Crafting the Customer Experience For People Not Like You: How to Delight and Engage the Customers Your Competitors Don't Understand

Chapter 1

How Tweaking the Customer Experience Grows Your Business

You didn’t pick up this book because you want to know how to provide terrific customer service. There are plenty of good books and articles on the subject, and they all cover the basic principles of being polite, efficient, and responsive to customers’ needs. You picked up this book because you’re smart enough to know that the business climate out there is changing. In fact, it’s already changed. It’s not easy to provide a level of customer service that resonates with all your customers anymore. It’s more fragmented than that. People are not “one size fits all,” and therefore, one sweeping customer service approach isn’t going to cut it when it comes to satisfying—much less delighting—a diverse group of customers.

Providing a great experience to different kinds of people isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the strategic thing to do. Crafting a customer experience that caters to people not like you will improve your business in five ways:

1. It will grow your business by bringing in new customers.

2. It will give you a significant competitive edge, since your competition is probably either ignoring diverse customer groups or, at best, underserving them.

3. It will increase customer loyalty and therefore customer retention.

4. It will help differentiate you from other businesses or similar enterprises.

5. It will give you a greater understanding of different customer groups, providing key insights into what ...