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Value your customer like you value your Jewellery
We always protect and treasure our jewellery like our loved ones. Making a purchasing decision for a niche commodity is as difficult as reading the mind of your customer. Understanding your consumer helps businesses gain an insight into their behaviour and modify the business operations accordingly, to ensure that they are served best.
An entrepreneur, especially a small business owner, must consider some of the crucial factors like product price, quality standards, choices as per the latest trends and an overall magnificent experience to provide best customer service.
In order to achieve this, you must begin with embracing the cognitive empathy of your customer. Get a clear idea about their expected customer service from you. Seek feedback and show you genuinely care. Dedicate your brand research and development towards creating a special experience for your customer. Keep your customer interactions consistent and timely. Establish trust and reward your loyal customers with utmost quality service.
Consider that every person walking in your store has an invisible sign on their head saying “I am important, treat me like that”.
I would like to share one of my personal experiences that completely changed my mindset and helped me as a newcomer in the industry. A customer got down an X3 BMW, wearing a pair of 5cts solitaires, carrying a Hermes, and entered my store one evening. I was overwhelmed and excited, thinking “…today I am definitely having a good day”. With diligence I attended her for almost an hour. It was later that I realised that she was just window shopping and not someone with an intent to buy.
Simultaneously, I had another decently dressed lady in her mid-thirties entering the store in quite a casual way. I asked my team to take over and address to her needs. To my surprise, she purchased jewellery worth ten lakhs in less than forty-five minutes and exited my store as informally as she had come.
It pinched my heart that maybe if I had attended the customer after understanding their mindset, rather than judging them by their clothes, bags or cars, I could have gained more business than I got. I also learnt that treating them with equal warmth, politeness, attentiveness, and smile can create a sense of value and trust.
It was a lesson of a lifetime for me and I dedicated resources towards training my staff accordingly.
From that day, it was a part of our core store policy that every person entering was equal to us. Our focus would be to read the mind and judge between the interactive play of words and thoughts of the customer. Everything else was a blurred image and I preferred it that way.
I feel a new customer is always welcome but retaining the old one is more of a challenge as customer acquisition is time consuming and expensive. Customer acquisition and customer retention are two sides of the same coin, without which one you cannot sustain your business.
Timely customer calls on the launch of new collections or offers, sending goodies or flowers on their special days, using effective sales promotion techniques are few of the many crucial factors to adopt for a permanent database of customers.
Always remember, your business is more likely to sell to a current customer than to a new one.
Know your customers better because only they can help you get more lead and thus more business. Understanding customers is the key to giving them good service and building trust which in turn results into strong customer relationships and new sales through positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
Satisfied customers have a healthier relationship with your business, causing them to make more and larger purchases in the future.
Also, the contemporary jewellery market offers more variety and choices of brands than ever before. Pulling in the right consumers from the crowd every time is a real challenge.
It works when you create a sense of worth for them leading them to associate with you. Raise the quality and standard of your products to a level of distinction. Niche commodity only sells with luxury conduct and conducive surrounding. Create an experience of knowledge, satisfaction and trust for your consumer.
Rave about your brand to any and everyone who is willing to listen. Cultivate and nurture the long-term relationship.
A little bit of creativity, active listening, and appreciation are the key ingredients to successful customer relationships.
Author: Binnita Shah
IIG faculty and Jewellery connoisseur
IIG India
International Institute of Gemology is an educational institute imparting knowledge about Gems and Jewellery. IIG has educated over 1,00,000 professionals excelling in the Gems and Jewellery industry. An institute par excellence offers education programs with certifications that hold global credibility. Having a stronghold in the industry for five decades, IIG has accelerated the quality of education in the Gems and Jewellery sector. IIG works towards bringing the best practices of the Gems and Jewellery industry under one roof.