Humanizing your product can mean simply building relationships with your customers. By getting to know them, you can identify ways that your services can meet their needs.
Bill Botkin, a sales consultant at Today’s Business Products, says his job isn’t just learning about new products as they come out. He also has to understand customers well enough to match products to their needs.
“The best advice I could give would be to develop the relationship within the client’s business,” Botkin says. “It’s a matter of knowing who the decision makers are and knowing what initiatives the client has that are important to them. What’s their mission? How can you help them accomplish their mission?”
But be prepared – once you ask the questions, the answers will keep flowing, bringing buckets of ideas for how you can improve your service. A network of consultants for Prentke Romich Co. stays in touch with customers to find out what’s working for them and what’s not. Ideas and suggestions bubble through them to a list in research and development.
When Russell Cross, vice president of product development, looks at that list to decide which ideas to implement, he subjects the suggestions to some metrics.
“At that point, what we do is to look at how many people we can affect by making a change and how much that will change their lives,” he says. “How will that affect the lives of their caregivers? Also, what does it take us in terms of manpower and resource to do it? The trick that we have is … to get a mix of finding opportunities that will give us the maximum output for the most people but using as few of the resources that we have available.”
[Watch a video of Cross discussing how ideas become reality at Prentke Romich Co.]
Because those resources are limited, you won’t be able to go after every opportunity – and you shouldn’t, says Carmella Calta, founder and CEO of Staffing Solutions Enterprises.
“[It’s] really understanding your customer base, really making sure that your core competencies are shored up and that you don’t move too far away from the core of your business,” Calta says. “It’s very attractive; you hear about all of these different opportunities and it seems very easy to go into a new business line or whatever. But if your core business isn’t strong, sometimes – especially as a small business owner – you’re spreading your resources out too thinly.”
[Watch a video of Calta explaining how she adapts to changes at Staffing Solutions Enterprises.]
For more coverage of the World Class Customer Service Awards, read about all 31 nominees.
