BE THE MESSIAH FOR THE CUSTOMERS

“A business is simply an idea to make other people’s lives better.” Richard Branson

“Business can be, and increasingly must be, about the development of personal relationships that span a customer’s lifetime.”

“Businesses are built around being positive, communicating with each other, being open, being transparent, being courageous, being accountable. You start doing all those things within the company and then you interact with customers, and suddenly, you’re delivering all those values to the customer.

Let me ask you - How much do you really care about your customers?

Or let me put it the other way – How much does your customer need you?

The answer is they don’t need you unless you are the “Messiah for the customers”  

messiah - a leader who is believed to have the power to solve the world's problems (Cambridge dictionary)

While companies continue to improve in the core aspects of marketing, like building better products and implementing more targeted marketing efforts, they struggle with silos.

Most organizations continuously strive to achieve operational excellence, but they spend less effort understanding customer needs — and few marry these two sources of customer value effectively. While a focus on lowering costs, improving quality, and providing consistent, reliable service will continue to be important, there will be a huge shift in the times ahead  to combining operational excellence with customer intimacy: tailored solutions for individual customers based on a deep understanding of their needs.

Once you have clarity of values and the right people in place to drive a values-based culture, the next order of business for building positive customer experiences is executing to “get it right” (delivering exactly what customers want the first time you serve them) and “make it easy” (reducing the overall effort required for customers to get their needs met).

Dissatisfiers for customers include slow service, inaccurate delivery, and situations where they must exert additional effort to get their needs met. Vigilance for operational excellence dedicated to accurate, swift, and easy customer experiences sets the foundation for the greatest insurance—a personal relationship with your customers. Companies that seek an emotional connection without operational excellence might spark a short-term customer bond, but that fascination quickly wanes, and those companies wash out as fads.

Companies that only “get it right” and “make it easy” often endure but are vulnerable to competitors who replicate the operational excellence while building the emotional engagement with those they serve. Organizational development expert and management guru Charles Handy put it this way, “The companies that survive longest are the ones that work out what they uniquely can give to the world—not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.”

It is highly imperative to recognize that customers buy solutions, not products or services. If customers could diagnose their own problems and come up with workable solutions on their own, they would do so. The reason that they're turning to you and your firm is that they're stuck and need your help. Therefore, you must be able to bring something new to the table to help your customers with solutions.

Although often misunderstood, marketing concepts are straightforward, and they are relevant to every part of your company. Marketing is essentially the art and science of getting and keeping profitable and valuable customers, and the hub of every business. This requires that you fully understand the problems and concerns of your market and can clearly explain how you can help them solve these problems. It is crucial to understand that marketing is an ongoing process that applies to every contact with your target market.

Remember that sometimes you need to get out of your own way to really understand your customers. Psychologists know, for example, that you’re likely to listen for problems that fit your own offerings, and to discount others. That can cause you to miss important opportunities, or to get blindsided later.

 So, try to listen with a third ear, as an anthropologist would, to what your customers are saying to you. If you can truly hear them, they’ll tell you all you need to know.