The Art of customer care

The art of customer care, service, retention or whatever you want to call it!

Lets not beat about the bush here you and I are in business for the same reason, to make money. And the only way to make money is to firstly get and then to keep customers. Our customers are the be-all and end-all of the success of our business. It matters not what your product is or whether it is the leading one of it's kind in the universe. Neither does it matter how long you have been established or how many staff you employ. The level of I.T that exists in your organisation or the ultra modern machinery that you have just purchased are all very nice things to brag about as well. But the truth is that if you don't have any customers you might as well be on Mars because every thing else you have is irrelevant. Therefore the most important job of every single employee in your organisation, from the top down, is to firstly get, and then to keep, customers.

I could go on all day about keeping customers happy by going the extra mile. What it boils down to though is this, unless you have invented a machine that can legally make money out of old newspapers you are not the only person or organisation in the world who does what you do. So you have got to make sure that when you do what you do you do it differently to the way others do it!

Here is a question that you should be asking yourself on a regular basis:

"When my customers want whatever it is that I do, how can I make sure that they come to me first?"

Whichever way you look at it, if you are doing exactly the same as everyone else you are not going to achieve much more than everyone else are you? Oh sure you can offer them something different as an incentive, but do you know how long the motivation created by an incentive lasts? No, me neither. But I know its not all that long. So what you need to do to keep your customers happy is to find out what everyone else does and do it a little bit more, a little bit better or a little but longer. I'm not too sure where I read this. I might even have written it myself, but wherever it came from it makes a great deal of sense:

It is an absolute fact that the success of your business will be in direct proportion to
what you do AFTER you have done what everyone else does!

There are a number of documented reasons why we loose business. Some people die (now if you can come up with something to prevent that you will have a captive audience). Some move away and some frankly get bored with us. However we cannot get away from the fact that the overriding reason why between sixty-five and seventy percent of customers leave is through an attitude of indifference from the supplier. So there's a clue!

How does your attitude to your customers make you stand out from the rest? When was the last time you said thank you to a customer just for being a customer? How do you thank new clients for giving you the opportunity to work with their organisation? You already know what your customer expects of you so how can you go that extra mile? In business, as in life, the one thing you can be certain of is that the extra mile is never crowded.

I'd like to leave you with three things you could do to turn up the cuddles for your customers:

  • Remember that it is what you do after you have done what everyone else does that will make a difference.
  • Say thank you more often. Call them not to sell to them sometime.
  • Remember everyone is somebody's somebody. Treat everyone you meet as a relation of your customers...they just might be!
 
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