This topic is sadly one that seems to be moving in the wrong direction.

It’s the lack of communication with your customers. Your “touches” — how often they hear from you, whether a deliberate sales or marketing message, exposure to advertising, or planned non-sales communication (just keeping in touch, reminders, warranty or admin issues).

You should touch your customers at LEAST 12 times per year. If not every fortnight in some way. That can include electronic methods, if you know they’re getting opened and seen.

You should ESPECIALLY touch your customers when your business processes change. Case in point: one of our trade printers operates to a strict weekly schedule. It’s at least a page long: absolute submission deadlines and then promised delivery days.

It’s a pretty important document between the customer and supplier.

Last time I remember (a couple of years back), they sent us out a new copy when the document changed. And we rely on that every month — sometimes more often — to send them work.

We relied on it today when we submitted two large jobs that have a delivery schedule on Monday.

Only to find out — AFTER the job was put through their system, that delivery is now Tuesday — “it’s on the new schedule,” they said.

“Did you send us a copy?”

“No, we put it on our website, but it is hard to find.”

Is pretty close to how the conversation went.

What are they thinking? This is a very important document between us and this supplier — nearly as important as their price list — and one of only 2 important documents they need to keep us updated on. But they didn’t bother to let us know when it changed.

We’re an active customer. We should be touched regularly! But we’re not.

It would only have taken a friendly email. Another good reason to keep the relationship alive.

When was the last time you touched your customers? Or let them know of important changes?

TWO websites this morning that I visited gave me great reminders about rembering the customer’s point of view.

We are after vinyl magazine holders/files. Believe it or not, our huge, massive office stationer doesn’t have vinyl ones anymore — just cardboard or hard plastic.

After discovering the search terms I needed, I found a couple of websites.

The first — blasted music from EVERY page — on a stationery website. What are they thinking? Every time I clicked a link on the site, the music started playing. I had to turn it off manually EVERY time. Crikey. I gave up, it wasn’t worth it.

The second — every product had “call for pricing” — with an email link. Another sales brick wall, on several levels. Firstly, most of their competitors are upfront about pricing, why aren’t they? Do they price differently for different callers? Where is the trust? If I email them, will they slap me on a mailing list without permission?

I took the step to email them… now waiting for a reply.

In the meantime, I found the page on their website that talks about shipping — orders over $50 free, under $50 it costs $6.60. That’s fine. NORMALLY, I would pick a few more products we need (we always can do with more office stuff)… and bump up the order for free shipping. But — in this case, doing that would involve an email for every product.

Crikey. Again, too hard from the customer’s point of view. Easier to just wear the $6.60 shipping and not bother. Not showing pricing took away my desire to spend more!

Are YOU thinking about your customer with everything you do?

Update: while I waited for a return email, I found another supplier with pricing online — $4 each. The email came back pretty quickly from the “call for pricing” people — but the price was $7.95 each for the same thing, and it was too late — I’d already ordered (and ended up spending $89 for some other bits and pieces too). They missed the sale — and we spent about 400% more than originally planned, adding in other items.

Recently we had a situation where a printing order delivered direct from our supplier to our client arrived in terrible condition.

Our client, most unhappy with the printing, dropped in the two boxes of newsletters and we could clearly see how the printing had gone wrong: lots of scuffing and smudgy ink. Out of 2,500 copies of the newsletter, we were only able to save about 800 copies — 1,700 needed re-printing. Our client wasn’t upset with us, by the way, because we are very upfront about using trade services, and don’t pretend to supply something ourselves when it comes via a supplier).

I called the printer, and they agreed to reprint the newsletters required. They were adamant the job left them all okay (we didn’t dispute that), but that the problems must have occurred in transit. I can only guess that technically, cold winter weather can cause problems, although it still seems rather poor to us, that either the packaging didn’t protect the contents, or how, technically, the problems only arose after leaving the factory. (The boxes weren’t damaged in any way.)

Whilst the goods were sent road freight, we used a different company (TNT, who we find excellent) than the printer would normally use, because of an extremely bad experience earlier this year with the printer’s choice of freight companies (in that experience, goods sat unaccounted for in Melbourne for 5 days and missed a very critical deadline, and the freight company refused to do anything about it. At that point we vowed not to give the freight company any more business and instructed our printer they weren’t to be used in future).

Back to this recent job.

We then got a phone call, later in the afternoon, from the printer, saying that, as we hadn’t used their allocated freight company, but our own alternative choice — they weren’t accepting any responsibility for the problem, and we should bear the full cost of the reprint. Even several days later, I still cannot see how this ends up being OUR problem — as the goods were sent from the printer to the client and arrived in terrible condition. How could a choice of freight company make a difference, as they both would have driven the same road route on virtually the same schedule?

I was somewhat aggrieved by this stance. We’ve given this print supplier more than $49,000 in work in the last 12 months, and had thought they had an excellent can-do attitude. Now, here they were baulking at a reprint that would probably cost them no more than $150 to $200 — what were they risking?

What was our “Lifetime Customer Value” to them?

On our average supplier relationships, you could easily expect us to be a customer for at least 5 years, if not 10 years or more. Our longest print relationship is 14 years and counting. Even if you halve that — and call it “7 years” as what we’re worth — that’s 7 x $49,000 (which we expect to grow to at least double that amount over the next 18 months).

Conservatively, the next 6 years are worth $294,000. That’s just from us — not even from referrals that we make. And here that relationship was at risk for a mere $150 or thereabouts.

Would you risk $294,000 in future business on a $150 decision?

I wouldn’t.

For our own clients, sometimes they make mistakes when ordering particular products we offer. In this case, it’s personalised honeymoon registry invitations for our travel shops. Occasionally, the shops gives us the wrong spelling of a name (they’ve supplied the names, approved our proof, and we’ve printed and despatched the goods. Our client’s honeymoon customer then sees the invites and points out the error).

In that case, our client knows they’ve made the mistake. They call us to order again, knowing they have to pay again, and even letting us know they’re sorry for the mixup and waste of time.

They expect us to bill them for it. But we don’t!

In fact, we generally reprint and send the goods again for free, even when we don’t have to.

How good — relieved — does that make our client feel?

They don’t have to wear the cost themselves, and they can even let their own clients know that replacement invites are being sent for free.

We operate ABOVE their expectation. They expect us to bill them again, and know that we can. But when we don’t do what they expect, we go one level better.

They love us! We get thank you emails and calls, our clients appreciate our attitude.

I’m not silly. I appreciate their business and I know what it’s worth. I know their Lifetime Customer Value to me. I would be crazy to risk that relationship and future business — even when we haven’t done anything wrong. Our clients are our advocates, and bring us in new business. We get word-of-mouth referrals multiple times every month.

So I’d never be as silly as our print supplier in making that kind of decision to aggravate my client. In the printer’s case, the decision is BELOW what we expect. That’s not conducive to future transactions, especially in a competitive marketplace (actually, for the particular product we’ll reprint free, we don’t really have a competitor, but we still ACT like we do).

For our printer, we politely pointed out to them our value — not future value, but just the past year. We also pointed out why, because of past very bad experiences, we don’t use their freight company. In the end, after our lengthy letter, they agreed to do the reprint for free, and recognised our valuable relationship.

We then agreed to pay air freight so our client had replacement goods within 2 business days of asking for the reprint. Our client gets the replacment goods days quicker than expected… again, we know what our client is worth to us and do MORE than asked to make sure they’re happy with how we’ve helped fix a mistake they know is not our fault. Our client is not dissatisfied at all, and appreciates our efforts to rectify the problem and advocate on their behalf.

Do you operate ABOVE or BELOW your client’s expectations? Are they aggrieved or relieved by your decisions? Do you know what your customers are worth to you, in terms of the value of their business over the average life of your customer? Do you act in a way that your customers become your advocates?

Can you afford to do it any other way?

At present we’re in Sydney (home tomorrow) for PrintEx07, and staying at the Somerset Serviced Apartments in Darling Harbour. Nice place, very well appointed (try not to get a low-floor though facing Druitt Street, a little noisy on weekend nights!).

So all is nice… except for the cost of access to broadband and modem-speed internet.

Thankfully, we’re on broadband, which “only” costs $24.95 per day (albeit the same high as we just paid at Legends Hotel on the Gold Coast for the last 2 days). That’s only $748 per month — for a 200Mb per day download limit.

Yes, I’m being sarcastic: at $748 per month, the cost is sky-high.

But if you think that’s bad — try modem pricing: access calls costs $0.95 per minute. They cap that fee at $20 per day (or a whopping $600 per month) for dial-up phone line access. Then you pay your ISP on top of that (probably only $5 a month!).

But that $20 cap is only for local calls. Dialling anywhere else, you pay $1.10 per minute and it’s not capped. A 1-hour phone call — for slow-speed modem access — would cost you a staggering $66 — over twice the cost of broadband, but only a fraction of the speed. We’ve been online about 5 hours today — if we were dialing a non-Sydney modem number, that’d cost an outrageous $330 per day… or $9,900 per month.

For modem line access.

Lucky it’s not an international number: that’s 400% of the same cost!

Thankfully those costs aren’t universal. Some accommodation is literally switched-on for technology users. We stayed in Surfers Paradise at apartments with hard-wired ADSL 2+ service (no extra cost, it was part of the regular rate), and they’re soon upgrading that to full wireless access. But I didn’t mind plugging in a network cable for that. Sure, we were limited to 500Mb traffic (counted both up and down the line) — but, as I was doing a large mailout of 16-page personalised pdf files, I needed to buy and extra 1Gb of traffic — for an extra cost only $10. Comparatively, that’s nothing.

That’s actually a great service in comparison to what is here at the Somerset apartments and the Legend hotel, who are still in dinosaur land for broadband pricing. But at least we have broadband here: some hotels don’t even offer that. Even at the Legend, with plug-in ethernet in the room, wireless was available on ground level and in the foyer — but, amazingly, didn’t work in the conference rooms on level 1.

I’m sure eventually there WILL be a day when hotels “get real” about the internet. And those services will arrive in a city-wide fashion — high speed free wireless — but not yet! If you need broadband on the road, it still requires research (and a hefty budget).