My husband has retained the same barber for the last five years in a city that is estimated to have over 5000 saloons; reflecting on this recently, I ended up concluding that every business must give a customer reason to not just want but need them.
Before he found his current barber, he had moved from one shop to the other every weekend for his weekly shave. “Kato is in his own league. Once you sit before him, your head is his business for the next hour. It is how he goes about his work that got me deciding—whenever I want a haircut, he is the man I need,” he says.
Usually, every customer journey starts with wanting something or service for which, often, there will be several service providers. You can relate this to your own sector—at the minimum, customers want you for the service you offer.
But do you have what it takes for them to need just you and not the competition?
I work in the financial services sector in a country where we are still trying to get more people to open a bank account. Often, you will hear people say—I want to open an account. At that point, they will ask friends to recommend a bank. Indeed, many a customer will end up opening more than one account but ultimately maintain one while the other will go dormant.
Go from being wanted, to needed
The differentiation in offering service, that excellence and uniqueness in delivery, moulds the wow experience we talked about last year and is what gives you the edge over your competition, elevating you from just wanted to being needed by the customer.
Writing about this at the onset of the year might be all you need to turn around your business fortunes. No sector is immune to competition yet getting customers to a point where they need your service experience will render the competition almost irrelevant.
A customer will always know what they want—a smartphone, for instance. But like Steve Jobs once said, it’s not the customer’s job to know what they actually need.
The market will have hundreds of options and the customer will easily be spoilt for choice. It’s the service provider’s job to analyse that information and make the iPhone experience, for instance, what the customer needs and make them look forward to the next product update.
In every customer interaction, I often find myself listening to the unsaid or unspoken words—a case of active listening. Reflecting on a recent family adventure to the park over the holidays, getting there with the kids exhausted from the grueling journey, the host really understood what would make our stay worthwhile and was patient enough to listen to each of our demands.
Sometimes, a customer is clear on what they want but do not appreciate the process to get it done—a process that may involve different people and thus the need to align the entire organisation value-chain needed in delivering a service.
Poor customer delivery is often caused by the misalignment of responsibilities in the entire value-chain. In the case of my family park adventure experience, the front-desk was able to commit to a promise with assurance that the backend staff such as the kitchen staff, room service, gaming team would support in making our stay worthwhile.
On the way to the park, I was pleased upon receiving a call from the administration staff expressing concern about the timing as we were running three hours late. When we finally arrived, tired, and strained, the concierge and reception team understood the brief—patiently listening to our long list of asks yet showing us that they understood. It was soothing.
The service was very particular to our wishes, and the teams tried to make a deeper connection with each one of us given the demographic mix in our group.
Observing how we were treated like royalty, it got me thinking that every company’s front-end talent is critical in the customer onboarding experience. The reception experience not only helped us forget the grueling road trip but also convinced us that we had made the right decision to come to that specific facility.
To be able to fulfil the customer need starts in the early stages of development with emphasis on the engagement between the consumer and the service provider.
We knew what we wanted as a family—a holiday adventure in the park. But the experience we got, the care, the warmth, the patience, the understanding made the statement that the place we had chosen is indeed what we needed to get most of the experience.
So, when a customer walks to you for the first time, knowing they want you—take it as an opportunity to make them know that you are the one, they need, not the next service provider. Just like my husband’s five-year client relationship with the barber, we seem to have opened one with the park!
Happy New Year, 2023!
