Website Design Blog

Love thy customer as yourself

This is a bit off topic and not necessarily to do with your website #doncasterisgreat.

I have not blogged for a couple of weeks now. I know it is no excuse but I have just been so busy I have, to my shame, not prioritised my social media diary. I have been so caught up in doing my job to the best of my ability in an attempted to please my customers and deliver to them what they need I have not had much time to do anything else.

So what is my point? Well it is not a sly attempt at a backwards way of singing my own praises (reading that second paragraph back to myself I can see it might come across as that, so I apologise). My point is, doing what I have been doing for the past fortnight, it got me thinking about my relationships with my website design clients.

I realised I am in a fantastic position of having close professional relationships with nearly all my clients and because of that I can see their needs more clearly and I can empathise with them. Most of my work comes through word of mouth. For this reason I am able to see things from their point of view and I am more willing to go the extra mile to help them. I put myself in their situation and ask myself, “if I were the customer how would I like to be treated or helped in this situation?”

For us to answer such a question with total honesty we must first ignore all we know about our position as the service provider (clients won’t know the ins and outs of what we have to deal with). When we have done that we can have a go at answering the question. Whatever your answer is, that is what you should do for your client. After all, why should you treat your clients in an inferior way to how you would like to be treated.

The relationship age

Now, I know not all companies can nurture such relationships, due to scale, but you should at least have some clients that you can call “friends”. But, then again, even if you don’t you can still perform the above exercise.

I guess what I am trying to say is that it is not hard to know what your customers want, or what they deserve, or what you would expect as a customer yourself. The hard part is outworking what you know is right. It is ultimately a test of our character to “love thy customer as yourself” but if we can honestly say that we do, then it will be pretty hard for us to fail in our businesses.

This philosophy is all the more appropriate as we start to enter what is being called “The relationship age”

How good are the relationships you have with your own customers?

Blessings

James