The most important aspect of business today is customer service. Whether you are a bricks and mortar, or an online business. There is no question in my mind that the one element that differentiates a successful company from its competition is their level of customer service.
Brian Tracy says that “customers today want the very most, and the very best for the least amount of money, with the best terms and with absolutely fabulous service. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive.”
I wrote a book with Brian called “Marketing Magic“ and have given several speeches with him and the guy really knows his stuff. Social media strategist Tony Bloomberg says simply “you must underpromise and over deliver“. That is often hard to do because we often tend to overpromise in order to get people in the door.
W. Edwards Deming who changed our lives by developing better ways for people to work together, said “profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your product and service and bring their friends with them”. You can only get word-of-mouth, attract new customers at low cost, gain repeat business, make up selling easier, increase margins and ROI by really knocking the customers socks off and doing the unexpected. Anything less is simply not good enough. Too many businesses that I speak with regard customer service as a cost center, where in reality, customer service should be a very strong profit center. You need to determine every touch point with a customer, this must include everything from the first touch point to follow-up service well after the product is bought and paid for, and then make every one of those touch points a wow experience for the customer.
My last customers service thought for this week goes to Jeff Bezos, the legendary CEO of Amazon, who said “if you make customers unhappy in the bricks and mortar world, they might each tells six friends, but if you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they will each tell 6000 friends”.