It seems natural customer loyalty would follow good service. If you get what you want and you are treated right, why would you not return to a business? But sometimes it’s useful to have more than an intuitive argument. So I have done a bit of research and I have found two statistics that tell me there is a clear link connecting customer service and customer loyalty. They also suggest some substantial benefits from improving customer service. The first is a well-known number. It comes to us from the American Society of Quality Control (as best I can determine). According [...]
customer service resource
Our Amazing customer service resource for this week is a post at the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur called: “60 Customer Service Tips for Entrepreneurs”. It was written by TPE’s Mike Michalowicz but actually consists of tips from dozens of bright people. Here are a few of my favorites: 4. Be You, Not a Script – Get off the script—LISTEN and respond to what’s really going on. -Shel Horowitz 7. Don’t Make ‘Em Wait – Never keep a customer on hold for more than 30 seconds. If you are going to need to leave them on hold for more than that amount [...]
Here’s a web resource that has useful customer service information, and a whole lot more. Actually it has over 6,000 articles and other resources for small businesses. It’s called WBSOnline.com and it’s a free service of Winmark Business Solutions. Winmark is a Minnesota company that offers franchise, leasing and other services to their small business clients. They’ve been doing it for many years and they’ve developed a solid reputation. So they decided to move some of their expertise online, giving them the ability to help more businesses than ever before. The result is a handy web resource that combines articles, [...]
About 15 years ago a bright guy from Minnesota started building a website to help people manage their organizations better. Carter McNamara, of Authenticity Consulting, LLC, had the idea long before most of us even knew what the Internet was. Even better, he stuck with it and built a popular and useful resource that is completely free. It’s called: ManagementHelp.org Today this website gets over 1 million visitors every month. It has an Alexa ranking of 26,392. I’d say he found a need and filled it very well. When you go to ManagementHelp.org, make sure you have some time to [...]
This week’s Amazing Customer Service Resource is as useful as it is fun. It’s the brainchild of Guy Kawsaki and it keeps getting better: Alltop – Customer Service Alltop’s reason for being is best explained by this quote: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” – Clay Shirky We all have too much information coming at us. We need better ways to manage it. Filters like Alltop are a way to do that. They manually select certain websites (blog and other media/information sites) to be displayed by their pages. Then they show headlines from the five most recent articles from [...]
Sometimes things happen just as we want them to. But often we get better results if we plan the changes we want. It doesn’t mean we’ll get exactly what we plan for. But we’re more likely to get what works than if we leave it to chance. So my message today is simply that we should all plan our customer service improvement for next year. Here are some ideas that might help: Ask your customers these three questions: 1. What do they want from you? 2. How are you doing (giving them what they want)? 3. How can you improve? [...]
Last weekend I spoke at the Ensemble Travel Group 2009 International Conference. It was held at the Fairmont Banff Springs hotel in Banff, Alberta. This week I will be sharing some of my experiences there and using them as examples of how we can all increase customer loyalty by improving customer service. For now, I’ll start with a short video. This was an interview we did before I spoke. The Ensemble Team made wonderful use of technology to capture and deliver learning throughout the conference.
It’s finally here! Customer Service Week is upon us once again. Every year it gets bigger and better. I hope this translates into better customer service for more people. So my question for you is: what are you doing to make the most of this week?
One of the best ways to increase revenue and profits in a tough economy is to get more new customers who are already sold on your product, service or brand. These customers can be hugely profitable because they require very little marketing or sales costs. By the time they reach your door they have already heard good things about your business and they are interested in learning more. If handle them right a high percentage will become customers with little effort on your part. Here are seven things you can do to increase customer referrals at your business. They’re not [...]
We all know what the typical customer service call center experience is like. It’s so entrenched in our culture, it’s cliche. The automated voice, the multiple options ans the joy of waiting on hold for what seems like forever, are all well known aspects of many call center customer service experiences. Customers get this. And we complain about it. And the media does news stories about it. And people like me write books and articles about it. Yet companies continue to do the same thing. They claim to want to offer good customer service yet they still offer us the [...]
