How to Get Customers - Simply

After recently describing how to lose a customer in 3 easy steps, here's a refreshing post from the guys at 37signals, about how simple attracting customers can be.

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!

Painfree Computing

Next week, I'm starting an internal I.T. program called Painfree Computing.

It's designed to eliminate some of the causes of end user frustration. This is going to be a long journey, but in the end I know it'll be worth it.

Our eventual goal is standardization, standardization, standardization. And to accomplish that, we're going to have a LOT of conversations with our user community before we reach the promised land.

But our team needs a mindset change as well. We don't always make things as easy as we could for our users. Too often, processes which should be improved, are ignored and evolve into a "us vs. them" or "they should have known better" discussion. Unfortunately that doesn't prevent the problem from re-occurring.

Out team spends a good portion of our day looking at other business processes like quoting, order entry, field service, testing etc and while that's all good, we sometimes fail to see that we have operational improvement opportunity in our OWN backyard.

Over time, we'll take a look at the entire computing process from the time our users show up in the morning and hit the on button, to logoff at night. We're going to look for ways that boot time can be reduced, all custom applications will automatically be updated to the latest version, software suites will all be patched to the same (current) level, systems will be backed up automatically to the network, remote access will look, act and feel the same as if our users were in the office.

I.T. processes, like Bug fixes will contain workflow to automatically notify us when new bugs are reported by our user community and auto notify our users when they are fixed.

Stuff will just work.

At least that's the plan!

Your Call is Being Monitored for Quality Assurance Purposes...

How often have you called a large service organization, only to be greeted by an automated system, which declares that your call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes, before connecting you to a real live human being?

I think it happens all the time.

I have a question.

If my call is being monitored for quality assurance, how come the service is so crappy?

I think that this recording must be a standard feature on big call center phone switches. You can turn it on and try to make believe you're serious about providing a great customer service experience.

Or you can actually provide the great customer service experience.

Your customers know the difference. Do you?

Because if you are really monitoring the calls, and reps aren't able to answer customer questions, you may be inadvertently saying "We're monitoring our customer service. And this is the best we can do".

So try turning off the feature. Sit beside your reps and coach them. Spend time with your new call center reps and demonstrate your company's service standards.

Set the bar high.

Sometimes using less technology yields better results.

My New Favorite Phrase

Brandon Schauer, an experience design director at Adaptive Path, writes about "The Long Wow".

Forget about traditional customer loyalty programs and concentrate on developing a series of Wow moments, driven by deep customer insight and empathetic product or service design.

"The Long Wow" is my favorite new phrase.

Who's Your Bubba?

A friend recommended a terrific book, called Designing the Obvious, by Robert Hoekman Jr. This book is all about designing web applications for ease of use.

One of the concepts Hoekman espouses, is to create a persona for each type of user - a brief description of a "typical" user of the application. You give your persona a name, a career and a business challenge he (or she) is struggling with (that you're trying to solve). You might even download a random photo from the web and give your persona a "face".

The exercise is indended to help you get inside the head of your customer. To change your perspective. To see things from your customer's point of view.

It reminded me of a road trip that our Marketing department took, several years ago, to a well known Direct Marketing company that specializes in outdoor recreation (hunting, fishing, camping and the like).

They told us the story of "Bubba".

"Bubba" was the name of their typical customer. They could describe what Bubba looked like, what Bubba liked to eat and what clothes he typically wore. They knew what truck (not car) he drove. They knew how much money he made and what he liked to do on his time off. No matter who we talked to, Bubba's description remained remarkably consistent.

And everything they did required Bubba's approval. If they wanted to add a new line of fishing lures, they needed Bubba's permission. If they wanted to expand their line of fishing boats, Bubba's truck needed to be able to tow them. Before deciding to expand their line of firearms, Bubba had to be able to afford them.

When their Marketing department held meetings, they typically reserved a chair for Bubba.

The concept might sound a little corny, but it worked. They never lost sight of the customer. And they were very successful with this technique.

How do you sustain customer focus? Does your company have a Bubba?