By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon
In our last three conversations about earning return business, we tap danced around something that is at the core of getting people to repeatedly come back to your business without a second thought of going somewhere else – Confidence.
Confidence is personal
As their confidence rises, people have this interesting way of insisting that others use their go-to business. You’ve probably had this happen to you. You’ll mention that you need a new dentist, or are going to buy a truck, put your family up at a local B & B, or want to get a fence built and someone you know will be positively rabid in their insistence that you use their favorite business for that purchase.
Some will take it very personally. If you choose a business other than the one they recommended and have a less than ideal experience, you’re likely to hear about it until you share your good experience with their favorite vendor the next time you have that need.
This happens for several reasons:
- They feel an obligation to you as a friend or family member and want you to have a good experience. In short, they want to do something nice for you.
- They want that business to stick around, so the more people they send to the business, the better.
- When a business knows you are sending them clients, they tend to treat you a little bit differently. We all enjoy that feeling of being treated a little bit special, much like the response Norm hears when he walks into Cheers.
Don’t underestimate that last one. Loyalty of this nature is easy to build with the right kind of attention and is invaluable.
Building loyalty with pizza
My wife and I often have a dinner date night on Friday and more often than not, we’ll find ourselves having pizza. There’s a lot of good pizza in the Valley, so we have plenty to choose from.
Despite that, we end up at the Back Room more often than not, mostly because of Zak Ward. Zak tends bar at the Back Room and when he was young, he swam with our boys during summer swim league. Yet that history isn’t why we go there.
After a long work week, we usually sit in the TV lounge area at the end of the Back Room’s bar. Because we’ve been there enough times, Zak automatically brings us one of the rotators he’s sure we’ll like (and he takes the time to tell us about it) after ordering our favorite pizza (which isn’t on the menu) and salads – never forgetting our preferred substitutions from prior visits.
Zak has learned that we’re creatures of habit when we come to the Back Room and we’ve learned to have confidence that he will take care of us and remember what we like.
Earning return business requires confidence
The more confidence clients have in you and your company’s ability to deliver what they want, when they want it, at the quality level they’ve paid for – the more likely it is they’ll keep coming back.
Confidence comes from a number of different places, but at its root, it’s about your clients’ peace of mind and friction-free experience.
I’ll bet you can think of little things that happened during recent interaction with businesses that affected your confidence in them.
The trick is figuring out what those little things are for your business and your clientele.
If you’re looking for ideas on how to instill that peace of mind, try these:
- A Realtor who provides a refrigerator checklist to her clients to prove her mettle by listing in advance the things that she may have to handle for the clients during a home transaction.
- A software company that documents the minute details of their in-house source management, build, testing and deployment process for their clients, raising confidence in the quality of releases that are publicly available to them.
- Once a rarity, now many restaurants frame their city/county health inspection for all clients to see.
- “Pre-owned” certifications for cars that indicate what has been checked prior to putting the car on the market.
- Banks that don’t have a deposit cutoff at 3:00 PM.
No matter how obvious these seem, the key is taking the next step.
How do you build your clients’ confidence?
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.
*****************
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him atmriffey@flatheadbeacon.com. Check out the Flathead Beacon archive of all of Mark’s blogs.