Did you mess up again?

Have you ever thought about the marketing value of knowing the mistakes you have made in the past? I am here to tell you that learning about your mistakes is a gold mine  of marketing wealth. Most of us would like to think that we are providing good services to everyone who takes a chance on using our businesses.  Unfortunately, this is rarely true for absolutely everyone who patronizes our businesses.

If you are competent and have a pleasant disposition, odds are that you are able to meet the needs of the vast majority of your clients. However, none of us are one hundred percent successful and the gold is found in understanding what caused us to lose clients. Somewhere, your marketing and customer service systems failed you and more than likely it will happen again unless you address it.

The real problem here is studies have shown that up to 96 percent of people who experience a bad interaction with your business will never spontaneously complain to you. Why is it a bad thing you don’t have to deal with their complaints?  Because they just leave and never come back!  Despite the fact that they don’t complain to you, they will be more than happy to tell everyone they know to stay away from your business.

Typically for every complaint you hear about, about 25 others are unhappy with you and don’t bother to tell you. Again, they just leave!  If that isn’t enough to motivate you, realize that up to 95  percent of them would have continued to patronize your business if you had resolved the problem quickly.

In today’s economy setting up a system to track client feedback about your business may be the most cost effective marketing task you will ever accomplish. It really isn’t that hard to do. First you need to have a system to track who patronizes your business and how often. Second you must have their contact information. Finally, you must develop a system to actively solicit their feedback about the experience with your business. Of course there are a lot more details to put all this together, but the  overall system is that easy. The vast majority of business never bother to set it up!

More on Customer Service Failure Gold!

It's no secret to anyone breathing that in the US we are in the worst financial crisis of most of our lifetimes. If you are worried about your business you are certainly not alone! The next few days bring great uncertainty about what the governernment is going to do to try and help. Will they bail out the banks, or will the hard line republicans win out and nothing will be done immediately? Who knows! What is clear is that the vast majority of Americans are very unhappy with the situation and not keen on sinking billions of dollars into saving an industry known for greed.

More on The Great Depression- Part Two?

The Washington Post last week had an article by Stephen Perlstein which compared the recent collapse of major financial institutions to a category 4 financial storm.  It is quite an eye opening article and clearly points out the dangers of our current situation. He described it as perhaps the greatest destruction of financial wealth the world has ever seen! The most important part of the collapse we are seeing on small businesses will be the inability to obtain credit and loans and the loss of customers who are becoming ever more tight with their budgets.

More on Category 4 Financial Storm and Small Business