By Samiur Rahman, Blogger, Lava Protocols
Whether you are a business manager or a consumer, you know that it is often easier to stick to your current brand rather than shifting to a new one. But sometimes, YOUR preferred brand gets outdated, stale, expensive, or just not to your taste anymore. Perhaps, you stumble upon a better company with choicer deals to make you delighted. After some thought, you cut ties with what is not meeting your expectations, and opt for something better suited to you.
For businesses, however, this is alarming consumer behavior. Attracting new customers can often incur a cost in comparison to retaining the old ones. Why is that so? According to Forbes, Market research, advertisements, and manufacturing can all be expensive when attracting new customers (Forbes, 2018). However, an old customer likely stays due to their brand loyalty. This is because:
For instance, my father preferred to go to a specific grocery store near our house. I once asked him the reason behind this routine. He answered with a smile saying, “The owner is a very friendly man. We have interesting conversations and he often sends one of his trusted employees to carry the shopping bag for me since their store is so close to our house.” This made me realize the importance of businesses being customer-centric.
Customers rule supreme. Whether we like it or not, we are ultimately trying to establish profitable customer relationships by understanding their needs and wants, and providing value accordingly. Interesting enough, no two customers have the same way of perceiving a service or product that is sold by the supplier. So how can corporate giants manage so many different customers with so many unique interests?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software like Salesforce can be a game-changer in the market for almost all businesses. It helps them to keep track of their consumer behavior. Detailed analysis of their preferences, purchasing habits, demographics and so forth can help businesses to segment their customer base seamlessly. It can help the top management carve strategies that are profitable and completely customer-oriented. They can also secure and speed up this process by selecting the cloud-based CRM system, for instance, Sales Cloud. Frontline workers can get easy access to it to determine the satisfaction level of their customers and the profitability of their business.
Do you often find yourself going back to something that holds an emotional significance to you? This happens to most of us and businesses can use it to their advantage and provide value in the process. An example is The LEGO Group, a mammoth business of this generation, which has turned around its business from the brink of bankruptcy by using some clever strategies as described in Business Insider (Business Insider, 2014).
One of these ideas centered around using customers as the source of idea generation. The LEGO Ambassador Program made forty ambassadors within the age of nineteen and sixty-five. From these fans, they generated ideas about the business and took advice on what they could do to make the business flourish. Furthermore, LEGO built a website for its consumers called LEGO Click. Here, consumers could upload their creativity through LEGO creations.
What we can learn from this is that LEGO successfully turned its customers into business partners. They strove to enhance their relationship with customers by including them in the business development process. The workforce needs to understand that businesses can increase their profitability and retain their customers by creating lasting bonds with them. What better way to do it than to respond to them more effectively? Installing a system that can document the personal requirements of its customers, and enable easy access from all devices at any time of the day.
Businesses are made to give people what they desire. However, businesses can change the world for the better with their ground-breaking innovations. This cannot be done without getting the support of the consumers.
As mentioned above, some of these factors will help you keep your customer’s satisfaction level high:
Hence, businesses need to realize that responding to customer’s wants is the utmost priority. With the right strategy, you could grow into a global reckoning just as LEGO did.
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Lava is an authorised Salesforce Partner in Malaysia and has more than a decade of experience in cloud solutions which includes marketing automation, CRM implementation, change management, and consultation. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.