30 Jun 09 Training Your Customers to Be Loyal
My wife and I brought home a new computer desk chair from Staples the other day, and like a good husband I offered to assemble it for her. The instructions that came with the chair were so elegant, so clear, and so well-organized that I realize that Staples is one of the leaders in customer service today. They two areas I have found that they excel in are rife with customer abuse stories: the aforementioned assembly instructions, and rebate offers.
Product Assembly Instructions that Don’t Inspire Fear and Dread
We’ve all had assembly horror stories, whether it’s on Christmas Eve or when putting together new office furniture. Maybe the parts don’t match the list, or the diagrams aren’t all that clear. Sometimes they’re written in five or six languages, but the translation into yours leaves something to be desired. I’m especially wary of the ones that include a number to call for free replacement parts; experience has shown me that this means that the parts are cheap to manufacture and likely to break again. All in all, writing product assembly instructions is not given the attention that it deserves.
Putting together this Staples chair, however, was a very different experience. The instructions were a series of drawings that were very clear, and the parts were all labeled visibly. The hardware was individually wrapped, and labeled with the number of the step it would be used for. Even the spare parts were clearly labeled as such. The entire assembly took me less time than it usually takes just to inventory the parts.
Rebates Done Simply
I’ve just about given up on buying things that have rebate offers, because the instructions for getting the money back are usually incredibly complicated and filled with loopholes designed to prevent me from ever seeing the money. Not so at Staples, where the company’s own in-house rebate program can be completed online with the information printed on the receipt itself. The novelty of actually getting the money back never wears off.
Lessons from Staples’ Customer Service
Staples invests time and money into ensuring that customers don’t get frustrated after they’ve already spent their money. No business can afford to stop giving quality service after money has changed hands, because a returning customer is worth so much more than a one-shot. Not only are are customers already educated about your unique market position (right?), they are also the ones that are most likely to refer others to your door.
What client after-care can you be doing that will increase your customer retention?
Tags: customer service, Guest Post, Terence P Ward
23 Jun 09 Target’s On-Target Umbrella Bags
This post is written by guest blogger Terence P Ward.
Target offers branded umbrella bags free to its wet customers in Poughkeepsie, NY
While many retailers were no doubt lamenting New York’s monsoon season, Target found a way to capitalize on it by offering complimentary umbrella bags to its customers. This is a great example of how to keep a brand firmly in the hearts and minds of the people. This service has some nice benefits:
- Thoughtful. Who wouldn’t appreciate the offer to keep a little drier while shopping?
- Viral. No doubt those Target-branded umbrella bags were everywhere in the mall, gleefully trumpeting the bull’s-eye logo in every nook and cranny of the competition’s retail space. I wonder how many people went to Target because they wanted an umbrella bag too?
- Clean. Even as the umbrella bags send forth armies of loyal Target shoppers into the mall, they’re keeping Target’s floors and merchandise cleaner. The cost of the bags is more than offset by not having to mop as often.
All in all, this is a really nice example of innovative marketing that adds value, creates goodwill, and spreads brand awareness for very little upfront investment. The best marketing ideas aren’t the ones that scream for attention; rather, they can’t help but get noticed because they add value all by themselves.
So is your marketing taking into consideration what your customers actually need, like Target’s is? What separates your promotional items from mere advertising, and elevates them to objects that provide value? Do you get caught up in the romance of promotional items when you look through those catalogs, the way I do? It really can be intoxicating, imagining the company logo on a letter opener, but when’s the last time you actually saw someone using a letter opener?
Like any other aspect of marketing, make sure you can track results with promotional items. For Target the result could be seen in the mall. For a law firm I once worked for, the tracking came in the form frequent requests for more of our post-it notes (they were in bright colors and stood out among the standard yellow ones). It only makes sense to promotional items with a high perceived value – even if the items themselves are as inexpensive as a plastic umbrella bag.
Tags: Guest Post