Hack: Lazy Customer Service Tips To Get The Most Loyal Customers

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One of the keys to maintaining a thriving business is a steady customer base. The Pareto principle states that 80% of business comes from only 20% of customers. This exemplifies the importance of your customer loyalty. Add to this the fact that the cost of attracting new customers is almost 6x’s more expensive and you have a powerful incentive to keep that core group of customers happy.

If your business’s goal is to live long and prosper, then any efforts toward building customer loyalty will certainly pay off. Following are 7 tips to increase and maintain greater customer loyalty.

Importance Of Customer Service in Customer Retention

1. Stand For Something

Customers are more likely to ignore you if your company doesn’t stand for anything. Research from the Corporate Executive Board that included 7,000 consumers from across the U.S. found that of those consumers who said they had a strong relationship with a brand, 64 percent cited shared values as the primary reason. If you want loyal customers, you need create real connections with them. What do you stand for?

2. Communicate with Customers

Whether it’s an email newsletter, a monthly flier, a reminder card for a tuneup, or a holiday greeting card, set up a system for reaching out to the customers you already have. Dedicate time to creating and maintaining a database of contact information, including phone, email, and snail mail addresses. If there’s a social media element to your business, invite people to your page or website and keep that online element fresh.

3. Commit to Quality Service

Go above and beyond your customer’s’ expectations. Your product knowledge will engender confidence and trust and enable you to anticipate their questions, focus on their needs and guide you both to an appropriate solution to their situation. It’s almost impossible to ask too many questions of your customers. Once you know what they want, you will be able to deliver the right product at the right time. In simplest terms: Listen to your customers and go that extra mile. Listening to customers also often enables you to make suggestions about your services and products the customer hasn’t thought about and they will appreciate your knowledge and your expertise to help them resolve their needs.

4. Courtesy and Respect

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You know how you like to be treated when you’re the customer. We all like to be accorded courtesy and treated as a sensible adult. You NEVER argue with a customer. Even if you know your customer is wrong, resolve the sales question or service issue quickly and in their favor and you’ve made a friend. Research shows that helping a customer resolve his or her issue results in continued business and likely makes a customer for life. Repeat business, not to mention word-of-mouth referrals, is the lifeblood of bottom lines

5. Be helpful even if your business can’t help them

If you can’t get your customer what they want, offer to help them find it elsewhere. It lets them know that you are willing to help without expecting anything in return. That unselfish gesture will make you stand tall in your customer’s’ eyes and will have them return next time.

6. Train Your Employees Thoroughly

Your employees are the face of your company, and training can empower them to make your company prosper. Training sessions should be a positive experience; boring training sessions are a waste of time and money and foster a negative attitude toward the company.

Encourage your employees to engage in training and explain how it will help them on the job and why it’s good for business. An excellent way to teach is on-the-job training, which facilitates on-the-spot demonstration of best practices.

7. Follow Up With Your Customers

No matter what the product or service you have sold a customer, you can be assured that they will appreciate it if you follow up in a couple of days to see how it’s working out. And it may lead to further business and more customers when your attention to detail and customer service is passed on by a happy customer.

The Art of Customer Retention

Customer service is a never ending task that will continue to build your brand loyalty. Customer Service is a long term commitment to customer satisfaction. It’s time to re-think how you engage and interact with your customers. There are many tactics, but no shortcuts. The tactics above should hopefully give you some fresh ideas for approaching retention, but they’re not a cure-all. Your product and service will do most of the heavy lifting in keeping customers loyal, and there are no shortcuts for that.

While pleasing customers with superior customer service is important, don’t forget to align your customer service goals to your business goals! There’s no point if you’ve got good brand image, if you don’t use it to your advantage! Realign with the Customer Service Goals template.

5 Traits to Look For When Hiring New Employees

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Want to know the top 5 traits of highly motivated and successful employees? Want to know where to start looking to ensure you have hired an A+ team? Summarized from various leadership conferences, case studies, and networking with rectuiters, I will save you weeks and months of anguish with the top list of qualities that are common with successful employees. These qualities make them outstanding candidates to hire to help your team be world-class and smash those management goals.

Characteristics Almost Every Successful Person Has

1. Disagreeable

The word disagreeable often has a negative connotation associated with it; however, progress cannot take place without someone willing to step up and do things their own way. I had the opportunity to attend a Malcolm Gladwellspeech where he emphasized that the most successful people are disagreeable. Now this does not mean they are disrespectful, they just know that to innovate, accomplish more than their peers, and be successful, sometimes you have to follow your own path and make decisions that nobody else is willing to do. For example, Dr. Freireich, the cancer biologist who is credited as the pioneer of cancer research and came up with chemotherapy, went against the whole medical field and designed his own drug. He risked his career, ignoring what his superiors were saying. Now this is an extreme example, and ignoring your superiors is actually not wanted in the hiring process, but the mindset of challenging set standards drives innovation and creates extremely successful employees. These people are often misinterpreted as disrespectful when making a first impression, but in fact, they just operate with higher standards of creativity and are willing to go off the beaten path to find their success.

2. Respectful

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Respect is a simple concept. You should treat everyone how you would like to be treated. You wouldn’t want someone to work for you if he/she is disrespectful because he/she will represent the company. At a company, it is just as important to respect people’s time as it is their property. Before and after an interview the candidate should say thank you and give you a handshake. Most candidates forget to send follow-up thank-you emails, and it is these small gestures that separate the best from the average.

3. Inspiration

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Another recurring characteristic I see in great candidates is that they are inspired and want to inspire others. There is a great quote that says, “I want to inspire others. I want someone to look at me and say, ‘Because of you I didn’t give up.’ ” I have found that the people who look for inspiration at younger ages end up inspiring their peers as they grow up. These traits don’t usually come from work, but outside activities such as sports, art, and other hobbies. They then transform into their work attitudes and drive people to be successful in their jobs. This drive to be inspired and to inspire others sets them apart.

4. Drive

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Out of all these traits, I believe drive is one of the most important. If you are willing to do anything it takes to accomplish your task, then you are resilient. Businesses should look for this trait because these people are extremely efficient in their work and want to succeed in their job. They will be up for taking on more responsibility early in their position and will be up for a more hands-off approach. They are the types of people who can be asked to do something once and will follow through on what was asked of them.

5. Leadership

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To be a true leader means to be able to step back and take charge with the people and not just bark out orders. Like I said before, I have been to many leadership conferences and I have learned again and again that it’s not always about the talent of the group, but the group’s ability to work together. As an ENTJ Meyers-Briggs personality type, I feel extremely at home in a leadership role, and I feel a leader should always lead by example. There are natural-born leaders, and then there are people who have to really work at it to gain respect from their peers. Either way, a successful leader knows that it’s more important for a team to work together than for a single person to be successful. Leaders are extremely adaptable and capable of working through hardships. It’s part of their resilience. Leaders have the ability to transform vision into reality, and they aren’t afraid to make tough decisions because they don’t shy away from failure; they embrace it. People look up to people who never quit and that’s why leadership, drive, and inspiration go hand in hand. A candidate who shows true leadership will always be a huge benefit to the team and willing to put in all the work asked of him or her.

Employee Traits

By no means do these exhaust the traits that a company should look for when hiring, but I have found disagreeable, respectful, inspirational, driven people who also embody leadership outperform many of their fellow employees. They are efficient, passionate and ready to take on any challenge presented.

Now let’s see how to put these employees to work. Check out 5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring and Top 5 Secrets to Excellent Customer Service.