Finding the right balance in your business between growth and creating a sense of community with your brand is crucial in creating a better customer experience.
Creating a sense of community in your business can lead to significant revenue gains, especially if you pair that experience with an excellent follow-up marketing strategy such as a loyalty program.
Your objective of growth and revenue shouldn’t come at the expense of the customer experience and their perspective of your business.
For example, a restaurant constantly having high-employee turnover while cutting back on portion size and quality will have a hard time with business revenue and growth.
The goal is to empower your employees by giving them the proper tools and to foster brand loyalty that makes customers want to return for more.
Employee training
Providing training for your employees does a couple of things. One, it provides your employees with the knowledge and understanding of what you value in the organization, gives them the resources to succeed in their roles, eliminates confusion and frustration, and leads to better employee morale.
For customer service and front-facing organizations, employee training and improved morale are crucial in representing your interests to the customer. For example, think about a restaurant where all the employees are considered team members, have a happy demeanour, and enjoy being at work together.
That attitude and behaviour are recognizable to customers, becomes contagious, and becomes an environment that customers enjoy. As a result, you can create a great brand with the right climate and pair it with delicious offerings.
Another area where education and training are essential is with business to consumer sales.
For example, life insurance sales is an industry that provides some well-needed relief for beneficiaries but can be a grind to build a business.
People don’t want to pay for a service they won’t see the benefit from, and it takes some deft handling on how to educate a person to think about the benefits to their beneficiaries rather than themselves to secure a deal.
With training and education, sales representatives will know how to best handle objections, lower defences, and create a worthwhile conversation with the client about the value and importance of a service like life insurance.
One of the essential phases of employee training is handling complaints and de-escalate situations. It’s an often overlooked yet important skill in customer service roles and is usually not dealt with by employers until too late.
Employees who have been provided with proper education and training are happier and more productive, cause fewer mistakes, and can operate independently of management.
Loyalty programs
On top of educating and training your employees, creating brand loyalty is an integral part of balancing growth and customer experience.
The value of reselling to others is almost 5x what it is to selling to a new customer. The value of a returning customer is that they are already familiar with your brand and offerings, so their defences are already down, requiring less effort on your part to sell to them again.
And to turn them from a returning customer to a rabid fan can go a long way toward creating a relationship with the customer and your brand.
Creating a loyalty program is one of the best ways to enhance brand loyalty, especially if you tie it into a sense of community around your products and brands.
There are two primary ways to create brand loyalty. First, provide quality products and services that improve people’s lives and offer exclusive deals and other promotions.
Apple is a great example of this concept of brand loyalty. While there aren’t many exclusive deals that Apple provides to their customers, they created a sense of community by giving top-of-the-line tech products designed and marketed to be unique and exclusive.
On the other hand, some loyalty programs provide free gifts, exclusive discounts, and offerings. Bands and performers use this strategy to build up their fan base, offering free merch, exclusive fan club-only music releases, and more.
Partnerships
Creating partnerships is another way to highlight your brand and make a better impression of it along the way. Consider partnering with other businesses and organizations that align with your core philosophies and goals.
For example, a local youth program that provides after-school services for kids in your community may make a good partnership for both you and the outfit, provided you have products that can help the other organization with their needs.
A car dealership with a literacy program may not be a great tie-in, but a family-oriented restaurant with an afterschool program may be an excellent fit.
When considering how to grow your business but balancing it with the customer experience, ask yourself, “what will this do for my customer loyalty?”
Customer loyalty is a gold mine for your business and should be part of the calculus with any growth strategies.