Yesterday, my blog title promised something I realized that I didn’t provide—how to treat your customers well. In my early morning fog, I ended up talking about how to get customers rather than how to maintain a healthy customer base.
What comprises good business practices? How do you make a good impression?
• Communicate clearly with your customers.
• Provide what you promise in your advertising.
• Make all transactions as smooth and easy as possible.
• Give something more than your customer expects.
• Pack books so they arrive undamaged.
• Ship in a timely manner.
• Handle any problems promptly, cheerfully and satisfactorily.
I like the idea of giving something more than customers expect. I know one author who
wraps her poetry book in pretty tissue paper and ties it with a piece of ribbon before sliding it into the padded mailer to ship. I enclose a gift magnet with the image of the book cover with shipments of my cat stories books.
It’s actually fairly easy to please a satisfied customer. The real challenge comes when something goes wrong with the order.
One author I know inadvertently shipped out a box of books that included a couple of flawed books. When the customer explained the problem, my friend replaced the books at no charge and even returned the customer’s original payment for those two books in order to maintain good customer relations.
A few years ago, a customer called me to say that the Ojai history book I sold him had a signature of pages missing. To keep things simple and take care of the problem quickly, I did not ask him to return the damaged book. I immediately shipped him a new book. And to further repair customer relations, I enclosed a copy of my Nordhoff Cemetery book as a bonus. This man will not hesitate doing business with my company again and he may even tell others about Matilija Press and Patricia Fry.
Sometimes an author/publisher is asked to go beyond what should be reasonably expected and, sometimes the author loses. As an example, a few years ago, a gentleman from Australia ordered one of my books through my website. He contacted me almost immediately after making the transaction to say that his card was charged several times, but he only wanted one copy of the book. I checked my merchant account system and, sure enough, his card had been charged something like eleven times. He admitted to having clicked “buy” maybe twice, but not eleven times.
This was my first experience with this sort of problem and it was a slow go. When I completed the tedious process of hand crediting his card, I contacted the customer and he claimed that I was still charging him for two copies of the book.
What? I double checked carefully and discovered that I had accidentally inserted the wrong credit card number in one instance while attempting to issue him the appropriate credit. Turns out it was a valid credit card number and it greedily accepted the credit.
I didn’t know what to do, so I called the tech people for my merchant account system and they advised me to simply charge that same card in order to retrieve my money. I issued my customer one more credit in the amount of the book and I attempted to charge the card I erroneously credited. Guess what? This card was red-flagged and was being investigated. I never did get that money back. Consequently, for all of my trouble and time (because of a situation caused by the customer), I ended up with zilch. Regardless, I sent him the book he ordered.
Not every transaction is flawless. That’s for sure. But you will make more friends and attract more customers (including repeat customers) if you do your best to keep things simple and if you will give the customer the benefit of the doubt.
Visit my new website: http://www.patriciafry.com