Make Love to Your Customers

At BarCampTampaBay last October, Saul Colt, Head of Magic at Canadian online invoicing company, FreshBooks, did a presentation titled How to Make Love to Your Customers. Saul presented a similar session at SocialMediaBarCamp in September. Here's one review. Here's Inc. magazine's perspective on it.

Business Leaders talk about Customer Evangelists and Customer Loyalty, blah, blah. In a competitive industry (and which one isn't today?), your job as the CEO or business owner is to make your customers love your company. How hard is that? Well, considering that the phone company and the cable company (and DISH Network) have received bad marks for "customer service" for years and have laid off tens of thousands lately, how hard would it be to take some extra steps to actually give your customer some service or better yet Care? Not very. Even WebHostingTalk has some ideas.

Besides staying in front of them with a monthly newsletter, a blog about your customers and employees would be another method.

• Robin Robins makes impressions by sending her clients and Prospects unique gifts.
• Thank you notes, especially hand written, make an impression.
• Do you have Google Alerts set up for your largest customers? So that you know what is going on with them and can congratulate them.
• Your team can call clients just to say Thank You randomly. Following up a day after every customer service call too to insure that the problem was resolved to your customer's satisfaction.
• Invite your customers to networking events. Introduce them around. Have breakfast or lunch with your clients.
• Give free seminars to your clients (and prospects) on tech stuff - Like How to download MP3's legally for your iPod. How to Upload Photos from your digital camera. How does that Hulu thing work? What's * and VoIP?
• Have a Customer Appreciate Day. Select a customer to give an award to (and make their day plus some PR).

And these are just of the top of my head. Be creative and remember that people leave mainly because they feel ignored.