Competition is more intense than ever, and most companies are constantly evolving to better serve customer needs – before their competitors do it. Change is no longer a luxury; it’s necessary for survival.
As organizations seek to continually improve their positions in relation to competitors in their markets, they have three tools at their disposal. In Loyalty Research Center’s Brand Positioning Series, we discuss communications, execution, and design as these tools. In around one-third of programs, LRC finds that communications issues are a top recommendation.
During the process of collecting and acting on information, they lose sight of informing their customer base of the improvements they are making. Communicating this change is critical to moving your position, and most companies fail.
While communication issues can be easier to fix than performance or design problems, they are far from simple. Here are three key questions to consider when addressing your own customer communications strategy:
- Are your communications relevant? When educating your customers on your changing stance, you want to be sure that your message speaks to their wants and needs. If it isn’t applicable, they are likely to tune out future communications or worse, think that you don’t truly understand them.
This doesn’t require a huge personalization effort, but rather knowing a little bit about your main customer segments. For example, in our programs, we sometimes segment customers based on their needs – the problems they’re trying to solve. This information enables the company to speak to how the solution addresses specific customer needs instead of simply discussing product features.
You can profile customer segments based on age, geography, tenure, or other demographics that you may have in your database. This enables you to tailor your communications to make sure the information is interesting and engages them.
- Do you have colleague and/or employee buy-in? The people who interact with customers on a day-to-day basis need to be aware of your communications campaign, understand it, and speak effectively to it. If they don’t believe in your campaign, how will the customers?
One great example that we’ve seen was with a client who engaged their delivery drivers. These drivers were essentially account reps and had frequent, consistent interactions with customers. They were the best avenue for getting the message across about their new service offering.
This client developed a one-page sheet explaining this new service in detail on the front. On the back, they used the space to introduce the delivery driver, including a nice photo and a biography. The drivers loved it! They were so excited, they couldn’t help but give them to their customers. It was one of their most successful campaigns to date, all because they involved the people that interacted with the customers.
- Finally, the biggest question of all: is everything really a communications issue? Compared to the time and investment in changing your performance in key areas of your business model, communications seem easy. But it’s also easy to fall into the trap of “fixing” all of your issues through messaging.
For example, one trap many companies fall into is thinking that their performance isn’t as bad as customers evaluate. To them, it’s not that they are executing poorly against their model, but rather the customer needs better education on their product/service/model. They treat this like a communication problem, when it goes much deeper.
Other times, communication is just a band-aid. A recent study showed that the language used by airline staff when solving problems had a significant impact on a customer’s satisfaction with the resolution process. While it improved the satisfaction with a single interaction, it didn’t fix the original, underlying problem that started the interaction in the first place.
Communications are a simple but effective way to improve and strengthen your position. However, it should be noted that it isn’t a box you can check off your to-do list. A simple Google search shows that it can take between 7 to 10 touches to truly get your message across. To this end, to be effective, you must develop a full campaign that touches every aspect of your model and is relevant to each segment in your customer base.