Interviewing your Best Customers
As Stephen Covey eloquently describes in his book The 7 habits of highly effective people, it is important to position our actions in 4 quadrants, depending on 2 variables: Important/Not Important, Urgent/Not Urgent.
The most important quadrant for the long term is the Important/Not Urgent: basically, the planning of strategies and tactics that will allow for the development of our project or vision.
Well, this is the theory then in reality we are caught living in the Urgent/Important quadrant, which is also called Emergency
Anyway, this long discourse is to bring the attention to one activity that should be in the regular planning of companies but that seldom appears: interviewing the best customers.
I give right away a very specific example: I travel a lot for work, and 99% of the people, I tend to stay in the same hotels when I go back to the same town. I spent literally hundreds of nights in the same establishments, and they know it, thanks to their database.
Or maybe they dont know it: I mean, the information is surely in their systems, but they probably are not aware of it... which basically is the same thing as not knowing it.
Now, a guest spending 100 nights in a hotel is worth about 150$ per night x 100 = 15,000$. Not shabby at all. I think it would be interesting for the hotel manager to have a 10 minutes conversation with somebody that knows so intimately his or her hotel: what would he want to see in the future, which services, which amenities etc.
Probably if hotel managers did this regularly, the widespread availability of high speed internet in the rooms would have started way before. And not as a competitive catch up with the other hotel chains, but as a competitive advantage: any traveling business person has been dreaming of high speed internet since the inception of broadband. And we were willing to pay for it!
And who knows, maybe you are even going to become friend with your best customers
Mau
The most important quadrant for the long term is the Important/Not Urgent: basically, the planning of strategies and tactics that will allow for the development of our project or vision.
Well, this is the theory then in reality we are caught living in the Urgent/Important quadrant, which is also called Emergency
Anyway, this long discourse is to bring the attention to one activity that should be in the regular planning of companies but that seldom appears: interviewing the best customers.
I give right away a very specific example: I travel a lot for work, and 99% of the people, I tend to stay in the same hotels when I go back to the same town. I spent literally hundreds of nights in the same establishments, and they know it, thanks to their database.
Or maybe they dont know it: I mean, the information is surely in their systems, but they probably are not aware of it... which basically is the same thing as not knowing it.
Now, a guest spending 100 nights in a hotel is worth about 150$ per night x 100 = 15,000$. Not shabby at all. I think it would be interesting for the hotel manager to have a 10 minutes conversation with somebody that knows so intimately his or her hotel: what would he want to see in the future, which services, which amenities etc.
Probably if hotel managers did this regularly, the widespread availability of high speed internet in the rooms would have started way before. And not as a competitive catch up with the other hotel chains, but as a competitive advantage: any traveling business person has been dreaming of high speed internet since the inception of broadband. And we were willing to pay for it!
And who knows, maybe you are even going to become friend with your best customers
Mau
posted by Mau @ 8:46 AM
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