In order to provide an experience that will make your customers want to return, your company needs to be ready to meet the inevitable customer demand for your product or service. This can be met with proper inventory, accurate reservations, or adequate staffing.

On our last family vacation, we rented a car with Dollar rental car. After the airport shuttle dropped us off at the pick-up location, we waited in line for almost an hour. The line of customers kept growing and wound its way outside the building. The office was significantly understaffed and the resulting delays strained the customers’ patience.

Ironically, Dollar knew exactly how many people would be picking up cars that morning. Everyone had reservations and there shouldn’t have been any surprises with the customer volume. Don’t let this happen to you.

Predict the Future

There are several formulas for calculating future demand for your products and services. Pete Abilla gives a great introduction to forecasting on his blog. Based on historical numbers, you can predict future demand. This, of course, depends on no unforeseen events changing the customer landscape. But whether forecasting with a formula or gazing into a crystal ball, the point of predicting the future is to help you anticipate future needs based on past performances.

Know the Future

One thing Pete mentions in his post is that “forecasts are no substitute for calculated values.” In the case with Dollar rental car, or other times where your customers have reservations or placed orders, you know what your demand is. Plan accordingly.

Prepare for the Demand

Once you know what customers want, you need to be ready. Staff your business accordingly, stock your inventory, or even extend your hours to compensate for customer demand. You should also have contingency plans in place for when your predictions or preparations are wrong. Empower your employees to solve problems on the spot or compensate customers who don’t get exactly what they want.

Verify and Adjust

Were your assumptions correct? If they were, you should have been able to ride your forecasts to successful sales. If not, learn from your mistakes and adjust your future estimates for next time. Constant iteration and adjustments will refine your predictions so that you can accurately and efficiently deliver on future customer expectations.

Do you have company policies or practices that are literally a slap in your customers’ face?

Many businesses spend significant resources in marketing and recruiting customers to turn around and take advantage of these very customers.

On a recent family vacation to San Diego, we visited both the San Diego Zoo and Sea World. Both had pricey admission fees which were to be expected. One difference between them was what they charged for parking.

Naturally if you’re going to visit one of these large attractions, you’ll have to park on their lots. Sea World charged us $10 for parking. The San Diego Zoo parking was free.

Either of these parks could forgo admission fees and still make money off of all the food and souvenirs you buy inside. However, unlike food and t-shirts, you usually don’t have a choice with parking. You have to park, and thus you have to pay.

Is your business like Sea World in this example, trying to squeeze every last penny out of customers? Or are you more like the San Diego Zoo, welcoming all with open arms and hoping that generosity encourages you to spend more later?

Tread carefully when you force fees and expenses on customers.

The United States has hit a recent subprime mortgage crisis. At its core this was brought on by questionable lending practices to people that really shouldn’t have been given loans. All of this was done in the name of revenue and profits for the banking institutions.

Unfortunately, this highlights how companies can get greedy and start down a path of questionable ethics which may lead to short term revenue growth but ultimately ends in disaster.

I saw an email from ING Direct’s CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann where he explained how his company has avoided the current mortgage crisis:

Global financial markets ended 2007 with many challenges ahead. While ING DIRECT avoided the sub-prime mortgage problem, we understand that this housing crisis threatens the well-being of countless families and, in the end, it will be seen as a major failing of the mortgage industry and its regulators.

The fact that ING DIRECT was not adversely affected is a testament to our operating philosophy that, as Americans, we should only buy houses we can afford. That way we can keep them for years to come. We believe a mortgage is a contract that both parties should execute in good faith and expect to see through to its conclusion. We will not waiver from our sworn promise to provide you with great value, service and convenience.

Kuhlmann mentions two very import points that should be at the core of every business transaction:

1. Customers should only buy what they can afford
2. Contracts should be executed with the trust that they will be honored

Imagine if more lenders lived by these principles. Surely we’d be in less trouble than we are today. Of course not all the blame falls on the mortgage industry and regulators. The homeowners who entered these contracts often knew what they were getting into. However, if more mortgage providers had denied questionable loans, they would have prevented customers from making mistakes in the first place.

Your business must hold on to the moral high ground. Don’t engage in unethical or questionable practices. This includes helping your customers and even potential clients avoid entering transactions that ultimately aren’t in their best interest.

Is your marketing just a thin facade to a nasty reality? Customer expectations and perceptions of your company and its products are influenced all along the continuum from pre-sales marketing to purchase to actual product experience.

Customer Disillusionment

Customers can be disillusioned anywhere along the way. If you lose them before the sale, you may never know. However, if you lose them after the sale because they weren’t satisfied with your product, you should be able to measure that via repeat purchases and return customers.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction often hinges on the product matching their expectations. Consistency is the key. If the story you told up-front doesn’t match the actual product, customers will be upset. Does your product match the marketing?

First Impressions Aren’t Enough

However, the first impression of your product isn’t the only thing that matters. If the first use of your product is great but the rest isn’t, customers can still be dissatisfied.

You need to make sure your product or service is good to the end. What is the end? Well, that depends on your product.

Are you good to the end?

Let’s look at an analogy. This is a tale of two desserts. The first is a shake from Sonic Drive-in. The second is that of a similar ice cream Blizzard from Dairy Queen.

The last ice cream shake I got from Sonic was great when I started eating it. It more or less matched the pretty picture on the menu and I was happy. However, as I got to the bottom, all that was left was plain vanilla ice cream. The shake hadn’t been mixed thoroughly and at the end I was no longer eating a shake but rather plain boring ice cream. That Sonic shake didn’t end on a good note and my last impression is the one that remains: disappointment.

The last Dairy Queen Blizzard that I had, on the other hand, was consistently well mixed and was good to the last drop. There were no surprises at the end to spoil my satisfaction. The Blizzard matched the marketing message I heard up front. Not just on the surface, but completely and totally.

Is your product like the Sonic shake or the Blizzard I encountered? Your product needs to be great both on the surface and continue to deliver on its promises throughout the customer experience.

Providing a solid and positive encounter through the customer life cycle, from marketing to first impression to user experience, will generate not only revenue but also return customers.

Sometimes your customers donate money to you or your cause. So how do you thank donors?

Acknowledge Their Donation

One of my favorite podcasts is by the crew at Internet Business Mastery. Since I have found value in their informative podcasts, I mentioned them in an online forum at StartupNation.com. A month or so later, I was listening to their podcast’s segment where they give thanks for those that have linked to them. In that segment they mentioned my post in the forum and publicly thanked me.

Your donors may not ask for recognition, but when you give thanks, either publicly or privately, people feel validated in their decision to support you. Additionally, that recognition will motivate them to donate again or even spread the word about your organization.

Exclusive Membership

My wife and I recently donated to a political campaign. Although our donation was a small amount, it was received with great fanfare. We received a thank you letter from the candidate and a “membership card” showing that we officially supported the campaign.

We were now part of the club and were invited into the team to help our candidate succeed. Our little donation opened the flood gates of inclusion and through crafty marketing messages, we felt that we truly had an impact on our candidate’s success.

Do you help your donors feel like they are a key part of the greater good? Do your donors feel like they are making a difference?

Special Benefits

I use a simple personal organizer called PocketMod. After trying PDAs and other mechanisms, I always come back to this simple and portable organizer. PocketMod is free so I made a donation to the developer.

I didn’t immediately hear anything from him acknowledging my donation. However, several months later, I got an invitation to try out the new version of PocketMod during the exclusive beta period.

Do you give your donors special access or benefits? Are these surprises or expected results of a donation? You may need to balance the known incentives of donating with the occasional surprise bonus to help donors feel they are truly special.

Overcome Doubt and Concern

The easiest way to acknowledge a donation is to do nothing. However, this has serious consequences.

I have used online e-commerce software called Zen Cart on several of my web development projects. Since this software is free, I made a donation to support its continued development. Unfortunately, I never received any type of response or acknowledgment.

When donations go into a black hole, donors start to fill with doubts and concerns. Did they get my money? Was it lost? Embezzled? What happened?

Doubt and concern are major roadblocks as you try to develop a relationship with donors. Very few organizations only want a one time donation. You’ll want to count on the continued support of those that have donated in the past. Acknowledging and showing appreciation for their donations are foundational to a lifetime donor relationship.

Customers trust that their orders will arrive in a safe and timely manner. How does your business ensure that nothing bad happens in transit?

Use Proper Packaging

Sir Isaac Newton and his laws of physics will be working overtime against your package as it travels to your customer. It will be thrown, dropped, kicked, smashed, bent, and possibly subject to puncture wounds.

The product packaging for shipping should be commensurate with the value of the product. The more valuable an item, the more care should be given to packaging. Amazon.com always seems to send my orders in just the right size box with an appropriate amount of cushioning from air bags.

Choose a Reputable Carrier

FedEx and UPS come to mind as reputable carriers. I say that as I don’t recall having trouble with them in the past. The United States Postal Service, on the other hand, always seems to mess things up.

A responsible carrier will also offer you the ability to insure your package against loss and provide you with your package tracking information.

Hide Package Contents

Sometimes you ship products to customers that they don’t want the whole world seeing. This could be because it is a surprise gift or something valuable that snooping or thieving eyes don’t need to see.

This past Christmas, I ordered some diamond jewelry for my wife. The jeweler shipped the package in a generic UPS overnight box. The return address label mentioned nothing about diamonds and surely didn’t scream: “hey mail room guy, your wife might want this.” The package’s boring anonymity offered an extra layer of security for my order.

Customer Perceptions

Shipping and delivery are part of the whole customer experience. When an order is placed, your work isn’t done. The customer judges your business and decides if they will buy from you again based on how that order arrives. A small investment in order fulfillment and delivery will help impress customers and encourage repeat business.

When customers make reservations, they fully expect to get what they are requesting. When you combine a reservation with a deposit, or up-front charge, expectations are even higher.

On a recent business trip to Las Vegas, I stayed at Harrah’s on the famous Las Vegas Strip. I had made my reservation well in advance, requested a non-smoking room, and was even charged for the first night.

When I arrived my first evening, I was told no non-smoking rooms were available. What? They knew I was coming, I had paid for the room that already, and there wasn’t a room? Since I was recovering from a cold and have allergies, the smoky room didn’t do me much good that first night.

Fortunately, I was able to switch rooms the next day. However, this was a big inconvenience as I had to run back from my conference at lunch and move all my stuff to the new room.

Deliver on Reservations and Expectations

Customers make reservations at hotels, restaurants, and even when they place orders with your business. Orders are essentially making reservations of products in your inventory. If you tell a customer that their reservation is confirmed, you must be sure to deliver on that promise.

People’s expectations are naturally higher when they feel something should be ready for them. This is your moment to shine and deliver what you promised and make a great first impression on your customers.

Asking for customer feedback is only one piece of the puzzle. You can’t forget to take action and improve your business based on what you learn from feedback and your own observations.

My business uses a mailbox service for our post office box. The other day a publisher sent me a book to review. I took the “you have a package” card from my mailbox and handed it to the girl behind the counter.

She searched diligently for my package but couldn’t find it. She pulled in the manager to look for it as well. Neither was successful.

Since I didn’t have any information about the sender, package, or courier service, I couldn’t jump over the counter and find it myself.

At the time, the staff didn’t really know what to do with me. I said I would contact the sender and get some details on the package.

A few days later, we got a call from the mailbox service that my package had been located.

When I went to pick it up, I asked what had happened. She told me that they were implementing a new logging system to prevent accidents like this from happening again. In so doing, they located my package at the bottom of a stack of boxes.

Don’t Let It Happen Again

While the initial confusion of my lost package was disturbing, the mailbox store recovered nicely. The key lesson learned is that they realized the mistake and implemented a new process to prevent the same issue from happening again.

Everyone makes mistakes. Your business will too. Great companies learn from their mistakes, identify the problem, and change their process to prevent recurrences of the same problem. Inefficient companies are plagued by the same issues over and over again. Customers will tire of such incompetence over time and move on to do business with the company that does learn from its mistakes.

You need your customers to be honest in their business dealings with you. Your company’s financial health and long-term viability rely on honesty in your transactions.

Mark Twain commented on honesty:

Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.

source

Money is a powerful force that can affect people’s behavior for good or bad. So how can your company encourage honesty?

Honesty Shouldn’t Be Hard

This past week as I was reviewing our bank statement, I noticed that there was a $600 deposit last month that we didn’t make. The statement didn’t give any details of the source of this amount.

I called the bank to inquire about this mystery deposit. After about 15 minutes on the phone the agent couldn’t help me resolve my issue but told me to talk to the check fraud department.

When I immediately called the fraud department I navigated through the phone tree just to find out they weren’t open yet.

Later that day, I called the fraud department and again waited on hold for quite some time before being helped. I reviewed the details of the deposit again and was told they would investigate it and get back to me.

That afternoon, the fraud department returned my call and told me that the deposit was a clerical error. I asked if the proper owner of the deposit had inquired about the money. They hadn’t.

It shouldn’t take more than an hour making multiple phone calls to correct someone else’s problem.

Encourage Honesty

The majority of people want to do the right thing. Make it easy for them to do it! I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get a clerical error fixed that was in my favor to begin with.

If the process for getting something done right is too complicated and time consuming, even the most honest of us will just give up trying.

Acknowledge Honesty

Honesty should be the foundation of your interactions with customers. However, sometimes customers do something like give back extra change, or tell you that you undercharged them, that not everyone does. In these cases, you should recognize that the customer did something out of the ordinary.

During my phone calls with my bank, I had to ask if other people reported extra deposits to their accounts. They told me “not usually.” Since this was such an odd occurrence I was surprised to be treated like just another caller.

Appreciate Honesty

Thank your customers when you catch them being extraordinarily honest. Tell them that you understand it took some extra time and effort to do the right thing and that both you as the company and any other customers affected are grateful for their honesty.

During our summer vacation this year at Bear Lake, Utah we enjoyed their famous raspberry ice cream shakes.

Rumor had it that most of the raspberries aren’t even grown in the Bear Lake Valley any more. This is despite the fact that they have an annual Raspberry Days festival!

So why not just close up shop?

Because people are expecting raspberries when they go to Bear Lake.

So what happens when your product or service depends on something that disappears or is no longer grown or manufactured locally?

You import what you need.

Customer expectations have been established that you’ll provide a particular product as you’ve always done. If you run into supply chain problems, your customer’s expectations don’t automatically dry up. They still want your product.

The Bear Lake ice cream stands and other local businesses helped meet customer demand by importing raspberries from elsewhere. They still make shakes. People still buy them and everyone is happy.

When your business hinges on having the “original” ingredient that you’ve always had, you should start planning your contingencies now. What will happen if you lose that key supplier, principle employee, or real estate lease?

If you’re unprepared, disaster could strike. Be prepared.