Secrets of Growing Your Business Through Customer and Employee Retention

The bottom line in this shrinking business market is to keep your customers happy. That means the "First Impression" you and your employees make can never be repeated. It takes only a few seconds for a customer to decide if they want to do business with you.

We want our clients to come to us for the solutions to their problems and we want our clients to recommend their friends to be our new clients.

What are the five secrets you need to know to develop "Excellent Customer Service" in your business?

1) In business to retain customers during this shrinking jobs and services market, we need to train sales people to do the following: Smile, be polite, be helpful,be knowledgeable, be clean, well groomed, dress appropriately and make a good first impression so our customers want to continue being our customers.

2) Sales personnel should speak to customers and their family members in a reliable and timely manner.

Examples of what not to do:

Employees should not be talking to their friends on the phone and ignoring their customers.

If your sales personnel are responsible for apartments,rental homes, offices, buildings, or hotel rooms and the toilet is broken it must be repaired immediately. Not tomorrow! Remember leaking pipes only get worse, can destroy buildings, and be costly to repair!

3) If your employees know your customers name call them by name. The customer will feel that you care about their business and they will want to continue doing business with you.

4) If you are answering the phone at a business, answer the phone as quickly as possible. Do not wait for it to ring 4 to 5 times. The customer may be ordering a large shipment of goods or booking a reservation for 40 people. If you wait to answer the phone you will lose the sale!

5) Remember to smile into the phone, be polite (say please and thank you) and be committed to giving excellent service today. Your employee might say "but they cannot see me!" That is true, but they can tell by the inflection in your voice that you are smiling and want to be helpful. If you do not know the answer to their question, tell them you will find out immediately what the answer is and will call them back in 2 minutes. Remember to call back as soon as possible! Your customer will want to do business with you because they can rely on you to keep your word and solve their problem.



Madeline Frank, Ph.D. business owner, teacher, researcher, speaker and concert artist. She writes a monthly newsletter "Madeline's Monthly Article & Musical Tips" and a monthly radio show "Madeline's One Minute Musical Radio Show".

If you need a speaker contact Madeline at mfrankviola@gmail.com