It is the age of customer, and being able to offer a charismatic experience would definitely be a competitive edge. But how can you deliver a charismatic experience? First off, let’s start by defining charisma. Owen Fitzpatrick, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Expert and author of “The Charismatic Edge” defines Charisma as follows: “Charisma is the ability to leave an impression in others, ability to engage people and being interesting”. In this sense, we find that all babies are charismatic. At the same time, babies are simple. They are able to leave an impression in others, and simply connect with people.
“In the age of customer, companies need to build charismatic brands, leave an impression and be simple to be able to connect with customers and improve their experience.”
Connecting with customers and improving their experience is not about treating their complaints, knowing their expectations and addressing their needs only. It is more about having them tied up, both mentally and emotionally, to your brand. You have to take initiatives that your customers are able to feel, and align your business with the feelings or impressions you want to leave.
Below are a few C’s to consider while building your company’s brand Charisma, improve the experience of your customers, and connect with them.
1. Communicate
Communicating with customers is a very important factor for building charisma. Like any public speech, maintaining a high level of simplicity will help transmitting the right message to your customers. Successful communication requires a simple and a clear tone so you can capture the different segments of your customers. Moreover, you should always be transparent on what you communicate. Fine prints are not preferable if you want to leave a good impression.
2. Customize
Customization capabilities should be a main focus while transforming business towards being customer centric. Personalizing the whole experience, like offering the right product or service at the right time, providing the next best offer, offering the preferred communication channel and matching customers with the right call center agents helps simplifying the connection with your customers. A European mobile operator is walking the extra mile by matching its customers with agents having the same age bracket, the same interests or hobbies or a similar personality type. It is worth noting that the ability to customize requires a lot of insights about the customer. Big Data is definitely an enabler when it comes to customization.
3. Care
Caring in terms of Empathy helps in emotionally connecting to your customers. At the end of the day, we are all customers and have defiantly been through negative experiences that we can never forget. You do not want to create those negative experiences to our customers. Being in the customer shoes and explaining how you empathize with them, helps minimize the hard feelings. Empathy is common grounds for Customer Experience experts in 2014. Empathizing is not enough though. Not taking the necessary actions to eliminate those bad experiences might result in an even worse experience.
4. Control
Controlling the business processes and aligning them with your objective of impressing the customers takes a lot of effort and dedication. Building a process that ensures the right flow of customer experience management within the organization, in addition to re-engineering the current customer impacting processes to cope with the new needs and expectations paves the road to building a charismatic experience. Lack of control over the internal processes decreases the ability to leave positive impressions in your customers.
5. Calibrate
Calibrate your culture!
Your human resources are your best bet to drive building your brand’s charisma. Being able to establish a human-to-human connection between your employees and your customers aligns all the efforts to establish one goal: improved, memorable and consistent customer experience. Engage your employees to simply and spontaneously engage with your customers.
Being charismatic enables quicker connections. The mentioned points are just a few to think of when trying to answer the question: “How charismatic is your customer experience?”
N.B. This article has been previously posted on Linkedin on June 12, 2014.
