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The Middle Seat Experience

4/17/2017 | Bill Petrie, Petrie's Perspective

If you are a frequent traveler as I am, there are few things more harrowing than a seat assignment ending in the letter B or E – a middle seat. Generally, this means you can look forward to one or more of the following for the duration of your flight:

• Inability to cross your legs

• Passive/aggressive jockeying for armrest space

• Shoulder to shoulder “bonding”

Under pressure to increase profits, airlines have maximized the number of seats on a plane at the expense of client comfort. Given the way airlines operate, they make it incredibly difficult for anyone to have a positive experience and the dreaded middle seat has become a symbol for all that is unpleasant about flying. Simply put, airlines have placed a premium on profit over experience. 

From a business perspective, this does the exact opposite of creating the most valuable feeling in a client: loyalty.

Client experience and customer loyalty is driven by an organization’s interaction with its audience and how well it consistently delivers on expectations. Your clients don’t see customer service and sales as two different things; they simply see one brand – your brand. Because of this, every single interaction with a client is an opportunity to reinforce your brand experience – either positively or negatively.

 To keep your client experience consistently positive, start by focusing on the following three areas:

• Hiring – Regardless of their role, everyone in your organization is an ambassador of your brand. Every associate should believe in your brand and be able to consistently communicate the brand value to clients through both words and actions.

• Empowerment – Allow your team to actively solve client issues without having to check with their manager. Empowered employees take ownership in problem solving and will leave a much more positive impact when communicating with clients.

• Velocity – The more time you allow clients to tread water in a sea of uncertainty, the worse the experience becomes. Fix problems quickly and conduct a postmortem later to learn from the issue to see what can be done to mitigate or eliminate it going forward.

The question is simple: does your brand deliver a great client experience or is it more like the middle seat on an airplane? The airlines typically don’t care about client experience because there are precious few other cost-effective options with different experiences available to the flying public. In the promotional products industry – an industry where distributors purchase the same products from the same suppliers at very similar pricing – that’s simply not the case. Elevate your client experience to a first-class window seat and customer loyalty will follow.

Bill is president of PromoCorner, the leading digital marketing service provider to the promotional products industry, and has over 17 years working in executive leadership positions at leading promotional products distributorships. In 2014, he launched brandivate – the first executive outsourcing company solely focused on helping small and medium sized-promotional products enterprises responsibly grow their business. A featured speaker at numerous industry events, a serial creator of content marketing, president of the Promotional Products Association of the Mid-South (PPAMS), and PromoKitchen chef, Bill has extensive experience coaching sales teams, creating successful marketing campaigns, developing operational policies and procedures, creating and developing winning RFP responses, and presenting winning promotional products solutions to Fortune 500 clients. He can be reached at bill@PromoCorner.com.

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