Bunch of Tesla driving, Apple using, lululemon wearing customers.

6 Quick Tips to Help you Make Price Irrelevant

1. Customer Service Feature Story

Q: What kind of customers do you want to attract?

A: “I want a bunch of Tesla driving, Peloton riding, Starbucks drinking, Apple using, lululemon wearing customers.”

Q: How do you attract them?

A: “Not by running discounts; this type of customer cares less about price and more about finding a compelling experience that makes them feel better about themselves which creates an emotional connection to the brand.”

How to Attract your Ideal Customer

Those brands are not trying to be for all people. They are unique, almost exclusive, yet have a cult like customer base. Their customers are looking for superior products and service wrapped in a compelling experience that makes them feel better about themselves. Those brands are a status symbol of a lifestyle. They offer customers an emotional affirmation. An affordable luxury that says if I buy this, I will be hipper, more attractive, more intelligent, more popular.

Do you compete in the price wars or experience wars?

Those brands also don’t compete on price. These types of customers are not looking for discounts. I prefer to compete in the experience wars—a lot less competition. Many times, when a customer complains about the price, it isn’t because they were not willing to pay for it; it is because the experience didn’t warrant it. Price is something you offer when you have nothing else. In fact, 85 percent of US consumers say they would pay 5 to 25 percent more to ensure a superior experience.

Price becomes irrelevant when your customers are so happy with you, they have no idea what your competition charges. Discounting your prices is just a race to the bottom. When the best is similar in price to rest of the pack, customers get suspicious, and the perception of excellence disappears. It is a major mistake to allow cheap imitators to appear as your competition by playing into their hands and reducing your prices. You are giving them credibility and decreasing your status as the leader of your industry. If you feel your products and services are superior, then your fees should reflect that. Everyone expects to pay more when they are dealing with the best.

“Many times, the cheaper a customer goes, the more it ends up costing them.”

Experience Epiphany

An “experience epiphany” fills a gap Customers didn’t know was there. What was once considered impossible is now the standard experience everyone else is trying to duplicate. Experience epiphanies rarely occur in familiar surroundings. Steve Jobs said it best: “The key to thinking differently is to perceive things differently, through the lenses of a trailblazer. And to see things through these lenses, you must force your brain to make connections it otherwise would have missed.”

My favorite Customer service models are the ones that are so unique to their industry. Too many businesses operate like blind sheep and do what has always been done. Then you have companies like Amazon, Tesla, Airbnb, Peloton, Apple, and Zappos, which introduce such simple concepts, unheard of in their industries, and dominate even in tough economic times. Listening to your customers is acceptable for driving incremental customer satisfaction, but it hardly generates breakthroughs. A better description for what great companies deliver is called an “experience epiphany.” That’s a vision of what the customer will want in the future and won’t be able to live without.

*Become a licensed Customer Experience Coach, register for April’s Coach Camp

2) Episode 35 of The Customer Service Revolution Podcast

In Episode 35 of The Customer Service Revolution Podcast, The DiJulius Group’s Chief Revolution Officer John DiJulius interviews Stan Slap, renowned thought leader in

company culture. He wrote the New York Times, Wall St. Journal and USA Today bestselling books on business culture, and he is the CEO of the international consulting company called, by a remarkable coincidence, SLAP. Stan just wrote an incredible white paper called Tough Times: Tougher Teams.

What you will learn:

Who cares why things suck? What’s important is what you do about it; it is the job of [leadership] to bring good answers to bad circumstances. “Whining” is not a strategy. “Victim” is not a job description. “Everyone else is in trouble, too” is not [a crutch for management].
What ‘culture’ really means.
The three critical cultures you need to be examining right now as a leader.
Your leaderships’ emotional commitment is what solves problems that are unsolvable, creates energy when all of the energy has been expended, and ignites emotional commitment in others, including your employee culture.
When a culture is allowed to blame external circumstances for internal performance, aggressive and innovative responses depart, and a culture marked by victimization, apathy, and detachment takes its place.
You don’t want your culture to take work home; you want it to bring your company home.
In times of crisis, customers will often have shifted from buying what they want to only buying what they need. Is your experience, what you sell, something they need?
Be human first; a manager second.

3) Best White Paper of the Year

Stan Slap and his team wrote an incredible white paper called Tough Times: Tougher Teams. It has so many amazing ideas, that I immediately shared it with my leadership teams. I highly recommend this.

4) Must watch short video

Watch this short video on The DiJulius Group’s Customer Service Action Statement & three pillars

5) Quote of The Week

“To reach your vision, your team has to believe that you believe it. This will only happen if your vision is about what is right with the world that must be protected and wrong with the world that must be corrected.”

– Stan Slap

6) 5 Spots Left for our 2021 Customer eXperience Executive Academy

We only have 5 remaining spots for the 2021 Customer eXperience Executive Academy (CXEA), which starts April 2021. Having worked with the top Customer Service organizations in the

world, The DiJulius Group’s Customer eXperience Executive Academy (CXEA) gives you both theoretical and practical experience on how to elevate the levels of service at your company. With the need for rapid growth of the Customer Experience Executive in businesses today, the Customer eXperience Executive Academy uses the X Commandment Methodology, which covers all facets and responsibilities that fall under Customer Experience. Unlike any other institution, the CXEA’s