7 reasons to meet customers face-to-face

I worked with fintech for a few years, we built a brand. Now, there are people in different countries who love that brand. Few years back, this brand name was just a project in a PowerPoint file of the founder. With all the dreams and enthusiasm, we, the team gave life to that project and built a brand. Now, it’s a known and loved brand by migrants in a few continents of the globe. 

We met people in different places in Malaysia and Singapore to give them a small token of appreciation. The people here means our customers, fans who were consistently engaged with us in social networks. Since it is an online business, all communications are mostly done through technology, from remote, people didn't get to see us and we didn't get to know them. These people, migrants, are the core of our business. If we want to do business, we need to know them. So we decided to meet them by person, one by one, face- to- face. And believe me it was all amazing!  

Apart from being a marketer, we gathered experiences that can ever not be attained by any other means. The variation in lifestyle, profession, behavior and the honor that we confronted is not totally explainable in words. 

Let this variation of life touch us, enrich us as humans and encourage us to do good business. 

So let me share my 7 reasons why you should meet your customers face-to-face:

1. KYC: Not for the sake of updating formal KYC documents but to know the customer properly as a human being, as a person. As a marketer, the more we know about our customer, their needs and problems, we can serve them better with offering solutions. 
2. Customer Relationship Management: It's an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customres. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth. - Wikipedia. So, yes, it's about sales and retention.
3. Marketing: We must wear our best outfit and pay a visit. Market our product along with ourselves. Whether we are employees or founders, our personality and belongingness to our company is a kind of POSM. Remember, when we meet a customer on behalf of a company, we are the brand ambassador.
4. Brand Building: For creating brand awareness and brand affinity, people need to be in the market exposing belongingness to the brand. Apart from the posters, TV commercials and other adverts, let's be humanitarian. We must reach customers in person to let them know about us, our company and our brand. Every brand has a story and intention behind it. We should let customers know our story. So that, whenever we say something they can easily understand and connect.  
5. Help spreading WOM: While making a purchase, we generally ask our friends and family. Inversely, if we make a good or bad purchase we tell our friends and family. Meeting a customer is equivalent to giving him/her post purchase experience. People are much more expressive nowadays. If we can make this experience good, it becomes an experience to share. Help customers to generate some good words on their mouth about your brand, it will spread. 
6. To increase reliability, trustworthiness at both ends: We need to stop being a ghost or acting like a ghost. In online business, from onboarding to after-sale service, none of the party actually meets. Either a delivery guy or a mechanic from a third party gets to meet the customer. A face to face meeting will actually increase your commitment on both sides. It's also important to make customers realize that they are important and integral part of your business.
7. Know their story and let others know as well: When products are tailored or for a niche, it's an undeniable fact that stories of customers can provide us new ideas, help to reshape your business culture and module. On the other hand, storytelling is a strong marketing tool where we address a problem and talk about the solution. If it's a real story of our customer, as a business organization we are honoring him/her by publishing it and other customers get themselves on the same page by reading it.