Elevate Your Group’s Status—Add to Your Members’ Sense of Belonging
Get your customer group more engaged and solidly on your side.
Jim Stein
Published Date: April 23, 2024
Think about your past, present and future customer group. Each member belongs to their own family, friend and work groups. Improving their sense of belonging in your group influences members (your potential customers) in their other groups. Here’s how you can do it.
1. Meaningful purpose
While member benefits make your group attractive, a meaningful group purpose elevates each member.
2. Personal invitations
In a world of bots, your team’s personal touch makes a new member feel wanted, which connects inviter and invitee.
3. Rituals and celebrations
Honoring members with acts that are unique to your group shapes your group brand in each member’s heart.
4. Good deeds
As a group, do something of goodwill. Invite members to participate. All members will feel the lift in their status, even if they didn’t participate. Report on the outcome to plant a valuable seed: “My group did this good thing.”
5. Communication and engagement
It has been said that 90% of success is just showing up. In this context, being a caring, consistent communicator wins the day. Most companies don’t consistently communicate, and those that do often spoil it with a deluge of company promotions.
How would it be if you improved your group’s fundamentals and helped them build your company for the future? It doesn’t happen overnight. Start implementing these fundamental components of your group’s framework. Take a mental “before” snapshot now and think how the richness of your customer group will improve during the next two years. We don’t know what the economy will look like in two years, but we can agree that through thick and thin, it will be wonderful to have your customer group more engaged and solidly on your side.
Related Blogs
Helpful Expertise #4: Knowledge + #5: Insights
Jim Stein
Expertise is what members of your team know about the various types of work they produce and the industry they belong to. They’ve gained this knowledge through direct experience and study. You’ve trained them on Best Practices, which produce better outcomes, and they use their expertise to communicate with customers and decide how to do the work.
Helpful Expertise #3: Personalization
Jim Stein
Personalization is how your team communicates to individuals uniquely, based on their key attributes and behaviors. Companies often use a one-size-fits-all communication framework that’s “workable” for most of their customers. Workable communications will help you satisfy your customers, while personalized communications deepen relationships and help you create super-satisfied customers.
Latest Blogs
Force Success
Jim Stein
Ask most company managers and they’ll tell you the key to satisfying customers is to “do what the customer wants.” Although this is a reasonable answer, I believe in adding to this by embracing the philosophy of “do what the customer needs.” Although it takes extra time to educate a customer and merge their wants with newly learned needs, it leads to a more satisfied customer and it’s the right thing to do.
EGO and Customer Satisfaction: Part 3
Jim Stein
Establish up front what your customer expects from you by asking, “What results do you expect to see from our work?” When you understand the customer’s expectations, you can address any misconceptions before the work begins.