Not long ago I had the pleasure of meeting someone dedicated to and passionate about customer service, whom I’ll refer to as “The Restaurateur.” What is it the customer really wants? Determine that End and directly help the customer get there. Engaging the Customer The Restaurateur expects his staff to size-up the customers, treat them accordingly, and adjust as they get feedback. “The We spoke at length and I drank up his insights, and couldn’t help but think to relate them to IT Service. It depends, but it’s certainly not that some SLA is met.

Imagine if you spent all that time building your business–plus risked your money–and customers hated what you built. In this program Eric Ries teaches you the lean startup ideas that saved his business when customers hated his product. 8221; She’s, customizing the avatar, deciding how’s she’s going to look, she gets into that. If you’re reading Mixergy, I know you routinely work hours that most people don’t know exist. Want to learn how to protect yourself from that devastation?

As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers.  We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features.  some came from our customer service, some were to improve performance / scalability from tech ops, some were bug fixes, etc.) Turn Your Organization Inside Out This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice .

In a world where everyone assumes that content must be free online, how is Gideon Shalwick getting customers to whip out their credit cards to buy his online classes?! Gideon doesn’t get customers by asking them for their credit cards the first time they discover his site. Potential customers might come across one of his videos on YouTube, and get a free lesson in blogging. What’s what I invited him to come to Mixergy to talk about. I

As noted in Pour and Stir Part I , the key to the successful execution of this strategy is managing the following equation:      The cost to acquire a customer < lifetime value of a customer This entry focuses on how you can minimize your cost per customer acquired by systematically establishing the infrastructure necessary to track the results obtained from a variety of online and offline marketing vehicles.  “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half.” John Wanamaker

Stonyfield Farms, the spunky organic yogurt manufacturer, knows how passionately their customers care about the environment, so many of its campaigns promote the environment more than their yogurt. They won over their customers by creating dead-simple hourly pricing and telling customers that they’d only be charged per mile if they exceeded 180 miles per day. Whenever I hear someone rave about a company, in the back of my head I think, hey, I’d like people to talk that way about my work. How can I do it?

Enjoy. Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs , February 2, 2010 Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth. Of course, one of the best ideas around this is to have Negative Customer Acquisition Costs . Here are some recent great posts that I’ve come across that generally fall in the intersection of startups and CTOs. Great stuff.

day might include a discussion with a finance partner, an investor, a customer or a fusion partner. Our new customer acquisition has grown and our costs have plummeted. We are actually getting paid now to obtain customers, so our customer acquisition costs are now negative. A negative I’ve recently had a chance to reconnect with Eric David Greenspan ( LinkedIn , Twitter ) He’s the CEO of Make It Work a high quality, personal, high touch technology service provider for homes and small businesses. He’s done several startups and is a board member of the Technology

In many cases, I can break it down into: Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models. We'll need to look at different customer acquisition channels, figure out how they are converting, and the expected lifetime value of customers acquired through those channels, and apply cost to those channels. A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation.

“Employees First, Customers Next” is my philosophy and how we roll at Make It Work . During public speaking engangements, when I attend meetings, or when I encounter Make It Work customers. Have you ever heard the term “The customer is ALWAYS right?” That type Let me elaborate… It happens to me frequently on three separate occasions.