Guarantee is a competitive weapon

What holds people back from doing business with you?

Worry?

Risk?

Uncertainty?

Value?

People hold back because of uncertainty!  Remove the uncertainty and you will remove one of the major roadblocks for new clients. Turn your guarantee into a competitive weapon.

A guarantee goes as long way to removing the roadblocks that prevent people doing business with you! The reality is that you probably offer a guarantee right now. Wouldn’t you work to resolve any concern a client has? Wouldn’t you do whatever it takes to make an unhappy client happy? Sure you would!

So, why not put that in writing and gain the marketing leverage!

Guarantees should be simple, straightforward and should also focus your business efforts!

Probably the best business guarantee every conceived was Domino’s Pizza “30 minutes or it’s free”.

A service guarantee delivers the following powerful platforms for promoting and accomplishes service quality:

* By delivering service guarantees, firms are forced to focus on customers’ want and expectation in every aspect of the service.

* Guarantees establish clear standards, which create a common image of what the company stands for in both customers and employees’ mind. Managers are motivated to seriously concern service guarantees, because they emphasize the financial cost of satisfaction failures.

* With service guarantees, firms are required to build effective systems to generate meaningful customer feedback and develop corresponding courses of action.

* Guarantees require service organizations to understand reasons of failure and motivate them to identify and manage potential fail points

* Guarantees help customers to reduce risk in making purchase decisions and to reinforce their long-term loyalty.

For buyers, service guarantees play an important role in eliminating perceived risks. The guarantee also allows more ease and more likelihood for customers to complain, since they expect the company to be ready with resolutions and appropriate compensations. From companies’ perspectives, designing the guarantee helps them understand what makes clients satisfied, rather than what we think makes them satisfied.

While no conditions are imposed on some guarantees, others have obviously been drafted by lawyers and cover many restrictions. The following points are important to include:

* Unconditional: Promises of the guarantees must be unconditional and no elements of surprise should be made to customers

* Comprehensible: The guarantees must be easy to understand and communicate so that customers can have clear awareness of the benefits of the guarantees.

* Meaningful: Firms must make the guarantee important to the customers and provide adequate values to offset service failure.

* Easy to invoke: The guarantee should be less dependent on the customer and more on service provider.

* Easy to collect: Service providers should design an easy and problem-free guarantees collection process for customers.

* Credible: Guarantees must be offer in a believable manner.

In our recruiting, training and consulting business we offer the following guarantee:

“Our work is guaranteed to the complete satisfaction of the client. If the client is not completely satisfied with our services, we will, at the client’s option, either waive professional fees, or accept a portion of those fees that reflects the client’s level of satisfaction.”

When we became clear on what we promising to deliver and how satisfaction will be measured then our work became more careful. Managing expectation is critical when offering a guarantee and this, in it, improves the business relationship.

Don’t be afraid of offering a guarantee but make certain that you can deliver. Eventually Dominos removed the time promise because of lawsuits over traffic accidents, resulting from speeding delivery drivers!


cold call
salesmasterybutton