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This Valentine’s season, you may be preparing to show appreciation for your customers. Or perhaps you have a customer appreciation day coming up later this year. Or maybe you have a whole department dedicated to employee loyalty and/or engagement campaigns. Learn from the McDonald’s snafu by assessing whether your ideas are more me-centered or customer-centered:
I’m a big fan of companies loving their customers. I think it’s often hard to be a customer. Customers put up with a lot of surprises, delays, and things that don’t make sense to them. One of the places a company might start getting it right is to show more love to their suppliers. How can a company expect to be loved by its customers, and at the same time be an indifferent turkey to its suppliers? It doesn’t add up. Many of us subscribe to the principle of treating employees well if we expect them to treat customers well. It’s plain logic. We know that employees see through the hyperbole to their actual work conditions and prospects for personal fulfillment.
Likewise for customers. Treating customers well means getting things right the first time. Making it a joy for customers to do business with your company, or at least pain-free, is an essential foundation to effective customer engagement, and to reaching your loyalty goals. If you want customers to love your company, focus on ease-of-doing business and helping customers efficiently achieve what they’re setting out to do. Show love not by asking to get, but by giving. Love, and you’ll be loved in return.
Image purchased under license from Shutterstock.
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