Ways to Build Long Term Relationships at Retail

#2 Creating Customer Value

Creating customer value has never been more important—or complicated. Consumer expectations are high, business models have changed, and it’s essential for brands to communicate value in everything they do.??At its simplest, customer value is how much customers perceive your products or services to be worth versus the possible alternatives.Whether your customer is a retailer, service provider and/or ultimately the end consumer, providing high value can boost confidence and trust in your company’s offerings. This then can translate to improving your brand’s reputation, increasing sales, and enabling long-term success. With these ideas in mind, here are 5 steps you can take to create value for your customers and grow your business:

1.?????Play to your strengths.??Identify what your good at and own it. Start by looking back into the history of successes that your business has had and how you got there.??Pinpoint where your value exceeds competition.??By finding the areas where you are strongest, you can design an effective value proposition that sets you apart.??The next step is to ensure everyone has accountability to be measured against this objective.??Adopting a data-based scorecard process can help you track how you fair relative to your competition, and it?is a persuasive tool in developing your pitch to your customers on why you're the best choice to meet their needs.

2.?????Optimize the customer experience.??Creating value starts with the ability to see your business through the eyes of your customers.??Think about what’s important to your prospective customers and how your product or service will benefit them.??Consider the problems or challenges they are facing right now.??Your ability to solve your?customers’ pain points will help you score big points in the customer value equation. You are offering more than just a product of service.??You’re offering a solution to those pain points that your marketing efforts can showcase through a mix of benefits and results communication and creative storytelling.?Don't be afraid to stretch your limits and think outside the box for ways that differentiate you from competitors in ways that tangibly and intangibly benefit your customers. Make it easy to do business together, keep an open relationship and communicate effectively.??The key is to make sure that the customer is getting a consistent experience —?whether they’re interacting with you in person, by phone or online.?

3.?????Focus on your most valuable customers.?Allocating more time and resources to the customers that are most profitable is also a good strategy toward customer value creation. You can’t spread your sales force, marketing budget and service teams evenly among your entire customer base and expect a good return. Because of this, it is important to invest in customer segmentation so you can prioritize your prospects. Likewise, allocating your resources towards building relationships with existing customers over acquisition as it costs less to keep a customer than acquire a new one. In the long run, great service and investing in new products and solutions that serve your best customers will boost the lifetime customer value, so each customer is worth more.

4.?????Make and keep promises.???It’s safe to say that keeping commitments to customers should be a foundational element of everything a company does. One of the things that drives customer decisions is the sense that they can rely on a business.??In today’s competitive environment, a company needs to be able to inspire confidence and trust to achieve loyalty.??Setting clear expectations at the start is imperative.??Be careful not to overpromise.??If you can’t deliver on what you said you would, you can quickly lose credibility and the trust of your customers. That said, mistakes do happen and sometimes you simply won’t be able to deliver on a commitment.?Customers are not interested in excuses – only results. So, be sure to set realistic expectations for correcting the problem, including an appropriate time frame.???Customers are ready to forgive if they know a company tried its best and that it would do just about anything to make it right.

5.?????Measure your value.????A key way to create more value is to understand the value you already deliver.??So often we focus exclusively on delivering to customers what we promise without stopping to measure what exactly our customers received or how they ultimately benefited from our product or service. When you create some form of results review you can start to make real assessments about the value you provide, and you can communicate these results as proof of delivering on your promises. It also identifies opportunities to continue to optimize your value proposition in ways that both maximize the benefits to your customers and your profitability.?

The truth is customers don’t care much about how great your product or service is.??They really only want someone to understand their pain points and what keeps them up at night. Connecting the dots between what they want and what you can offer allows you to build deeper, more sustainable relationships and a brand that attracts the best customers who are willing to pay a premium for it.??This is what creating customer value is all about.