Thursday, August 13, 2009

Look for the simple answers

With a multitude of business books and marketing theories it is easy to become convinced that marketing is a very complicated and confusing business.

I am sure it can be, but often that is because we fail to look for the simple solutions.

For example, I once worked with a company promising 24 hour delivery - we probably managed it 80% of the time but that meant we let down a fifth of our customers.

When we asked them how important 24 hour delivery was we found that much more important was keeping to our delivery promises - whether that be 24, 48 or 72 hours!

By understanding what really mattered to our customers we could tailor our service and ensure that we were actually satisfying almost 100%.

A simple question but a huge impact on customer satisfaction.