Each and every day, every one of us make consumer choices. From where to get dinner to renewing car insurance, either consciously or otherwise we decide where to get these services from. For the business owner, the question will always be 'what gets people to buy?', and while the answer isn't quite as simple as you might hope it would be, there is one area a business should always look to improve upon.
I speak, of course, about customer service. Recently, the trend has been to drive prices down to get as many people through the door (electronic or otherwise) as possible, thus creating a constant flow of customers paying out before they leave again. This works for supermarkets because often in a town they're the only real place to get the majority of your shopping done in, but for other businesses (a camera shop, for example) the custom isn't heavy enough to justify the supermarket model.
Instead, the focus should be on truly fantastic customer service. This ranges from complaints handed to the company in way of broken or malfunctioning goods or world class follow up care, a call a few months into the purchase asking if everything is going well with the product and if they can offer any help at all. It truly is about the finishing touches when any other store can get the same goods as you and offer them at the same price, what gets customers to your door rather than any other? It has to be customer service.
To illustrate this point, let me tell you a little about the way I shop. A few years ago, I moved to a new town, and for the first month or so I used nearly every shop in town, just to get a feel of which ones suited me best. Slowly, I stopped visiting the ones who failed to stick in my memory, within 6 months I had 10 shops which between them sold everything I needed. I go out of my way to visit these shops because the people there know my name, they ask me about my purchases and treat me as a valuable part of their business (because, let's face it, without us they'd fail to function). As a human and therefore a creature of habit, I'll probably never stray from these companies, despite slightly lower prices available in shops elsewhere. To me, that's the true power of correct customer service.
I hope this article has been of use to you. Similar articles with relation to customer service can be found on my blog here at Ezine. For other customer service articles and examples of these departments in action,
visit http://www.customerservicescontact.co.uk/santander-customer-service-2/. The news articles can be found if you Click Here.
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