Does Any of This Sound Like Your Company?
- You’re feeling margin pressures,
- You’re suffering under escalating personnel costs,
- You’re watching your best customers defect to competitors whom you know aren’t as good as your company is,
- You feel your business model isn’t as relevant to the market as it was 10-20 years ago, or
- Your company lacks the flexibility or budget to do things it used to do.
If any of these things sound like what you’re experiencing right now, you’re not alone.
To minimize disruption in the workplace, and to survive in this disruptive environment, you must innovate, you must change, and you must do so in a customer-centric way. What does it mean to be customer-centric? It means understanding your customer’s needs and ensuring that they’re satisfied with the extent to which you meet those needs. To do so successfully, you must understand the true nature of the changing market in which you operate.
The Trends You Face causing Disruption in the Workplace Are:
Millennials
The largest birth cohort of the last century, Millennials now comprise the largest generational segment of the US workforce (US Bureau of the Census). Your company must increasingly adapt to the dictum that “Millennials are different.” And the key to marketing to Millennials lies in understanding who they are and what “keeps them awake at night.”
Geography
Location has become less of a barrier, creating a situation in which your prospects and customers can, and do, search online through hundreds of your competitors. And, they know well that they can as easily purchase from competitors who are thousands of miles away from you as easily as they can purchase from you. You must increasingly provide an exceptional customer experience or risk losing your customers to competitors.
New Technologies
Millennials and their older counterparts increasingly use new technologies to communicate, relying on devices and analytics (such as social media and online search), rather than print ads, to gather information. You cannot expect your customers to adapt to your technology. You must adapt to theirs. To do so, you must understand how your customers prefer to communicate and order.
What Should You Do?
The kind of rapid industrial, technological, and social change you are facing demands radical solutions and fast action. But sometimes, those solutions don’t have to be radically new, just radically simple. As simple as going back to the basics—the basics of generating profit by connecting with your customers.
One of the best ways to generate profit in your company is to differentiate your company from your competitors. To do that, you must change radically the conception of customer service that has prevailed in wholesale distribution for decades.
Want to learn more?
This blog post is based off material from my book with Randy MacLean, “YOU CAN’T SERVE THEM WELL IF YOU DON’T KNOW THEM WELL: Capturing and Captivating Customers with Concierge Customer Service™”
You can get the entire first two chapters for FREE here.
If you’d like a full copy of the entire book, you can get it here.
Dr. Jeanne Hurlbert, President of Hurlbert Consulting is an expert in sociology and survey research. After spending more than 25 years in academia, she now uses her extensive behavioral science expertise to help companies like yours distinguish yourselves through customer service. What sets her approach to customer service apart is that she begins by helping companies meld research and marketing to find out exactly
(a) what their customers want and
(b) how well they’re succeeding in giving customers what they want.
You can schedule a consult with her by going to www.ConciergeCustomerService.com; you can call her at 888-590-9677; or send an email here. And, if you’d like to complete her complimentary assessment to see how well you’re doing in knowing and serving your customers well, just go to www.FixYourService.com.
