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3 Keys to Building a Winning Customer Service Strategy
How will you meet and exceed your customer's expectations and keep them coming back and spending throughout 2003?
January is a time for resolutions to be made. It is also a month when resolutions are broken. Did you make a resolution to eat...
5 Steps to Better Manage Your Customers' Expectations
You have completed your project on time, well within schedule and with great quality deliverables. You can feel your customer trying to distance himself from you. You are at a loss to understand why. Sounds familiar?
WORDS COUNT: 1499 words...
Can Point of Sales Systems Really Enhance My Customer's Visit?
You may assume that your guest's experience at your restaurant may be enhanced by a point of sale system. Maybe you had not even though of it. However, the fact is that a good point of sale system can benefit the experience of your guests.
So...
Create a Win Win for Small Your Small Business
Discover How Specialized Cost Containment Creates A New Win-Win Position For Property Owner’s And You Property Management: A simple strategy to increase client loyalty By Gary L. Goldsmith Property managers who pro-actively employ...
Get More Customers – With Less Work!
A lot of website owners work tirelessly at increasing their traffic. They submit to FFA pages and classified sites. They participate in startup programs and pop under exchanges. There is no end to the gimmicks they will try, all in the hopes...
How To Decrease Profits Without Really Trying
Hurting your sales efforts can be accomplished easily with the proper guidance. The following effective yet simple ideas are designed to generate results when implemented into your sales strategy. • Don’t listen to what your clients are...
It's a Training Issue!
There’s a common phrase used by Organizational Development and Human Resource professionals, when identifying kinks in the growth of an organization or company - “It’s a training issue.” The same phrase can be applied to almost any group of...
Reward Your Customers
The formula for success for any business is to get your customers to make repeat purchases. There are a number of factors involved for getting repeat customers: pricing, quality of products and services, excellent customer service etc. One of the...
Successful Small Businesses Use PR
It’s obvious when a small business has accepted the fact that its most important outside audiences need lots of care and feeding. They do something about it. There’s a sense of urgency and a recognition that those “key target publics” have...
The Importance of Background Verification
Today's society has created an environment that requires business owners to be armed with numerous tools. Many employers currently spend little time verifying the accuracy of employment applications and the cost of not doing normal due diligence...
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Take Care of Yourself Before You Take Care of Your Customer
One of the most important questions people ask when they are focused on improving their quantity and quality of business is: “What is my competitive advantage? What makes me unique, memorable, special… what truly sets me apart from the rest?"
While there are no definitively right answers to that question, most people come to some conclusion that customer service is a critical component of your competitive advantage. For most businesses, the service they offer can vary from exceptional to not so hot, depending upon circumstances.
Why is that? Why does the same company, and even the same people within that company provide world class service some of the time, and marginal service (or worse) other times?
That answer can be found in asking a different question: “What makes you (or your staff) happy when serving your customers?” While these answers also vary, most people come up with some sort of variation of “I am happy when my customer is happy.”
Do we enjoy dealing with agitated or disgruntled people? Normally not. We derive our joy from delivering value, by making others feel good about their experience, and by exceeding people’s expectations.
What comes first then? The happy customer or the happy person serving the customer? This is not the chicken or the egg quandary. The happy person serving the customer NEEDS to come first, because it is a very unusual day when your customer comes into your business looking to cheer YOU up.
This all seems very obvious. At
the same time that many people realize this truth, it is rare that people consciously take steps to make sure that their greatest customer service assets are being serviced too - w hether that person in on your staff, in another department, or if that person is YOU. It is critical that you continually improve the emotional, physical and mental support you are supplying to the people serving your customers.
One of my friends and colleagues, Paul Wesselemann, shared a story about his time working at an HIV/AIDS support network. He explained how it was absolutely unacceptable to come to work when you were feeling even a bit ill, as even the smallest cold could be extremely dangerous for someone with HIV. He was REQUIRED first and foremost to take care of himself, make sure he was 100% before he was allowed to offer help and support to others.
How committed are you to taking the same care of YOUR needs? Your task for the month is to identify and act upon a couple of ways to keep you in proper shape so you can take care of your always important customers.
BE FREE!
Eric Plantenberg
About the Author
Eric Plantenberg is a nationally known memory trainer. His new program, Winning The Name Game, teaches professionals how to train their memory to remember names more effectively and be able to recall them at the right moment. For more information on how to better remember hundreds of names and faces visit http://www.WinnngTheNameGame.com
Or email info@WinningTheNameGame.com
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