Good customer service pays, period.
A business without customers is not a business.
Customers are the business, so anyone who is in business and does not recognize this is doomed to go out of business. This statement is true of 95% of all businesses.
Despite this truth, many businesses look on their customers as consumers only and not as people. Certain businesses, the 5%, can get away with such an attitude, for example, some of the large fast food chains could not care less about you as an individual, all they want is a constant line of consumers to buy their burgers.
They are however aware that consumers are only consumers if the food is reasonable and is served quickly. This then consists of their good customer service! They are in fact selling convenience through quick service. Any burger joint that took half an hour to serve their burgers would not be in business long!
The other 95% of businesses have to give their customers a service that will satisfy them and get them and their friends to return. This because they are catering to individuals and not simply masses of people.
Your future in business depends on the attraction, satisfaction and retention of your customers. To succeed in business you need to get this right.
Let’s take a look at the various ways of doing this for both your and your customer’s satisfaction.
What is customer service? Simple, good customer service is customer satisfaction.
So let’s look at some of the many reasons a customer will want to buy from you and feel satisfied:-
- To be treated with respect.
- People don’t like to be taken for granted.
- People like to be shown attention
- Shown promptness to their presence.
- Be treated as individuals, if you have their name, use it.
- To be told the truth
- Tell it as it is, don’t try and cover up or make excuses.
- All your product, advertising, literature, selling techniques must be 100% credible.
- To get satisfaction for money
- A quality product, with credible
merchandising.
- Product backing by guarantee
- A no questions asked policy on returns.
- Value for money, fair pricing
- Good customer service on after sales
- To find competence and dependability in your business
- Well trained staff
- Only recommending what the customer really needs. To push your product is to put off!
- Timely
deliveries.
Close does not count!
- All complaints dealt with promptly and to the customer’s satisfaction.
Of course all of the above comes down to giving good customer service and so meeting the customer’s expectations.
How to give it to them
Remember that as a business we cannot expect customers to want to do business with us.
Customers must in fact give us their permission to allow us to sell to them. So to grow our businesses we must have the permission of the marketplace in order to do any business at all, and this permission has to be earned.
Here are some customer service tips on how to earn your customers permission to sell to them.
- Be your customer
- Stand outside of your business and take a look into it. Would you like to do business with you?
- Be aware of what you are trying to sell and sell it only in the right locality. As your customer, would you want or need to buy what you are selling where you are trying to sell it?
- Does your business give the right impression overall regarding its
advertising,
décor, sales and service? Does it fit?
- Is your business wholly acceptable to you? Is it respectable and credible?
If you, as the customer, would want to do business with you, then you are a long way towards customer satisfaction, by supplying a good customer service.
- Is it service?
- Good customer service cannot be the end product if your employee relationships are wrong.
- So employees first. Treat them well so that they serve your customers positively.
- Give your employees the responsibility for customer service and the authority to say “to heck with the company, my customer comes first”
- It must feel right when serving a customer and if it does, then it probably is.
- Service is meaningless if your product is rubbish. Good product is part of good service. You cannot have one without the other.
- Do you offer a full refund to your customers? If you are frightened to do this because of the potential cost to you, you should not be in business and you probably won’t be for much longer. This is the test of your quality.
An aside here to illustrate. When we stated our tubular steel furniture business, from scratch, we soon realized that our quality was of the best, no boasting!After being in business for two years, we started advertising that we would give a five year guarantee on our workmanship, not on the finishes however. You have no control over the customer who carelessly or deliberately scratches your table top.
After a further two years, and not one return complaint, we upped the guarantee to ten years! We sold the business eight years later and had only once been called on to honor our guarantee. A man bought in a coffee table that he said his wife had bought from us some three years previously. It was very bent, buckled and bashed, obviously no fair wear and tear damage here.
We told him that it would be ready for collection after repair by the end of the week, no charge.
Only later did we learn that he and his wife had had a big fight and that she had landed, all 400 lbs of her, on the coffee table!
He and his new wife continued to buy from us for many years afterwards.
Good customer service certainly paid here.
- Policies on Service are meaningless
Who needs customer service charters or policies?
A sign on your wall cannot guarantee any actual form of service at all.
So don’t upset your customer with notices and signs all over the shop on what and what not they can do or can’t do!
Action speaks louder than words, so your actions and the actions of your employees are the only way to guarantee service for your customers.
Your customer ethic, if strong from day one, will always guide your business in the quality of your customer service. Sometimes you might even lose money providing a good customer service, but this is a small price to pay for customer loyalty and patronage.
Remember that it is always the customer who perceives whether or not it is a good service, not you!
Keeping your customer
Customers are people and as such like a bit of love and appreciation. They appreciate good service and tend to be loyal to a supplier that they are familiar with, you in turn can guarantee this loyalty by also showing some appreciation.
- Customer loyalty is hard to win, but easy to loose so reward loyalty via annual gifts, membership programs, events in the community and loyalty discounts.
- Stay close to your customers in order to know their needs and try to meet them.
- Reward your employees who get recommendations from customers for their customer service.
- Show by your actions that you appreciate your customers business.
- Keep a database on your customers, use customers relationship management software, to help you here.
- Think, think of ways to keep your customers totally reliant on you be retaining their loyalty.
Finally in this section, remember that most customers will never tell you when they are dissatisfied. They will however tell everyone else. A little good customer service that shows your appreciation can prevent this.
Finding those customers
Giving outstanding customer service and rewarding loyalty is all well and good, provided you have the customers in the first place.
You have to attract and keep customers, particularly when your business is small, so here are some suggestions as to how to keep new customers coming into your business.
- Define your ideal customer; they can be very varied, depending on your business. How and where do these people presently find the service or product that you would like to sell them?
- Consider the best ways to get your potential customers attention. Where do they look, who do they listen to, and what do they read when they are looking?
- Then advertise to let the customers discover you. Start small on local TV, in trade magazines, local newspapers, etc. Small but often.
- Do more reading of your local newspapers. They are treasure troves of contact information and can lead to potential customers.
- Attend local events, meetings and seminars that your potential customers also attend.
- What are your competitors doing? Where do they advertise, how do they promote themselves? Do the same.
- Attract people to your business by giving free advice, samples, and contributions to local newsletters. All part of your good customer service.
- Work to completely satisfy those customers you get so that they recommend you to others.
As a rule of thumb, you can bank on a satisfied customer recommending you to 2 – 3 other people. Very good, the best kind of free advertising. On the other hand a customer who is unsatisfied will complain to 3 – 8 others. This is not the sort of free advertising you want!
Like everything else in life, you must have a plan, a
marketing plan
to attract customers and then you must maintain their loyalty through good customer service.
Bad customers!
How to deal with them.
All the customer service people will state that there can never be a bad customer, only an unsatisfied one! To put it politely, this is BS!
In all businesses you will find that there are simply some bad customers and you must have some policy as to dealing with them.
From experience, I can tell you that all bad customers tend to fall into one of two groups, ‘the don’t know any better group’and ‘the try and take unfair advantage or enjoy being difficult group.’ You will sooner or later have to deal with both groups. Here’s how to do it.
- The don’t know any better group
- Never read the instructions and cannot understand why it does not work, or won’t fit together!
- Have no patience and will not listen to explanations. They never learn and never will.
- Cannot understand that the electrical toaster they bought from you is not and never will be designed to stand in the rain and then be expected to work!
You know the type; they cannot buy anything without coming back with it three times! Deal with them politely, explain where you can and demonstrate how it should be done, then let them know that that is the end of the matter. Good customer service can only be taken so far!
- The take unfair advantage group
These are habitually bad customers that you are better off without. Certain customers are not worth the effort. Here is how to spot them.
- They will try and take advantage of any little miss type, quote or word, from whomever they can. Anything you say will be turned to their advantage.
- They will always want more than a refund or replacement. Compensation is often demanded as well.
- They always threaten to go to the press, tell others and so on.
- They tend to move from business to business trying to take advantage. Check them out with other businesses in the vicinity; you will be amazed how many know you r bad customer as well.
Don’t waste your time with these truly bad customers as good customer service is totally wasted on them... Don’t do business with them again.
That covers it then. Apart from what’s in it for you?
Why care?
- Finding customers and then attracting them to your business or product is expensive. It is cheaper to keep a satisfied customer than to find a replacement.
- If you want to remain in business and not care about your customers, you won’t.
- Customer care begins with employee satisfaction. Satisfied employees are good employees who can be trusted to care about your customers...
- Profits from companies that care for their customers are always better than from those that don’t. Good service is good for profit.
- Customer suggestions and complaints can help keep you ahead of the game.
- The personal satisfaction from knowing that you have a business that customers like doing business with.
A final point:
All businesses are “in service”. Good customer service is only the final stage of the production line, which cannot be called complete until the customer is satisfied.
In any good business, good customer service will always be King.
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