An essential way to stoke brand loyalty in your customer base is to create more trust between your company and the customers that help it thrive. And, in turn, a big part of gaining more trust and brand loyalty is being more open with your customers.
To some extent this is only fair and a way of reciprocating for all of the data, demographic studies and customer insights gleaned from social media that go into driving your sales and marketing processes. Make no mistake, when done right Big Data and tools like local SEO can be leveraged to efficiently link customers up with the goods and services that they need and benefit local businesses. It's a win-win.
Realize Transparency, Responsiveness and Customer Satisfaction Often Go Together
It used to be that transparency was wielded more like a tool or treated as a necessary evil by companies who'd fallen out of favor in some way with the public or found themselves embroiled in controversy. For better and worse, those days are long gone: Businesses now treat more openness as the norm and use it to improve their operations.
A really interesting study from the Harvard Business Review showed that when customers were able to look in on cooks getting their meals ready, customer satisfaction went up dramatically and preparation time went down.
Here's how you can harness that same power of transparency to streamline your business:
Consider Letting Customers in for a Day-in-the-life Look
One quick way to kickstart your transparency and connection to customers is by releasing a few behind-the-scenes looks of your daily business operations on social media. You could just as easily post short clips of your store, staff or manufacturing plants to let customers in, so to speak.
Post Your Thoughts and Updates on Social Media
This makes customers feel like they're part of the family, and it could also be used as a way for your customers to ask questions on social media. Social media managers and community managers can help you run this, put your brand in the ideal light and increase your overall transparency with customers.
Create Internal Transparency from the Top on Down
Increasing the amount of internal transparency in your organization does a few beneficial at once. It promises to increase the dialogue between senior leadership and mid-level managers, eradicate silo mentalities in your company, and streamline the message that gets out to customers. Open emails can also enable everyone in your organization to feel involved and like their input is being heard. As a bonus, open emails might also cut down on meetings and miscommunication.
Transparency Gives You the Benefit of the Doubt
As long as your managers are asking pointed, tough though ultimately fair questions of your leadership team, then your managers will, in turn, have more credibility with frontline employees and be able to respond to tough issues. For managers to be more transparent with their employees, though, often requires them having the full picture in front of them.
Workforce management software can put all the facts at your disposal so that you can answer tough questions, earn more respect from your employees, improve workplace efficiency and morale, and gain the benefit of the doubt should anything go awry.
