I came across an interesting blog post in Forbes today about the importance of using social media to help not only get involved in, but manage, your customers’ journey. 

Customers begin their buying process way before they contact vendors that they are interested in.  Think about the amount of research you personally have done before deciding which vendor to contact about any product or service you purchased recently.  Personally, I’ve sent inquiries out to email lists for groups I belong to as well as put out inquiries on Facebook to get recommendations from like-minded people in my community who can recommend solutions to my problems. 

Customers are also using web search to become more educated before deciding who to contact.  Web search provides access not only to vendor websites and product/service information, but also community board, blog posts, and rating sites.

Being armed with all of the above information can help short circuit the qualification process as a buyer and your buyers know that.

By understanding what your customers are looking for at each step of their research process, and providing it, you can ensure that you are included in their short list of providers they will contact. 

And the best way to get a deep understanding of how your customers are navigating their buying process is to talk to both customers you have won as well as those you lost.  By conducting ongoing win-loss analysis, you can ensure that you understand the various points in their research and purchase process, what information that were looking for and what criteria they used to qualify vendors. All of this information is vitally important to making sure that your marketing efforts are hitting the target.

What do you know about the information your customers is looking for, and where?  You may be surprised…

It’s that time of year for giving thanks…but I suggest that this should only serve as a simple reminder of a mindset we should have all year long, especially when it comes to our customers.

Keeping customers happy and preventing them from being lured away by your competitors is a key strategy to having a stable customer base and healthy revenues. Part of a successful customer retention strategy is ensuring that customers know that they are valued and not viewed as a commodity that you can replenish as needed.

And when it comes to making your customers feel valued, a simple message of ‘Thanks for your business!’ does the job perfectly. Have you ever been on an American Airlines flight when they say “We know you have other choices and we appreciate that you chose to fly with us…”. I know it’s a script that the flight attendants are given, but obviously, it had an impact on THIS customer. It’s a great message…for all of us!

But words alone can only have so much of an impact. I just looked back at the July 2011 email I received from Netflix which was their first announcement of the debacle that led to a plummet in customer numbers and their stock price. “We realize you have many choices for home entertainment, and we thank you for your business.” And now we are going to raise prices on you and ‘encourage’ you to stop ordering DVD’s…what?! I felt ANYthing but valued after reading that email. And will never feel the same about Netflix, a company that I had been a raving fan of up until then.

An example of how ‘actions speak louder than words’: Yesterday a San Francisco gas station owner lowered gas prices by 50 cents per gallon for 8 hours as a way of thanking his customers and helping make their holiday travel a bit less expensive. WOW! No advertising of this offer ahead of time to get MORE business, just a concrete (and unexpected) thank you to his customers. And, how cool that his actions made the local news, but that wasn’t his objective. It was a pure token of thanks. Side benefits: extremely loyal customers who hopefully won’t be tempted by saving a few cents per gallon at a competing station and who will spread the word about this station to others.

Here are a few ideas for how you can say thank you to your customers, not only during the holiday season, but ANY time during the year (or ALL year!):

• Send an insert with all orders (or orders over a certain amount) that provide a discount on future orders…with a message saying “Thanks for your business!’
• Create a culture in your organization for anyone who interfaces with your customers (sales reps, support staff, cashiers, customer service reps, etc.) to make sure they say a sincere “Thank you for your business” after each interaction.
• Have executives proactively call key customers for the express purpose of saying “Thank you”…no selling involved.

Those are just a few deas to get your juices flowing…let us know what you have done, or are thinking of doing, to let your customers know how much you appreciate their continued business!

And thank YOU for taking the time to read our blog! We’d love to hear your comments…

Businesses across the world are realizing that they need to figure out how to sift through the megatons of information that is being shared about them via social media amongst customers, ex-customers, prospective customers and more.

It’s extremely important to pay attention to the information being posted online about the impressions that people have of your products and your company.  This information can complement the work you may already be doing to collect customer feedback via customer satisfaction questionnaires or any other research you do to understand how to better meet your customers’ needs.

There are many social media monitoring tools available to collect information from public areas of the Internet.  Most of them automatically classify each comment using natural language processing technology (NLP) to help assess whether they are positive or negative.  This approach can help take a broad sweep at assessing what the sentiment is out there about your company and your products.  Monitoring these metrics over time and seeing what variations occur in conjunction with new product launches or organizational changes is very important, however this just tells you ‘what’ people are saying and doesn’t tell you ‘why’ people feel that way about your company/your products.

In order to get the biggest benefit from monitoring social media, it’s important to look at the actual comments that are collected and analyze what is behind them.  For people that are frustrated with your company or products, is it the purchasing process, installation of your product, or actual daily use of your products that is the core of the problem?  This information can be very helpful in making decisions about where to invest improvement efforts, product enhancements, etc.

Likewise, it’s very helpful to understand what it is that customers like most about your products.  This information can help you ensure that you don’t mess with the elements of your product that customers like most.

Getting full understanding of the social media noise requires in-depth analysis of a sampling of the actual comments.  Some organizations have the bandwidth and expertise to do this in-house, however, sometimes it is necessary to bring in external resources.  Researchers who do qualitative research such as interviewing, focus groups, etc. have the expertise to know how many comments to review in order to have a valid sample that represents all of the comments that are out there.  A good researcher can glean the details behind the comments and look for trends to help you get clearer about what to do to improve the perception of your company and products.

Net net: be sure that you are not only looking at social media metrics, but also investing the time to analyze what those metrics mean via thorough analysis.

• Get information from your sales team or contact database to identify accounts that you ‘won’ and those that you ‘lost’ (aka didn’t WIN) in a given period (monthly or quarterly is most common)

• Have a conversation with the key contact(s) at each account to understand the following:

                   - Who they consider your competition

                   - What their key criteria were for evaluating their choices

                   – How you measured up against your competitors on their key criteria

                   – Their perception of the sales process

These efforts don’t require a huge investment of time or money: these conversations can be brief and you don’t need to talk to a lot of people—you can pick a random sample of people who bought or didn’t buy your product/service.

The rewards for collecting this information are huge! To have a regular, ongoing perspective on these items will help you make sure that you have a finger on the pulse of your marketplace and that you anticipate issues before they become huge problems. To understand how your customers/prospects perceive you and the marketplace, is extremely valuable…and in some cases, the side benefit is that you make a great impression on a lost prospect which may turn their impression of your company around and change their mind (I’ve seen it happen!).

Think about how win/loss analysis could help you or your clients…it could be the perfect tool to get insights that you need in order to make some key business decisions with your customers’ needs/wants in mind.