For many businesses, particularly those providing services, more than 85% of business comes from personal referrals and recommendations. Yet many businesses spend thousands of hours, and dollars, trying to acquire new customers, and relatively little time and effort nurturing and retaining their existing ones.

Valuing and retaining your current clients and customers is essential. Not only will you benefit from their continued custom directly, you are also more likely to benefit from any new clients or customers they recommend. And given that it’s 6-7 times more expensive to gain one new client or customer than it is to retain one, retaining your existing clients and customers, and being highly recommendable, can have a huge positive impact on your profitability.

Clients and customers who already trust and respect you:

• are more likely to acknowledge, and value, what you provide and the benefits they gain from dealing with you
• may be more willing to accept your prices, terms and conditions without question or negotiation
• are often more loyal
• require less ’selling to’ and
• are more likely to continue doing business with you, and even increase the amount they spend, as their trust in you increases.

They are also significantly more likely to recommend you to people they know and trust giving you an opportunity to gain new clients whilst reducing your acquisition costs and improving your profitability. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many ways to create, and maintain, a winning reputation, some of which are specific to an industry, or even a business or individual. However, the seven ‘Reputation Branding Essentials’ below apply across the board and can help you develop and maintain a reputation that will open doors rather than slam them shut!

1. Keep abreast of changing values and expectations
People’s expectations are constantly changing. What they value in you, and your products or services, today may not be what they value tomorrow. Read and research widely and actively engage with those you want to create lasting relationships with regularly to stay in tune with them.

2.  Aim for ‘win/win’ outcomes from every interaction
Focus on nurturing a long-term relationship rather than a short term gain. For example, if you know another provider may have a better solution than you, recommend them. The level of trust your client or customer will have in you will go up and your reputation will be enhanced immensely.

3.  Make it easy for people to recommend you
When someone recommends you, they are putting their reputation on the line. Make people feel good about dealing with you and you’ll enhance your chances of being recommended. Deliver on your promises and focus on building high-trust, high-value relationships. Acting with integrity will also help you be recommended more often.

4.  Never ‘bad-mouth’ or be disparaging about others
Bad-mouthing your competitors or others is a major reputation loser. No-one likes a gossip. News travels fast, especially online and people will think “if they say those things about them, what might they be saying about me?” If you don’t have anything good to say, it’s better to say nothing at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Very occasionally companies or organisations provide excellent examples of how to create a competitive edge simply by being who they are. The email below – a genuine email sent to a genuine customer, who then sent it to me – is one such example. (Personal details have been changed.)

Being friendly without being overly familiar, and allowing your personality to shine through, is almost always a reputation winner!  Congratulations to 1-day for a memorable, ‘feel-good’ response to an every-day event.

From: David at 1-day
Sent: Thursday, 6 May 2010 7:29 a.m.
To: Richard
Subject: Invoice from 1-day for PSP game

Dear Richard

Thanks for your order with 1-Day! Invoice # ABCDEFG.

Your product has been painstakingly removed from our shelves, the dust wiped free, and carefully placed inside its packaging. It has gone through a number of checks and all with contamination free sterilised gloves.

A hush echoed through the 100 staff as the final tape locked down the packaging. We all linked arms and swayed in time (except for Luke who was swinging his hips in the opposite direction to everyone else) and sung the 1-day version of ‘I’m leaving… On a jet plane’. Real tears were shed by some of us, who are still coming to terms with the fact the product has left the building for good.

Read the rest of this entry »

When a company decides to have an official presence on Facebook, or other online social media network, they open themselves up to two huge opportunities:

• They can connect and communicate with potential and existing clients and customers keen to engage in a dialogue with that company and build trust in the process.

• They also run the risk of getting offside with ‘fans’, friends’ and ‘followers’ big-time if they fail to understand the ‘rules of engagement’ and try and use what are perceived as ‘big-brother’ tactics in the process.

The fall-out that’s occurred, which is neatly summarised in Bernard Warner’s blog post at SocialMediaToday.com, demonstrates how the internet can become a bitter battlefield where wars are won or lost based not on words, but on behaviour.

No matter how much a company or organisation may want to control their image and reputation online, it’s almost impossible to do – especially via Social Networking sites such as Facebook.

Attacking its commentators is unlikely to have endeared Nestle to the 90,000 or so ‘friends’ it has (had?) on Facebook as Rick Broida points out at bnet.com.

I’d hazard a guess it would have earned more respect, and perhaps even enhanced its reputation, if it had responded in a way that said ‘we hear you, we welcome your feedback, and we’re actually quite pleased you’re taking the time to let us know how you feel’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you finalise your New Year resolutions? Got your targets and action plans in place for a stellar year in 2010? Are you lining things up to give yourself the best chance possible of achieving everything you want this year?

Great! You’re amongst a small percentage of people committed to making things happen. People who are willing to be held accountable for their actions, and accept full responsibility for their achievement.

Setting high targets and challenging ourselves is a worthy pursuit. Congratulate yourself as you tick them off your ‘to-do’ list and enjoy the sense of satisfaction that will surely come from achieving your goals.

And as you enjoy the journey, remember that in our rush to acquire more, achieve more and experience more, we sometimes forget that what we have, and do, is less important than who we are and how we contribute.

The words of Michael Josephson, of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, are very timely at the start of a new year and new decade. We are, after all, human ‘beings’, not human ‘doings’ or human ‘havings’.  What will matter?

Read the rest of this entry »

New Year resolutions happen every year, but predictions generally only occur at the turn of a decade. Knowing what might happen before it actually occurs would certainly be handy.

If we could predict what might happen it would certainly give us a competitive edge.  We could be ‘one-step-ahead-of-the-game’, give us an opportunity to maximise every opportunity and put all our efforts into those things likely to generate the greatest reward – whatever we might want that to be.

Moving from the ‘noughties’ to the teen years of the 21st Century  gives us a opportunity, not only to look back on what happend between 2000 and 2009 – think iTunes, the social media explosion and wireless internet – but also to look ahead and predict what might happen during 2010 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Think social media doesn’t matter to you, your business or your reputation? Think again!  Socialnomics’ ‘Social Media Revolution’ clip on YouTube is doing an excellent job of showing how important social media is, and will continue to be, to all of us – both as consumers and product and service providers.

There are currently more than 200 million blogs with 54 percent bloggers posting content or tweeting daily.  Around 34 percent of these bloggers are posting opinions about products and brands online. What might they be saying about you?

It’s worth giving it some thought as around 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations, but only 14 percent trust advertisements.  I wonder why?!

Now, you might think ‘all this web stuff’s not for me’ and you may be right. But celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres currently have more followers on Twitter than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. Read the rest of this entry »

2009 was the year the rules changed. The ‘who cares?’ attitude that seemed to dominate so many of our businesses, and personal interactions, up until then finally faced a reality check. Suddenly, large numbers of us started to care.

We cared about whether our life-savings and investments would still be around for us to draw on so we could enjoy a comfortable and happy retirement. We cared that our order books were shrinking and our debtors were taking longer to pay, or not paying at all. We cared that the jobs we were in, and the businesses we ran, would continue to generate income so we could keep paying the bills and live the life we’d become accustomed to. Read the rest of this entry »

‘Perception is reality’ and ‘the customer is always right’. Two tenets Contact Energy’s board failed to consider when they tried to push through a significant pay increase for themselves whilst increasing prices by over 10% last year.

It cost them dearly. Not only did they lose around 41,000 customers and millions of dollars, they also lost a massive amount of goodwill and severely damaged their reputation. The long-term effects will be significant.

When a telemarketing company phoned me a few weeks ago trying to entice me to switch from my current energy provider to Contact I let her know I wasn’t interested for one reason only: what I considered to be the behaviour of the board in thumbing their noses at their customers and shareholders. She seemed quite surprised I was so specific. “I’ll pass that on” she said. ‘Yes, please do’ said I.

Whilst Contact was left scratching its head at the customer exodus, other energy companies that took a customer perspective clearly benefited as a result.

If each of those 41,000 customers paid, on average, $400 a year for their power, Contact would have lost over $16 million. Multiply that by, say, 4 years (before the customer’s inertia cuts in and they decide to switch providers) and could lose more than $65 million. Quite a sum to throw away.

Business editor, Liam Dann’s comments in his New Zealand Herald article hit the nail on the head:

“… managing director David Baldwin was forced to publicly concede that the losses were linked to the high-profile efforts of the board to ram through large fee increases in the face of widespread shareholder opposition. The admission is one which confirms a monumental failing of the board. It acted in its own self-interest and ultimately in a manner which was damaging to the company.”

That about sums it up! Not only did they lose immediate and longer-term revenue, the reputational damage is enormous. Indeed, another Herald report notes:

“… the fallout following last year directors’ fee shambles was the worst blow to its reputation in the company’s history.”

Lines company Vector, on the other hand, read the mood of its shareholders and customers more accurately and dropped its proposed directors’ fees increases before its meeting, winning praise – and no doubt customers – in the process.

Dann’s article concludes:

“It is about keeping up with social trends and behaviour and staying in tune with the mood of the people. After all the people, if nothing else, are the customers.”

I totally agree. Perception is reality and the customer is always right … in their opinion. Forget this at your peril. The sound of departing customers can be thunderous or silent. Either way, you may find yourself with fewer, if any, to argue with.