This Halloween, 10 Ways to Scare Your Competition and Steal Their Customers
Halloween brings up images of spooky costumes and haunted houses. So, here’s a question for you: Are you confident your customer service and CX won’t scare your customers away?
That’s a rhetorical question. If you’ve been reading my weekly newsletters or watching my videos, it means you’ve been investing in yourselves and your company by creating an experience that doesn’t scare customers away … but it may scare your competition.
I’ve created a list. If you do any of these, your customers will love you – nothing scary about that – but your competition will be scared their customers might find out and switch to you. Great for you. Not such a treat for them! See what I did there … trick or treat! With that in mind, I looked for strategies from my recent newsletters that could scare your competition. Here are 10 of them:
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Super-Fast Response – You want customers to say,
They always get back to me quickly.
Customers love prompt responses. When they can predict the consistent experience of fast response time, they may not take a chance of doing business with anyone else. - Impenetrable Trust – Trust is an emotion that creates confidence, and confidence not only brings customers back, it makes it very difficult for the competition to steal them away.
- Proactive Customer Service – When you reach out to a customer before they call you about a problem – and sometimes before they even know there’s a problem – you’re proving you have their back. Why would a customer take a chance on another company that might not do that?
- Hyper-Personalization – This starts with knowing who your customers are, what they buy, why they buy it and how often they buy. The more you know, the more you can personalize the experience, creating a personal connection that’s hard to break.
- Always Available – Even with AI and digital support as good as they are today, customers may still want to talk to a human. Make it easy and quick for them to do so.
- Empowered Employees – Customers want to work with employees who can make good customer-focused decisions and don’t have to ask a manager whenever there is a unique or special request.
- Loyalty Programs That Offer Real Value – More than points and discounts, create a program that makes customers want to do more business with you.
- A Cause That’s Important to Your Customers – You can’t win over every customer because you believe in a cause, but you can win some of them. Some customers choose to do business with companies for the sole reason that they align with the same beliefs or causes.
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Be Transparent About Everything – You don’t have to give away trade secrets, but sharing the
why
behind how you do business can be refreshing. -
Just Be Better – We’ll wrap up with this one because it can scare the competition more than anything. If a competitor asks a customer why they left to do business with you, and the customer says,
Because they are better,
you’ve now created a haunting experience that goes way beyond Halloween!
Shep Hyken is a customer service/CX expert, award-winning keynote speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. Learn more about Shep’s customer service and customer experience keynote speeches and his customer service training workshops at www.Hyken.com. Connect with Shep on LinkedIn.
