Insisting Companies Listen to Their Customers
(Translated from Reforma national newspaper)
MEXICO, May 14, 2008- David Sable invites companies to communicate what is relevant.
Forget about the classic “location, location, location” (or that the location of your company is everything) as the premise for sucessful business. Clients now can find any company, as all of them have the same location: the internet. “Location means nothing, we need relevance” assured David Sable, marketing specialist and COO of the agency Wunderman.
Companies, he explained in the Foro Mundial de los Negocios, must be able to communicate important and relevant information for each one of their customers. The problem is, said Sable, that most companies believe they know what customers want. “We are seduced by the fact that we believe we know everything about our customers”, assured Sable.
“(but) the biggest part of the information we have, mostly saturates our service”. With technology, it is possible to know where they navigate, where they live, what they do for a living, where they are. “The deal is, what happens when they find you, when they enter your store, when they click on your web page, when they phone your call center….Do you know them? Do you pay enough attention?”.
An average person receives between 2,000 and 6,000 daily messages from diverse sources. “This means that customer really manages the business; they can delete us, turn us off or ignore us”, adviced the expert.
Then the challenge is to try to understand them. A client can actually be a house wife, a rock diva and at the same time, a martial arts fan, David Dable said playfully. He also insisted that businessmen should listen to customers, even when they complain. “When clients call with a problem and complain, you have a loyal customer begging not to be hugged, but to be listened to”.
He recommended to allow customers to become the managers of their companies and to remember that they are looking for a good service, a good product and at a good price.
“Some of this was lost during the beginning of the internet revolution, but finally they realized that just a good price (without the service), it is not enough”, he explained after, during a press conference.
Highlights
Learn from the successful people. These are the key concepts David Sable highlighted in the Foro Internacional de los Negocios.
- Listen. “In your ability to listen is where true innovation happens”
- Join the movement. “Can’t be ashamed of being exposed”
- Be innovative and test your products “You can test in small amounts”
- Be relevant. “No matter how much you focus your products to clients, if the information is not relevant, its worthless”