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Customers Don’t Know What They Want

August 23, 2007 By Joe Rawlinson

Customers will come to your business seeking a solution. They need help with a problem that you are aptly suited to solve. Many times they will rely on your expertise because they don’t fully understand everything about your product, service, or industry.

Do More Than a Customer Could

Our ongoing struggles with Logoworks have been frustrating and time consuming. We hired them to create a logo for our company in the hopes that we’d get an amazing logo like those shown on their website. However, many of the revisions we saw were of clip art quality. Our early revisions even had us asking, “Could we have just done this ourselves?”

Those are words you never want your customers to say. When you are competing in the marketplace, it isn’t just against your rival businesses. Customers may choose no one and do it themselves.

Your deliverables must instill confidence in your customers such that they are reassured they made the right decision in hiring you.

You’re the Expert

Your job as the “expert” is to translate the customer’s needs, situation, problems, and requirements into a valid, working solution. You must leverage your history with similar clients, industry knowledge, and training to fill in the blanks of your customer’s requests. A customer may not even know the right questions to ask. You must make sure those questions get asked and answered properly.

Taking Customer Feedback

Customers may offer suggestions or request changes. You, as the expert, must weigh those inputs with what you know about the entire process and product. Don’t take a customer’s feedback literally unless you fully understand the reasoning or problem behind it.

It is acceptable to tell a customer you shouldn’t do something if you can explain why it is a bad idea. When countering a customer request, don’t make it an emotional argument. Instead, focus on what the results would be if that exact feedback was implemented.

New Possibilities

Take customers’ feedback and then offer them alternatives or solutions that expand on their input and combine it with your expertise. This way you keep them on the right track while still incorporating their requests.

On a previous project, we had Lea Alcantara design our logo. She did a fantastic job of communicating with us and taking our inputs and creating something well beyond what we could have imagined. Lea truly is an expert and goes beyond simply doing what we told her to do.

Do you give customers exactly what they asked for? Or do you take that and give them something better?

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