Marketing Comet - Small Business Marketing Secrets

Your Customer's Time is Very Valuable

Today I took my car in for some routine service and to get a state inspection sticker. I normally take my car to a specific Toyota dealer because they have aways given me exceptional service. I am willing to pay a bit extra for good service.

When my wife and I took the car in at 8:00 this morning, they told us it would take about 2 hours. Great, I had an appointment at noon and that would give me plenty of time. At about 11 am we hadn't gotten word the service was done and I started to worry. The repair desk was very busy so I peered into the wok area, but our car wasn't there. Hmmmmmm.

I looked outside and noticed the car parked outside. I thought maybe the service was done but they had neglected to tell us. I asked the cashier but she had no idea - I had to go to the busy repair desk to check.

The man at the counter said he would check on the car so I went back into the waiting area. It's now 11:20, my wife goes out to check. The man at the counter sees her ticked off and decides he better check on our car.

He comes back and tells us that the car hasn't been inspected but we are next in line. "Sorry, we'll pay for the service and take the car somewhere else, I have to go."

He tells me that if I can wait ten minutes he'll do the inspection right then and we wouldn't have to pay for it. Fine, I can wait ten minutes. 20 minutes later the car is finally done. We get the car and the repairman has left a half-full container of Gatorade on the passenger seat. We hurriedly pay the bill and leave, not noticing that we had indeed been charged for the inspection.

Ouch - they get a D, and they only got that because they were always courteous.

There's practically nothing you can do to tick off a customer more than waste their time. I'm not unreasonable, I know that sometimes things take longer than expected. However, we had been kept waiting because other people, who had come in later without an appointment had been put in font of us.

There is nothing more valuable to me than my time. I tend to look at things from a billable hours perspective. As consultants, my wife's and my billable hours are worth multiple hundreds of dollars. If you waste  an hour and a half of my time - a free inspection sticker doesn't even begin to make up for it.

Likewise - when the cable company gave me a 4 hour window that I had to sit at home waiting it was inconvenient. When they never showed up I was furious. A single month's free cable did not make up for it and didn't make me happy. It's been almost 10 years since it happened and I'm still ticked off.

Every company will have screw-ups with customer service from time to time. Nobody is perfect. If you want to keep your customers you have to make them whole. If you own a restaurant, and one of your waiters spills tomato sauce on a customer's coat it's not enough to pay for the cleaning. You should comp the meal, and offer to take the coat to the dry cleaner and then deliver it clean to the customer.

Just paying for the cleaning means that you are forcing the customer to take the coat to the cleaner - taxing their time. Guess what they are thinking about when they are bringing the coat to the cleaner, picking it up, and then trucking the bill over to you? They are thinking about how that stupid waiter spilled the sauce, and what a pain in the butt it is for them.

When I showed up at my noon appointment 1/2 hour late today, and I hate being late, all I could think about was how ridiculous my wait had been. Has the dealer lost me as a customer? Maybe. They have given me about 10 years of good service, so they get maybe 1 more shot. If they mess up again - goodbye.

My wife and I are planning on buying a new Toyota this year, so they may miss out on that, as well as the rest of my life in service calls. Their failure to keep me happy may cost them tens of thousands of dollars in business.

Think about what to do if your customers aren't absolutely thrilled with your service. What's a customer worth to you? How far are you willing to go to keep your customers?

J D Moore - Marketing Comet

An Easy Way to Overperform

Invest your time and energy into making your customers feel good to be doing business with you. If you want to outdo your competition – creativity can be better than cash. It's the small different things that your customers will remember

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing Blogs: When a customer orders a product or engages your services, toss in something extra. You don’t need to make a big deal of it but do it systematcially and don’t advertise it.

I agree 100%.

Let me give you a few examples of surprises that I've used or had used on me that worked:

We sent out Mothers Day cards to clients of ours who were mothers. This is something nobody else does. We got great feedback from our clients that they were touched that we thought of them. The cards cost around two dollars a piece including the stamp. Some of our clients represent tens of thousands of dollars in revenue to us. What a great win!

When Amazon.com was first around I bought so many books from them that they gave me free priority mail shipping without my asking. They also sent me a mug and a mouse pad at Christmas. It seems they now may think they are too big to throw in these extras – or they just weren't cost effective. But I loved it.

A Chinese restaurant that my wife and I used to order from weekly would always throw something in for free – usually an appetizer.

Think about a time, maybe as a child, when you got a totally unexpected gift that just floored you. How did it make you feel? Now imagine that you make your customers feel like that on a regular basis. They will want to do business with you more and more to get that good feeling.

J D Moore – Marketing Comet

Keeping in Touch Pays Off

An important aspect of good customer service and customer relations is being able to keep in touch with your customers and prospects. So many businesses are bad at this - which is hurting their bottom line.

Recently I tried to contact someone to purchase a product from him that costs around $1500. The only method listed to contact him on his website was email. I emailed ... and waited .... and emailed again ... and waited. A week later and no return email - a $1500 sale lost.

I have no idea what's going on with this person - maybe he got hit by a bus, maybe he's on vacation.

I assume that one of the goals of your business is to make money and not to thow money into a pile on the floor and light it on fire. You might as well do that when you do not return phone calls or email from prospects and customers. Even if you are incredibly busy there are solutions.

1. Schedule 1/2 hour a day where you do nothing but answer email.
2. Schedule an appropriate amount of time to return phone calls.
3. Have a live person (even outsourced - as long as they speak english) answer your phone.
4. Have an intern (paid or unpaid) go through your email and sort out the junk - and you respond to the important ones.
5. If you are on vacation or otherwise indisposed have an out of the office reply set up that tells people when you'll be back. Set that day for the day after you'll actually be back - that way when you return you can spend the day catching up and returning the most important emails.
6. Get yourself a laptop with cellular Internet access and answer your emails from your hotel when on the road.

Basically any systematic thing you can do to make sure you are getting in touch with prospects and customers will help ensure you aren't letting piles of money walk out the door.

J D Moore - Marketing Comet