When it comes to customer service, be sure you can deliver what you promise.
As any homeowner will tell you, if something major is going to break, it will happen on the weekend. That’s so you can spend hours trying to find a tradesman to fix your problem and then spend double-time paying for the repairs. In my case, it was a hot water heater. From what I could tell, it was installed a decade ago, so it had long outlived its useful life. I was lucky. On the other...
Read MoreGreat customer service starts with the basics.
In today’s marketing world, there’s so much emphasis on high-tech, sophisticated approaches to customer service, we tend to overlook the basics. Here are two stories that suggest that good customer service really starts with the basics. Both stories are true. And while the examples concern a consumer real estate business, the lessons can apply to nearly any service business. In the first...
Read MoreTo make the sale, manage your prospect’s perception of risk.
Last week we received a query from the owner of a retail shop in Chichester, New Hampshire, that sells wood stoves and fireplace inserts: “With the spiraling cost of heating oil, we’re starting to see an upsurge in the number of people walking into our store. Although my one salesman and I seem to do pretty well, I still get the sense that we are not selling as much product as we should,...
Read MoreOver-reliance on customer feedback is hurting local retailers.
For the past few years I have been trying to unravel the mystery of why so many local retailers are reluctant to embrace new marketing technologies such as email marketing and e-commerce web sites. The explanations I get from various small business consultants and web gurus usually fall along the line of “they are resistant to change,” “they are stuck in the past,”...
Read MoreSocial media and email marketing compliment each other.
Back in October after reading a Wall Street Journal story about the demise of email, I asked the following: Is the growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter slowly killing off email as an effective marketing tool? “Death of email” articles like the one from the Journal assume that two methods of communication cannot coexist, each having a unique role to...
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