Something as simple as listening to your customers can keep you ahead of the game. Meeting the customer’s needs and expectations is the core to any marketing campaign. When you’re creating services, ordering products and creating your advertising messages you naturally think of what will attract the most customers or what they want to buy and hear. The customer will always let you know if you’re doing something wrong but you really need to listen to hear what they want.
I’ll use my latest product alteration as an example. About a year ago I started offering a bookkeeping service where my office did everything. All the client had to do was fax over their information at the end of the day. I thought this would be great for my clients that would go the WHOLE YEAR without accounting records. Theses client never seem to have the time or found a bookkeeper that they could rely on.
So I created this product and I would charge them a weekly fee. Sounded like a win, win situation, well as I signed up clients and started to fulfill the service, a majority of my clients who signed up didn’t follow through on providing their information. Confused, I asked the clients if there was something wrong with the service. All of them said the service was great; it was just more than they needed. They had a lot of other tasks during the day, so they would simply forget to fax their information. They didn’t have a problem not knowing their exact daily sales and cash balances; they just didn’t want to go a whole year in the dark.
So, I altered the product and had the client send us their information once a month and now they were billed monthly. This actually worked out better for the client and for me! The clients just stored the information in a box for a month and sent it to our office and my bookkeepers were able to put the client’s information into QuickBooks in one day (well, most of the time a day). I finally got my win, win.
By listening to my customers and changing this particular product I am now able to free up more time with my staff, SELL this product more often and have a service that meets more of my client’s needs. Make sure you’re doing the same.