Customer Service: Small Businesses’ Inherent Advantage Relationships and flexibility are key to retaining and attracting customers.
By Dan Browne
You’ve spent several hundred hours—and a lot more dollars—marketing and selling your product or service, and now you have some well-earned customers. But now the real work begins because you need to keep them coming back!
Great service is key to retaining customers and attracting more. Small businesses have two customer service advantages⎯closer relationships and greater flexibility.
Customers often place as great an emphasis on name, reputation and relationships as they do on the product or service. In other words, customers buy from people they trust and identify with, an easier task when owners are visible.
Second, small businesses have always enjoyed a competitive advantage in flexibility and customization in meeting customers’ individual needs. Small businesses that focus valuable resources on customer service have a good chance of beating their bigger rivals.
According to Chip Bell and Ron Zemke, authors of “Managing Knock Your Socks off Service,” businesses that were rated high on the quality of their customer service: • Keep customers 50 percent longer than their competitors • Have 20 to 40 percent lower marketing costs • Experience 7 to 12 percent higher return on sales • Reap 7 to 17 percent higher net profits
Following are five suggestions to sharpen your company’s focus on customer service. Define Expectations, Values, and Beliefs Communicate your customer service expectations clearly and often to your employees, including values, beliefs, guidelines and procedures. Make customer satisfaction a critical part of all employees’ performance reviews. Stress that “Good Enough” is never “Enough”!
Treat Everyone as a Customer One thing rings true in every great customer service organization: They treat each other as well as they treat paying customers. Great customer service starts internally, and it can’t help but spill over into your relationships with paying customers. After all, helping others is what it’s all about. So remember, employees that are treated poorly, probably treat customers just as poorly.
Hire Great People If you believe that your employees are the strongest link between you and your customers, then take as much care in designing your team as you do in designing your product or service. Think of the hiring process as casting roles in a play, and define the roles before you start filling them. Take your time to find the right person. Interview each strong applicant more than once yourself, and consider using peer or committee evaluation for leading candidates. Hire people who best fit the role you cast—people who share your values and goals—not just people who you know or like. Listen to Your Customers Be open to suggestions, complaints and feedback from your customers. The only way to truly know how you are doing is through feedback from your customers.
Whether or not you have a formal customer feedback process in place, take the time to listen to your customers. Your job as the service or product provider is to make sure customers leave with both a quality product or service and the feeling they were treated as a valuable customer. The basics to remember are to treat each customer as a friend, demonstrating courtesy, fairness and understanding. At the same time, give customers control over the situation and options on how their needs might be met. Always seek to exceed customer expectations.
Put Quality Performers in Key Roles Put your best quality performing people in the key positions that communicate with and serve customers on a regular basis. Then, take care of these key people and give them great customer service.
The receptionist is often the least paid, lowest level and least trained, and is sometimes even a temporary employee. And yet, this individual is often the first to have contact with your prospects and is usually the last person with whom departing customers communicate. If you want to be a quality customer service-focused organization, you must take a serious look at all roles and their value to the company.
Customer service has always been an inherent advantage to small business, but if you want your company to survive and thrive during the good times as well as the down times, then put quality customer service at the top of your “to do” list.
Dan Browne is the owner of D & M Associates, a training, consulting and organizational development company based in Lenexa, Kan. He specializes in small business consulting with fully customizable training, assessment and development capabilities. You can reach him at (913) 390-5475 or .
