Dare to Compete
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Dare to Compete
By: Robert A. Kobek, RRP, President
CustomerCount
“The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do”. Roy L. Smith
It should not be a surprise to anyone that I find out what is wrong with our competitors’ products, sometimes before they do. I am talking to their customers every day. Some are very happy, some are don’t care, some are really mad. And, if I don’t talk to their customers, I follow their Facebook and Twitter accounts and I have friends engaged in LinkedIn. Even my Gmail account searches for posts of those that dare to compete with me. Oh the information we glean from all of this is enough to curl your hair!
Bringing us now to the year 2012 and the question “why in the world would you not find out what is up with your customers before your competitors do”? The technology is there (here, actually), the data is easily collected, and it is proven, time after time after time, that customers will tell you; by phone, via email, fax, social networking and word of mouth.
Bad news travels really fast; with today’s technology that’s the speed allowed by fiber, light speed. (Light travels at a constant, finite speed of 186,000 mi/sec. A traveler, moving at the speed of light, would circum-navigate the equator approximately 7.5 times in one second). Good news travels at a snail’s pace. Nothing good comes from bad news and good news is too late to get to you to do anything about.
So the question is you doing so much business that your business is too good to find ways to capture customer feedback?
