Have you ever looked around your business with your customer’s eyes? Try it for one day – pretend to be the guy or gal off the street and find out exactly what their experience is of every minute detail of your offering.
At the end of the day ask yourself honestly, are you satisfied that you’re giving the best service you can? Can you make some improvements? Do you need to think about staff training?
Now more than ever, customer service is everyone’s job. If not everyone in your organisation is putting the customer at the heart of every decision and every action then you’ll sell less than your rival who is. It’s that simple. US business guru Micah Solomon says “Customer service is a decision you make” – in other words, it’s totally up to you just how well you want to treat your customers.
What says, ‘we really care about you’, according to Solomon, is quite straightforward: a perfect product delivered by a caring, friendly person in a timely fashion. And an effective problem resolution process if anything goes wrong. “You need to plan for upset customers”, he says and treat them with a super-caring attitude that doesn’t minimise their problem, makes them feel understood and solves their issue.
Make them feel like their problem doesn’t matter, that you don’t believe them or that you simply don’t care and they will find a retailer who does. And a lost customer almost never comes back. How much does your business and your customers mean to you? Can you afford to take that risk?
That scourge of shoddy High Street service, Mary Portas, has compiled her top ten ‘crimes’ of customer care. Among them:
· Mute cashiers who don’t greet you and don’t even tell you the price of your goods.
· Plugging inappropriate offers – who wants a slab of chocolate when you’re buying a newspaper at 7am?
But what would the right service be? A warm, friendly smile and a welcoming hello would ensure your customer left feeling valued and wanting to return.
Assistants who don’t know their stuff
Shoddy fitting rooms – dirty, untidy and without basic amenities like hooks
Shops that are really social clubs where the staff gossip while completely ignoring you
People buy people, so hire the kind of staff who cares about others and who have a friendly, approachable personality. You may have to re-think your hiring process to introduce ways of identifying the right people. Hire the people-person every time – the rest of the job you can teach but not that priceless natural aptitude for making the customer happy.
And don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ve got a great product so does it matter if you’ve skimped a little on the service? It matters enormously and here’s why – everyone is producing great products, what separates the winners from the losers is the quality of their customer service from call handling through to the shop floor and your online dialogue through social media.
Statistically it costs 5 times more to gain a new customer than it does to keep one. Never be satisfied with the quality of your service – you can always find ways to do better. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to attract your customers so, now you’ve got them, make sure you keep them.
Bio: Business owner, marketing expert and writer Karen James has always been conscious of answering all of her calls and as her businesses have grown she seeks guidance from one of the best call handling services; 1stResponse who are experts in their field. When Karen is rest assured her business calls are taken care of, she likes better than long walks with her dogs or weekends by the sea with her grandchildren.
