I’m on the plane returning from a jam-packed Contact Centre Lunch in Christchurch. Any three of the speakers chosen by host Nick Egerton from UCMS could have held the room for 40 minutes, but together under the title ‘The Importance of Customer Interaction’ they presented a comprehensive session on this broad topic.
Chris Price from Permission (specialists in online marketing) talked about how to turn website leads into paying customers. That is, the casual user who is looking for a product or service and comes across your company’s website, downloads some free information and then becomes a part of the database. How should you communicate with them, and indeed, should you make contact straight away? Price said that 25 per cent of ‘website leads’ won’t be ready to purchase – but rather than be ignored, they should be nurtured.
Stewart Price from Microsoft New Zealand said that a CRM tool is in many ways only as good at the business strategy behind it. And he pointed out that ‘customer’ is really a lose term. For example, Microsoft has created a CRM tool about the lifecycle of a puppy for an organisation that trains guide dogs (hmmm, wonder who that could be?!).
Suzanne Pratley and Heather Walker from Madison Recruitment turned the idea of the customer on its head and suggested that for managers, it’s all about keeping staff happy and engaged. They introduced me to a new term ‘onboarding’, which apparently refers to how well you instill the company’s values during the induction process. They ended their presentation with a ‘scary stat’, which I won’t reveal here for the benefit of those attending the lunches in Wellington, Hamilton and Auckland this week.
So my overriding take-home is that whether or not we are in direct contact with ‘customers’, every one of us is involved in sales - whether its managing the product itself or managing how it is delivered. Funnily enough, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay sums it up rather well in the in-flight magazine on this plane:
“Don’t take customers for granted. We’ve never sent out a dish and said ‘They won’t know the difference.’”