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How can you give your customers more time?

Written by: Curt Skene

Article Overview: Time is that asset that noe of us have enough of. Its also the one thing that stands in the way of customers doing business with us. By respecting time and finding ways to help your customer save time you will be sending an important message that you care.

How can you give your customers more time?

I read a great quote once that said, "In the past 20 years we have gone from speaking milliseconds to nanoseconds which is the equivalent of compressing 40 years into 4.8 minutes!"

This is the inspiration for my question this month, "How can you give your customers more time?"

Customers buy time every day. They buy availability, they buy delivery, they buy ease of implementation and they buy ease of use. In reality, aren't these all just elements of time? We want it now, we want to know how to use it now, we want it performing now. We don't have time to wait! We don't want to have to go to far to get it!

Everyone is under an incredible time constraint. Our workweeks are getting longer, our productivity expectations are getting bigger and our need to have a balanced home life is getting stronger. How does anyone keep up? How does your customer keep up? It reminds me of the old saying, "None of us have enough time but all of us have all that there is!"

When was the last time you stopped to think about how you can give your customers more time? Do you even know what time means to them?


Time could be:

time required to deliver/install

time required to decide

time to prepare

time required to change

time required to learn

time required to acquire

time available to reserve/pre-order

time service is accessible (especially in Professional sector)

time required to maintain

production time (amount of output per hour)

other ideas?

BONUS THOUGHT

I read about a great "best practice" whereby a Professional in North America hired his Admin in Australia. When he got up in the morning all of his work was done and it was waiting in his inbox! Could this idea work for you?

This month take some time to think about time. What does it mean to you, what does it mean to your customers, how can you be more efficient with time?
I will guarantee you that tomorrow's winners will be the masters of time.

Brainstorming Ideas

How would your customer define time?

How could you give customers more time?

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Article Tags: australia, bonus, elements, implementation, inbox, inspiration, masters, milliseconds, nanoseconds, north america, production time, productivity, professional sector, sector time, time constraint, time customers, time service, when was the last time



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Re: Do Your Prospects / Customers Trust You? - All good points everyone and I'm learning as I read through. Gaining trust takes a lot of time and even if you're an expert or a startup in the field that you're promoting or excelling with, still, you have to put enough attention on how you'll be able to establish value among your prospects and customers by giving them what they need (contents, contacts, ventures, etc) and not only by offering them services and selling them products. Thus, customers do trust us with the way we give them satisfaction first before they give something back in return.
Re: Starting customized giftware... - Starting off with a Customized Gift is definitely a great idea. But you have not mentioned anything about what is or are the products that your organization is into. You have also not mentioned what is the target market or who your customers are. But it needs to be mentioned that whom you want to give the gift. There are two different categories of people who visit you. One category is those who are not much interested to buy. They visit the store for inquisitiveness or finding out what you have to offer them. These people can be given some smaller tokens. The other category is of those who buy from you are your real customers and you can give them gifts. The best gift after the sales will definitely be the after sales support and customer services. But these are in the longer run to retain the customers. You can start off with giving some percentage extra depending on what you have to offer. How about Discounts or different Gifts in lieu of purchase of X Amount, Y Amount...
Empathize with customers - [quote="mphcoach":t5ys84d2]Truth is, to get past a bad customer interaction you really do have to give something extraordinary and memorable. Most importantly, you have to be sincere. Tom Peters has some amazing stories in hos books. In fact, when customers do give great feedback it truly is a gift to you to create a lasting relationship. Four bits of chicken was not a response worthy of your problem. For me, the whole deal needed to be free; you would be invited back for free next time and the manager would have spent quality time with you, listening to what went on and using that as feedback for his team to do better next time.[/quote:t5ys84d2] I agree with mphcoach's comments as Doug Fleener says "Most unhappy customers are reasonable once they feel that the company representative they're talking to understands the problem and is interested in finding a solution that works for both parties...it's important to let her vent her frustrations and tell her story... Some examples of how to empathize with the customer include: 'That must have been incredibly frustrating.' 'I can sure understand why you're so unhappy.' 'I would be frustrated, too.' Then follow the acknowledgement with a transition statement: 'Well, let's see what we can do to make it better.' 'I'm sure we can fix this together.'" (The Profitable Retailer 75 & 76)
How to develop sales contacts? - Unfortunately starting off there isn’t a whole lot of easy tricks. But when you get those 2 interested prospects from sales calls and turn them into customers, you need to develop a referral system that gets 3-4 good prospects from each of them. That's the key to prospecting in sales, referrals from satisfied customers. Sometimes they'll give you the business without having to ask, but normally you'll have to pry a little and ask them who they know that could use your service or product.
Re: Marketing to Wealthy Consumers - Hi Russell - lots of great ideas so far! I haven't seen talk about referrals yet though. It's the most powerful way to reach more wealthy consumers if you already have an established base. I'm assuming that your customers may be repeat clients but there is a long time period between purchases (they don't come every month for a new item). Have you tried any referral programs for existing customers or thought of a way to stay in touch with your customers on a regular basis so at least they keep your company top of mind?


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