Netflix Customers Experience Christmas Eve Outage | Small ...

All entrepreneurs must learn this important lesson: No matter how great your product or service may be, how you deliver that product or service ultimately makes or breaks your business. Fail to deliver what customers expect, and you will suffer the consequences. Deliver consistently at or even above those expectations and you build a loyal army of followers who will keep buying from you while bringing even more customers to your door. Here we see evidence that even large brands can get it wrong when it comes to delivering on expectations and also hear some advice from small businesses on how to get it right.

Customer Relations

The gift that keeps on giving. On Christmas Eve, Netflix users discovered the streaming video service isn?t always a good alternative to cable. An outage affected users in Canada, the U.S. and Latin America that evening and was not fully corrected until Christmas Day. It was not a great gift to Netflix customers, many of whom have abandoned cable and other forms of entertainment for the innovative service, and like many bad customer experiences, it may linger in their minds for some time to come. Reuters

Signing an unwritten contract. You may not think of it this way, but each time you make a sale of products or services to a customer, you effectively enter into an unwritten contract. Once you adopt this approach to customer relationships, you?ll probably never look at your business the same way again?or want to. Instead of simply moving on from one sale to the next, you?ll look at each transaction as a set of promises made between you and your customer, says blogger Harry Vaishnav. And they are promises that must be kept if your business is to succeed. Small Biz Viewpoints

Service with a Smile

Above and beyond the call of duty. The most successful businesses are those that do a little something extra. They are also the ones that make sure their customers know and remember the added benefits they provide in their products and services. Take the baker who always slips that extra bread roll into your bag, a ?baker?s dozen.? You remember that little extra the next time you?re buying bread and decide which bakery to visit. Do the same in your business, says Tom Watson, and you?ll keep them coming back for more. Cleaning 4 Profit

Up close and personal. Personalized service can be an important edge, especially for smaller companies. One important step in creating this personalized service is to get closer to your customers. This closer relationship lets businesses learn specifics about customer preferences and how to deliver on them effectively. Here business networking consultant Jeff Owen suggests some great steps that will bring you closer to your customer base. UPrinting

Communications & Community

How to change the channel. Customer service and engagement depend upon communicating with your customers and fans where they are, and like it or not, this does not always mean a single or small collection of channels. Not only do customers expect your brand to engage with them across multiple channels, but 97 percent of these customers expect their experience to be consistent no matter what channel they use to engage with your brand. The good news is that one study found those customers who engage you on multiple channels are likely to spend more money and be more loyal too. SalesPortal

Truth is more profitable than fiction. We all like to believe that our products and services help our customers. So the best kind of customer service should be to deliver those products and services in a way that will make our customers? lives better. But it turns out that telling the truth about what our customers need is also the best marketing. It may also be the best way of keeping customers loyal and bringing them back again and again. Business mentor Laura Humphreys tells the story of a dentist whose candor is winning business one patient at a time. Liber8Me

Talk to your community. Talk with your community and you create loyalty in ways you cannot fully calculate. As blogger Sian Phillips explains, your community allows you to connect in a way that goes beyond simple marketing and customer service. Ask them to answer a question or to share a blog post or other message, and they will respond. They are more than customers, clients, and fans, they are friends. These connections will serve you well and help you deliver products and services in tune with your customers and community. CorpNet

Source: http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/12/netflix-customers-experience-christmas-eve-outage.html

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