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Sales & Service - Your Promise.
With almost 100 books available on CRM (Customer Relationship
Management) and seemingly just as many software programs, CRM has
one common goal – building a relationship and keeping it. Sales and
Service is an expansive topic and is very uniquely defined by a
respective product/service/company. We’ll briefly review the most
important element and its core, which is managing expectations.
The basics: Who is your customer and what are their expectations? Are you meeting or exceeding expectations
and how can you build a better relationship?
In
an ever-changing landscape,
with business conditions and market
share constantly
shifting, customers have
more choices than ever before.
They expect more because
they see more, well-informed
through resources such as the
Internet and a constant
ability to connect with
each other. If that
sounds somewhat intimidating,
which it can be, Crossroad
Business Consulting can help. On
the other end, if you find this challenge exciting, then how can we leverage
this as a chance for better business?
Our objective is to build a relationship strong enough to withstand competitive advancements, test
your customer’s loyalty and
your worth. Think of the process
and pool of resources
that’s needed to obtain a customer. Now, ask
yourself if you’re using those same
resources to retain that customer, build loyalty and
ensure their happiness.
We establish expectations
from the moment we wake
up. We expect our
shower water to be hot, we
expect our favorite morning beverage to taste the same and we
subliminally expect the sun to be shining. Sometimes these
expectations are consciously established, but other times they
aren’t. Conscious or
not, it’s what happens
when expectations are not met that
we really have to think about.
Customer satisfaction, loyalty and strong relationships
are built by expectation management. Consumers
keep a subliminal log of expectation bytes
- moments when their
expectations were met - or
not. It’s
a revolving number
calculated on an expectation balance sheet.
One column when expectations were met, the other when they are not,
totaling a satisfaction
number or factor that
has thresholds. The
higher the quantity of bytes, the higher the probability of getting
a returning customer, one that will make referrals to other
customers and keep them loyal for life. The
lower the number, the greater the probability of customer flight –
or fright.
To illustrate, there are 32 expectation "bytes" that happen within
the simple purchase of a cup of coffee. Starting when you drive in the parking lot +5 (inviting, clean and safe), to
when you enter the building and undertake the process +17, (wait-time, greeting, transaction and product quality setting, atmosphere and exit experience(comfortable, clean and friendly) +10,
totaling 32 for perfect.
You get the point. There are
32 opportunities in one
single example to build
your brand up or break it down.
Cataloging these
bytes is real
and the reality is the more bites you have the stronger your brand
is and the deeper the loyalty to
your brand. This is not
a new concept - far from it. It’s the very foundation that the franchise
business model was built upon.
Staying on the coffee theme, will the expectations of a Starbucks
customer differ from that of a Dunkin’ Donuts
customer? Both businesses
are basically built on
the same product, but there are different expectations because each
delivers to a
different audience:
Starbucks Coffee-Currently 5.6 million fans on Facebook (approximately 11,100 US locations)
Dunkin’ Donuts-Currently 1.1 million fans on
Facebook (approximately
6,400 US locations)
So, as outlined under Marketing,
expectation management will
always go back to knowing your audience. Who are they? What do
they like, dislike? How do
they prefer to communicate?
Don’t know? Then we’ll find the best way to
ask them.
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