Do You Really Care?

Do you really care? 

I mean really really care about your customers? 

The battle that we face is between recognition and perceived indifference. 

If you really care, if you really hold your customers in a special place, if you really love your customers, then it will show. 

The best way it shows is through the power of recognition. 

What do we mean when we’re talking about recognition? 

We’re talking about bringing them along for the journey with your business, because you want to be on the journey with them, but they need to be on the journey with you – it’s a two-way thing. 

You’ve got to sit with them, you’ve got to create space for them to talk about the things that matter to them, to engage with you, to engage with each other, to solve problems together, to rant and moan frankly, to critique your business, to tell you what you’re doing wrong, to help you improve your products and services, and to show you what would make them happy. 

The recognition that customers feel when a business asks their opinion or seeks their input or wants to find out what it is that we’re doing wrong, that recognition goes a long way to telling customers how much you really care. 

If you think about it the other way the alternative is perceived indifference. 

If you only speak to your customers to ask them for money, if you only ever call them for a sales pitch, if you only ever email them to book in an update call or an end of program call so that you can resell them, if you do anything like that, if you show them no consideration. 

Maybe find out their birthdays, maybe send them a special discount for their birthday. 

There are so many things you could do. 

If you don’t show them the recognition and the love they deserve, they will feel forgotten about, they will feel alone. 

It’s so simple isn’t it? 

Gary Vaynerchuk recently said “The best marketing strategy in the world is four letters, c a r e” 

You’ve just got to care about your customers in as many ways as possible. 

Because whoever cares wins. 

That’s the reality, whoever cares wins. 

It’s a funny battle because we constantly want more fans for our businesses, and yet we’re so busy running our businesses we forget about the customer and then we wonder why we don’t have fans. 

And in the cold light of day now that I’m presenting it to you, it probably seems really obvious doesn’t it. 

I’d like to challenge you to taste the victory of fans versus the defeat of critics. 

I’d like to challenge you to ask yourself what three things you can do to recognise and involve your customers, your existing customers and your future customers, in your business?

How could you bring them into the product development cycle, to the marketing cycle, to the sales cycle, to the customer service cycle? 

How could you involve them? 

How could you recognise their input? 

And not just from the perspective of we want to get free advice from our customers, but really, meaningfully caring about them. 

If you do that, you will win the battle between recognition and perceived indifference. 

Your customers will become fans. 

They will see a commitment to them that they won’t see in many other places, if any at all.

So that’s the challenge – do you really care? 

I think you’ve got to work out ways to show it.