Business pulse

You have a pulse – it’s important it never stops.

Your business has a pulse – when it stops your customers assume your dead or dying.

pulse

This why the following elements are crucial for your business or startup:

  • Advertising frequency
  • Newsletter updates
  • Web page changes
  • Twitter feed on your homepage
  • Regular blogging
  • Returning phone calls & emails the same day
  • Speedy invoicing (guilty)
  • Product iterations and improvements
  • PR & media exposure
  • Team, fan, member, evangalist get togethers
  • Conversing with your people on line
  • Conversing with people off line
  • Acknowledging (not hassling) everyone who enters your office, retail space or workshop.

Let your customers know you’re alive, and they’ll treat you like you are. Let them think your dead or dying and they’ll ensure you die for sure.

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Your phone number

I have my personal mobile number published on the rentoid.com contact page. Crazy? Maybe. Yes I do get the occasional phone call from overseas at 3am – and I answer it bleary eyed, and turn on my laptop to help the rentoid member.

Here’s why I do it:

– I get instant feedback on what we need to do to improve rentoid

– I ask them how they found us

– I tell them things they not not know about rentoid to improve their experience

Importantly, I surprise them with some personal service, from an actual fully fledged web business, which is beyond expectations.

Sometime in business we need to be prepared to be ‘annoyed’ in order to ‘delight’

Startup blog says: Make yourself available.

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Southwest Airlines – customer service

Here’s a nice piece of personal input from a staff member at Southwest Airlines. Although they do have a reputation of doing things a little different, the thing that really matters is the fact that they let staff ‘add value’ and be real people.

I like it…. I’d be interested to know if you do, or if you’d find it annoying?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0KbDUUt63M]

For startups, simple service innovations and staff input cost almost nothing. If you’re lucky, 25,000 people will see it on the internet!

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Dubai Series: You snooze, you ‘win’

These are starting to pop up in the better airports around the world. But every airport has the space for them in the international departure lounges. I’ve seen them in Singapore and now in Dubai International Airport as seen below:

airport-sleepers

They are just a cool idea which makes sense for ‘the people’. A classic ‘1 percenter’. When we are traveling for days at a time a little welcome relief on the ground or a stopover might just make us go through that airport on our next global trip, instead of that other one.

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Dubai Series: From Chrysler ‘A Space’

Here’s another simple innovation from an old industry, a parking lot, actually giving a hoot about their customers.

car-park-lights

As you can see in the pic there is a little red or green light above every space indicating its availability. So the tiny car space mirage is now a thing of the past. The thing that actually excites me about this innovation is that it doesn’t benefit the car park owners. They’d be better off having cars drive around longer searching for a spaces and elongated traffic jams, which would result in greater revenue. But they chose this instead which is very cool.

What stuff is your business doing for them, and their benefit?

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