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Customer Service

Good customer service is the lifeblood of any business. You can offer promotions and slash prices to bring in as many new customers as you want, but unless you can get some of those customers to come back, your business won’t be profitable for long.

Good customer service is all about bringing customers back. And about sending them away happy – happy enough to pass positive feedback about your business along to others, who may then try the product or service you offer for themselves and in their turn become repeat customers.

If one is a good salesperson, he/she can sell anything to anyone once. But it will be your approach to customer service that determines whether or not one can sell to that same person again. The essence of good customer service is developing a relationship with customers.

1) Answer your phone.

Get call forwarding. Or an answering service. Hire staff if you need to. But make sure that someone is picking up the phone when someone calls your business.

2) Don’t make promises unless you will keep them.

Reliability is one of most important factors of maintaining a good relationship. One must think before giving any service promises – because nothing would annoy a customer more than a broken commitment.

3) Listen to your customers.

Let your customer talk and show him that you are listening by making the appropriate responses, such as suggesting how to solve the problem.

4) Deal with complaints.

If the staff can give the complaint their  full attention rather than avoiding it, the staff may be able to please this one person this one time – and position your business to reap the benefits of good customer service.

5) Be helpful – even if there’s no immediate profit in it.

Being helpful to a customer goes a long way in terms of getting repeated business from them and spreading good word of mouth.

6) Train the staff to be always helpful, courteous, and knowledgeable.

Train staff about good customer service regularly. Good Customer Service: How to Help a Customer explains the basics of ensuring positive staff-customer interactions. Most importantly, give every member of the staff enough information and power to make those small customer-pleasing decisions.

7) Take the extra step.

If someone walks into a store and asks for help in finding something, one should not just suggest where it is but lead the customer directly to the item and see if he/she has questions about it. Whatever the extra step may be, if you want to provide good customer service, take it. They may not say so to you, but people notice when people make an extra effort and will tell other people.

8) Throw in something extra.

For extra service, one can give the following as an added measure:

• a coupon for a future discount,
• additional information on how to use the product,
• a genuine smile
• The local art framer that we use attaches a package of picture hangers to every picture he frames. A small thing, but appreciated.