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Post purchase care and "word-of-mouth"

Keywords: word of mouth, post purchase care, customer relationships.

Your best adverts can be satisfied customers.

Satisfied customers can become unpaid ambassadors for your product. Yes word-of-mouth advertising is free, well no in fact it requires big investment.

OK that confusion should be common sense to most people, and it may be, but there are plenty of companies who forget the basic premise, that satisfied customers are investments, and in my opinion very few who give it the gravity it should demand.

As a customer I perceive that very few of the companies I have bought from, truly show they care about my attitude to them after the transaction is complete.

Word of mouth for the purposes of this article is simply when one individual not associated with the company spreads a message about the offering. It can be positive or negative. Belief in the effects of word-of-mouth mean that you cannot avoid the fact that you now have a relationship with your customers which exists after a transaction has taken place and even if there is no chance of any future transaction.

Why are satisfied customers so important?

People tend to believe the opinions of people they know, more than an advert. They prefer even more to believe people they view as impartial experts in a field, more than an advert. People even trust press editorial more than a paid advert.

Folk know a paid advert is a commercial message designed to tell the "good side" and to attempt to persuade you to buy the offering. They attach lower value to messages in adverts accordingly.

This explains the great demand for product reviews for example "car price guides" and the whole "Which" family of consumer advice products, which are seen as relatively impartial.

It also explains the strenuous work companies will put into obtaining celebrity endorsement as punters will tend to think "if XYZ is using / wearing / eating / quaffing this stuff" it cannot be all that bad.

People do know not to trust adverts.

More important than all of this is the aftertaste people are left with when they have bought your products, this is what generates word-of-mouth.

Do they feel the choice they made was the right one, now, having the benefit of hindsight;

do they congratulate themselves on making the right purchase decision?
Do they feel they have been misled or perhaps find "the actualities" of your offering do not match the expectations you created when persuading them to make the purchase?
"Treat your customers as sheep at your peril", you do not lead them, they lead you.

Word of mouth is a critical business sponsored communication

Why is it business sponsored when I have said that it differs from advertising and is free?

It is business sponsored because word-of-mouth reflects the customers perception of the companies deeds (actions) not company advertising blurb.

The company is wholly responsible for the quality of word-of-mouth its deeds generate. It is consequently vital to ensure "the word" your company generates is positive.

This would seem to be obvious even to the most hardened sceptic but there are a number of extra reasons why positive word of mouth is valuable which textbooks tend not to examine.

Word of mouth is self-targeting.

People will tend to tell others about their experience with brand "X" washing machine, normally when they are asked about washing machines.

So it is when someone is thinking about buying your offering that your investment into "post purchase satisfaction" starts to pay its way for your company.

Word of mouth is often geographically relevant.

While it is true that telephones, the post and email can extend word-of-mouth's reach geographically without limits, significant and very real benefits can be had if you manage to get clusters of satisfied customers.

Local Repute: Say you are a German company who start selling your product in Milan. You have at the moment no outlets in Roma or any other parts of Italy yet. You may be able to make a cluster of satisfied customers in Milan who will self generate business for your outlet for years to come.

Savings on travel, maintenance and increased call rates: If your product or promotion methods require visiting your customers or prospects, clusters reduce the time and cost involved in getting from one to the other increasing face to face time and numbers of calls you can achieve in a working day. If you want to operate telephone support, all your clients in this cluster will be a local call charge away from each other.

Word of mouth works inside skill sets and technical areas.

While paid advertising will target skills sets and categories of people if correctly planed and executed, word of mouth does this better as people tend to operate in peer groups. If the leader of a particular peer group is a convert to your offering it is likely they will sell your offering for you to others in their group.

This explains why in the innovation or start up phase of your offerings life cycle it is important to target peer group leaders and innovators, though different animals, at the same time. A bad example of this is the free beta version software issued to magazine editors long before the full-blown and fully tested product is available.

Beta testing this way is a very risky business; can you afford to alienate peer group leaders who really have the ability to communicate about your offering, before you have debugged your product?

Final comment:

Bad word-of-mouth can be a real business looser.

Simple proposal:

I advocate any organisation selling an item for more than £500 (US$800) who knows they are going to miss a delivery date, send a bouquet of flowers to arrive on or before the delivery date with a personal apology, an explanation of why they will fail to meet expectations, a personal commitment (from a named individual) to rectify the situation, and a choice of actions the customer can take to reduce the inconvenience that will have been caused by the missed delivery.

If your company cannot guarantee on-time delivery of your offering, or organise this little apology "on-time" when you are going to fail (delivery, the first test of expectations), you should be asking questions about your ability to retain customers and generate positive post purchase word-of-mouth communications.

[Author mark@sticky-marketing.net date 10/03/01]