Just got back from a couple of weeks in Cyprus. Lovely.
Anyway, there’s a short tale of two contrasting restaurants and how they got customers through the door (or didn’t).
One restaurant was the talk of the town. We’d been told about it and had seen a few adverts in the ex-pat magazines and local rags. We tried it out. Excellent service, good food: we’ll go there again and recommend it.
We also went to a new restaurant merely because it was close to where we were staying. No-one had told us about it, we hadn’t seen anything about it in the local papers. There wasn’t even a sign outside that said what they did.
The service was lousy and the food wasn’t the best. We won’t be going there again and we won’t be recommending it to anyone.
What I’m saying is that if you have a service you need to sell then make sure you do it well. You’ll soon find that your satisfied customers become you greatest advocates. They’ll tell people about what you’re doing and how well you do it.
Perhaps the quote from the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams that reads “Build it and they will come” should be changed to “Build it well, give a great service and get other people to evangelise about it, and they will come”.
This is even more prescient these days, as the word of mouth has found a new home on social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and LinkedIn to name but four. And there is also a huge number of trusted review sites with user generated content that people do read in order to make informed decisions.
With ease of information flow on the Internet, from a PR point of view, people talking about your service in a good light (on and offline), and the recommendations you get, breeds more recommendations. More success comes from success.
With this in mind it’s become ever more important to know what people are saying or not saying about you and your brand online. If you don’t know, how can you respond to negativity and how can you capitalise on the good things in order to meet your business objectives? This is where using monitoring and alert tools can help give you the valuable insights you need and the ability to respond accordingly. Depending on the size and scale of you enterprise you can use something as simple as Google alerts or more sophisticated free monitoring tools.
Maybe that restaurant we won’t be recommending should take note. Anyway, if you ever find yourself in North Cyprus, then let me know and I’ll tell you about the restaurants I would recommend.
