Today’s post is short and sweet.
It centers on a wonderful quote from Bill Gates: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
As human beings, we tend to cruise down the great highway of life, taking as few detours as possible, intent on reaching whatever big goal it is that we have in mind, if indeed we have fixed on one. To use an expression I learned years ago in sales, we can be described as “fat, dumb and happy.”
If we’re in sales or marketing—and I believe we all ultimately are—what disrupts our forward momentum is unhappiness on the part of our customers. Dealing with someone who doesn’t like our work or our latest product is never fun, but even for the crabby or the lazy, there’s something to be learned. When everyone seems pleased with what we’re doing, we continue to do it, even though we may sense that we’ll be tripped up at some point.
So, what can we learn? Here are a few ideas:
- Our product or service has become irrelevant.
- We haven’t delivered what we promised, hoping the client wouldn’t notice or would give us a free pass.
- We have appeared to be unengaged (and maybe we were).
- We’ve missed a deadline without a really, really good reason
- We’ve gotten a little sloppy, opting to deliver something that was “close enough.”
These problems create unhappy customers, and they’re not limited to small businesses with constrained resources.
I love it when things get interactive on my blog, so please let me know what you’ve done to avoid having unhappy customers or tell me how you’ve responded to them.
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