Ticking the boxes

Last Friday I had one of my regular lunch-meetings with my good friend Richard (who I consider my mentor and who's advice and help has kept me sane in some difficult times over the years). One of the topics we discussed was how customers experience our 'niche-market' product/service and how we can improve this further by getting the customer (suspects, prospects etc included) involved in the process/experience as early as possible. The first thing we always explain to suspects, prospects and customers is the principle we work with: KISS (but of course) Keep It Simple Sweetheart.

Our websites are very, very informative (as acknowledge by many of our customers, because they tell us) and aims to educate our customers in the benefits and advantages our product has for them. Our FAQ blog turns out to be very popular for doing this bit by bit.

During the discussion last Friday we also checked if our aim in educating customers is working and we can always improve our efforts, but the overall feeling is: yes we tick most boxes.
Which boxes? Low and behold, today I read Seth blog on embracing the naive prospects and they are listed there one by one:

• Educate
• Transparency
• Guaranteed
• Personalised (again and again, every suspect knows something different of your products so no 'standard' one-suits-all talk)

Not only Seth's blog talks about this specific subject: Fred on Ideate discusses the same in his excellent thought's on how a customer should be able to experience your company/product/service.

One thought on the side: lately I'm experiencing de-ja-vu's and ah-ha moments on various marketing topics (could be that I'm just reading too many blogs and books ;-))