Hidden in plain sight
My stress relief these days is easy. Take the Harley out for a ride.
Recently my wife and I, along with some friends, decided to make a day of it and organised a ride down to the harbour in Sydney to have a lazy lunch.
As part of the process I had to set up the rear seat of the Harley for my wife to ride with me. So off to the garage I went to get it all sorted. All I needed was a screwdriver and it would have been all sorted. Do you think I could find a screwdriver? Nope.
No matter how hard I looked it wasn’t anywhere to be found so I had to then go back out to the shed, rummage through some boxes until I found one.
I got the seat all sorted and we started putting our helmets on and there it was… the dreaded screwdriver that I spent ages trying to find but couldn’t staring me right in the face, exactly where I left it last time. It was hidden in plain sight.
I know what you are thinking right now….. “what’s your point Justin?”
Many times, as business owners or those in management positions we get so busy trying to run the business, find ways to grow the business and even manage the daily outcomes that we tend to oversee some of the simple ways we can take the businesses to the next level.
As it was with my screwdriver, the solution can be hidden in plain sight.
There is no point spending any money on a fancy marketing or brand awareness campaigns if we aren’t looking after our customers properly and fully.
What is hidden in plain sight for many business owners, and for many larger organisations, is the ability to tap into their customers by engaging with them like we do when we are trying to win them over as a customer the first time we come across them and grow organically. It is so simple yet often neglected.
Customer experience and customer satisfaction seems to be only looked at as a last resort these days and not a first priority. You don’t have to invest into fancy campaigns to grow. If the culture of your business is a customer focused culture, then it will be your customers who will engage with your business in a way that will increase your bottom line due to their loyalty.
We all want loyalty from our customers and I hear it all the time when I am doing in-business sales or service training with clients. But your customers want you to be loyal to them as well. As a customer, I can be treated poorly by just about any business out there these days. It’s the ones who make me feel special, the ones who I know appreciate the fact that I choose them to spend my money with are the ones who I become a raving fan for. The goal for any business large or small is increase the number of raving fans within their business not just their customer numbers.
Sadly, these days it seems many businesses have a “burn and churn” mentality with their customers as they think that another one will come along and replace any that get lost or move on to their competitors.
What are you either doing or not doing that now is excluding the customer from having an awesome experience with your business?
Many times, it’s the whole “systemising” of how we do things internally inside our business processes that have a knock-on effect that in turn alienate our most valuable asset, our customers. Your customers do not want to feel like a number or just part of your global domination plan.
Call me old fashioned, but real customer service and customer interaction is what is needed back into the business landscape. It has been missing for quite some time.
Sure, I could walk into any major organisation and I would see on a wall somewhere a “the customer comes first” framed picture, but experiencing what those words state from a customer’s perspective is fairly rare these days.
The real reason, I believe, that the customers experience isn’t amazing these days, is due to many business owners and management not actually being a customer in their own business. If they did experience what they dish out from a customer’s perspective, they would soon realise that there’s a lot of times that their business misses the mark all because the solution is hidden in plain sight.
If all we all do from a management perspective is ensure our staff are constantly trained in service aspects and we provide a level of service that blows our customers away every day then the outcomes will astound you.
Justin Herald is the Managing Director of Customer Culture which provides onsite customer service and sales training to businesses throughout Australia and globally. To find out more information, check here to see how Customer Culture is the solution for your business to stand out from your competitors.
