Connecting With Customers By Paul B. Baron

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. - Anonymous

Customer relationships are a fundamental—but often overlooked—component of marketing. The results of those relationships- or the lack thereof- will be seen in your sales and bottom line growth.

Few companies truly understand their customers, making it impossible for them to accurately predict their behavior or consistently influence their decision-making. Even fewer companies understand what "customer-focused" means and how to achieve it.

Every interaction with a customer is gold, presenting an opportunity to connect in a way that builds loyalty and leaves a positive, lasting impression.

These days, contact takes many forms -- it can be the result of an in-person interaction from walking through the door to your retail ‘brick and mortar’ store or an on-site visit to your client’s location. Or through online chatting, telephone contact to your live customer service representatives, an email, or a visit to your company’s website. Seize every available opportunity to develop rapport and provide a trustworthy face to complement your company's products and services.

You (the business owner) and your employees come into contact with both internal and external customers throughout the day. If your business provides a service, you will be expected to solve customer problems and meet customer needs in a way that reflects positively on your team, department and the entire franchise system.

Seven factors tend to influence customer behavior and fostering relationships with them. Although you may be familiar with several of these concepts, considering them all simultaneously may be helpful in creating and building your customer base.

Opportunities lie with customers, not products or services

Customers don't buy products or product features—they buy benefits.

Relationships with customers are a two way street: it's more important to listen to your customers than to research them.

Realize that customer experiences are more valuable than generic market demand.

The only truly sustainable competitive advantage is a superior customer solution. And even that can be eroded with bad experiences.

Customer value is greater than the sum of quality perceptions and satisfaction.

Success in customer focus is measured in terms of (mind) share of the customer—not market share.

At the core of marketing success in the understanding that customers want to know more about how your products and services will address their needs, not about the

features your products or services might offer. To communicate this understanding to your customers, you have to connect emotionally.

Customers must like or respect you first before they'll listen to anything you have to say. That is true today more than ever. With all the technology we have, it’s critical to keep the customers' interests in mind first and foremost.

Even more than features and benefits, we must stress the experience that our customer will enjoy when they become involved with our products and services. That doesn't mean that we neglect the technical features completely. It means locking into the aspects that are important to that customer.

An old saying in sales goes "What's important is what important people think is important." How true! If the customer really does want to know about your product’s technical features you'd be wrong to avoid a discussion of those features. You've got to find out what is important to that customer, and then deliver.

Lock into your customer's needs today. Find out what they want to know and provide it for them. How do you do this?

First, be inquisitive. Listen to them. Find out what they need. Ask questions and then listen intently to what they have to say. Your sale and your paycheck depend on it! Sure, this is obvious and easy but how many times do you hear people really follow-up with questions about what someone else is thinking and doing? Utilize examples to which they can easily relate , where they are, where they have pain. Connect with them in some way to communicate your understanding, win their confidence, their business, then loyalty and a customer for life. In today’s world of online positioning via websites, search engines, and email, small business owners need to build lasting, valuable relationships from whatever means available. Using a combination of these communication vehicles will successfully and directly connect you to your customers. It's not enough to open your doors and rely on the messaging from the parent (in the case of franchise systems or other national dealership networks), or to send product updates or announcements of new services. Of course, in any competitive business climate, you’d be wrong to ignore the benefits of available, affordable technology that supports national positioning with local or other targeted communications. Properly implemented, technology can be used to both attract and track customers and offer marketing supplements to personal interaction. These will serve to continually increase your company’s ‘face time’ or ‘touch points’ with customers and prospects

Looking at one such vehicle - Email - progressive marketers are creating and solidifying customer relationships by delivering resources via email. Email has transformed the world of business. In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to imagine working without it these days.

Let’s look at email with a bit more depth. These days, next to ‘face to face’ and personal

telephone contact, email is recognized as the best one-to-one communication vehicle available, providing the fastest, most cost-effective way to deliver personalized, time-sensitive information while maintaining close relationships with customers, prospective customers, vendors and partners. Yet, there are certain criteria that must be met to ensure a consistent, useful e-mail resource and communications channel for customers.

Provide relevant content. The best way to ensure that subscribers remain on your email list is to provide them with content that is interesting and relevant. For instance, if your company sells or rents movies or computer games, you may want to provide a newsletter that contains information on the latest releases, games, tips and tricks, or celebrity news, as well as special offers on new releases. If your site provides financial or accounting services, a newsletter with the latest industry-specific headlines and new software releases for small business owners (e.g. the 2007 release of Peachtree Accounting software) would potentially be of interest to your prospects and customers.

Target and customize your messages. Be sure that you segment your lists appropriately and send targeted messages to each segment. Give your clients information about what they want and less of what they do not want. To further customize your messages, allow subscribers to select their own preferences for receiving email in HTML, plain text or URLs, or allow them to offer their own suggestions for what they’d like to see in your next communication.

Personalize, personalize, personalize. Personalized messages sell. Talk to your readers on a one-to-one basis, and your marketing campaign will be much more successful. For example, an auto service business might send out an automatic reminder email for the next oil change due, along with an offer for $5 off - good through the end of the month.) Prepare for an explosive response. Make certain that your email system will handle the high volume your messages will generate. Provide an automated subscribe/unsubscribe process. If customers are not interested in your resource, make it easy for them to remove their email address from your lists. Also make it as easy as possible for new subscribers to sign up.

Create viable storage for customer data. Maximize the value of your customer data throughout your organization by storing it in a standard relational SQL database. This will allow you to better integrate the information throughout your entire company, and will enable you and your employees to have a better handle on each customer during every interaction- a critical tool for building rapport and turning each customer into a

‘customer for life.’ Contact management programs, such as ACT! by Sage can facilitate this kind of information tracking and sharing, and are an invaluable tool in keeping tabs on your customers.

Automate e-mail "bounce" resolution and CAN-SPAM compliance. Some of your emails will bounce back to you. Rather than manually searching for correct addresses,

ensure that you have an automated process for handling those returns. For example, while I use ACT! by Sage for my email campaigns, I also use a product from an outside vendor, SwiftPage Email (http://www.swiftpageemail.com/) to comply with the CAN-SPAM law, and have automatic suppression of email addresses that have opted-out.

Respond to e-mail inquires within 24 hours of contact. This may seem obvious, but it's not so obvious to the number of both large and small companies that are swamped by messages from inside and outside their organizations. Many small businesses take from three to five days to respond. Sadly, some do not respond at all! If you are slow in responding, most likely your customer will think, "If they can't respond to my email in 24 hours, how long will it take them to service me, send a sales person, fix a problem, or deliver the product?"

Adopting these practices will help you ensure a sustainable, successful relationship with your customers. You should always strive to be as useful to your customers as possible and to provide the best service you can. Customers will reward you with loyalty and sales that would not have been possible with standard offers and discounts. Use all means to connect with your customers.

Note: the above article, written by Paul Baron, was published across CRM, trade association, and franchise business trade journals and websites, in August, 2006, during my tenure with Sage Software, acting as its Director, New Business Development for Trade Associations and Franchises.