The Hindu Business Line : Only happy customers come back

There is a lot of focus on customer service and customer loyalty. All companies talk about building relationships with customers (CRM), providing superior service and thus hopefully building customer loyalty and retaining customers.

What is customer loyalty all about? It’s about customers coming back to us over and over again. What do we need to do to get customers to come back to us? Of course, ensure that our products or services have features that are relevant to customer needs. Give them a product or service that meets specifications and delivers the promise.

Unfortunately, this is not enough. In today’s competitive environment, almost all leading brands in any category offer features that are almost identical to one another with fairly high or equal levels of reliability. Differences between one brand and another on basic specifications are almost non-existent.

In fact, I am sure we all realise that most products have features way beyond what the average customer actually needs or uses. How many of us actually use even a small percentage of what our television or audio system offers? We probably use less than 10 per cent of the features that our standard word processing or presentation software offers.

Yes, continuous innovation and feature addition are important more from a marketing angle to attract customers in the first place. They are not, however, enough to hold on to customers. We need to do something beyond giving a good quality to product retain customers and build loyalty.

WHAT MAKES CUSTOMERS COME BACK

So, what makes customers come back? What can we do to make customers want to come back to us ? It’s actually quite simple. Make them happy. That’s when customers come back to us. We do not go back to people or places that make us unhappy. We like to go to places that make us feel good. That’s the name of the game – make customers happy and make them feel good. Easier said than done – and yet not really that difficult. Let us see what makes people happy and remember us?

I am reminded of a fairly regular situation I face when I attend a marriage function alone and get back home. My wife would bombard me with questions about the bride and the groom, what they were wearing, how they looked, what others looked like, the decoration in the wedding hall and so on. I generally find it extremely difficult to remember or recall any of these things that will help me give a meaningful reply to my wife.

Many marriage receptions are about going through the mandatory handshake with the couple and family, the video and the still picture and then off to dinner or lunch or whatever. But I certainly bring back some memories from such functions. It’s always about the hosts and how they greeted and treated the guests in the function.

What makes an impact on me are not just the decoration and the food and the set-up – all of which money can buy – but how I was received, the warmth and affection or the lack of it from the hosts, the attention paid by them and so on. I am sure I am not different from others in this respect.

Two types of needs

Let’s move to a business situation and see what puts off people. Let’s say you are a quality-conscious person and you need a shirt. You walk into the show room of a leading brand of shirt on M.G. Road (almost every city in India will have an M.G. Road and almost every M.G. Road will have the leading brands of shirts). When you walk in, you find three salespeople behind the counter engrossed in a story that one is telling the others and they pay little or no attention to you. They look at you, wave to the counters to browse around and continue with their story.

What are you likely to do? At least 90 per cent of participants in my workshops say they will walk out. I don’t blame them because I would do the same. I ask why? The replies include – because the salespeople did not pay attention to me, my ego was hurt; they did not give me importance and other similar reasons.

Why does the customer walk out of a shop because he did not get attention when what he walked in for was a shirt? We all believe that we are rational and objective in our buying behaviour. Yet when we go to buy a shirt we would have no hesitation in walking out for a reason that has nothing to do with the quality of the shirt. This seems extremely illogical, unreasonable and crazy – yet this is reality. This is how very sane, reasonable, good customers like you and me will react and behave.

The customer walks out because he can always get the shirt in another shop. He gets the same brand or an equally good brand in another shop and thus he does not compromise on his requirement of the shirt. What makes you different from others is not just that you have good quality shirts but how you handle him and how you make him feel – his experience with you. If you were to dispassionately assess the buying behaviour of this customer (who is not really unique but a normal customer like you and me), what the customer is really saying is that I am paying you Rs 1,200 for how you deal with me and make me feel and not so much for the shirt. I can always get that shirt anywhere.

This simple illustration is powerful to help us understand what customers are really looking for when they do business with you. Of course, they want a product or service that satisfies their need. This is what one might call a physical or tangible need. There is obviously another need they have and sales and service people need to recognise this. Customers also have an emotional or psychological need that needs to be satisfied. It is the satisfaction of this need that makes a customer happy and makes her want to come back to you.

Whether we are dealing with shirts and sarees or televisions and washing machines or even electric motors or machine tools, we must remember that we are essentially dealing with a customer who is a human being. This is the crux of business everywhere. Business is really about managing people and relationships. When we deal with customers (people), we have to satisfy two kinds of needs – a tangible or physical need and a personal or psychological need. Today’s reality is that there are numerous products in all categories that will satisfy physical needs equally well. The differentiator that keeps customers tied to you is the way you deal with her and how you make her feel. Did you make her feel good? Was she happy that she came to you? That is what customer facing people have to constantly ask themselves.

In the next part of this series, we will see what are the needs that sales and service providers must satisfy that will make customers feel good and happy.

These are fairly basic human needs and apply to all whether young or old, rich or poor, man or woman. I believe these are very basic after the roti, kapda and makaan needs. We will also see that these needs are interrelated and the solution for all is almost common.

The writer is Director, SDM Institute for Management Development, Mysore.

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