e-Customers and Holiday Rush: Symbiosis is Essential

As Thinker Clothing(tm) continues its best holiday season to date, the true meaning of "valued customers" is paramount daily in order to make it happen for everybody involved.

From early November the planners order.  They're hunting, ensuring the exact items are available.  They take more risks with new products and know they have enough time to return, to exchange sizes, and they still have time to chat so they pick up the phone.   

Making that personal, human, empathetic connection, one customer at a time, is the gold.  Discovering one customer favors a Downeast Maine antiques haunt you used to know, or that an Oklahoma customer is part of a brainy group to which you'd hoped to market.  Perhaps that a Bay Area customer lives in a once-favorite hamlet, or that a Canadian metropolis was a favorite for tech business travel.  

Listening as customers comment on your brand, your products, how they feel about them and their family's first/gut reactions.  Hearing the excitement of "I just found your site and made it a favorite!"  Nodding quietly as they wax on about the value and needs of education, the substance of your design topics, and offer to be quoted.  Hearing their understanding and enthusiastic support while discussing the challenges of inventory planning and distribution during an unexpectedly good season.  Gifts, all of them.

Experiencing the "roll with it" attitudes of folks who recognize that business is trying to make 'em happy, trying to meet their needs and get their gifts into the hands of those they love.  Appreciating their willingness to wait for a size, to hang on until a favorite color has arrived, to reselect.

Thanking, appropriately, customers for that understanding, team attitude or patience -- with coupons for future purchases, offers to cover reshipping, all investments in the power of the relationship established and to come.  And delighting at the reactions to a simple, "We're out to make you happy" with often-heard, "Yes, I'm happy and yes I'll be returning to buy more."  

The last-days, last-minute, 12th hour shoppers who need it now, need it soon, need it by-when, need that miracle, need the extra care of wrapping multiples and identifying which goes to whom, need a shipping guarantee and to not feel fleeced in the rates they pay, need options if their favs are already sold out or won't arrive in time, need more for less to stretch their precious currency/credit.  Need relief.

At the holidays, businesses and customers are in it together.  Expressed appreciation, understanding and a simple desire to earn loyalty and satisfy go a long, long way.  

Ultimately it's showing respect, value and manners, once again.

Happy holidays to you and yours, and best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous new year.

Lisa C. Clark, MBA
Founder/CEO
Textiles for Thinkers, LLC
d/b/a Thinker Clothing(tm)
Knowledge as Your Style(tm)

(c) 2010 Lisa C. Clark
All Rights Reserved.