Last week, we talked about selling air and getting that marketing slot machine cranked up so it works like your favorite ATM.
One of the ways that you can take another step up the ladder is to keep an eye open for all the little things you can do to ensure that someone comes back to your business.
As you might guess, there are a bunch of these little things.
They range from how you answer the phone to that little something extra you do when packing something for shipment to a customer.
It definitely creates an impact when you fine tune how you respond to calls, emails, tweets and other inquiries – such as “Do you have any iPads in stock?” (a frequent question to Apple dealers these days).
How do you answer questions that you *know* aren’t going to immediately close a sale?
Do you just throw out a matter of fact answer and move on, or do you use the opportunity to make an impression without being a pushy pain in the rump?
Let’s use a software developer. How do they handle errors? Upon detection of an error, they have a ton of choices:
- You can display a technical message about what happened (“Stack push failure in c70mss.dll at C53DAE.”)
- You can display a friendly message explaining what happened in non-technical terms. (“I’m not sure what’s wrong, but you’ve gotta reboot.”)
- You can display a message that provides instructions to fix the problem. (“Don’t do that again. Do this instead.”)
- You can make the program blow up and force the user to start all over again, and just skip that whole “display a message” thing. (Not recommended)
- You can fix the problem (and if necessary, inform the user) and move on.
That last one might make you scratch your head a bit. If you’re a programmer who went to the trouble to detect a situation *and* create a message, why not just fix it when you can?
Sure, there are cases where you can’t assume what to do and you have to ask… but those are normally the exception.
Not just the geeks
The same goes for handling customer situations in your business.
You could say “Sorry, my alignment guy isn’t here on Saturday” and then go back to your work.
Or you could ask the customer to make an appointment while you have them standing there. Or you could do that while reminding them that a messed up alignment is ruining their tires nibble by nibble with each revolution.
In the case of a refund or exchange, you could force your staff to say “Sorry, my manager has to be here to fix that.” or you could simply put a process in place that allows them to deal with it – and do so without risking financial loss.
That’s a win in several ways:
- It’s a win for your customer because they get helped immediately rather than having to wait for you and even worse, make a return trip to the store for something that should’ve been right in the first place.
- It’s a win for your staff because it empowers them, giving them the emotional “reward” for helping a customer – which will motivate them to want to continue that little buzz-fest.
- It’s a win for you because it keeps you off the phone. Rather than dealing with minimum wage questions you shouldn’t be interrupted with anyway, you can keep playing golf, fishing, planning your next strategic move and/or creating the next big thing that’ll push your business into its next big growth cycle.
If GiantMegaStore can issue a refund (or execute an exchange) without requiring a phone call to the CEO, I think you can find a way too.
Look around. What can you tweak? What can you polish?
Make it all better, tweak by tweak.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site or contact him via email at mriffey at flatheadbeacon.com.