Creating Value For Your Customers

Companies are in business to make a profit and your customers provide a steady revenue stream. As a business owner, it’s your job to identify what drives your customers and create offerings around those drivers. It’s your job to create value with the products and services you provide, or the way you offer and provide them.  This is can be done through convenience or ease of use, fiscal rewards or savings, pride of ownership or a number, customer service, reliability or perhaps something else that is added or provided at the point of purchase.

What is value and why is it important?

Value is what causes people to want to trade with you. It’s what makes someone decide to go to your website and subscribe to your product, take out their wallet and hand you money. They’re going to get something they want–something they find of undeniable value.

Business owners work hard to understand exactly what value means to their customers so they can generate and provide it. Value isn’t fixed or tangible; it rests in perceived benefits. In other words, value is in the mind of the beholder and businesses must learn to see the world through the eyes of their customers—they make their customers the center of their universe. Creating long-term relationships goes a long way in customer retention and expanding the bottom line.

Customers assess your value two different times: before they purchase your product or service, and after they purchase your product or service. Today’s happy customers, however, could become tomorrow’s ex-customers. When they get what they expect, they no longer notice it. And that’s when their loyalty begins to falter. The aim must be not only to service or satisfy your customers, but to make them successful.

Our society is one that competes on speed, convenience and reliability. Therefore using a service like GigaBook to book client appointments and send reminders will add this element to your business. Successful companies respond quickly to customer requests, are easy to deal with and do what they say they are going to do. Some companies have discovered that simply by increasing customer satisfaction by one percentage point, they can increase their revenue by tens of millions of dollars.

What are some ways you can create value?

• Understanding what it is your customers value is the first step in delivering value. Find out what your customers are trying to do, help them to do that and they will not think of themselves as being your customers. They will believe that you are their partners.
• Give them something extra. You can wow your customers by giving them something extra and, thereby, gain an advantage over your competitors. If, for example, you provide solutions to problems your customers would love you to solve but cannot reasonably expect that you would, you will far exceed their expectations.
• If you can help your customers improve their business performance to the point they’re, in turn, helping their customers save money, then you will have created even more benefits for your customers.
• Pay attention to exactly what drives your customers. When you can deliver that offering, you’ve created more…better…or new value. New value is the most difficult strategy. New value emerges from the need of members to find suppliers and the need of vendors to access a target market. Creating more value is much easier because you’re working with something you already have. Better value is also easier to produce because again, it’s an extension of what you are already doing—you’re delivering a more powerful punch behind the value that you currently have.

Creating superior customer value should be the focus of everyone working in your business. As long as your customers believe the benefits they receive outweigh the costs they have paid, they will consider they have received tremendous value from you and will be a satisfied customer.