Tweet

Buying Trends – the Shift to Hassle-Free

Written by: Jeff Mowatt

Article Overview: You may have noticed a shift in recent years in what it takes to satisfy customers. Customers are now making buying decisions less on the quality of an organization’s products and services, and more on the quality of the buying experience itself. If you’re a business owner or manager, this trend offers both risk and opportunity. To ensure that your organization profits from this shift in customer loyalty, consider a recent history of buying behaviors…

Buying Trends – the Shift to Hassle-Free

You may have noticed a shift in recent years in what it takes to satisfy customers. Customers are now making buying decisions less on the quality of an organization’s products and services, and more on the quality of the buying experience itself. If you’re a business owner or manager, this trend offers both risk and opportunity. To ensure that your organization profits from this shift in customer loyalty, consider a recent history of buying behaviors…

Why quality is no longer top-of-mind
When it came to satisfying customers in the era immediately following World War II, no one could beat the USA. With the development of the atomic bomb they had demonstrated that they had the most advanced technology on the planet. The fact that they had developed such a terrifyingly sophisticated product gave American businesses an unrivalled reputation for innovation. That reputation resulted in a ‘honeymoon’ demand for US products that exploded throughout the 1950’s.
Fast forward to the energy crises of the 1970’s. People begin turning to smaller more fuel efficient vehicles made overseas. At first the vehicles are perceived to be of poorer quality. Yet in Japan in particular they embrace the concept of Kaizen - the practice of continuous improvement that had been introduced to them, ironically, by an American, W. Edwards Deming. Eventually, the quality of foreign vehicles and other consumer products - particularly electronic equipment, is perceived by consumers to be better that the stuff produced in North America. Domestic manufacturers are forced to improve quality. So, throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s North American manufacturers join the movement towards “Total Quality”.
It works. Quality improves significantly. So much so, that now in the twenty first century, it’s not that consumers no longer care about the quality of manufactured products – it’s that quality is now taken for granted. So much for products. Interestingly, the same assumption about quality also applies to services. Consider the following…

Why credentials don’t stand out
When it comes to hiring services, consumers now simply take it as a given that the person is ‘qualified’ to be providing the service. When we call a company to send a plumber we don’t ask to screen candidates. We figure the person must have some sort of a ‘ticket’ or the company wouldn’t be hiring them. The teacher who instructs our children is assumed to have the proper certification. In other words, the technical capabilities of the person providing the service is generally taken for granted.
Where we’ve ended up then, is a point where consumers now assume that when they buy a product from any large well-know manufacturer the product quality will be just fine. Or, if they use a service from any reasonably sized firm the service person will be technically competent. In other words, quality itself no longer impresses consumers as much as it used to. Meanwhile, there is something more important that consumers are clamoring for.

What customers will now pay a premium for
Consumers want to be appreciated. They want respect. They want it badly because in recent years they’ve lost so much of it. They’ve gotten fed up with phoning a large company and being told to, “Press 1 for… press 6 for …” (One of my seminar participants described this as being caught in “voice-mail-jail”). They’re tired of return policies that force them to find the original packaging and paperwork, spend time and postage, waiting and hoping.
To create loyal customers, business owners and managers need to recognize that your quality alone won’t impress people that much. As we pointed out, quality is now assumed. Instead, there’s a huge opportunity to create loyalty when, in addition to solving the customer’s obvious immediate problem, you go the extra step to make the buying experience more humane. That means a hassle-free buying experience, and competent service professionals that understand how their product or service fits into the buying context of the customer. By context I mean how this purchase fits in to the customer’s overall needs, and how this transaction must be impacting the customer’s day.
Bottom line – you may have reliable products and licensed service providers, but the question customers really care about now is, “What are you like to do business with?”

This article is based on the bestselling book, Becoming a Service Icon in 90 Minutes a Month by customer service strategist and professional speaker Jeff Mowatt. To obtain your own copy of his book or to inquire about engaging Jeff for your team, visit www.jeffmowatt.com or call 1-800-JMowatt (566-9288).

Related Articles
  Surviving Shift Work – When you’re Rostered to Work on Christmas Day!
  The Hazards of Shift Work – Going To Work Twice In One Day!
  Career Planning for Baby Boomers -- Starting, Buying or Selling a Business
  4 Sure Fire Ways to Develop A Dynamite Media Pitch
  The Latest Trends in Packaging Boxes and Cheap Stickers

Article Tags: buying trends, credentials, customer loyalty, customer service, hassle free



Related Forum Posts
Re: "Diversity" Is Costing Us Dearly! - Hi WendyGirl33, Thanks for this post. This is your 2nd post, not many have made such an impressive contribution to start with. Excellent. What can we say about this subject and be constructive. One thing is sure, nothing stays the same for ever. Trends change, fashions change, peoples perspective change etc. In fact we can never exhaust the continous changes that take place all around us. Many of the changes happen without us recognizing it until later; sometimes too late to stop it, if need be. PS, English is my second/third language. If you can write the above better, please do it an let me know. I want to learn to write better and better.
Re: Why Some Websites Sell and Others Don’t? - There is myth that if you build websites people will come. It is never through, you need to do a lot of things to make your website to work. You have many models of attracting traffics to your site. PPC Article Marketing SEO Press Release Banner Ads Forum Posting Classified Advertising Media Buying Solo Ads and a lot of more. If you are not doing any of the above your websites will just be one of the millions of the unknown sites in cyber space
building a list - Good advice Martin... I've traveled down this path and learned that once you get through that brief learning curve, you'll find that it's well worth it. As you build your highly targeted list, you can trickle in your new offerings over time via 'broadcasts'. I use Aweber too, they have excellent support and a great rep. Buying a list? I'm not so sure about that... You'd really have to do some research to find a quality list service. Whether you buy a list or not, I still think setting up a auto-responder should be a priority, your list will GROW.
Ways To Improve Your Alexa Ranking 11-15 - 11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example. 12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material. 13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters. 14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines. 15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
Getting links from the giants - Hi Kevin - it's simple - what do you have to offer them? What kind of compelling reason can you give them to link to you? According to my Google Webmaster Central Tools I have a total of 15,937 links to my site. 4,523 of them go to my homepage while the remaining 11,414 go to various pages on my site. My last sitemap indicated that I have 34,789 pages of content on my website so, excluding the homepage, I have about one link for every three pages of content. I think it’s important to also note that I don’t do any link buying and never tell people what anchor text to use when they link to me. I always suggest that they use whatever text they feel best describes the page they are linking to on my site (if everyone links to you with the same anchor text you can get penalized from Google). Having great content is one way to build links but usually you also need to take an active approach to marketing yourself. Can you build a section on your shoe site along the lines of "The Tennis Player's Ultimate Guide To Buying Shoes" where you talk about all the different considerations someone needs to make before buying shoes - and then at the end recommend Nike? In return Nike links to the site because it's a 3rd party endorsement of their products. Many big companies have News sections on their sites and always love showing off good news - you just need to find a way to give them something worth showing off!


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

How To Become A Member of the Paparazzi

LISTENING SKILLS IN COACHING

The Future of Online Marketing

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.