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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Get them, Keep them
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Everyone knows that keeping customers happy is good for business - or at least, everyone pays lip service to the idea. Here's a post from Dale Wolf that goes into that using the phrase "customer love":
If we really loved our customers, cared about their issues and pains, their desires and wants, the expectations that they hold out for us 26 would we act a whole lot different that we do today? Could caring love change the corporate scene and produce more valuable marketing communications?
If we loved your customers as much as we love our companies, how would the content on our websites change? How would our service offerings get better? Is it possible that customers would love us back?
I think this starts with customer service. One of the easiest ways to torque an existing customer off is to offer sub-par service. The thing is, it goes beyond that one person - they'll talk. Take a look at this post, for instance - bad service spreads by word of mouth, and that word of mouth is accelerated by the blogosphere. If it ever was a no cost thing to tick off a customer, it stopped being one a little while ago - and ignoring the problem can have even higher costs. The very last thing you want is for a product search to list a bunch of complaints right at the top.
So what can you do? Take complaints seriously. You can't satisfy every customer or prospect, but you can treat them with respect, and you can chuck your script for dealing with calls. Nothing irritates me more in a service call than for the second and third person I talk to to be reading from the same script as the first. It's even more maddening when I get to a person who can work beyond the script and be reasonable, but only after investing an entire day of my life to get up to them.
People tend to be willing to go back to a place where they got good service - that's why we have favorite restaurants - and it's also why we have restaurants that we avoid like the plague. Truly awful food is rare (at least at US restaurants) - but you can find truly awful service. The same rules apply to business relationships - if you extend shoddy service, don't expect to see a customer come back, and don't be surprised when you learn that they migrated to a competitor. You don't have to "love" your customer - but you do have to be respectful and professional.
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