The do's and don'ts for customer care for your small business.

When you look at the do's and don'ts of customer care for your small business, you rill find that the key is customer service. Customer service and customer care are 2 key elements for success in your business.

There is a natural tendency to spend most of the owner and staff's time and resources on keeping your major spending key customers happy, and to ignore the smaller ones. Perhaps no one is going after new ones at all. The weakness is evident if a major buyer finds a new source of supply, or gives his or her contracts to someone else etc.

Richard F Gershon, author of note, gives some basic reasons why companies loose customers.

 68% are upset with the treatment they received
 14% are dissatisfied with the product or service
 9% start to deal with the competition
 5% seek alternatives or develop other business relationships
 3% move away
 1% die

These numbers come from a book entitled "Keeping Customers for Life". Two thirds (2/3) leave because of the way they were treated. This percentage alone should be high enough to convince small business owners and staff to zero in on the customer and treat them very well.

Perhaps expensive equipment, custom printing, a top priced or prime location is not as necessary as giving customers a extra little bit of professional, polite attention to see the fruits of your labor in repeat sales, returning customers, and a higher profit.

Your customer service shapes the satisfaction level of every action you have with your customers. This customer service policy involves more than the idea that service is giving customers what they want. There will be times when you cannot do this. Most of the time there are many more aspects.

Included are some additional ideas to consider:

1. Communicate:
Send out an email newsletter, monthly flier, a reminder card for a tune up etc. Reach out to your steady customers.

2. Customer Service:
Meet customer needs and educate your staff to do the same. Customers remember being treated well but they definitely remember being mistreated.

3. Employee Loyalty:
Owners and managers can cause employees to feel the company has loyalty to them. They will feel good about their jobs and pass that loyalty on to your customers.

4. Employee Training:
Train employees in the skills needed to do what you want them to see as your priorities with customers. Allow employees to make decisions that benefit the customer.

5. Customer Incentives:
Give customers a good reason to return to come back. Use half price sales, or buy one, get one free.

6. Product Awareness:
Know your regular customers needs and keep those items in stock. Add other products and/or services that go with the products your regular customers buy.

7. Reliability:
If you promise delivery on Wednesday, be there on deliver it on Wednesday. Establish a reputation of being reliable. If something goes wrong, let customers know immediately. Explain why you could not do what you told them, and offer to do all you can for them at that time. It's a form of respect to be on time, or call and explain why you could not.

8. Be Flexible:
Try to resolve customer issues or complaints. Failure to provide the service or product return the customer requests, based on "well that's our policy" will lose more customers then setting the store on fire.

9. People over Technology:
Customers want to speak to a human being when he or she has an issue. The less likely it is that you will see that customer again if all they get is phone menu choices to `press one".

10. Know Their Names:
Remember to get to know the names of regular customers or at least recognize their faces.

Since it costs much more money to get a new customer than to maintain a good working relationship with an existing one, your efforts toward building customer loyalty will certainly payoff. This is what you need to know about the do's and don'ts of customer care for your small business.

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Categories: Management,

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