Customers Redefine "Customer Focus"

Cathy Allington
Member

Posted 19-Jun-2006 08:16 PM
I loved Dick Lee's article on this!! And so very timely!! I would really love to hear from people here about the merits of 2 very different types of thank you letters which our customers use to thank new customers.

One is very personal—"Just a quick note to say "thank you" for visiting our store last week—your custom means a lot to us—just wanted to say thank you", etc. Very low key, personal, and—dare I say it—Heartfelt.

The other—which one of our Direct Marketing Experts complied—starts with "New customer Harry Grolsch welcomed to XYZ store—Store owner John Smith says he's "delighted and looking forward to long and happy relationship!"It might not make the headlines in our daily paper—but the day that you decided to begin using XYZ store in LOCATION was certainly a red letter day for us!" etc. etc.

I much prefer the first letter—as a customer—it is much more personal. The DM tone of the second letter is not—to me—sincere. It follows the DM concepts of writing copy, complete with the 2 "P.S"'s, but to me, a customer just won't find that sincere. It doesn't cover the ""soft" attributes such as honest and respectful communications" which Dick Lee mentions.

But is this just me?? What is everyone else's opinion? I would very much appreciate your feedback.

Kind Regards
Cathy Allington
www.gyob.com.au

www.gyob.net.au

Evan Wood
Member

Posted 20-Jun-2006 09:56 AM
Cathy,

No question, go with the first one. It's more genuine and more personal, something every person wants when it comes to the 'experience'.

The second one sounds like a typical direct mail approach—very 'campaign-ish'.

Why turn an honest "thank you" into anything other than it is?

President, JumpWood Marketing
www.jumpwood.com

Cathy Allington
Member

Posted 21-Jun-2006 03:14 PM
Thanks Evan. That was certainly my "gut" feel, it's just that after listening to a lot of DM experts lately about successful campaigns, I was thinking perhaps we should be doing something different.
So thank you for the confirmation—much appreciated.

www.gyob.net.au

Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist
Advisory Board
Member
Picture of Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist

Posted 26-Jun-2006 04:54 AM
Cathy

Allow me to add another thought; why send a thank you letter at all? It seems to me that sending any kind of thank you letter is artificial and insincere, particularly for relatively small transactions. Customers simply don't view a first-time purchase as the beginning of a long-term relationship. Such relationships build over time and ought to be earned, largely through the behavior of your employees.

While the company may consider every new customer to be an opportunity to build a relationship, the fact is that most aren't. Most won't grow to become emotionally connected and the cause is not helped by sending obviously-insincere communications. Genuine relations are build by delivering superior service and by your employees being as sincere and helpful as possible. It may not require much more than having them say "Thanks for coming in; hope to see you again soon."

I might make an exception in a B2B context where a company has won a contract or was successful in landing the business of a new client. A sincere letter to the CEO thanking him/her for the business and making a commitment to deliver great service may go over very well. But, a retail customer will find such a letter quite false, in my experience.

Jim Barnes

Jim Barnes specializes in Customer Strategy as a member of the CRMGuru Advisory Board. For more information, please visit Barnes Marketing Associates.

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 27-Jun-2006 11:03 AM
Cathy

Despite Jim's theoretical reservations, the reality is that we do not know what will ultimately work with your customers until you try stuff out!

I suggest you take a sample of new customers, develop a few sincere letters and see what the impact is. There is no other way to see if they work.

Incidentally, it is because of this overwhelming number of unknowns and unknowables in customer management that CRM Strategy is best seen as a portfolio of options which need trying out to see what ultimately works.

Best of luck. Graham

Cathy Allington
Member

Posted 28-Jun-2006 12:04 AM
Thanks Graham and Jim:
As always, all feedback is appreciated. Our clients have actually been receiving a very good response to the very personalised thank you letters—they are written in a very sincere tone—the objective is just to say thank you. I just had my reservations about the more DM style approach. Graham, your advice was the same as my friends at Australia Post have said—just test both and see which works best.
Kind Regards
Cathy

www.gyob.net.au

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 28-Jun-2006 11:28 PM
Cathy

The comments posted remind me of something Donald Rumsfeld said about knowledge. He described the world as being constructed of combinations of things you know and things you don't know.

Bear with me and I will explain.

The first of these are things you know you know. In customer mamnagement, these are often the things you can most easily act upon to improve customer profitability. They are the data-based marketing campaigns, the sales plans you develop for the salesforce and the experience-based customer service scripts that you define. For most companies this is more about customer management than about customer relationships, which, in my opinion, is not necessarily a bad thing. This is CRM business as usual.

The second of these are things you know you don't know. So you do market, customer and competitor research to find them out. Or as in your letters example, you try stuff out to see what works. The new knowledge can then be incorprated into the first category of things you know you know as business as usual.

The third of these and more challenging than the first two are things you don't know you know. These are the marketing campaigns just released to te market but not communicated to customer service. Or the detailed customer insight that customer service has that sales never asks about. Or even the credit information about customers that finance has but is not allowed to pass on to marketing due to data protection laws. These things make business extra-ordinarily wasteful. They can largely be overcome through planned collaboration. This is CRM business as unusual.

The final and most scary of these are the things you don't know that you don't know. These are the things that can badly derail your business, as has happened over time with litigation surrounding the harful effects of the asbestos and tobacco industries' products (although there is strong evidence that the tobacco industry did know about the harmfulness of its products but supressed the knowledge). They are also things that can replace your business, as is happening with new competitors in the direct insurance, low-cost airline and no-frills mobile telephony businesses.

So there you have it. Four combinations of knowns and unknowns. Each with implications for how your business manages customers.

Customers may have many of the answers to the things you don't know. But you have to ask them if you are going to find the things out. This is driving us towards a new world of "Customer 2.0", where customers are directly involved in driving-innovation, in generating marketing media and in serving themselves.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Cathy Allington
Member

Posted 05-Jul-2006 06:43 AM
Graham—as always—you provide thought provoking answers. Thank you, And yes, the most dangerous of your 4 scenarios, lies in not knowing what you don't know. Totally scary, that one! And hats off to those who acknowledge this—it's the people who don't even acknowledge what they don't know, who are really scary.

However, I still believe, that the key to making CRM work, is to put yourself in the shoes of the customer ("to understand a man, you have to walk a mile in his mocassins").

All of us "experts" buy things from businesses, all of us are people. The Xhosa tribe in South Africa have a wonderful word which is so hard to translate into one word in English—"Ubuntu". The closest translation we can get to is "People are people through other people". In other words, we define ourselves through our relationships with people. If we existed only on our own, we could not define ourselves.

You and I, and everyone else—when we buy a product or service from someone, are people. We may buy initially based on locality or price or whatever, but for whatever reasons we buy, the fact remains that we are all living human beings, and because of that, we also have feelings and emotions. We don't buy because of obvious clever analytics—we continue to buy from that business because they make us feel good—for whatever "people" reason that is!!

One of the things I do know, is that if you treat people as people, then you have a far better chance of building relationships in business.

www.gyob.net.au