How To Lose a Customer in 3 Easy Steps

In the past 48 hours, a long time service provider to our company, lost our business. You too can easily shed customers if you follow their example.

1. Make it difficult for your customers to interact with you. Last week I spent 15 minutes navigating voicemail, automated attendants and then a "generic call center person" who wouldn't even give me the name of the salesperson I needed to speak to. Their response? "A salesperson will get back to you within the next 2 business days." Not good enough. Not in these economic times. Force customers to do business the way YOU want to, at your own peril.

2. Take your customers for granted. This whole saga began, because we happened to notice the amount of money we were spending to rent some equipment (a time clock). The payroll service had been in place for a decade (and was working acceptably) and so no one bothered to determine whether the service was still price competitive. Like many service providers, the pricing inched up year over year - not by a big enough margin to raise any flags, but over a decade, the pricing became significant. Because I could not get an answer to a very simple question about the pricing for the time clock (see #1 above) we began examining the pricing of the payroll service itself.

3. Ignore your competition. No one at our office can remember the last time anyone from the payroll service provider has ever contacted us. Their business model is geared toward a successful initial setup, then milking the processing fees until the customer wakes up and leaves. They count on the fact that their customers will be lulled into a state of apathy....until they aren't.

My call to a competitive payroll service was returned within 20 minutes. I had a quote on my desk within 90 minutes. Potential annual savings for the identical range of services was 5 figures.

A 10 year customer gone... in 90 minutes.

You too can achieve these amazing results by following these three easy steps!

Building Customer Communities

Last week, I attended a three hour presentation on SharePoint functionality. it was sponsored by a local I.T. consulting company.

SharePoint, for those of you who don't know, is a Microsoft application platform that enables companies to easily communicate, collaborate, share documents and can act as a portal for basic information workflow. SharePoint, used well, helps companies share knowledge and execute better.

For several weeks prior to the seminar, the sales team were beating the bushes, trying to attract local companies to sign up - to invest a morning listening to their internal expert share knowledge about how SharePoint works.

For the most part, I enjoyed the presentation, but afterwards sent a note to my rep with some suggestions because it seemed ironic that a company purporting to be SharePoint experts weren't using their platform to share knowledge and build a community of potential customers!

The approach might have been - now that you have SharePoint, let us show you how to get your company to use it well and how to build a collaborative culture within your company. Instead, they invited a room full of geeks to show them features and functionality of the software, in the hopes that somewhere down the road, we might need some development help.

Why not help the geeks sell the idea of collaboration within their own companies and then drive consulting from the dozens of business people who want to collaborate more effectively or work more efficiently?

Why not build a community of people who want to collaborate by developing and hostin an attractive and useful SharePoint Community site to foster enthusiasm, share stories, share knowledge and attract potential customers from the millions of people who were not at the seminar?

My advice to our hosts? Stop the local lecturing and start building a global community! Find ways to help the geeks evangelize. Make it easy for their end users to quickly gather confidence in using the tools. Once end user creativity is unleashed, the development consulting opportunities will abound.