Customer Service: Three Ways to Make Your Customers Love You

Customers who don’t absolutely adore you are more detrimental to your business than those who belong to your competitors. The latter might give you a chance in the future, but the former have already tried you and found you lacking. If you don’t enthrall your customers--and make them believe you respect them--you’ll lose them. Following are three tips on how to start making your customers love you.

1. Stop customer hot potato. The rep who first speaks to the customer should “own” the customer. There’s nothing worse that sends a signal of disrespect faster than an impatient person on the other end of the line trying to pass a customer off to “someone who can better help you with your problem.”

2. Give customers a choice. Don’t bind your customer into the fake choice of letting them “opt out” of communication. Let them know up front they can decide to get e-mails or offers from you, and give them the choice. You initially may build a bigger mailing list by binding customers in with the opt-out policy, but it doesn’t show customers the respect they deserve.

3. Fix the top ten issues bugging your customers. We’ve created an hysterical customer feedback muscle in the marketplace by over-surveying our customers and asking “How can we improve?” Customers have told us what to do and we haven’t moved on the information. You probably recite the biggest issues right now. Do something about them. Customers read the lack of action as lack of caring and certainly lack of respect. We all over-brain what the customer effort should be. Start by striking these top ten things from your companywide to-do list.

Jeanne Bliss is a managing partner at Customer Bliss, a consultancy focused on driving profit from the customer. She can be reached via her Web site, http://www.customerbliss.com.