It was a precipitous and entirely avoidable fall.

Liz Claiborne broke the first commandment of branding: Be true to your clients and yourselves.

Claiborne made its name by designing stylish career wear for the millions of women, particularly younger women, entering the workforce. Their pieces were consistently styled and well made, delivering a specific brand promise to the women who stocked their closets with Claiborne ensembles that could be mixed and matched to create multiple outfits from a handful of separates.

Claiborne developed a loyal and trusting following of women who appreciated her collections. But with her retirement from the company in 1989, the brand began to suffer. There was no designer who shared Liz Claiborne’s design aesthetic and without a design leader, the company regressed to a financial leader whose focus was the bottom line, not the hemline.

Design by committee emerged, diluting the Claiborne brand promise in a fruitless pursuit of the youth culture. Their working women loyalists took notice and turned their backs on uninspired and confusing Claiborne collections that were considered fashion forward but not geared toward working women, the brand’s core constituency.

The dispiriting Claiborne story was in sharp contrast to the story that Jay Greene recounts in his book Design is How it Works. Porsche has remained remarkably successful in an industry that has few perpetually thriving automakers. Porsche attributes their success to an unyielding devotion to the design principles encompassed in the very first 911 that debuted in 1963.

Since their very first car, Porsche has remained true to its design DNA by incorporating specific design cues – intakes instead of a radiator grill, a car that always tapers to the rear, open wheel rims to display the strong brake calipers, front fenders always higher than the hood, ignition always on the left of the steering wheel and vertically oriented dashboards – that support their vision of a car that is all about driving performance and authenticity.

Porsche has never varied from a design approach that produces cars that their own designers crave. They never cut corners. They never adopt trends that risk the company’s credibility. And they never try to appeal to everybody.

Porsche designers intuitively understand the desires of their most passionate drivers and develop new cars with them in mind. Liz Claiborne took a different tack and abandoned their brand promise and with it their most loyal clients in pursuit of a younger, more active customer. They alienated their most loyal customers without generating any traction with the fickle and trend conscious youth market who want nothing to do with the company who makes clothes for their mothers.

Porsche has had an endless string of hits, including their Boxster, Cayman, Cayenne and Panamera and reported record profits in 2009. Liz Claiborne has virtually ceased to exist. Breaking your brand promise appears to have severe repercussions. If only the Claiborne executives drove Porsches, they’d understand.

How many other successful brands have hastened their corporate demise by abandoning their core principles and their most loyal customers? Sadly, I’ll bet it’s long. Real long.

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As a competitive tennis player, my racquets are the most important tools I carry so there’s no way I’d entrust them to any airlines baggage handlers. In pursuit of the perfect racquet I’ve tested an assortment of frames and experimented with strings at a range of tensions until I found the right combination that provides the responsiveness, feel and power that I rely upon every single shot. And when I break a string, I have complete confidence that the next racquet I pull out of my bag will perform precisely the same way. Every time. Without fail.

How do I know that I can rely upon each racquet’s precision and performance? Because each racquet is prepared by a local entrepreneur, Paul Schambs, whose racquet stringing skills have attained artisan status.

For those who don’t play tennis, or play it casually, the importance of consistency in racquet preparation may seem obsessive, but the deviation of just a few pounds in the string tension can dramatically affect the playability of a racquet. And having pulled a racquet out of my bag that was strung by another, less talented stringer I can attest that the difference in power and feel can throw off your game and affect you mentally.

Which is why so many highly skilled players and even tennis professionals rely upon Paul’s expertise and allow only Paul to string their racquets. He is the tennis equivalent of Stradivarius, carefully crafting each racquet to the specific needs of his stable of players and taking pride in the consistency and exceptional quality of his work.

All of which led me to wonder why so few entrepreneurs and businesspeople are recognized as artisans in their own fields of expertise. Artisans are pursued. They’re highly valued. They can charge a premium.  They’re the recipients of referral business. And they don’t have to produce expensive works of art like Stradivarius. They can make pizzas, fix cars, paint houses, or provide marketing guidance. As long as they do it with deep personal commitment, pride and unmatched expertise, they become irreplaceable artisans.

If you’re not perceived as an artisan in your particular field, what are you doing to change your perception and deliver consistently expert work that separates you from the rest of the pack?

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A terrific article in today’s New York Times by Edward Niedermeyer prompted me to document my own belief, from the day I heard of GM’s announcement of their eco-friendly Volt hybrid that it would be a massive and historic commercial failure.

There may be no single automobile ever made that has garnered as much positive press and unfettered support from the press, the green lobby and the government. They desperately want the Volt not only to succeed but to be a game changer, a tipping point in the auto industry.

And I’m here to tell you it won’t be a game changer. It will tip no points, and it will end up losing massive sums of money.

It would be hard for any product to live up to the anticipation and hype that’s surrounded the Volt. The Volt’s has been assigned messianic status in the auto industry, it’s supposed to be the savior of GM, the transformer of all transportation and the harbinger of an entirely new way of thinking in the auto industry.

But the Volt has been destined to fail from day one. Rather than asking their designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, GM should have asked them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.

Their objective from the start shouldn’t have been limited to the objective of building a new hybrid car, but to create new interactions, entertainments, immersive, emotional activities that are embodied in an entirely new way to travel.

But GM is not a strategic, design-centered company. They’re a tactical company that has never demonstrated a capacity for design brilliance or its commensurate risk taking.

Want proof? Take a look at the actual Volt that they’ll be attempting to sell this fall for $41,000. It’s nothing more than a Toyota Prius with a $15,000 Chevy bowtie on its grille.

Contrast this bland design with the original concept car. It was bold, it was edgy, it stood out and made a statement. So, of course, GM had to assign some internal committee to tone it down a little. After all, they want it to appeal to the largest audience possible.

Their design killing efforts proved Mark Twains adage that “I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.”

I believe that brands are the promise of an experience. Great brands can project our hopes and dreams and aspirations. They broadcast who we are and what we believe.

So what is it that GM wants to convey with this rolling testament to corporate mediocrity that hasn’t already been captured and owned by the Prius?

Beyond the branding and design failures, GM has to overcome enormous financial, technical and practical hurdles that all conspire to doom the volt.

It’s expensive at $41,000 – which doesn’t include the price of the $4000 charger you’ll need in your garage.

Its electric motor range of 40 miles is virtually guaranteed never to be met in real world conditions. Subtract mileage when it’s cold or when you’re operating the AC or the radio.

And, when its battery needs to be replaced, get ready for the $8000 sticker shock.

The Volt is a corporate response to political pressures. It validates the contention that great design and revolutionary concepts don’t emerge from corporate boardrooms and government bureaucracies. The Volt is exactly what we would expect from Government Motors, and that’s the tragedy.

Imagine what could have been produced if Apple were to design a car from scratch. Or if Google teamed with Ideo to create a new commuter vehicle. I don’t know what they would conceive, but I do know one thing for certain: it wouldn’t be the Volt. And it wouldn’t require hundreds of millions in subsidies to attract buyers, and it wouldn’t be conceived without considering alternative green technologies that could be integrated into its design.

If the Volt symbolizes the new GM and the new Michigan, as Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm claims, pray for GM and Michigan.

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As someone who grew up in a family of talented writers and had his early publishing efforts edited ruthlessly, I appreciate the value that editors bring to the publishing process. I’ve frequently relied upon the sharp editing eye of my blog readers to point out minor errors or miscues in my posts and have found their feedback to be useful and edifying. Yet I see every day the carnage wrought in the blogging universe by bloggers who have never submitted their work to an editor and view any editorial comment as a personal attack.

Scan any cross-section of blogs and you’ll run across those that contain repeated grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, the misuse of I/me, your/you’re, their/they’re, complimentary/complementary, and other niggling errors that diminish the impact of their posts and suggest a verbal slovenliness.

Typically, when I encounter an error on a blog that I read regularly, I’ll send a private message to the author identifying any errors in their post. I had always assumed that the blogger would appreciate being made aware of their published errors so they could correct it before it was observed by future readers. However, several recent communiques have indicated I might be dead wrong.

It’s important to note that my messages to the authors were always private, were courteous and praised their work before identifying the error contained within their post. In return, I received comments including:

It’s so annoying when you tell me my mistakes.

So who are you? The internet police?

It’s a blog, not the New York Times.

You can guess whose blogs I’ve stopped reading.

There appears to be a generational component to the level of receptiveness to editorial comments. Those authors over 40 have been unanimously appreciative of editorial feedback while those under 30 have exhibited extreme sensitivity towards feedback that they perceive as critique and chastisement, even when none was intended.

So, in this era of social media dominance, is it appropriate to engage in crowd-editing? Or should I keep my red pen firmly in pocket and simply move along?

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Alec’s approach was so simple and so direct, that it will undoubtedly be copied frequently by other job seekers. And why not? It was imaginative, it was unique and it worked. No reason others shouldn’t push the same envelopes in their job search endeavors as well and take full ownership of their personal brand and determine precisely how it’s presented.

For those imaginative small business owners, you can do the exact same thing when preparing to meet with a client who needs SEO or social media services. Buy the Google adwords for their company name a few days ahead of your meeting. Then, during your pitch, ask them to Google themselves and see your pitch for their precise needs at the top of the page. They’ll wonder how you got the top position, they’ll be impressed that you know how to manipulate the page rankings and you’ll have demonstrated your capacity to outimagine your competitors.

Bottom line, for a few dollars and a few minutes of your time, you and your firm can appear distinctive and memorable. And that’s always a good thing.

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If your business engages in unethical or inappropriate behavior, then you have legitimate reasons to worry about the potential negative impact of social media since social media doesn’t camouflage your true identity, it reveals it.

However, if your concern centers around the potential reaction to typical business slip-ups and oversights, then you really have nothing to worry about as long as you demonstrate immediate empathy and care for your clients. And when you make a mistake, as everyone does, follow these simple, proven rules:

1. Apologize. If you screwed up, simply acknowledge your mistake and say you’re sorry. We all  make mistakes every day. And we deal with companies that make mistakes every day. We understand that mistakes are inevitable. However, we expect that if you make a mistake that you will acknowledge it and proffer a sincere apology. Your apology isn’t an invitation to sue you or embarrass you, it’s simply an acknowledgement of societal norms that require the acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions.
2. Resolve to fix the mistake. The apology is a great start, but the problem still remains. You screwed up. You sent the wrong product. You didn’t deliver your proposal on time. You overcharged on your invoice. Whatever you did (or failed to do) still needs to be corrected. So, step up and tell them how you intend to fix the problem and ask them if that effort is satisfactory.
   One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is offering a solution that benefits them, but not the client. If you failed to deliver your product on time, it’s your responsibility to overnight the product, to get it there as fast as you can. I don’t care if you have to eat the extra shipping costs. I expect you to do the right thing, even if it’s inconvenient or expensive. That’s how you show you really care about fixing your failure.
   If you offer to fix the problem, and your client says “that’s not good enough,” then you’ve got to work with the client to determine exactly how you can make things right.
3. Fix it. Steps 1 and 2 are actually pretty easy. You say you’re sorry and offer to fix the problem. The tough part is actually fixing the problem since this is your final chance to ensure that your relationship isn’t significantly harmed. If you promise to overnight a spare part, you’d better make sure that the part is put in a box, is properly labeled and is handed off to FedEx. Don’t delegate, do it yourself.
4. BONUS STEP: Follow up. Once you’re sure that the problem has been resolved exactly how you promised, make a follow up call (not a tweet or email) to let your client know how important they are and to demonstrate your care and concern. I know that your first reaction will be to ignore the problem rather than revisit it, but you’ll actually enhance your reputation by confronting it, ensuring that it’s resolved and proving your value as a reliable and caring business partner. Pick up the phone.

Typically, it’s best to take the conversation off-line while you’re addressing a client’s problems. After you reach out to them online to let them know that you heard their complaint and that you want to take care of the problem, suggest that they contact you through a Twitter direct message, an email or a phone call so your conversations and ultimate problem resolution remain private.

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Never combine a condolence letter with a blatant, self-serving sales pitch.

The backstory:

Yesterday I received a message through LinkedIn from the CEO of a local firm that specializes in social media marketing. Yep, one of our own. The message’s subject line read: We heard through the grapevine about your loss, referring to the sudden and tragic death of one of my colleagues last week.

I was taken aback by the message since I did not personally know the CEO and had never conducted any type of business with his firm. However, I read on, expecting a standard note of condolence. Holy cow, was I wrong. The message read:

All of us here at Company X are very sorry for your loss. If there is anything we can to to help keep everyone’s chins up, just let us know.

The Technic on July 24th might be a great outing to start looking forward to – we are expecting over 300 and Microsoft has joined the sponsors list.

All the best,

I was stunned. Did he really just suggest that in the aftermath of a shocking personal loss I should start looking forward to a summer picnic he was sponsoring? And then wish me all the best?

This was exploitation of social media at its most crass and tasteless. Apparently, the sender was looking for a way to connect with me to promote his event and decided to use LinkedIn to find me and employ tragedy as his hook. Brilliant marketing strategy.

I did some investigation and found that this CEO actually teaches classes on how to establish strategic business relationships using LinkedIn. Personally, I’d challenge his qualifications.

UPDATE:  The author of the message called me this afternoon to express his regret that his message was interpreted as an insensitive and clumsy attempt at promotion. He explained to me his true intentions which I believe were sincere and supportive. I expressed my appreciation for his reaching out to me personally to clarify his intentions and informed him that I would immediately update my post to reflect his sentiments.

This messaging confusion illustrates one of the biggest drawbacks of communications that take place solely through social media channels: the total absence of non-verbal cues. I’ve been embroiled in SM controversy myself after posting sarcastic comments that were interpreted literally. Attempts at humor have fallen completely flat. In the real world, the recipient of these messages would also receive the verbal intonations, the smile on your face and the suppressed chuckle in your delivery and would understand your actual meaning. In the online world, those cues are missing and can lead to serious misinterpretation.

In this instance, since I did not know the author of the message, I had no emotional connection to him and interpreted his succinct expression of condolence and suggestion that we look forward to this summer’s summer Technic as a tactless attempt at promotion rather than a genuine expression of support and assistance.

Written communications, especially those that deal with sensitive topics, have to be written very carefully and thoughtfully to avoid any chance that your intentions could be misconstrued.

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Although most of the public missed the online contretemps, last week Nestle Corporation’s Facebook Fan Page was essentially hijacked by Greenpeace activists and supporters protesting Nestle’s use of palm oil and its associated destruction of the rainforest.

Techguerilla provides a handy timeline detailing the escalation of hostilities between Greenpeace activists and Nestle’s Facebook administrator that ultimately degraded into social media warfare.

What lessons can your business learn from Nestle’s Facebook surrender?

You should expect organized attacks from your critics on your social media platforms so you need to prepare your crisis response in advance. Although you might think that you own your Facebook page or Twitter account and hashtag, the community actually has the power to dictate the content of conversations revolving around your brand.  What you can control is your response and your message. You should have a crisis response team identified and prepared to respond to likely attacks before they ever happen. You know where your weaknesses are, and so do your critics, so plan for the worst.

You may not be able to convert the mob, but you can rally your supporters. Although the Greenpeace activists essentially hijacked Nestle’s corporate Fan Page, Nestle still had the capacity to respond and plead their case to their true fans. While they did post a link to a detailed and persuasive written corporate response, it lacked the impact of the Greenpeace videos and unrelenting attacks. Large corporations don’t have to respond with lawyer approved communications, they elect to. And when they do, they don’t look social or engaging, they look monolithic and impersonal. If you elect to participate on social media platforms, you need a social strategy and trained social media participants.

Utilize the power of the social medium to engage socially. Nestle never put a human face on their corporate response. Nobody knows who the inept Facebook administrator was, they had no identified corporate employees respond and they failed utterly in dealing with angry posters, fostering relationships with supportive advocates or engaging their critics.

What could Nestle have done differently, acknowledging that they didn’t have a crisis plan in place, once the attack began?

1. Respond immediately and cordially. Nestle’s lack of an experienced community manager may have precipitated this entire battle. Their early combative tone and snarky responses fueled anger on their Facebook page and enabled the conflict to attain viral status.
2. Convene an internal crisis response team to review the attack and anticipate their next move. Once the conflagration started, Nestle should have assembled a response team of social media managers, corporate communications and marketing executives to strategize their response and look ahead to anticipate their critics’ likely next step.
3. Shift their focus to engaging the attackers and trying to find common ground for resolution (Olivier Blanchard makes an excellent case for reaching out to Greenpeace rather than combatting them). Nestle’s Facebook page isn’t a battlefield, and they can’t vanquish their foes. Their best course of action isn’t direct and repeated confrontation, but negotiation and appeasement. Had they reached out to Greenpeace to discuss how they could work together to solve the environmental problems they could have mitigated much of the continued anger. Neither side benefits from continued digital warfare, so find a way to reach accommodation.
4. Determine the appropriate message and medium for continued conversation. Nestle responded to their critics with brief statements and a link to a more detailed corporate response. They never leveraged the power of the visual medium to communicate their position. This wasn’t a time for press releases.
5. Prepare video responses to put a human face on the issue and to communicate their corporate commitment as concerned employees, not a compassionless multi-national corporation. Take a page out of Toyota’s response to potentially life-threatening concerns with their cars and respond with video. Toyota put up a series of videos dealing head on with the issues being covered in the media, with corporate spokespeople standing up to defend their position and address specific concerns. Additionally, they recruited independent safety experts and engineers as supporters. Nestle had the same opportunity to respond and defend their position and demonstrate to their fans that they care about the accusations and take seriously their role as environmental stewards. They had a strong case to make, but they never made it effectively.

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The same difficulties frequently arise in marketing and social media programs that rely on intricate and detailed plans but fail to account for cultural realities and ingrained behaviors.

Businesses aren’t sterile case studies. They’re collections of individuals who collaborate around a single purpose. And they typically adhere to the values espoused and demonstrated by their company’s leader, not by a lofty mission statement.

Although you may want every company to demonstrate the customer service attitude of Ritz Carlton, the friendliness of Southwest Airlines, the ingenuity of Apple and the thrift of Wal-Mart, that’s simply not the world we live in. Companies frequently disdain customer service, disregard their employees and customers and focus myopically on preserving a rigid and unresponsive business model.

The difficulty in planning a social media strategy for companies that are controlling, insular and generally unresponsive is that social media doesn’t camouflage their true nature, social media reveals it.

When working recently with a large company in devising and executing a social media strategy, I was confronted with conflicting realities. On one hand, the company seemed eager to exploit the potential of social media in reaching their target audience frequently and inexpensively, but on the other hand, the company’s culture incorporated autocratic control, restricted authority among their staff, lacked any feedback mechanisms and romanticized reliance on historical business processes.

A social media program, no matter how carefully designed, wasn’t going to change any existing cultural artifact. In fact, a successful social media rollout would actually have the potential to damage the company’s reputation by revealing its weaknesses to an audience previously shielded from the company’s true nature.

How can you predict social media failure?

1. Obsession with control – many companies believe that as long as they can control their message, they control their brand and, ultimately, their destiny. Social media shifts control to the participants, not the originator of the message. Companies can listen, engage, converse and interact, but they cannot impose control.
2. Unwilling to commit people to the program – your clients have no desire to develop a relationship with your company. Companies are, by their nature, impersonal entities. However, they may be willing to engage with individuals within your company, as long as those individuals contribute something to the conversation. These relationships take time to develop and rarely deliver immediate results. If nobody is devoted to the program, the program withers and dies.
3. Management views social media platforms as time drains – every office tool can be a time drain if the employee misuses it. They can chat with friends on the phone, they can while away hours in the Internet and they can even waste each other’s time in mindless conversation. Facebook is no different. If your employees use it as a tool, it can deliver results. If they use it to connect with high school buddies, you have a management problem, not a social media problem.
4. Think only in terms of pitching – if management hears the word “marketing” and immediately envisions another channel to pump out self-serving sales pitches, they’re doomed. The “social” component of social media is overriding, yet frequently ignored.
5. Management refuses to participate – It’s not a good sign when senior management refuses to participate in any way on any of the social media platforms. The message this sends to their employees is that social media is irrelevant or unnecessary to management and hinders adoption throughout the organization.
6. Users restricted to certain subjects – As a corollary to controlling the message, if users are restricted from engaging in open conversations and required to deal only with specific topics under unyielding rules, then they’re eliminating the human component and diminishing the effectiveness of the conversation.
7. Social media participation isn’t tracked or measured – It’s universally accepted that companies will get more of anything that they measure, and when they refuse to measure staff participation in social media, they’re sending the message that it’s not that important. The result is preordained: limited participation and effectiveness.

There is no getting around it – when strategy confronts culture, culture wins every time. If your company culture is too rigid, controlling and unresponsive to support an effective social media program, the best solution is to pursue your standard marketing tactics and ignore the social media channels entirely. No participation is eminently preferable to desultory participation.

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Mirroring the explosive growth of Twitter and Facebook has been the excitement  of companies eager to exploit what they see as another marketing platform able to reach targeted individuals at virtually no cost. Company after company set up Twitter identities and Facebook Fan Pages that immediately began broadcasting endless pitches for their products and services.

These clumsy and ineffectual efforts were summarily followed by claims that these social media platforms were a waste of time for companies trying to build their business and attract customers. But what these companies failed to recognize was that most consumers simply aren’t looking to engage most companies online. We’re already overwhelmed with marketing messages and have no desire to open another advertising pipeline right to our desktop.

That doesn’t mean that social media participants won’t interact with companies, but they’ll to it on their terms and on their time, not yours. This shift in the balance of power to the consumer necessitates a shift in communications strategy for your company. Your focus can no longer be solely on your outbound message but now must recognize and accommodate the need for two-way communications that integrates customer service, not just sales.

So, what are the new rules?

1. become an active listener. Conversations are going on all day that mention your company by name. You need an active listening outpost that captures these conversations and funnels them to the appropriate internal people to respond. Is someone having a problem with your product? Contact them to see how you can help. Send them a link to an owner’s manual. Put them in touch with your company’s 800 support number. Link them to their local retail outlet where they can get the help they need.
   Is someone ranting about your product and claiming that you suck? You have two choices: let them rant and spread their vitriol across the web or step in and attempt to defuse their anger. Will you convert all the ranters to raving fans? Probably not, but without an active listening strategy, these rants will occur without your influence and they will all end badly for you.
2. involve listeners throughout your organization. Most organizations plan only to listen with sales personnel, eager to jump on any mention of their company as a sales opportunity. However, most companies will find that customer service will be a larger priority for those mentioning your company by name. Make sure you have people actively listening and ready to respond from customer service, product development, your executive suite and even your legal and HR departments.
3. respond immediately. Your 800 number is staffed and answered at least during your business hours, and so should your social media channels. You can’t impose communications methods on your clients. They’ll let you know how they want to get in touch with you. Some will phone, some will email and some will contact you through Twitter. It’s your job to be ready to respond immediately no matter how they contact you.
4. empower listeners to resolve problems. If you assign an employee to monitor customer service issues on Twitter, it’s essential that you empower them to resolve the issues that they encounter. There’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with a nameless, faceless and voiceless person who does nothing more than take your name for someone else to deal with tomorrow. Responding with immediacy simply magnifies the customer’s frustration if you instantly tell them that there’s nothing you can do.
5. apologize. accept responsibility. tell them how you’ll solve their problem. Face it, there are times when your customer has legitimate complaints about your company, product or service. It’s unavoidable. Your customers don’t expect perfection, but they do expect you to apologize for their troubles, accept full responsibility and then tell them exactly how you’re going to make things right. And then do it. It’s not complicated, but it’s amazing how few companies get it right.
6. continue the conversation until the customer determines it’s over. I tweeted this week about problems I had with a Sony Reader ebook. A phone call to their support line that took nearly an hour could have been reduced to a minute or two if the support rep had simply asked the right question first: Do you have a Mac or a PC? I was annoyed and frustrated and vented in a tweet that was read by someone at Sony. To their credit, they responded:
   Sorry to hear you’re having a bad experience. What is going on? Can we help?
   I sent them a reply and then… nothing. But I wasn’t done yet. I still wanted to know how they’re addressing the issue of Mac users who cannot upgrade their firmware and therefore cannot use their latest Reader software. Instead I got silence. My conclusion: they don’t have the capacity to deliver exceptional user experiences and their half-assed Twitter response just confirms my perception of their company.
7. don’t forget marketing fundamentals. There is no better time to cement a customer relationship than after you reach out to help them solve a problem. Even if the problem wasn’t entirely solved, you have the ability to appease them if you send them a coupon for your online store, enroll them in your Customer VIP program or register them in your free online training program. You rarely have person-to-person contact with your customers, so don’t blow it. Do something to delight them and remain memorable for all the right reasons.

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