Snow arena Druskininkuose

Nors Druskininku Snow Arena del savo ilgu eiliu prie keltuvu ir prastoko aptarnavimo jau buvo apipinta liudnomis istorijomis, musu tai neisgasdino ir savaitgali isbandeme ju paslaugas patys. Pasirinkome strategija vykti sestadienio vakara. Trasoje atsidureme apie 16 val ir musu nuostabai minetu eiliu visai nebuvo, lygiai tas pats nutiko ir sekmadienio ryta, kuomet i keltuva pavykdavo beveik iciuozti.

Na bet si karta ne apie trasas, ne apie eiles ir net ne apie darbuotojus, o apie pacia snow arena. Keistai mums nustebino ant trasos virsunes isikures "Ledo baras", kuriame nepastebejau per dvi dienas nei vieno kliento. Ir kas galetu eiti i ledo bara, kai aplinkui ir taip salta? Po sporto sniege, labiausiai norisi prisesti prie zidinio, suvalgyti garuojancios sriubos, susilti, o ne dar labiau atsalti ledo bare. Toks siltas baras yra trasos virsuneje, su nuostabia panorama ir karsta arbata. Ta bara kas karta matai keliantis keltuvu, deja, net ir labai noredamas i ji patekti negali, nes iejimas yra uzrakintas, kabo uzrasas "tik personalui". Kad patektum i sia oaze turi leistis zemyn, iseiti is arenos, apeiti ja lauke is kitos puses ir tuomet uzkilti i bara. Idomu, kiek potencialiu pajamu negauna baro savininkai del sio "nuostabaus" sprendimo neleisti i vidu slidinejanciu?

What Drives Customer Loyalty Now

By Tom Searcy 2012 01 13

Kaip ir nieko labai naujo, bet svarbiausia nepamirsti ir naudoti tai darbe!

If you think customer loyalty is driven by personal relationships or because of your hard work, then not only are you wrong--but you're putting your revenue at risk.

The reasons for customer loyalty have changed dramatically in the past decade, according to research published in the book, "The Challenger Sale" by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Relationships and hard work now come in second and third on the list of what customers value most--and what will drive them to change providers.

Instead, customers today are looking for sales people to be experts--not in the products or services that they offer, but rather in the customer's own business. Sales people who can demonstrate that expertise in the sales process are winning big deals away from formerly entrenched competitors.

Here's how customers consider your value, from lowest to highest:

• If you know your product, you are a human catalog
• If you know your services, you are a technician
• If you can match your products and services to the customer's needs, you are asales person
• If you know a customer's problems and business, you are a consultant
• If you know a customer's industry, market challenges and competitors, you are an expert

Customers are moving their business from sales people to experts. If you want to be the big winner in your market, you have to increase your expertise and demonstrate that expertise in meaningful ways to your customer.

Here's a course of action.

1. Learn your customer's industry, business challenges and competitors.You don't have to become an encyclopedia of information to be of increasing value. Instead start with just a few steps:

• Read and subscribe to your customer's industry's top two or three blogs.
• Put keyword notifiers in your Internet search tool for the top three or four key terms for your customer's industry issues.
• Read the trade association newsletters and website materials of your customer's industry.

2. Ask your customers about changes in their industry. Focus on these four categories: technology, regulation, mergers/acquisitions and innovations. These categories are forward-looking and often are the market drivers with which customers need the greatest help.

3. Suggest how you might help your customers. Explain how your products and solutions address their upcoming challenges. When you are demonstrating expertise, the language you use is important. Focus on their issues more than your offerings. Use the language of:

• Time: How you can help them to be faster and more responsive to the market and to compliance deadlines.
• Money: Saving and making money is always a motivation for a buyer considering the value of expertise. In addition, there is the measurement of money in relationship to the market. How will working with you change their position in the marketplace in the area of value, price, cost or share?
• Risk: The impending negative impact of something that you point out can be a powerful motivator for action. Loss of market share, penalties for non-compliance and the risk of being technologically overrun by competitors are all threats that can help customers see you as a valuable expert.

Achieving a level of expertise value has a big impact on customer loyalty. Increasing your relevant expertise can help you trump your competitors' hard work and personal relationships.

Observe your guests

There is no better source of data about the guest than the guest himself may provide to us. It is true that, unfortunately, we do not always have enough data about the guest prior to his arrival; hence we must get it while we interact with him in our daily attendance.
However, it is also true that fortunately the guest is constantly transmitting information, although much of it goes unnoticed as we are not adequately prepared to grasp.

Use an old technique - observation. This is an action performed by human beings to identify, collect and assimilate information. In order to make good use of observation we need to answer some questions like:

1 - Who is the observer? All those who are involved in the attention to the guest, become observers capable of examining carefully the guest or interact with him through their own senses.

2 - Why should we observe? First of all we should be convinced of the importance of observing the guest, for it gives us the possibility to obtain information types which start emotional and differential meanings in the guest, the prelude to his fidealization.

3 - What should we observe? The observation of the guest is directed to aspects such as his body language, behavior, habits, actions and reactions, likes,dislikes, preferences, belongings, that is, everything related to his emotional and behavioral patterns.

4 - When should we observe? The observation is continuous, provided that the guest is detected by an observer across all the Hotel sites the guest usually visits, places that become par excellence observation posts. One of the key advantages of observation is, quoting Van Dalen and Meyer (1981): "Observation provides one of the fundamental elements, the facts," which are merely validations for what is observed, say an example:

Every morning we notice that the guest gets up early, always at the same time, go to the gym and comes back eating an apple. Which facts do we get from this observation?

1-The habit behavior, i.e. his wake-up time and activity to be performed.
2-The food preferences: fruits and specifically, apple in this case.

How will those facts influence our daily attendance?

• Offer a wake-up call service at the usual time in anticipation of his order to guarantee that he can perform his daily routine.
• Let apples in the room’s fruits basket or make sure that there are apples among the fruits offered at the Spa.
• Offer power drinks or leave some of them in the room’s mini bar.
• Surprise him arranging a relaxing bath in the hot tub after having finished his physical activity.
• Use the tool my habit-your habit (see article The Experiential Hospitality and habit of the guest) as a link booster to obtain new data.

Most significantly, the use of observation, being part of the daily care offered to guests, makes that the observable events (information or data taken from the guest) are produced as naturally as possible and without any influence from the observer or any other factor, so that the guest never feels observed. This facilitates to surprise him with special details he perceives as unique and of his own, which therefore, will have an important effect on his emotional satisfaction.

“How did you know…?” Or “How did you realize…?” They are two of the questions from guests I enjoy most about, especially if accompanied by a big smile of satisfaction.

Osvaldo Torres Cruz
Hotel Butler
Guest Experience Advisor

Vero cafe cross sales

Jau ne pirma karta buvau maloniai nustebinta Vero Cafe, esancio Jasinskio g., darbuotoju (gaila nepaklausiau vardo). Pirma karta apsilankius ir uzsisakius kavos, jis maloniai man pasiule prie kavos isigyti Zmoniu zurnala. Mano nuomone sauni ideja - kava ir zurnalas puikiai dera, o pasirinktas zurnalas yra pats populiariausias Lietuvoje, tad sioje vietoje cross sale pardavimai neabejotini. Siandien tas pats darbuotojas man prie kavos pasiule saldumynu ir tikrai nuosirdziai bande itikinti, kad verta si karta nesusilaikyti ir isbandyti ju sviezia bandele:)

Druskininku kepyklele

Sia istorija pasidalino kursioke (beje pasidalino su visu 50 asmenu kursu - word of mouth galia!), su kuria pries kelis menesius turejome isvaziuojamasias paskaitas Druskininkuose. Taigi, per petraukele nuejo kursiokes i netoliese Spa Vilnius esancia kepyklele. Svieziu bandeliu ir kavos kvapas viliojo tiesiog is lauko. Bandeliu pasirinkimas sioje kepykleleje tikrai nemazas, tad sulaukus savo eiles ir niekaip nenuspresdama, kuria bandele paragauti, kursioke pasiteiravo pardavejos: "kokia bandele Jums skaniausia?" ir cia ji sulauke atsakymo is nelabai patenkintos pardavejos: "Jokia"...

The Email Marketer's Success Kit: Five Trends for 2012

Labai trumpos ir aiskios rekomendacijos apie email marketinga. Dalinuosi su Jumis, ka perskaiciau Maciej Ossowski straipsnyje skelbtame 2012 m. sausio 3d.

This article is about:

Five email marketing trends that'll hold strong in 2012

Why knowing customer preferences is pivotal to email marketing

The email marketing environment shifts especially swiftly, so let's take a look at some of the key trends that dominated the game in 2011 and that will surely continue to reign this year.

1. The R Word

Some email marketers hate the term, but hey, relevancy is here to stay. Email service providers, such as Gmail or Hotmail, continue to develop new ways to prioritize messages with a very individual approach. Newsletters no longer have to be marked as spam to disappear from one's inbox.

Considering the ongoing emphasis on features such as Gmail's Priority Inbox or Hotmail's Sweep functionality, senders need to ensure the relevancy of their offers. Gone are the days of "batch and blast." 2012 is all about tailor-made offers matching the recipients' preferences. If you miss that, you will lose conversions, decrease your sending reputation, and wind up in the junk folder.

2. Personalization 2.0

Is anyone still impressed by the plain "Hello, (first name)" type of personalization? The answer is no, and it's high time to take email personalization to the next level.

This year will be all about using customer data for newsletter content. Purchase history, website activity, and customer relationship management (CRM) data will be used widely among top retailers to ensure that their emails are as personal as possible.

If you hadn't started collecting the "finer" data yet, this past holiday season would have served as a great opportunity to learn more about your customers so you could send them more personalized emails this year.

3. Click "Send" Less Often

Clicking the "send" button less often is something you should definitely do over the next 12 months. Don't get me wrong; that doesn't mean that you should send fewer emails. Communication is becoming more and more event based, so the subscriber should actually prompt your sending of an email in most cases.

How? That's easy. Here are some examples:

• Sending emails when a customer abandons her shopping cart
• Sending welcome messages to new subscribers
• Sending "thank you for being with us" newsletters

Event messages (or, so-called triggers) will become more and more popular this year, and they should definitely be a part of your email strategy. Event messages reportedly have nearly 71% higher open-rates, and they can generate five times higher return on investment (ROI) than a standard weekly newsletter. Offers created on the fly will surely be on the come up!

4. What, When, How... Let 'em Decide

Facebook is getting more and more popular, and people love to tweet because of the brevity of 140-character-limited messages. Some 15% of email opens were generated via mobile device in 2011. Is that something that you should worry about? Does that mean that the good ol' desktop email clients will shortly become obsolete?

No!

2011 was a decisive year for email marketing. With ROI at its finest (4000%, according to the DMA), we've witnessed a definite channel and platform infiltration. Facebook fans sign up for newsletters on fan pages. Email users hit "Tweet this!" buttons in messages to share hot offers with their followers. Smartphone users consume email communication while stuck in traffic jams or while waiting in line at coffee shops.

The word "cross-channeling" best describes this channel infiltration and teaches us a great lesson for 2012: Be wherever your customers can be. Make sure your newsletters are readable on an iPhone. Capture customers' email addresses on Facebook. Let them share your offers with their network. "Social" no longer applies only to social media. Social = marketing communication. You can be social via email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, SMS texts, PCs, Androids, iPhones, etc. Those who work across those channels effectively will win the most customers.

5. So, Will It Be Any Good?

Absolutely. Yes. Email marketing is here to stay; and as one of the most cost-effective channels, it'll still be popular in the struggling economy. With marketing budgets being cut back, emails are still the best way to retain current customer databases and open many upsell opportunities via low-cost promotions.

Optimize your email communication, and follow your customers' needs and preferences. I'm sure your email ROI will not disappoint you in 2012!