Category: Marketing

customers

Does great customer service matter?

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“Of course! If I didn’t give my customers great service, then my customers would leave for a competitor” (which we know is is not a good outcome)

True, but let me phrase the question differently: What does it take to keep your customers coming back?

Before you answer, did you ask? Yes, customers typically love great service, but here’s the most important thing to remember:

Customers became your customers for a reason (or several). If you do a great job at a bunch of things, but not that (or those) thing(s), you will lose your customer.

Yes, it’s that simple.

Let me give you an example: I used to have DSL Internet service in my home (which gives you an idea of how long ago this was), and was more than a bit suspicious of cable-Internet. When I signed up, the DSL was the fastest connection available. And, my DSL provider was fantastic (shockingly) at customer service. Every time I called, I got an actual person. I wasn’t transferred around, the person who answered my call did the research and talked to colleagues for me. He/she was nice, friendly and often offered credits for past poor service.

But….I needed a fast connection (when I signed up, they were the fastest available). And in the months preceding my change, my DSL provider’s speeds had slowed dramatically and a connection that hadn’t dropped in six years (you read that correctly!) was suddenly dropping several times every day.

The best efforts of several customer service reps, technicians, and even the people they sent to my home (for free!) could not resolve the issue.

They offered me credit; they offered me free add-on services; they made so many enticing offers that I was tempted to live with the unreliable, slow service. But in the end, I switched. I needed fast service.

My new provider has horrible customer service. An actual person never answers the phone, and when I get a person they are always rude and unhelpful, it usually takes five, six or seven people just to get a simple answer. But my connection is fast and almost never drops (three times in five years).

If you don’t believe me, take a look at two very well known examples of poor customer service. Whenever people bring up bad customer service stories, the examples they rely on are typically cable television companies and airlines. In my area, that means Comcast and United (I pick on them a lot). Think about it: Do you fly one airline all the time? If so, are you getting great customer service? If not, why do you keep going back? (If I had to guess, it’s schedule convenience, fares or frequent flier points — not customer service!)

This may not be how your business works, but if your business depends on repeat customers, you have no choice but to ask: “Why did my customers buy from me in the first place, and what will keep them coming back?”

Then invest your customer retention budget right there.

So, yes, if customer service matters to your customer, make it great. But always be sure you know — and are serving — your customer’s needs.

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customers

Keep Your Customers Coming Back: How to Increase Repeat Business and Reduce Churn

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Are you in a business that depends on returning customers?  Or a business that sells a subscription service?  If you are, then you already know intuitively that bringing your customers back — or ensuring they renew — is the lifeline of your business.

Knowing that, are you spending disproportionately on new customer acquisition and leaving renewals to a customer service team that lacks the incentive to maximize return/renewal revenue?

Many of my clients are in the technology industry, which is in the midst of making an industrywide shift from one-time product sales to subscription based services (the trend to so-called cloud computing is leading the way).  In the old model, it was fair to assume that once a customer purchased a product, they would most likely use it and then buy smaller add-ons, such as upgrades or service contracts.  In that model, most of the revenue came from the initial purchase, so most of the marketing and sales effort went into new customer acquisition.

But as the model has shifted, the investment has not kept pace.  My clients see symptoms such as customer service teams that are expected to renew their customers but have little or no incentive to do so or sales reps that have no incentives tied to long-term customer success.  The result?  Churn (customer turnover) rates as high as 33% are common.

So how do you keep one-third of your revenue from walking out the door every year?

The most common response I get when I ask this question is, “Good customer service.”  But what does that mean?  It’s usually measured by anything from product performance, to support center response/resolution rate, or to customer satisfaction survey scores.  This is all good, and these are desirable results.  But they are not (necessarily) what keeps your customers coming back.

To succeed in a repeat customer or subscription renewal business, you need to do two things very differently:

  1. 1. Redefine your business strategy and goals to align with this desired result.
  2. 2. Create metrics that both demonstrate success and allow consistent incentives to be

provided to those teams responsible for that success.

Aligning Your Business Strategy

You have, I presume, a very successful sales and marketing strategy and process for acquiring new customers.  Do you have a parallel sales and marketing process for bringing customers back?  This won’t be the same approach as customer acquisition, but it will take advantage of the existing relationship — and everything you know about your customer and how they value your products.

The information you have from your ongoing customer relationships will determine how to set strategy and process for renewal/return sales and marketing.  To define that strategy, you must answer questions such as

  • What customers are most important to you? Why?
  • How do you determine the value of a customer to you?  Are you considering all the aspects that matter?
  • How important are you to your customers?  Why?
  • What criteria do they use to evaluate your relationship and determine whether they return/renew?
  • How predictable are return customers or renewals?  What predicts them?

If you have sources of data — and you likely do — that hold information about customer behavior, usage patterns, specific activities, interactions with the various parts of your organization, etc., then you have an opportunity to mine that data, test (or defy) conventional wisdom, and learn very specifically what actions (or lack of action) can give you a reliable signal about your customers’ intentions.

Which leads to the second part of building an effective strategy: investing in the right people, systems and processes.

Once you know how to value your customers — what actually signals a return or renewing customer and what signals a departing customer — you can then institutionalize this in processes and systems, and communicate it to your people so concerted, prioritized action can be taken to maximize your ongoing revenue stream.

Creating Metrics and Driving Results

How you measure the success of your renewal/returning customer sales and marketing processes will depend on your specific business and what results you want to achieve. But with the data about how to value your customers and predict behavior, you can start by creating metrics that measure things such as

  • Increases in renewal/return rates year-over-year (or reduction in churn).
  • Increases in value of your customers to you.
  • Increases in value of you to your customers.
  • Success of programs that persuade customers to take the actions that predict renewal/return.
  • Success of programs that convert predicted nonrenewers to predicted renewers even before it comes time to renew.

A variety of other metrics can apply, depending on how your organization is structured and how your customers come back to you.

An important point to keep in mind is that a repeat business or subscription based business model is fundamentally different from a single product sale model.  The differences go much deeper than how you bill.  The investment levels are different, the management of the customer relationship is different, the way you offer and likely distribute your product is different…the list can go on and on.

Those of you in telco (telecommunications) and banking (and similar businesses) will know how to do this intuitively; these businesses depend on repeat customers.

For those of you who are in industries trying to make the shift to a recurring revenue model, don’t underestimate the fundamental changes in strategy and process that are needed. Looking at how you make sure your customers are coming back again and again is a very good start.

In my practice, we have found that understanding the true depth and value of the customer relationship can make the creation of a recurring revenue business much smoother and more successful.

Do you run a recurring revenue business?  Or are you trying to convert to one? Share your thoughts on the challenges and how you address them!

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conversation

Making Better Investments in Your Customer Relationships

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for PAKRAgames. It is part four of a series of four.)

Business relationships are not this intuitive (though I contend they should be), but let me ask you this (if you’re in a long-term relationship, think back to when you were single).

When you started dating, you had opportunities to begin and pursue relationships. How did you make the choice of which woman/man to pursue? Was it the best looking? The smartest? Maybe the most accessible or one you thought would say yes? And if you were lucky enough to have several people from which to choose, into which relationships did you invest your effort? Was it with the cutest partner? The one who seemed most likely to succeed? The one most likely to commit to you?

I’d be willing to bet you made these decisions based on some form of intuition. You probably agonized, analyzed and got lots of advice from your friends and family, but some sense of the “right” choice probably made itself apparent, and off you went.

We don’t do the same with business relationships. We look at forecasts, financials and, if we’re smart about it, marketing and culture compatibility. Specifically, when we look at our customers, we have pretty much one measure of desirability: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which is essentially a net-present-value of expected future revenue from that customer.

But if you ask your sales people and customer service and support representatives, you might see a very different story. You’d hear endless anecdotes that go something like this: This customer may not produce much revenue for us, but they (pick one or more of these) helped us fix several critical bugs, showed us some new uses for our product, are really devoted to us, use only our products and never our competitors’, or have been our best reference customer and a big advocate in the market.

How much value do you place on any (or all!) of those things? My guess is that when it comes to making decisions on how much effort to put into the customer relationship or how hard to try to save them if they suggest they may not come back next year, you put not much value at all (or maybe a little, as an exception).

But you should. Companies that do have customers who keep coming back to them and not their less-successful competitors.

Here’s one example of why: Clayton Christensen’s (@ClayChristensen) “Innovator’s Dilemma” suggests (among other things) that as companies grow, they miss the customer doing something weird with their product. Smaller entrants see it, find the new market based on it and can disrupt the larger company’s market in doing so. But if you — I presume you are the larger, growing company — found the customer doing that weird thing and knew they were valuable, then worked to keep them, you would be able to see the new opportunity and capitalize on it.

There are similar examples for any number of the possible reasons noted above that customers can have value beyond CLV.

So what do you do about it? It’s a simple yet hard answer: Develop a model that can evaluate any given customer’s true value to you (building and helping you manage this model is one of my firm’s main services). That model must include revenue (CLV), but also must include the other dimensions that could make a customer useful and valuable to you. Not all possible dimensions will apply to all companies and, even among the subset that applies to you, not every customer will have much value in each one.

Once you have a model that can assign a quantitative value to each customer relationship, you not only know how valuable each customer is, but how to rank them and know who is genuinely more (or less) important to you. Then you can make well-conceived and well-informed investment decisions. You’ll also know why exactly you are making those decisions.

So when it comes time to allocate budget, time and people to ensure customers are happy, you’ll know who to make happiest. It’s not exactly intuition, and your friends may not have much to say about it, but it will ensure you are doing the best for your customers and for your company, and building relationships that last.

Conclusion:

Over the four parts of this series, I’ve suggested a new way to approach improving and deepening customer relationships, which can reduce churn and ensure customers who walk in the front door this year don’t walk out the back door next year.

I’ve covered:

– Rethinking our business model to ensure we’re making the most of recurring revenue

– Building an effective and measurable sales and marketing process for renewal revenue, and why that’s just as important as your acquisition process

– Learning to understand the value our customers place on our services

– Valuing customer relationships and making better investment decisions

I hope this has helped you think about your business model a little differently and more clearly, and that it has helped you focus your efforts on maximizing the power of your recurring revenue model.

We’d love to hear your story about how you are making the most of your recurring revenue model. Tell us in the comments. And thanks for reading!

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Marketing

Prediction, Renewals and Big Data

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for PAKRAgames. It is part three of a series of four.)

Do you know why your customers renew their subscriptions or services? Do you know how to predict whether any given customer will renew? I suspect you probably have an answer something like, “Well, yes, but it could be better.”

So let’s make it better.

And let’s make better marketing investment decisions by doing so.

The big marketing shift

One of the most important shifts in marketing in the past decade is the combination of the exponential increase in the amount of data available to us and the advent of tools to analyze that data. This trend is generally referred to as “big data.”

Those of us who relied on data-driven marketing in the era before all this data became available used statistical models to attempt to predict behavior based on the few items we could measure (does anyone remember when the measure of success was the order percentage from direct mail … yes, postal mail?)

Big data is an improvement, but it presents us with a very big issue: We now have more data on our hands than we can possibly handle, and, while dramatically improved in the past few years, the tools available to handle this data are barely in their infancy — in fact, they are barely keeping up with the exponential growth of data.

This leaves us with only one way to get the most out of all the data at our disposal: Ask good questions. I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough. And what constitutes a good question isn’t always what you think it should be.

The key question

To answer the questions I posed above, we want to ask not why customers renew, but rather what predicts whether a customer will renew.

To answer, we must use both statistical and data-mining techniques. Historically, we’ve been pretty good at looking at this question and answering with either subjective measures (such as attitude during on-boarding) or objective measures (such as number of successfully resolved support/service calls).

But we need to go farther. We need to look at actions taken during the course of the use of the service. Are your customers adding new users? Are they putting specific kinds of data in the system? Are they completing a full cycle of whatever your service is supposed to help them do within a certain period of time after signing up? All these and many, many more items are potentially significant.

How do you know which ones are? Here we use good old-fashioned statistical techniques to correlate the data to renewals.

What will we learn? We don’t know until we’ve done the analysis, but we might find out that customers who take one series of specific actions within the service always renew, and customers who take a different series of specific actions never renew. Whatever we find out, we’ll have a very good method for predicting the likelihood of renewal.

Now what do we do with that?

To me, this sounds a lot like lead scoring. We can assign grades to customers based on their likelihood to renew and take different actions based on that. For customers we think are 100% likely to renew, maybe we just make them a really good offer. For customers 5% likely to renew, maybe we make a rescue offer. For customers on the bubble — maybe they will, maybe they won’t — we might assign a renewal rep to learn more about how they value the service and turn them to renewal.

Which decisions you make for your particular service depend largely on the economics of the renewal and the specific relationship with and value of that customer (we’ll discuss this in the next part of this series). You can then make good investment decisions and create renewal programs that will help you maximize renewals for your most valuable customers.

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Marketing

The Grass Isn’t Always Greener

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for PAKRAgames. It is part two of a series of four.)

Here’s a scenario that will disturb most of you: You are happily in a long-term committed relationship. Then you meet someone interesting, attractive and with a personality similar to your current partner. You figure your current partner isn’t going anywhere, so you spend lots of time developing a new relationship with this new person. You spend time together, you spend money on gifts and activities, and you find you have common interests. You end up in a relationship with this new person. Are you still assuming your first partner hasn’t gone anywhere? I think we can all agree that’s a pretty bad assumption.

So why do we treat our customers this way?

As I pointed out in Part 1 of this series, we invest far less time and effort (and people and money) in ensuring our customers renew than we do in acquiring them in the first place. But whether your annual subscription is worth $100 or $100,000, the second year is worth just as much as the first (as is the third, fourth, fifth, etc.)

The bonus is that we know our customers already. We know (if we did a good job tracking the initial sales cycle) why they bought from us. We know what value they expected to receive. We know how they did in the on-boarding process. We know why they called in for tech support or service. These are all things we don’t know about new prospects that can help make the renewal cycle so much easier.

My recommendation: Create a sales and marketing process and sales cycle for renewals that matches (with appropriate variation) the acquisition sales cycle.

Once a customer signs up, that is only the very beginning of the relationship. The process should start with translating the value the customer said they expected in the sales cycle into an on-boarding program that will help them achieve that value. The marketing process might include everything from tips-and-tricks newsletters, to periodic offers, to user conferences, to community resources.

But just like your acquisition marketing process, your renewal marketing process needs to capture how much value the customer is actually getting from your product and how they value the on-going relationship. This is precisely analogous to lead scoring in acquisition. The goal is to create a method to evaluate how likely a customer is to renew.

Your renewal sales cycle should start with your best renewal prospects. Unlike your acquisition sales cycle, this will be nearly everyone. This means you have a much fatter pipeline. The good news (for those of you who are now afraid of the staffing requirement) is this sales cycle is much lighter weight. But just like your acquisition sales cycle, you need to define the steps, ensure your customers meet certain criteria to move to the next stage and include opportunities for adding more products or services (upsell).

If you think you already do this quite well with your customer service reps, ask yourself one question: What one person in your company has responsibility for renewal revenue? This person is analogous to the head of sales for acquisition. If you don’t have that person, you don’t have a renewal sales process.

This is no small undertaking, so here is my recommendation to get started: First, create a method for evaluating how likely a customer is to renew (I include some recommendations on how to do this in parts 3 and 4). Then assign a small number (maybe only two or three) sales reps to focus on the subset of customers who are unlikely to renew but you believe are close enough that they can be saved (those very likely to renew probably will anyway; those who really hate you are probably leaving anyway — focus where you can make a difference). Give that team a quota, and let them at it. Then add marketing processes and programs to make sure you don’t lose touch with customers after on-boarding or renewal.

Then measure. The most important measurement is the difference between renewals among the marginal customers before you did this and after. You can even create a control (assign the team only half the marginals, and let the other half use your current process).

I think you and your customers will be much happier, and there won’t be so many clamoring to get out your back door next year.

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customers

The Missed Marketing Opportunity: Your Customers

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for PAKRAgames. It is part one of a series of four.)

Why would you let as much as one-third of your revenue walk out the door every year? And knowing it will, why include it in your forecast, and consider it a “success” as long as it’s no more than one-third?

This is exactly what many companies with subscription-based business models are doing.

The move to subscription-based business models has accelerated in the past decade, led by technology-services companies moving to cloud-based offerings. Most companies that have made this shift have benefited from having a recurring revenue stream and the ability (generally) for more automated sign-up and service options for prospects and customers.

But we missed something.

Recurring revenue means it’s critical to ensure that customers who walk in the front door this year don’t walk out the back door next year. Put another way, it means the value of renewing your customer’s subscription is just as high as starting the subscription in the first place.

A few of you who are doing this right may take exception to this, but in most of the organizations with which I’ve worked, the effort devoted to renewing customer subscriptions is not even close to the effort put into acquiring the customer in the first place. Ask yourself this: In your organization, how much of your budget and staff are devoted to ensuring customers renew? I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at the answer.

Conventional wisdom says it is far less costly to keep a customer than to find a new one. But translating that into action is far more challenging than it sounds (isn’t it always easier said than done?). Some companies do a good (sometimes great) job of bringing a customer up to speed with their products or services (called on-boarding), but then don’t do much of anything else until it’s time to renew. At that point, many companies will alert their customers of upcoming renewals and even assign so-called renewal reps to solicit the renewal.

Which means those companies missed numerous opportunities in between to understand how the customer uses their product and gets value from doing so.

Is it any wonder that as many as one-third of customers walk away every year?

How do we do better?

I propose three areas on which we need to focus to do a better job:

  1. Treating renewals with the same respect we do new customer acquisitions: This will ensure we gain the expected financial and market benefit from our customer relationship.
  2. Gaining a better understanding of how customers value our products and services: This will help us understand why customers renew or don’t — and what do to about it.
  3. Understanding how valuable our customers are to us: This helps us understand how to prioritize investment in our customers and in our renewal efforts.

Parts 2, 3 and 4 of this series will discuss these and how to make them work for you.

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Differentiation

Differentiation is in the eye of the beholder…your customer

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Be honest. If you’re a marketer, you love nothing more than shouting to anyone who will listen (and maybe some who won’t) about why your product or service is so cool, special, interesting….meaning different and unique.

Of course you do – it’s your job.

But while we’re all talking about why our thing is so cool, and what the latest features are, we must remember:

Differentiation is in the eye of our customer, not ourselves.

I want to thank my friend Yvette Cameron for reminding me (leading me to remind you) just how important this perspective shift is. And it’s good to see customers asking this question and defining how their vendors are unique and different, rather than marketers trying to come up with a useful description of the latest new feature.

So, please, when you start shouting about why your offerings are so cool and interesting, ask a few customers first why they think so. They’ll tell you how you benefit them more than your competition (I hope!).

And once you know, go ahead and tell the world.

Share how you discover your unique value in the comments:

 

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Disruption

Apple’s plight: will disruptive innovation make it a winner?

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Earlier this week, Apple (once again) became the world’s most valuable company. For those of us who have been fans over the past 10 or 15 years, this may come as no surprise, especially given their loyal customer base and their ability to enter, and often define, entire new markets.

But the rise of Apple has, at many points over the past few years, led me to ask whether their leadership will remain intact for the long term. By long-term, I mean the next 20 or 30 years (I’m pretty confident about the next year or two). Then I came across this article from the Wall Street Journal blogs which asks at least part of the question I’ve been asking, and I thought it was worth explaining.

One of my favorite professors taught me an introduction to business strategy. He opened the course by making the point that business always changes – dramatically – and as the time horizon lengthens, the rate of change increases exponentially. So, to use his method of making the point I looked at the Fortune 500 lists from 1955, 1985 and 2005 (keeping the decades even), and found:

– 210: The number of companies on the list in 1955 which were still there in 1985
– 139: The number of companies on the list in 1985 which were still there in 2005

I think it’s a safe bet to say that in 2015 (just three years from now) the number of companies that were on the list in 2005 that are still there will be smaller still. And yes, I assume the rate of change in business, most importantly the rate of market disruption, will continue to accelerate.

Which leads me to ask: What can keep a company on the list decade after decade?

General Motors was on top of the list in the 1970s, and we know what has happened there. I won’t go into all the factors, but the saturation of the American car market, global competition and consumers holding on to cars longer were certainly factors in GM’s decline.

Exxon Mobil, which has topped the list a number of times over the years, doesn’t face these challenges. The demand for oil is still increasing and prices are (generally) still rising. One wonders what will happen when other unexpected energy alternatives become dominant.

Back to Apple.

One thing Apple has shown over the years that few other companies have shown (at least to the same degree of success) is the ability to create disruptive innovation (for an interesting discussion of Apple’s innovation strategy, take a look at Curt Carlson’s book, Innovation).

Apple has continued to re-invent itself (from computer company, to music company, to mobile device company and so forth) as the needs and desires of technology consumers have changed. And whether through it’s visionary founder or it’s innovation process – most likely a combination – it has often been the company that defined what was possible and showed us how to turn our technology aspirations into reality.

If Apple is to stay at the top of the list, it will – among other things – need to continue and accelerate this innovation capability. There will be challengers. Not just the kind of competition that comes out with “the better alternative to _______ device” but the companies that will define the future needs and aspirations of technology consumers. Apple will have to continue to disrupt our world in order to stay on top.

And if in 2025 we look back on today, and we are amazed at how Apple has been so successful for so long, then we will be able to point to the disruptions they defined. If we are wondering how such a mighty company fell down the list so quickly, we will likely collectively conclude that the passing of Steve Jobs must have been the cause. But in reality it will have been the loss of the ability to continue to define the market disruptions that will happen increasingly frequently.

And no, this is not exclusive to Apple. Any company that makes it to the top of its market faces the same issue. In part, it’s Christensen’s famous innovators dilemma and in part another idea Mr. Christensen introduced. If the job that people are hiring your product to do for them is no longer necessary, then your product is no longer necessary.

And the jobs we need products to do are evolving quickly.

Are you taking the steps you need to in your company to make sure your products will do the job your customers will need done in the future? Tell me how.

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Community

Happy New Year! A Thought for 2012: Build Your Relationships

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Happy new year! I hope that your celebrations were fun and that your 2012 is not only happy, healthy and prosperous, but also is everything you hope it will be.

I’m back to blogging after a rather long hiatus (at least that’s one of my goals for 2012 – it’ll be obvious to you if I keep that promise). Like all of the things we all hope 2012 will bring, this won’t happen just for new year’s day or a few weeks after. To keep that promise, I will have to keep working at it for the whole year.

Which brings me to the topic of the day: Relationships. This year DS3 will increase our focus on helping our clients build, improve and maximize the value of relationships with their customers, partners, suppliers and other key constituencies.

Just like with personal relationships, I believe that real value for businesses is created through relationships. Relationships hold the key to revenue and business growth, but maybe more importantly, they hold the seeds of market disruption and dominance. The stronger and broader your customer relationships, the better you will be at becoming disruptive in your market, or defending against being disruptive.

Your customer, partner and supplier relationships are a source (sometimes the only source) of competitive advantage. Your competitors will have a hard time taking customers who value your business and the value you provide.

We will be helping companies understand the range of sources – many hidden – of value in these relationships and help identify the typically unseen opportunities that can help your business make disruptive progress in your market.

But just like personal relationships, we all know business relationships take time and effort to build and maintain. And they require that all parties find compatible interest and value. We look forward to helping you understand what creates that common value, and how you can better use your resources to maximize the relationships and opportunities that make the most sense for your business.

So check back here for tips and tricks to help improve your relationships, and a few rants on what some are doing wrong (and how to avoid it).

And if you want to create disruptive opportunities by maximizing the value of your business relationships, contact us.

Start the conversation: how have your customer relationships helped you create disruptive opportunities? Chime in!

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Brand

Little Things Really Do Matter

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This is admittedly a bit of a rant, but is also an important point when it comes to how you demonstrate your sustainability to your customers and other audiences. (recommended reading on this topic: Little Big Things by Tom Peters).

The background: I buy many of the sustainability-related products for my home from one particular on-line merchant (who is the subject of this rant, and to be clear, not a client). I’m also one of those people who hates to receive anything printed – catalogs, statements, whatever…for sustainability as well as clutter and efficiency reasons (I never miss a chance to point out that they are almost always related)

The event: I picked up my (US) mail today, and in that mail, found a printed catalog from this company. I’ve never received one before, in the several years I’ve done business with this company.

The rant: Why did I receive a catalog from this company? They are a sustainability-products company. They purport to be a very green company. There are lots of images of trees on their website (I wonder if any of those were cut down to print my catalog). Yes, direct mail marketing works well. But I’m an established customer.

The solution: There are people who prefer to receive catalogs in the mail. Others don’t mind. And still others, like me, do mind. I wonder if this particular company might have considered sending an e-mail (in the fashion of a hotel pillow card) after my first order just asking if I’d prefer to receive communications electronically or in print (or even both).  I know I would have both opted for electronic and would have appreciated them asking.

This is a double win for the company – they make me happy with my choice and they improve their reputation in my eyes. Just sending the catalog both annoyed me and damaged their reputation (particularly their green claims). And I wonder if it would have cost them less to produce the e-mail than to produce and mail the catalog?

The conclusion: Yes, this is a very small thing – and not all-that-uncommon. But over the scope of a large number of customers/prospects and in the eyes of the larger community, if you’re really serious about sustainability (or for that matter, managing your reputation at all), little things like this go a long way to both improving your reputation and demonstrating just how strong your commitment is.

So pay attention, even when it seems the question is not very relevant.

And chime in if you have a story like this to share.

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