Customer Satisfaction Archives

Get Your Customers to Get You Even More Business!

We all know that it’s great when our customers are happy and spread the word, as I have discussed in other posts. However, we tend to just cross our fingers and hope for the best, rather than taking matters into our own hands to increase the chances of them referring more business to us. What, if anything, can we do?

Be Great!

You have to be worth people telling others about you. People will not refer others to boring businesses, or “just ok” businesses. They will however recommend businesses they think is great. So to start off with, you have to have a great product or service, but you also have to consider the total customer experience – your brand and all your brand touchpoints! Great businesses are not made by accident, and those that are truly great won’t need to spend as much time and money on their marketing (remember what Seth Godin said about small business and branding? ;) How can you improve your product, service and the customer experience?

If you have a great product or service, help your customers help their people by making it easy for them to recommend your business.

How Can You Help Them Create More Customers for You?

[Read more…]

Your Most Powerful Marketing Question?

We all know that it’s great to have happy customers that tell others about us. Those that hear about us this way are much more likely than others to do business with us, and sooner, than those that hear about us through other ways. We also know that referrals are one of the most powerful marketing tools out there, and can cover the marketing process and get the sale, even without anything else coming into play.

All businesses, products and services can benefit from referrals in some way, but the general rule seems to be that the more expensive the purchase or the more personal the service, the more important it gets. If you get someone to clean your house, for instance, you would like a referral – right? But they can also influence much smaller purchases and less personal. If a friend tells me that the Wagawaga bread at the Boom Boom Bakery is great, I am much likelier to buy it, right?

Word-of-mouth is one type of referral, but there are various ways one can get them and increase the likelihood of getting them. Why should we just cross our fingers and toes and hope that someone recommends us when we can do things to make it so? ;)

So, we come to that question, which may indeed be one of the most important ones in your marketing…

“Would you recommend … to others?” (insert the name of your company, product or service) [Read more…]

Customer Relationship Nurturing With Online Groups

We have all heard that it is easier to keep your current customers than to get new ones. And this is very true. However, we tend to forget this and neglect the customers we already have, whilst we offer the world to new customers and give them all our attention.

For a while now I have been thinking how best to remedy this in my business and find ways to better maintain my relationship with my “older” customers. So I want to share with you what I am getting up to, and perhaps this is something that you could use in your business.

I buy a lot of online courses. I have bought courses on Facebook marketing, LinkedIn marketing, Pinterest marketing, email marketing, SEO etc. etc. I love this way of learning for so many reasons. I don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time, I can always go over things again if I need to, and they provide easy step-by-step instructions. Very often these courses are accompanied by closed, members-only, Facebook groups where participants can interact, ask and answer, discuss and just in general help and support each other. The instructor is also there regularly to answer questions and take part. This means that you not only have constant access to the materials but you always have someone you can look to for help. Of course you can’t just take, take, take, you must also give in the form of helping others and answering questions ;)

Another thing that a group like this does for the instructor of the program is that they can keep in touch with their customers and thereby continue to build the relationship with them.

I had been thinking for a long time about this as a way to keep in touch with my customers before I did it. So I decided to invite my current and “old” clients, that have gone through my training program, to join. I wanted to build an active and lively group of great people that want to master marketing for their business, support each other and share advice and ideas. Something much greater than I can provide on my own. People have really liked the idea and most of my clients have joined. This has been just great. There are useful and lively discussions and exchange of information, and I myself am do my very best to make it so by checking in regularly, answering questions and taking part.

How could you use something like this to continue building your relationship with your customers? Here are a few ideas. [Read more…]

You Need to Communicate

If I had a dollar, pound or euro for each time I hear people complain about a customer, how they just don’t understand this or that, I could probably have at least one free meal a week (even if it is only a sandwich).

I recently came across this quote: “If you’ve told a child a thousand times and he still does not understand, then it is not the child who is the slow learner.” (Walter Barbee).

It might as well say: “If you’ve told a prospective customer a thousand times and he still does not understand, then it is not the customer who is the slow learner.”

It is not the customer’s responsibility to understand you. It is your responsibility to make yourself understandable to the customer. Perception is each person’s reality. I perceive the world one way and that is my reality, and you perceive it another way – which is your reality. You can’t say that one perception of reality is wrong and another one is right. There is only different perceptions. My perception is my reality and that is what I base my decisions on – including whether or not to do business with you.

So what to do if you know that things are like this or like that but the prospective customer just won’t understand and therefore will not buy from you? [Read more…]

Stop Trying to Sell!

Peter Drucker said: “…the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available.”

No one wants to be interrupted

Despite this, there are always people out there who continue with salesmanship, à la used car salesmen. There are courses on salesmanship, sales techniques, closing the sale etc. etc. There are still people who you have never heard of before, let alone spoken to, interrupting a cosy evening watching your favourite TV show by calling you on the phone, and there are still people scouring the web for email addresses and then sending emails to people who have never heard of them before. STOP! Nobody wants to be interrupted! Nobody wants to buy from you after one phonecall or an email that they didn’t want in the first place (there is a word for that: spam).

And it is expensive. Really really expensive. Monty Python legend John Cleese did adverts for Icelandic bank Kaupthing before the economic collapse. As Iceland only has about 330 thousand inhabitants, in one ad he asked why Kaupthing didn’t just call all of them. It was funny. It was a joke. He is a comedian. And it was before the collapse.

Relationships matter

Marketing is about building a relationship. A relationship that makes people want to do business with you again and again, and choose to do business with you rather than the competition. Traditional sales methods are like walking up to the girl at the bar and going straight for the marriage proposal. How likely is it that she will say yes? [Read more…]