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This week’s customer service "Touchstone"
The key to developing and nurturing any relationship is ‘frequency of
interaction’. Sometimes as parents, we dupe ourselves into believing that
‘quality’ time is sufficient to overcome our lack of ‘quantity’ time
with our children. But in our heart of hearts, we know this not to be true.
The same goes for our relationships with our customers. We try and kid
ourselves that if we really look after our customers in the moment, then they
will continue to return again and again. The reality of modern business is
such that this may have happened once, but it no longer happens today.
Sustaining long-term relationships with your customers requires continual
monitoring and management. Hence the arrival of the term Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) into our business vocabulary.
CRM doesn’t happen by chance, it happens by design. And one of the key
components of CRM is the systematised process of regularly keeping in touch
with your customers.
I very much agree with Wendy Evans who in her book How to get new
Business in 90 days and keep it forever explains in great detail the ‘magic’
of keeping in touch with customers and potential customers at least every 90
days. For some reason, when customers don’t hear from you within 90 days of
last having contact with you, their loyalty seems to vanish into thin air and
they become receptive to propositions from your competitors.
The most ideal form of contact with your customers is face-to-face. This
can take the form of a prearranged appointment or a casual ‘drop by’ chat.
The next best contact is a telephone call. Telephone calls need to be as
informal as possible along the lines of a friend calling to ask ‘what’s
happening’?
Another way of keeping in touch with your customers is to periodically send
something that you know will be of interest to them. It may be a clipping from
a magazine about some sport or hobby that they are involved in, or an article
on their particular industry.
Newsletters are always a great mechanism for keeping your company in front
of your customers. These can take several different forms and shall be
discussed in greater detail in Touchstones # 81.
If all the above seems like too much trouble and effort, then a simple bulk
mail, fax or email to your customers every three months is an absolute
minimum. If you aren’t prepared to do even this, then good luck. You’ll
need it.
Until next week, many happy customer returns!
Graham Harvey APS
Next week: Accurate database.
Watch out for Graham’s new book Seducing the Vigilante Customer – winning
strategies to guarantee the return of happy customers and healthy profits,
available in all good book stores early in 2002.
Previous newsletters available at www.grahamharvey.com.au/Articles/
Please feel free to recommend "Touchstones" to your
family, friends and business colleagues. Tell them that their free
subscription is waiting for them at www.grahamharvey.com.au
