The importance of engaging your customer positively- a laundry list of benefits

I thought I'd make a quick 101 list of the benefits of engaging well with your customer.

Let me provide a clarification first. When I say "engage", I mean it in the most comprehensive and inclusive way possible - before, through and happily ever after the buying cycle - the total experience delivered to the customer.

Coming to the list:

1. Repeat purchases by customer
2. Increases purchase quantum during the repeat purchase
3. Reduces probability of buying elsewhere
4. The customer buys more number of extensions of your brand
5. Reduces customer churn
6. Reduces the chances of buying from competition
7. Advocates your brand and product to everyone - creates a domino effect
8. Reduces the cost of acquiring a new customer - you need to tom-tom less on advertising
9. Your residual advertising gets sharper :-)
10. Reduces your servicing cost - lesser complaints to begin with
11. Reduces your servicing cost - lesser need to clarify / provide information after the sale is done
12. The customer is willing to pay more
13. Your employees stay engaged, and feel good (I'll surely come to this in one of my future posts)
14. You fulfill a key moral imperative of being in business
15. Your obsess over understanding the customer better through all pieces of touchpoints and information that you can lay your hands on - you design your overall experience much better than competes.
16. You have got too many things going right over a period of time, for your current and future competitor to replicate
17. You have set in motion a passionate organization that is hard stressed to always improve on their customer experience delivery - you catch on technological disruptions better and outlive competition

If you notice, the earlier bullets are shorter sentences, and the length of the sentences is almost increasing in a linear fashion. There is a very clear reason for this. There are some very strong no-brainers on being customer-focussed - which are very easy to explain. However, there are also fundamental but long-drawn out advantages, which needs to be mined better
 

A blog that focuses on everything customer

Customer Satisfaction...
Customer Experience...
Customer Centricity...
Customer Effort...

The buzzwords will come and go. But the core idea shall remain. The customer is a reasonably important aspect of business, especially for business that want to continue to be in business!

This blog will focus on most things customer in nature. My day job is to focus on helping companies improve the quality of the relationships they have with more and more customers by finding out and delivering what the customers say they want, and, more importantly, what they'll never say they want, but will get terribly happy if they are provided.

But this blog is pretty much going to be my own personal views, opinions built through my years of working as a management consultant, as well as being at the forefront of many (personal) purchasing decisions.

Yes, you heard me right. I have a job and I buy stuff - that gives me the power and credibility to inform, and influence what you do!

I'd also want to share my take on why this blog is named as such. I'm a movie buff (more Bollywood, and other regional Indian movies than Hollywood). But the name is inspired by "The Pursuit of Happyness". Like the central premise of that term, as defined in the United States Declaration that Happiness cannot be achieved, but only be pursued, it is fairly established that the Customer cannot ever be owned, chased or tricked...only wooed permanently.

Let me share a quote that is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi (though there are doubts whether it really was his quote):

A customer is the most important visitor, on our premises.
He is not dependent on us.
We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption on work.
He is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider to our business.
He is part of it.
We are not doing him a favor by serving him…
He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do it.

I'd agree with every part of the above, except for the cardinal assumption being made here that the customer is a "He".