Winning customers and loyalty the easy way

Getting your customers to shout good news about your business is absolutely the most efficient way of selling. Especially in todays market where everybody talks to everyone about everything (much of which is pretty unimportant) - it is wonderful to be able to scream about a great customer service story and marketing initiative I have just have had the pleasure of being a part of.

I needed to order a few business cards for Tuetalk and decided to use a very simple online tool that is very cost effective, namely http://www.streetcards.com/ . After placing the order on Thursday morning I set up a new email service on Friday and realised I should have used the new details on the cards so I contacted Streetcards to see if it was too late.

Check out their reply late Friday:

Hi Keith, sorry for the late response, we got your messages, it's been a busy day! We did in fact already print your cards but to celebrate that the sun actually was shining here in London this afternoon, we'll redo the order with the changes, as long as you spread the word of course, about Streetcards!

If you need anything else, we do offer a full design service and can print much more than just business cards, so do think of us if you want any other marketing materials.

Have a great weekend and thanks for your order!

Best
regards,

Design Director
Streetcards
020 8876 5466
http://www.streetcards.com/
http://www.streetdesigns.biz/

I expect to buy more cards in my career and it'll take a hell of sales pitch to tempt me away from using Streetcards in the future. I'd thoroughly recommend you try them too.

Time to get going again

A few friends have suggested I should start posting again - especially as I am going to want to drive consulting business for TrueTalk.

So much has happened since my last post - I left Sharedband a year ago and have been working for Stone Computers until recently. (Note to myself to write a couple of posts on my time at Stone, and an update on where Sharedband is now).

Currently I am working on a number of new business ideas and looking around for consulting projects to keep the wolf from the door. I have been developing the proposition for TrueTalk consulting and believe that today there is real demand to understand the value marketing brings an organisation. Not just the tactical comms stuff (which is important) but the whole picture of the customer experience.

Without understanding of the true value of marketing the temptation in today's economic climate is for CEO's and CFO's to cut budgets and resources. Even if cuts are unavoidable it's extremely important to understand how to optimise what is available.

So I am going to pitch a service that gets a dialogue going with customers and partners first so that it's possible to paint that picture with the right perspective.

Dinner, Hope and Dispair

I was out to dinner with half a dozen good friends last night, discussing blogging and generally chewing the fat over what is happening to communications, marketing etc. Someone worried (or maybe it was a joke) about being too old for all this new stuff, we soon put the record straight by listing the ages of top bloggers we could think of - it was obvious that age is no barrier to success on line. It’s a good job too considering that there is a new law in the UK next week dealing with age discrimination! Then I saw this great post about late developing geniuses – QED.

We also witnessed a stunning failure of customer service, or if kind a real lack of understanding. When we ordered 3 starters for the 6 of us to share - one of the dishes served had 5 pieces of ravioli. We looked at the waiter and said, that’s a shame one of us will have to miss out, he grinned and walked away – leaving us each with 5/6ths each – we’d have paid for an extra piece of ravioli – but what’s the real cost!

Not Dell again...

I’m not sure if it’s great to be posting how my daughters notebook had a second major fault within 4 weeks - but twice now Dell have delivered a great service experience. On the first occasion they replaced the motherboard, this time the screen went. It seemed like they were unrelated faults.

Once again the call centre was very polite, helpful and arranged the engineer visit the next day. They followed up with confirmation emails and a double check to see if all was well today. The engineer phoned first thing to advise me of his expected arrival time, allowing me to plan my day. The job was completed inside 20 minutes and everyone here is happy. The same can’t be said for BL Ochmans second experience with her Dell service.

It felt to me like someone cared about my experience and was doing as much as they could to manage the situation and it wasn’t one of their “top honchos” that BL Ochman had resorted too. The secret of providing a great service is being able to repeat it every time to meet everyone’s expectations. That requires everyone at all levels in the service delivery organisation doing their bit to make it great.