The Need For Customer Relationship Building in a Short Case Study
Customer relationship is a key facet of a brand. It’s not just a transactional relationship… At least it shouldn’t be. It’s easy to sell burgers for 99c all day. It’s hard to create a culture where you’re likely known as the best quality fast food restaurant with the best service. Where sauces are free instead of 25c. A place where they’re polite, almost always saying “my pleasure” when you thank them and they close down for 1 of 7 days every week yet stay extremely profitable. In fact, that restaurant is the most profitable fast-food chain in the nation. You know the one I’m talking about right? That’s the power of cultivating brand-customer relationship equity.
So how do they do it? It’s all about brand-customer relationship equity. They’re predictable, polite and go out of their way to ensure you know they’re there to serve. There’s a lot to be learned about those 3 traits and ways to show your customers that you care. Some subtle investments in creating a brand culture and a hardcore dedication to remaining true to your core values can help establish any brand as a leader in their industry.
1. Predictability, creating an unwavering customer experience…
We’ve all heard that if you get a burger from McDonald’s anywhere around the world it’ll taste the same. That’s a pretty powerful statement considering what it takes to create a worldwide distribution chain overcoming languages, borders, international laws… But one thing you can almost be assured of, a Big Mac will taste like a Big Mac.
That’s an incredible feat, no doubt, but in my opinion, what Chik-fil-A does with its brand culture a lot more impressive. When you’re interacting with a client, you’re marketing… and your brand presence is either being reinforced or credibility is being destroyed. Especially if you’re advertising. I’ll write more on the topic of advertising on future blogs… but if you’re advertising, you’re making a promise. A statement of why “people like us do things like this.”
Essentially you’re introducing yourself and saying, “if you go with us, we’ll do X.” Whatever that X may be… a service or product and the associated passion you put into delivering it or lack thereof. When you deliver once, you’ve earned some trust. We all know that the key to a business though is in increasing the LTV(Lifetime value) of our customers and clients. So if we did a good job, hopefully, they’ll give us a chance to serve them again. If we did an amazing job, maybe they’ll even write a review? Awesome, now we’ve built some KLT(know, like, trust) factor built! What next?
Replicate it again with the same degree of passion and you’ll earn yourself a super fan on occasion… Keep doing this enough and you’ll never have to look at anyone as competition again. But how do you do that? Great standard operation procedures and empowered, happy, employees… That’s why what Chik-fil-A does is a feat because they keep their employees happy. It shouldn’t be that hard but darn does it seem tough for some employees to value their employees as the lifeblood of their business.
2. Manners Make Money… How to increase customer relationships by being polite.
A brand can create equity in the way they treat their customers. More importantly, though, a brand can create equity with its customers by the way they treat their customers. If you look at it holistically, a business is built of a mind(the C suite or decision-makers), a body(the main organization of systems and processes that the business is made up of especially including employees), and spirit(the energetic signature, innate personality, or the feelings everyone including employees get when they think about the business).
How you make your employees feel has a massive impact on their spirit, and since we mimic each other’s emotions. An article in Sage Journals states that “they(we) postulate contextual information is needed for emotional mimicry to take place.” Further going on to say that emotional mimicry is highly socially contextual!
That’s a lot of science… what does it mean for brand equity and building customer relationships? Your employees’ actions will determine how your customers feel and how your employees feel about being at the workplace will likely dictate how everyone feels about it… Now, this isn’t always the case, life happens and as good as you treat people sometimes they’re just in a terrible mood but you’re a lot less likely to be a misappropriated punching bag if your manners are on point.
*Side note: There are a few brands or cultures that thrive off of “predictably terrible service” like diners where they’re supposed to treat you poorly or other one-off situations do exist and they are branding to create a “tell-your-friends” experience.
3. Going out of your way to serve will always result in customer relationship building and brand equity.
When you and your employees show up to serve, the relationship building with your customer goes through the roof. Combining bulletproof standard operating procedures, brand promises and an attitude of servitude creates an unstoppable combination for a business. When you have “a mind” that’s making great decisions for “the body” and “the spirit” is rich and full of passion, your business is destined to stand out.
Servitude is really the ultimate way to create strong customer relationships and it really stems from the top down. Many of us have heard about leadership and how culture is set from the top down. Well when you serve your employees from the bottom up, you set yourself up to win. If you serve your employees’ needs in order to help them fulfill SOPs, it’s only logical that your brand promises will be fulfilled. And when the “mind” shows up with an attitude of servitude, it will likely permeate the culture and create a culture of servitude between employees and customers. Especially if it’s trained in.
At The Media House, we love to help create internal online training platforms and podcasts for businesses in order to help set company culture from the top down. We work with the C Suite in order to fully convey the passion and purpose of the business in order to reinforce the brand from the inside out.
These types of podcasts and courses go a long way in helping serve employees and help them stay up to date on all of the important information they need to do their job with ease.
Remember a holistic “mind-body” relationship generally indicates an attractive “spirit”. Investing and serving your employees will permeate every facet of your business’s operations and build bulletproof customer relationships that will last.
Now’s the time to start reinforcing your brand culture, inquire here to talk to a consultant about what we can do to help show you the multifaceted power of digital media.
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Scot Chrisman(https://themediahouse.co/)