Imagine Your Customer as Tom Brady

The half-hour of non-love for Survey Monkey was the window of time when they auto-renewed my subscription, which I wasn’t expecting, and I got annoyed and self-righteous about it. I figured it was likely my fault. They probably told me during the sign-up process that they would do this and I probably just didn’t pay attention.

But I still felt like I might have been tricked, and I was annoyed at the prospect of going back to investigate all of this in order to build a rationale for why they should remove the charge.

Instead, I did no investigation. I just took the chip off my shoulder (for a minute) and sent a short email saying I wasn’t expecting the auto-renewal and asking that they remove the charge. A few minutes later I received an email saying that yes, the auto-renew approval had been part of my sign-up process, but no matter, Survey Monkey was happy to remove the charge and allow my account to sit as a free account until the next time I needed to use their premium features.

And now here I am blogging about it. And other people will likely tweet this post and share it on Facebook.

The point is this: your customers are incredibly empowered, and if you treat them like people and treat them well, it is very easy for them to share those experiences with your brand. Which gets you new customers. In other words, your customer drives your offense. And in today’s hyper-connected world, happy customers can move you down the field faster than you can say Mr. Bundchen.

It’s worth noting, by the way that your customer is also Vince Wilfork, and I’m not talking about him being a secret touchdown machine. I’m referring to the fact that really great customer engagement is also what drives your defense. It’s what keeps empowered, highly informed, super-mobile customers from going to your competitor, and it’s what keeps competitors from turning your business into a pure commodity where price is the only differentiator.

So engage with your customers in ways that feel personal and human. Listen to them and respond directly – like SurveyMonkey did here. And they will reward you by sharing their enthusiasm and delight with the other people in their social graph. And you will find yourself in the end zone. At the Super Bowl. (Go Pats!)

Dave McLaughlin is CEO and Co-Founder of Vsnap, a Boston-based startup that makes it easy to send short video messages as a more personal alternative to email.