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My Historic Barn post sparked a heated debate with a client yesterday. I made the point that every person in an organization is responsible for the customer service experience. She disagreed.

Here’s my logic, and why I believe I won the argument. Let’s say you have a small business employing 15 people. And, let’s also assume you serve 200 customers a year. Now think carefully about how these valuable customers interact with your staff, and who they come into contact with.

On any given day a customer may need to speak to the following people in your organization:

• your receptionist,
• your sales staff,
• your accounts department,
• your technical staff,
• your workshop technicians,
• or you, the business owner.

Work this out for yourself. 15 people serving 200 customers. Assume that 80% of your staff complement communicates with each customer. That’s a whopping 2400 opportunities to impress your customers each year.

Of course, there’s always the alternative; 2400 opportunities to annoy your customers each year. Which would you prefer?

Yesterday, while wandering through our manufacturing area I stumbled on a product to add to our line.

A few informal discussions with colleagues and a handful of A-list clients confirmed that the idea was great and they’d be happy to buy-in provided the price is right.

The weird thing is that the company has been offering this particular product for over 20 years. It’s just that nobody’s thought of marketing it until now. And neither has anyone else in the industry.

An added bonus is marketing this product should also help to improve the sales of one of our stagnated product lines we’ve been considering canceling.

While I’d love to take credit for identifying the potential for this new product through a rigorous market research study, that’s not how it happened. I simply saw something happening, asked a couple of simple questions, and got a great answer.

Now, I’m certain there will be a couple of mistakes along the way, but there’s an opportunity for us to help a lot of businesses save a lot of money. Our investment is zero and our product can go to market as soon as I can train our sales people.

When was the last time you tried to imagine one of your old products being used in a completely new way?

If you’re a regular Copyblogger reader, you’ll know that yesterday’s guest post by James Chartrand made mention of a really simple way to improve interaction with your blog visitors.

The premise is that finishing your post off with an open-ended question, rather than just a statement, gives your reader a reason to interact with you, hence attracting more comments and helping you to build your online community.

Told you it was simple, didn’t I? (not much of an open-ended question, but I’ll work on it…)