So we are into the second week of the new year … if you’re like most people, you’ve already abandoned at least one of the resolutions on your list. Don’t feel too badly – at least you made one at all! Research shows that only 40 to 45% of American adults even make resolutions each year.
Even though almost 50% of people who make new years resolutions do break them in the first 6 months, research shows that making resolutions is useful. People who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t. So why not improve your odds at making a change and explicitly define one goal that will affect you, your business, your customers, employees and your competition in 2012. What resolution has this 5-fold effect?
RESOLUTION:
Focus on CONNECTING with your customers & improving their
EXPERIENCE with your organization
THE RESULT BOOST:
1) Retention 2) Sales 3) Team morale 4) Gain competitive advantage
5) Your peace of mind because your business is founded on rock-solid customer relationships
You may not be able to influence the national economic forecast or consumer confidence index – but you can impact the confidence your customers have in your team’s capabilities, reliability, quality and commitment to their business.
Other options for improving profitability & gaining competitive advantage are: 1) lowering prices – not very profitable and 2) improving product quality, which can take substantial time and money. The fastest and most cost-effective way to impact the bottom line & differentiate your business is to focus on improving your relationships with your customers & boosting the number of positive experiences they have working with your organization.
FOCUS ON PEOPLE – NOT NUMBERS
The most important aspect of this resolution is helping your team learn how to move from concentrating on customer service or satisfaction, and focus on really connecting with customers & improving their experiences when working with your team. They are different goals. Let’s look at the definitions of each:
Service [sur-vis]
a. an act of helpful activity
b. to aid or be useful
Connect [kuh–nekt]
a. to join or unite
b. to relate to or be in harmony with another person, or one’s work
Given the choice would you rather simply provide a helpful activity, aid & be useful to your customers, or be joined or united and relate & be in harmony with them? If your customer feels like you “get it” and are tuned in to their business, understand their goals, pain points & find solutions to their needs – they will feel a connection with your organization, as opposed to simply serviced or satisfied.
Now no one is saying you shouldn’t measure the resulting improvements with customer relationships in some way, but if there is too high a focus on” ratings”, then it is easy for it to become more about achieving a minimum level in satisfaction, rather than becoming tuned in and focused on understanding your customer’s business, their needs & how to solve their problems. Let’s face it – people either feel like someone “gets it” or they don’t – there isn’t a sliding scale. Who can walk away feeling confident about the job someone will do if they feel like they were only kind of understood? From this customer perspective, on a scale from 1 to 10 – you are either a 10 or a 1, there’s no in between.