Customer Service

1.Be professional and polite: We all know that First Impression is Best Impression, so make it as best as possible. Lot of times we make some conclusions about people or the organisations within sometime after doing some interactions with them. Make your employees to be professional in handling customers and also polite. Provide them with adequate training and support in this area. This will not only boost their confidence but also helps make you more business efficiently.  2.Be Knowledgeable of products or services: I have seen many times that the front-desk employees do not have enough knowledge about the products and services and when a customer enquires about them, either you will get the wrong information or no information related to it. Keeping your employees knowledgeable of your products or services, especially those who are interacting with customers like sales people and customer service personnel is very important if you want to deliver good customer service.3.Consistently following the procedures and policies: Ensure the employees who are constantly interacting with outside customers follow the procedures and policies of your organisation like refund policies, warranty and guarantee policies, etc. In failing to do so, will cause unnecessary misunderstandings, chaos and other problems leading to poor customer satisfaction. Provide the employees with right set of tools and ...

What do these companies have in common, Southwest Airlines, Neiman Marcus, Marriot, Disney, and Enterprise Car Rental? They are all customer service pioneers. Each company has forged a new path through their commitment, dedication, and innovations, to become known as leaders in delivering excellent customer service. Serving the customer is more than some fancy words on their company mission statements. Customer service truly represents the very essence of each company’s’ existence.These companies, along with hundreds more, have already done the hard work; they have laid the ground work, set the examples, and blazed the trails for other companies to follow. They have demonstrated how to achieve success by serving the customer.Why then, don’t all companies follow this proven path to success?Do they not know the core principles these companies follow?To borrow a concept from the Late Show with David Letterman, this is a top ten list of principles all companies need to implement to achieve service excellence.Number 10: Focus – The customer should always be the number one focus of any company. All decisions, services, and products should be based upon satisfying the needs and expectations of the customers.Number 9: Take Action – The best laid plans will never come to life, without action. If you are going to talk-the-talk, then you ...

I took a phone call at my office the other day from a pleasant sounding young man representing the national office supply store I have a reward card with. He spent a minute of my time reading from a script about the current deals the company had and then asked me if I would place an order and receive an additional 10% discount. I was very impressed at this point with the telemarketing campaign this company was undertaking to boost sales in this difficult financial period. As all small business people do several times a day, I wished I had thought of this marketing strategy and assisted my clients in implementing it.Unfortunately, I didn’t need 3 cases of copy paper or a new desk chair so I told the young man that I could not take advantage of the program at this time. I expected to hear him say, “Thanks for your time and we look forward to serving you when you need future office supplies.” Unfortunately, the next words out of his mouth were – “I need you to place an order today because I have a quota and will be fired if I don’t meet my quota this week.” Very little in the business world shocks me anymore but this ...

What is an organization’s “culture?”   It is simply a critical mass of the attitudes and behaviors of its people and groups. The fifteen statements below each reflect an important “cultural” reality impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty.  They have shaped our customer service program's success.  Do they shape yours?  How is your customer culture?1.   T / F:  In our organization we operate under the assumption that customers view customer contact persons as “the organization” and representatives of what the organization means to them personally. 2.   T / F:  We communicate regularly the importance of realizing everyone in our organization has customers: external (“paying”) customers and internal (work group/ inter-work group) “customers.” 3.   T / F:  We design our processes and train our people around 2 things customers want to know: (1) Do you do what you say you will? (2) How do you handle problems? 4.   T / F:  Realizing that organizations choose, consciously or unconsciously, to be financially driven and/or customer-driven, we make decisions remembering that organizations working from a short-term, financially driven philosophy are not as effective in service situations.5.     T / F:  Since front line persons make most customer service decisions on a daily basis, our top management understands their key role and allows them to inform the organization about customer needs.6.     T / F:  We promote the status ...

Nothing’s worse than when a situation is more confusing and complicated than it needs to be, especially when it comes to your customer service experience.Here’s an example: Say you have just purchased a pair of shoes for a sale price. However, when the item is scanned at the counter, the sale price does not come up. The regular price does.Now, an easy answer to this solution would be for the customer service representative to already know why this is occurring and plug the sales price in without any hassles.However, in most cases, what happens is another customer service rep is called over the intercom while you wait in line. Ten minutes later, the two customer service reps will question you and often you will be left to return back to the item and find the price tag with the sales price.By then you are fed up and don’t even want the shoes anymore.This is not an easy solution and is the perfect example of poor customer service.Make sure this doesn’t happen to your customers by always providing them with the easiest methods possible.•    When it comes to your contact informative, ensure that your customers know how and where to contact you. Include your email address, your phone number and your business hours ...

IntroductionBusinesess expects good relationship to be maintained with customer. This facilitates progressive improvement of quality of product or service offered by the customer. The customers are valued as the moral supporters for enhancement of the business. So it is viable if the customers give valid feedback about the product or service in a motive to replenish the spilt quality constraint. There are various technical advancements related to the filed of customer management. These advancements bring about instrumental changes in the proper progress of the firm towards ultimate goal. Advancements manifest different forms and one such form is development of user-friendly software to assist the company to maintain good rapport with the customers, who are in business now and also who were in business before.Developing Customer Relationship Management SoftwareHence the software integrates totally different environments under a common canopy pertaining to same ideology and motive. The development of customer management based software includes inputs from various departments present in the organization. This may largely depend on the transparency observed in the firm regarding the occurrence of routine activities. Software generation may include steps such as coding of the actual process, data collection, data retrieval and data manipulation. The manipulated data are displayed at the customer interface. The development of application type of software ...

            One of the major reasons businesses fail today is due to poor customer service. When a retail business is born, its main objective is to gain and build a strong customer base. Many businesses today are successful because of this strong customer base. Businesses advertise on radio, television and newspapers all the time. Huge budgets are spent on commercials. It is not the advertising on television or in newspapers that will retain the customer. It is the ability of management and its staff to retain those customers   that will contribute to the success of the business. A bad taste or feeling left with a customer at any time would leave a lasting impression. Therefore, the business must always provide excellent customer service, no matter the situation. It is always important to leave a good impression with your customers.  The old adage is correct:  The customer is always right!                        The impact of customer service is especially noticeable at the front counter. This is the first place a customer goes to make an inquiry and where the customer checks out.  It is the last place they go before leaving the retail store. It is said "the first impression is usually the last impression."A study was done in June, 2000 by Bain & Company, ...

These customer service tips will save you thousands of dollars and create a lasting bond with your customers. I was thinking recently about one of my worse home based business nightmares and how it turned out to be a very valuable lesson for creating excellent customer service.It started out like a great dream. We just started our toner and ink-jet business and our first business customer was a medical firm of about 20 offices. I had known the purchasing agent for sometime and before long we got the contract to supply these offices with printer products.We were so excited to get the order that we did not question when the purchasing agent placed a huge order for hundreds of toner and ink-jet supplies. She had mentioned that they were going to make the main office the headquarters for all the printer supplies.The business we had set up was a drop ship company which meant we would be getting all the products from various manufacturers. We were on a cash basis with the suppliers, meaning that all funds were paid up front.We ordered all the supplies believing that the purchasing agent knew what she was doing. Well, it became a logistical nightmare when they could not fit all the products into the storage ...

What is customer service? Have you ever stopped to really think about this question? We have trained literally thousands of people and hundreds of organisations in customer service. No matter who the person or what the organisation, the answer to this question is always generic. They will say: “Customer service is about giving customers what they want” or perhaps “it’s about satisfying customers” some times they will say that it is about “making customers happy.”While at first glance these answers may sound correct, nothing could be further from the truth. Say for example that you ran a restaurant. If a customer were to enter your restaurant and ask for some office supplies would you be able to give the customer what they want? Would you be able to satisfy a customer who was looking for some jewellery if you worked in a hardware store? No, it would be impossible. The best that you could do would be to politely tell the customer where they can go and get Jewry. Obviously, customer service is not about giving customers what they want, or even satisfying customers.The same is true for the way we give customer service. When we ask the question: what is the most important thing for good customer service, almost everyone we ...

To determine how a company is performing in terms of customer service, some customer service measurements are used regularly. These measurements are designed to assess how satisfied customers are with the services provided by a company.Customer service is commonly defined as a series of activities that are organized to increase customer satisfaction levels so that a product or service will exceed customer expectation. Customer service may be extended in an automated manner through self-service means like support Internet sites, or by persons like sales and customer service representatives. Usually, the main basis of customer service is customer data collection or demographics. Today, a wide variety of customer service tools are now available. Aside from support websites, databases that determine individual customer preferences and buying patterns and specialist software are now used. Moreover, companies also have come up with new ways to capture feedback from customers. A few of these new feedback channels include mobile email and text messages. By knowing the perceptions and opinions of customers, companies are able to find ways to enhance the quality of the services they provide as well as improve the experience of their customers.Several companies have integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technologies to their operations. CRM is a multifaceted process that allows companies to have better ...