Really Care What Your Customers Think?
If so, give them your personal contact info for two months and prepare to listen
Starting next week and for two months straight, we will be putting this postcard above in the over 24,000 boxes that we directly ship to our MegaFood customers. It includes my email address and more importantly my personal cell phone number…
“Why in the world would you ever do that? Won’t you just end up getting calls from people who just want to whine? What if your number gets on a list somewhere and you get crazy calls from people just trying to sell you? There is so much that can go wrong with this idea, Robert — what are you thinking?”
These are the questions I heard from people. Well, here’s what I am thinking:
- I want to hear the good, bad and the ugly
- I trust my customers to call with important stuff
- This is an opportunity for me to build personal relationships with my customers — relationships are at the foundation of great brands and partnerships
Big Trust is the main driver of this idea. Trust starts with relationships. Relationships start with vulnerability. This vulnerability all starts with a simple conversation. Trust is one person at a time, not some hyped up, big company, marketing approach to building a brand.
Besides, people who are passionate enough about MegaFood to call me will give me the keys to the kingdom! They will tell me:
How do you stay connected to your customers?
- Exactly where we are making mistakes, so we can make it better
- What has them excited about our brand, so we can keep doing that
- What they are seeing in the marketplace that has them concerned, so we can help them with that
- Cool, new product ideas that will satisfy them personally, help their customers and that just might be the next big thing
What’s the worst thing that could happen? You learn some things about your business? Make some new friends? The risks of this approach are far outweighed by the advantages.
Robert U. Craven, MegaFood CEO
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on March 23, 2016.
