5 Tips on Getting to Know Your Customers

5 Tips on Getting to Know Your Customers


1) Determine what you need to know. For example, what do they like or dislike about your product or service? How do they feel about the way your company handles complaints? Are they repeat customers? Why or why not?

2) Use one or more survey methods to measure customer satisfaction, such as direct mail, telephone calls, or focus groups (groups of 6-10 people who share their ideas about your product or service).

3) Hire an outside market research firm to develop questions and interpret findings, unless you have an experienced person in-house.

4) Have employees keep ongoing written records of customer compliments and complaints. Review these at staff meetings.

5) Once you know what your customers want, make the adjustments and improvements necessary to keep them coming back.

Brought to you by SCORE "Counselors to America's Small Business." Ask SCORE

Make Someone Happy—Your Customer


By Lillian Vernon
The Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership

...



Selling as Practicality


With making customers happy as your guide, an entrepreneur's next step is to ferret out the building blocks of happiness. In my opinion, there are three: selecting the right products, being honest with customers, and welcoming communications between the company and its customers.

What follows are suggestions for integrating these practicalities into your salesmanship.


Know Your Market.


Find the right product for the right customer, and find the right customer by advertising in the right place. This is the basic premise that drove my initial bag-and-belt success story in 1951. Aiming to reach teenage girls, I secured a product that would appeal to them and advertised in a publication they read.

A few months later, I advertised the same product in Vogue, resulting in very few orders. Teenagers didn't read Vogue. Mature women who did read it wanted haute couture, not matching bag-and-belt sets. All of a sudden, what had been the right product became the wrong product, sold to the wrong customer, through the wrong advertising venue. It made all the difference.


Sell, Don't Oversell


We've always made sure that our products represent quality and good value. I was a stickler for this, because back in the 1950s, mail order had a questionable reputation. Lots of products sold through catalogs were shoddy. I wanted to make sure my customers weren't disappointed.

For the same reason, we want the photographs and copy in our catalogs to provide an accurate representation of each product. Once, we featured a handsome purple poncho that, unfortunately, photographed with a bluish tinge. A schoolteacher wrote: "I would have bought your poncho, but, although the caption said it was purple, it looked blue in the picture. I couldn't afford to take a chance." That's the kind of catalog pitfall that we at Lillian Vernon can't afford either.

Similarly, we steer clear of hype in our copy writing. Aiming to sell, we don't want to oversell. We don't want our customers to be disappointed. It's even better if they're happier with their purchases than they thought they'd be.



Offer a Money-Back Guarantee


To overcome the questionable image that plagued the mail-order business in the early days, we also made it our policy to provide a 100 percent money-back guarantee. We have always refunded in cash or in credit, always without hesitation and with no time limits.

Once, a customer who was packing up her house to move found an unopened box of Old Foley stoneware from England. She had ordered it 20 years earlier and now had no use for it. When she returned it to us, it took me a little while to dig through the old catalogs for the price, $79.98, but we sent her the refund.

While some retailers fear abuses of such a policy, we don't see it that way. We believe the no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee shows respect for our customers as enlightened consumers. Forty-seven years later, it has paid off: the Lillian Vernon name is synonymous with outstanding customer service.


Communicate with Customers


Customer service is a two-way street. From the beginning, we have always listened to our customers and encouraged them to contact us. When we offered a $1 bookmark that became one of our all-time bestsellers, we heard them loudly and clearly. When they rejected a rolling pin that could be filled with ice to make rolling out pastry easier, we also heard that.

We read and respond to all customer letters, cheers and jeers alike, and we welcome and have acted upon many suggestions from customers. One of the best was listing age-appropriate guidelines on products in Lilly's Kids, our specialty children's catalog. Since we incorporated this idea, we have received countless compliments from readers who view it as an important service.


Interact With Customers


Communicating with customers needs to go further, however. In my view, an entrepreneur must be involved personally. In the early days, I myself answered the telephones and talked with customers. While that isn't possible any longer, I have tried to maintain that same spirit by personally writing introductions for each of our catalogs. Readers consider this message, complete with my photograph, a personal tie to me.

These days, the kitchen table and the index cards have been replaced by sophisticated focus groups for identifying customers, computers for keeping track of their preferences to a degree unimaginable 47 years ago, and state-of-the-art personalization and distribution facilities for making sure that disappointments are even fewer.

But these are just the trappings. The basics haven't changed. At Lillian Vernon, we strive to keep customers happy. From a catalog image that attempts to tap into their yearnings to be "a bit happier," to the steps we have taken to assure they aren't disappointed, we deliver on both a philosophical and practical level.

In doing so, we are guarding our crown jewels. Without the loyal following that those names represent, our company wouldn't exist. Making customers happy has made Lillian Vernon Corporation successful beyond my wildest expectations.

-30-

This article provided by The Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (KCEL) through its small business web site www.entreworld.org. EntreWorld is an online information resource for entrepreneurs and supporters of entrepreneurship. EntreWorld provides a solution to information overload on the web by providing highly filtered information coded by stage of business development.