Most of us who are old enough to remember would have fond memories of the good old days when businesses were ran by owners themselves: corner stores, book shops, coffee joints, where everyone knew everybody by their first names, and even hang out for meals on occasion. In the good old days, businesses ran on relationships.
We may not always be able to get very personal with the scale of our business operations. Besides, there is the internet, telecommunications, and social media that has allowed us to be more efficient in reaching out to our customers.
But today is “Get to Know Your Customer Day.” This is a good opportunity to reorient our mindset back to building relationships with our customers, and believing that customers will do business with people they know, and like.
TIPS:
- Make follow up calls on how they like the product or service so far and how the customer can be helped with anything. We turn the tides today. We call to ask them something, and not wait for them to do it.
Be careful not to make it sound like a sales call, though or we negate whatever impact we’d like to achieve for today in the first place.
- Go on Facebook, or whatever social media you can utilize to conduct a survey, and maybe mount an online promo, say, an instant gift for answering a survey. This gives the day a feel of being special, and sends the message that you are serious in trying to get feedback from them.
- Send out thank you notes, and if resources allow, attach a gift along with it. Strive to have the note hand-written to make it personal. This gesture will go a long way in establishing your presence and will make the customer feel like you remember him/her, AFTER you got his/her business.
- Organize a cocktail reception/ intimate meetings with your customers. Manage the number of invitations for these activities, or you risk losing the personal contact that you want to achieve. In choosing who to invite, run a list of those who are not yet your best customers, but want them to get to the next level. And don’t lose sight of what this activity is for: to get to know them. Talk to them. Find out more about their personal circumstances and preferences. This will provide the all-important fresh perspective that may immensely help the way we look at ourselves and how our customers look at us.
In this highly competitive environment that we operate in, customers are spoiled with choices. We need to help make it easy for them to choose to do business with us, not only because our product or service is superior over others, but because we actually care to know them and reach out to them.