Courtesy of VoucherCodes.co.uk

In great stories (like Harry Potter) the hero is prepared to die to save the day. Your company should be willing to die for your customers. But to think this way you have to care about the people with whom you do business. Viewing them as a necessary evil won’t do.

Who do you care enough about to die for?

I’m not sure where I discovered Derek Sivers, but his writing and videos are quickly becoming my favorite sources of inspiration (just ordered his book today). Here are 5 tips from Derek’s video for anyone who deals with customers:

1. answer the phone. I’ve been making a concerted effort to answer my phone more. I’ll confess that it’s incredibly hard for me to break focus on a project to take a call and then get back into the groove of what I was doing. So I have a tendency to let calls go to voicemail and then call back a few customers in the same blocked off time period. But as a customer, I really love it when I feel like I can get a hold of someone if I have a question about a purchase.
2. changes require pizza. Any designer or developer can relate to that dreaded feeling you get when a client looks at the site you just built for them based on their specs and says, “Can you just change these 3 things.” Usually the customer isn’t taking into consideration how much effort you invested to make the site in the first place or the time it’s now going to take you to change it. So when you get a request to change something, ask the customer for a pizza. Or a cup of coffee. Or something else that you’d appreciate around the office. Asking for a token item in return humanizes the request.
3. connect customers with feedback. Derek’s CDbaby example was forwarding comments from CD buyers to the artists who designed the CDs. In our case, I forward the results from user testing or surveys back to our customers. In fact, I ran a survey last week for a Rails development shop to help them determine the product/market fit for their application. The results were incredibly insightful and inspired confidence to begin marketing the application more aggressively.
4. special requests at the end of the order. Our main contact at pooltables.com had his first child while we were working on the project. I got the name of his wife and daughter and sent them a congrats card. It took me less than an hour to run to the store, sign a card, and drop it in the mail. But the impact on the client out-shined all of my hours of work on his site. Derek’s suggestion is to provide an opportunity for your customer to tell you what they want by creating space for it in the order process.

People remember you more for the little ways you make them smile, than all the business-school stuff you do.

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