Three Tips for Serving Your Customers with Pizzazz

 
Issue # 60: January 30, 2007

To our readers:

To serve all of your customers more effectively, follow this simple rule: Always remain professional and polite. This statement would serve you well as a motto. Maintaining a high level of professionalism and manners will help you through all the situations and crises you encounter in a typical business day. Provide your customers the utmost courtesy and the highest level of competence you can deliver, every time they make a request of you. They deserve it, and you will ultimately benefit from it.







Three Tips for Serving Your Customers with Pizzazz

1. Respond quickly to customer requests.

Hop to it. Respond to every request without fail! If your customers are clear about their needs and wants, make it your priority to satisfy those needs and wants as soon as possible. If you offer a promise, make sure you deliver on that promise. If, in spite of all your best efforts, you can’t deliver on your promise, present your customer with another option or solution. Make sure you meet your customer’s every reasonable expectation. Always make time for your customers. If you are too busy to respond to your customers, you are too busy to have customers.

2. Use the power of being cool.

Remember, your job is to assist your customers. You can do that much better when you are in control of your emotions and behavior. If your customer’s attitude starts to slip, help him or her raise it back up to your level. Practice taking the power away from those who choose to be less than polite by keeping your cool. Use these pointers:

a. Remain respectful, relaxed, and unruffled.

b. Keep your anger and irritation low, and honor for your customer high. You choose how you perceive the situation.

c. Remember, there are almost no problem customers, only customers who have problems that need solutions. Take their concerns seriously by putting yourself in their place. Simply pause and ask yourself: “how would I feel if this were happening to me?” That reflection alone will go a long way in helping you remain sincere, understanding, and helpful.



3. Demonstrate customer service finesse by making known your desire to be helpful and responsive.

Make your customers feel welcomed; let them know you look forward to assisting them. Your enthusiasm will work to your benefit. When your customers see how open and receptive you are, they will be more cooperative and patient with you. Your willingness to be helpful can diffuse the most unfriendly, unsympathetic, and insensitive behavior of the other.

A few great customer service quotations:

Be everywhere, do everything, and never fail to astonish the customer. Macy's Motto

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong. Donald Porter, V.P., British Airways

People don’t want to communicate with an organization or a computer. They want to talk to a real, live, responsive, responsible person who will listen and help them get satisfaction. Theo Michelson, State Farm Insurance

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it. Peter Drucker

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind. William James, Psychologist

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. Sam Walton

Well done is better than well said. Benjamin Franklin

You have to perform at a consistently higher level than others. That’s the mark of a true professional. Professionalism has nothing to do with getting paid for your services. Joe Paterno