One of the blogs I regularly follow is Seth Godin. Why Seth? He has a very no-nonsense way of putting things in plain english for all of us to understand about marketing, customers and a host of other interesting topics. I was thinking the other day about a particular topic to talk about – how to handle a crisis with a customer to actually build MORE LOYALTY. And wouldn’t you know it, Seth happens to write an interesting blog entry on just that topic.
Rather than repeat what Seth said in “Winning on the Uphills” post, I just wanted to share this with you and add my 2 cents. The key in this to me is hat we all have the “moments of truth” many call them where things are in a shambles and look like there is no light at the end of the tunnel (except the oncoming train) and we don’t know what to do. The key here is to “rally the resources” and demonstrate what you are really made of – delivering a great customer experience.
It reminds me of my days back at IBM when something would go wrong with a system or an installation (I was in sales and sold their big iron to big companies). They didn’t sit around and blame or point fingers or try to convince the customer it was their problem, NO, they put “people in planes” and flew them in to solve the problem. The customers LOVED it and we earned more LOYALTY that day than all the other days where we just kept them happy.
Morale of the story – use the worst of times and the crisis to demonstrate what it is your customer wants – focus on their issue and resolving it in the heat of battle. And you don’t have to do this very many times – only once in a while and you earn a lot of Loyalty Points in their eyes. So “man up” and show them what you’ve got…
One thing I have noticed over the years is how important something can be to someone and yet how little attention they give it. Take for example a relationship with someone. How many times do you see the relationship being neglected and taken for granted by the other person – only to wake up one…
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Last week was my wife’s birthday and we wanted to do something fun and special – of course, where have you heard that before. Since we live in Woodinville Wine Country, Woodinville Washington, we decided having a party at a winery would be a fun experience. But which one – there are tons of great…
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Loyalty is not built overnight, but it can start with a single event. This past week I was in Nashville celebrating my wife’s birthday and had some great experiences. I thought you might enjoy hearing about them as you think about “customer experiences” and how they can create “customer loyalty.” Consistency is still KING. One…
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I have a problem. The problem is that I am actively engaged in speaking, writing and consulting in the area of Social Media. Why is that a problem? Because I am all about “what can I do for you” in the customer world and in the Social Media world it is “all about me and…
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For some reason this past few weeks the discussion about “how to collect customer feedback to improve the customer experience” has come up so I wanted to address this and hopefully get everyone back on the right track. My rule is that if “you don’t know the answer, go ask”. This basically says that if…
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There almost isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t hear someone tell me about how they lost a customer to their competition. Upon further inspection there are all sorts of reasons such as price, terms, product availability, better expertise, or a host of other so called “reasons” why they defected. BUNK! OK, sometimes…
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Written on
March 23, 2009 by
Blaine Millet in
Breaking News,
CEO Insights,
Customer Experience 2.0,
Economy,
Increased Profitability,
Market Differentiation,
Relationships,
Seattle Business,
Social Media,
Social Networking
Last Wednesday I had the distinct pleasure of speaking to one of the most influential and well respected business groups in the area – Bellevue Chamber of Commerce’s EBRT (Eastside Business Roundable). This group is comprised of some of most well known business leaders in both Seattle and Bellevue. Why was I there? They were interested,…
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I had the opportunity to speak to a great group of small and middle market business owners and executives yesterday that were part of The Seattle Executives Association – what a great group of people! This is an executive networking group that has been around for 90 years and has a very rich history and…
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I wanted to apologize to my readers for going “dark” the past four or 5 days and my blog being down. Unfortunately, this was not something in my control and didn’t even know it was happening until a reader pointed it out to me on Friday. As it turns out, there was something that went…
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