|
|
| www.1001TopWords.com |
|
|
Do You Want More Profits? - Follow The Golden Rules Of Providing Good Customer Service
Last night I was at my computer and a Skype chat window opened up with a link in it from a stranger. I clicked the link and was taken to one of those "You would have to be crazy to pass up this business opportunity" sites. You know, the kind with great testimonials and it seems too good to be true possible outcomes. All it takes is a few hours a day and you can be pulling in thousands of dollars! Wow, sounds great. Of course there was no mention of what the business actually is. Call me paranoid but if an opportunity has to be hidden that makes me suspicious. The sales copy is alluring, the testimonials seem to come from real people just like me, and the financial incentives are extraordinary given how much time they claim is required for success. It's all just a little too good to be true, and worse still you can't even judge for yourself because they won't tell you what the business is unless you sign up for more hyperbole marketing materials. I sent back a message to the person that sent me the link stating that the message appears an awful lot like SPAM and I prefer it when strangers say hello first on Skype rather then just shoot me a link. The person responded and we ended up having a conversation which was filled with more and more claims of how amazing the system was, how other people were making so much money with it etc. I said I was quite happy with my income and lifestyle and I wasn't interested. The conversation continued with more and more sales pitching. I was even once accused of being crabby and told I was probably unhappy because of the way I had responded to the original message. The chat had all the ingredients for a flame war which is never very productive so I wished them luck with their enterprise and killed the conversation. Good Customer Service Rules I've worked in customer service for quite a few years. I've never had significant formal training and usually stuck to my gut instincts, intuition, logic and empathy to guide me through. This technique has served me well and safely negotiated plenty of potentially "heated" moments with angry people. There are two simple rules that I believe are at the crust of good customer support: Customer Service Online Running an online business means that most of the customer support I do is via email. I've continued to use my golden rules when dealing with clients and again they has served me well. I rarely do a "hard sell" of my services and prefer to simply answer questions when asked. I look at customers as human beings with needs. This is so important because your business should be about meeting other people's needs. Your ability to empathise with a customer's situation means that you can identify their needs and go to work servicing them as best as you can. This is what successful businesses are based on. You don't make a product and then convince someone they need it, they come to you with a need and then you build the solution. I recently had a client tell me that they liked my business because I am easy to deal with. All I did to receive this praise was to answer the phone when called, converse as if I was talking to a person and not a potential customer to be converted and respond to emails in a timely manner clearly addressing the questions asked. As a result I now have a customer loyal to my business and unlikely to change to a competitor as long as we keep meeting their needs. This is a competitive advantage created simply by treating a customer as a human. Some organisations have so much trouble grasping the idea of business run by humans for humans. They are so distracted by conversion rates, sales systems, best practice procedures and the bottom line that they neglect the human condition. Courtesy, respect, honesty, empathy are all traits humans naturally appreciate and gravitate to. Unfortunately this if often forgotten and business relationships can be abusive and toxic. I believe this is symptomatic of our corporate structure, where profit is chased to the expense of everything else. Treating customers as humans may not always yield the quickest response. Being honest might not always maximise returns. These are not acceptable conditions if there are shareholders to please and profit targets to meet. A Human Business for Humans Running a business as a human servicing other humans is sustainable and personally gratifying practice. I would rather lose a few customers and perhaps reap a smaller margin knowing that I was honest and respected my client as a human, not a sales figure. This practice also leads to very positive business outcomes. Customer loyalty increases, word of mouth is encouraged and perceptions change so that clients face less resistance when making a choice to purchase in the future. It's not hard to implement. Communicate with your client as if you are talking to a mate, offer honest answers and be courteous. Don't involve your emotions, don't take things personally and know when it's a good time to stop communicating. These are smart practices for general life and make just as much sense when applied to business. By Yaro Starak Do you want to profit from your own successful home based Internet business? Learn from Yaro Starak, a young entrepreneur from Australia. He works part time from home on several web based business that generate between $2,000 and $8,000 per month. Get your free articles and audio now - visit his Internet Business Blog.
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
One Critical Question to Ask Yourself Every Day What happened to the old saying, the customer is always right? I'll bet every one of you reading this article has a "customer service nightmare" story to tell. My most recent nightmare experience took place recently when my business partner and I went in to a wireless phone store to purchase two new pda wireless phones. We told the young man who greeted us that we had only one question: is this phone compatible with the database software we intend to purchase? "I don't know," he said, "Most customers do the research on this before they come in." We politely requested that if he didn't know, he find the answer. He told us we could call the company ourselves, that he didn't have time to be put on hold with them. As you can imagine, we left without spending what we felt was a significant sum of money. And of course we've told at least 10 other people about the disappointing service at that particular store. How Not to Get Stiffed, Improving Your Collection Procedures Some businesses have slow paying customers or past due balances because they didn't "train" their customers in the beginning. How Do You Create Customer Loyalty? Another sad fact of life is that these days, very few customers are loyal. Most of their loyalties lie with their bank accounts, and you can't blame people for watching their shrinking dollars. If you have regular clients, offer them an extra incentive now and again. Thank them for visiting and remember their names. Give them an additional discount for regular business or a promotional item to remember you & your business. 4 Easy Steps to Better Online Customer Support Customer support is very important when you're running a business, whether your business is on or off the net. If your customer support is hopeless, you'll soon find your customers running away from you and worse, telling others to stay away too. How CRM Software Works -- Creating Customer Satisfaction with a Click When people ask, "What is CRM?" the literal answer is, "Customer Relationship Management," but that doesn't really convey much in terms of what all CRM does for a business. This CRM definition is too narrow to really explain everything the system does if it is working to its fullest potential and is user-friendly enough to expand and grow as a customer-client relationship changes and grows. Outsourcing: The Unspoken Costs Outsourcing seems to be the new-new thing and approximately 50% of our major corporations are doing it. What are the costs? The benefits? And what skills need to be managed in order to make it work optimally? Dealing with People - Words to Avoid You probably realise how the wrong tone of voice andnegative body language can cause problems when dealing withother people, particularly customers and staff. However,using the wrong words can also cause problems. 10 Customer Service Quality Statements to Measure up Against It might sound quick and simple, to say how well your business does in satisfying it's customers. Hearing such as:-"We're increasing our turnover by 14% year to date""Our customer complaints are now less than 4% or our transactions"...might sound like music to your ears, but that's just the time you need to be very careful.A regular measurement of where you are as your organisation, not depending on some of the easy-to-fake figures, might just make the difference in how well you are doing now, and into the future.Try these quality statements and set up a mechanism whereby you review them monthly - yes, that's right, monthly. This needs to be thorough and objective. And maybe even the scores made by a cross-section of your people in all areas of your business - then you get objectivity and a true picture of how you are scoring. It is a great activity to score each of these out of 10, make a tracker month by month and each time you review, ask yourself the question:-"What would we need to do to move our score up by 3 points"Do it point by point and then, after you have that 3-point question, work out a monthly action plan, so that step-by-step, you gradually improve. (Note:- If you are too near a score out of 10 to have three points to go - upgrade your statement!).Then and only then will your improvement be sustainable and you can reset the questions over time to a higher standard. Then you truly will be The Best in class!The Quality Statements:-We use a variety of staff to monitor customer service on a regular and consistent basisWe know and can clearly state our customer groupsWe listen to customers about our products and proactively seek to redress issuesWe notice and congratulate our people and teams when they perform wellSenior management are fully and visibly engaged in customer activitiesOur people enjoy the challenge of changesOur organisation and our people have aligned valuesOur customers find working with us easy and pleasurableWe know how our people feel about working here and always respond to make it betterWe have teams and individuals who can respond quickly to changes circumstances, whatever they areKeep a track of these - visually represent it somewhere very publicly for your people. Involve many of your them in monitoring, finding solutions and taking accountability for change, where needed and your business, your people and you will thrive.One final point. Starting is good, being able to demonstrate your success in 12 months is another thing - as is still doing this review at that time. Why Passenger Surveys are a Transport Operators Best Friend Public transport operators who already use passenger surveys may not fully appreciate the multiple benefits that surveys can bring. Not only are surveys an efficient method of market research that will help identify areas of passenger dissatisfaction, they are also perfect for measuring the effects of improvements and can, at the same time, help promote new initiatives to customers using the service. Five Tips to Calm Cranky Customers 1. Tis the Season Proofs of Delivery and Logistics: Speeding Throughput and Avoiding Pitfalls It should be a straightforward business scenario: making sure that the delivery documentation from the supplier or haulier matches up with the documentation at the target destination. Complaints Are Actually A Good Thing! Nobody likes to get complaints. They make you question your judgment, they can ruin your day, and they almost always leave you in a bad mood. But what if I told you that complaints are actually a good thing? Profit from a Customer Service Recovery Program A client recently said to me: "Most days things seem to run smoothly; but whenever we have a customer complaint, we seem to collapse. Where are we going wrong?" Customers - What They Really Want - 6 Secrets of Customer Service What customers really want can be divided into two areas. Complaining Consumers The salesman's job is to be well informed; extremely well informed. For this information is how he earns his bread. At a car dealership the commission over the MSRP on some cars would barely be enough to pay rent. A dealer must fight for every penny of the margin in order to receive the best paycheck. On the other hand, the consumer must also fight for every penny in order to receive the best deal. Sorry, No Customer Service After 4:00 P.M. A few months ago, I wrote about ingenious styles of customer service that every business should know about, mostly because their employees were inflicting them on their customers. How to Keep Customers Who was it that said - "The customer is always right"? Wellfor those of you who can't get through the day withoutknowing, it was H Gordon Selfridge, the founder ofSelfridges's department store in London. Treating the Customer Dissatisfaction Epidemic: How to Go Beyond Simply Masking the Symptoms Corporations in every sector are spending more than ever before in an attempt to improve their customer service levels. Every year they pour hundreds of millions of dollars into new systems and training programs that promise them the ability to win customer loyalty. Despite their efforts, however, customer satisfaction results continue to fall. Why aren't these massive efforts paying huge dividends? One would think that by now the organizations that have committed these vast resources would have a large cadre of satisfied, loyal customers, but in most cases just the opposite is true. Find Out Where Your Firm Stands in Today?s Customer Looking For Ways to Improve Sales and Customer Relationships? Customer Service A Chickens Way Anyone who knows me knows my favorite fast food restaurant is Chick-fil-A. Aside from the fact their chicken is especially good and I can always get sweet tea, I have a valuable business reason for eating there ? they serve up amazing customer service. And these lessons aren't just served in my nearest location. But in any city, any town, any time I have been to a Chick-fil-A, I have left feeling like the most valuable Customer.
|
| © Athifea Distribution LLC - 2013 |