Great Doonesbury Cartoon... for note writers!

Check out the full Doonesbury comic strip by clicking the link below ....

http://www.arcamax.com/doonesbury/s-444545-988452?source=1930

Church of the Customer tackles Thank You notes

One of my favorite blogs is "Church of the Customer" because they often have articles with ideas to improve your business and Jackie Huba just posted a great article titled, "Five must-haves for thank-you notes".

In short, this is what she had to say...

... there are five must-haves for an effective, buzzworthy thank-you note:

1) Spell the recipient's name correctly (doh!).

2) Thank the person for choosing your business. If they shared a specific reason why they choose your business of why they like it, reaffirm it. For heaven's sake, though, don't turn it into a sales pitch.

3) Include a personal detail about the recipient that you picked up on. Prove that you were listening. Humanity is a good thing in the antiseptic world of business.

4) Open the door to feedback. Whether the recipient provides it isn't the point; it's the idea that you're passionate about creating a recommendable experience.

5) Be authentic: Include your full name and contact info -- email and/or phone. Or a business card.

These 5 keys are important... and they begin to give you a feeling for what a Thank You note, especially one from a business to their customer, should include. The last one, "Be authentic" is especially important and is one of the reasons that most businesses fail to use thank you notes... they see business as impersonal or "just a job".

When you care enough to make your business GREAT, the idea of sending handwritten thank you notes is a simple step in that direction. It shows how much you care to do a good job (very unusual nowadays) as well as how much you care about your customers... and people will always do business with people who care about them over the standard [i.e. rude, impersonal, rule-following] businesses.

Click here to read the full article including an example of a thank you card that Jackie received.

Changing the world ...one thank-you note at a time

This post on lifehack.org pointed me to a great article by Tom Chiarella called "A Little Gratitude... How to change the way the world sees you, one thank-you note at a time". Here is an excerpt...

Being grateful matters. A good thank-you -- a real thank-you -- means something. It is notable, memorable, important. A meaningful thank-you reveals the evolution of a friendship; it declares what we value, making one party certain that the other party notices and cares about the quality of human
transactions in the world around them. But every verbal thank-you, even a sincere one, risks being forgettable. No, there is only one way to really thank someone: You have to write it down. You gotta write a thank-you note.

Tom goes on to explain a experiment where he wrote at least 3 Thank You notes per day for a month ...

I've never been very good at this whole daily-reflection thing, but if I ever gave it a real shot, it was while I was scratching out these notes. Time passed differently. I began to look at the day as a series of opportunities for thankfulness rather than obligations to a calendar. The discipline of the writing gave me a morning ritual beyond a cup of coffee and the blathering of
SportsCenter. I started, for the first time in years, to work on my handwriting. The morning didn't tear by the way it usually does. I found that I could sit there and reconstruct the prior day by thinking of the faces of the people I met, the tenor of the things they did, and the places in which I met them. With
each day, I could remember more about each day that passed.

Kind of makes you wonder who you should send a thank-you note... it doesn't just make them feel good... it helps you as well.

Think about it !