Customer Think Archives - Page 17 of 20

How Was Your Day as a Customer?

May 13, 2006 by Liz

Whatever You Did Today

Whatever you did today — enjoy a cup of coffee reading the paper, watch TV, work on your computer, clean the house, go to the mall, drive a car, eat lunch, read blogs, take a shower — you used a product. You were a customer.

How was your customer experience? Did anything about it leave you wishing that some business knew you better?

What percent of your experiences leaves you feeling more than satisfied, makes you want to tell people what a great experience you had?

It’s hard to miss when you’ve bumped into a business that values a customer. It’s hard to forget the name of their brand.

Brand you and me.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles
Feeling a CustomerÃ¢â¬â¢s First Response
Customers and Credibility
The Customer Think Series on the SUCCESSFUL SERIES Page

Feeling a Customer’s First Response

May 8, 2006 by Liz

An Opportunity

A customer’s first response runs deep and lasts long. One way I keep myself close to customers is to monitor my first response to new information whenever I can — you know, that initial response that occurs without thinking. I’ve made habit of looking for such responses as I move through my life.

Information has no positive or negative value until I respond to it.

This morning I encountered information that you might use in the same way. Ready? [Read more…]

Helping Clients Get Past Blogaphobia

May 3, 2006 by Liz

Enthusiasm Can Kill

Just today I wrote an email to a potential client I met with two weeks ago. In it I wrote this phrase I know my enthusiasm can be huge. We’d gotten into a conversation about blogs and how they were changing the world.

I wish that I had read the article I found exploring later that afternoon. It’s a piece by Anil Dash at Six Apart News called How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people. It’s just packed with truths. [Read more…]

Getting Customers to Stop by to See You

May 2, 2006 by Liz

Walking the Trade Show Floor

Yesterday walking the trade show floor, I felt I was in a 3-D blog world. Aisles and aisle of blogs sitting side by side with real people in and around them. They were all in the same market, different niches. Some were not easy to tell apart. I was scanning the signage to get a clue. Oh my! 60% were woefully inadequate. Here’s what I saw.

Company names with not a hint of what they do.
A list of what the company does, but no name to pull it together.
Taglines that said abolutely nothing, i.e. making things happen — good things? bad things? It didn’t say.
Taglines that said the same five buzz words that I found at most every other booth.

It seemed clear to me that the folks who designed these books — 3-D blogs — were thinking of what they thought the customer should know rather than thinking of what the customer might have come to find out. Standing outside each booth that I’m talking about I only had one question. [Read more…]

Quality, Schedule, Budget

April 30, 2006 by Liz

Taking This Show on the Road

In an hour or so, I move my computer downtown to a hotel in Chicago while I attend a literacy convention. I know. I know. I live here. I could stay at home.

It’s a bit of a financial hit. Convention hotels in Chicago aren’t particularly inexpensive, but I see it as an investment in my customers and myself.

It’s hard enough to give my clients my undivided attention at a convention of 15,000 attendees. I want to have the flexibility to be at their exhibit booth when meetings inevitably are rescheduled. I want to be around for the after-hours events when relationships become real.

An adage in publishing, perhaps in every business, says:

Quality. Schedule. Budget. Pick Two.

What’s the right choice? Is it always the same two?

Besides it will be fun, sending you notes from the convention. Any advice you have for me while I’m there?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Customers and Credibility

April 29, 2006 by Liz

Two Words

Two words I guard ferociously when it comes to my brand — customers and credibility. They, in fact, mean the same thing as Brand You and Me. I cannot think of better brand promotion than valuing customers and earning credibility.

Darren is running a fabulous series on Credibility. If you’ve not been there yet. You need to be. There’s nothing else like it on the Internet.

Come back and tell me what you think of it.

–ME “Liz” Strauss