Killing Customers
June 12th, 2014 // 12:50 pm @ Scott Manning
Last week I shared my personal experience and life phenomenon about getting married. I received so many well wishes, congratulations, and endless notes of praise, advice, and everything in between. I am forever grateful for this and for each of you. Now that things are calming down…haha, since you know me, you realize what a joke that is, there’s a lot of peace but not much calm going on, busy busy busy. I will take time to thank each of you personally, I am honored by our friendship and your care over me and my life.
This week I wanted to share with you some of the literal terrible experience it is dealing with anything related to the Wedding Industry.
It is the ultimate anything-but-customer-centric industry there is, with the only one trumping it being the airlines and airports.
It is an interesting concept however and there is much to be learned through this industry despite it’s complete lack of regard for giving the customer an amazing experience. For us, everything did work out beautifully of course that was with my micro management and control over the process despite having a ton of support, vendors, and other experts involved.
We made great friends and had exceptional wedding planners, however there were still unexpected things.
Mostly nothing is as it seems and that includes budgets, quotes, prices etc.
I told each of them had they just notified me in advance that it’s actually going to cost 30% more I’d have happily paid it to just remove all the last minute BS and other time wasting coordination that was dropped as the last impending week culminated.
For your benefit, today, right now, I want you to ask yourself
“What is it like buying from me?”
“What do my customers really think about this experience?”
“Am I making it more than a transaction?”
“What am I doing differently than others in my industry or that my customers interact with?”
I talk and teach about “obvious differentiation” in that it only matters what is known to your customer – NOT – what you say about your business or your experience or anything else that YOU say, only what you Customer actually experience and can say about you.
This is worth all of your consideration and thought.
Where do you go wrong?
Where is there room for improvement?
Where might the customer bail out, change their mind, have room for error?
One of my big money breakthroughs that I teach is the concept of CONTROL.
Control over the customer expectations.
Control over the process.
Control over the outcome.
Pretty much the more control the more profit and opportunity. If you do it right, the more control over the customer’s satisfaction, transaction size, referrals, etc.
I really challenge you to assess your business.
You are losing money through opportunities where you could “wow” your customer, through them feeling and thinking and experiencing things that you do not realize.
This is why I suggest surveying your customers routinely and at least one a year taking a check up over your customers and prospects through an elaborate campaign.
My desire to promote and refer other people to have elaborate beach weddings and spend money with vendors is very soured after my experience. I learned things, I would advise people accordingly, but it wouldn’t be in the vendors’ best interest for me to be sharing my “feelings” with them.
That is the case in most of our businesses.
We leave way too much up to the Customer…
My friend and mentor Bill Glazer used to talk about the sales prevention department, I call it killing customers. We all do it. The key is to be proactive and always try to improve.
There is a fine line between making the business “your way” and designing it to serve your purposes and going over board to forgetting the main point is to maximize profit AND SERVE the customer. Creating an extraordinary experience which is what’s best for everyone involved.
Taking action on this is one of the highest and best uses of your time. It is making you more profitable. And all the marketing in the world won’t help make you more money with an inconsistent or inept or dysfunctional customer experience.
How can you avoid Killing Customers in your business?
What’s your list and what you are doing about it?
More next week…
Category : Blog
