Time-defining moment events occur at various times, leaving little time or cost-eforting opportunity for your business to respond. These time-defining moment events can include national elections, natural disasters, celebrity birthdays, and the like.
When a time-defining event occurs, your business should prepare to handle tens of thousands of customers in just a few weeks. If you have limited resources to respond to all of those clients, you may run out of supplies or services before you finish building trust with your customers.
It is critical for businesses to be able to respond quickly when such an event occurs. If it does not appear that you are responding, then it may appear that you do not exist or are unimportant. This can harm your brand and make it look unresponsive or less than committed.
Three principles of responsiveness
In today’s fast-paced world, it is more important than ever to find time to respond to customer requests. When you respond to customer requests, you demonstrate your commitment to the customer and cost them less trouble in the long run.
To be a effective and value-add consumer agent, you must learn how to respond with little penalty in time, cost, and/or customer value. This is possible with three basic principles: begin with a question, listen attentively, and transition gracefully.
When I coach consumers on what steps they should take when trying to save money, I always emphasize the importance of beginning with a question. A question can be anything from: “What did you want or need?” to: “What did you just buy or take away?”
These three simple steps can start your response on the right foot and help guide your next step.
Examples of responder companies and products
When a company does not have the ability to respond with little penalty in time, cost, and customer value, it may be relegated to a subcategory of over-the-top (OOC) services, or even discontinued business.
Sometimes, the response time of companies can be an issue. For instance, if a company needs to respond in less than 24 hours, it may be better off hiring an over-the-top response service that can deliver a response in as little as 48 hours.
However, for companies that need more periods of time to process a response, having an answer come in less than a day may not happen. This is where over-the-top responses are able to help them.
For example, product review sites like Amazon’s have “response teams” that can provide quick answers to customer questions. The response teams are usually compensated by the product review sites and will eventually charge people for their help.
How to be more responsive
Responding effectively can be tricky in time, cost, or in the value that your customer puts into your service or product.
When we think of time, we think of hours or days. However, there are many examples of timely responses to quickly changing circumstances.
In business, there are always things that need to be done and products that need updated. In the personal realm, we often times need to respond to changes in our relationship partners, health, etc.
In this article, we will talk about some tips on how to be more responsive in time, cost, and in the value that your customer puts into your product or service.
To be more responsive in time, you must keep up with the changing demands of customers.
Responding quickly is important
in this past week, I’ve seen two stories that highlight the importance of being able to respond quickly. In both cases, the companies involved exhibited poor time management and communication skills in response mode.
The first case highlights a company that was forced to cancel a customer loyalty program due to poor time management and communication skills exhibited by the company. The customer loyalty program was scheduled to launch next year, and the company had not scheduled any initial sign-ups yet.
The company decided to send an email to all of their existing members explaining why the program was being cancelled, as well as offering them an opportunity to join before it launched. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out to be too little too late.
By sending this email just weeks before launch, the company was able to take some attention away from recruiting and managing members for their program.
Responding accurately is important
When customers experience a companies response to them (or their situation or experience) as being little penalty, they will likely not refer or recommend the company.
This can be a frustrating feeling when the mistake was caused by an employee’s or company’s best effort. It also can lead to a decrease in loyalty and purchasing behavior for the company.
Having the ability to appropriately respond is also important when dealing with customers. Having a way to agree or disagree with a product or service presentation is only one way people respond to being treated well.
Others include gifts, receiving acknowledgment of what they have done for the company, receiving feedback on how they make things look, receiving information on what they were paid for, and more.
Responding with the right tone is important
When people feel compelled to respond with a little penalty, it can contribute to poor customer experience. If someone responded with a tone that reinforced the person was prioritizing the customer over the company, customers would reduce their trust in the company.
This happened to me recently when I saw a tweet from an official @Disney account about my product. The official account sent an email promoting my product and asked me to give it a try. I did, and after using it for just a few days, I felt like they were being condescending in their response.
I was upset that they didn’t seem interested in my feedback or what they were trying to promote was helpful. It made me feel like they didn’t value my time or cost when they reply to messages from people.
When companies have heavy-handed responses that don’t seem like they care, people feel like they are being treated with barely any respect.
Customers do not care about your problems
In fact, most customers don’t even know that problems can have a little penalty or cost. They only learn about this kind of treatment in business schools and marketing classes.
But if you do have trouble responding with little penalty, then your customer will notice. And if you can never fix a problem because your company doesn’t exist in the world of quality, then maybe you’ll be able to find a better solution for your next customer.
And when problems do occur, your company will be unable to fix them quickly enough to keep up any kind of customer loyalty. That is why it is so important to be able to respond with little penalty.
What Is the Ability to Respond With Little Penalty in Time, Cost, or Customer Value? precedes an article on the importance of the language companies use to address their customers.
Customers want you to tell them about future products or offers
Customers want to be notified about future products or offers. This is called customer anticipation.
To have a chance to respond with little penalty for you, you must keep your customers informed about your products and services regularly. Failure to do so may harm your business relationships down the road.
Keeping customers informed about offers and future products or services is called subscribership. You can have a lot of subscriberships-offer yourself, your family, and even the community you serve.
To have a chance to respond with little penalty for you, you must keep your subscribersinformedaboutyourproductsandservicesregularly. Failure to do so may hurt your business relationships down the road.
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