Customer Satisfaction....Guelph Style

This morning I attended a Communitech networking event at Bingemans in Kitchener. The speaker was Ali Alisaria who is the owner and CEO of the very successful online Health & Beauty store well.ca, which is located in Guelph, Ontario Canada. In his talk he explained how they do customer satisfaction....

First off you might be asking who well.ca is. Well if you don't know them yet I bet you will know them soon. They are a fast growing e-commerce site, that is poised to be the number one e-commerce site in Canada.

Here is a little bit about where they are currently

- They are the #1 healthy and beauty site in Canada

- according to Alexa a 3rd party website traffic ranking company they are 1,546th highest ranking website Canadians visit

- they ship products across Canada

- they have over 35,000 non-prescription products that they carry

- they currently have something like 15 employees, despite the fact that the company was only launched like 2 and a half years ago

So not bad for a guy who started a company from his apartment. You don't become that successful without knowing a thing or two about customer satisfaction. In Ali's talk he described just some of the things they do to increase customer satisfaction

- including hand written thank-you notes in all packages

- providing telephone support numbers on every web page of their site (when most ecommerce sites avoid offering telephone support like the black plague)

- their current approach of sending customer complaints directly to the president of the company so that he can reply personally

- providing free shipping to anywhere in Canada

- offering a 60 day return policy on purchased items (when many online stores don't allow returns and box stores usually only allow 30 days)

Although these ideas may not apply to every business, what I think they do show is that if you want to have highly satisfied customers you need to go above and beyond the call of duty. If walking 10 miles will do the job, make sure you go 20 miles.

So what does this have to do with generating new customers....is this article not really all about keeping current customers and increase sales with them....NO.

The thing is, referrals are THE #1 ONE, the mother load, the big cheese of how to get new customers for a B2B small business. And the best way to get referrals............have customers that are elated with your products and services. If you have outstanding customer satisfaction that may be the #1 way to generate new customers.

I help various B2B small businesses in Waterloo and Kitchener generate new customers. If you are interested in keeping up to date on issues related to generating new customers for B2B small businesses consider subscribing by email to this blog.

I hope you have found this blog on customer satisfaction interesting. I know after listening to Ali's talk it made me think about how I can work to improve my customer satisfaction.