Customer Service

Do you think you are providing great customer service? Most businesses would say yes, yet customers report that modern business is plagued with poor customer service and rude employees. In this atmosphere, knowing the secrets to great customer service can set you apart from the competition and guarantee repeat business. There are five concrete things you can do to make customers look forward to dealing with you and your employees.

1. Make personal interactions with the client. At some point during doing business with a customer, you are liable to make small talk. Remember what your customer says and follow up an a key topic the next time you see or talk to them. It can be something as small as their health, or something that happened in their family life. To you, it is small, but to them it can be what makes you seem bigger than the others.
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At first glance, big picture thinking and customer focus would seem to be mutually exclusive terms. After all, the first phrase connotes a farsighted, panoramic view of business, while the second implies an intense, laser-beam-like concentration on the customer. Yet as revealed in Magnifying Customer Focus: A Study of Current Trends and Future Possibilities 2006-2016, a global study commissioned by American Management Association and conducted by The Human Resource Institute, the terms are not only compatible, they are inseparable.

The study finds that customer focus is a top strategic concern for many businesses today and is ranked as one of the most important needs concerning issues ranging from leadership challenges to ethical behavior and innovation. Yet it also reveals that there is a wide disparity between what activities companies practice when it comes to customer focus and what they should be practicing.
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Despite all the rumbling and grumbling about poor customer service, there are always a handful of renegade businesses that somehow find ways to keep their workers fired up and their customers delighted and coming back for more. In these rarified places, highly motivated employees pursue customer delight with a passion; they ignite a flashpoint of contagious enthusiasm that spreads throughout the organization like wildfire.

How do they do it? They conscientiously avoid what I call the Top 5 Monster Customer Service Blunders”:
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How did you get started making corsets?
I’ve made them for years as part of theater costuming. There’s a fun narrative that gets passed around in those circles. A commonly heard gripe is that sometimes when you design a production with period costumes that require proper corsets or undergarments to achieve the correct silhouettes, certain pesky actors will stop wearing them, ruining the look (and this is usually once you’ve gotten on a plane to fly back home or have departed to work on other productions).
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This question would have popped up at least once either when we are talking to some one or even to ourselves. For more reasons than one it is much more superior to shop online and that is the real answer to this question. Here are a few valid reasons why the net is the best place to do your shopping.

Firstly, going for shopping to the mall means that you have to put on the right kind of dress depending on the climate. When you do your purchases online, you can even be in your house clothes to research the item you wish to buy.
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The formula for success for any business is to get your customers to make repeat purchases. There are a number of factors involved for getting repeat customers: pricing, quality of products and services, excellent customer service etc. One of the best ways is to reward your customers for their repeat purchases. Here are three effective customer reward programs you could implement: Number Of Purchases

This program is based on the number of purchases made by any customer. You could give away a free product or service to any customer that makes ten or more purchases. To make the program more effective you could require a set time period that all ten purchases must be made by.
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Have you ever noticed how some organizations tend to be consistent in providing a great customer service experience? What exactly do these companies have that makes them so much better than their competition? Their service team always has a way of positively exceeding the expectations of their customers.

If we examine these organizations more closely, we will find one single factor that separates them from the rest. This factor is simply the employees who make up the service team. I call them the super service teams who genuinely understand the importance of the customer. These special teams are different because they clearly see that business is first and foremost about serving their customers.
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Providing exceptional customer service results when we consistently create an enjoyable experience for the customer. In reality, each organization shows itself either to be welcoming or unwelcoming. There truly is no middle ground. If we are to win at gaining more customers, we must build a team that is passionate about serving others. The key is to understand that success will only occur when every person on our team is genuinely dedicated to making customer service a top priority.

I’ve listed six key ideas that will assist in developing a perfect environment for excellent customer service to thrive:
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Every so often we will cross paths with what I like to refer to as a customer service superstar. They are a breed apart from everyone else. We can never tell when we will have the honor of being served by one of these service superstars. They are in every type of organization and appear normal from all outside appearances. But be served by one of these superstars and we soon discover that they are head and shoulders above the rest.

So what is it that makes them so different to be bestowed with the title of a customer service superstar? Is there something that gives these people an edge when it comes to serving others? The very first thought that comes to mind in answering these questions is that customer service superstars have a way of making us feel valued. They give us the impression that we are the most important person in the world at while serving us. We also tend to walk away feeling like a VIP.
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Every person in the world will play the role of a customer throughout his or her life. From early on each of us becomes acquainted with being the customer and having others wait on us. No matter where we go, we are always prepared to take on the role of the customer and be served by another person. Look at a typical week and we discover just how much time is spent on being a customer.

Simply reflect on the past experiences that we have had as a customer and we will soon find that some people are better at customer service than others. We will also discover that most of our customer service experiences are average at best. There will be those moments when we are given the honor of being served by a customer service superstar. But on average, service in America usually leaves us with the impression that we are interrupting the person responsible for taking care of our needs.
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