NEWS EXTRA: CONFERENCE
MALLINDER MAKES MARKETING MOMENTS MATTER
EH Smith marketing director Mark Mallinder’s BMF Conference Marketing Forum presentation was all about how businesses can make their customers feel valued.
“W
hat influences a customer’s decision to buy from a particular supplier” Mark
Mallinder, EH Smith marketing director asked the audience at the BMF Conference in June. “Often when you ask people what they think of when you say customer service, the first thing they mention is the complaints desk. And yet it’s a minute part of what customer service is all about. “
Customer service, Mallinder said, is about creating an experience, making sure that that experience is the best it can be and ensuring that the needs of customers are serviced as well as possible.
What do we want when we become a customer, he asked. “We want to feel welcomed, to feel valued as a customer. We want an experience.
“The world has changed and so has our industry. The way that we communicate and connect with customers has massively changed over time. We now live in a multi-channel world, at a time when communications from those customers can be over many many different channels and platforms. “We used to spend far more time one to one with our customers who might deal with Brian or Fred for everything. There were fewer touch points but they were all in one place. All that has changed. What we are now left with is fragments of time spent with a customer. Literally moments, and if we want to improve what we do to raise the bar of our service and to engage with these customers we have to make those moments really matter.”
A good experience as a customer means one is likely to tell nine people about it, Mallinder said. However, a bad experience will be related to 16 people. “That’s nearly twice as many people. Then, if we expand that, for every 26 people who have a bad experience, only one will complain. That might seem great because you won’t get bombarded with people complaining. But it’s not good because it means there are still 25 people who don’t complain, but who also don’t come back. They become disengaged with your brand and disengaged with your company. They come to you after that because they have to not because they want to.”
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Making Moments Matter boils down to three things: relationships, reducing friction and empowering staff Mallinder said. “This isn’t rocket science. I’m not talking about anything revolutionary. This is all basic stuff, but this is about getting the basics right and doing them well.
“Relationships: as an industry we are well known for being people people. We are known for relationships and being good at building them. Human interaction is still hugely important, no less important than it was 10, 20, even 1000 years ago, especially in what we do in our industry. 73% of people say that a friendly member of staff and a friendly experience is the reason they remain loyal to a business or a brand. That’s huge. It’s vital we take note of that and don’t just keep saying ‘oh I’m sure it’s OK. I’ll just ping them an email.’
“I am all for ecommerce because that’s also about service and communication and helping others deal with us in the way that they want to be dealt with. But we mustn’t lose sight of what’s important. And the important thing about this is that technology should enhance what we do, not replace it.”
Knowing who your customers are and making time to get to know and understand themis vital, Mallinder continued. “We often make our staff go in all sorts of directions because we need them to achieve this target and that target, but we have to allow them the time to do the job that they do so well. These relationships take time to develop and build. Ultimately, we have to try and get to a stage where our customers feel that we are genuinely trying to help them to get their jobs done.2
The second thing to think about is reducing friction he added. “Ask how customer friendly your business is. How easy do you make it for customers to do business with you? Is the customer right at the heart of what you do as a business, whether you are a merchant, a manufacturer or service provider. It’s important to put yourself in the shoes and boots of your customers and look at how all of your organisations from the perspective of our customers because that is the only way we will truly understand what it is that they want from us. When you start unravelling
this you understand that lot of processes are designed to make life easier for us, not necessarily for our customers.”
The core experience elements include stock, range, opening hours and staffing levels and processes. But these have to be in place for people to do business in the first place, Mallinder pointed out.
“We have to look at the small extra things that make the difference. How clean and tidy is the place where you deal with your customers? Is there a broken pallet in the car park that’s been there for weeks, how easy is it to get in and out of? How clean is the trade counter, how clean are the toilets? These are all elements which can make your customer choose whether to turn left to your branch or right to another one. Ask yourself what you can do to make it easier for your customers. Even if your service levels are right at the top of what people expect is there anything else that you can do to make it seem better for customers?”
Empowering staff was the final point and it’s massively important. “Staff are the glue that holds our entire industry together. They do a fabulous and often challenging job. We need to make sure that they are engaged and on board with what we are trying to do because they are the core of what we do. “We need to ask ourselves do our staff understand what our goals are? Do they share our aspirations and those of the board? Do we share those and are we communicating that properly? And the most important thing of all is that we need to tell our people why it’s vital that they do all this. It’s not our service as business leaders, it’s about their service, it’s about their customers and their moments with their customers. “So get them on board, empower them, get them to think outside the box and come up with ideas and suggestions for taking these customer moments to the next level.” BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net August 2019
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