Buzz!Words

Trust and Relationship Marketing

Trust. Did you know that 30% of customer loyalty is determined by a customer's feeling of trust? According to Ipsos Canada, trust is more important than brand (13%) and price (14%) in determining customer loyalty.

Sunday night I watched The Nature of Things, which had a documentary on medical errors. According to their research, the way to prevent medical mistakes is to tell the truth and learn from our mistakes. Patients want honesty, information and apologies, not lawsuits.

Business gurus call this behaviour "transparency". Don Tapscot and David Ticoll, in The Naked Corporatation show how transparency or lack of it can profoundly impact consumers' trust.

We are entering an extraordinary age of transparency, where businesses must for the first time make themselves clearly visible to shareholders, customers, employees, partners, and society. Financial data, employee grievances, internal memos, environmental disasters, product weaknesses, international protests, scandals and policies, good news and bad; all can be seen by anyone who knows where to look.

Lesson Learned: Tell the truth when you screw up, admit it, apologize and fix it. Honesty and openess can build your business, and let you sleep at night.

Easy Way to Lose Sales

My rant today is about responding to customer inquiries. Did you know that the average consumer expects a response to an email inquiry within one day? They would prefer it to be within one hour.

I sent an email last week to McAfee, about their Spyware software, because I couldn't seem to get it to work properly. It took me 20 minutes to find the "free" support email on their site. I couldn't call them, cause they charge $1.99 USD per minute, and the average call is 17 minutes. And I'm cheap. I have not yet received a return email, even acknowledging that I am in some kind of response queue. Eight days later.

This is a problem. For McAffee. Because next year, when my Norton anti virus subscription runs out, I was considering buying the McAfee big bundle (you know the anti superbug killer, spy ware remover, spam killer the whole kit and caboodle package). Now, it's Norton for sure, even though it costs more.

Here is an interesting fact. 84% of realtors in the US agreed in a poll that email inquiries from their customers should be answered within 8 hours of reciept. So Realtors.com did a study and found that 73% of all email leads did not meet this 8 hour guideline. And 44% of leads were not responded to at all. Talk about wasting marketing money. You just spent big bucks to develop a website, and lots more bucks to market it.

If I will migrate to another supplier for $149 software purchase, you can bet your boots I'll go to another real estate agent for a $300,000 purchase. And, with the internet, it's as easy as clicking a button.

Lesson Learned: Always have a customer response plan for all email leads generated from your website and other marketing initiatives.