Your Customers Want These 4 Things

Sure, all your customers are different from each other.  They have different strengths, weaknesses, cultures and goals but there are FOUR things they all want!

We have interviewed hundreds of customers from our client organizations in order to advise them on ways to improve customer loyalty.  From all that research with all those different customers, there are four strong themes that always emerge to influence levels of customer satisfaction.

Listen to me.  This is the big daddy of customer desires.  Your customers want you to listen to them. The implications of this theme lead to a variety of creative Listen To Me programs we’ve designed for our clients to allow them to listen to their customers.  Many of our clients hire us to do the time-consuming work of listening to their customers.  We interview their customers and ask them why they let our client serve them.  Our outsider status lets customers talk about whatever is on their minds.  They can vent safely and we can collect valuable insights. On the other hand, for some of our clients, we have recommended ways for them to capture customer feedback themselves. 

Other organizations send out customer satisfaction surveys.  We talk about surveys often but you won’t read our full philosophy on surveys in this post.  Nevertheless, we must state clearly that sending surveys to customers does NOT satisfy the Listen to Me desire to be heard.  (In many cases we’ve found that customers have been annoyed or insulted by surveys.)

Show me you’ve listened.  If your customer takes the time to speak up and offer their opinions about their experience with your company, your company must show a response.  We are not talking about sending a thank you note.  We are talking about showing the customer that changes have been made.  Showing them their opinions made a difference.  Again, we view this as tremendous opportunity to be creative about building relations with customers. 

When we interviewed a cross-section of customers for one of our clients, we found fingers pointing to serious problems in the accounting department.  In fact, the problems were so extensive, the accounting department was ruining the relationship altogether.  Our client acted on all of our recommendations for improvements and created an entirely different department of well-functioning professionals now trained in customer service.  We made sure our client made their customers aware of the turn around.  After all, it was their opinions that uncovered the impediments to customer satisfaction and allowed our client to make productivity improvements.

Serve, don’t sell.  Each customer thinks they are different and unique.  They also know they have needs and they know your company has some solutions.  We rarely if ever talk to a customer who loves being sold to.  Instead, customers want their service or product providers to listen to their needs (refer back to theme #1) and offer a response to the need.  That’s different than selling although the activity may end with a sale being made.

So what’s a person to do who must book business?  People in sales and business development hear it often enough that complex sales are consummated after relationships are built.  And we all know the best relationships are built on trust and respect.  Customers tell us their most satisfying relationships are with people who:

1. Do what they say they will do
2. Demonstrate they are interested in the (customer’s) business more than making a sale
3. Build good, respectful, personal relationships with them

That means you must look for opportunities for your customers and prospects to trust you.

Understand me.  Customers who have a high level of satisfaction with their service/product provider feel they are understood.  It’s a key differentiator.   We recently were talking to one of our clients’ customers who stated, “The project didn’t go as well as it could.  Maybe it was me but your client should have figured out how to deal with me.”  Think you know this person?  You have probably had to deal with him. The goals of most engagements are to get something done well, get paid well and be enthusiastically called back.  The toughest personalities are those that aren’t predictable and those that aren’t up front and clear about what they want.  These may be your Worst Customers (Zephyr can turn them around for you, by the way). To achieve customer loyalty, your organization must learn how to first identify and work with the variety of personalities at your customers’ organizations. 

Of all the customer satisfaction assessment programs we’ve completed, our clients who had achieved the best levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty had these four themes covered.  They provided a mechanism to listen to their customers.  They demonstrated in many creative ways that they listened.   They have a service-oriented, not sales-oriented culture dedicated to serving and understanding their valuable customers.  They also hired the appropriate individuals (in every department!) to support all those requirements.

How is your organization doing?  Can you say with confidence your culture responds to these four themes of customer desires?  How do you know?