A whirlwind of conferences this past month – attending 5 conferences in 3 weeks! Crazy! And through this hectic travel period, attention was required to keep and nurture new accounts across multiple time zones around the globe, along with the other pleasures of keeping a business growing.
Keeping customers excited and happy to be doing business with me has always been a high priority. So how do I cope in chaotic times such as I’ve just come through? With 2 key tools:
· The first is a practice – one that I have long preached: always manage the expectations beings set and be sure to deliver to them… or be ready to explain why you couldn’t.
· The second is using the tools available to me (what did we do before the Blackberry... cell phones… laptops… VPN… J ). The upshot of this focus and commitment to our clients was that we closed the best quarter in the record of Xpertdoc history (you can read more here)!
A critical aspect to being able to connect with your clients is being able to show them you can add value to their lives and bottom line results to their business. With the Xpertdoc solutions (we offer document output technologies that help companies design and generate personalised client communications that also adhere to and respect corporate branding & compliance standards), our clients typically enjoy cost reductions of 50% + and 20% + productivity gains. Great for the business - yes! But the individual sponsors also find their own lives improved – lower frustrations in generating their communication pieces, efficiency in delivering timely solutions to their markets, comfort in using known technologies but leveraged to provide leading edge capabilities... all lend to creating a value-based experience in their jobs.
So while the business benefits from better bottom-line results, the knowledge worker feels empowered and able to contribute value to their interactions with their customers instead of being constrained by legacy systems and procedures that hinder their ability to deliver and excite their clients!
When a customer service agent makes a promise to their client, isn’t it great to be able to do deliver that on time and in a personalised format that makes the client feel like he/she is special and ‘known’? And if the agent fails to deliver to the expectations of the client, in today’s environment where instant gratification is the norm and loyalties are fickle, that client is quick to look at and move on to your competitors. So, key to continued success is the ability to set and manage the client’s expectations while delivering real tangible value in the process!
At the various shows attended, there were some little gems I encountered on this topic. And I will share some of the key experiences on each over the coming days …