Are you a turn-off? Fatal blunders killing your customer relationships

Please welcome Guest Blogger, Lara Marlin Hull. Lara spent many years in the lab at Amylin Pharmaceuticals as a “bench monkey” and brings a fresh scientific voice to improving sales to scientists. We love her take on scientist relationships. Feel free to ask her a few questions.
Enjoy! – Rusty and Mark

by Lara Marlin Hull

Your customer relationships are your goldmine.  Once you get to move your scientist from Lead to Prospect, you’ve gotten your foot officially in the door – not easy in the life sciences industry.

As a former bench monkey figuring out all the sales and marketing magic that happens on the other side of the lab door, I still marvel at the power behind the idea (bear with me) of each scientist /prospective customer also representing this lab, this building, this campus - for years – way more valuable than a mere sale!

All the more reason to keep the relationship alive.  I’ll share some examples of customer relationship flops I have either experienced or heard about around the centrifuge.  They definitely don’t represent the typical scenario – but they help to illustrate my point that these situations wouldn’t have to end in misery.

Guiding Question

From what I’ve seen, “Is this good for my customer relationship?” could be an easy way to decide if tactics are going to be effective.

In any case, some of these missteps would put anyone in the doghouse  so don’t let them happen to you.

1.  Unfulfilled Promises

If there is one lot you can be realistic with, its scientists.  It’s nice for us to talk about you getting us a lower price than the current vendor, but if you can’t make that happen (or even have an inkling that you can’t), don’t say it, and really don’t promise it!   Imagine running a painstakingly long series of assays to compare media because New Vendor promised cheaper prices than Old Vendor.  After months of work, you find that New Vendor’s quote is, in fact, more than Old Vendor – !

A Company Apology that Works

We all mess up, especially during times of a lot of change. It’s may be one thing that everyone can agree on.  I recall when Invitrogen was seemingly buying companies every month, the integration of  systems and people caused all kinds of problems.  Even though there was every attempt to shield customers, many slipped through.  

Since we had to deal face-to-face with the customers, the sales force caught a lot of grief from those customers having to learn new account numbers and changing billing procedures. Even changes in product look and feel caused researchers to be concerned about the performance and reliability of their favorite items.  You never want to make it harder to do business with your company but it happened.

You can never prevent all problems. The key to how it impacts a customer long-term is how you respond to the issue.  If your response is satisfactory and resolves the issue, the initial incident is largely forgotten (or only brought up during contract negotiations). If the issue is not resolved, then the customer is left with an open wound–sometimes it heals, but many times it gets worse. 

The Apology

I got an email apology from Boingo Wireless this week and I liked it (see the email at the bottom of the post). I signed up for their service once in an airport to access the internet and haven’t used it since so Im not an important customer. Apparently, they sent an inadvertent notice to all their customers that their accounts were no longer valid. Can you imagine if that happened in your company? What a hassle.

The outage didn’t affect me, but the apology did. I liked it. It had me at “hello”.

“Let me start this off with a big, fat apology.” 

Doesn’t that sound like someone just picked up the phone and called you?  It’s real and it gets right to the point. It’s from the CEO, Dave Hagan. Whether he wrote it or not, the tone is human, you can empathize, and it’s not so serious that you can’t smile a bit when it mentions the “system deciding” to send the erroneous message. Check out their blog, The HotSpot, for more of the same tone. It’s a fun read with good travel information.

Small Details 

I only have a couple of recommendations that would make this better.

Faster is better… but correct is best.

The apology was sent 4 days after the erroneous email. For an issue that touches on a large part of your customer base, I think that is pushing the edge of timeliness.  As a company, you need to determine what happened so you can reassure recipients that it won’t happen again.

Put contact information next to your offer to have people contact you.

It’s nice to remind people to contact them if there is anything they can do to help but there is no easy email address or phone number for customer service. Create an email address to handle these questions, put it right in the email so people don’t have to hunt. Small but important details.

Mistakes R Us (all of us)

Mistakes are just a part of being an organization made up of imperfect people. Being online, your customers and prospects may get to see them more as you participate in the online community. There are real benefits to having your customer base see your company as more human.  The risks are there, too.

In my mind, this is a great example of making lemonade from lemons. Do you have a plan to deal with the inevitable? For me, I’ll remember Boingo and be a happy, prospective customer.

Do you have a recent experience with great or poor online customer communication?  Share it with us in the comments section below.