What is Kindness means to you as a business professional? How kind do you want to be with your client or customer? Is there an ROI benchmark on the amount of sweetness you put in in the relationship with a customer? Would you be willing to offer a free service to get a lifetime word of mouth marketing from the customer? In the same way, would it be okay to clean a yard for your neighbor to make him friends for the rest of your life?
The answers to all these questions depend on prioritizing your goals and what you consider ‘true success.’ It also has to do with what you feel of humanity, Karma, and business culture. They say to keep emotions and business separate, but how can passion exist without emotion? Tricky right?
Let’s try and solve this riddle. I think that the role of Karma in business and customer management is more than we imagine. For example, If you have ever been to a trade show, you might see salespeople at booths offering free stuff to the visitors who stop by. Sometimes people don’t even stop by, but the salesperson tries his best to handover the free item to the person. Do you know why?
These free items help the visitor remember the name of the booth they went to or walked by. It is a small example of showing Kindness in a business environment. A little act of Kindness like this makes a sweet memory for the visitor. That free item has a symbolic recall reference. It is partly an appreciation of having good faith in business practices. And believe it or not, the ROI for that little transaction per visitor is highly positive.
I have seen Karma taken over business logic in my professional experience over the years. With businesses and their marketing getting digital, the ‘Karma-based sweetness’ transforms into a value-based digital user appearance.
Did you know 90% of the digital ads right now are sales pitchy? In my opinion, this phenomenon is absolutely a ‘crime’ in the world of modern relationship marketing. Although digital advertising is one of the significant digital success ingredients, you don’t realize that you lose something at the other end of the rope. In simpler words, it is a trade-off deal.
Do you know a Facebook Ad pops up after every four organic posts on your timeline? Isn’t it too much? Also, what makes you think that customers are desperate enough to still engage with your sales-pitched social media ads at such a high impression frequency? That is a little unkind and unfair to the user. The digital consumer is the most literate out of all.
Digital marketing has evolved, and now the stakeholders are pretty mature. Extraordinary results are only possible if you stop selling and start educating your potential customers about your product/service. Follow the philosophy of being kind and generous when it comes to selling your services. Free & valuable content is the best form of Kindness you can give to your customers digitally.
As a marketing agency owner, here is my vision, which I love to share with my clients. I tell them we sell a service, not potatoes. When we take you on board, we take care of you, and you become family, Period. It’s okay not to charge a client for minor development tasks, campaign changes, or anything that pops up at the client’s end unexpectedly and is out of the scope of the current contract.
Our relationship with clients has been tremendous, and our retention rate of 99% due to the way we treat our clients. Try going the extra mile to ensure that the customer is taken care of, and he will sign you up for life. A smart customer knows that loyalty & Kindness is priceless.
According to research by HubSpot, 85% of the B2B customers will never talk to a salesperson on call before they had done their thorough internet research. It is a high level of digital literacy we are living in this era. How to deal with such well-informed customers? The only way to win customer’s hearts is Kindness. It’s a win-win.
Did you realize that If the customer does not buy your product/service even after your kind offer, you still earn the psychic edge over to your next customer for being at a higher moral ground, which is always a victory and creates job satisfaction? Your Kindness and benevolence to the customer will never make you feel low. It is a pride and expresses itself through your body language for the rest of your lives.