I hate to shop. Because I hate to shop, when I finally break down and do it, I’m ready to spend money. That means when I’m looking for clothing, its common for a shopping trip to result in a couple thousand dollars worth of articles.

On many an occasion when necessity forced me into this task, I was determined to ‘be a good shopper’ — you know, look before you leap! I had to force myself to comparison shop at first. I thought this was wise. But, it didn’t take long to determine that comparisons were easy. Once I was treated poorly on a regular basis at a major department store chain, (nobody would help me — the sales staff would rather talk among themselves than help a customer), I wandered into Casual Corner.

Boy, did I get lucky. Not only did I find many of the same garments, but I also found a salesperson who understood customer service. She actually cared that I hated to shop and made the process as fast and simple as possible.

I’d walk into her store and she’d greet me by name. Then she’d quickly qualify what I was looking for. Next, she’d find all the clothing that she thought might work, including accessories, and brought complete outfits to me one after one. I was in and out of a dozen or more ensembles — generally in less that an hour. I’d have all my accessories, and be out the door (my wallet usually quite a bit lighter) in a flash.

One day I found the perfect ensemble, but I wasn’t happy with any of the earrings they had in the store. She suggested I go down the mall to "THE DEPARTMENT STORE". I explained to her why I didn’t like to shop there. She gave me a cold soda, sat me in a chair, and announced she’d be right back. And sure enough she was — with three pairs of earrings she purchased at the department store for me to look over. She found a perfect pair — and a life long customer!

Whether you’re selling clothing, accounting services, or business machines, extraordinary service pays off more than anything else you can ever do. If you recall, it costs 80% less to get additional sales from an existing customer than is costs to get a new customer. That alone says how important this phase — this lifelong phase, of your sales process is.

Lifelong, but not difficult or costly.

There are three key areas you must concern yourself with in order to develop an extraordinary customer service program in your business. They are:

1. Have Regular Contact With Customers

2. Role Model Extraordinary Customer Service

3. Involve and Empower Employees

Nine Steps to Success

1. Contact Customers Regularly

It never ceases to amaze me that business owners and managers rarely work their customer base with any regularity, if at all. A customer list provides endless opportunities for additional sales and great referrals. In fact, if you actively work your customer base, you might find it’s the only marketing you really need.

The exception, of course, would be if you are so new in your business that you don’t have an extensive customer list to nurture. If this is your case, you’ll want to spend more time and energy in the lead generation area for a while until your customer database develops.

Your first step for success in this area is to develop and regularly maintain a good customer database in a good contact management program. This assumes that there’s no question about having a computer in your business — if you don’t, you simply won’t be around for long anyhow. If you do and you don’t utilize it’s power to help you keep track of customers, you’re in the same boat — the sinking one!

When you’re looking for a contact management program, I strongly suggest you find one that includes invoicing and inventory — even if you are a service organization. You’ll find it’s sales volume and product tracking ability valuable in your database marketing.

Back to the point, the more you know about your customers, the better off you are. For instance, if you are a lawn mower dealer, it may be important to know how much property your customer has. Are they serious gardeners or just into minimal landscape? You must figure out the appropriate bits of information that will help you target specific promotions or customer follow-up. Regardless of the industry-specific information that may be appropriate to your business, consider keeping some or all of the data you can get in the following areas:

• kids names

• product preferences

• hobbies

• favorite colors

• brand preferences

• birth dates

Now you might wonder how you can get a hold of some of the kinds of information I’m suggesting without seeming like a snoop. It’s really easy. If you just pay attention to your normal conversations with your customers you’ll find all sorts of tidbits dropped in conversation. Maybe someone is buying a gift for a family member — it’s a great opening to ask the sex, age, and more particulars about that family member as well as learning about the rest of the family through very conversational queries.

Then, when that customer has a birthday card show up for themselves or a family member, or a note when you get a new shipment of their favorite brand of product, or a call asking how one of their children is doing away at college, you have just made a major step to establishing a lifelong relationship with that customer.

But how often should you contact customers? If you want this to be simple, contact everyone once a month. If your database is too large for personal contact every month, then drop a post card in the mail, an invitation to stop by, or some other pertinent bit of material, preferably something very personalized.

As I finish that last paragraph, I wonder if I’ve just given the faint of heart an easy way out. You could have just 500 names on your customer list and use the ‘it’s too large’ excuse, and never get anywhere. Or, if you’re serious about generating additional sales and profits, you’ll simply find a way to make this happen.

Oh, I guess I should tell you — businesses that have employed just this technique of personally contacting every customer every month — well some of them have tripled their business in a year! That’s not a bad pay off for a zero cost customer service tactic.

Businesses who employ this technique successfully will make every employee responsible for making a certain number of calls a day. And they teach their employees how to make these customer contacts without sounding intrusive or pushy to the customer.

2. Become an Active Manager

Part of the effectiveness of any customer service program will be the active participation of management. You must become highly proficient at using your contact management program so you can generate the valuable management information it will be storing. Once this system is in place, and once you and all your staff are using it religiously, then you will have a wealth of information you can tap. Are your staff really making all the contacts they’re supposed to? Are customers coming in more frequently because of your staff’s nudging? What are customers purchasing? What are your most in-demand products or services? What are your most profitable products or services?

Once you start developing a comprehensive database, you’ll be able to use the data to know when a staff member needs help or training. You’ll start seeing activity patterns so you can plan more effectively. And you’ll have direct, quantifiable results of your advertising, public relations, and other marketing elements. In other words, a good contact manager is your accountability tool for your people and programs.

3. Be a Role Model

Walk through different businesses and get a ‘feel’ for their culture? You literally can feel the difference in a business that’s created a positive culture from one that’s created a negative culture.

In the positive culture you’ll hear laughter occasionally. Employees will be smiling — obviously liking their jobs and their surroundings. You’ll find employees rallying around to help each other if there’s a problem.

That positive, energetic culture starts with the leaders. Owners and top managers must role model all that is positive in a business environment if they hope to have a healthy, productive, and profitable organization.

You simply must wear a smile — even in the face of adversity. You simply must dress appropriately — everyday. You simply must demonstrate the best techniques for closing sales, defusing customer problems, and following through on your commitments. Because if you don’t practice what you preach, nobody else will either.

4. Involve and Empower Employees

So many business owners and managers think their job is to ‘run things.’ And sure enough, they lock themselves in their offices, pretend to know everything, and dictate how the business will function.

The employees in the meantime get more and more bored by the routineness of their jobs. Oh, they do most of what management wants, how they want it — even though they’ve found a dozen ways to make things run smoother, and more profitably. But they’re not asked. And the bold ones who venture forth with ideas are soon discouraged because management, if they listen at all, just gives them lip service. After all, they were hired as ‘just employees’ — not management. So they accept the boredom — until another job comes along and they’re gone in a flash!

The employer is stuck with the cost of hiring and training a new employee. And the vicious, and costly, cycle starts again.

Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common. And yet when one interviews the employees of the firm with an open mind, they’ll find lots of intelligent, interested people with lots of potentially profitable ideas.

When management actively seeks, and responds to, employee ideas and suggestions, actually involving the employee in the operation and management of the company, their attitudes, energy, and enthusiasm for the job soars. All of a sudden they have ownership of the ideas, and they’ll work like crazy to make them work. They’ll be happy, you’ll be happy and you’ll all profit monetarily and emotionally.

How do you develop such an environment? First you must hire right. Look for attitude and intelligence along with the traditional ‘job skills.’ And set the right expectations from the time of the interview. Let the interviewee know what’s expected of him or her in the way of sales volume, customer contact, attitude, and commitment.

That means that you must have your act together before you start the hiring process. You need to build systems to operate the various parts of your business, then define the various tasks that it takes to make that system work. For instance, if you know that if all your employees who make calls to a minimum of 10 customers a day have the highest sales volumes, then be sure you have job descriptions written that reflect that task as part of their duties.

Also, you’ll want to analyze your sales systems to build in incentives for your employees to exceed base line performance standards. Bonuses for making more calls or for being the top salesperson are simple things to put into place and are great motivators for your sales team.

Regardless of the type of sales position you’re hiring for, you’ll want to work with new employees to help them set realistic goals that mean something to them, not you. Ask yourself why you’re working. It’s not just to make sales. It may be to be able to take your family to Disneyland, or put your children through college. Money can certainly motivate, but it’s not the only factors that may be important to them. Intellectual stimulation, security, travel — there could be any number of factors instead of, or in addition to, money that motivates them.

Your job is to help your employees identify their own positive and desired outcome. If you can accomplish this, it will allow them to visualize, and achieve those goals more readily.

Once you understand their motivators through this process, you can better encourage and motivate them. If they really want that red Turbo Carerra, them get a picture of it for them, frame it and put it on their desk.

If you actively pursue, and I hope you will, developing a positive upbeat environment for your employees, you’ll find that simple things can go a long way. Everybody deserves a pat on the back now and then. You have to become an active ‘observer’ of the little things, and big ones too of course, so you can acknowledge every individual as often as possible.

A plaque on the wall for the ‘employee or salesperson of the month’ can do wonders for self esteem — and sales production. A special parking spot, an impromptu day off for exceptional performance... If you use your imagination, combined with a good shot of psychology, you won’t have to use your checkbook to motivate your employees.

Find ways to help them achieve their goals, and there’ll be little question whether you’ll achieve yours.

5. Provide Training

I so frequently hear "I’m going to hire only experienced salespeople, that way I don’t have to worry about training." And they do. Then, as if by some mystery, the ‘experienced salesperson’ doesn’t produce. The business owner grumbles something like "there just aren’t any good people out there — nobody wants to work."

There are a lot of people in the world who have worked at sales, and only a handful who succeed. Probably because they don’t get any training. The successful ones are self starters who pursue training and education on their own, because unless they’ve come from a large company, sales training is rarely even thought of, let alone imparted to the troops.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you may never have gone through sales training yourself. You may not know how to isolate and identify techniques, and thus may be unable to pass them along. But alas, there are training programs for you that can make a world of difference in your own personal performance, and help you find techniques that you can pass on to your staff.

Dale Carnegie training is available in most larger cities. Every Carnegie franchisee I’ve ever sent anyone to has been top-notch. And the trainees I’ve sent have been transformed into selling machines. Other programs are available through your local Sales and Marketing Executive Club, the American Marketing Association, the American Management Association, and others. At the very minimum, buy books, audio or video training programs on sales and sales management. Even if you’re experienced in these areas, a refresher never hurts, and could arm you with the tools you need to make your sales staff more productive than ever.

For most in-person training programs you’ll invest from $1000 to $3000, the books, audio and video of course will cost much less. Whichever method you choose, if you take it seriously, it will be one of the best investments you can make.

In addition to sales training, you should invest in telemarketing training for yourself and for your staff. I don’t mean the kind of telemarketing where you’re going to cold call every household or business in your market, I mean learning the skills to handle incoming calls properly and to make customer callbacks effective. Your local telephone company may have programs of this nature. Otherwise look for a skill based program on audio or video you can share with your staff.

Once you and your staff are trained so you can optimize your effectiveness in these areas then you truly must stay a step in front of the staff with your knowledge (a constant learning program never hurt anybody that I’ve heard of) and you truly must manage the sales activities and processes.

Other areas of training that can be extremely helpful in providing excellent customer service is in the areas of problem solving, handling complaints and suggestions and dealing with difficult or irate customers. Again, in-person training is great or you can find many excellent programs on video or audio tape.

Once you combine good skills with a positive attitude and an active outreach to your customers on a regular basis, you’re really on the way to success. But extraordinary customer service takes even more. Once you’ve provided the training, set the stage for "the customer is always right," reinforced the fact that a customer should never be dissatisfied, then you must empower your people to do whatever is necessary to assure that your customer is satisfied.

Empowering your people to make decisions that you’ll stick by no matter what, is sometimes pretty scary. But unless you do, they’ll never be truly satisfied with their job, your customer will likely be less than satisfied with the service he or she receives, and you’ll continue to have staff — and customer turnover.

Teach them and let them make their own decisions. Oh sure, they’ll make mistakes, but even if they give the customer a replacement product for free, or do something else that has an immediate short term cost, you must ask yourself how much did you gain by extending the life of that customer doing business with you. It’s a common mistake to look at a short term cost as opposed to a long term customer relationship. Don’t fall into that trap.

6. Become an Active Listener

There are so many things that we assume. For instance, we are given two ears, so we assume that everyone knows how to listen. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Just a week or so ago, I attended a seminar presentation which was designed to get people interested in the services of the company offering the program. The woman making the presentation was intelligent and well versed on her subject. But, she was far more focused on herself than on the needs of the audience. Repeatedly, audience members would ask questions, and repeatedly, she would answer a totally different question, if she answered at all. Later, when this was called to her attention, her response, "well there were certain things I was supposed to cover."

Nobody cares to listen to a one-on-one presentation or a seminar if the presenter doesn't consider the needs of his or her audience. It doesn't matter what your product has, if the prospective user doesn't understand what it will do for him or her, then the attributes of your product become irrelevant.

I've told many a beginner salesperson to set their first appointment with a prospect and only ask questions. Don't start babbling about product information until you truly hear the prospect's needs, because if you don't, it won't matter what you say, it won't hit the mark.

God gave us two ears and one mouth. We would be wise to use them in the same proportion.

Active listening is a learned skill, and an easy skill to teach at regular sales meetings. Practice, get some books or tapes on the subject, and be sure it's a part of the process you teach and expect of your sales staff.

7. Respond to Complaints & Suggestions

Your receptionist lets you know there's a customer on the phone, and he's not very happy. It's been a long day -- you'd really like to get back to him tomorrow -- it'll wait, won't it?

Mrs. Smith put a suggestion in your suggestion box regarding a new brand of widgets she says is far superior to the old brand, and she really needs them to complete a project she's started. Well, you're not in the market for a new widget maker, so you blow off her suggestion.

Mrs. Smith starts doing business at the competitor -- where she can get the new brand of widgets.

The next year, good marketing has made the new widget line very much in demand. And you can't carry the line because your competitor now has the exclusive distribution agreement. A costly "oops" that may be avoided by giving more credence to your customer's opinions.

Complaints and suggestions are some of the best market intelligence you can ever hope for. Only 4% of all unhappy customers bother to complain. Most just go elsewhere and you never get the opportunity to correct the problem and save the customer. In fact, most companies lose 20% of their customer base to a competitor every year. That's a lot of costly new customers you must bring in just to maintain your existing volume. It's far less costly and better for business to implement a customer service program that reduces customer attrition to begin with.

8. Listen to & Involve Employees

Some of the most successful companies in America involve their employees every step of the way in their operation. They ask employees, at every level, for ideas, ways to improve the company or its operation, and they involve them in management decisions. Companies who operate in this fashion rarely hear any grumbling about a new policy, sales plan, or operational procedure because they’ve had a hand in making them.

Your staff, especially your sales staff, is your 'front line.' They know far more about operating your business successfully than you may be giving them credit for. Their input should be sought frequently (back to those regular sales meetings again) on a formal basis, and an open door policy for them to drop in on you or the appropriate manager with ideas other times surely won’t hurt.

It’s so very important for the success of your business that you have a reliable information loop back to you from each and every customer either directly or through your sales staff. Encourage them to carry a notebook with them at all times so they can easily jot down notes about a customer, his or her requests or problems.

And if you happened to have a reward system for money-making or money-saving ideas, you’d probably get even more enthusiasm going in your organization.

9. Provide the Tools

Now that they’re trained, you must provide them with some tools. This is really quite simple. Thank you cards (they should send one to every customer who makes a purchase). Don’t forget that contact management program — it’s a vital element to providing extraordinary service. You may also wish to have other promotional or educational items on hand that can be dropped in the mail when customers inquire about a solution to a particular problem, or may just want to stay up on the latest widgets. A personal note with a third-party article that solves a customer’s problem or gives him or her more information on how to solve it will add lots of points to their customer service rating of you.

Conclusion

Hopefully you've learned that successful marketing doesn't take money, it takes tenacity and a good knowledge of the marketing process. If you use the techniques in this book consistently, you'll consistently enjoy higher sales and lower costs. And these techniques work for any product or service.

I invite you to share your successes with other eager marketers by sending a brief synopsis of your situation and the creative, low-cost marketing methods you used to improve your bottom line.

In the meantime, keep on doing the right things and you'll reap the rewards now and in the future.

END 

Table of Contents l