When it comes to building a business, it’s not necessarily about the product or even the service you sell. It’s more about building strong relationships with people, creating a journey and building an experience for your customers.
When we can build an experience for people, we can build trust, stay in integrity and we can give them knowledge. This is how we can take all of our ideas and give the best gift ever to our customers – by building trust, giving them knowledge and keeping our word to help them and to guide them.
So many times, people want to focus solely on the product, constantly putting their product in people’s faces and continually promoting their service. What we really want to do, is to build an experience – an experience that is going to attract the people we want to work with and people who really need our services. We want to engage with them in a positive way, educate them on what it is they need to know (they may not know what they need to know!), to build and nurture the relationship with them. Ultimately, we want them to have confidence in us.
The way that we do this is by creating an experience that takes into consideration (we know our own strengths and the things we provide) the things our customer is struggling with and how our service can help. That’s the journey we want to take them on instead of just seeing us on social media. We want to build a relationship with them to take them on a transformation from struggling, frustrated, and confused, all the way to successful, thriving, and happy through getting them what they need in order to do that.
Here are the three stages of the customer experience we want to be aware of:
- What does it look like to engage with you before someone becomes a customer? What does that look like on social media, in your store or on your website?
- When someone becomes a customer, what happens in that transaction? What happens when someone works with you? How do you want them to feel after every session with you or after they’ve purchased something?
- What is someone’s lifetime experience with you? Are you going to constantly send them emails and offers that don’t really apply to them and risk getting them frustrated again? Or do you continually build trust, provide them with knowledge they need, and show up for them every day? People forget about this. It’s not all about the initial engagement (even though this is very important too!). We also need to think about what it looks like after they’ve completed the transaction.
It’s not just about the product or service that you offer. That is what initially gets them in the door but remember, it’s the unique experience you create for them that keeps them coming back for more.
The experience you provide when working with customers is what will make others want to build a relationship back with you and how you can build a strong community.
