In today’s digital world, businesses are digitizing most, if not all, of their functions to increase efficiency, lower costs, and expand their digital presence. But to become a great business, you still need the ‘human touch’ to separate yourselves from competitors by building sincere and genuine relationships with your customers, employees, and stakeholders - something technology cannot replicate. Here’s why sincerity and genuineness still matters, and how you can harness its power to take your business to another level. 

Increasing customer satisfaction

Most businesses are obsessed with their bottom lines, and see customers as opportunities for profits to be made. This perspective often leads to short-term measures to secure immediate payouts by customers in the short-run, but in the long run, it becomes the detriment of businesses who have become tone-deaf to customer needs. Customers who find that their needs have been addressed disingenuously will switch to other businesses they feel they can trust more. 

How can you build lasting relationships with your customers then? It boils down to simply being sincere with addressing your customer’s needs and genuinely taking steps to meet those needs. Customer surveys, complaints, and criticism can sometimes be difficult to stomach, but this data is a gold mine to learn from when it comes to the needs of your customers. This data helps direct your resources to point the business in the right direction, to avoid investing in an advertising campaign or product launch that begets little traction. Customers who feel their needs have been heard and addressed will start to build trust with your business, and as a side effect, will spread awareness of your services through word of mouth - the best form of outreach of all.

Empowering your employees

Employees are the backbone of any business. Yet less than 50% of employees trust their companies, according to a Harvard Business Review article. A dysfunctional organization often sees its employees as a means to an end, and exploits employees' time and energy with little regard for employee welfare. While seemingly expedient at first, this approach is ultimately costly to the organization, which has to incur high search costs to replace employees who leave. Disgruntled employees also suffer from languishing productivity that translates to overall subpar operations. Ultimately, this lack of excellence could damage the brand’s reputation.

Your employees are the biggest assets of your organization; they are the eyes and ears of what’s happening on the ground. Information they possess can inform future business decisions that would benefit the organization. Such critical information, if ignored, could risk your business falling behind your contemporaries, or worse, drive your business to the ground. Additionally, an empowered employee will also take the initiative to resolve challenges as they arise, which takes the pressure off other peers and superiors from needing to resolve them - a further value add to your business.

Empowering your employees is as important as building trust with the customers you serve, and can be as easily achieved by sincerely understanding the challenges your employees face, genuinely giving them the environment to speak freely and air their grievances, and then providing the time and resources they need to be effective in their roles. This can be done through providing an avenue for employees to air their concerns openly to management without fear of reprisal, rewarding initiative taken to resolve issues and fostering a horizontal collaborative culture where employees feel they have ownership in the decisions of the business as opposed to a top-down command-and-control environment.

Cultivating strong business relationships

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
~ Isaac Newton ~

No business can exist singly and withstand the dynamics of an uncertain environment on its own - it needs the support of various other players to thrive. Hence a sincere and genuine approach to service extends to not only end customers, but also to other players in the ecosystem a business operates in. These include suppliers, vendors, business partners, investors and governments.

Business arrangements need not be zero-sum games where one party benefits at the expense of another. A parallel narrative similarly exists for business partners as it does with employees - businesses who take advantage of their business partners will find themselves knee-deep in constantly finding new partners to run the business with. On the other hand, businesses who have carefully cultivated strong relationships with their business partners, vendors, and stakeholders not only benefit from partners that are cognizant of the business’ needs, but also go the extra mile to help you succeed - a win-win scenario. 

In amenity management, the property owner and the amenities manager must see eye-to-eye regarding the business direction of the property to successfully attract, retain and meet residents' needs. A property owner and amenities manager who are in sync with the needs of the business can trust the other to undertake decisions promptly for the mutual benefit of both, which can only be achieved if a certain level of trust and sincerity has been established. 

Wrapping it Up

Technological tools can make certain business processes more effective or less burdensome, but it wont make a business successful or impactful. What truly leaves a lasting impression on both your clients and society as a whole is a business that is rooted on meeting the needs of people. This can only be achieved by building trust, by being sincere and genuine in both who you are serving and who you need to deliver that service.