Customer Service is your Best Marketing Tactic (Part 1)

The goals of marketing, greatly simplified, fall into three basic categories:

•  Generating new customer leads
• Retaining and growing existing customers
•  Reactivating inactive/lapsed customers

People don’t usually think of customer service as a marketing tactic, but I argue that it’s a tactic that is well put to use in category 1 and 2 (category 3 is trickier and I’ll talk about that another time, or, you can contact me and I’ll talk your ear off about it).

Most of our time/energy is spent on the first category - new leads.  I don't think you should ignore this, but you must make sure you are spending a lot of time addressing the second category (retention and growth of existing customers).

How many companies have you interacted with that had huge marketing budgets and slick facilities, but when you dealt with them, it was obvious they didn't care much about you as a person, but only how much money you could give them at the moment?

  

Do you think she just got
back from the spa or the airport?

Companies with that point of view need to have "captive" customers with few options other than to deal with them (examples would be the United States Postal Service, airlines, and cable/dish tv companies) or they depend on tactics that drive a LOT of new customers so they can “afford” to lose more of them later.

In my opinion, the airline industry is the perfect example of this.  Check out the American Customer Satisfaction Index satisfaction scores by industry, and sure enough, airlines are usually in the bottom five every year.  ASCI by Industry.

Look at the personal services industries, such as spas - wouldn't it be great if your airline treated you as if you were a spa customer at a spa?  Yeah, I won't hold my breath on that one, either!

For you, however, here's why you need to always like a spa (no matter what your business offers) and not like an airline: your customers generally will NOT be captive and will have plenty of options to acquire your product/service via other means.  Most small businesses can't afford to "fill that funnel" with new customers to overcome the loss of existing customers due to poor customer relationships.

Here's one key thing to keep in mind: acquiring new customers is almost always more expensive and more difficult than retaining and growing existing customers.

As a small business person, you need to acquire new customers always, but once you have acquired them, you need to keep them.  And one of the most cost-effective is to deliver excellent customer service.

More on that in part 2.