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Involve your customers in the process of making or delivering your product or service. Involvement helps customers gain valuable information about the quality of your product / service. The personal experience creates positive feelings that are the force behind their talking about your enterprise.

Sure, you may have liability risks to keep in mind when you involve customers. However, even if you cannot allow customers on the production line of your factory, you can probably find ways to involve them. More ideas are in the book, but here are a few ideas as starters:

• Give tours (either live or video) of your production facility to the public, to distribution companies, to your marketing company, to champion customers.

• Let your customer select some features on your product or service before it is made for them.

• At the retail level give hands-on demonstrations of how your product / service works, how its chief benefit is a value to them, how it differs from the competition, etc.

• Educate customers how they can maintain the product / service after they purchase it.

• Let champion customers talk with selected suppliers so they can learn more about the value that you purchase and include in their product / service.

• Let champion customers participate on a product review panel to give you feedback about improvements you are making for their benefit.

• Give internet access or modem access to some step in the production or distribution process so customers can monitor the status of their purchase.

• Are in the words of consumers expressing consumer issues.
  
• Help a new customer visualize what it will be like for them if they try your product.
  
• Speak in terms that other customers understand and relate to easily.
  
• May, if offered by a carefully selected celebrity, provide a high-visibility recommendation.
  

Testimonials can be solicited and filed for later reference. If you solicit written testimonials, be sure to explain what you are doing and why. Also, you can capture testimonials that surface during typical transactions with customers. For example, if you hear a customer talking favorably about your product or service to someone else, you can ask them for permission to quote them in your next newsletter, your next advertisement, etc. Use a customer response form that contains a section that asks for this type of feedback.

If you use testimonials, keep the following principles in mind:

1. Secure permission from the individual before using the qotations.
   
2. Use the testimonial in context. Refuse to twist the truth.
   
3. Keep written testimonials on file incase someone wants to verify a source.

1. Ask your staff to gather stories that illustrate what your reputation means to customers.
2. Tell stories at staff meetings so that your champion staff have the details needed to spread these stories to others.
3. Write the stories down and use them in brochures, newspaper advertising, direct mail advertising, radio advertising, newsletters and personal correspondence with customers.
4. Train sales staff to tell stories in the process of closing the sale.

Here are a few ideas, but use this list as simply a starter for your own team to develop further:

1. Conduct a opinion survey or series of focus groups of opinion leaders to determine what topics are of most interest. You and your senior management team should select one or two topics that you can become known for.
2. Pick any topic but the topics that are near to the core of cultural expression, e.g., food, arts, tools, language, trade, etc., may be more important to champions.
3. Choose an educational method that is cost efficient, one that is appropriate to your business, and one that you can sustain over time. This maybe simply a series of free seminars that you host giving free information. Or, it may be a newsletter you start, a weekly column in the local newspaper, point of purchase displays, or an internet web site. Make a two to three year commitment to the project.

1. By simulating word of mouth.
2. By stimulating word of mouth.

Simulating word-of-mouth is a form of using the testimonial to build trust. Stimulating word-of-mouth takes many advertising forms including educating customers about who to ask for advise, suggesting that customers seek opinions of others, creative messages and images that spark spontaneous conversations, etc. See Chapter 10 of the book for more information on this tactic.

• Responsiveness
• Efficiency
• Flexibility
• Consistency
• Durability
• Convenience
• Simplicity
• Reliability
• Accessibility
• Security

Find out how important these and other characteristics are to your target consumers. Then find out how you perform on the most important ones. If you completed this type of analysis last year, do not assume that things are static. In fact, assume that consumer perceptions have changed to some degree and that what was important last year may not be as important this year and visa versa.

When you are faced with a complaint always ask yourself, "What can we do to send this customer away happy?" remember these bits of marketing truth:

• As the severity of the problem for the consumer increases, so does his or her tendency to engage in negative word of mouth.
• Opinion seekers assign more weight to negative word of mouth or service evaluations than they do to positive evaluations.
• Negative feelings customers have about your product or service occur in a moment, but these feelings may last for years if you do not address them immediately.
• Most customers do not want to confront your company about things that make them dissatisfied, since they believe that they will get no action or feedback. In addiition, to complain requires them to face their own feelings.

• Add unexpected value to the transaction: value to the product, value to the transaction experience, value to the service, value to the information about the product or service, unexpected valuable products or services. When you add a surprise don't advertise it to the public. Just let word-of-mouth carry the information. Using paid advertising to alert the public that there is a surprise waiting for them eliminates the surprise element.
• Add entertainment to the buying experience. Be careful here since some customers may not want to spend the time "enjoying" the entertainment. So, make it optional. Theme parks have been using this tactic for years by having mimes and clowns interact with the crowd waiting in line to get in to the attraction. Fast food restaurants have tried this approach, too.

Carefully research your ideas for surprises to eliminate the risk of offending customers.

More and more companies are beginning to show consumers how and why their quality improvement benefits them. And, rightly so because consumers talk with one another about the quality improvements they see in products and services. When you form "Continuous Quality Improvement" (CQI) teams, make sure that you involve your champion customers in some way during the team's work:

• Gather data from champion customers relating to the types of problems they are having or the types of changes they want to see in your products and services. Don't assume that you know customer expectations completely.
• Test quality improvement changes (either in reality or, at least, in concept form) with champion customers before final implementation.
• Inform champion customers of the specific changes that you make showing why the changes were made and how these changes will benefit them.

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