Jeb Blount in his book People Love You: The Real Secret to Delivering Legendary Customer Experiences masterfully sets out the most important customer service challenge facing sellers today: "There is no loyalty when everything looks the same."
From the client's perspective, Blount argues, virtually all products and services are identical. If you do happen to have a truly unique product or service, similar offerings will very quickly enter the marketplace to compete with you.
If customers believe your offering is like everything else out there, how can you create a customer experience with the power to retain them when a competitor offers them a cheaper price or another color or a prettier package or better service or more bells and whistles?
The answer? Love. I know, at first glance it sounds silly. But it isn't.
People Love You isn't a pie-in-the-sky gooey piece of sugar floating somewhere outside reality. Blount builds a solid basis for creating a customer experience that results in an unbreakable relationship built on trust, solving real customer problems and creating positive emotional experiences.
Blount employs these seven essential principles of customer engagement:
1. You need your customers more than they need you.
2. Customers are people.
3. You are always on stage.
4. Customers act on emotion and justify with logic.
5. Customers do things for their reasons, not yours.
