Last month Allegra Networks, a 400 plus unit franchisor, published an article in their quarterly franchise magazine, Connections, sharing lessons learned from around the network. The article explains how Eileen Rogers and Ted Raymond, owners of the Allegra franchise in Scottsdale, AZ, focused the business on multi-channel marketing, including variable data printing and personalized URLS, while making the shift to a marketing services provider. In addition, Eileen and Ted explain how customer feedback became part of their strategy.
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NAPL releases Field Case Book, a new initiative to share best practices and innovations with printers.  In NAPL’s first  field book case study, a printer is highlighted for a creative customer retention strategy saving $130,000 in business within the first month of the strategy. 

Click here for complete case:  http://www.fieldcasebook.org/

Jamestown, RI, March 23, 2009 – As part of its commitment to help printers develop profitable, highly responsive, customer-focused organizations, Survey Advantage ( www.surveyadvantage.com), a customer research and loyalty firm, has released a new report for all CustomerPulse™ customers. The report tracks customer loyalty and a referral rating continuously, and benchmarks real-time with other printers.

“It is great that the different printing industry MIS systems are incorporating CustomerPulse™ into their customer management processes. This enables printers to select jobs and contacts to send a survey in just five minutes a week. With low administration time the printer can now get the same customer intelligence the hospitality industry has been collecting for years. Now any size printer can obtain feedback after jobs are shipped helping them gauge loyalty, promote referral programs, and drive improvements.” said Michael Casey, president of Survey Advantage.

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In January 2009, 205 independent quick printers shared their thoughts on the question “Where do you think the top growth opportunities are in 2009?” Digital printing is on the minds of 82% of quick printers. The ability to make short runs quickly, managing staffing levels, and training time are key drivers of this investment. After that quick printers see mailing services (56%) and large format (28%) as the next most important to growing their business. Marketing services, web design, promotion products were all in the low 20′s or teens in the percentage seeing these areas as growth areas.

It is amazing how many quick printer customers still don’t view their printer as a mailing house or someone who can do large format. As an example, in a recent print buyer study we asked the awareness question for these services. We surveyed the customer base of a quick printer asking thier customers about awareness of each product and service. Only 25% of their customers were aware they offered bulk mail and 70% large format. The interesting thing was that many customers stressed their interest in learning more.

You can’t assume that customers will remember you just by mailing a few flyers and mentioning it a few times. Get creative on your messaging. Becoming a marketing service provider starts under your roof. Launch that new service this year and measure awareness as you go. A good goal to shot for is over 90% awareness.

The difference between customers “Likely” to recommend and those “Very Likely” to recommend is much wider than you think. Let’s look at how a conversation could go between a prospective print buyer who is asking one of your customers for help choosing a printer.

As an owner and sales person I would feel just great with my customer’s performance! That performance is a direct result of your performance. The quality work and service you provide makes it easy for them to feel confident in you helping their friend.

As an owner or someone is sales I wouldn’t be too thrilled with my customer’s enthusiasm here. The prospect is probably thinking he may consider ABC Printer, but it definitely isn’t a homerun and he probably should just keep asking other friends.

ABC Printers is not flattered to say the least! Now it can get really ugly from here. No one has customers feeling the way this next person feels. Only kidding, we all make mistakes.

Ugh! This is what brings a business to the brink. We don’t need to many of these characters running around spreading doom and gloom. What was that commercial “Don’t let this happen to you.”

Now let’s get back on the bright side of life.

Keep your employees focused on “WOWing” customers and keep all employees accountable for driving the customers to jump on the chance to refer you. Give them the opportunity to brag about their great decision to work with you. If someone is “Likely” to recommend you, find out what it will take to get to “Very Likely”.

It is amazing how many customers will give you a false sense of security by saying “Likely”. Some customers will say “I never give anyone the best ratings.” I totally disagree with this and any time you probe and dig deeper you will find that they do recommend other suppliers who are “WOWing” them.

Your “Very Likely” customers are most likely to take full advantage of a referral program, drive prospects through your doors so you don’t need to spend big advertising and marketing dollars, and they will help you stay profitable. Creating more “Very Likely” customers will maintain that stability in your business. Rally and promote to your team to focus on the customer no matter where they are in the organization. Everyone is in customer service and their goal should be to delight customers.

Focus on keeping a high percentage of your customers in the “Very Likely” to recommend bucket.

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A few years back a great book was published, The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld. He explains how several well known leaders in their industries leverage customer loyalty to drive profitability. It makes so much sense. If customers love your product and feel unique and special, they will recommend you.

Think about your marketing budget. What if you could get rid of the budget because prospects keep knocking on your doors? Enterprise Rent-a-car™ is praised in their industry for profitability and embracing the concept of customer loyalty. It is no surprise they have become the #1 rental business in the world.  Their advertising budget is a fraction of their competitors’.

What does this have to do with the printing industry? The best run printers have lower marketing budgets and leverage referral programs to keep customer’s promoting. This doesn’t happen overnight, but is part of their long term strategy.   ABC Printers tracks performance, reads customer comments daily, sets up teams to correct problems, engages the customer with this first hand feedback, sets up referral programs, and promotes customer loyalty.   They know when loyalty is dropping, and more importantly they address the issues immediately.  The operation remains customer focused and it pays off.  

We changed the name of the real printer to ABC Printers to protect identify.

How do you know if your customers are promoting you? The best way is measuring sources of incoming business. Recently one printer measured that 17% of their customers came from referrals while another was over 40%. What a difference. What a great way to save marketing dollars by having prospects knocking on your door. It is not surprising that the printer with 40% is growing during the recession while the 17% printer is hanging on.

How do you measure the customer referral factor in your business? There are two ways. First, any good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system has fields to flag the source of new customers. Measure both internal referrals within your larger shared accounts and external referrals or new business relationships. Second, printers should ask after orders are delivered if the customer will recommend you to colleagues and friends. Do this on a continual basis, but respect your high volume customers. Surveying once a month is acceptable if the survey is short and done professionally. Only the highest ratings should be considered promoters of your business. Based on our print buyer surveying the average printer receives an 82%. This means that 82% of their customers are very likely to recommend. The best printers are above 90% and the lower tier is just north of 70%. The fascinating thing about the concept of creating raving fans or delighted customers is that major corporations such as Enterprise Rent-a-car, Southwest Airlines, and Intuit continue to grow profitably by viewing the long term value of a customer and measuring their referral scores.

In the printing industry we offer printers a program, CustomerPulse, which calculates the industry referral index on a monthly basis.  Frankly the bar is higher for the printing industry than just about any industry out there.  The ability to move to another printer is easy in many instances and most print buyers already buy from multiple printers.  Also, the Business to Business dynamic needs to be taken into account.

Be truthful with yourself when measuring customer loyalty or tendency for customers to refer you.  One printer shared that their score was over 90%, but it was based on 50 surveys a month out of the 4,000 individual businesses buying from them monthly.

Start measuring referral sources and measure your customer loyalty and referral index on a continual basis.  It will help your long term profitability.

Ever work with a supplier, business partner, or vendor when your relationship was virtually dead and you were actively searching for someone else to supply that service or product to you?  You were walking or still buying from them, but trying like mad to get out from under them.  They made life so miserable for you, were very difficult to do business with, were rigid in their policies, did not come through for you when you needed them.   You felt liberated when you could finally tell them to go pound sand.   You then went on to tell everyone you could how aweful it was and now how good it was. 

Now as a business owner or manager, we all need to look in the mirror.  I will be the first to confess that I have at times made life miserable for customers, but not on purpose.  Maybe you are now saying “Boy, that business is messed up”.  Well, if you have been in business more than 20 years and haven’t had a dissatisfied customer I want to hang out with you.  Things happen, but we need to own up to it, fix the issue quickly and stay on top of it.  Process breakdowns, lack of proper resources, miscommunications can cause train wrecks, but typically the problems start small and if left uncorrected come to a head.  When we hear of these problems we apologize and can’t believe it happened.

Does your business know when customers are so frustrated with you that they are trying to leave?   The larger the enterprise, the trickier it is to know.  The smaller the enterprise, the easier for the customer to gently walk away without telling the truth to your face.  Here are a true story from a recent survey we conducted.  A printer recieved a loyalty rating, those who say they would recommend you to others, of 53%.  Average printers run in the 92% range here.  Nearly 100 years ago they carved out their niche and owned the market by locking out competition, but now things changed and their ex-customers were telling them why they left and really gave it to them.   The “Walking Dead” or those still buying, but feeling hostage explained their efforts to find someone else.  I felt aweful for the business because it was slowing dying and management continued to blame the economy and the shift to the internet as the reason.  There is some truth in that, but customers were also walking to other printers.  It was not the quality of the product as much as the level of service that caused the walking dead.

Lesson learned:  keep the pulse of your customers over time, react quickly, and don’t become complacent.     

Here are a few things to consider when you look at customer loyalty and keeping the pulse.  Think of the critical satisfiers for your customer base.  Assuming your product is solid, think of the things such as responsiveness to e-mail and voicemails,  shipping product on time, having clear invoices, estimating properly, estimating timely, communicating project status on a continuous basis, issuing credits timely, shipping the right products,  having product in stock for quick delivery.  Pick the top 4 or 5 things that if done well will put you in the best position.  But, don’t neglect the little things that can drive people crazy.   

Great Customer Loyalty is driven by treating each customer in a unique and special way while doing the basics well.

A quick post today to close out the week on Customer Database Management.

I cannot stress the importance of maintaining an accurate and reliable customer database. Of course this should include contact, company, mailing address, email, etc. Most importantly – the information in the database must be clean. That means names and companies spelled and punctuated correctly, and not in the dreaded all caps format.

If you aren’t email marketing to your current customer database, you are missing out on an extremely easy, fast, and cost effective medium. If your contact list isn’t up to date however, you can throw easy and fast out the window. By taking the time today to make sure the information goes into your CRM correctly, you can save yourself hours later cleaning bad data out of an excel sheet.

Think of your best suppliers, vendors, partnerships. These are busineses that make you feel special and unique. They do the little things that don’t cost a lot of money, but show flexibilty, responsiveness and you connect with them. For printers this means asking your customers what you can do to make life easier and then delivering on that. If they want proofs picked up, then you pick them up. If they want a call when you drop the mailer, then you personally call their cell phone to let them know. Here are a few easy things to do to make the customer feel special.

1) Give your best customers your cell phone and maybe even your home phone. They won’t call unless it is an emergency, but it shows you care.
2) Invest in a robust CRM system. Be able to track key dates, events, personal information, notes from past meetings. Takethe time to review this before your visits or phone calls.
3)Communicate the way the customer wants. Some love e-mail and others hate it. Ask customers and use the appropriate methods. Respect “Opt Outs” from your communications, but be careful managing this. Most customers don’t want to be “Opted out” of everything, but maybe just one e-communication piece. Manage this to keep communications open.
4)Don’t assume they are doing well. Ask them face to face, survey them once a year, do a short simple survey once a month. Keep those lines open. Some customers will tell you face to face if something is up, but some rather think and type up their thoughts in a comments box of a survey. One size doesn’t fit all.
5) Think of chemistry and don’t be afraid to move or assign CSRs and sales people who match the chemistry of the customer. Many people will buy based on rapport as well as how well you do.
6) Always tell the truth. I know this sounds obvious, but customers respect if you tell them if you made a mistake. Of course you can’t have too many of those, but owning up to it is respected and honorable.