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10 Ways To Keep Your Customers Happy

In a world where everyone tries to delight us, why are we not so very delighted?

 

Companies lose customers because they go elsewhere.  And the reason that customers go elsewhere is that the people who serve them are indifferent to their needs. Here are ten ways to keep your customers happy.

1 Understand what people want - You must keep asking questions of yourself: ‘What’s the unmet need..?’  ‘How are we doing….?’ ‘How can we do better….?’

2 Engage your customers - Treat them how you would like to be treated yourself. 

3 Real relationships blow away the institutional hype - Consumers are fed up with mass-produced mediocrity.  ‘Authenticity’, a genuine product rather than a created manifestation from the brains of the marketing department, will generate ‘customers for life’. 

4 Infect your customers with your enthusiasm

5 Infect your staff with your enthusiasm

6 Create memorable ‘wow!’ encounters that inspire customers to spread the ‘legend’ to others  

7 Forget about selling - Customers hate to be ‘sold at’ but they love to buy. 

8 Make everything simple and easy to understand for your customers and for yourselves

9 Create a culture where people find real pleasure in giving service to others

10 Never forget that what customers value most are attention, dependability, promptness and competence.

Is this really so very hard to deliver?  Evidence would suggest that it is…. But think of the benefits to you if your business could deliver this way!

And, The Best Kept Secret of Customer Service?

Service tends to be bad because it is really very hard to do, perfectly, all the time.  Try being a waiter for a week!

However, the really hard part of providing excellent customer service is everything but the service.  The hardest part is to do with how the company thinks about what it is doing.  Most train operators and airlines offer bad service and bad food because they don’t think of themselves as service organisations; they see themselves as machines for generating revenue from seat miles.

THINK SERVICE FIRST!

 

 

About the author

Robert Craven is a keynote speaker and author of the business best-sellers 'Kick-Start Your Business' and 'Customer Is King'. He has recently been described as 'one of the UK’s leading marketing specialists' and the 'entrepreneurship guru'. He runs The Directors’ Centre, helping growing businesses to grow.
For further information, contact Robert Craven on 01225 851044. (rc@directorscentre.com) www.directorscentre.com

©2005 Robert Craven, Wiltshire Times.

publication details

First published in Wiltshire Times, 2005.