Today, a very cold and icy day, I met my friend Loredana Pascal at a down town cafe I usually like a lot. Mostly because of the menu, not their service. I was so happy to finally see her as work, life and other minor details meddled in our plans and it had been a while. I got there first and as I was pretty much frozen, so my first thought way hot chocolate!

Hot chocolate, the right choice! Only I love white hot chocolate and not all cafes or coffee shops have it. The cafe in question has it most of the times, one of the reasons for me choosing them So I ordered it! By the time Loredana arrived, a couple of minutes later, I had drunk half of it. She wanted the same thing and ordered it. The waitress told her, not before giving me a look that said “You’re a total freak for drinking that!”, how the traditional hot chocolate is much better!  Loredana still went for the white one…

So, in less then a minute and one sentence the waitress implied that we had bad taste and their cafe sold bad hot drinks to their customers! Awesome technique to win us over and make us spend more money! As Loredana explained in her earlier post in Romanian, we all love getting recommendations from those who know more about the menu then we do. We also love it when they recommend against something that’s really not tasty on a given day and point out something much better. But this is far from saying what a customer explicitly picked is basically the worst choice ever. Especially when the second customer goes for the same thing…

The line between saying those you’re attending have bad tastes and making a nice recommendation is not that fine. It’s actually quite easy to spot! If you don’t, it’s bad for business! And no, intentions don’t matter! Remember the saying about the road to hell?

Also, it’s only fair to notice two marketing and PR girls are a tough crowd!

How about you? Have you been in a similar situation where you felt the waiter or waitress was offending you instead of making a useful recommendation?

When answering a customer support enquiry, when replying a reporter’s email or a fan’s request, when simply sending out a sales offer, anticipating the next move you need to make to help the customer is the secret to your impressive success.  You need to be able to predict what their next question will be and reply to it before they actually ask it.

Let’s consider a few examples to better support my statement: anticipating questions is a PR superpower and by extension a business superpower.

A customer asks if he has the option to do a certain something when using your product or service. While you might be tempted to send a quick yes or no reply, stop for  a minute and think: his next question to a positive response will be “how?” and to a negative one “what other options do I have?”. Why not take the time to answer the questions you’ve anticipated? It will save your customer save time and he will feel like you can really understand his or her needs.

Someone send an email to your sales team asking about a certain product or service. You might also be offering one or two alternatives to it, maybe one that’s more affordable, or another that’s provides some needed extra features. If based on their requirements you feel the initial product or service of interest might not be what they need, why risk forcing them to realize it on their own? They might send a second email explaining what they need and asking if you have something that suits them, or they might go straight to the competition.

Let’s say a journalists contacts your PR rep asking if it’s possible to interview someone on a certain issue. Why would they want to reply with a simple yes, when they journalist will obviously need to know who they should interview and when they are available?

Doesn’t sound like rocket science, does it? It just takes a bit of information on your customers, their needs, and your own experience dealing with similar issues. Anticipating the next question in media relations, customer care, sales, internal communications translates into going the extra mile. Putting in a little more effort to provide a great solution instead of a simple answer to a question you know will generate more.

I have a confession to make… I am extremely harsh when it comes to customer support. I’ve spent quite a while being a tech support engineer, I know how much it matters in building a great relationship with customers. So when I make my decisions about certain products or services, the quality of tech support backing them up is extremely important.  Why? It is simple. Anything can crash. No one should look for guarantees they will have no problems, they should make sure they will have help solving them when they appear. And based on my fare share of customer support talks, chats, email exchanges, I thought I’d make a top of the best ways to drive customers away.

1. Don’t pick up when they call

Definitely, this is the fastest and never dethroned method to make sure your customers will switch you for any of your competitors quicker then lightning.

2. Ignore the problems!

Have your customers report the same problem a few times and then make sure you constantly ignore it when you reply. This is bound to drive them nuts! So you’ll have a lot less of them to worry about!

3. Be nice, but completely unhelpful!

Make sure you explain in the nicest manner out there that nothing of what the customer needs will ever be possible. Remember, smile and keep being inflexible and unwilling to adapt or change! That should scare them off!

4. Don’t get your message straight before sending it!

Confuse them and then rule them all! The moment they get  a bit upset, send them a quick email promising something, to then have it contradicted by another representative of your company.

5. Be completely inconsiderate when it comes to their needs or issues

When you make major changes that affect the way their business works, don’t ever ask them if they’re OK with it! Just go ahead and if it’s in the middle of the week, even better!

What would you add to the top? I’m curious to find out what your experiences have been.

Need to increase the satisfaction and loyalty of your customers and turn them into evangelists through effective communication? Our marketing and PR agency can help!

In most cases, before buying something, we stop and evaluate our existing offer. From a cart of milk to a computer, car or hosting service, we need to know we’ve made the right choice, that we’ve invested wisely, especially in a time where the economy is forcing us to act smarter. It sometimes happens that a certain buyers is extremely loyal to a brand, but that doesn’t mean he or she has never compared it against its competition. It only means they chose the brand they most like and trust every time they wanted to buy that same item.

When trying to decide what to choose, a potential customer might request offers from several companies. They might also tell you who you are up against and they might even ask for your opinion. And here’s where the tricky part begins!

What is the customer really after?

He/She definitely doesn’t care what you personally think of the competition. He’She might be looking for a better price, but he/she is not looking for getting his choices validated. What they’re really after is a somewhat objective comparison and something to make their choice easier.

How should you reply?

Unless you know one of the names poping our of your prospect’s list is a fraud and you have evidence of some sort to support you, don’t ever attack the competition. If you don’t know them well, it’s best not to start assuming they work out of some garage, aren’t reliable or other statements of sorts. You will hurt your customers feelings and make them feel you’re being condescending. No one wants to hear their choices are not good enough or that they are completely wrong, especially when it’s just someone else’s opinion.

When mentioning others, the potential customer is mainly interested in one thing: finding out what you do better than the others, what specific problems your product or service solves faster and better. Picking on the competition with no valid background will just make you look scared and threatened.

What you should do instead is focus on your solution’s benefits, on the problems it adresses, on its positive effects and on what other customers like most about it. If you have some valid comparatives, you can send them to your prospects, along with independent research and reviews.

Sure, you could just ignore all this, take an allknowing attitude but…

An example for the road

Someone I work with has just told me one of his customers also talked to a large competitor of his, mentioning he was testing the two solutions. The reply he got was quite arrogant, trying to diminish my friend’s service. Guess who the customer chose in the end? Hint: my friend was really excited about this!

The conclusion is, in such cases, you need to keep it sweet and to the point: what you have to do is convince all potential buyers your product is better. Not that you can act smart and joke about the competitors. You have to show them your services are the better choice, the one that works perfectly for them, the one they will feel comfortable enough with to recommend to others.

If there is something everyone loves about Open Source software (FLOSS) is that every issue ever discovered with it is known, there are no surprises. All incompatibilities, if discovered, are out there and anyone trying out the software knows what to expect before they begin. The main benefit of such transparency is that customers are never outraged by bugs. And let’s face it, there is no bug-free software, especially if you try to make it work on Windows

When it comes to closed source software, I’ve been in the industry enough to know the rule of “hush-hush” is the preferred business model. Known issues, bugs, incompatibilities? Keep them buried and hope no one finds out. The perfect plan to have everything blow in your face.

I thought a series debating all the aspects of this “hide it all under the carpet” strategy would help software vendors understand that transparency can actually be a great selling point. No customer likes to be bullshitted and asked to remove programs without any real explanation. That is why I’ve come up with a series focusing on how important respect and telling the truth are in this competitive industry and what the lack of these values can lead to. Up to now, I’ve thought of 4 parts, but things might get more complex around the way:

1. How Much Do Sales People Know and How Much of that Do They Hide?
2. Should the Marketers and Communicators Care about What’s Wrong With the Product?
3. When Everything Goes Wrong, Do Support Engineers Eventually Come Clean?
4. Software Utopia: Transparency All the Way! Any Benefits?

This is indeed a large and complicated topic, so while posting each entry of debating the subject of transparency in the software industry, I’d love to hear your thoughts, your pleasant encounters and horror stories involving tech support, sales people and marketer in the software industry.

So stay tuned, and let’s start debating!

There a clear difference between work hours and after work fun time when it comes to your employees. Their personal life is something the company can’t control, it’s their private business and what there’s nothing an employer can do to control their activities. If they are high-profile figures in promoting your image, the story is a bit different, but when it comes to the average Joe-employee or Jane-employee, you have no say in matters that can in the end affect you. Like stealing, murdering someone or other such negativity that can be associated with you.

When it comes to breaks, there’s something you can do. You can’t tell anyone when to take breaks or where to take them and I would never recommend something of sorts. But you can kindly ask your employees to display a decent behavior. And if you don’t know what they do or say on their breaks, I suggest you try and find out. Because customers visiting you don’t care you’re staff is on a break, they will associate their behavior with your image because everything happens in your garden.

Why is this important? An example might help. A few days back I went with a friend to get some juice from the bistro in our office building. It was 3pm, long after the rush hour, and half of the employees were taking a break on the hallway. And they’re fun activity of choice? Imitating the sounds of an extremely horny cat! Can you imagine what was going through our minds seeing three grown up men laughing over and over again at the same tasteless joke? Given it was half they’re employees in this category, it was enough to form a pretty general opinion on the company’s staff and the values the employers promoted, the customer care skills they had, etc.

Luckily, I also knew the nice, decent people working there. But for a first time customer, would it have mattered? I seriously doubt it!

I believe Generali is a great insurance company. My experience with them has been really pleasant. But their Marketing and PR team really needs a little scolding. Why, read on and you’ll find out!

My car insurance is a mixed product of Genrali and my bank, ING. It’s supposed to expire in 15 days. So today, I got a letter from Generali. I opened it anxiously and what do I get? A scary notification saying my insurance policy will be canceled in 20 days.

After three paragraphs of scary legal stuff, I get the reason why this happens. They have a new and improve insurance package that they distribute through Generali! Really now? Wow, that’s not really scary at all.

How they should have packaged this information? If you have to send the legal stuff, then send it, but put it on a separate page. The first page should be something like this:

Dear X, (surely better than Notification)

Thank you for being our customer in the past year. We’d like to tell you we’ve got this hot new product for ING Office and as your old insurance is about to expire, why don’t you find out more about it.

By the way, we’ve included some legal mumbo jumbo on the second page. But basically we have this new cool thing to make your life better.

Cheers,

Generali

I would have definitely avoided a huge scare, wondering if there’s something wrong I did to receive such a formal notification.

I am going to take Generali’s product for another year. But this letter definitely didn’t help me reach that decision. So I suggest a nice bonus for the rest of their personnel and some kind of training for those handling their communication with customers.