Caring About Your Customers

If you want to earn a consumers business this year, you have to appeal to what matters most to them.

That statement is true if you are selling Land Rovers or if you are running a dollar store.

It’s also been a truth that has been around forever, but now I have a fresh set of data to help you navigate 2021.

It comes from a survey just released last month on MarketingCharts.com.

Do you know what tops the list?

Convenience and Safety.  I’m willing to bet that before our pandemic, those two items wouldn’t be linked together and be a the top of the list.  Sure, we’ve been steadily looking for ways to make our lives easier forever, so convenience would be pretty high on the list anytime, but coupled with the repeated and continuous warnings about our health and safety due to the virus, this is a new category of consideration that we need to keep in mind for many more months to come.

The idea of getting your groceries delivered to your doorstep was an option very few people were willing to spend the money on.  Even curbside pickup was a concept that was still in its infancy a year ago for grocery shopping.

Sure we’ve been having pizza’s delivered to our door for decades.  That concept was expanded awhile ago locally by a company called Waiter on the Way that would take your order over the phone from dozens of restaurants and deliver to you for a small charge.  Of course this concept has since expanded with national companies now providing this service.

Ordering online with delivery of nearly anything has become the mainstay of Amazon’s retail operations for years.  As consumers we knew that we could order online and buy stuff that would be delivered to our homes, or our cars, but the pandemic created the increased need perceived by consumers who were previously not even considering these conveniences, but now do it for safety’s sake.

My question to you, is what have you done this past year and what will you be doing in the months and years ahead to adapt to this trend?

Also on the list is the word Empathy. How do consumers feel about your company and the way you care about them?  How do you manage this internally and externally?  If you have a customer that leaves a less than 5 star review online, how do you respond?  Are your marketing and branding messages conveying empathy and do you live up to those expectations?   Time to clean this area of your business up because this relates to another item on the list.

Losing loyal customers.  With all the changes in buying habits and the disruptions caused by the pandemic, this has also accelerated in the past year and will continue in 2021.

Two more items on the list go hand in hand.

The acceleration of e-commerce and providing the best customer experience. The best way for a local company to compete with an online, out of town company is the customer experience angle.  We want to shop local, make it easy for us to do that because there is an alternative.  Better yet, have you added an e-commerce option for you local customers?

Looking for ideas on how to implement some of these ideas and concepts?  Contact me and we can explore some options.  Send an email to Scott@WOWO.com .