The Thank You Economy

On the ride home yesterday, I heard a great interview with Gary Vaynerchuk, who turned his parent’s liquor store in NJ into a $60M/year online wine retailer. What was almost serendipitous was that, over the weekend, I had fired off a message to another online wine retailer, wtso.com bemoaning the tone and content of their email response to my concern about their site security (it’s all good now…and they remain my personal favorite, thanks in no small part to the personal phone call I got after my message). Here’s the interview.

What’s most interesting is that Gary has published a book called The Thank You Economy, and he really hits the nail on the head. I’ll defer a full critique until after I’ve read it, but for now, I’m very interested in how his concept of customer “over-caring” can result in richer, less wasteful customer experiences. Gary points out that, before social media and the self-documenting business medium of the Internet, we spent most of our time on our most demanding customers, not necessarily our most valuable, simply because they demanded it. What happens when we use information and different modes of communication to add specific value to each customer’s relationship with us? I believe that this critical element of lean thinking applied to time and customers (do not waste a single minute of your customer’s time) is rich for exploration. We are working hard to implement new tools and systems that automate much of our interaction with our customers data so that we can have more time for interaction with the actual customer.

What if we applied that same principle to suppliers? How about to parts? In the end, good ones are both a lot like customers – costly to find, challenging to keep and hard to replace when they’re gone. And, unlike the old adage, you cannot have too much of that good thing.

Tagged as: social business customers waste time