Hearing Customers? Is That the same as listening?

An experience before Christmas made me think about how businesses communicate with their customers. In the usual mad rush to get all the present shopping done, I picked up a present for my son from one of the major electrical chains, one I had visited many times before and one I guess I had developed a degree of loyalty to. I had reason to raise a query via email with the head office, not to complain but to make, what I thought was a query worthy of their consideration.

Two "standard emails" later I had my answer, but I was left feeling that they had heard or listened to me as a customer. The net result being "I got the hump" and have moved my recent custom to a rival chain where I had a particularly good buying experience during the post Christmas sales. The whole process had been owned by them and my message seemed to get lost in it!

With modern methods of communication being so extensive and frequent there is a real challenge in delivering the important messages to prospective and current customers in a method They can digest and at a time when They have time to digest them in. Do we also consider or Ask them how they would like us communicate with them? Can we tailor the communication? Can we Personalise the offering and can we most importantly Deliver the offering in a way that is Right for the customer?

When I work with clients and prospects I am very conscious in being very clear on how I communicate with them, its frequency, timing and when I am most likely to get their attention and quite possibly a hearing! With social media gaining some pace and with self made video and audio communication becoming the new ways of making Impact statements with prospects and customers who knows what we might be offering five years from now! Anyone like to offer a guess? Is anyone going to Ask what customers want?

That being said, selling is a people business and we must all be aware of how our customers want to interact with us, for many "corporates" this is not something that they can easily assimilate. The pressures on achievement of volumes and profit targets mean they have to select one delivery route and "one sized fits all" product delivery and to some extent "blow the consequences"! Or at least thats how it feels as a customer! Losing sight of the customer can be a high risk strategy.

The moral of this piece? The retailer I have "walked away" from has already lost some £1000 of my custom is some three weeks. In the time I have been shopping at the chain, some 12 years, my best estimate is that I have spent around £10,000 on a complete menagerie of electrical goods, but more than that I have related this story to probably 25 people since and with the power of networking including this blog who knows how many people may hear of my "bad experience"? It's not me as a lost customer that is consequential, it is the loss of my network that might just be some much more significant!

In your business, make sure you develop raving fans, a small low cost high perception trade, can, not only keep a customer, increase their lifetime spend, but in time make them a raving fan of your business. This will do so much more than any advertising can ever do.

The lifetime Value of a customer is the amount they spend multiplied by the number of purchases over one year and then again, by the number of years you keep them as a customer. Work those numbers on your business and your key customers relatiosnhsips, it will prove to be a sobering thought! In a recent example with a restaurant client this amount to £1,000 per customer, better kept than lost I think you will agree.

Keeping an existing customer is Eight times cheaper than finding a new one, it is possible to double the profits in a business purely by keeping your existing customers, selling them more products, more often and winning some new customers in the process. Simple!

To your success! Have a good week.

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Does anything really change?

Well the festivities are now starting to be a fading memory and life starts to settle back to normal. A friend of mine told me in an email over the weekend that he was looking forward to "getting back into a routine". "Thats interesting" says I, "last week you were telling me about the new years resolutions you going to make and this week is back to the old routine". For a considerable number of us making resolutions rarely last beyond the end of the first week of January and for this very reason I stopped making changes to my life in January some years back apart from paying so scant attention to lowering the calorie count, once the new year arrived.

For most small businesses change has to be a way of life, not a time of year thing, or a nice to have thing, but a real thing, reacting to the market and your key customers is part and parcel of running a successful small business. I sometimes think that providing he most to your customers is anticipating the next big thing, like the killer pass that opens up the defence in sport or foreseeing a need before the customer does. Just imagine a business anticipating the current salt shortage and how they might have been able to have placed their customers at an advantage.

It not all about financial advantage, running a successful small business is all about delivering value to clients and customers, being there when you customers arrive at the point when they need you the most is going to deliver real value to your client. 2010 has had an unprecedented start lets hope its energies now focus on an unprecedented recovery.

Have a great week!

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