Love those customers!

In keeping with my recent rants on service and Customer Service Executives here’s some more info to get your team going.

The organisation you work for has done some shuffling of titles etc. Or perhaps they are about to hire a new person (you) for a role in Customer Relations – they want you to manage it… Let’s say they are giving you ‘some scope’ to develop the role and or the department and let’s say they are serious and want to really wow the customers, love them so to speak. How will you go about it? Here’s ten thoughts from my perspective.

1. Create an environment in the organisation from top to bottom where the Customer is King (it’s not new but it is still a great idea) no customers – no business right… so it should make solid sense.
2. Get clear about the intended results – more sales from more visits of existing customers – or higher level sales from existing customers? (Hey did you notice I’m talking about existing customers and not new ones, they’re the role of the marketing dept…)
3. To what level can you ‘schmooze’ them? If you sell luxury or expensive items it will be very different to lower value items (or it should be…)
4. Plan like crazy – implement the same way. A great plan will beg to be implemented, so take a look at the plan and set out what will happen for the year (once in place the tweaking should be fairly easy).
5. Develop a budget plan, see if you can get the budget to go up based on results more sales more slice of the pie to build the relationships further.
6. Customer loyalty plan – sounds nice what does it really mean – I think it’s more part of the relationship and a guide as something to aim towards, not so much a plan on it’s own.
7. Exceptionally train everyone who comes into contact with Customers, remind them, support them and allow them to give the customers service brilliance…
8. Watch customers dealing with your business and go crazy over any and or ALL barriers to them being able to do business with ease. Just watch them for a while, any squirming, wincing, annoyance of any kind do something about it NOW!
9. Ask yourself (and the rest of the team) how many ways can we woo the Customers so they love us and want to come back… perhaps search the web for ways to connect with customers you might not think of (go for weird, you can always cut back.)
10. Scream “Service – Service –SERVICE!” at the start of every training session on service and at the start of each day (just before the customers start to buy) and ram home the message often (perhaps whisper it quietly to staff with a grumpy disposition).

Now take massive action on all of the above and give the people what they want, your unconditional love! Sure it might cost a few $$ to do, but the end result should be very well worth it. Oh and one last thing, do not tell people you love them, just show it by brilliant action and example,.. They will tell you they love being loved and that’s a far sight better!