What is the Mission of your Business?
A Successful entrepreneur won’t have the same answer as you are having in your heart right now. Too many small business owners assume that the mission or goal of their business is to make money. If you set your eyes on making money, be rest assured that your business won’t last for long.
Businesses are practically packaged solution to people’s need. Businesses are meant to satisfy the need of individuals or organization. If that is the case, then making money cannot be the mission of a successful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur that aims at making money will only survive until an entrepreneur that aims at satisfying the need of customer comes around to dislodge him.
Customer Satisfaction Should Be Your Mission
Successful entrepreneurs often encourage their staff to aim for two things. First, attract customers. That is the whole essence of internet marketing and all the gimmicks internet marketers parade online. Everyone is trying to get the attention of customers. The competition for customers attention is very keen. Even though you have the capacity to satisfy the need of a market better than your competitor, your inability to attract the customer will make it impossible for you to prove that you are better!
The second goal is to satisfy the customer. Whatever you do, aim at satisfying your customers. A satisfied customer will safe you thousands of dollar in advertisement. His or her recommendation may earn you better return than you can ever get on paid advertisements. Also, a satisfied customer repeated patronage pays huge dividend which cannot be easily quantified. Instead of attempting to subtly grab a few hundreds of dollar from a prospect work at making the prospect a satisfied customer and watch him spend thousands of dollars in repeated sales while recommending your business to his friends.
Quality Customer Support Service Holds The Key!
Irrespective of how good a product or service is, poor customer support service will run the business down. People love to be treated with love, care and respect. Every human being is craving for attention. You will agree with me that everyone, including yours sincerely will love to be treated as Royalty. When this fails, customer support service should come to the rescue.
To err is human, so it is not out of place for a business to fail in its bid to satisfy customers. However, whenever such failure occurs, customer support service personnel should spring into action to ensure that the mistake is remedied. Customer support service must ensure that the dissatisfied customer does not leave the business because of such failure. Everything should be done to redress and win back the customer’s confidence.
This is one area that small business owners in Nigeria need to look into. It has been discovered that too many big enterprises dump inexperience and ill-motivated personnel in their customer support service departments. Such personnel when attending to dissatisfied customers are often rude and abusive. Some even act as if they are doing such customers a favor. Instead of treating the customers as royalty, they actually demands subtly that the aggrieved customer be grateful that they are spending their precious time attending to such trivial complains. This is a golden opportunity for small business owners to tap into.
Give The Customer Royal Treatment and Watch Your Business Grow!
Since the market is already full of lots of aggrieved customers, take advantage of this! Build a first class Customer Support Service Department for your business. Ensure that the department is staffed with the best behaved, smooth talking, diplomatic, courteous staff you have. Explain to the personnel that they are the last hope of the company in retaining any aggrieved customer. So, their attitude should be such that a customer having come in contact with them will find it difficult to leave.
Get Feedback About Your Customer Service Department
If you really want to stay and grow in business. You need to get direct feedback from your customer on what your customer support service personnel are doing. You need to know if they are striving to keep customers for you or doing otherwise. Too many businesses have lost valuable customers because an aggrieved customer was not well attended to. Getting feedback from customer is not so difficult. You only need to be creative and you will be surprised that customers are willing to comment on how your staff treat them.
Reward Good Support Staff and Fire Bad Support Staff
It is your business, so be bold enough to reward good support staff and fire without hesitation any support staff that is killing your business. It is foolish to allow an arrogant and uncultured support staff to continue in your employment. Any staff that does not accept the fact that it takes the income from satisfied customer to keep the business running must be fired. Customers pay for satisfaction and it is the responsibility of any business that takes a customers money to provide such satisfaction or refund the money taken. As such, it is compulsory that every staff understand and agree to treat every customer like royalty.
This post was provoked by a recent experience I had with a business organization. Having failed in keeping their promise, their support service staff are acting as if they are doing me a great favor listening to my complain. If I were to have my way, I will recommend that the entire customer support service department of that business be overhauled, because their response to customers sucks!
Your business mission is to attract customers and satisfy them. Never forget that if you truly want to be a successful entrepreneur.
Do you have a story to tell about customer support service? Do you have a tip to share that will empower a small business owner? Please do so in a comment. Cheers 😉