Saturday 28 July 2012

Make £millions by changing customer habits

Make £millions by changing customer habits: by Jason Li 2012 ©

It’s one of the secrets of business success...

Changing customer habits to do what you want...

Just like brands such as Google, facebook and Kit Kat...

Who earn millions from you changing your habits.

(Creepy alert: Please don’t use these powerful methods to do creepy things.)

In the last few years, everywhere I go I see people with a smart phone. It’s unbelievable. I stand on the train platform and people are either texting or on the internet. I’m in the restaurant and people are sharing photos. I’m walking down the street and tourists take pictures on their phone; there’s no such thing as the instant camera anymore. And then I go on facebook out of habit and see people’s new pictures that are uploaded.

Is it any wonder that people involved in smart phones from the manufacturer of the chips, the phones, and even facebook are making all the money at the moment? People are habitually using these gadgets and tools. Go back ten years and hardly anyone did these things. Young people today will not understand when you tell them people socially sat at restaurants without anyone bringing out a phone.

These companies are doing two magical things to make millions by changing customer habits:

1.       Creating value

2.       Changing customer habits

Replacing customer habits

Now you might not be able to go out and create and mass manufacture a smart phone to challenge Nokia. However, you can use training to work on replacing customer habits in your industry.

You may be able to help your customer by training them to use your product in a way that is better than the way they do tasks with their existing product. So let’s say you have an electronics kit that a sound engineer uses, you can train the engineer to get better results with your kit than a competitors. Once the engineer gets used to it, the engineer will continue to use yours out of habit.

Imagine that, just a bit of training will cause someone to start using your product instead of a competitor. (Just don’t show the dog how to beg for steak!)

Adding customer habits

Work with customers to find out new ways they can use your product by adding customer habits. Customers will always want to get the best use out of products and services they have paid for. So if they can do more tasks then they originally bought the product for, they will naturally use it of other tasks. To do this, keep in contact and offer bits of training for additional features.

The best thing about adding customer habits is that the more uses your customer has for your product and service, the less likely they are likely to change to another supplier. Even if your business makes mistakes or does something wrong. The fact that your product or service is relied on for so many tasks makes it really hard for a customer to change to another vendor.

All you need to do now is turn your coffee machine into a toasty maker too!

Removing customer habits

Sometimes you will have a customer or prospect that has been used to doing a task in a certain way for months or even many years, so your focus is training them by removing customer habits.

Imagine you have a customer that already uses your sophisticated software system and only use it at the moment for storing documents. When they create company notices it is normally sent by email or they pin up messages on a company board. If people read the email then they see the message, if not, it’s just one out of 100 emails a day they get.

If you want them to use your intranet system then you might train the administrator to post on the intranet system, and following this, train the administrator how to train department managers to train staff how to access the intranet. You could even train the administrator how to put a link on the emails to the intranet too for new notices and to access all sorts of company information. Now the intranet will be habitually accessed and no-one ever misses a company notice.

So is it really possible for your business to create a way for customers to change their habit so they cannot live without your product? Well, here is an example to show it happens all the time. When you want to know something, have you ever heard people say: “Google it.” Noticed how this has replaced the encyclopaedia. (Another one where young people may never know what it’s like to see a book shelf of A-Z encyclopaedia to research subjects; because our habits have changed.)

If not, can you find a way to train customers to habitually use your product? Think of Kit Kat: their advertising is trying to train you in the habit of having a Kit Kat on your break if you are hungry.


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