Issue Number 5 – Increased Customer Churn
The world is becoming more and more competitive and the market in now truly global. Customers, previously disempowered by misleading marketing and over enthusiastic advertising, have become cynical and disloyal: and now they have global choice and price transparency like NEVER before.
No wonder so many long standing ‘entrenched’ businesses are struggling and failing!
On top of this the customer is now empowered as never before: with social media and feedback enabling them to check you out before buying from you, and feedback to the world how you performed … without your knowledge or involvement.
With reputation being the mainstay of profit and success, businesses are getting more and more lost and confused because this is such a threat and an issue to them.
In effect, the world has been turned upside down, and in order to deal with this effectively, you have to be putting in place ‘upside down processes’.
Without clear differentiation, customers will be driven on price alone: but we know that, in reality, we, as customers, value attention, trust, feeling valued, and ease of use or ease of life, above money: so why is money becoming such a major competitive area?
The answer is of course: BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS COMMON SENSE: go back to basics and ‘treat the customer like you would want to be treated if you were in their shoes’. But, with 400 years of business working contrary to these principles, and being driven by ‘Marketing and Selling’, old habits are VERY hard to change!
And the result is that very few organisations know how to act effectively in this new world of customer empowerment, feedback and global competition.
The answer is counter intuitive again: embrace competition, embrace feedback, embrace customers and listen to them more: make sure that you put some really good customer experience measures into your business and use them through your ‘go the extra inch’ practices to continually improve and continually focus on your customers’ real needs.
And, of course this must all be driven through a clear and passionately supported customer focused mission.
Doing this sort of thing will build customer loyalty and repeat purchases, up-purchases, cross purchases and referrals.
