Do you know what your customers want? Ask them! Some of the most successful companies in the world are that way for one reason and one reason only, they know their customers and knew what they wanted. Amazon was started because one guy, Jeff Bezos, knew that people wanted an easy way to order books online. Now he's one of the richest man in America and trust me, he knows his customers. A similar story happened at eBay. The online auction Web site was founded in San Jose, California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar. Pierre knew there was a great opportunity to sell things online and pursued his mission.
The topic for my blog today is that companies that know their customers are very successful. And how can you know your customers? Here are a few ideas:
1. Meet them in person. Go to conferences, user groups, customers sites, anything to get to know them and to truly understand what they want and need
2. Customer surveys - Ah the golden egg of customer knowledge. Companies who do customer surveys and do them well are very successful.
3. Customer communication. Talk to your customers and more importantly, listen. It's a two way street. You have needs, they have needs and hopefully you can produce a win-win situation
I want to share a quick story on one company's success in the area of communication. About a month or so ago, I got an email from Netflix, I think from the president. In the email he apologized for an error they had been having, offered up a solution and offered up a partial refund for the month. Wow, was I impressed. Honestly I hadn't even known there was a problem going on but this company is so awesome that they proactively reached out to customers to apologize AND to make things better. Here's their message that they not only emailed to customers but posted on their website
IMPORTANT: Your DVD shipments might be delayed… We're sorry to report that we've been experiencing issues with our shipping system, so some of you are not receiving DVDs in a timely manner and some of you have not received emails letting you know we got a DVD back from you.
We apologize and we'll be automatically issuing credits to all of you whose shipments have been delayed. Our goal is to ship DVDs as soon as possible and to provide a personalized email update to you if your DVD shipment was delayed.
We're sorry for any inconvenience we've caused you and thank you for your patience.
The Netflix Team
I was already a very happy customer but now I am a customer for life with this one email they sent! GO NETFLIX! And go great management at company's who value customers!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment