Here’s a great article, titled “Taking a Customer from Like to Love”, that shares a nearly-unbelieveable stat from a Rockefeller Corporation study: nearly 70% of customers leave a company because they believe the company doesn’t care about them.
Ask yourself, “How do my customers know I care about their business?” Just because you care about your customers doesn’t mean they know you do.
Pick up the phone and call a few customers every week and tell them you were thinking about them and value their business. Ask them to give you one way to improve your service, and then commit to doing it.
From the ever-perceptive Jessica Hagy:
Here are some great social media “Propaganda” Posters with messages that reflect more than a few firms’ “official” social media policies.
Mashable shares some creative ways small businesses are using the iPad. Here’s what an owner of a yoga studio says about using the iPad as a customer-intake device:
First order of business? Ditching the front counter and bar code scanner you see at a lot of yoga studios and gyms. “When people walk in the door, we hand them the iPad, and they sit on the couch — it’s a lot more casual, and we can bring them tea or water,” Foster says. Instead of standing awkwardly at the counter and filling out waivers and liability forms on a clipboard, the iPad makes people feel comfortable and also makes data entry a breeze for goodyoga. The studio uses a Google form, so the staff doesn’t have to worry about decoding a patron’s chicken scratch and the team saves times since the client info goes into the database automatically.
Whenever I work with attorneys and ask them to picture their “ideal” client, I always get a few chuckles from my audience as they collectively imagine a client that can’t possibly exist: the one who walks into their lawyers office with a huge retainer, a bottomless checkbook, uncomplicated work an unlimited amount of time to get it done. Because, for most lawyers, their “ideal” client doesn’t exist even in their own imaginations, I’ve begun to ask them to picture a different animal: their Ideal Average Client.
The Ideal Average Client is described thusly:
a person (or business) who exists in the real world you could realistically build a practice around. Put another way, if you built a fantastic practice doing the things you love to do (and that you’ve gotten really good at doing), your Ideal Average Client would be the person you’d no longer be surprised walked through your door.
I’ll share an exercise here soon, based in part on my Haiku Elevator Pitch exercise, that will help you to identify and understand your Ideal Average Client.
Until then, think about who (or what) is your Ideal Average Client, and what are you doing to build your practice to attract and serve them?
![The [non]billable hour](http://www.nonbillablehour.com/images/headway/header-uploads/xNonbillable,P20Hour,P20442.png.pagespeed.ic.sJ1SiCvIT_.png)