SHOPSMART AUTOS – CUSTOMER INFORMATION – MARCH 17, 2021
Key To Uncertain Times: Create Customer Confidence
The world we live in today has more stress than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic has created uncertainty in so many different places. In the business world, customers (consumers, clients, patients, guests, members, etc.) are concerned about who they are doing business with. No industry is immune. It’s impacting all types of businesses—B2B and B2C. So, what’s a company to do? Here’s a short two-word answer: Create confidence. I’ve been thinking and writing about this quite a bit during the past few months. A recent Forrester report, Design For Confidence by Andrew Hogan and SenemGulerBiyikli, addressed this topic. The best way to describe the result of creating confidence is this. Your customers don’t want to worry about using whatever it is you sell—or even your website or app. They just want it to work the way they expect it to work and do what it is supposed to do. As the report states, “they want to be assured that it will provide them with what they need to meet their goal.” The authors use Uber and Lyft as an example. These companies created a confidence that the traditional taxicab could not deliver—which is exactly why they disrupted their industry. I’ve actually experienced this firsthand more than once. I used to live in the suburbs and I needed to get a taxi to take me to the airport. I called the taxi company and was informed a taxi should be at my home in 15 minutes. After waiting for 20 minutes, I called the taxi company and asked where my cab was. I was told it would be at least another 15 minutes before the driver showed up. Uber eliminated this problem with an app that shows where the driver is. This information creates confidence. The customer knows how far away the driver is and can watch on the map in the app as the driver gets closer. This gives customers a sense of control—which also creates confidence. Customers, whether they know it or not, love confidence. Have strong communication with your customers. Think about what Amazon does at a digital level. When you make a purchase on the Amazon website, you immediately get an email that your order was received. Another email follows to let you know that your order was shipped and give you the tracking information. You receive yet another email once the order has been delivered—sometimes there’s even a picture of the package at your front door. All of this creates confidence. Another tactic is to be proactive by reaching out to customers about a problem before they contact you—ideally before they even know the problem exists. Listen to what customers complain about and fix the process. Find out the most frequently asked questions about your product and build answers and explanations into marketing materials, instruction manuals and your onboarding process. There is much more to the concept of creating customer confidence than what I covered here, but this will point you in the right direction. Consider the way products are designed and how easy and intuitive they are to use. Be sure your frontline employees are trained to manage difficult conversations. Take a close look at what your customers experience as they navigate your sales and service processes. These are good places to start. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, many of our customers feel out of control because of the COVID-19 crisis. They may be short on confidence, which is why it’s more important than ever to create confidence for them when and where you can.
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