If I would do a survey of the readers of this blog to ask the question, “Do you care about your customers?” — my wager would be about 100% would enthusiastically answer in the affirmative.

Perhaps a significant reason for such an overwhelmingly positive answer is simple: if you didn’t care about creating a distinctive level of engagement with your customers, you probably wouldn’t make the effort to be reading posts like this in the first place.

However, there’s a subtle – yet critical – shift in thinking that we all must make to address an extraordinarily significant problem.  It’s not whether or not we think we care about our customers – it’s whether or not our customers believe that we care about them and their business.

Think of your customer relationships as something like plants; it doesn’t matter how much sunshine and rain YOU have…if your plants fail to receive the nourishment they need to grow, they will wither and die.  

And, if you’ve hired a gardener to take care of your plants/customers – she or he had better be spreading some sunshine and sprinkles along the way, or the result will sadly be the same.

Your employees are the gardeners that you’ve entrusted to care and grow those plants.

You can care about customers – but, if your employees fail to smile, if they act as if the customer is interrupting them, if they do not look the customer in the eye, if they give off the vibe that their work is beneath them, or make the customer feel they aren’t appreciated…your customer relationship is soon dead on the vine.

And, by the way – isn’t it interesting that many companies spend vast sums to teach their gardeners about biology…the facts and features of the product…and not as much on the actual care and feeding of the plants themselves? 

In other words, we teach our people about the product and the processes – and not about how to deliver a highly personalized service experience.

When we examine why a customer might choose to do business elsewhere, consider the result of a study by Pepper/Rogers Group: 60% of all customers stop dealing with a company because of what they perceive as indifference on the part of salespeople.

YOU know you care about your customers. The important questions are:

• Do your front-line people show them the same level of concern as you have?
• And, do your customers know how much you care for them?
• Are you SURE?

Maybe…just maybe…this week is a great time to tell them once again.