What do you do when your customers expect fast, friendly, and free? And, your competition is giving away the store? Step back and look at what you are doing. Because your customer expectations are defined by...wait for it...wait for it...you.
You may not have a manifesto that details what your customers should expect, but everything you do trains them. For example, maintaining a regular sale marketing schedule year after year trains people to wait for the sale. One of our clients had a successful one day sale postcard program. Every major holiday was a "One Day Sale" with discounts of 15% - 25% on everything in their catalog. Customers received a postcard announcing the sale a few days before the holiday.
When we reviewed their sales data, we noticed a drop in sales a couple of weeks before each holiday. People had been trained to wait for the sale. We created a new marketing strategy that kept the one day sales, but rotated the customer segments so people didn't receive an invitation to the same sale each year. Changing the mail strategy allowed us to retrain people so they didn't wait for the sale before placing an order. It also increased response rates for the postcard campaign because they didn't know when the next sale was coming.
If you've trained people to expect certain things, retraining them takes time and effort.
The first step is knowing how they have been trained. Take a hard look at what your team does that affect your customers. Does your marketing team promise things you can't deliver? They are setting customers up to be disappointed. Is your customer care team slow to respond to emails and quick to answer calls? They are training customers who would prefer email correspondence to call when they have an issue. Guess which costs more?
Pleasing customers is easy. All you have to do is deliver on the promise. It's defining the promise that is hard. Most companies have guarantees as in "60 day money back guarantee" that are clearly defined and simple to honor. It's the unspoken promises that are much harder to fulfill.
Spend some time evaluating your marketing and service from your customer's point of view. What are you training them to expect? What expectations need to be reset? Once you know, you can implement a new strategy that retrains your customers. If you make it a gradual process there'll be little resistance and you'll reap the rewards from having your customer expectations aligned with your business strategy. They include increased retention, lifetime value, response rates, revenue, and profitability.
One last thing - If you've trained your customers to expect poor service with a lot of attitude, change it immediately. If you try a gradual transition, you may lose your business.
Related posts:
- 5 Simple Ways to Use Integrated Marketing to Manage Customer Expectations
- Customer Life Cycle Part 1: Your Customers are Changing - Does Your Marketing Still Fit?
- Customer Life Cycle Part 5: Getting Value Out of Discount Customers