Are Mars and Venus close enough?

Guy Creese notes that vendors often don't seem to understand their customers. He cites a couple of examples where training and support were extremely important factors to customer success (and vendor selection). No doubt. It is an excellent time to be a vendor right now, as long as you're paying close attention to your customers needs and requirements (and innovating!).

Guy notes that, especially in a maturing market like web analytics, execution is critical to success. In a parallel industry to ours, blogging tools, the market is less mature, and the tools are far less complex, but customers are no less forgiving. As I noted previously, SixApart has had some growing pains recently with their Typepad service, and won praise for communicating well with their customers during the tough times.

This week, they went a step further to mend the fences. Typepad customers received an email from Barak Berkowitz, the CEO of SixApart. In the email, customers were given options as to how much of a credit they would like, based on how much of a disruption the customer felt the recent service issues caused them.

Good idea. Taking care of customers. Others thought so too. Now they need to execute!

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