Promise Them the Moon
Posted on 4/13/2009 at 5:51:38 AM
I’ve been in one area of the service industry or another for over thirty years. I am helpless in that I cast a critical eye on every service provider I come in contact with during my day to day dealings, whether it’s the counter person at the local deli, the young lady who performed my facial last week or the new bartender at my favorite watering hole. I can’t help it – my mother was a bartender and waitress for her entire life and I started waiting table when I was fourteen years old, learning at her knee that the core of customer service is your customer.
I’ve worked in hair salons, restaurants, as a housekeeper in a four-star hotel, nail salons, greenhouses, motorcycle body shops and now as a website designer and have honed my customer service to fine point.
It’s also made me highly critical of other businesses and how they treat their customers. I can’t walk into an establishment where I’m going to be “served” without checking out how they do business. And I learn something new every time, even though their business is DIFFERENT than mine.
One concept applies to every service based business – you MUST care about your customers and make them feel as though they are the ONLY customer you have. Oh, they know you have other customers and if you follow my mother’s rules of customer care, they’ll even send you MORE customers, but in the back of their mind they’ll be thinking “Mom always liked me best.”
Promise them the moon, and then deliver. If you follow that thought, you will never lack for customers (or an income) even in a bad economy.
Make a point to know your customers – their time with you whether, it’s ten minutes or an hour, is all about THEM. Make this effort even with the clients that you may never see again; you never know who THEY know and will sing your praises to.
Even if you deliver a spectacular service at an incredibly low price, if it’s done unemotionally – if your customer doesn’t FEEL it – they won’t be impressed.
And they WILL tell others, good or bad.
This is the age of Facebook, Twitter, blogging and online messaging … can you afford to possibly blemish your name by coming off as impersonal or worse, indifferent, to your clients, their friends and perhaps the entire world?
