer to connect with you more regularly, and this may strengthen their positive attitude towards your brand while building loyalty. It is, therefore, vital that such interactions between you and your customer remain positive for brand loyalty to be ensured.

Business-to-customer communication initiatives reduce customer anxiety. Therefore, consistent communication and contact with your customers is a vital feature of customer satisfaction. But how often should you make contact with your customers? The suggested timeframe of every six weeks is sufficient to keep your brand front of the customer’s mind.

Organisational reputation and expertise are other important contributors to customer relationship management and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the capabilities and knowledge of your sales staff are critical influences in a customer’s investment and purchasing choice. More about the sales management for customer-centricity will be discussed in Chapter seven.

Communicate with Your Customers

Have you ever thought about how you communicate with your customers? What channels do your customers have to get to know more about your business? How do they make purchases? To whom can they complain? Customer communications is an integral part of your business and some consideration needs to be taken when outlining your communication channels and your communication behaviours.

The first step to great customer communication is to tell them how to contact you. This may sound pretty simple, but businesses often forget that different customers have varying preferences as to how they want to interact with you. Supply telephone contact details, email details, and social media details. Your customer can decide which one suits them best. Make sure that you are active and available on all the channels you offer. Customers don’t like feeling as though they have been left in the dark. Unanswered emails and phone calls create anxiety for your customer. So, make sure that you respond to their emails timeously and answer or return phone calls as soon as you possibly can. It’s a great idea to incorporate key performance measures for your teams with regards to communication channels and reply turnaround times. Set these measures together with your team, and use them to assess your team’s performance as well as their commitment towards customer engagement.

It’s important to realise that when communicating with your customer, regardless of the communication channel, never assume that they are familiar with technical terms or phrases. Always ask you customer if they understand what you are saying, and make sure that you leave the interaction with your customer sure of the information that you have provided them with. For example, if you have an online business, don’t assume that your customer knows how to order from you through an online portal. When they reach out to your business and your team for assistance in ordering, make sure that they understand exactly what they need to do and how.

It’s important to always use positive statements. Be careful not to tell your customers what you can’t do. Always highlight what you can offer them and what solution you have for their needs and requirements. Make sure that you prepare responses to anticipated objections and questions so that you and your team can answer them as soon as they arise. Not only will this make your customer feel more confident in your abilities and your business offering, but it will make your team feel more centred and confident too.

Always update your customers with any changes or issues that may affect them. Decide on the best channel to use for this and offer an email or SMS option to keep them updated at all times. Remember that no news is still news, and updating your customer accordingly is important when it comes to awaiting orders or the resolution of issues. Let customers know that your business is busy dealing with their requests. This will make them feel secure in their dealings with your organisation.

Handle Customer Complaints Like A Pro

At some point, your business will experience a customer complaint. Even though this might make you feel uncomfortable, receiving a customer complaint is completely normal and a healthy sign that your business is active and gaining traction. It is also a great opportunity for your business to learn, to innovate, and to improve.

More often than not, a customer will not complain directly to your business, but to others through channels such as social media. And an unhappy customer may choose to take their business elsewhere. Handling customer complaints quickly and effectively is a great way to ensure repeat business and enhance your business reputation, before it becomes tarnished. Train your team to manage customer complaints correctly, and make sure that you do the same when the complaints reach your desk. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

1. Listen. When you receive a complaint from a customer, make sure that you give them undivided attention. Make sure that you listen to what they have to say and be polite with your response. You need to thank your customer for advising your business about the issue and accept the complaint with grace and appreciation. It’s important to apologise to your customer and to assure them that you will attend to the problem that they have raised.

2. Be vigilant on social media channels. If you have identified a customer complaint via a social media channel, make it a priority to contact that customer directly. Indicate the resolution of the complaint on the same social media channel for others to bear witness.

3. Record it. Once you have received your customer’s complaint, record the details so that your business can understand the problem as clearly as possible. Keep customer complaints in one place so that you can identify trends as they arise.

4. Be factual. Make sure that you get all the facts of the complaint. If necessary, ask questions and contact your customer again if any information needs to be clarified or verified.

5. Offer options. Don’t try to offer your customer one resolve or response. This is a great opportunity to discuss with your customer how they would like to move forward from this problem. Ask your customer what they would like you to do. Do they want you to replace, repair or refund their purchase? Whatever options come up, discuss them with your customer and select one that works the best for your customer and for your business.

6. Be quick. When handling a customer complaint, it is advisable to do it quickly. The less time that your customer has to complain to others and across social media channels, the better. Ignoring the problem or taking too long to respond to a customer complaint often leads to an escalation of the complaint.

7. Stick to your word. Never offer your customer a resolution to their complaint that you cannot fulfil. Follow through with the promises that you do make, and do not delay in sorting out the matter.

8. Follow up. It’s a great idea to follow up with your customer in the future. Make sure that they are satisfied with your resolution to their problem and advise them of the steps that you have taken to avoid a similar issue from happening to other customers.

Remember the basics when it comes to your customers. Communicate clearly, understand their requirements, engage with them, represent your business with a strong brand, and know who your customers are. By starting with the fundamentals, and continuously going back to basics, you will be in a powerful position to begin your journey towards customer-centricity. Once your business is in a position to commence in the direction of customer love, it needs a leader.

This was an excerpt from my book 'Competing in the Customer-Centric Economy'. To purchase a copy please visit https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=competing+in+the+customer-centric+economy+samantha+worthington&ref=nb_sb_noss