The Entrepreneur’s Advisor

Best Practices Means Exceeding Customer Service Expectations Every business has customers and they have a choice with whom they do business with. Failure to recognize this fact even if you have a relative monopoly on the market will ultimately spell disaster for your company.

Best practices for customer service will vary across industry and are dependent the product or the service sold. Establishing great customer service programs all start with asking similar questions. Ten questions to begin with are:

1. Why did the customer buy from you?
2. Does that need still exist?
3. How often does your company stay in contact with customers?
4. What is the competition offering?
5. How price sensitive are your customers?
6. Do you establish personal relationships with your customers?
7. How often are you spamming them with emails, newletters and other unwanted information?
8. What is you loss client ratio?
9. Do your customers tell you about problems or do they just not purchase again?
10. How often do you do customer satisfaction surveys or problem resolution follow-up?

Great customer service requires a commitment from the top of an organization in order effect a cultural change. Most importantly, the culture of your business must be adjusted to recognize that all things being equal, businesses must exceed their customer’s expectations as just meeting customer expectations is not a strong enough hook to keep them. Read the full article now