With many other photographers in your area, all using the same equipment as you and perhaps offering the same photography as you, how do you set yourself apart? After a few clicks of their mouse, a potential customer may think that all photographers are the same.
What can you do about it? Get a fancier web site? Offer more price discounts? Buy some gimmicky photo background or trendy lighting accessory?
None of those are long term solutions.
Instead, you have to know the customer more. Know what they’re really looking for when they search for a photographer, know their concerns and business constraints when they hire a photographer, know what they want when they work with a photographer, know how they can best use the delivered pictures. None of these have anything to do with shutter speeds, pixel counts or focal lengths.
This isn’t about customer service but rather it’s customer experience (link to PDF) and the two are different.
The short explanation is that customer experience is what a customer takes away from a business transaction. For a photographer, that transaction usually starts when the customer first visits the photographer’s web site. Customer service, which can be part of the customer experience, is what a business does to or for the customer.
Improving your customer experience by more thoroughly understanding the customer’s business can make you the photographer of choice more than any new equipment you might buy or any price discount you might offer.
