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Top Tips of the Month...
Achieving Growth
Customer Service
A very common mistake made by smaller businesses is to not take customer service seriously. Too often, managers think all it entails is answering the phone promptly and being polite to customers – and how often do companies fail to do even that!
In fact, customer service can soon become more important to a small company than sales and marketing, helping it retain customers (selling to existing customers is much cheaper than finding fresh ones) and maximise its income from them.
Good customer service can also help gain new customers, as word spreads about how great a particular company is to do business with. Managers should, therefore, have a strategy for customer service which goes well beyond simply being polite on the telephone.
So how do you go about delivering good customer service? Begin by thinking what customers might reasonably expect as a basic level of service. For a shop, that could be having friendly, knowledgeable sales staff to help them and a good range of products in stock. That, in turn, means being careful to hire the right kind of people, giving them adequate product training and having effective stock control procedures in place.
But achieving a basic level of service isn’t enough if you want your small business to be really successful. You must find ways to exceed the expectations of your customers – remember, the objective is to have them tell their friends and colleagues that your company is “great”, rather than just “not bad” or “OK”.
One low cost way to do this is to consciously control the expectations of your customers, by always making promises to them that you know you can exceed. For example, if it will take a week for your shop to supply a spare part you should tell the customer it will take ten days. Then when the part arrives ‘early’ he or she will think you have done a great job getting it to them so soon.
Market Research is vital
It really is! But too often managers think that market research is an expensive and unimportant 'optional extra'. This stems from a misunderstanding about what it is exactly and what it involves.
For example, you might think it requires spending thousands with a research company. But in fact market research could be as simple as looking in Yellow Pages to see how many competitors are already operating close to where you are thinking of opening a new outlet.
Done properly, market research will in fact save you both time and money. By not doing it, you will be taking unnecessary risks, miss valuable opportunities and probably blunder into very avoidable pitfalls.
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