LOYALTY IS LOVE

Ok first and foremost, let’s get something straight, a business is legally defined as a legal entity separate from its owners. In other words a business is like a human being capable of loving and being loved. However since the body chemistry and other factors necessary for human beings to fall in love don’t exactly exist in a business, most businesses don’t fall in love; rather they become LOYAL. Now the question is how often is your loyalty questioned? Loyalty means to be faithful and is something of value. Loyalty is a rare gem that is hard to find in today's society. Think of your loyalty to an organization. People do not spend the same amount of years working for the same company, as my parents and grandparents did. Think of the number marriages that end in divorce. People are quicker to terminate marriages for the smallest of issues, such as "irreconcilable differences." Loyalty is a strong force that will keep you in any relationship, whether business or personal.

Your loyalty to someone or even an organization will always have a high appraisal value. When your partner for example senses a hint of disloyalty in you, the level of trust goes down. When trust diminishes, the relationship deteriorates. The same is true for the organizations and customers you work for. When disloyalty is evident in you, your opportunities for growth in that organization are lost. Trust and loyalty go hand in hand in a business as it does in a marriage.
Now that we’ve established the facts above, we need to look into ways to make your businesses and customers stay in love or rather remain loyal to you! I work for a company with a huge goal of helping Nigerian businesses in creating great brands that can compete globally. We’re serious about this and because we love our business we are serious about our customers.
From first-hand experience we realize that being a small business does have its advantages if you know what you’re doing and constantly thinking about the customers’ needs and proactively fulfilling it with your services. Who knew attention to such small details could do so much and it helps cut our marketing and advertising budget. We don’t have any fancy billboards or ever had the need to advertise on television or radio, yet the new job orders keep coming in! It is amazing!

I’ll share with you briefly some of the five (because 5 is my favourite number) ways you too can benefit from intensely loyal customers. You can trust me, I adopted these while working at Jean-Paul & Associates and we’re already seeing results!

1) Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
Dependability trumps skills most often. Trust is key in building customer confidence and relation and that trust must not be misused. I’ll give you an example; I went into a mechanic workshop after hearing some funny noise in the engine of my car. Turns out the engine was about to “knock”, or so. Luckily the insurance covers that! Who knew? Anyways I got a notice from the workshop telling me the car would be ready in 10 days. So I took a deep breath and waited. 10 days came, no phone calls came in, so I took a drive down there asked for my car and was met with apologies asking me to come in a week! The same thing happened again after that one week, and needless to say by the time the car came out I was tired of the car and vowed never to return to the mechanic! The same rule applies to client appointments, deadlines, etc.. Think before you give any promise – because nothing annoys customers more than a broken one. When promises are broken the trust ties break as well.

2) Listen to your customers.
Is there anything more exasperating than telling someone what you want or what your problem is and then discovering that that person hasn’t been paying attention and needs to have it explained again? From a business customer’s point of view or even a personal, I doubt it. Allow your customer talk and show him that you are listening by making the appropriate responses, such as suggesting how to solve the problem or nodding while the customer tells you what he/she wants and not just pretending to listen; which unfortunately most men know how to do this especially through practicing the act in their relationships by grunting and make funny throat sounds to show their spouses that they following the story when they’re really just watching the football match or continue chatting on the Blackberry. Your wife knows this already and still feels the need to talk; most customers won’t be this nice. Listening to your customer makes you do your job better to suit his or her needs and makes the customer feel assured that the job will be done according to the given specifications. For more on active listening follow us on Facebook and read our article on Becoming a Rainmaker or in the alternative kindly wait for a few months till our next newsletter.

3) Be a Good Samaritan
People have a saying “Are we running a charity organisation?”, or “Am I the Good Samaritan?” You may not be running a not-for-profit organisation and your origins and ancestral descents may not be from ancient Samaria however you should when convenient and possible put customers and potential clients first. I’ll give you an example, a business developer from a firm we were trying to get to do business with, ran into our office requesting for an urgent design for an invoice and print as he needed it to close a sale. We had earlier given his firm a quotation for rebranding their organisation and that was still pending. We had two options; A) Tell him to get his boss to approve our bid and we’ll do so or B) Do him a great favour and expect he remembers this and nudges his boss to take up our proposal. Fortunately we went with option B, and not only were he pleased but his boss was impressed and gave us not just their account but their parent company too. In our day-to-day lives as human beings, according to your religion, your reward may be in heaven, but in the business world, you’re rewarded with referrals, word-of-mouth marketing and undying loyalty. Therefore if you have to bend over backwards just to please your client…THEN DO IT!!

4) Deal with complaints.
Most times when a client makes a complaint he can sound like a nagging partner. No one likes hearing these complaints, and many of us have developed a reflex shrug, saying, “You can’t please all the people all the time”. Maybe not, but if you give the complaint your attention, you may be able to please this one person this one time - and position your business to reap the benefits of good customer service. Sometimes the customer just wants a phone call from the person with the highest authority to be emphatic to his/her plights and make amendments if possible at no extra cost.

5) Train your staff to become worthy ambassadors.
Do it yourself or hire someone such as me to train them. Talk to them about good customer service and what it is (and isn’t) regularity. Most importantly, give every member of your staff enough information and power to make those small customer-pleasing decisions, so she never has to say, “I don’t know, but so-and-so will be back at...” At our workplace usually we give clients a month’s notice to renew their domain names and hosting and usually amidst all the hustle and bustle in doing business, they forget but we automatically renew them anyways and then invoice them. They always come back bringing more business to express their gratitude.

6) Throw in something extra (like I just did)
I know this from experience to be true, so rather than five tips I threw in an extra. So whether it’s a signed letter for a future discount, a year of free domain name renewal or hosting, or registration of a group in Facebook for free and tips to market a website, people love to get more than they thought they were getting. Don’t think a gesture has to be large to be effective. We found that out when setting up a website for an institute for learning; for extras we threw in free articles to get them started and get others to follow suit. A small thing, but so appreciated.

If you follow these tips as listed above you’ll have the satisfaction of having repeat businesses and very happy partners clients. The sweetest part remains the fact that good customer service will bring in more new customers than promotions and price slashing ever did!

Ebuka Anichebe is the Managing Director of Jean-Paul and Associates Consultancy. He has an uncommon approach to marketing media consulting, business development and customer experience evaluation. He’ll like to hear your views on this article and more, write to him at ebuka@jeanpaulconsult.com or call 07040448749