It’s true. If we can offer our customers more than they expect, they are more likely to become repeat customers and refer you to others.

I love your examples…so obvious to the outsider, but often these ideas are not thought of by the businesses.

One thing I hear a lot of is that when I answer the telephone, customers think I am an answering service. They may have called others, only to not get an answer, get an answering machine, or an answering service. They’re extremely pleased to know they are talking to “a real person”., who is a part of the business.

Barbara’s last blog post..Blog Loses Massive Traffic Due To Profanity

Hi Tim – thanks for fixing the commenting issue. You would no doubt lose commentors if they can only log in under blogger or google.

Yes Neil is becoming something of a phenomenon and he is so young. This is his blog address: http://www.quicksprout.com/
and hopefully you’ll find his contact details there.

Catherine Lawson’s last blog post..Could Earplugs Improve Your Business?

I we would all listen 2x to the amount we talk, we would all be much further ahead.

Great suggestions

RacerX’s last blog post..Star Wars Economy: The Empire Falls

I think it would be great if you could offer that service. I know you mentioned it the other day and there are no similar companies offering it in your area so it would be a brilliant USP.

But, I can understand how hard it would be to co-ordinate.

We offer 2 hour service and did this in the last business too, but only for emergencies. All the non emergencies are 48 hours.

But, it sounds like this would be something you would be offering to everyone who had a contract with you, which is probably much more complicated to organise.

And I suppose, what you really need to do is start monitoring every single job you do now, and the response times you are able to achieve – if you haven’t been doing so already.

This will give you an idea of how many staff you will need to offer the service. And then you will need to work out how much extra it’s costing you to provide the service and how much extra you’ll need to charge the customers.

Then finally you’ll need to approach your customers to see whether they’ll be interested in paying more for a faster service.

Most will and the additional cost may not be a whole heap more anyway.

And by offering 95% instead of 100%, you’re covering yourself for times when you have problems that are too complicated to fix within the four hours, as I should imagine you’ll always have those.

It will be so worth it if you can do all this. My experiences with IT companies in the past have been awful and I know that the service you’re planning to offer will definitely see you taking customers from your competitors.

Catherine Lawson’s last blog post..Could Earplugs Improve Your Business?

I had that problem.

I had racked my brains for a long time scratching the surface for things which improved the customer’s experience.

And the big one, which was so obvious I nearly missed it, was responding faster.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re good. But the client wants a fast fix when things go wrong with their IT.

We’re not able to do this yet, but we want to SOLVE 95% of all reported incidents within 4 hours.

So by setting the target, it has focused our minds. And straight away you start to stop operational challenges which can be fixed to achieve it.

So we’re working through that list. When we’ve got there – which may take a while – one component is more and better engineers who take time to find, we can boast about it on our web-site and elsewhere.

That will draw customers to us and away from competitors arguable more than the other stuff we have done.

So it’s good to look at the really obvious stuff you can improve.

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