Giving Customers What They Want, Where They Want It, When They Want It—How Business Is Leveraging Technology To Increase The Bottom Line

Business Building Action From Terry L. Brock

There are a lot of opportunities now, even in the midst of The Great Recession we’re going through. Many businesses are taking advantage of technologies and giving customers what they want, where they want it and when they want it.  You can too by following some important considerations.

Customers want customization.  They don’t want impersonal, inhuman voice mail systems that leave them in voice mail hell.  Companies who provide easy access for customers when they want it, in a pleasing way, at an affordable price will be rewarded with business.

You can’t offload customer service to an automated system.  No one likes that.  Why do so many companies feel it is okay to do that to their customers when the people implementing this decision despise it if such lousy customer service is foisted on them?

On the positive side, many companies are doing things right.  Facebook announced a big change in the way people will interact with their system.  They’ve realized that having 5,000 people click on a link doesn’t necessarily make them your “friend.”  We like to be in groups of people who share common interests.  This is what Facebook intends to provide with Facebook Groups.

The concept of Facebook Groups is recognition of human reality. We want to be with people we like and with whom we share common interests.  Facebook has programmed the group so that if more than 250 people are involved, chat is terminated. This means you need to keep the group manageable for communication.  The feature should diminish the amount of spam advertising.

The number of friends you have on Facebook or followers you have on Twitter really doesn’t matter.  It’s similar to having a hundred gazillion subscribers (an accurate number!) to a free newspaper that no one reads.  What matters is the quality of interaction, not the quantity of “followers” who really aren’t there.  Don’t be impressed by people who have an enormous amount of followers.  What matters is the quality of interaction and collaboration with those people. We’ve now moved to a point in social media where success is more focused on quality than quantity.

Bottom-line Takeaway: Let technology serve people, real customers who pay the bills.  Put systems in place to help customers at the critical moment they most likely will need help.  And always have the provision to have a real human being assisting (yes, that means on the telephone, in most cases).  If those are not available, provide fast email response.  Oh, and if you don’t want to do that,  don’t worry about it — your competition will be happy to step in and take care of your customers!