Good Customer Service for Independent Businesses
No matter what business you are in, the most important part of business is customer service. This is especially true of when you are running your own company, or when you are working as an independent agent in direct sales for a larger company like Southwestern Company . No matter which case you are in there is no one to blame for bad service than yourself. It is easy to say that the product is still on it’s way or that you are sorry for the product being defective and that you will contact the manufacturer, but in the end it will be your product that they remember not to buy again, not your manufacturer or your distributor. If you are a direct seller, it is not likely that they will necessarily contact the larger company, such as Southwestern Company , about good or bad behavior, and if they do it is not that company’s responsibility to deal with your behavior, it is yours and yours alone. There are a few things you can do to make sure that service is great at least most of the time however.
The golden rule of course is that the customer is always right . Even when they are wrong, they are right. If a customer says that they had a rude delivery man, keeping the man on that route won’t help your reputation and neither will simply apologizing. While you should apologize, and possibly even take the guy off that route and put him on another route, also give the customer something extra for the trouble they had to go through. It will make you stand out a little and make them remember how nice you were about the whole thing. Remember not to get gruff with them, share their outrage and disarm them with kindness and you might be able to turn a customer who is ready to leave into a loyal customer for life .
As your company grows and succeeds you will need to hire more people. When this happens make sure to share your standards for customer service with each and every employee and make sure that they treat the customers with the same standards. When this happens word of mouth will continue to spread, allowing your company to grow even further.
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