Retention, referrals or acquisition? Which is most important to you?

When it comes to you and your clients/customers/patients, do you spend more $, time and energy on retention, on getting referrals or on acquiring new?

Which should you be concentrating on?
I have seen through practice that retention is cheaper, and has a bigger payoff, than the other two! Hence, I recommend YOU start there and stay there. When resources for a referral plan exists in ADDITION to the plan for retention, THEN and only then should that take resources from the business for referrals. Lastly, the attention/resources should be brought to acquisition of NEW clients/customers/patients.

What do you think?

What could you do to make what you do in all three arenas better?

C

Contest to WIN Tony Hsieh’s Book – Delivering Happiness, before it is even released!!!!!!

Delivering Happiness and the Zappos mentality that I SO adore, is all about delivering happiness to customers, employees and the world!

Obsessed with the subject of Customer Loyalty?

Read Daniel Pink’s book Drive?

Love the Zappos mentality?

I am pleased to announce that I am hosting a Book Club all about Culture Creation and Customer Loyalty AND I am having a contest. Enter to WIN a copy of Tony Hsieh’s book before it is even released!

Join the Book Club and be entered into a drawing to win a free copy of Tony’s book! ONE will be given out each week for the next three weeks!

To join, either place a comment here and tell me your #1 struggle/question with creating your company’s culture OR join my LinedIn group called Zappos Insights Mastermind Group OR re-tweet my tweet about this on twitter! My twitter name: christiescott1

Look forward to brainstorming with you on our Book Club calls!

C

Seth Godin’s TWO approaches to How to Respond to the “Bad Economy”

So, the economy has affected us all. Many companies are looking to cut expenses, payroll, budgets, everything and anything that will lessen the outflow to attempt to balance the lack of inflow!

BUT, is this a SMART business strategy? Well, if you would like even less customers, revenues, clients, then yes.

If you want to grow your business, NO.

Seth Godin illustrates this well today:

One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That’s actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.

No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings… what’s the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.

Of course, there’s a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least.

Radically overdeliver.

Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.

So, how should you respond, as the business leader? How can you overdeliver? How can impress the socks off of your current clients, customers, patients?

What will that create in referrals, word-of-mouth, and media attention? Whether in your marketing videos, on twitter, facebook, face-to-face with your clients/customers/patients, how will that change the interaction and the reaction and the after affect?

Look at Tom’s Shoes or other companies who seem to just give, give, give! Do they suffer financially? Absolutely not!

So, whatcha gonna do about it?

C

www.christiescott.com

One Email and You Lose a Customer/Client for Life!

Ah, yet again, this one comes to bite someone in the butt! I have seen it before, I will see it again. It seems so simple a fix to me, yet, so many do not enforce this and they pay the nearly Ultimate Price – Lose the client, tarnish their reputation, risk public embarrassment.

NO AMOUNT OF social media marketing, book writing, PR, or business education can stand up to this problem.

Today, I received an email that tore up my belief in the company with whom I had previously purchased from. I can guarantee, I will not buy from them again! Why? They showed me how unethical they are, without trying. How? I don’t want to defame the company but…

Let me tell you a similar story! Imagine a customer service rep receives an email from a customer, the email has a complaint in it. The rep does not know how to reply, hence he forwards the email to his superior. The superior reviews the complaint and writes a reply to the rep for him to use in communications with the customer. He also directs the rep of what NOT to do in the email, i.e. do not tell the customer what REALLY happened, give the customer this excuse. Communications may have involved others in the company, there were 3-5 forwards to get opinions of how to handle the situation, referring to the customer as “hard to please”, “waste of time” and a “pain in the butt”. Eventually, the rep gets the response back and clicks to send the customer an email in response, but he doesn’t start a new email, he simply clicks forward and writes his reply.

This SHOULD send off alarm bells for you, the owner of your company, you should see the failure here.

If not, let me spell it out to you.

The customer receives the email response and scrolls through the email, seeing all of the internal communications between different people in the company. He reads that the customer service rep is to withhold information from him, to make up an excuse, and quickly gets infuriated at being lied to and called names, when all he wanted was SERVICE!!!

There are MANY mistakes here, you should have a policy that no one call customers names in any communication type, I agree. But, many things that are internal that NEED to be communicated should not be seen by customers. HENCE, the answer here, my friend, is DO NOT FORWARD EMAILS! I have a policy with companies I work with – NO FORWARDING EMAILS. If you want someone to see or understand a communication, IF they are your superior, under SOME circumstances this may be neccessary, but even then, I would be skeptical. If you forward emails, forgetting that some email strings are quite long, there is much to be forgotten in them, you will forward something and incriminate someone soon enough.

So, you should implement a policy of NO forwarding of emails, unless the string is only one email long and you are forwarding internally.

You need to address this, I want to hear about it!

Hey, I would love to hear your horror stories about the WORST thing that has happened when an email was forwarded. Worst story I receive will get a FREE PRIZE! Make a new policy and enforce it, you get a different type of prize altogether

Get to it,

C

www.christiescott.com

Best Customer Service = Billion Dollar Success? LL Bean, Zappos, Amazon, Overstock…

LL Bean wins the annual Retail Customer Service Awards again!

But, surprise, Overstock.com wins second, over Zappos, the famed Customer Service company. I personally love Overstock too, must be for a reason right?

Here is the complete list:

1. LL Bean
2. Overstock
3. Zappos
4. Amazon.com
5. Lands’ End
6. Newegg
7. JC Penney
8. QVC
9. Coldwater Creek
10. Nordstrom

What can you learn from these TOP retailers?

How can you mimic their customer service, as this is definitely something you will strive to do as Zappos hit 1 Billion in sales in the middle of an “economic crises” and retailers are sufferng top to bottom!

They make the process easy, they make returns easy, whether you want to instant chat or call them, they are available, the websites are very easy to maneuver… need I go on?

How do you measure up? In retail, the gap between the suffering stores and the thriving stores is CUSTOMER SERVICE!

How do these sotres achieve these levels of Customer Service?

Policies

Procedures

Training

Support to their employees

Connection

Look at each of these areas, score your company 1-10 on how well you are doing, make a multi-phased plan for improvement, and get to work. Make hay while the sun shines, or pay the ultimate retail price: store closing and possibly bankruptcy.

If you are not in retail, you still MUST take note of this. If you don’t give good customer service, you may lose customers or clients FOREVER! AT&T will never get me or many other consumers back because of horrid customer service. I now have an aversion to my satalitte provider Direct TV, can’t wait to get out of contract. Contrasty, I love my cell company, I have been with them since 1999!!!! And I purchase many things from online companies that I am loyal too.

Do ruin the opportunity you have. Get it together, we aren’t willing to overlook this bad customer service anymore, unless you are Wal-Mart (why they can get away with is beyond me!).

(Oh, this blog post has taken a woeful turn… maybe that’s what you need to shake you out of the stuper keeping you where you are. You can do better than this. Get to it.)

My absolute best,

C

www.christiescott.com

See the article about the Retail Awards here: http://tinyurl.com/retailawards

TOP TWO Trends in Marketing and Branding!!! Are you WITH it?

WE ARE THE INSTANT GRATIFICATION NATION! THIS IS one of the most important things to remember about branding, marketing, and the delivery of every portion of the sale.

The SECOND most important trend, I believe, is CUSTOMIZATION!

Have you noticed how EVERYTHING is now CUSTOMIZABLE? You can get a customized ANYthing just like you always could, but now, it is to an all new level and at new actually affordable pricing! We don’t want the same ANYthing as ANYONE else! We want to express ourselves, we want to be unique, we want to stand out!

Products and companies that have responded to these needs:

You can buy a deck of playing cards with a different photo on each one!

You can get a different photo and words on every one of your business cards in a pack, rather than having 500 or so, of the SAME old, same old.

You can print “one off” or print on demand books, T-shirts or coffee mugs, not have to buy 12 or more of them.

You can get different initials, words or even photos on M & M candies.

You can put your logo on a plant seed and grow the plant to see the logo on the leaves of the plant!

You can NOW even customize your marketing. This is done with emails and even postcards, where each one has the recipients name on it in the photo or graphic.Going further, you can send the postcard with a customized website with the recipients name in the url!

How much further can this go? Nobody knows, but for now, have fun with it! Over the holidays I saw the office supply company that had a simple way for you to put your photo on a cartoon elf that danced and sang in a video before your eyes.

At Disney they do some similar things on rides and with different activities at their parks as you would expect. But, now they have even gotten on the customized email marketing train. I got an email from them and it talked about their newest marketing “ploy”, oh, did I write that outloud! I mean their newest philanthropic venture

Give a Day, Get a Disney Day

The email had a link at the bottom that said The Muppets have already included you in the volunteer fun. Click to see!

Go on, check it out. Look at how they customized, not only the words on the “newspaper” but also the Muppets actually say my name too!

SOOOO, how can you use this? How can you make people smile? Entertain them? Surprise them? Show them that you care? Get them to feel famous?

My best,

C

www.christiescott.com

How to get Social Media Marketing to actually WORK!!!! Make money with social media, humph, how novel a concept!

(hee hee. I think I like to push the envelope of how long a title can be.

Alright, so you want me to tell you how it is really done, right? How to make BIG things happen with social media, how to create amazing buzz around your product or business for FREEEEEE on facebook or twitter…

(One caveat here: Learn from the pros, but don’t copy per say. Think outside  their box. Make it your own.)

CONTESTS!!!! I saw a trend a few weeks ago and began tweeting and blogging about it. Companies are using contests of all types to get people to retweet their promotions. WE are promoting them for FREE, because we want to WIN BIG. Or small in the case of Whole Foods, they offered free cookies for one winner, but they did this every day for a period of time. It was very successful!

Then, I see five other companies in one day offering contests too!

IKEA does it and does it well! They create a Facebook profile for a store manager, then load the account with gorgeous pictures of products, portrayed showroom-style. The first user who tagged his or her name on a product won it!

As you know, when a user is tagged on a photo in your Facebook account, that photo automatically appears in your newsfeeds of your network. The users who missed out demanded more pictures of course (I found out about it after the dust settled or I would have been one of them!). The efforts raised a very passionate interest in the campaign, the product and the brand.

SOOOOOOO, IKEA got truckloads of brand exposure with very little investment of the big three (time, energy and money). All of this simply for an the investment of a few thousand dollars’ worth of furniture. For the result, quite a ROI, don’t you think?

How can YOU profit from this? Give away furniture? NO. Have a contest? Maybe, but not necessarily.Think outside of the box of what has been done. Get a little crazy. Forget about the status quo, it no longer fits today’s markets. Ikea is a brick and mortar and a catalog company first. Then, it became a website too. Don’t box your company in to how it delivers, instead maximize your reach and expand your impact to your buyers, are they online? Then, GO GET THEM! GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT (or at least some of them).

Challenge your team to come up with out of the box, over the edge, insanely different ways of getting people to talk about your company/product!

I want to hear about it… you know!

C

www.christiescott.com

Do you WOW your clients? Customers? Patients?

Books have been written about it, businesses have been built on it, how are measuring up?
Zappos, Disney, Southwest Airlines all do it and do it well. In fact, the company oozes these standards in everything they do.
Are you saying, “But, it takes so much time”, or “My company is much smaller than that”, or “It’s too expensive”?????
I can make it easier, faster and cheaper to do wow them this season: (And with the link below, you will save $2 OFF your orders!)

YOUR DISCOUNT WILL SHOW UP WHEN YOU ARE AT THE CHECKOUT!

My best,
Christie Scott
“When Average is JUST NOT Enough”
www.christiescott.com