The Relationship Between You and Your Customers

What is it that you and your customers have in common? Your products or services is something that your customer needs, the customers money is something you need.

These are of course the two things that any typical business and customer relationship has. The one thing that does stem from any transaction is the relationship you have with your customers. Sure this is nothing new, nor is it something that is odd, unique or even a big deal. Probably one of the best things that comes from a relationship between you and your customers is the feedback they give you.

If you have got long term customers that you have a fairly good relationship with, or even customers who you hold a long conversation with every time you see them, a good question to ask them is what they look for in a website … namely yours of course. See what response you get.

Recently we had a potential customer come in and have a chat about building a new website. One of the questions that came up was “What do your customers do when they visit your website?” This stumped the client as they had never actually asked where most of their work came from. Yet they had been in business for over 15 years.

A little shocked to say the least I decided we should really go through and find out more about what marketing feedback they had received. I got a similar response… We have never asked our customers.

The potential customer then said “I better get people asking that question to customers.” and while this seemed a little too easy, it also seemed a little bit hard to believe they would finally start asking their customers what they would like to see or do on a website for their business.

Some time had past (about a month or so) and we heard back from the client. They had finally decided to survey their customers and more importantly ask the question of what they would want to do if they visited their website. The standard comment for this particular customer was “Buy any of the products you sell in the store, online…”

Sure enough that is one of the things that they had asked for already. The other thing was make their contact details easy to find. After getting these 2 key points from the customer I decided I would ask them now that they have a better understanding of what customers want to do on their website what else they think customers would like to do on their website. After a blank look I rephrased it to “If you were buying one of the products from your store, what would you like to see or do on the website?”

The customer thought about it then replied “Oh I would like to know their phone number, how long they have been around and what it would cost to send each item in the cart”

Before long we had a list of similar questions and they client had developed quite a good long list of things they want from a new website. After them going a head and us building their new website they came back for training (which we include with every website we build) I asked them how everything was going and the owner responded “Well if I stopped asking our customers questions on different aspects of the business and what they expect I will get some work done.” After quizing them a little further on why that was their response the customer said “Now that I have asked a few questions about the business from some of our good customers I find myself asking them what they want, what they would like to see in different areas and as a result they are spending more.”

This was a great result as far as we were concerned. After pondering over the results one hidden message came out for us, the message is true when it comes to building a website, and to be fair, we all need to do it more often before building a website. Ask yourself and your customers what would you look for or want to do when visiting our website or a similar one selling the same products or services.

See what sort of answers and solutions you and your customers come up with. It could help you build that list of must haves and have nots a lot quicker than you expect but more importantly help you increase your website sales after you let people know the new one is built.