If there’s one thing you can always depend on in your professional life, it’s this: if you truly care about your customers, your business will flourish.
You never hear anyone say,
I’m never going to do business with that place again! They treat me nice and make me feel special. The owner and his employees always make sure I’m satisfied, and you can tell they truly care about me having a good experience when I do business with them. That’s the last time I’d do business with them.
Caring about the total customer experience is paramount to having a strong and successful business. Making sure that your clients get the satisfaction that they want in every business transaction can help your business withstand economic downturns and full on assaults from competitors. When your company has great customer service, it’s hard for your competitors to lure your customers away from you just on price or even the promise of good customer service.
There are many ways to provide good customer service and customer satisfaction. One of the most important is getting back to people in a timely manner. Time is gold, and this is especially true in business. Nothing makes a customer feel more unwanted than when a company doesn’t get back to them in an appropriate amount of time.
Develop a system for getting back to your customers with guidelines clear and transparent not only to everyone on the team but also to your clientele. This ensures that your team knows how and when to fulfill your clients’ expectations. Always make sure they hear back from your company. If they call and get an answering machine, include when they can expect to hear back from you at the end of the message. It can be as simple as ‘We will return your phone call by the end of our business day.’
If it’s an email, have an auto-respond email that lets your customers know that you will respond to their email within 24 hours. Most people don’t mind waiting if they know how long they’d have to be waiting until someone to gets back to them.
I do business with a florist from Central Square Florist and she has incredible customer service. Her name is Jackie Levine and while I have never met her personally, I feel like I know her personally just by ordering flowers from her floral shop.
My girlfriend Eronica works at a hospital in the city where Jackie’s shop is located and the practical reason behind my ordering flowers from her shop. It is, however, through the remarkable way she has handled our transactions that I found comfort and ease in taking care of my floral needs. I had emailed Jackie a couple of times with some questions and she had always gotten back to me very quickly.
One time when I ordered flowers, there was a miscommunication between the person who took the order and myself. I was talking to Eronica about it and I mentioned that I was going to send an email to Jackie to find out what went wrong with the order. It was a Saturday, so Eronica was a little cynical and laughed, saying that there was a very slim chance of her getting back to me since the shop is closed. Despite that, though, I still sent an email with my concern before leaving for the gym. It was around 5:30 pm when I did this. I was already driving to the gym when my phone rang. It was Jackie, and she wanted to make sure I knew she had received my email, and would be looking into the order and would get back to me after she spoke with the person who took my order.
What kind of impression do you think that made on me? Aside from being able to tell Eronica the old ‘I told you so’ (which always feels good for us guys), I felt pretty good to know that Jackie cares about her business and her customers, even when the ‘closed’ sign hangs on her store window.
Last week, I received an email and a postcard , reminding me that I had ordered flowers at this time last year for the anniversary date of when Eronica and I met. Again if you’re a guy, you’d understand that dates like those probably don’t mean much to us but they mean a lot to a woman. The schedule was not that good for me to place an order for flowers that week, but I very much appreciate the fact that Jackie was not only trying to make a sale but had also gone the extra mile by taking note of a date that is of importance to my life.
So let me leave you with this million dollar question: Where do you think will I order flowers the next time?
Have a similar story? Tell us about someone that you do business with that cares about their customers with great customer service.
