Winning Customers In 2022: The Complete Guide
By David Avrin, CSP
A man from 1972 is mysteriously caught in a temporal distortion and is flung 50 years into the future. How do you think he would fare? Not well if left to make sense of this strange new world on his own. He would struggle to survive not knowing how to buy food, clothing, make a phone call and or even pay for a ride. It’s 2022 and the world has changed in dramatic ways.
In 2022, not only can we find anything, learn about everything and buy in profoundly different ways, but how we communicate about what to buy and how to buy is unrecognizable from just one generation ago. He wouldn’t understand a smartphone, digital transactions, or social media. He would never have heard of the internet or could even fathom what “online” shopping means.
So, when it comes to winning customers in 2022, it’s first important to recognize that our customers are not like our wide-eyed time travelers. Far from it. They are educated, connected, savvy, impatient and well aware of all the choices they have. The world has become vast, flat and very, very convenient.
For the first time in modern history, convenience has overtaken quality as the primary driver of customer purchases and loyalty.
It’s not that quality is unimportant. To the contrary, quality is more important than ever, but it is also assumed. Today, if you didn’t offer high quality, the world would find out about it quickly through the myriad of social proof resources such as: Yelp, Trip Advisor, Rotten Tomatoes, Health Grades, Glass Door and more.
But in an age of vast choices and pervasive quality, the key to winning customers in 2022 and beyond is becoming ridiculously easy to do business with. Here’s the point; if we all know (and we do) that we can purchase anything we can afford, or learn about services we need on our mobile device and have them delivered to our door, how does one player gain a competitive advantage over all those who provide what we do, or some variation?
When everyone can see everyone else’s prices and selection and we aren’t bound by distance or even daytime operating hours, we run the risk of becoming a commodity. When everyone is good and everything is readily available then customers simply look for the lowest price. Today, we need to work harder and look deeper to discover or create true competitive advantage.
And I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but your belief that your superior quality and great people will carry the day, doesn’t hold water in 2022. In fact, I’m not even sure it would be meaningful to that 1972 time traveler. Winning customers in 2022 is more about the customer experience they want to receive and less about the customer service we are used to delivering.
Customer service is not the same as customer experience.
We’ve been talking about providing good customer service for nearly 100 years. If you don’t know how to be nice to people by now, you have a deeper issue than winning and retaining customers. Customer experience, by contrast, is about how preferable you are to do business with.
Customers ask themselves, "was that complicated and frustrating, or easy, friendly, intuitive and stress free? Did I have to wait for a table, argue with a frontline worker, struggle to get a returned call or feel my questions were dismissed?” It goes even deeper when technology is involved. “Was the user experience simple? Was my information stored for a quicker log in next time? Did they force me to converse with a chat bot (robot) or was there an offramp to a real person?”
Almost none of those transactions or interactions involved someone asking “So, got any big plans for the weekend?” Those are the words you’re training your people to say. And while friendliness is not unimportant, your customers just want to get in and out quickly.
Winning customers in 2022 is about eliminating friction in their customer journey.
Winning customers back is about fixing what drove them away in the first place. Allow your customers to skip your complicated process and jump to exactly what they need. Make a real person available if they have a question that is not a “frequently asked question.” Give them the option of self-checkout, but also the option of a trained person to staff the register.
Today, a complete guide to winning customers isn’t a step-by-step formula because every business is different. However, most customers are the same. What? Don’t agree?
Most customers, clients, patients and more want a process that is simple. They want a customer journey that is easy to navigate and prices that are easy to find. They want the option to do it themselves unless they don’t. They want to know you are listening to them and willing to accommodate a product or process that is unique to their situation. They don’t want to feel like they are talking to a brick wall and want to deal with someone authorized to solve their issue. Oh, and they want it fast. Today if possible.
Of course, people are different and have different lives and families, careers, traditions, preferences, needs and more. Some might need legal advice while others want a Philly Cheese steak. But the point is that the customer experience that most want is one that is simple, fast, convenient and worthy of recommending to others.
Most in business will still craft marketing messages and internal conversations based on the belief that their pedestrian claims of competency will be persuasive. However, if you want to win customers in 2022, focus less on the basic things you share in common with competitors and more on what your customers prefer.
Wendy’s hamburgers slogan is proudly emblazoned on the outside of their restaurants directly under their logo. “Quality is our recipe.” Ugh. That simple assertion was likely met with thunderous applause as the ad agency presented it to the leadership team. Why? Because it likely echoed exactly what the Wendy’s team believed and wanted to say. Deep down, however, I think the ad agency creative team knew they had not served their client, but merely pandered to them.
Nobody goes through the Wendy’s drive through because they believe that Wendy’s has superior quality. They drive through because they like their food and believe they can get in and out fast. They can get a delicious chocolate Wendy’s Frosty without waiting for them to blend it like a traditional milkshake. The slogan is about them and not their customers.
Winning customers in 2022 comes down to taking everything we know about our business and filtering it through everything we are learning about our changing customers’ expectations and preferences and allow them to engage with us the way they prefer to. Use technology to make THEIR lives better, their transactions seamless and simple. Finally, optimize your business for speed. Speed of information, service, response, delivery and answers.
As that time traveler gets sucked back into the vortex following his brief glimpse into the future, his mind is racing with the transformative advancements that even science fiction never dreamed of. And as he climbs into his AMC Pacer and drops off his film at a Fotomat, (Gen Y, ask your parents) he realizes that it's Friday afternoon and he only has an hour to get cash from the bank or he’ll be broke all weekend. The world has changed.