Page 14 - GBC Spring 2023 Eng

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Golf Business Canada
With awareness, we innovate when it makes sense to our customers, we innovate to build and maintain loyalty, and when we do, we are sure to understand how the tech works first. Without awareness, we focus on logos and mission statements while ignoring how our market and employees define our brand.
EFFECTIVELY ADDRESS CUSTOMER CONCERNS
Once you have gained a better understanding of your business, your awareness and connection lets you lead proactively to empower employees, fight the erosion of passion and encourage creative thinking. For our teams, leading with awareness creates a more supportive workplace, with less turnover or quiet quitting (as the kids like to say). After all, if you want them to stay, you have to give them a say. What this support does or does not look like will depend on your business, but allowing your assumptions to be challenged will only move you forward as a leader and work to get you out of complacency.
Perhaps it will mean flexible or remote work or moving employees into roles where they are empowered to be visionaries and risk-takers themselves - why is this reserved only for “the” leader when we need everyone to build success? Awareness allows collaboration, rather than compliance, and will help you make policies that make sense. It will allow you to more effectively implement them and truly connect with those working with and for you. This also means hiring for passion, and knowing the best way to improve your bottom line, is to improve your front line. Value front-line workers because they are your brand.
For our customers, leading with awareness allows us to understand why our happy customers keep coming back, to thank them, and to find out before unhappy customers leave. When a customer comes to us with an issue they are having with our product or service, we can have two possible reactions – it is our problem, or it is not our problem.
All too often, issues are met with each and every attempt at dismissal. You have called the wrong number, you are in the wrong line, you need to do x before we can help you, etc. As customers, we hear these excuses every day. It seems like whomever we are speaking to will do just about anything not to help us.
One of the simplest ways to improve your business’s customer service and, therefore, the happiness of your customers is to let their concerns be your problem. That does not mean every employee needs to have a resolution for every issue – it means that every point of contact should be part of leading to the solution.
Sometimes, this can be as easy as connecting customers to the right department rather than just sending them off with a new number and little hope. Businesses can no longer sit back and assume they know more than their customers. Today, the power of information has shifted. Purchase decisions are made before the pitch and outside your funnel. An educated market with a voice demands more. We are connected online to a world of opinions and reviews, a great collaborative conversation we trust much more than any ad campaign. Consumer choice is the enemy of company complacency.