Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Get Your Customers To Product For You!

Your customers have questions. A certain percentage of your customers don't like to ask you questions. They prefer to answer their own questions. You can take advantage of this by better understanding co-production.

Have a Question?

Guide customers to areas where they can have their questions answered. Co-production is getting customers to provide part of the workload. So whenever you can have them answer their own questions you save man-hours and can help more customers at any given time.

Many catalogers do this with callouts throughout their catalog. You can apply this to cover a broad area of topics. Refer to articles, recommend books, maps, links to areas on and off your site or in and out of your town. The goal is to provide relevant materials to your customer base that help them buy and use your products and services.

Examples of Have a Question
Amazon.com does a good job of recommending relevant materials. To do this in your shop create posters that say, “Visit our ‘how-to’ section at the end of the aisle.” or “Visit our recommended resources section—click here.” You can also use this information as an approach when a sales rep approaches a customer. “If you have any questions, my name is Dana, feel free to ask me or you can use our reference center found at the end of each aisle.”

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