One thing that I have learnt in nearly 30 years in business is that you have to look after your customers because if you don’t somebody else will!  In the ever-automated world that we live in, larger businesses have rightly used technology to help them provide their products and services to their markets, quicker and with fewer mistakes and at lower cost to them and their customers.

BUT…

Oh yes there is a but, in recent times I have seen technology being put in charge of managing the client relationship more and more and let’s be honest in most customer situations it plain doesn’t work.  We will all have stories of getting stuck in a virtual circle in some large corporate companies phone system only to be back at square one 15 minutes later despite being told “Please continue to hold your call is important to us”!

A slick technology based customer facing system can work for some of the “New World” businesses, Amazon is a great example of this, great customer delivery system backed up by an astonishing personal marketing strategy that sells you stuff you never knew you wanted!

I sometimes feel that businesses of all sizes lose sight of what is important to their customers, conversations tend to exist on a transactional level and little or no time is spent these days on understanding customers and where their business is going.  As face to face account management has become less common being replaced by more remote forms of customer care can we still maintain that all important relationships with customers?

There is no doubt the Internet is a powerful market but if your model is more traditional how do you best serve your customers?

• Make your best customer feel special, if you have a new product or fresh service offering make them feel special by offering it to them first and ask them what they think and how you can improve your service.

• Have a regular opportunities to call or visit clients, in sales a “Reason to call” is one of the most powerful marketing tools, bring your customers into your business introduce your key staff it all helps to strengthen the business-to-business relationship.

• Make sure you have a process for dealing with a customer complaints, take them seriously after all is often said that the very best customers to have are the ones who forgive you when you make mistakes!

The reality is none of us own our customers but we do share them with other suppliers.  The real challenge is to make the service we offer stand out.  Make them feel special, help them out when they are stuck and most importantly value their custom!  Use technology to serve your customers but be careful not to replace the all-important personal touch.

About the Writer

Clive Mulligan is the Principal of Simply Consulting, a Sales & Marketing Development Consultancy focused on helping small and medium sized businesses grow their businesses by developing a strong sales & Marketing Strategy.

A Sales Professional since 1984 Clive has been described by colleagues, business partners and colleagues as being “Challenging and Supportive”, being a “Knowledgeable professional and a pleasure to work with” and as having “wealth of business development experience across a number of sectors”, Clive harnesses this experience to work with forward thinking business owners to help them realize their full business potential.

For Further information please visit the website at www.simply-consultancy.co.uk or to contact Clive at clive.mulligan@simply-consultancy.co.uk or call 01923 831 725

Stop asking me….

So you’re in Smith’s and you are just about to pay when the assistant asks,”would you like some chocolate,it’s on special offer,two for the price of one?”

Or you are paying for your petrol and as you pay a never to be missed offer is up sold to you, Red Bull, three cans for the price of two…

It happens all the time and it’s about time customers complained and put a stop to this as it damages customer relations and staff morale which will lead to them not being as attentive as they could be.

Customer relations get damaged because you just want to pay and go.If you wanted to drown in Red Bull you would have asked for three cans.If you wanted to test the pricing structure of your dentists practice you would have demanded two bars of the biggest slabs of enamel corrosive known to man. What about that giant bar of Toblerone? Yes please,seven…

Customers do not want to have to feel as if they are on University Challenge when all they are trying to do is pay some money which will help with profits and supposedly help pay for improvements in the customer experience.

Staff morale suffers because they are made to ask the same inane question to every customer,they have no choice.It must destroy their morale,it takes the spontinaeety out of engaging with customers.There can be no special customer touch point here because all experiences are reduced to a common denominator, sales over kill.

Staff are doubtless driven by area managers who are themselves goaded by head office to improve sales of target items.There is probably some tedious sales competion that staff are supposed to be so excited about that they relish asking their question a thousand times a day.

No one wins in this up selling over selling excercise apart from some short term improvement in sales margins.Customers and staff might just not want to play anymore and shop and work at places where a Thank you may just be enough at the till.

Tel-E-Market to stay ahead

What does it cost to run a good Tel-E-Market campaign? A modest amount that is a brilliant return on investment.

What does it cost not to run a Tel-E-Market campaign?

You could be costing yourself valuable clients and intelligence by not keeping up some regular customer and market place research.

Non Tel-E-Market use could effectively contribute to some of this happening to your company -

• Loss of valuable customers who haven’t been able to contact you to talk about their relationship.They will go to someone who wants to listen and find out – your competitors
• Not being able to regain lost or lapsed customers because you are not making customer research a priority.Without doubt a lost or lapsed customer has gone because of something that can be sorted out with ease
• Missing out on opportunities by not investigating your competition
• Never being aware of  new services that your customers,current and lapsed,would like to see you offer them

Most companies profess to having a strong and proactive Tel-E-Market system in place already with no need to outsource a “house keeping” function.

To those that do,well done, to those that don’t call or email Customeyes and find out how much business you could stop missing out on by using our Tel-E-Market services

Big day for England as they take to the pitch,vital that they do convert the expectation into action and a good result.

They really are taking to a field of dreams.Dreams of another world cup glory and to give us something to cheer about.

This made me think of the film,Field of Dreams, and the  line in it “Build it and they will come”which many companies have followed to the letter when they have put up their web sites.

The expectation is that huge visitor numbers will descend on the site, by the end of the first week orders will be stacked to the roof,by the following week you are looking at retiring…would be nice but not realistic.

Build it and they might come…

PPC,Pay Per Click, is a powerful tool that helps you to get the numbers visiting your site.It’s a delicate process of key word management,timing and an understanding of how Google works.

We believe that Google is not enough to get you business, your web site is but one part of the marketing mix needed to be used in business development.

Customeyes have PPC which to us means Phoning Prospects & Customers.It works as well.

We are surrounded by references to Social Media, what’s Sociable about it? Very little as we seem to have lost the desire to talk with prospects and customers.Most communication is by in Twitter,Facebook,Linkedin and email.

People buy from people not from keyboards…

If companies picked up the phone and actually had a conversation with a prospect or customer then far more business would be done with less reliance on the web delivering the goods.What happens when your web site is down? Do you close down for the day? Do you wait for it to be back up and hope that a prospect has found you and then has decided to call you? What happens if prospects don’t ever find you on the web?

Customeyes can help you to Tel-E-Market and get results from our version of PPC.

How can we help with Business Development?

• We can use the telephone as an effective tool to research and discover what prospects and customers want from you company
• Help with appointment setting
• Clean up old databases making sure that prospect and customer details are up to date -are you still sending Christmas cards of Christmas emails to people and companies who no longer exist?
• Use Web based surveys(we have our own web based survey tool)to learn more about what customers and competitors think
• Integrate and don’t Separate – Link the phone,web and Social Media to bring you a wider trawl of responses from research

So why do any or some of the above?

It may succeed in doing the following for a start -

• Get you some new customers
• Prevent customer churn and defection to companies that do phone and ask if all is OK
• Introduce customers to services you offer that they didn’t know about
• Win back lost customers – why did they leave you?
• Find out what your competition is up to
• Highlight possible New Product or Service areas
• Get some good PR material for future marketing

Sounds like some good reasons to consider getting in touch with Customeyes Research

It’s easy to Tel-E-Market effectively, its about not getting confused over when to use which variant of PPC – both get results.

Why not give us a call and we can explain how we can help in more detail.Email if you’d rather and we will call you and gladly explain how Customeyes PPC can help you.

Winston Churchill once said,”the future is one damn thing after another”

How seriously true and how easy is it to forget?

We spend our time trying to catch up on new trends, we have just got the hang of one thing and, zoom,there’s a new gadget that links your Twitter with your Linkedin and sends messages to everyone who has a vowel in their first name…Its makes for a long day when you are trying to master all this technology.

Technology gets smarter than the speed at which most of us can keep up, we get information richer and time poorer by the end of every week.By the time that I’ve mastered one thing to improve my Google rankings along comes some thing else that knocks me back down.

I am a bit swamped by all this techo lingo and just wonder how savvy we all really are..most companies I know all have a social networking presence and some to be honest over play that presence.How many Tweets do we need to tweet to let our followers know that we need x amount more votes? Do we need to let the world know that we are running a 20% off end of holiday discount club?

It’s all about rankings and footprint and about getting the right people to get to your site and all the rest but we fail if we do not use the technology that we have to find out if technology is actually working for us. Not sure I’ve ever been asked what I think of these various platforms?I’m sure that over use is killing the essence of what is trying to be achieved.

If we are trying to drive contacts to our various sites so that we gain business then it seems that we are having to try harder all the time.The competition for attention is just massive and it gets harder to stand out from the crowd.We are not getting on with delivering what we are constantly letting the world know that we are doing..

Rather than tell people that I can do X,Y or Z, I’ve hit on a revolutionary new approach…I’m going to ask people what they want and then give them it. I see this as a very effective plan for the future, one huge crowd will be muffled by their own noise broadcasting a multitude of services and I’ll be a lone voice simply asking,“what can I do to help to your company”..

Will it work? Who knows but at least I wont have to work out what the next Twitter twist does to my Facebook profile..

Customeyes and their customers..

We do practice what we preach and on a regular basis we make sure that we find out what are clients really think about us.

The feed back is always illuminating and often not for the right reasons.Having said that we have never lost a client because we have let them down it’s always for a reason beyond anyones control.

Clients have come to expect that we can provide results and that we can  translate research findings into good business direction. To help this we use our own simple metric to group customers into easily understood categories. These are by no means hard and fast and are designed to offer broad guidelines on what type of customers our clients have nad hence inform resource allocation.

These categories areas follows and are designed to illustrate the customers desire to help you achieve more success.

Generators representing the ideal.They are brand,company evangelists and are your flag wavers.

They outspend other customers, are more likely to try new product offerings and of most importance they promote your brand.The oft quoted research that says it costs more to recruit new customers than hang on to existing ones is the reason why this group is so central to success.

Resistors, the bunch of customers that you don’t want to waste marketing budgets on..

They may well switch their allegiance to another company becoming someone else’s problem.They generally are a problem in so much as they are more at loggerheads with your efforts than in line with them.As a group they spend money with you but they take out of the company at the same time. They command a higher proportion of your resources to keep them happy and its a resource that could be directed towards Generators and Acceptors.

The issue is that whilst still complaining as your customer they are not only draining your resources in having to deal with them, staff time etc, they are a negative PR campaign that is impossible to control.  Should there be a few of these campaigns going on at the same time then reputation and standing in the market can take a potential knock.

What of the middle ground, the Acceptors? These are the customers that have mixed experiences and the ones that haven’t quite decided where they should put their cross. These are the very customers that every business should be attending to so that they are gently pointed towards the Generators and become your Brand Evangelists.

So what does our feed back tell us?

To be honest we have our fair share of all the above with a couple of Resistors in there as well….

Our Generators do just that, they promote our services to others where possible.

The Acceptors are to be honest moving towards being Generators but they ain’t there yet…

What did surprise us is that some of our lapsed( we don’t call them lost,there’s always hope…)customers turn out to be Generators…How can that be I hear you ask?

Market circumstances have meant that a couple of clients are standing back from undertaking any new market research but will return to it early next year. Despite the fact that they are lapsed clients they are still actively referring our services to other companies.We have had some very promising conversations with contacts they have supplied.

That is the crux of this – lapsed clients are a source of potential business as they still hold your company in high regard. They will continue to promote your services and should be contacted on a regular basis.

“Listen to your Customers before someone else does” is something that we are passionate about, it forms the basis of what we do. We provide a cost-effective research service that enable clients to do exactly that.

Business is about customers, getting them and then building profitable relationships with them. These customers could be from your competition so it is essential to listen to all customers, yours and rivals.

Intelligent business decisions should be based on sound business intelligence – your own customers and the feed back from your competitive environment. The current economic climate makes it even more important to keep getting feed back on how your brand is performing. Every business is a brand and every brand has to stay in tip-top condition to be able to respond to changing market conditions. By gathering feedback from your existing customers and from your competitive set you are giving your brand an effective market place work out.

Every New Year brings personal resolutions to get fit, stay in shape and improve overall health. Make 2010 the year that this is extended to your business as well.

It is well established that the best sales force is always going to be your current customers who, in an ideal world, should be recommending your company to everyone they know. Too many customers defect to other suppliers because of perceived indifference to their needs.

How many times have you heard the phrase, “if only you’d asked me what was wrong” when it comes to hearing a customer moved their spending to one of your competitors? It seems strange that companies don’t find out why customers defect, especially when some of those customers may have been long term ones.

Questions=Answers=Relationships =Profit=more business = Profit

You could of course conduct that research yourself and get some good results. You might consider using the services of an independent, objective and experienced company that will be able to help build and carry out a cost-effective research framework.

The obvious benefits are that often customers feel that they should flatter by saying the right thing if approached directly by the client.Rarely is the real picture of a business relationship portrayed and rarely will a customer even begin to suggest what could be changed or what improvements would have kept them spending with you.

Lost customers will often not even want to engage in a discussion as to why they left and you will never get the full picture of what factors contributed to the departure.A third party is often seen as independent are more likely to be given chapter and verse on what is good and bad.There is no embarrassment in telling the truth to third parties .Often a good chat leads to  suggestions of other services or products not previously considered that could be extremely profitable.

Competitive Framework

Customer Insight is important but only a part of what our Business Builder Service seeks to deliver.

Your competition is a vital source of market intelligence on where the market is and where it is going and more importantly where your company brand is sitting.

Customer feedback often informs the short-term, competitive  monitoring is the long view allowing you to plan and allocate resources to potential new sectors before they become established. A joint programme that looks at both current customers and the competitive framework lets you neatly cover both bases.

Business Builder is a cost-effective service that helps companies to make sure that their brand is in the best possible shape to trade profitably.

Business Builder makes sure that current customers, lost customers and customers from the competitive set are contacted giving you a comprehensive picture of your market place. Flexibility is the main point of this service, any, some or all of the competitive framework can be covered depending upon client needs.

Benefits of the service include -

• Prevent customer defection
• Regain business from Lost Customers
• Early warning mechanism so that issues don’t become problems
• Potential New Product or service intelligence
• Market environment assessment to make sure that you know what your competitors are doing and where the market might be heading.

Please contact us at info@customeyes-research.co.uk with any questions and to ask how we might be able to help your brand and company. We will be glad to talk with you about the particulars of the service.

Please call Angus Grady on 0845 688 5272.