Dr. Tom Sant of The Sant Corporation has a recent post on his blog entitled Broadcasting on WII-FM.  While his posts usually focus on sales, there is a very close relationship to customer service and I wanted to comment on that parallel using this article as a base.

First off, in order to be successful in selling, it is true that you need to sell to a need. That is, the prospective customer has to perceive a need for what you are selling and the cost of purchasing what you are selling far offsets the cost of not purchasing in terms of opportunity cost, problems solved, etc. This is the basic premise of the ‘Whats In It For Me’ (WII-FM) theory.

But once you have acquired the customer, not much changes. You have to continue to deliver and wow your customers in order to keep them. The good thing is they already bought from you so you have an advantage that your competitors don’t have, which is trust. If you embrace and cherish this trust, you will be handsomely rewarded with additional business, referrals, etc.

Unfortunately, many businesses forget the value of this trust and lose focus of the WII-FM principal. Once you win a customer, there may not be any reason for them to continue their business relationship with you. Especially if you don’t show them how much they mean to you and fail to communicate with them. Customers can be very loyal, or they can be very fickle… how they become, is largely a result of how they are treated.

This is where many companies fail… they turn the tables and start thinking about What’s In It For Them. And once a company gains this mind sight, they begin the path down a slippery slope of lost customers, poor customer service, and of course, lost revenues. This is usually followed by more lost customers, lost employees, lost market share… you get the picture.

You may think this picture is exaggerated but hey, wasn’t China some poor Communist country 30 years ago? And wasn’t India some non-developed land of a billion poor people with no literacy and no skills?