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It's Only Common Sense: Make Your Customers Proud

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...When was the last time a customer said something nice about you? Better yet, when was the last time you did something so amazing that a customer came back and mentioned it to you? Isn’t that the ultimate win? Isn’t that what we all want? We should all strive to make customers so proud of doing business with us that they want to brag about it.

How do we make this happen? How do we become such a good and valuable vendor that customers are proud to tell people about us?

First, make sure you give customers what they want. Hell, why stop there? Give them more than what they want. Be so engaged that you know their PCB needs as much as, if not more than, they do. That means working very closely with them and developing a strong understanding of their needs, from technology to quality, from the market they're in to what it takes for them to be successful. Learn all of these things and apply your products and services to meet and exceed those needs.

If you're working with a medical equipment OEM, for example, you must know that reliability is the key to their success. These companies are literally in a life-or-death business--a business where zero errors are tolerated. Their vendors must also be reliable, as well as consistent and dedicated to quality requirements. If you're going to successfully service medical equipment customers, you have to develop a dedicated quality process focused on such needs. Your processes and quality checkpoints must be as failure-proof as possible. You’ll want to position your company as the tried-and-true experts in the fabrication of medical electronics circuit boards. Your end-game is to be so good at this and so customer-focused that you can say you specialize in building PCBs for the medical equipment industry and then provide the evidence to back that claim up.

Your end-game is to get your medical electronics customers to brag to their customers that they are using a PCB vendor who specializes in building boards explicitly for their industry.

The same applies to all other markets. Each has its own hot-button issues and market needs. Each segment's players want to be experts in their chosen fields and to be able to say that  their vendors specialize in their particular products and needs.

Another way to get your customers to brag about you is to change their adversity into opportunity for you. There's no better time to prove your value to a customer than when that customer is in trouble. Maybe they didn’t place their order when they should have and are in a terrible time crunch, or maybe there's something horribly wrong with their design, or maybe they got hit with a big order too fast. No matter the reason, when they're in trouble and facing adversity, that’s the time for you to shine. It's the perfect opportunity to show just how truly valuable you are, the time to cement a relationship for life. The more dramatic the story, the more trouble you saved them, the more grateful they will be and the more they will brag about you. It’s the perfect time to ask for a testimonial/success story from them as well. I guarantee they will be happy to oblige.

Finally, be customer-focused. Know what your customers need and give it to them--without argument. If they're in trouble, don’t play the blame game, don’t chastise, and don’t say things like “you should have come to us in the first place.” Instead, go right into help mode and immediately figure out how you can help them. Get right to work solving their problem--worry about the details later. Do this and it will really pay off. You’ll become a company they're proud to work with and a vendor for life. It’s only common sense.