Tips for the companies

You learn a lot as a customer, whether you take it onboard or not. Whenever I talk to small businesses as part of my consultation work we discuss how their customers perceive them. You might think it’s simple and straightforward, but you would be surprised how often this is what catches us out the most. Sometimes people want to hear about ROI and market share – but more often people want to be spoken to in a friendly informative way that doesn’t talk down. Dry business speak will only get you so far, and 90% of your customers won’t care about it.

The problem is that you KNOW what your business does so you don’t often have to explain it to yourself. You need to imagine that you have never seen your company before. Do you make the right statement? Do you promote the most important and interesting parts of your business to your potential customers?

Being a customer can be an important learning experience if you think about it. Think about why you shop somewhere and why you don’t shop somewhere else. What you want a company to tell you about their products before you buy and what is less important. Use that information and build upon it. When I started looking into print, I realised that though I may now the sizes of A4, A2, DL etc., many customers wouldn’t. So when I set up the flyer printing section, I decided that a graphic representation of the relative size of flyers  would be helpful to some people. Not all people, but some. And why not try to make it easy for as many people as we can?

Be Helpful

For printing companies and suppliers, it’s important to be helpful and customer service is vital. But this includes telling a customer when their demands are slightly outside your expertise or ability. When a customer asks for something to be printed by tomorrow, it is definitely better to admit that you might not be able to hit the target than say you can and miss it. Yes, you might lose the sale. But they might come back again. If you let them down, then they may not.