My friend Cathy is going to spend Wednesday evening sitting behind the one-way glass eating mediocre Thai food and listening to her business customers say the same things they were saying last year and the year before. A week after that, she is heading off to a soul-sucking Holiday Inn meeting room to discuss the happiness (or lack of) among a group of IT managers who also use her product.
The last time I checked, a small but ambitious customer focus group series with analysis and lousy food was coming in at a minimum of $50, 000. Let me save you that princely sum and answer your three primary questions:
What your customers think:
- You suck and so do your competitors
- You make excuses
- You charge too much
- Your products were designed for someone else
- You don’t listen
- You don’t understand
- You don’t acknowledge the value of their business
What your customers want:
- A product or service that works all the time
- A product or service that makes them a corporate star
- A product or service in which they have a personal stake
- An apology
- A relationship
- Support, and not just when things go wrong
- Accountability (yours)
What you should do:
- Fix your product or service and don’t expect anything better until you have
- Invite your customers to help you fix it
- Deliver it flawlessly, all the time, in all circumstances, no excuses
- Give a shit, and don’t hire people who don’t
- Be better than everyone else
- Say please and thank you all the time
- Acknowledge the value of your customers’ business out loud in their presence; do this frequently
- Invest in your brand, not in your branding
When, and only when, you can honestly say you’ve done all this, you can go back out and ask your customers for an opinion. But if you’ve done all this, you really won’t need to ask.
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams,
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
Jane Oldaker says
Bizmarketer, fantastically well said. In fact, so succinct and comprehensive that you have gobsmacked me into silence.