8 Love Your Customers

There are very few businesses in the world that truly put their customer at the heart of everything they do. Some companies can seem distracted by the opinions of shareholders, managers and people other than the customer, whose intentions tend not be in the customers' best interests.

And there aren't a lot of businesses that start every day by thinking about how they can do what they do even better to make their customers happier. Usually, they try to figure out how to make more money in the short term, how to cut costs and how to make their own lives easier.

Sometimes, though, a company comes along that really sees itself through the customers' eyes. It understands that if it makes the customer happy, money and all that stuff will simply take care of itself.

Businesses like Virgin, FedEx and Wal-Mart have a very clear idea of what it is that their customer wants, whether that's great customer service, delivering packages on time or cheap prices. They devote their every waking moment to delivering that one simple aim consistently, and their customers love them for it.

Companies that put the customer at the heart of their business are bound to be successful, loved and profitable. For SuperJam, trying to listen to our customers and engage with them is something that I have taken really seriously. Even now, I spend a lot of my time answering calls from the people who buy our products and asking people in the supermarket store what they think when they taste our jam. I know that this enthusiasm for talking to the people who buy our products is what has helped to make SuperJam such a success. In your business, it is going to be important that you nurture a relationship with the people who regularly buy from you and that you take every opportunity to ask what they think.

Encouraging Loyalty

All too often, we focus all of our energies on getting new customers. You go out there and call people up out of the blue and try to sell them your products. This is great, as long as it isn't taking your attention away from doing the best job you can for your everyday customers. Without the people who are already buying your products, you're finished.

There's a saying that it costs five times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an old one, and there's definitely some truth in that. You should do everything you can to keep your existing customers on board; they are the bedrock of your business and you need them to keep placing their orders.

In essence, you want to show your regular customers that you value their business and you want to offer them a reason to keep coming back. Could you encourage them to use your products more frequently? Or maybe you can offer them an upgrade to a premium version. Your existing customer base is the most fertile place for you to look for sales, so you should make sure that you are always offering something new.

I also think that there's a lot to be said for rewarding your most loyal customers. Take every opportunity you can to say thank you and let them know that you really value their business. Why not send them a personal letter to say thanks and maybe enclose a token of your appreciation, a bottle of champagne or a box of chocolates, for instance.

You could even consider setting up a loyalty programme that offers rewards to the customers who spend the most with you. This could be as simple as having a card that you stamp every time the customer visits your store and giving them a freebie once they've collected a certain number of stamps.

Perhaps the most powerful loyalty scheme in the world is the Tesco Clubcard. By taking note of everything you buy from its stores, Tesco can build up a profile of what type of person you are. Maybe you're a young family that eats only organic food, for example. It can then send you offers for organic products that it thinks you might be likely to buy. If, for example, it sees that you don't buy any milk from its stores, it can assume that you buy it somewhere else and send you some money-off vouchers for organic milk, to encourage you to start buying it from Tesco.

The more you understand about your customers, the better you can encourage them to become loyal to you. Perhaps you know when their birthday is. You can offer them a free meal at your restaurant on their birthday—of course, they're not likely to come on their own and they might even bring a whole party with them. If this kind of thing is done well, it could be a really touching way of saying thank you, but also probably a pretty smart business decision too.

Don't be afraid of saying thank you to the people who keep you in business; show them you understand who they are and that you love them.

Talk to Your Customers

The best way to show your customers that you value them is to listen to what they have to say. Tell them in person how grateful you are for their business and always ask what you can do to improve things for them. By requesting their feedback, you can find ways of making your products even better, and perhaps your existing customers will give you ideas for how to find new ones. What do they think you do really well and where do they feel you let them down? Maybe they think you don't shout enough about the things they love you for. Or perhaps there's something that they feel isn't up to scratch.

The best way to get a perspective on how the customer experiences your product or service is to put yourself in their shoes and experience it yourself. Perhaps you could send a mystery shopper into your store or actually browse your own website and place an order. You need to imagine what they will think when they look at your product: do the labels look cheap or is the floor dirty?

Don't forget your front-line employees either, who are in a prime position to understand what kind of experience your customers are having. They are the only people in your business who really know how the customer feels. Talk openly with them about what the customers think you need to improve and have somewhere for them to make a note of complaints and compliments alike.

Your employees don't enjoy hearing complaints from customers every day, so foster a culture where if a customer makes a complaint to you, it is your responsibility to find a solution so that nobody ever has the same complaint again. In a company where the customer is saying great things about your brand and telling your employees how much they love it, they will be so much more motivated in their job. They will really believe that what they are offering is a worthwhile product that they can believe in.

And of course, there's nothing like hearing from your customers what they think—so ask them! Give them a comment card with a stamp and address on it along with their delivery and encourage them to tell you what they think. Maybe enter them into a competition if they send the card back. Try to keep it simple, by just asking one question like ‘How could we make our service even better?’ or ‘What do you love about us?’

Opening up a conversation with your customers is now a lot easier than before, with new technologies like social networks and blogs providing a means to connect with them. If you are successful in creating an online community, by getting people to become fans of your brand on Facebook for instance, that gives you a great opportunity to talk to the people buying your product. Why not ask them for ideas, comments and suggestions? You can even make it into a competition where the best idea wins some freebies.

Why not have a bit of fun with it and invite your customers round for beer and pizza or a cup of coffee, whatever is appropriate, and pick their brains. The customers who love you will be more than willing to spend their time helping you to improve your business. And the ones who don't will love having a platform to vent their frustrations about what they think you need to change.

The Lovers and the Haters

There are two groups of people that a business should be really keen to hear from:

1. The people who love you.
2. The people who hate you.

Every business has customers who love them and it feels great when they get in touch to say so. They're the ones who call you up to say how much they enjoy your service, who tell all their friends about you and come back again and again. If you take the time to ask them why they love you, you'll find that they're more than happy to talk to you and tell you anything you want to know. They'll help you to understand the essence of your brand, what it is that actually makes people buy your product, why they love it and why they come back for more.

You might even find that their reasons for loving you are different from what you imagine your brand is all about, which can be really surprising and useful to know. For instance, perhaps you've been shouting about how cheap your prices are, while all along the reason people like you is that your location is really convenient, or your service is faster than anywhere else. If they like you enough, they'll probably even offer you some good ideas and give up their time to help you improve your service.

Then there are the people who hate you. Hate is probably too strong a word, but you know what I mean: the people who don't think you've done your job properly. The angry people who phone you up with a complaint that you don't want to hear about. You might think that their complaint is ridiculous, but that doesn't matter. Someone who paid their hard-earned money for your service isn't happy about it, and if you take the time to find out why, you have the opportunity to make a change. Most companies take the people who love their brand for granted and try to get the people who complain off the phone as fast as possible. If you take it as a chance to improve your business, you might just be able to turn those angry people into people who love your business instead.

Acting on Feedback

It's all very well collecting all of these comments, but they don't have any value unless you take the time to listen to what your customers have to say and try to do something about it. You might find that you don't agree with their views or you might even find what they say offensive. Whatever they write, you have to take it on board and use it to improve your business. Try out the ideas they suggest to you and do your best to fix the problems they tell you about.

You must be willing to change your products, your pricing or even your entire business model, based on the feedback that your customers give you. They are the people you need to impress and if they tell you what they want, this is exactly what you should be doing. Of course, some people will make suggestions that aren't practical and a lot of complaints will be the result of a one-off mistake. You have to focus your energies on solving the problems that people repeatedly tell you about and launching the products that are requested most often.

It is inevitable that, unfortunately, there will be occasions when something goes really wrong. Perhaps one of your employees is rude to a customer, or a delivery turns up broken or you don't deliver on what you promised for whatever reason. You will, once in a while, find yourself with a big complaint on your hands, and how you deal with it will be a test of your commitment to making your customers happy.

When something goes wrong, always make the effort to call or meet with the customer and explain in an honest and open way that you screwed up. Apologize as sincerely as you can and in a way that they can empathize with; don't merely send a standard letter with a money-off coupon attached. Really show them that you care and that you feel bad about what has happened; ask what you can do to make things better. Usually, a sincere apology in itself is enough to show that what has happened isn't an everyday event. Be generous with replacement products and refunds.

Thankfully, SuperJam hasn't had too many things that have gone terribly wrong. Of course, there has been the occasional jar of jam that has been opened in a supermarket or smashed in the post on its way to a customer's home. We always send an overwhelming amount of free jam to people who have experienced something going wrong and, as it happens, some of the nicest letters I have ever received have been from those people writing back to say thank you.

Perhaps when something has gone wrong it is going to prompt you to have a think about how you can change the way you do things to stop it happening again. Why not invite the person who complained into your company premises to tell you how they think you should be running things? You never know, they might just give you some good ideas.

Replying to Every Letter

For SuperJam, trying to listen to every comment, every criticism, every idea that customers have, has been a major focus for me.

It has always been a principle of mine that every single letter that someone sends to us, whether they're just writing to say how much they love SuperJam or writing to complain that they feel we're overpriced, gets a reply. Not only with a standard letter but with one that someone from the company has taken the time to write out thoughtfully and in a friendly way.

In the early days, if someone called the number on the back of a jar of SuperJam, which was an official-looking number, their call would come straight to my mobile phone. As you can imagine, most people calling up were very surprised to be speaking with the owner of the company!

That set-up came about mainly because I was the only person in the company at the time, so there wasn't anyone else to answer the phone. But what I realized was that having direct contact with the people who were buying our products was hugely powerful. Even though I now have a team of people who help out answering the phone and replying to letters, I still answer a lot of phone calls myself. From people who merely want to ask where their local store is or those who want to know why we don't make chutney, I think it's crucial to pay attention to what people are getting in touch to say, no matter how senior you are in your company.

Much of the time, people won't be complaining to you about massive issues. You'd be amazed at how annoyed people can get at what, to you, might seem trivial. You're going to need to listen to all of these tiny little things that people find annoying about your business—the font on your menu is too small, the chairs screech on the floor or whatever it might be—and make dozens of small changes to improve your product. A good example of this for SuperJam was that in the early days we had a lot of people complaining that the labels were difficult to take off. For people who wanted to be green and reuse their jam jars, that was a problem. It seemed like the most trivial issue but it attracted a lot of complaints. So, as you would expect, we changed the labels and that became one of many tiny changes we've made over time to continually improve our packaging, our recipes and our marketing.

If we had simply ignored those complaints, we wouldn't have made that easy change to our product that turned people from complaining about it to loving it. By listening to all of the silly little complaints, the big ideas and the wacky suggestions that our customers make, we improve our products and our marketing all the time. I love hearing feedback and maintaining a conversation with the people who love our brand.

Creating a Sense of Community

As the business took off, I found that we were being inundated with letters, emails and phone calls from people who loved the brand. They really liked it that someone had brought out a healthier kind of jam and appreciated the charity work, and loads of people had ideas for new directions in which we could take the business.

Historically, it wasn't possible for a grocery brand, like SuperJam, to nurture a meaningful connection with the people buying its products. There was always someone in between, like a retailer, making it hard for the brand to have much contact with the consumer. But now, by having a website and perhaps a presence on social networks, it is possible to connect with the people buying your products. They can learn more about your story, your business and your ethos, and hopefully you can understand more about who they are and what they want.

It sounds pretty simple, but I love the idea that when something happens at SuperJam, everyone who cares about the brand knows about it right away. From people who put SuperJam on their toast every morning, those who work on the production line, supermarket buyers and everyone who volunteers at the tea parties, they can all find out in an instant when we launch a new product, or share with us the exciting news that a new supermarket has taken us on.

The online world in particular has made it possible to have a meaningful dialogue with the 10,000 or so people who really care about SuperJam. It has created, I suppose, a sense of community. By having a blog, a Facebook page, Twitter and all the rest of it, we were able to start having more of a conversation with these people who loved SuperJam and wanted to see it succeed. We can invite them to comment on what we're doing, ask for suggestions of where to take the business and really just provide a platform for them to tell us what they think.

One of the best ways in which we have used social media is by having a ‘suggest a store’ page on our website, which we promote on the blog, Twitter and everywhere else.

We encourage our fans to tell us about a shop in their area that they think should sell SuperJam. That might be an upmarket deli, an earthy farm shop or just their local grocery store.

We then send out a postcard to the suggested shop, letting them know that one of their customers thinks they should stock SuperJam, with some information about the products and an introductory offer for the store. If the outlet places an order, we send out a free jar of jam to the person who made the suggestion.

It's a really simple idea, but it's worked really well. Thousands of people have suggested stores to us and, since they are shops that they know and like, a lot of them have placed an order and it has helped us to get the brand into hundreds of independent stores.

I also love having an email newsletter, which goes out to tens of thousands of people who have signed up to receive it. It gives us a chance to update them on what's going on at the company and I like using it to pose questions to our fans: what should be the next flavour we launch, or what should we do at our summer tea parties? Hundreds of people will reply to the newsletter right away with their suggestions.

The conversation with your customers can be like an open tap, with an almost limitless flow of ideas, suggestions and information coming from them to you. In a sense, it turns conventional marketing on its head: it used to be about companies feeding information about their products to customers, but now the people who love your brand can talk back and tell you how they think you should be doing things. However you communicate with your customers—by text message, blogging, letters, noticeboards, or whatever—what is important is that you engage with them. Make the effort to understand what they want and how you can do what you do even better for them.

Doing so makes it possible for all of the people who care about your business to be kept up to date regularly, with everything going on at the company. SuperJam gives customers a chance to be involved with thinking up ideas for new products, assisting with organizing tea parties in their area and helping the company to grow.

You could say that this has created a feeling that we're all in it together, as a group of people who believe in something—whether that's the idea of making jam healthier, the idea of doing business in a different way, challenging the status quo in an industry that has been around for hundreds of years or simply the idea of putting a smile on the faces of thousands of lonely elderly people.

Whether it has been through social media or merely taking the time to read the letters that our customers send in, SuperJam has been able to learn what people think we're doing a great job of and what they consider we should improve. We have opened ourselves up to the idea of having a conversation with the people buying our products and as the years go by, we'll get to know them even better. The more we know about the people who put SuperJam on their toast, the more we can improve our products, our marketing and our outlets and, hopefully, they'll love us in return for it.