A guest article from PDW Group, a performance improvement business who help businesses transform the behaviour and performance of their people, teams and organisation.
Customer Advocacy
Anyone who supplies other businesses with goods or services knows how important it is to build high levels of customer advocacy (or good will) if you want your company to be sustainably successful.
Most people in business know this, but even in ‘normal times’ far fewer businesses behave and act in a way that actually achieves it. Many businesses do not have high levels of advocacy from their customers, which suggests many are missing a big opportunity.
So if it’s hard enough in ‘normal times’, how much harder is it during this period of uncertainty when most are struggling to be face to face with their customers or internal colleagues?
Well the answer depends on which angle you look at it…One could say that in principle, very little has changed. Your customers still want the same things as they wanted before, albeit they too may have additional short-term needs because of the Covid-19 situation.
Customers usually still want the right type of relationship with their supplier; they still want their suppliers to demonstrate that they understand them and for them to keep their promises. And they want you to be easy to do business with, right from ordering to supply to invoicing and so on. And I don’t know many customers who don’t appreciate you ‘going the extra mile’ from time to time, whatever that looks like to them and you.
So all of the above is pretty much the same. If you were doing a great job of those things before the Covid-19 outbreak, then there really is no principled reason why you can’t continue to do that. It’s really only the temporary barriers of the lack of face to face communication both within your organisation and directly with your customers that will affect your company’s ability to keep doing a great job.
But if you weren’t doing such a great job before this, then maybe now is the time to find out why that is and what your customers actually think.
It’s a fact that most great businesses measure their customer (or client) feedback formally and track it as a KPI. This helps them in a whole host of ways to be ultimately more profitable. If you don’t currently do this, have a look at this link here to see how you can do it, and how we can help you.
So what are the actual barriers that the current Covid-19 situation is providing?
Well in short, much of it boils down to communication. If you are a B2B product company it is likely that you can still take orders, deliver your product, get paid and so on.
If you are a service business, some will be hit very hard with limited ability to do the job, whilst others may well have already switched their approach to an almost ‘business as usual’ one.
But regardless of what you supply, how do you ensure you remain properly open for business?
Some of the things you may be contending with are:
A reduced workforce due to furloughing
One or more of your offices or premises closed and phones on divert
No proper customer management that is face to face in nature
If you think about it, the solutions to all of the above share some common themes, and the foundation is how effectively you communicate, both as an organisation, and as individuals working directly with your customers.
So let’s start with the Organisation
Consider what communication you have sent centrally to all your customers telling them what to expect. Which employees are still working, where they are working from, which products or services they can still buy from you and how, etc.
And what have you told them they can expect in terms of response or delivery times, any changes to work delivery or payment, and what levels of customer service to expect?
These are critical pieces of communication. The easier you can make it to do business with you, the more likely you will keep your customers happy. And you never know, you may even win some new ones if your competitors are ‘asleep at the wheel’!
And don’t just communicate once, do it regularly, in bite sized chunks using different mediums. There’s your website, there’s paid media, email bulletins, and phone calls directly from your customer managers or your customer service team.
And what about your key individuals….
A key piece of the communication jigsaw is what your key customer facing employees can do to help. Well it’s clear that video calling is the most obvious replacement for face to face contact. But of course, phone and email has not changed.
So ensure your company begins to use and master modern video technology such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Hangouts; all of them work in a very similar way and are either free or very low cost.
Ensure your customer facing employees proactively contact your customers. Offer a video call or phone call and book it in the diary. Offer to give time, and spend some time talking on a human level with your customers, not just about tasks such as work, orders, deliveries or billing.
And spend some time asking what they really need from you, don’t just assume. It’s incredible how little curiosity so many people demonstrate, preferring to tell the customer all about them and their offering, than actually listen and understand what is keeping the customer awake at night, and how they could actually help to overcome some of their ‘pain points’.
And finally, as mentioned earlier, get some feedback on how you are doing.
The net promoter score is the globally recognised metric used by companies to assess their level of customer advocacy, and you can read more about it here.
Proper measurement and insight into your customers’ views will enable you to make key decisions with much more confidence than if you are simply guessing…and in these difficult times that could the difference between staying afloat or inflicting lasting damage to your business.
PDW Group is a long-term strategic partner and supplier to Armstrong Watson.
If you’d like to know more about them and how they can help you to better communicate with your customers, understand their needs and build your advocacy, then do get in touch using the web link below.
