How To Maximize Your Customer Perceived Value Using Simple Ideas

In this blog post you’ll to learn how to maximize your customer perceived value using simple ideas. This alone will make the experience of doing business with you emotionally positive so your customers will want to return and buy more of your products and services.

Our customers feel out of control. When buying something, each of us wants to avoid making a mistake, looking foolish or being ripped off. The less we know about the product we are buying, the more out of control we feel and the more fear we feel. Anything you can do to help your customers feel like they are in control will make them love you.

And also will help them feel confidence in your business and your product and help them feel confident to come back and buy more from you or buy more from you as an up-sell or cross-sell during the purchase experience.

The Secret Behind Customer Perceived Value

A lot of business have succeeded by just helping customers feel more in control. I just wanted to let you know that when a person feels out of control in their life, they get emotionally activated, they start to feel fear and it makes them less likely to buy.

So, ask yourself – where does my customer feel out of control? Anytime you can identify a place where someone feels out of control and then you can figure out how you can transfer control to them, in some way, you increase the likely that they’ll feel more confidence, that they’ll feel more calm and that they’ll buy from you and buy more from you because you’ve increased your customer perceived value.

In Silicon Valley, where they’re very focused on software and technology there is a position that’s emerging and it’s called a UX person (a user experience person). In a lot of very successful companies they will have a director of user experience. Now this person is usually responsible for the design – the overall design – if it’s a piece of software and the overall experience the customer has.

What’s really interesting is that often times companies will put their customers & users in a room and they will watch over their shoulder as they use their product, to watch:

• where they run into problems
• where they have challenges
• where they make mistakes
• where they have questions

These companies really take the experience, that the customers have, very seriously – they treat it as an art and science to create a really spectacular experience. This is what the big companies are really thinking about, every step of the user’s experience to increase customer perceived value. Here is a great resource that will help you understand how to calculate & increase customer lifetime value on ConversionXL.com

Your Customer Perceived Value Through Windows Of Opportunity

Every time you interact with a customer, it’s an opportunity to make an emotional impression, every time. So each time your customer sees your marketing, contacts your business, visits your website, talks to you or your team, it’s an emotional window of opportunity. It’s a window of opportunity to make an emotional impression. Some windows of opportunity are more powerful than others.

Which are most important to your customer perceived value?

Let’s pause for a second and think, which windows of opportunity – in other words, which of these touch-points that your customer makes:

• which are the most important?
• which are the ones where they have the most emotion built-up?
• which have the most anticipation or the most at-stake?
• which are the ones that mean the most to their lives and to the outcome that they want?

Which window of opportunity matters most for your customer perceived value?

So, let’s consider for a moment, how do people bond with each other and get attention. In my experience, the primary way that we do it, is that we tell each other stories. Since your customers are going to be telling stories anyway, give them stories that help them get attention, impress their friends and feel important. Here’s how to calculate the lifetime value of a customer on Entrepreneur.com

You are not just giving them a great experience so that they have a story to tell. We are going beyond that – increasing our customer perceived value and realizing that telling stories is actually one of the currencies that we use, it’s like a social currency:

1. to get attention
2. to get social status
3. to get people to like us

If you could zoom out and you could watch 100 people do this in a row, what you’ll notice is that this is our way of making the other person:

• know we are still important
• know we are doing interesting things
• to pay attention to us
• give us approval
• give us sympathy

We also use stories to play status games. It’s very interesting the way human beings interact with each other and stories are kind at the core of the relationship building mechanism. So, since your customers are going to be telling stories anyway, what you want to do is give them a story to tell that helps them get attention, that helps them impress their friends and helps them feel important.

Customer Perceived Value – How Can You “WOW” A Customer?

Let’s go upstream to just the “Wow” experience. Take Zappos example, their moto is “delivering happiness” and they are really serious about it. If you’ve purchased from Zappos, how delightful is it to be able to return your shoes or your other merchandise for a full refund and have them pay the shipping both-ways? Isn’t it great to be able to buy several pairs of shoes and then return the ones you don’t like, not having to pay for the shipping?

It’s amazing and you call-up and talk to them, they’re just the nicest people to talk to. They’ve got a big tour-bus that they bought and they call “the happiness bus”, that their CEO rides around it when they go to events and things. So they are really serious about “delivering happiness” and it shows – customers really love them for it. Talking about customer perceived value 🙂

A great place to start in order to “Wow” your customer is when making a sale. It’s easy to lose momentum right after you’ve made a sale. It feels like the hard part is over so most businesses move on to getting the next customer and they kind of abandon their customers.

What if, instead of moving on, you took a bit of extra time to make sure your customer is getting the most from your product or service? What can you do, right after you make a sale to “Wow” your customer and not lose momentum? To really see it, as the beginning of the relationship and not the end of the sale.

When you take off all constraints and you invent from the place of pure possibility, that’s when you come up with really great ideas and then you come back after that and ask – ok what could we do? So, what would be magic for your customer? Just ask yourself right now…what would be a magical thing for them and then how could you offer a version of that in the experience you’ve created to maximize your customer perceived value…

Signing off…