As a brand, you earn trust by delivering and exceeding expectations. If you promise easy, the experience better be easy - particularly in the customer’s first interaction with your product or service. It takes an unwavering commitment to excellence to create customer intimacy. Intimacy requires letting someone into your heart, and to earn a customer's heart you must woo them.
You do that through excellence in your product, service, or experience. If you consistently deliver what you say you will deliver, you should also benefit from a strong word-of-mouth ‘army’ that drives prospective customers to you. Even better, customers who have been referred are predisposed to trust you before their first interaction takes place.
Most of our customers at 99designs were referred by a friend, which gives us an opening to build intimacy in our first interaction with them. Once we are given that opening, we deliver an excellent customer experience to earn their trust and to create customer intimacy. As any business manager knows, excellence is not easy. It is difficult to deliver excellence across so many parts of the customer experience.
The good news is, you can deliver excellence - and drive intimacy - without being excellent everywhere. The key is to be in-tune with what delights your customer and focus your efforts to drive excellence with your ‘delighters’. Examples of brands that do this really well include Target with its merchandising approach, Tim Tam with consistency, and Jetstar with its low prices. The childcare industry is highly competitive, with increasing supply of centres a constant challenge in maintaining and growing attendance levels.
As a national not-for-profit social enterprise, Goodstart believes in partnering with families to deliver the best outcomes for our children and value to our families. We work to tease out what value means for our families, to create customer intimacy and ultimately drive brand loyalty. We’re a high-touch human services organisation, managing relationships with more than 59,000 families, so customer intimacy is core to what we do.
It is focused at our early learning centres and driven by a desire to truly partner with families through their child’s first five years. That goes beyond being a ‘childcare’ provider to be there for families in meaningful ways. To do this, we need to have an acute awareness and knowledge not just of what our families want, but why they want it, when they want it, and how best to deliver that support.
Goodstart invests heavily in customer insights, with a rolling feedback loop that intercepts families at key touchpoints in their Goodstart journey. We also undertake deeper ethnographic research, to observe families in their real-life environment and understand everyday challenges, so we can co-design solutions. Our goal is to establish trust, using customer data and insights, alongside operational agility to create and deliver irresistible offers for our families - in and beyond our early learning centres. We also deliver customer intimacy by being relevant to them. To have utility, to help them get things done, give them advice or information that enables them to be better parents.
Oily fish is particularly rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Aim for at least two portions of fish a week, including one portion of oily fish. You can choose from fresh, frozen or canned, but remember that canned and smoked fish can often be high in salt. Eggs and pulses (including beans, nuts and seeds) are also great sources of protein.
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