Good customer service can make or break your company. After all, your profits directly come from your customers. And the best way to keep the profit rolling in is to keep your customers coming back for more.
To ensure that your customers are 100 per cent satisfied with every experience you need to figure out a way to make every experience a good one. Unfortunately, not every customer service experience is perfect. Often there are complaints to take care of or problems with the product, service or system that are unavoidable. Many times customers can call screaming, frustrated or upset and many times customers feel unsatisfied with the state of things. It is your job to fix these problems and offer an incentive to ensure that even these bad experiences are transformed into good ones.
Need some ideas? Read on to explore some of the situations that have personally made me a loyal customer.
The Good: One of my favourite electronics store always greets their customers with a smile, a friendly attitude and a promise to give you the product at a discount. The simple “it’s usually 50 dollars but I can give it to you at 45 for today only,” is a sure-fire way to make a sale and keep the customer satisfied. I am sure that the customer service sales rep gives all his customers the same deals, but it makes me feel special and this keeps me coming back time after time.
The Bad: Even bad situations can be made good again with the right customer service. Have you ever ordered take out and the staff has messed up your order? Well I have. My favourite take away restaurant once confused my order with another person’s and gave me the corrected entire meal for FREE. Although I had to wait an extra couple of minutes, the generosity was unexpected and 100 per cent appreciated. Now I go there at least once a week and they have yet to mess up again.
The Ugly: Similarly, even ugly situations can be taken care of effectively and efficiently with the right customer service approach. How’s this for an ugly situation: On a family vacation to Disneyland, we rented a four-door coupe to travel around California. However, when we arrived at the car rental shop, our four-door coupe was all sold out. Flustered, upset and in a foreign state, the situation could have gone from bad to worse. However, the customer service representative upgraded us to a convertible for no extra charge and even threw in a free camera for the trouble. Crisis averted and loyal customers convinced. It all comes down to good customer service, no matter what.
In each instance, the customer service sales rep went the extra mile for me and made my customer service experience a great one, even if the situations were less than ideal. Running your business with customer service as your number one priority will ensure that your customers remain loyal, your company remains trusted and your business remains profitable.
George Raymond has been marketing online since 1999, the website: Solutions For Internet Marketers is a compilation of works developed over those years. Visit my site: Solutions For Internet Marketers