Building Customer Loyalty

2. Essentials of Customer Care

Whatever added extras you may offer, they will be useless if you do not give your customers excellent basic service.

2.1 Encourage employees to deliver high-quality customer care.

• Make sure employees have good basic communication skills.For example, poor spelling and grammar will ruin the credibility of letters, emails and faxes.
• Train employees in job-specific skills. For example, get sales people to listen to the customer more, so they sell intelligently, not aggressively.
• Train all relevant personnel how to answer and deal with telephone calls.
• Make sure employees can handle complaints effectively.They should apologise, be sympathetic, listen, establish the facts, agree what to do, and then do it.

2.2 Think of ways to make life easier for customers. For example, a retailer might provide customer car parking, and a simple procedure for returning unwanted goods.

• Concentrate on providing quality service in key areas. For example, customers often complain that deliveries or maintenance people fail to arrive on time.
• Try to save the customer inconvenience. For example, the motor trade gives top priority to maintaining stocks of 'vehicle off road' spares.
• Exceed your customers' expectations. For example, promise delivery in ten days, but actually deliver in seven. Always keep your promises.
• Keep customers informed about any problems, and make it easy for them to contact you. For example, by offering fax-back forms or freephone numbers.
• Use your website to give customers services and information they want.For example, you could provide a simple ordering system using secure servers, useful information - including answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), and technical advice -- or a tracking system for orders placed.

2.3 Use appropriate technology.

• A good database system can help you record, organise and plan your contact with customers.Make sure information from your website can be transferred to your main database.
• Contact management software may be a useful tool if you have a lot of high-value customer accounts.You will need to explain the advantages of the system to employees, and provide training and incentives for use.

2.4 Give customers a personalised service.

• A common way to achieve this is by giving each customer an account manager.
• Personalise all communication (see 4).For example, a well-organised receptionist who greets a customer by name can make the customer feel special - and show how friendly and efficient your business is.
• Personalise the email addresses of customer-facing employees (eg This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ).
• If you use computerised telephone systems, give customers the option of talking to an operator at any time.