You can have every product that your customers could possibly want, but if you don't treat your customers well, you can kiss your business goodbye. Numerous studies have shown that it costs more to acquire new customers than it takes to retain existing ones. Use these six service strategies to keep your customers coming back for more:
Strategy #1: Stay in Touch
Let your customers know you value their business by reaching out to them. Use newsletters, postcards, individual letters, or e-mails to deliver news about products, special promotions, and store events. (Allow customers to sign up for these missives in the store, and never send an e-mail without their express permission.) Send a thank-you note after a major purchase, inviting the customer to contact you with questions, feedback, or to discuss additional requests. Focus all these communications on letting customers know that you can solve their problems and meet their needs.
Strategy #2: Make Great Service a Priority
Excellent customer service requires training your staff and constantly reinforcing the message that customers come first. Start with the little things, such as a standard way of politely greeting people on the phone or asking that sales staff courteously greet anyone who enters the store.
Strategy #3: Store Collective Wisdom
One of the most important customer strategies is to set up a system for responding to customer inquiries or complaints. The last thing you want is for your employees to provide inaccurate information to your customers. Neither should they fail to provide a solution to a problem or quote policies that may not accurately address the situation.
Your goal should be to resolve issues during the initial customer contact, or, when that's not possible, within one business day. Whenever necessary, make sure employees let customers know that they may need some time to locate the information. Do not leave customers hanging.
With that in mind, staffers need to know exactly where to look for answers. While it's natural for new employees to rely on the wisdom of more experienced ones, you don't want all that wisdom to walk out the door when someone quits. Develop a "knowledge base"; that is, a store of information with answers to common questions, methods for solving problems, and standards for resolving disputes. Your knowledge base can be as simple as a notebook where staffers or the store manager jots notes; a searchable text file on a computer; or a database.
Strategy #4: Empower Your Staff
In some cases, where there is no policy -- and occasionally in cases where the policy needs to be flexed -- you need to empower certain people to make decisions, use good judgment, and bend the rules. Ask them to document these special cases; you can provide a pad of paper forms, let them enter information into the computer, or simply leave you a voice mail. Depending on the size of your operation, you may want to designate one person per shift as chief problem-solver
You can have every product that your customers could possibly want, but if you don't treat your customers well, you can kiss your business goodbye. Numerous studies have shown that it costs more to acquire new customers than it takes to retain existing ones. Use these six service strategies to keep your customers coming back for more:
Strategy #1: Stay in Touch
Let your customers know you value their business by reaching out to them. Use newsletters, postcards, individual letters, or e-mails to deliver news about products, special promotions, and store events. (Allow customers to sign up for these missives in the store, and never send an e-mail without their express permission.) Send a thank-you note after a major purchase, inviting the customer to contact you with questions, feedback, or to discuss additional requests. Focus all these communications on letting customers know that you can solve their problems and meet their needs.
Strategy #2: Make Great Service a Priority
Excellent customer service requires training your staff and constantly reinforcing the message that customers come first. Start with the little things, such as a standard way of politely greeting people on the phone or asking that sales staff courteously greet anyone who enters the store.
Strategy #3: Store Collective Wisdom
One of the most important customer strategies is to set up a system for responding to customer inquiries or complaints. The last thing you want is for your employees to provide inaccurate information to your customers. Neither should they fail to provide a solution to a problem or quote policies that may not accurately address the situation.
Your goal should be to resolve issues during the initial customer contact, or, when that's not possible, within one business day. Whenever necessary, make sure employees let customers know that they may need some time to locate the information. Do not leave customers hanging.
With that in mind, staffers need to know exactly where to look for answers. While it's natural for new employees to rely on the wisdom of more experienced ones, you don't want all that wisdom to walk out the door when someone quits. Develop a "knowledge base"; that is, a store of information with answers to common questions, methods for solving problems, and standards for resolving disputes. Your knowledge base can be as simple as a notebook where staffers or the store manager jots notes; a searchable text file on a computer; or a database.
Strategy #4: Empower Your Staff
In some cases, where there is no policy -- and occasionally in cases where the policy needs to be flexed -- you need to empower certain people to make decisions, use good judgment, and bend the rules. Ask them to document these special cases; you can provide a pad of paper forms, let them enter information into the computer, or simply leave you a voice mail. Depending on the size of your operation, you may want to designate one person per shift as chief problem-solver.
Strategy #5: Know Your Customers
Instituting a formal way of tracking your customer interactions will help you identify your best customers, as well as those who may not have frequented your business in a while. You can also see if someone has needed repairs or is due for servicing on a product.
There are many software applications designed to do this, ranging from powerful -- and expensive -- "enterprise software" products to simple Web-based applications that cost less than $20 a month. As you gain new customers, you enter their contact information and notes about the transaction into the software. Later, you can sort this data or analyze it to uncover useful information.
But you don't have to use a computer to track customers. A small shop could simply prepare an index card for each customer and file them alphabetically. If the customer returns, sales staff can pull the card from the file, review the history, and note the latest interaction.
Strategy #6: Manage Customer Relationships
Once you have some history on your customers, whether from written notes or via a database, you can identify your best customers and reward them. Perhaps you'll offer a special discount to frequent customers or make a follow-up call to those who have needed recent repair work.
Use the information you've gathered about your customers to make customer service a science. Give them a quality experience and complete satisfaction, and they'll keep coming back for more.
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