Why is Helpful Expertise so Important?
Helpful Expertise is the way to serve each customer as an individual, both in style and substance. It’s how you customize both your recommendations and communications based on each customer’s specific situation.
Jim Stein
Published Date: June 22, 2023
Giving Helpful Expertise means meeting customers where they are by customizing your responses based on their job specifics and their personal communication style and pacing.
“Helpful” is in the eye of the person being helped, not the person providing the help. Your customer is the judge and has to feel that the expertise you provide really is helpful to their exact situation and is given in a manner that suits both their personality and experience with the subject.
Before I get into how to get your company to consistently give Helpful Expertise, we should answer the question, “Why is Helpful Expertise so important?”
As an owner, I’m sure you’re nodding in agreement. Intuitively it makes sense to deliver Helpful Expertise, but do customers even notice or care? In 2014, I decided to find out. I was CEO of American Ratings Corporation, creators of Diamond Certified Resource, and we had conducted hundreds of thousands of telephone customer satisfaction surveys of local companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. We added the following Helpful Expertise survey question to our then-standard series of questions.
“In addition to providing quality and customer satisfaction, how important is it to you that a company provides Helpful Expertise?”
The results were definitive. Eight out of 10 customers felt it was important that a company provides Helpful Expertise, with almost half of these saying it was very important. While not surprising, it was interesting to see that customers seemed to know what Helpful Expertise meant to them. Some would ask what the research agent meant by the phrase Helpful Expertise and were told that they should interpret the meaning themselves.
So, we set out to discover the answer to the question, “Why is Helpful Expertise so important? And the answer turns out to be because Quality Customers say it is.
We believed them! We took the results seriously and created several key improvements based on Helpful Expertise for Diamond Certified Resource. We started by adding a Helpful Expertise survey question to the company qualifying survey. So, companies that qualified weren’t just highly rated for quality, but were rated highly for giving Helpful Expertise as well. This allowed us to present company owners who qualified as Helpful Experts—local heroes, really, who contribute their expertise back into their communities. Next, we created special Helpful Expert content and tools for them to differentiate their company from their competitors. I’ll show you how to create your own later in this section.
Let’s focus on your company. First, ask yourself, how will you elevate your Quality Customers’ experience with your company by consistently providing Helpful Expertise in all of your communication channels?