Start conversations with your customers to find improvements

Portland just wrapped up a major snow and ice storm. Word is that it set some records for how crazy it ended up being.

Yesterday I did a walk around to check for any damage as the ice was melting and happened to chat with a neighbor who I haven't talked much with. It ended up being a 15 minute conversation around various topics but one thing stuck with me.

We've had power and internet the entire time (luckily), but our neighbor lot theirs for a few days. Their kid almost missed out on an important test and had a pile of schoolwork to get through.

We have a high-power router, a guest network, and a gigabit connection. More than enough internet for them to share while theirs was getting back online.

But since it never came up before now, neither of us thought about it.

Now next time there's an outage, we'll both know to have a chat early on and see what we can share. It could be internet. Could be power (2 major outages in 10 months has us looking at solar seriously). Or anything else really.

All it took was a casual conversation about the topic. Which, granted, even that was difficult since we moved in right when the pandemic was getting started and everyone's been stuck in their homes.

You can have casual conversations with your customers too, though it probably won't be about the weather, outages, and house projects. Customers on your email list want to hear from you and not just promotions you have. Make sure you're contacting them regularly and trying to start conversations.

In other news, I snuck in a small update to the Monday Morning Metrics report in Repeat Customer Insights so it'll now highlight more of your star customers each week. It was a small change but because a customer had a conversation with me about it, I was happy to add it for them. Now everyone benefits.

Eric Davis