Category: Customer Service

What Else Would They Buy?

I just got back from a guitar workshop led by Robin Nolan. Robin’s a terrific musician and a good teacher. But he missed a real opportunity at the workshop.

The 6-volume Robin Nolan Gypsy Jazz Songbook series is considered the “essential text” by students of the genre. Robin’s also written several other well-regarded guitar books. I own volumes 1-3, and brought cash to buy the rest of the set. But he didn’t have any of the books with him. So he lost about a hundred bucks in incremental revenue from me. Multiply that lost opportunity by the other dozen students in the class, and you’ll have an idea of how much he could have made if he’d brought books to sell with him.

A Customers in your store or on your web site may have come for a specific item. Some of them — not all, but a significant number — could be upsold into related items or services. Some examples:

On the web, Amazon always offers something extra under the heading “People who bought [your item] also bought…”.

When you buy a suit from Men’s Wearhouse, their salespeople always lay out a selection of shirts and ties that match the suit. Not everyone bites, but a lot of customers walk out of the store with an extra bag full of “stuff.”

What else would your customers buy — if only you made the offer?

Tips for Creating Loyalty

Although I subscribe to Business Week, I somehow missed this article on creating and maintaining loyal customers. The folks at Church of the Customer Blog caught it and provided the link.Their original post appears here.

To me, the most powerful tip had to do with some of the things we’re tempted to do in order to sneak a few extra profits:

Don’t treat your customers as if they were expendable. Companies that break the Golden Rule by misleading, coercing, and disrespecting their customers effectively turn them into detractors. Examples in today’s world are countless, but they include nuisance fees and hidden charges, poor in-store service, and dreaded automated customer help lines. Such mistreatment causes customers to switch to competitors, cut back on their purchases, and, worst of all, warn others to stay away from the company.

My favorite recent example was the “spa use fee” that two different Scottdsale hotels saw fit to add to my bill at a conference. $15 a night in one, $13 a night in the other. In their “defense”, it was in the fine print in my reservation after I booked it. But geez, guys, if you’d told me it was $154 a night I would have paid without complaint. Telling me it’s $139 and then sticking me is dirty pool.

Do We Really Give Good Service?

Today, Seth Godin tackles the issue of customer service. It’s his position that most of of us have given great service, and that’s why we’re so upset at bad service.

I’m not convinced. I think most of us think we do, but we’re kidding ourselves. We talk a good game, with mission statements, memos from the CEO, and the like. But many corporate mantras are accompanied, out of the public eye, with orders to cut expenses. So head count gets slashed, and training gets eliminated, and we’re left with an overwhelmed, poorly trained, unmotivated front line.

And then the marketing department tells the ad guy that “our people make the difference.”