What the World Needs Now is... L.O.V.E.

It's February 14th and there is no better time to show a little L.O.V.E. in your most important relationships: your customers and clients. Because the cost of maintaining a customer is far less than the cost of acquiring a new one, maintaining and growing revenue from existing customers creates marketing leverage by lowering the cost of business acquisition. To leverage your existing clients, try the 4-step L.O.V.E. System that can turn good customers into great ones and great ones into evangelists:

Learn about them, even when you think you know them.
Obsess about response time, even when they aren't in a hurry.
Visit them even when you don't have to.
Educate them even when they know about what you do.

Learn, Even When You Think You Know Them
The best way to serve your customers is to get to know them. Learn what they're buying, their frequency of purchase, personal information, and feedback on how you're doing. Knowledge of your customer can be acquired through a variety of methods, but one of the best is through surveys.

Surveys allow you to ask specific questions, in either in writing or in person. For example, warranty forms that come with products, and ask for a variety of information to activate your warranty, are a form of customer survey, to allow companies to better understand their customers. If you have a product, it is a great way to get information from your customers. If you provide a service, sending a written "customer satisfaction survey" can provide the way for customers to give you feedback on your service, and qualify themselves for future services.

The sales effect of surveys can be quite extraordinary. A recent study conducted jointly at Rice University and New York University confirmed the amazing impact of surveys on customers buying behavior: customers were three times as likely to buy something else and half as likely to defect.

Obsess About Response Time
The single biggest reason for customer dissatisfaction isn't high prices. It's not even bad quality. It's slow response time. The easiest and best way to say you care is to respond promptly. Very promptly. Obsessively. That means returning phone calls immediately, or at least the same day. It means getting quotations to a client a day early. And doing what you say. Fast.

A lawyer I know has a policy. He tells his clients that when they call, either he or his assistant will return any call within 3 hours. The effect: the focus groups we've had with his clients say he's the best lawyer they've ever dealt with. The truth is, he admits, he's actually not that great a lawyer. He just returns calls fast.

Visit, Even When You Don't Have To
Customers often don't complain. They just fade away. They feel neglected. Apart from formal surveys, keeping them abreast of what's going on through an occasional visit. Nothing works better for cementing a relationship than face-to-face contact. It can be to drop off a sample of a new product, or a 'just in the neighborhood' informal hello. This is also true with referral sources. I know a mortgage broker that has a big jar of candy on his desk. I once asked him about this. He told me that a certain real estate agent stops by once a month to fill it. While he's there, they talk and often there's a client for him.

Educate
Ongoing communication with clients helps give them a better sense of your capabilities and knowledge. A newsletter, outbound email, or occasional postcard about an issue or problem that is relevant to your customers needs, can give them a sense, over time, of your knowledge and additional products and services.

A more formal way to create an educated customer is through seminars. Having regular "updates" or inviting clients to presentations that you might be making at a conference or meeting, lets them know about your expertise and offerings. Even if they don't come, you can offer to send them the outline of the presentation and the materials you distributed.

And, it doesn't always have to be about your products and services. A friend of mine prides himself on knowing the best restaurants in town. When he finds a good one, he tells others. It's not just a matter of letting people know about a good place. It's a matter of "being in the know." His knowledge of new restaurants helps create the perception that he knows what others do not.

People like to be "insiders," with information that others don't have. When you can encourage the sense that the customer is part of a "special group" with first-hand experience with a product or service, there is a good chance that you can turn that customer into an evangelist. Customer evangelism is the process of creating customers who proactively refers business either through word of mouth or identification of new prospects. They continue to make their own contribution to revenue, by using your product or service. But, in addition, they exert energy on your behalf to generate new business.

Conclusion
So, try some L.O.V.E. with your customers and have a Happy Valentine's Day.

For more information on how to love your customers, contact Droz at 412.338.1818, or ddroz@droz.com.