It’s an age-old question for CBD business owners who seem to run out of time every day. Of course, you need to focus on building your customer base. How will you ever have time to build a relationship with your employees as well?
You can listen to Move the Stairs CBD Brand Protection PR™ conversation each week as a podcast! Find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify.
Let’s look at your employees first. You pay your employees right, isn’t that enough?
The short answer is NO.
According to a Harvard Business Review article in April 2019 there’s a strong statistical link between employee well-being reported on Glassdoor and customer satisfaction among a large sample of some of the biggest brands today.
Finally, the Society of Human Resource Managers estimates it costs and average of 6-9 months salary to recruit and train a new employee.
Do you think your employees will give great customer service if they aren’t happy?
Building strong customer relationships, not just selling to them but engaging with them is key. We know how much it means from a financial standpoint. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, according to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company.
But let’s look a bit deeper. Building loyal customers is the first step in brand protection when you are facing an issue, challenge, or crisis with your business or in your industry. It can make the difference between customers fleeing and customers who want to know more about how you are handling the situation. You have filled their trust bottle. They know you. And therefore, will give you time to explain what you are doing. Hopefully, they give you the benefit of the doubt and stick with you and your company. Those loyal fans are key to CBD Brand Protection PR.
So now we know the answer to our first question of which group take priority is BOTH. How can you do it?
Here are 5 steps to building your employee and customer relationships.
1. Consistently communicate with employees. Start a closed employee group on Facebook or another platform. Post a video from your leadership once a week. Have contests to get engagement. Highlight employees. Introduce new employees. Spend 1 hour a week developing content (remember to use your bucket system which you can revisit our Nov 2019 blog on Social Media strategies)
2. Talk to your employees first before the media during a crisis.
3. Proactively answer your employees most pressing questions during an issue or crisis. What do they want to know about when they can come back to work, is it safe, will there be a job, what will happen to them in the meantime?
4. Fill your TRUST BOTTLE. Use the 4’C’s to consistently communicate, build and nurture your customers on social media, email and phone calls.
5. Become the CBD Thought Leader. Build your credibility by taking the time to share your knowledge and educate your customers on the latest CBD information. That credibility will go a long way toward increasing loyalty and mitigating the effects of an issue or crisis whether it is happening to your company or to your industry.
It won’t take a lot of time, but you will find the financial and brand protection benefits are worth every minute.
Here's a link to your free downloadable content calendar.
Here’s the video recap from today’s episode: