Extraordinary Customer Service Helps Businesses and Employees Survive Economic Downturn

Whether you have your own business or work for someone else, the key to surviving and thriving in this slow economic climate is providing excellent customer service.

In order to be successful in business you must keep customers coming back. You must to have a product or service your customers want, but your competition has that. How do you set yourself apart from your competition? The key to surviving and thriving in the economic downturn is providing service, service, service. You must deliver extraordinary customer service and make your customers feel valued so they keep coming back and tell others about your company.

The numbers show us how important it is to hang on to your existing customers. It costs businesses six times more to attract new customers than to keep the old ones. Customer loyalty is worth ten times the price of a single purchase. It makes economic sense to cultivate the loyalty of your customers.

Why do businesses fail to create loyal customers? Why do customers leave companies? You may think that it’s primarily because they’ve found a better product or price somewhere else. But it’s not. If you’re focusing your business on only those two things, you are probably losing business and may not even realize why.

The newest Customer Experience Impact Report by RightNow® Technologies and Harris Interactive released in October 2009 shows that 86% of the time when people quit doing business with a company it’s because of a bad customer service experience. That’s a huge number! Eighty-six percent of the people who leave feel they were treated rudely or with indifference by an employee, manager or owner. Most never go back to that business. That’s a number that you can do something about.

Customers not only have high expectations for service, they’re demanding it every time they interact with an organization whether in person, on the phone or on your website. If you want to succeed in business, as an owner or as an employee, you have to focus on treating your customers the way they want to be treated – with extraordinary customer service.

You can take steps to make sure you and your employees put your customer first. One of the steps is to train your employees how to deliver extraordinary customer service every time. The good news is that customer service skills are trainable. Look for my upcoming blog on effectively training employees in customer service.

In this economy, the companies that are going to survive and thrive are the ones that deliver excellent customer service. Make your company one of them.