Five Ways Businesses Enhance Customer Goals

For do-it-yourself customers, the value chain of customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty begins when customers accomplish goals. Goals motivate customer performance and they set the standard for acceptable outcomes. However, if goals are absent or not well defined, customer performance suffers – and you’ll take the blame. These are the five key ways you can enhance customer goals.

1. Ensure that a goal exists.

Without a goal, customers can’t perform – which means they have no need for your goods or services. If customers lack goals, help them set goals. Also remember that customers may have goals, but the goals are currently unimportant and lack priority. In this case, you’ll need to persuade the customer to elevate the goal’s priority. A lot of life insurance is sold this way.

2. Make the goal consistent with your solution.

Most of the time customers have goals, but the goal is inconsistent with your goods or services. Obviously, you can accommodate customer goals by modifying your goods or service. For example, a goal many women have is to not have others know they are using a tampon. Thus, products like Kotex® have redesigned their packaging so that it makes no noise when being torn open. Alternatively, the other solution is to shape customer goals so they are consistent with your goods or services.

3. Verify the goal is specific.

To ensure customers know when they have achieved a goal, goals must be as specific as possible. This means forming the goal such that it reflects observable, objective measures. Without specific goals, customers will take more time, exert more effort, and encounter more dead ends, false starts, and backtracking.

4. Check that the goal has the right level of challenge.

Goals that are beyond the expertise of customers only end in frustration and dissatisfaction. For example, the do-it-yourselfer who has the goal of fixing a leaky drain but who has never performed plumbing repairs or handled plumbing tools. On the other hand, goals that are too easy dull customer attention and are seen as monotonous. Thus, help customers define stretch goals – ones that are challenging yet leverage prior experience such that customers can be successful.

5. Set the goal sooner, rather than later.

Goals that are too far in the future are out of reach for most customers. Thus, they are less likely to be motivated to pursue the goal. Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. frames the investment goals of customers in terms of how much one should save per month, rather than what assets one should possess by the time they are 65 years old.

Authors:

By Peter C. Honebein and Roy F. Cammarano, authors of Creating Do-It-Yourself Customers

Website: http://www.doityourselfcustomers.com/

Source: http://www.doityourselfcustomers.com/press_kit/vision.pdf