Getting Your Customers to Complain is Invaluable

Getting Your Customers to Complain is Invaluable

Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business. --Zig Ziglar, U.S. author and speaker As much as you want your customers to be completely satisfied with your product or service, it’s rare for any business to ...

Tom Smith

Does your brand make an emotional connection with your customers?

Does it? Do you know? Have you asked your customers? Chipotle makes an emotional connection with me by consistently serving me great tasting, healthy food that I'm not allergic to. I have alot of allergies and have beeen eating burrito bowls at Chipotle for lunch almost everyday for the past six years. When I travel, I try to stay in hotels withi...

Tom Smith

How to Make an Emotional Connection with Your Customers

Making an emotional connection with your customer is critical whether your in a B2C or B2B business. If you, or your employees, have an emotional connection with your customer they are more likely to be a long-term customer with higher value to you and your firm -- economically and emotionally. An emotionally connected customer will be more inter...

Tom Smith

5 Reasons Social Media is About Relationships, NOT ROI

I read a lot of articles and posts of people questioning the ROI of social media. I find this discouraging and disingenuous. Social media is about creating, and enhancing relationships, not about making sales. People buy products and services, B2B and B2C, from people they know, like and trust. Social media is a great way to meet people, establish ...

Tom Smith

7 Ways to Leverage Your Best Customers to Accelerate Sales

Do you know who your best customers are? Not the ones who spend the most. Not the ones who visit you most often. The ones that tell others about your products and services. The ones that rave about you on Facebook. You have prospects, customers, satisfied customers and "raving fans" or advocates. Your raving fans are your most valuable customers. T...

Tom Smith

Consumer Insights From Moms Accelerate Sales

I am fascinated with the findings of NeuroFocus in "The Buying Brain" by Dr. A.K. Pradeep. While I was not surprised to learn the difference between male and female brains, I was surprised to see the powerful differences between the female brain and a mother's brain. This is likely a function of never being a father. Moms make it all happen in a f...

Tom Smith

Top 10 U.S. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) for 2013

Satmetrix the owner of Net Promoter Score (NPS) published its 2013 Net Promoter Industry Benchmark reports for the financial services, technology, online services, retailing, travel, hospitality, insurance and telecommunications industries. For those unaware of NPS, customers are asked, "On a scale from 0 to 10, with '0' be 'very unlikely' and '10'...

Tom Smith

A Clear Call To Action Will Accelerate Sales

What do you want your customer or prospect to do? I recently attended a presentation by an advocacy group. At the conclusion of the presentation, they had someone handing out a flyer asking us to go the their website to tell our story. I went to the website to tell my story and didn't see where they wanted me to do so. I sent an email to the grou...

Tom Smith

7 Ways to Improve Your (Company’s) Reputation

We know consumers place greater importance on the perception of the company offering the products and services than the perception of the products and services themselves. As such, whether you are working for a large, medium or small business or you are a single-person business, you need to worry about your, and your company's reputation. Here are...

Tom Smith

7 Ways to Leverage Promoters to Accelerate Sales

We instituted a customer satisfaction measurement and improvement (CSMI) program using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology. The survey is simply three questions that should take a customer three minutes or less to answer: On a scale of zero to 10 where 10 is "very likely," how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? ...

Tom Smith