Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You

With the economy still trying to find its legs, your customers & prospects are cautiously sitting on the sidelines struggling with concerns about their company's revenues and bottom line. The focus must now be on how your sales & service company can keep its current customers/clients, the ones who pay your bills and salaries each month, happy and continuing to do business with you.

Statistics show it costs 6x more money to replace an existing customer; so let's focus our energy there. As I speak around the country to sales & service companies I hear their concerns about lost business and that their customers/clients are looking for better deals. Some even voice frustration about their companies imposing rate/price increases during these challenging economic times. Unless your company is at maximum growth, does raising rates/prices sound like a good idea at this time? Probably not. It's simple: don't bite the hand that feeds you.

So what can you do to keep your customers/clients happy and continue doing business with you? First of all, treat and handle your customers with care. Let's start by providing less "lip service" and delivering more "customer service". Remember to under promise and over deliver. I truly feel delivering world-class customer service is an attitude that you can't learn from reading a book; it comes from within. When it comes to customer service attitude, you hire for it or fire for not having it. This may be your business, but the key is their satisfaction. So who doesn't have that customer service attitude on your team.

According to statistics, 68% of customers stop doing business with you because of what they term "perceived disinterest or rudeness by the company's rep or the corporate office". These issues can range from inadequate training to poor quality of services/products or slow response to service requests. Whatever the reasons, the customers didn't feel your company did enough to service their needs. Secondly, delivering and creating world-class customer service is a conscious choice made by you and your team every day. You either choose to deliver a negative experience, a neutral experience, a positive experience or I challenge you to create a WOW experience. The more WOW's your customers experience from your company, the higher the probability you'll have to renew those customers.

Here are some other ways to WOW your customers:

• Offer to sponsor or support one of your customer's events. Even volunteer to help out. Your customers will love you for that.

• Provide a follow-up phone call to a customer to see if they're satisfied with the outcome from a poor customer service experience created by your company.

• During any customer conflict, ask yourself are you willing to lose this client and possibly others from any negative fallout?

There are many other ways to create WOW experiences for your customers. Get together with your team and put your brainstorming caps on and ask the question "how can we WOW our customers?"

Tip: During your customer service strategy meetings include all personal at some level as everyone in your company has the biggest impact on your renewals or repeat business. Do you know you're your customer's birthdays are coming up so you can "WOW" them with a birthday wish or card? Do you have an action plan for your customers coming up for renewal over the next 120-days? How are you and your team going to make a difference to those customers?

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