Customer Service Information
Mastering Challenging Service Situations
During the course of everyday business, many of you encounter unsatisfied customers. How you and your staff handle these situations, will shape your service image and ultimately your bottom line. How can you best handle challenging situations? I have developed and practiced a simple method for just such encounters. If you follow the steps listed below, you will greatly improve the likelihood of achieving positive resolutions to challenging situations.
Doesnt Anybody Work Here? Nametags Impact Employee Communication
Walmart was the first business to require all its employees to wear nametags. (There's a surprise!) Sam Walton created this initiative because he wanted his customers to "get to know the people they bought from."
What Do Your Clients REALLY Think of You?
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What Exactly is Customer Relationship Management?
The defintion of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that I favor is "CRM is the business strategy that aims to understand, anticipate, manage and personalize the needs of an organization's current and potential customers"
How To Use Your Current Customers
Jay instructed a customer of his to offer a rare coin collection to new customers for just $19. He was actually losing a couple of dollar on every sale! But .... of the 50,000 people who bought the coin collection for $19, nearly 10,000 come back and bought.
When the Customer Demands: Give a Discount or Lose the Order
Periodically every sales person encounters the customer who refuses to buy unless they receive a discount. Sometimes this is driven by the organization's culture or the buyer wanting to look good to their boss and sometimes it is simply the mindset of the individual buyer them self. To some people price satisfaction and their perception of value, is not about the actual amount paid as much as it is their sense that they have negotiated the price down from a higher starting point, thereby obtaining a ?better deal.? A case in point is the retail consumer who will only buy items that are ?on sale,? even if the sale price is really no lower than the everyday price at a competitor.
Customer Service Is More Than Just Being Nice To People
Many organizations tackle to the issue of customer service by exhorting their employees to speak with a smile. Be polite. Never lose your cool. But isn?t that a little like closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out? Good customer service should be about a good customer experience with your product. This begins with the relationship your company cultivates with a customer.
Restaurant Owners ? How Important are People Skills?
You are serving great food. Your establishment is new, spotless and inviting and yet you are not getting the repeat visits that you expect. What?s up? What?s going wrong?
How to Provide Instant Customer Service
Customer service is an essential component of any business. Clearly, if you work alone your business thrives on good customer service. But what if you run much of your business online? How do you provide excellent customer service 24 hours a day seven days a week? Here's an idea which is working for me.
Dealing with People - Words to Avoid
You probably realise how the wrong tone of voice and
negative body language can cause problems when dealing with
other people, particularly customers and staff. However,
using the wrong words can also cause problems.
E-Business?s Best Friend: eCRM
From Ebay to the smallest home-operated start-up, e-businesses of all sizes struggle to accurately answer a common question: who are my customers? If you can?t answer that question, chances are you?re also in the dark about the following questions. What customer demand trends can I expect in the future? How can I improve customer retention? What can I do to build long-term relationships of trust with customers? Knowing the answer to these questions can mean the difference between long-term growth and profitability and crashing and burning.
The Dissatisfied Customer
We, as small business people, naturally dislike complaints from our clients and customers. Because we're intimately involved with our home businesses, small businesses, or freelance careers, any complaint takes on a personal commentator. A dissatisfied customer is a direct reflection on our performance and a blow to our egos. The common reaction of small business people to a consumer complaint is defensive posturing and/or avoidance.
Everyone talks in code!
How often have you left a meeting with a customer or your boss telling yourself he likes my ideas. Only to find later that you didn?t get the sale or your boss has told everyone that you are crazy.
A White Paper: Profiting with Kindness
In 2002, there wasn?t much interest for Kindness in business, and some business people would question, ?What does kindness have to do with business, anyway?? Is this a for real question or just to prove a point? Or perhaps they couldn?t figure out what being kind really had to do with business. Or perhaps the word was a jargon word, an unfamiliar language.
What Every Manager Should Know About How to Learn from the Complaints of Customers and Employees
Listening to complaints, whether they're reasonable or not, is a part of every manager's job. Sometimes complaints can be overwhelming. However, when we take them in stride with an open mind, we can learn much from our employees' and customers' feelings about the workplace. After all, a complaint is nothing more that a person telling you that his (or her) needs have not been met. As dissatisfied customers, they are giving us a second chance to correct something that should have been done properly the first time around. (In some cases the customer might happen to be your employee.)
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RELATED ARTICLES
Is your Online Business Customer-Friendly?
Customer service is increasingly seen as one of the most valuable uses for a commercial World Wide Web site. Your Web site is available on a 24 hour, seven days a week basis. So it is well worth exploring ways in which your customers can virtually "serve themselves," without the need for overtime staff, or lengthy voice mail procedures.
Making The Most Of Newsletters
Newsletters can be wonderful tools for communicating with your customers or prospects. Because of their format, they're often infused with more credibility than traditional brochures. If your newsletter is little more than blatant self-promotion, however, it's likely to hit the wastebasket before it hits your target's desk.
Customers Who Rave About You and Your Service
According to customer service studies by marketing gurus of the world, here are the following qualities, which must be present in your life and your business in order to develop raving fan customers who are not just satisfied but completely loyal to you over the long haul.
Writing The Book On Great Customer Service
Q: One of the big chain bookstores recently opened up near my small book store. Already I can see my business starting to decline. Is there anything I can do to compete with the bigger store or should I just accept the inevitable?
-- Peter Q.
Outsourcing: The Unspoken Costs
Outsourcing seems to be the new-new thing and approximately 50% of our major corporations are doing it. What are the costs? The benefits? And what skills need to be managed in order to make it work optimally?
If Everyone Thinks They Give Good Service, Why Do We As Customers Think Its Poor!
First of all let's look at what customer service is all about.
How to Deliver Exceptional Customer Service
Having been in business a number of years, I'm amazed at the number of people who don't have the slightest idea of what customer service is. Customer service is not a way of doing things ? it's an attitude.
Responding to Complaints
It's possible that in the course of your business dealings, you may (just may) have to deal with a complaint from a customer or client ....
Restaurant Owners ? How Important are People Skills?
You are serving great food. Your establishment is new, spotless and inviting and yet you are not getting the repeat visits that you expect. What's up? What's going wrong?
One Critical Question to Ask Yourself Every Day
What happened to the old saying, the customer is always right? I'll bet every one of you reading this article has a "customer service nightmare" story to tell. My most recent nightmare experience took place recently when my business partner and I went in to a wireless phone store to purchase two new pda wireless phones. We told the young man who greeted us that we had only one question: is this phone compatible with the database software we intend to purchase? "I don't know," he said, "Most customers do the research on this before they come in." We politely requested that if he didn't know, he find the answer. He told us we could call the company ourselves, that he didn't have time to be put on hold with them. As you can imagine, we left without spending what we felt was a significant sum of money. And of course we've told at least 10 other people about the disappointing service at that particular store.
Sending Mixed Signals Can Send Your Clients Away
I call it the "wave and roll."
Clients?Do You Really Need Them?
Running a successful business takes a lot of energy and there are so many areas that as a business owner you need to pay attention too.
Does Your Customer Talk Back To You?
What is your customer saying about you? Do you really know? Does your customer really know who you are?
Customer Service and The Human Experience
Historically, customer service was delivered over the phone or in person. Customers didn't have many choices, and switching to competitors was cumbersome. Today, these methods are but two of the many possible touch points of entry for any given interaction. With all the options the Internet brings, competition is literally a click away. If, as has been reported, 65% of your business comes from current customers, then in order to stay in business, you best focus on winning the satisfaction and loyalty of those customers.
4 Customer Service Mistakes Companies Should Avoid Making
1) Being placed on hold endlessly. Don't you just love it when you call a company and they place you on hold, leaving you to listen to their latest on-hold, recorded sales pitch, over and over again. Would you think it normal business practice for a retail store clerk to ask you to "wait a minute" while they disappeared into the back of the store for ten, fifteen, thirty minutes or longer? People do things over the phone that they would never do in person. It's bad business either way to leave a customer hanging without at least coming back to let the customer know how much longer they'll be holding.
Are You Giving Your Customers Enough Reasons To Return To Your Business?
Good customer service just isn't enough anymore in the marketplace in which we live. Times are changing and business owners are learning that they need to create such an awesome customer loyalty program that they are always at the forefront of their customers' minds on a regular basis.
What Type Of Software Is This?
The other day while at the book store, I came across some accounting software CDs strewn with other CDs and books in garage sale box.
Creating the Right ?Viral Reputation?
Unless you are brand new to business, or have been under a rock for quite some time - one key marketing technique (which isn't new) - is called 'Viral'.
The 7 Principles of Business Integrity
If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't
have integrity, nothing else matters. -- Alan K. Simpson
Turning Customer Mistakes Into Raving Fans
When you make a mistake with a customer, should you write them off as lost -- never to return again?
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