Here are some key ideas to make this work in practice:
Coach and Train For Success
Customers are human beings, a well trained and fully empowered group of customer care representatives reflect the truth of that. They’re able to make decisions in the interests of the business that deliver a great experience – there’s no need for a handbook or manual, it’s a matter of common sense.
Honesty and Integrity
No cheap tricks, no sleight of hand. If you have a returns policy – honor it. If you have a special promotion, tell your existing customers when they place a repeat order, don’t let them find out from another source and leave them feeling cheated. Treat people with respect and fairness, both inside the business and outside of it. If your staff work in a backstabbing, dishonest environment don’t be surprised when this carries over to the customer. In short a great place to work, delivers great benefits to customers.
Lead from The Front
This ties in with the last point. Your leaders must embody the philosophy that the customer counts. A disconnect between; “Do what I say not what I do.” is a recipe for disaster. They (your leaders) develop the culture and promote the positive business model.
Reward Excellence
If you have superstars on the phones, or on the shop floor – recognize them for it, and not with gimmicky employee of the month programs, pay them more and offer genuine career advantages like more training or flexible working arrangements.
Shout Out About Your Care
Make it easy for clients to get in touch, don’t bury your customer care number in small print. Make it a prominent addition to every piece of marketing material and branded collateral you have. Encourage unhappy customers to get in touch, don’t wait until they’ve moved to the competition and then try and win them back.
Remove Complexity
If your customers need to push 12 buttons before they talk to a person, that’s way too much. Make it easy for your clients to talk to someone as soon as they call. There’s nothing more frustrating than endless automated options and it’s better to reduce the level of upset facing an already unhappy customer.
Apply Common Sense
If you hire people you trust (and you should). Then you should trust them to do their jobs. Don’t set individual targets for call length or face-to-face time, let your people decide how much time is “enough”. Measure customer happiness and make that the basis of reviews and rewards. Then elevate the very best in front of their peers, and encourage them to meet those standards.
Building the right environment for client satisfaction is essential to win over business. It’s also the critical path to retaining that business and turning your clients into ambassadors for your brand.
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In difficult economic times it’s important to recognize where you can achieve the most value with your business. Retaining existing customers is important during the good times, in the bad times it’s vital. It costs more to win and service a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer happy and grow their relationship. Here are some key drivers to reduce churn in your organization.
Customer Service is the Bottom Line
The way you serve and support your customers is key to your overall business strategy. Customer service should be represented at boardroom level, and not as a subsection of sales. In a market where everyone is chasing a smaller pot – it’s absolutely essential to protect what you already have.
Customer Service Really Matters
Over 70% of clients rate customer service as the single most important factor in doing business. They place it above sales, marketing, brand, everything. Over 80% place after care for a major purchase as the determining point for future loyalty.
Your Customers Must Come First
When times are tight, people are more ready to switch suppliers or providers than ever before. Nearly 50% of consumers say that they would consider making a move if the benefits were right.
Cost Cutting Is Not The Priority
It’s easy to focus on new revenue streams and tighten care budgets, after all – sales are what count right? Wrong. Your existing customers spend more money than your new clients in most instances and serving them is cheaper than winning over new clients. Don’t slash care budgets to chase rainbows.
Well Trained Employees Deliver the Goods
If you want to have a reputation for the best customer care, then make sure your people are well prepared to deliver it. Invest in motivating, training and empowering your service staff – their level of professional competence translates directly into the customer experience. Happy clients means more money.
Engage with your customers and empathize with them
Remember your clients if you meet face to face, keep key details to make dealing with you more rewarding – on CRM systems. Use social media to broaden your reach. Make it easy for your customers to reach you, and make it easier to serve them.
Monitor Feedback and Complaints
Each complaint is potentially lost revenue, turning a complaint around successfully can bring enormous financial benefits to your business. Make sure you have the appropriate systems in place to track problems all the way through to resolution. Make sure you can analyze the data and use it to prevent some problems from occurring again in the future. In short be proactive for your customers, and don’t wait for a disaster before doing something positive.
Be Creative and Strategic
That means make sure that every point of contact is consistent in its approach and that customer delight (not satisfaction) is at the heart of what you do.
A downturn in the economy can still bring plenty of opportunities to the customer savvy business. Don’t waste that moment – go after perfection while your competitors are licking their wounds. Make your company the single best in your field, and listen to your customers tell the world about it.
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Are you taking yourself for granted?
My wife works as a project manager for the education department of a Fortune 500 company. She was in the process of hiring a key note speaker for one of their events and showed me his proposal. I started to read it over and I was shocked at what I was reading.
In his proposal he listed the basic topic of his talk (No big deal there). Then he listed how it would be presented. And it was that list that was largely responsible for his being hired. Here are some excerpts from the actual proposal (I am just going to list the actual beginning of the sentences to illustrate a point):
- Participants will answer two poll questions which …
- Participants will create a list of ideas to help them …
- Participants will share with a partner what makes them …
As I was reading this, something my 15 year-old son often says came to mind: “Duh!”
Even a mediocre trainer/speaker would engage the audience with two engaging (poll) questions.
Even a mediocre trainer/speaker would involve the participants with a written activity (list creation in this case)
Even a mediocre trainer/speaker would have the participants share what they wrote to solidify what they learned.
However, reading his proposal was a major “AHA” moment for me. Having been a professional trainer for one of the largest personal and professional development companies in north America, I believed that all of the things he listed are just par for the course and would not have even thought to mention them as a benefit of my programs. I realized then that I had been selling myself short.
Even though the items he listed are the basic building blocks of any professional presentation, they are in fact skills acquired through study and practice and coaching. They are skills that, although being very valuable, they are skills that most competent Trainers/speakers take for granted (including me up to now).
Lesson for the day:
- Take a look at your product or service
- Find the benefits that you offer but that up to now you have taken for granted. Remember; your clients won’t know what benefits are if you don’t tell them
- Let them know how awesome you are and
- DON’T SELL YOURSELF SHORT!
The third customer relationship strategy involves letting your customers know what you have to offer. But what I encourage is that you tell them what you’re going to give them and then give them more. I have used this practice in every one of my businesses. You promise what you’re going to do for them and you promise that you can solve their problem, (if of course you can!), but then you go above and beyond. You do that little bit extra; add that extra value. But here is the important part: let them know that you did that for them. This part is really critical. There are a lot of businesses that do extra. They go that little bit above and beyond, but they forget to make sure that their clients know that they have received extra value.
For example, there were a lot of times early in my practice, before I understood the strategies, when someone would come into my office and we would do the basic chiropractic care. But on top of that we would also include some extra therapies. We wouldn’t charge them for those and all we would basically say would be, “Have a nice day!” But those extra therapies were valuable. So now what we’ve trained our staff to say is something like this: “We just wanted to let you know that you had your chiropractic visit, but in addition to that we also did a massage therapy or heat therapy or we’ve provided you with this appliance. Normally our charges for that would be $300, but for you there is no charge. We just want to make sure that you’re comfortable.” It’s very important to let them know what you’ve done for them.
Here’s another example: I have a friend who is a very high-end carpenter and when he used to go to his clients’ homes to do finished carpentry work, he would often do little extra things because he is a very meticulous person. He was really terrific at what he did, but he would do the extra things and the bill would not show that he had given the client added value. Once after he had done work at my house I met with him and shared, “Ray, you know I really appreciate that you’ve done these extra things but you have given them no extra value. You’re not increasing the value of yourself and your company.” So I recommended that when he completed his jobs that, even though he is not going to charge for the extras he does, he should let the customers know how much he actually did for them.
So now on Ray’s invoices, he lists all the things that they had agreed on at a certain price and then he writes, for example, “In addition to that, we also did this extra chair. We repaired this, we patched that, we laid about 20 extra feet of board on your floor, we made this look right, and I didn’t like the way the last guy hung that door so we re-hung it for you. Normally that would have cost you $2,000 but that’s all at no extra charge because I wanted to make sure the job got done right”.
So when you over-deliver, let them know that you over-delivered. Tactfully letting them know that it was done is a very important step in your customer relationship building strategy.
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