8 Questions You Must Ask

8 Questions You Must Ask

Welcome to this week's business insight by Shep Hyken. This week's insight is titled:
Know Your Customers
It is very important to know what your customers want, expect and think of you. (This goes for your internal customers as well.)
So how do you get to know your customers? There are a number of ways. You can hold focus groups, mail surveys, call on the
telephone, keep a guest book with a place for comments, etc.
The best way is to directly ask them. Here are a few questions
you may want to ask. They may vary depending on what you do and the type of business you are in.
1. Were you satisfied with your most recent experience with us?
2. Was the service friendly?
3. Were the employees helpful and knowledgeable?
4. Were your expectations met?
5. What products (or services) would you like to see added?
6. What would you suggest we change about the way we do business?
7. Where else do you do business for the same products (or
services)?
8. Can you think of one thing that can make your experience with us even better?

Copyright © – Shep Hyken, Shepard Presentations
Shep Hyken, shep@hyken.com. (www.hyken.com)

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Create a Journalist Listening Station

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Create a Journalist Listening Station

Garnering great press for your business is a powerful marketing strategy and as such, journalists should be on your radar as a target market. Now, instead of abusing them with buy (press releases) messages, how about starting by building some know, like and trust before you ever ask for the order - that’s just good marketing.

The absolute best way to do this is to become a resource to a select group of journalists that report on your industry or businesses in your community. As a resource your primary job is to help them do their job better by sending along industry information, adding to stories they write and commenting on potential resources and angles they might consider - nothing to do with selling your business or story.

If you do this I can almost guarantee you will start getting calls to provide quotes in stories as a reliable source.

Here’show to make the job of journalist relationship building easier.

Use Google Alerts and Google Reader to track every story, blog post and mention your target list of journalists create and scan them in five minutes from one location (or, even have them sent to your email inbox as they happen in real time.)

Thenyou can visit your Reader page, see if anything from one of your journalists pops up and go make a relevant comment on their blog, drop an industry study in mail or suggest a follow-up angle to their story through a hand-written note. This entire process should take just minutes a day and can even be delegated once it’s up and running.

Sometech notes:

GoogleAlerts
• Use quotes around full names to get best results - “bill smith”
• Check the RSS version to have it sent to Google Reader

GoogleReader
• Create a folder in Google Reader just for your PR efforts so that you can store the results of your RSS alerts in one handy place
• Get in the habit of checking and responding at least several times a week.