Page 59 - Print21 March-April 2022

Marketing
Start the year by
listening to your clients
Marketing guru Malcolm Auld says understanding your customers’ needs is crucial if you want to keep
client. And the client was also less likely to argue about price due to the high-quality service.
Interestingly, with the move to replace humans with computers
and frustrating DIY websites where you cannot contact a human, good manners are rare – and extremely appreciated when provided. How can you improve your client relationships simply by improving your manners?
You can learn a lot about your industry and individual clients by talking with front-line staff, sitting in call centres and analysing search terms and social media. In the early days of the interweb, a recruitment company in the US realised through website analytics that most people were looking for jobs during the boss’s time, rather than after hours. Quite rightly, they had expected it to be the opposite.
To help potential candidates feel more comfortable searching on the boss’s time, they devised a button on their website they called “The Boss Button”. If you clicked on it, a spreadsheet automatically appeared on the screen. This was excellent customer service, as anyone looking for a job on the boss’s time, could quickly change their screen to a spreadsheet if their boss approached their desk.
“One thing you know about your client is worth more than anything you know about your product or service.”
So, why not start 2022 by finding out what your clients want this year? Not just from you, but for other parts of their business. Who knows how you might be able to help them working with your industry partners if you don’t have the resources?
Don’t be shy about asking – explain you want to work with them to ensure a jointly successful year. And listen with big ears – because you may hear that one thing that changes the way you do business together, for the benefit of both you and your client. 21
Ithem, and grow them.
suspect there is hardly a business owner who isn’t wishing 2022 is better than 2021. So, in the tradition of New Year resolutions, why not
start this year by committing to doing things a little differently? Before doing any marketing
activity, make time to have an in- depth conversation with your clients. You can meet with them personally or if unable to meet, send a survey
by email. The reason is simple, and you’ve heard me say it before:
“One thing you know about your client is worth more than anything you know about your product or service.”
You’ll be surprised what you can learn from a conversation with your clients. Here is an example from
a marketing training course I ran about a decade ago. I was training some small businesses in regional Queensland. As part of the exercise to develop a marketing plan, the delegates interviewed their clients for feedback on their business relationship, and to learn what these clients wanted.
The customer service
that wasn’t
One of the delegates was surprised to learn his clients thought his customer service was excellent. Now you may think this is a good thing. But the delegate hadn’t a clue what the clients were talking about, as he didn’t have any specific customer service staff. He had to ask the clients to explain the alleged service.
Apparently, his business received lots of orders by fax (please, we will not judge outback Queensland based on technology usage). The fax was still a popular method of ordering in many small businesses. Law firms still use faxes two decades into the 21st century.
The business owner discovered that whenever clients faxed an
order, his very polite receptionist would ring the client and confirm she had received the order. She then established an agreed delivery time. To her it was just good manners to call and confirm a client’s order had been received. The clients loved this service, as they were never sure if the fax was received at the other end of the high-pitched squeal.
I suspect if you provide online
or email order services and don’t provide confirmation emails or delivery tracking functionality, your clients also wonder if their orders have been received.
Under-promise and
over-deliver
Now if you know the term ‘under- promise and over-deliver’, you’ll know its benefits. So, I recommended to the delegate that he train his receptionist to continue to confirm receipt of all orders, but to also agree a delivery time that was just a few days later than his company
could deliver.
This allowed the company to
deliver the order earlier than the agreed date, and so create a happy
Above
Listening: key to growing customers
Print21 MARCH/APRIL 2022 59