Of course, your customer is a PERSON! It is very obvious, shouldn’t everyone know this? Well this is quite different from saying your customer is a human being. The ‘person’ here, refers to someone with EMOTIONS.
Lifestyles and preferences have so much evolved that emotions of your customer play a leading role in their continuous patronage of your service/product in the face of many other substitutes and competition. After serving your customer they should feel like they have been acknowledged, respected and appreciated. The chop bar, the bank, the airline, the retail shop and the market woman all need to build in natural processes at the touch points that make the customer know that he/she is known. Call them by name if you know them. There is nothing refreshing to hungry customer who calls a restaurant and gets to know that the restaurant knows his/her voice. This attribute of a business would however just not come to be. It has to be planned and executed. Customers’ details and consumption trends should be known. For formalized businesses, it would be easy to get customer data and process them for staff to be aware. For the more informal businesses like the chop bars and market women they can rely on the build-up of our usual relationships. The key is to make use of what information has been gathered on the customer whether by formal or informal means.
By 2020 customer experience would overtake price and product/service as the main brand differentiator.
If you make your customer feel like a person, you have them forever. Let’s get to work!
Good Related Reading: Your Customer, Your Future
by M-DoZ Consulting, http://m-doz.com/
www.ghanatalksbusiness.com
