Did you ever experience such outstanding service you were obliged to say so, and congratulate the server? Did you ever ask him/her could you talk to the boss to mention how impressed you were?
Doesn’t happen very often, does it?
That’s because we all too often don’t receive (or probably give) that level of service. But this should be the goal every time a business interacts with customers, or prospects. This type of service gets us easy repeat business, referrals and helps us protect our prices. Customer’s are never as hard on the price when they know they’re getting the very best attention.
In his recent post at Chris Brogan’s blog the social media guru explains when times are tough in a down economy it’s even more important to create this type of relationship with people we do business with. Here’s an extract, but it’s really worth reading the rest.
“Build. Relationships. Now.
Learn the tools. Understand how to re-humanize communications. Learn how to scale differently. And put your efforts into relationship mode.
The cost: a cutback on the mass approach.
The reward: deepening of relationships (and potential sustained or augmented sales) with your client base.
Math wise, if the dial is already going down related to things you can’t much control, you’ve just earned a little time to convert to a relationship-based mode.
Or don’t, because I’ll love me a good fire sale on your database.”
Of the fundamentals small business people have to understand the need for delivering outstanding customer service is paramount. It’s the one way we can compete with the big businesses (who never really understand).
This doesn’t mean doing exactly what the customers want. Often they’re not best placed to know what’s in their interests. They’re relying on us, as providers, to know and deliver that.
It does mean listening, interpreting, researching, going the extra mile. It does mean having all our information available at our fingertips. It means preparing for any conversation ahead of time, anticipating what might be the subject of the call, knowing what’s been expected and whether it’s been delivered.
This is the extra mile, doing the research so the customer doesn’t have to to. Customers shouldn’t need to explain why they’re calling, we should be there ahead of them, and have thought about the answers.
Of course this might be easier said than done. Too much else going on and too little time to spend understanding the background.
An interesting question we can all ask ourselves is how many places we have to go, to find the background information we need prior to any customer interaction.
* Email
* Documents
* Plans in spreadsheets
* Notes on paper
* Conversations with colleagues
* Deliveries scheduled and achieved, or not
* Service history - issues resolved, and not.
Depending on the business there might be a lot more. GRRRRR How can we achieve our goal of outstanding service when we can’t find the most basic of details?
The other interesting question is how much more capable would we be, and how much more time would we have, if all of this information was available on one page, available at the click of a button?
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