Customer Service – 3 Ways to Treat Momma Right!

If you haven’t noticed, I tend to refer to Newsweek articles quite a bit. The reason being is that it is one of the few magazines (in paper form) that I take and read (along with Inc and Relevant). Today, I have another intriguing article to share with you.

Mother Knows Best

Lisa Miller writes about the growing stress that is on mothers (and some fathers) to do it all. The reality is that most mothers work at least some, and it’s not a choice. At the same time, while many domestic jobs are now shared with husbands, other things are not shared. seemingly simple things like banking, gift purchases, vacation planning, or family portraits.

However, because the internet has changed the world, the service typically ingrained in many businesses have moved to self-service. This means that you are now taking care of your own stock purchases, health insurance decisions, and vacation planning. While you can use services like travel agents or insurance brokers, it’s probably going to cost you.

Here’s the point. Based on this trend, the stress put on mothers, and the fact that it’s mothers who are integral to booking portrait sessions and then purchasing the finished products, how can you make their lives easier?

Here are 3 ways to help these stressed out mothers choose your studio:

1. Provide clothing (specifically for children) – while many mothers will love to make sure their little boy or girl’s outfit is perfect, others would love for you to do the work for them. Maybe it’s just for a special session you are offering, but take the work out of outfit planning for them. Or offer an upgraded service to shop and provide unique and fun outfits just for their child
2. Hang their finished wall portraits – when it comes to hanging wall portraits, photographers are usually pretty comfortable in making the right decisions, but that’s not always the case for our clients. Not only that, but it’s another chore that simply takes that much more time. Kent Smith from Kent Smith Photography offers this service to his clients, not only as a helpful service, but to make sure that they portraits actually go up and look right. This ends up being a marketing tool for his studio too!
3. Offer baby-sitting during the sale – Many times mothers will bring their young children to the sales session, and it works out fine for everyone. Some mothers may not want this distraction, but not have another good option. Why not take care of this for them, during that sales session provide someone at or very near the studio to watch their child(ren) during the sale. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up more than paying for itself in increased sales.