Attention — It’s what your customers crave.
Attention — It’s what your customers crave.
The thing that’s most expensive to give customers—a defect-free product—just gets you in the door. Only human attention, love shown to, your customers is going to buy their loyalty in return. (If you’re making airplane engines, please, please ignore this paragraph. I like a defect-free flight. A lot. Concentrate on that, nix on giving me personal attention. Thanks.)
In many, many industries a large part — significant enough to make a crucial competitive difference — of what you’re selling is attention. This is where the small business has a chance to clobber the big one, where the upstart can get ahead because, well, you’re paying attention.
A great hotel could have the exact same floor plan as the fleabag next door and it wouldn’t matter: it isn’t renting rectangular rooms by the evening. Its business is attention. The Lexus line is significantly similar to the Toyota line but it doesn’t matter. Lexus doesn’t just sell transportation. They very successfully sell attention.
Get good enough at the attention business, and you’re going to get a lot more attention from your banker.
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QUESTION publius2u: Your basic message seems to be for us to FIRST learn how to provide “five-star” customer service, then erven if our business is not superior to the competition in its product/service line, we’ll thrive. Why do you say it’s not expensive to provide the best possible service? I’m not sure about that for our business, but really want it to be true. How do I hire the right people without paying more?
ANSWER FROM MICAH, music@micahsolomon.com Well, I have to applaud you for rolling a lot of questions into a very small paragraph!
I don’t think I’m saying first learn to provide service. The parenthetical statement, although provided with humor — I hope — regarding airline parts, is important. Nobody wants a faulty car, safety boots that aren’t safe, etc. This stuff is important. And it’s important in all lines of work.
Where there seems to be an opening, and what you’ll find encouraging if you take the time to download our ebook, is that everybody has gotten worn out providing these great products that surround us. And they are neglecting that little bit extra: the attention to the customers, the willingness to listen, the willingness to build simple systems, simple memory aids that remember things for you about your customers.
If you will take the time to work on this last 1%, you will have a huge competitive advantage. Because you will prevent your business from becoming a commodity.
QUESTION, FROM DYAD Micah My wife and I run a small business which looks like it’s about to grow, and we may be supervising 3 or 4 part-time employees by end of 08. Is there a “humanize it” guidebook you recommend that goes beyondf the ebook?
ANSWER FROM MICAH, music@micahsolomon.com Great question! Have you read the ebook yet? (I guess yes.) Leonardo and I (this is Micah typing) are working on a full length book at this point which should be available some time after you have hired your 4th employee. Please subscribe to the RSS or email feed for updates.
The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center offers some courses depending on your budget and the nature of your business — I do know some 2 person businesses for which these courses would be very reasonable and some for which it would be a significant expenditure for which you would only want to do undertake if you budgeted for it carefully. And of course Leonardo’s company West Paces Consulting group offers consulting for various budgets. But the book is going to be far the most cost-effective solution. And the items I’ll continue to post on this blog. Free is a very good price.