If You Don't Know What To Do With Your Customers, Start Here

Have you ever noticed how much angst there is around our customer relationships?  We wonder if they like us. We wonder if we are satisfying their needs. We wonder if they are going to come back and visit us again.   We hope they never break up with us. 

Whether we like it or not, we have established relationships with our customers, and with those relationships come expectations.  Expectations we hope we meet, but reallistically, sometimes we won't.  As long as we are committed to the relationship, we can make a fairly safe assumption that our customers will stick by us through thick and thin.  And those that don't probably aren't our Right People.

The Month of Love

February is an exciting time.  Visions of Valentine's Day dance in our heads, but it is also another official Customer Love challenge month.  If you haven't heard about Customer Love before, the basic premise is that for 27 days, you do nothing but love your customers.  How you choose to do that is entirely up to you. 

On Day 28 of the challenge, you launch a product- if may be an entirely new product you've been working on, or something you already have that you've taken the spit and polish to and made into something brand new. In any case, you offer something of value to your customers, and it becomes a fantastic win-win proposition.  Your customers feel loved and special, and you sell stuff.  It's good kharma.

The Secret Sauce

Just talking about the challenge makes me all warm and fuzzy.  I launched my first product, the Writer's Battle Plan, as part of the Customer Love Challenge in November.  It was an amazing ride, and one I can't gush about enough.  Our fearless leader, LaVonne Ellis, and the wonderful group of participants I met made it an experience I won't ever forget.  In fact, it fundamentally rewired my brain.  (I talk about this in an interview with LaVonne coming up on Day 12 of this month's challenge.)

But the underlying principle of the Customer Love challenge is the idea of reciprocity.  If I create an overwhelmingly positive experience for you, you will, in turn, do something positive for me when I ask you.  Now those last 4 words- those are the kicker.

Don't Be Afraid To Ask

In order to create a "customer experience", there is an inherent assumption that there is a product or service being sold.  You, as the customer, are buying something from me, the seller.  Ideally, what I am selling you is valuable and actionable for you. But to get there, I have to ASK you to do something and I can't be shy about it. Otherwise, well, this feels like a different type of relationship and neither one of us is very comfortable because we have no idea what the expectations are supposed to be.

So I ask you take action, and hopefully you are getting something out of the deal that makes you happy.  And when you are happy, that makes me happy.   That's the way positive reciprocity in customer satisfaction works.  And Customer Love is a shining example of it.

So I'd invite you to take a stroll over to the Customer Love site if you haven't already and check it out.  Join the #customerlove chat on Twitter and meet a bunch of incredibly cool people doing flat out amazing things this month.  Even if you aren't inclined participate, watching the month unfold is an eye opening eperience in creating a unique customer experience.

Don't forget that because I am a Customer Love participant, I will be launching a new product on February 28th.   And if you sign-up to be a Blot Insider as part of my Advance Notification email list (see the right side bar if you are viewing this on my site), you will not only find out what that is before anyone else, but you'll also get a special deal.

Go ahead. Be mushy- get out there and spread the love!

(photo credit schipulites)