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5 Steps to Better Manage Your Customers' Expectations
You have completed your project on time, well within schedule and with great quality deliverables. You can feel your customer trying to distance himself from you. You are at a loss to understand why. Sounds familiar?
WORDS COUNT: 1499 words...
Are You PR-Challenged?
Please feel free to publish this article and resource box in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication or website. A copy would be appreciated at bobkelly@TNI.net. Word count is 870 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly ©...
Customer service lessons from Tony Soprano and Club Med
Whether you work one-to-one or deal with customers in groups, you identify a target market of customers most likely to value what you can offer. You develop processes that work best with those clients. You learn to anticipate their responses and...
How To Gain and Retain Customers for Your Online Business
It's the most basic rule of business: you need to sell some to
earn some. Salesmanship therefore, or the art of closing a
sales, is of paramount importance for any business venture.
After all, we can't expect any earnings if we don't make...
Streamlining Customer Interaction for Business Success.
Whether on the phone placing an order or in the checkout line,
people hate to wait. Rarely am I physically present to make a
purchase in a place of business where the facilities are not
optimized for fast service. In those cases, it is often a...
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Take Care of Yourself Before You Take Care of Your Customer
One of the most important questions people ask when they are focused on improving their quantity and quality of business is: “What is my competitive advantage? What makes me unique, memorable, special… what truly sets me apart from the rest?"
While there are no definitively right answers to that question, most people come to some conclusion that customer service is a critical component of your competitive advantage. For most businesses, the service they offer can vary from exceptional to not so hot, depending upon circumstances.
Why is that? Why does the same company, and even the same people within that company provide world class service some of the time, and marginal service (or worse) other times?
That answer can be found in asking a different question: “What makes you (or your staff) happy when serving your customers?” While these answers also vary, most people come up with some sort of variation of “I am happy when my customer is happy.”
Do we enjoy dealing with agitated or disgruntled people? Normally not. We derive our joy from delivering value, by making others feel good about their experience, and by exceeding people’s expectations.
What comes first then? The happy customer or the happy person serving the customer? This is not the chicken or the egg quandary. The happy person serving the customer NEEDS to come first, because it is a very unusual day when your customer comes into your business looking to cheer YOU up.
This all seems very obvious. At
the same time that many people realize this truth, it is rare that people consciously take steps to make sure that their greatest customer service assets are being serviced too - w hether that person in on your staff, in another department, or if that person is YOU. It is critical that you continually improve the emotional, physical and mental support you are supplying to the people serving your customers.
One of my friends and colleagues, Paul Wesselemann, shared a story about his time working at an HIV/AIDS support network. He explained how it was absolutely unacceptable to come to work when you were feeling even a bit ill, as even the smallest cold could be extremely dangerous for someone with HIV. He was REQUIRED first and foremost to take care of himself, make sure he was 100% before he was allowed to offer help and support to others.
How committed are you to taking the same care of YOUR needs? Your task for the month is to identify and act upon a couple of ways to keep you in proper shape so you can take care of your always important customers.
BE FREE!
Eric Plantenberg
About the Author
Eric Plantenberg is a nationally known memory trainer. His new program, Winning The Name Game, teaches professionals how to train their memory to remember names more effectively and be able to recall them at the right moment. For more information on how to better remember hundreds of names and faces visit http://www.WinnngTheNameGame.com
Or email info@WinningTheNameGame.com
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