Customer Service Madness
There appears to be a customer service madness perpetuating business to the exclusion of sales
I can see you jumping up and down already. Believe me I know I’ve been having this conversation a bit recently.
All we hear about is customer service. Customer service excellence, the best or better customer service. The issue is that it is not necessarily defined. It does not always include sales. Often serving customers is solely about keeping customer’s happy. So, in a downturn that means being so exceedingly nice and polite they feel free to come in and chat with you without buying anything – ever!
I don’t think that’s what it is supposed to mean but it seems to have become synonymous with never saying boo to a customer – customer is always right in absolutely every circumstance sort of thing.
The Customer Always Right
Well the customer is not always right. There are people who work their way through life getting everything for free and having people bend over backwards because they complain about everything and they play on the fact that staff know they have to keep them happy.
I ask why you have to keep them happy because they’ve cost you money, wasted time, upset staff. OK so they threatened to go and tell everyone how awful you were. Anyone who already knows them knows how they make their way through life and is likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.
No SALES and you have No BUSINESS
They didn’t make a sale and are likely only to have cost you the cost of their own.
I am not talking about normally calm, sensible, rational buyers who feel a need to complain so strongly that they actually go through with it. These people you should listen to because what they have to say could be costing you sales without you even knowing it.
See business as in life is all about perspective. It is about serving customers but serving customers includes selling to them.. You need sales to survive in business and without a compelling offer you probably won’t make sales.