As a business owner or manager, you know that your blood and sweat have gone into designing and building that perfect product or service. Keeping your business alive and running has been challenging and ever-demanding. Acquiring new customers has been expensive and so time-consuming that It becomes even more critical to maintain hawk-eyed attention to existing customers. It is so crucial to converting our buyers into loyal brand advocates.

So here are five proven strategies you should NOT do to keep your customers loyal to you and also be your flagbearers and refer you:

1.    Be COMPLACENT in customer service

A brand could just crash if the customers are not feeling valued and appreciated. Providing the consumer with just the product or service and not going above and beyond their expectations is an easy recipe for losing their trust and association with the brand.

As a business owner, what you can’t afford is to be complacent in issue handling, responding to inquiries, being empathetic, and offering personalized treatment.

2.    NEGLECT your loyal customers

Every relationship needs acknowledgment or appreciation for it to work. Not rewarding your customers, who are appreciative of your offerings and go the extra mile to refer you further, is a subtle way of pushing them away. Little encouragement goes a long way in making their return to your business and referring to their friends and families.

Don’t let your proactive, engaged customers’ effort go neglected, and find creative ways to thank them for their advocacy. Some of the most common ways are rewarding them with exclusive discounts, referral bonuses, or special perks.

3. DON’T SEEK just TELL your customer

Being reactive to your customer, defending your mistakes, always telling how your product or service is the best in the market, and not giving appropriate time and space to let your customer talk or tell their side of the story is undoubtedly the easiest way possible to make them feel unwanted and experience negative emotions in their interactions with your brand.

Customer centricity is a culture every business needs to adopt! All it takes is to make it easy and relevant for your customers to share their thoughts, experiences, and opinions on your brand. Use the insights from their inputs to make improvements in your business and loop it back with them to ascertain they are heard and that they matter!

4. NO HUMAN connection

The biggest myth in customer handling is to treat them like Gods or kings. This is a simple way to distance them and dehumanize your relationship. It becomes more of doing what they demand and being a yes man rather than being transparent and authentic in your communications.

When you connect with your target audience emotionally, at a deeper level, you create an environment of open communication and understand their emotional needs, expectations, or behaviors. Don’t shy away from sharing your company story, values, and culture and reflecting on your human side. 

4. Ghost your customers

Only focusing on the primary offering and making it look good enough at the surface to attract a buyer without any underlying work on post-sales engagement is a great beginning to a quick end of any enterprise. Not keeping in touch with your customers and missing out on opportunities to engage is only going to make it so easy for customers to forget the brand and in some cases make them share their frustrations or problems in public domains. This could be so detrimental to business growth and calls for efforts on rebranding.

It is so easy to stay top of mind with your customers by connecting with them on social media, emails, and calls and not ghosting.  Omni channel presence and offering them relevant content, promotions, or updates are key to making them engage with your brand effortlessly and keep coming back to you for more.

Building strong relationships with your customers is key to converting them into your advocates and having them spread the word about your business. Remember, it's not just about selling products or services – it's about creating meaningful experiences.

How Empowered Customers can make a difference to your Business

 In today's digital age, the lines between the physical store and digital experience have vanished. There has been a complete shift as the brick-and-mortar store experience, and multi-digital channels are governed by customer behavior, engagement, and expectations. Businesses earlier focused just on reaching customers, and it was more than enough for customer connect.

Customers and businesses have come a long way from the era of production and sales with limited offerings and choices to the interconnected world we inhabit today filled with information, opinions, and knowledge. It influences customer choices, behaviors, needs, and expectations. As a result, it has a significant say on the organization's quality, nature of experience, and deliverables.

Today's digital age and the interconnected world have ensured that the customer has more information about different brands, products, and services. Customers share information about their choices and viewpoints, and hence their point of view is essential even while designing the products and services. It is the era of "Empowered Customer" who are better informed and have a necessary voice on how businesses and brands work.

 "Customer Loyalty" is a significant outcome of "Empowered Customer" essential for businesses' short-term and long-term growth. It ensures that the customers will buy or use existing services and try more products/services. Furthermore, those products/services shall be per customer needs and expectations and lead to positive word of mouth, emotions, and references. 

"Empowered Customer" for Businesses

 Customers have huge expectations from businesses. With the information and knowledge, customers now seek more control. They like to connect with organizations that share their values and provide products/services that are truly unique and innovative. 

 From a business perspective, "Empowered Customers" is the process of providing customers with the tools and resources to help them achieve their goals. In addition, it enhances customer experience as customers feel in control, and they can trust the organization as the deliverables are as their needs and expectations.

 Research studies show that customers are happier with a brand experience when the companies make efforts to help customers make informed choices. And, this rapport leads to improvements in customer retention as well as opportunities to encourage customer advocacy. It is essentially a differentiation strategy to ensure that the customers stick around and buy more products/services."

But, as a brand, how would you know to make it happen? 

It happens for you when your customers voluntarily provide you with suggestions to improve. They provide businesses with ideas and celebrate their successes as their own. Empowered Customers own and spread the word about an organization's products/services to their peers with enthusiasm. And solicit upgrades in products and services.

Hence, through this blog, we outline three vital steps on how businesses can work with and "Empower Customer" in their strategy, deliverables for business growth, and success.

1.Listen and Listen through aligned Feedback systems to understand

  "Listen to your Customers" is and has to be the first mantra in today's digital and connected age. Therefore, it is a good idea to allow customers and create platforms to talk about their thoughts, woes, and feelings while experiencing products and services from the organization.

Few tips

•  Use social media to understand, listen, and let your customers put their opinions, points of view, and frustrations across. It is a great way to listen to your customers. Facebook, Twitter, and a platform to connect can help a business, your brand to know what is in their minds and what kind of emotion is being felt by the customers.

• Collect feedback at regular intervals of time. It can be transactional feedback after every or random interaction or cumulative feedback to assess the overall experience over a time frame. The idea is to be open to listening to understand and take action.

Create a feedback system including sending customers surveys to ask them to describe their experience and whether they'd recommend it to their peers. As a decision-maker for your brand, you can use NPS and Customer Effort Score tools to see how satisfied customers are with your company. 

 There are numerous feedback tools to utilize, and you can visit us at https://www.pinkguava.org/customerexperienceblogs/how-feedback-is-an-effective-tool-for-business-success to know more about the feedback process and its implementation.

• For positive feedback, follow up with participants to see if they'd be willing to provide a testimonial. You can then post that review to your website for potential leads to see. For negative feedback, consider it as an opportunity for your Business to prevent customer churn. Reach out to these participants and ask them to provide more details about their experience. 

• Closing the feedback loop is an essential follow-up of listening to customers. It is to humbly and graciously accept the customer's thoughts, feelings, and experiences and open more avenues to improve.

2. Understand Customer's Journey

Understanding Customer's Journey is an opportunity to provide relevant and correct information at crucial touchpoints to enhance customer's experience and product/service satisfaction. Empowering customers through more details and carefully designed products/services is a great way to improve positive emotion.

 You can also utilize Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) as a tool(CJM). It is a tool that is excessively used today across industries. CJM by definition, is a visual representation of every experience a customer has with a brand/organization across touchpoints. It's a story of the experience derived from a customer's engagement culminating in a relationship with the organization.

 Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) helps create a cumulative understanding by bringing diverse thoughts, opinions, and expectations and synergizing on who the customer is and what it means to the organization's mission and vision. The process helps gather valuable insights into the consumer's feelings, motivations, expectations, questions or concerns at every interaction point through well-researched Personas. 

 You can get more details on Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) by clicking the blog here https://www.pinkguava.org/customerexperienceblogs/how-customer-journey-mapping-stands-out-as-a-starting-point-for-your-customer-experience-management-initiative

 Few tips

•  Identify the crucial touchpoints and moments that matter to enhance customer's positive emotions and experience. For instance, the on-boarding of a customer once they purchase a product from a brand. It is a critical stage that can retain your customer, and they might also go and talk negatively about you or may bring more references for the positive emotion experienced.

• If your product is complex or takes time to master, informing them of the key steps to use it will help them save time and enhance their satisfaction.

• Enhance personalization in your experience design by understanding the data and the patterns around- which customers prefer which platform- what kind of personalization will help the customer to make an informed choice. For example, e-commerce companies recommending products basis people who had similar tastes. Even the reviews are an opportunity with thoughts for everyone to read. Customers who feel supported by a business are also more loyal. 

 3. It's All About Engagement. 

It's no longer about keeping brand conversations in silos. Over time, marketing, sales, and services that earlier operated in their silos now work together in complete harmony. Thus, a service call is an opportunity to increase brand loyalty. A promotion to engage super-fans can turn brand advocates into customers/salespeople. At every touchpoint -there's an opportunity to connect with the Customers and empower them with information and tools.

 "Empowering Customers" means not just focusing on the excellent product features to beat the competition. It means delivering over and beyond and retaining customers and calls for an understanding of customer behavior and their emotional drivers. We will agree that the "make" or break" decisions in any relationship are triggered by an emotional impulse, and the consumer-brand relationship is no different. Customer Loyalty built on a strong foundation of "Trust" is one of the key variables to know how your consumers associate with the brand. 

You can read more about Relooking at Customer Experience with New Lens by reading our blog by clicking here https://www.pinkguava.org/customerexperienceblogs/relook-at-customer-experience-with-new-lens

 Few tips

• Initiate conversation with customers on social media by sharing valuable advice, thoughts to create a positive emotion.

• Manage change by providing information to customers regarding products/services, what to expect and how to use them. So the usage depth and its impact can be understood by customers leading to more engagement.

• Engage to understand if your product and services are supporting your customers to meet their goals. Helping them to grow because will make them hold your brand. Provide guidance, content, and extra information to build understanding and engagement.

• Enhance engagement by understanding the reasons for negative emotions or "customer churn," as we call. Pay attention to product usage decrease, features not used, etc. Customers do not want to be told and asked, "Use this and that".Rather more engagement can be turned in by understanding customer behavior and simply asking what they need. It opens opportunities for brands and businesses to enhance engagement to "Empower Customers."

So what are you doing to empower your customers? Let us know by commenting here or writing to us at contact @pinkguava.org

How feedback is an effective tool for Business Success 

Feedback is an essential tool to build a person's leadership, empathy, and communication skills by listening, identifying, and acting on thoughts, feeling, and experiences. Feedback is underrated both for the transformation of individual skills and importance in a business. It is a process to listen and understand ways, actionable to make things better. Feedback is instrumental for actionable insights in a business by capturing customers'’ feelings, thoughts, and expectations across the complete journey.

 If feedback is such an essential ingredient to becoming better both from an individual and business point of view, then why is it not that utilized? Why do organizations yet have to wake up to this underrated tool to organize, scale-up, innovate, and enhance customer engagement, including internal and external customers? Is it lethargy in collecting feedback or simply ignorance in the process and its importance? Most of the time, it is both, and we, through this blog, are trying to reason out an effective way to collect feedback and how it impacts business success.

One of the primary reasons for the lack of utilization of the feedback process is that feedback collected doesn't yield many actionable inputs for the business. We often discover that intensely critical feedback that is awkward and harsh can have a detrimental effect on the business plans for employees and suppliers. In the times of the digital age, when data and each interaction provide some input as feedback, this sleuth of data and the sheer thought of collecting and making sense of it usually overwhelms decision-makers and organizations. So ignorance for the feedback process or simply getting defensive in understanding the intent has become a common norm.

Feedback in today's time can give insights to a business to enhance customer satisfaction, product improvement through innovation and by designing new ways, features, approaches, and even enhancing customer support. For instance, think about creating a website and utilizing the feedback of a representative group to assess the flow, patterns, and ease in usage to enhance customer satisfaction through the website. Sounds exciting and needs focus and discipline by the business to invite and use feedback in improving its deliverables while also remaining vigilant to the feedback giver’s perspective and time. Usually, the absence of this crucial feedback diminishes the chances of customer engagement.

Feedback also collected to make performance better usually gets hindered due to its limited scope. Research proves that feedback if taken to improve performance doesn't help much as thoughts and feelings are limited by customers' knowledge, understanding, and unconscious biases. More data points and then averaging those improve the learnings from the feedback process. But most of the time, it is limited because more data points improve the random error in the data but not the systematic error. By definition, random error is one time, out-of-turn error due to chance; hence the statistical and thoughtful process can eliminate it.

In contrast, systematic error is a part of the process and can have far more ramifications to improve. Systematic errors are part of the process and not by chance. Thus, a feedback process through an objective viewpoint and process while considering the various biases and errors can provide a business with actionable inputs for action through their digital interactions and structured feedback collection process including cumulative and transactional ones.

We highlight three tenets through this blog to improve the feedback for actionable inputs. 

Use feedback with the Intent to listen and understand

Intent on why the feedback is being captured and analyzed makes all the difference. Customers, both internal and external, share experiences and feelings when describing an event, an occurrence, and a transaction while interacting with a business through a touchpoint. Hence along with scores, the open-ended questions are instrumental in analyzing what is working and why so? 

When captured with Intent to understand, improve and get better, feedback will always find takers and the candid view from employees, customers, and suppliers. There will be candid, harsh truths that can be detrimental to business motivation and plans. This doesn't mean at all that harsh feedback should be discouraged or should be constructively put aside. Instead, it will need an objective, outcome-based analysis to filter, analyze the feedback, and correlate with other indicators to utilize for actionable inputs.

Importance of feedback Process

 There are a lot of tools that are utilized by businesses, including "Voice of Customer," "Customer Satisfaction," "Live chat," "Social Media Interaction," "NPS," or simple "email" surveys with different modalities and Intent to capture. All are instrumental at different points of time to listen, analyze and act. For instance, NPS is used to analyze the pulse of customer feedback by first a score-based question and then an open-ended question to find the reason for the same.

 1. Seeking feedback in real-time or when the event is happening, or you just completed the execution can have different viewpoints due to time-lapse and various biases that come into action. Insights in real-time by different stakeholders are instrumental in gauging the friction during performances, interactions, and corresponding emotions.

2. Language, too, can make a lot of difference. So instead of just asking if there is any feedback for me, more thoughts can be assessed by the business by asking how they can improve the product/service deliverables.

- What was worked for the customers?

- What was that which needs more work?

Effective feedback is about Intent, context as it is about remaining open to listen and receive. Thus finding the reasons behind the scores is more important than dashboards to show where and how the organizational deliverables provide an impact.

Closing the feedback loop

 An essential part of a feedback process is about closing the feedback loop. 

Closing the feedback loop means the following –

1. It is to humbly and graciously accept the thoughts, feelings, and experiences shared by the customer, including internal and external, for their interaction through the entire customer journey. More quantity or more feedback pointers will slowly support in enhancing the quality of actionable inputs.

2. Creating a follow-up implementation and action plan after scrutinizing the relevant information in an unbiased manner without errors will support achieving the business objective.

3. Communicating the resultant action plans to the customers who gave feedback is the most crucial part to close the feedback loop and to keep the loop open for more candid feedback in the future. It is also true in complaints or regular interaction on social media or feedback for a relevant tool to business.

 Actionable input for business will improve deliverables, clarify objectives to employees, and identify touch-points where deliverables faltered for the customers. Feedback at the business ideation stage improves innovation as product/service can be tuned in as per customer needs, expectations, thus enhancing the chances of creating the right product-market fit. Feedback is instrumental for business success through more engaged employees, customers, decision-makers, and above all, deliverables to ensure the business remains agile to achieve its objectives. 

 Write to us to know more about feedback, and how it can support your business success at contact @pinkguava.org