Page 51 - Lighting Magazine November 2018

you?” Providing immediacy is important in today’s marketplace. “This is the mindset of people now. The internet is always on. Everyone is armed with a camera/phone, and they share everything — the good, bad, and the ugly,” he remarked.
He urged retailers to examine every touchpoint in the customer’s journey, from nding your business online and the convenience of pulling into the park- ing lot to walking through the front door and the way they are greeted and nd what they need.
“Your employees don’t pay the bills, they are the bills,” he joked. “Treat your employees great, but not be er than your customers.”
How easy do you make it for customers to contact you? One of the common contact methods that irks Avrin is the ubiquitous “Contact Us” form on nearly every website. “The Contact Us form drives away more business than your worst employee, but I’m sure your website developer told you it was a great idea,” he said. His advice is to do a deep dive into how people experience your business and nd out whether customers are happy with the way you’ve designed your business.
AlwAyS Open
“Business is 24/7 these days, but you can have more life balance if you have more customers,” Avrin ob- served. “Does your company go to voicemail at 5 p.m.? We know the Golden Rule (treat others as you would like to be treated), but we should operate with the Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they want to be treated,” he commented.
“If you don’t have a plan in place for how your company treats customers, then you have no way to measure how well you are doing it. Having a good culture is not enough,” Avrin warned. “We tell peo- ple to treat others the way we want to be treated, but we’re not them.” How a 16-year-old wants to be treated is very di erent from what’s important to a 50-year-old.
Giving great customer service worthy of talking about and sharing with others is the goal. “This isn’t something gimmicky. It’s nding a way to do some- thing be er or how to solve a customer’s problem,” Avrin stated. “Your customers will vote/decide with their time and their feet if yours is an experience they want to repeat. It’s a comedized world, but they need to know why you do what you do.”
DO The Drill
One of the exercises Avrin nds to be most
bene cial in his consulting work is to have retailers list a ributes of their typical types of customers. “What’s going on in their day? What do they struggle with? Get speci c,” he advised. Examples of these customers might be “Bob” a local builder in his 40s with a small work force, who needs a ordable prod- uct that is nearly goof-proof to install. Or Betsy, a homeowner in her 60s who is looking to downsize her living arrangements and needs a exible interior design to suit both grandkids and her aging parents.
“This is not about giving broad strokes,” Avrin cautioned. “This is a complicated drill-down that has you writing down the answers to ve things you think each customer would hate about doing business with lighting stores (i.e. wasting time, inconvenient hours, items out of stock), ve things you think they would love (i.e. special pricing, a varied product assortment, ready answers for any questions), and ve things you think they fear about the transaction (i.e. shipping delays, product looks di erent than expected, the hassle of returns).”
In addition, he instructed audience members to write down ve other choices the customer has for sourcing that product besides your store (i.e. home centers, online store, direct from manufacturer).
“Relationships are a retention tool, but they don’t bring in new business,” he remarked. “Why do people come in? Historically speaking, most of our prospects have been ge ing their needs met somewhere else. You [ guratively] are asking them to stop doing business with someone else and start doing business with you. Part of your customer ex- perience is the result of research and development into the products you sell, who you are selling them to, and how well you are addressing these ques- tions. This is worth an hour of your time [doing this self-examination] at your o ce.”
Retailers should answer the same set of ques- tions for each customer type. “How can you come up with services that allay some of these pain points for these customers? Basically you are telling
“Relationships are a retention tool, but they don’t bring in new business.”
AVRIN’S UNIVERSAL RULES OF THE INTERNET
Þ If you want people to be interested, you have to be interesting.
Þ If you want people to talk about you, give them something to talk about!
Þ If you want people to nd you, you have to be ndable.
Þ And most importantly, if you want people to come back, you have to give
them an experience worth repeating.
noveMber 2018 | enLIGHTenment Magazine 49